The Fundamental Blog

I find it astounding that the things that make worldly sense to the human race are opposed to God. Despite all the writings in God’s inspired Word, unless it makes sense to us, we tend to dismiss it in favor of nearly anything that soothes our human lust for rationale. On the other hand, it can not be too surprising to find worldly pursuits being grounded in worldly logic. In this light, one of the hardest, but most essential tasks that the person pursuing holiness must strive to attain is the refusal to ask the, “Why?” question. For all the direction that God gives us in the Bible, He rarely ever answers the, “Why,” behind His instructions.

Sometimes it is easy to assign motive to God’s decrees but most other times, we are left to simply accept what we are told as any young child who asks, “why?” only to hear, “Because I said so.” Regulations prohibiting the eating of animals that feed on decaying flesh, or the pronouncement of uncleanness for anyone who touches a dead body make sense; if disease is to be found, these are likely sources. But other times we stamp our feet and practically demand the God tell us why He is doing the things He does in the way He does them. This strikes me as being the height of arrogance. What right does the created being have that would allow him to demand that the Creator explain Himself?

This issue presented itself to me when I heard the story of a man, (William), who had survived a serious car accident. He is a new convert to Christianity and he was very depressed because he lost a good friend in the accident. William was driving and his friend was a passenger in the car with him that night. To William, his friend had it all coming together, a nice wife, a new baby boy, a good job, in fact it seemed to William that his friend had finally reached the point where he had it made. William, on the other hand, was struggling to get through the mess that his own life still seemed to be. The accident killed his friend and left William to wonder why God took the one with so much going for him and left him to struggle on day by day.

William’s girlfriend asked me, (because she knows that I am Biblically minded), if I could offer any ideas as to why God would allow such an outcome to this tragic situation. I have opinions on such things, but I hate to be in the position of trying to assign motives for occurrences that result from the providence of God. The other problem with such requests for the, “inside scoop,” is that it is too easy for any supposition to sound like empty platitude. It is obvious to me that there are things far worse than death, but to many others, death is as bad as it ever gets. After some thought I began by explaining that there is no way for anyone today to be absolutely certain about any motive of God, but that there are some clues in Scripture that might point us toward some possibilities.

Questions like this usually go on my list… that is, the list of stuff I want to ask about once I arrive in Heaven. I’m sure that when I get to Heaven, questions like, “Why this…” or, “Why that,” will seem foolish, but in this existence it seems reasonable to put these imponderables on my list. I found Scripture ringing in my head… Jeremiah 29:11, “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” and Isaiah 55:8, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.” These do nothing to answer the, “Why,” question but are useful in showing that we need not press for the answer to, “Why,” but that we need to trust that God’s reason is probably far too lofty for us to understand.

Not knowing anything about the friend who had died in the accident, I couldn’t say much about why he might have been taken, but knowing that William had not yet professed his commitment to Christ at the time of the crash it seemed plausible to me that God might have spared him for the most basic of reasons. Since God knows who His elect are, and that to have taken William then would have required that God would have had to sentence him to Hell for all eternity, it seems logical that God might have spared William so that he might yet be saved. But there is a fundamental flaw in the questioning of this circumstance because William is really asking the questions, “Why do the wicked prosper while the good are taken away?” and “Why do bad things happen to good people?”

This is nothing new, Jeremiah asks the same question in Chapter 12, verses 1-2. “You are always righteous, O Lord, when I bring a case before you. Yet I would speak with you about your justice: Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why do the faithless live at ease? You have planted them and they have taken root; they grow and bear fruit.” If we look at the account of Lazarus and the rich man we can see that perhaps God is merely allowing the wicked to live in, “seeming,” ease in this life because it is all they will ever have. The bigger question about bad things and good people betrays a humanistic pattern of thinking that is flawed from the beginning. This line of thought only makes sense if we are willing to assume that there are good people but the Bible teaches us that this is not the case.

In Romans we are shown that there is no such thing as a good person; “… that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin. As it is written, ‘There is no one righteous, not even one.’” 3:9-10. And again in 3:23, “for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” Jesus, Himself states that there is no one who is good except God alone. So the question becomes not so much about the misfortunes of the good, (as seen through mortal eyes), but why are we not all extinguished like the smoldering wicks we are. It’s what we deserve, isn’t it? Ah… But let’s not overlook grace and mercy. Thank God that these traits abound in Him without limit because if they did not, you would not be here to read the words I write, and I would not be here to write them!

We may never know the reasons for the way things play out in this life, but we must accept that the mere fact that we open our eyes in the morning means that God is not through with us yet. We are in no position to demand that God reveal His motives to us. Look, let’s say that you like chocolate-chip ice cream OK? Sometimes God may give you a dish of plain old vanilla instead. We don’t always get the chips, sometimes we might, but to sit and whine because the gift of God is not what we expected, or prayed for it to be, is foolishness.

If we remember that each day is a gift, and that our actions are but reflections of our responsibilities to the giver of that gift, there might be a whole lot less complaining going on among us. God does not give things that are not needed and the things we need, (not our wants), are not withheld. If we pray for a solution to a situation He will give us the answers we need. They might not be what we would have expected but regardless, He will respond to our prayer. When God brings into our lives the provisions of His providence, then it becomes our responsibility to pick up the pieces and use them to demonstrate God’s love and grace in a way that’s…


All for the Glory of Christ

Isn’t Christianity supposed to be about making more of others than about ourselves? How can overlooking ourselves be considered a bad thing Self is something we should set aside for the service of others, not put effort into , right? How could I even suggest that we need to be concerned about, “Self”? The Bible has a thing or two to say about how we should not completely forget about ourselves in the process of serving. This has to do with the area of self-discernment! Yes, we are to look after others and see to it that charity and love are displayed before the world, but it can sometimes be too easy to concentrate on our outward show of faith and neglect the caring for ourselves in the process.

I am not encouraging vain practices or advocating luxuriating one’s self, rather; I believe that it is important to turn a critical eye on what we call Christianity in our own lives. The Scripture is 2 Corinthians 13:5, “Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves.” Sure, we call ourselves Christians but do we really fit the bill? Paul is warning about getting so caught up in the trappings of religion and becoming so comfortable in our worship that it turns into rote mechanical observance. We go to church once a week, (sometimes more for the sociality of the whole thing), sing the songs, drink the juice, munch the wafer, drop a couple of bucks in the plate and tell the pastor how much we enjoyed the service on our way out the door and that should cover it, right?

Actually, examining ourselves to see if we are in the faith is much easier than the more important task of examining our faith to see if our faith is in the faith! We need to cast a hard look at our concepts of Christianity to see if they’re in line with the teachings in the Bible. Most of us are victims of, what I call, “The Faith of Our Fathers.” What I mean is simply this, we are taught our faith by our parents and elders without really ever casting a critical eye on what it is that we say we believe. This is why I am convinced that fundamental, Biblical, Christianity is not a bad thing at all, the way some people might have us believe. If Christianity tells us anything, it is that the Bible is the Word of God.

Since we aspire to use of God’s Word to evaluate the things in our life, to assess the truth claims of the world around us and to setting a standard for our behavior; why then should it be so disconcerting to think that we might hold our churches and the very faith we call Christianity up to the scrutiny of the Bible as well? One person grows up in one denomination and their best friend in another, doesn’t this demand that we compare the differences in the factions of the faith to see if we are really following the teachings of Christ? One church says that they are Christian because they believe that salvation is through Christ but they don’t think that Jesus was divine, only the spirit brother of the archangels. Another says that they have new revelations that, though they contradict the historic cannon of Scripture, because it is newer, it has to be better.

When one church’s doctrine is shown to be in error, the effects can be devastating. I will personalize this just a bit to make an example of the problem I’m talking about. When I was seven, the pastor dropped by our house and informed my father that for the amount of his income, the proportion he was tithing to the church was too small. My days of going to church ended that day and I came away with the idea that church was all about buying your way to Heaven. I didn’t think of this as a failing of our specific denomination, it was a failing in the roots of all Christendom. When the rule of no meat on Friday was set aside by the Pope, a lot of people saw it not as a weakening of Catholic doctrine, it was the very pillar of Jesus Christ wavering. There are many doctrinal differences that cause the same problem, Sabbath worship, infantile baptism, even petty squabbles over things as small as the type of music or the color of the carpet can drive people away and when they leave, it is because Christianity failed, not because of any isolated incident.

I am thankful that my religious upbringing was as scant as it was because I was never totally immersed in any doctrinal misconceptions. As I said, my family split from the church when I was still quite young and as I came to faith in my later years, I was basically learning from scratch. Some people who have come up in the Episcopalian church may have looked at the placement of openly gay clergy as proof that Christianity was a false faith instead of seeing it as a denominational problem. But it seems to go that as the denomination fails, so fails all of Christianity. This is the problem with the, “Faith of Our Fathers.” If our entire concept of Christ and Christianity is filtered through the lens of denominational, or traditional bias, then we truly must heed the call to , “Examine ourselves to see whether we are in the faith.”

This, of course, requires that we blow the dust off of our Bibles and actually open them to see what the faith is supposed to look like. “Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.” Acts 17:11. This must be us! We can not afford to allow ourselves to be spoon-fed a watered down version of, what once started out as, the Word of God. If the latest, greatest arena-packing evangelist is telling the masses that they can co-create their reality by the power of the Holy Spirit within us, then someone needs to take that teaching to the Bible. Going to church doesn’t make one a Christian, being a Deacon or Elder doesn’t make one a Christian, being a pastor doesn’t do it either; Christianity is a commitment of spirit, it’s the changing of the heart, it is not the trappings of position or title.

The admonition to examine ourselves is serious business. We must strive to work out the salvation that God is working in us through Christ Jesus. The pseudo-Christian is more damaging to the cause of Christ than nearly anything else. When the world looks at the pretender of the faith and sees the hypocrisy, (and they always will), they come away saying, “If that’s Christianity, I don’t want anything to do with it.” When you read the book of Acts, you can see where the church grew by thousands in a single day, why? It’s because the church, meant something important, she was different from the world. Today we see 1 or 2 people come forward in a month and then we wonder if they are really sincere in their profession of the faith, or only doing something to make their family and friends happy.

We have allowed the church to become influenced by society instead of standing for the moral absolutes that God sets forth. The church is supposed to lift up the weary, but more often than not, she ends up coming down to the base level of depravity in which the world exists. We live in a world where God has become, “the man upstairs.” Reverence has been lost to moral relativism and political correctness is prized above the absolute virtues of the Christian faith. Christians, we must examine ourselves to be sure that our faith is real and true, and to be sure that we are in it! We are the church so the failings of the church are really our own failings in the faith. We must examine ourselves!

We have a set of instructions to follow, it’s called the Bible. But we will never pay any attention to it unless we first find out what it says. You can read books that claim to be able to help you improve your level of esteem, to make you a better parent, to guide you to a higher degree of success or any number of other things but there is only one book that will make any lasting difference. We don’t need books to tell us how to be more comfortable in the world. We need something to teach us who it is that can save us out of the world. If we have fallen into the fire, who cares about being able to stand the heat better, we want to be lifted out! God wrote us a book like that, but we need to read it and examine ourselves to be sure we are in the faith, it’s a little something called the Bible, and by the way, it’s…


All for the Glory of Christ