God as he is

Love is not a verb that God does; it is a noun that he is. God, who is all-powerful, can not cease to be love without ceasing to be God. It is *the* essential element of his nature.

I can anticipate the objection, "yes, God is love, BUT...what about holiness (or justice or mercy or wrath or forgiveness, etc.)?" The problem with this question is that it pits one divine characteristic against another, as though they were separate, discreet things, but they are not. Holiness, mercy, wrath and forgiveness proceed from God's love. This is how we end up with the schizophrenic god who loves with one hand and smites with the other, who takes our sin away on a cross but holds us to account for every misstep after that, who gives us freedom so that we can love him meaningfully but withholds that freedom at the same time, who tells us that he is just and good, but that he has destined millions and millions of people for hell for doing *exactly what he created them to do*. These are not apparent contradictions, they are in fact contradictory notions, which means that you can't rationally hold both of them at the same time. It's at this point that we retreat into "the mystery of God", as though it were a rug under which we sweep all our bad philosophy. We must not believe these things under the rubric of faith, accepting self-contradictory notions because "God can do anything". They are self-contradictory because they are not true.

If we get the love part wrong, everything else downstream of it gets screwed up. We end up living a quid pro quo life with God, whereby we give him our loyalty and obedience and he keeps us from going to hell and (hopefully) gives us a home in heaven when we die in return. This is the "contract" worldview. When we have this worldview then everything becomes a process of self-evaluation. How am I doing? Am I doing it right? Am I doing enough? What am I getting in return? Is it feeding me? Everything is a deal. Love is filtered through the lens of how it will benefit me. I become an expert evaluator of people (based on what the do, of course).

God works through covenant, not contract. The covenant worldview is other-centered. It's based on love, the central characteristic of which is knowing, intentional self-sacrifice. It is an act of the will which is aware of the probably cost. Covenant does not love because of something the beloved has or doesn't have or because of some character trait the beloved possesses; it loves because the beloved *is*, and so it is not conditioned by its environment, is not lessened by time or reduced by circumstances. There is no self-evaluation in the same way that we do not look at our eyes with our own eyeballs. They are not an apparatus for evaluating that; it is not what they do. So it is with covenant love. It is not an apparatus for self-evaluation. It is not what it does.

God tore up the contract on the cross. He entered into a unilateral covenant with us just like he did with Abraham. God is pouring all of his love into me right now as though I were the only person on the earth and he had only this second to do it, so dump the contradictions. Shred the contract. When God exercises all the power he has, it looks like love. When God, who has all the resources and power available to any being, wants to respond to sin it looks like free pardon. When God, from whom all wisdom comes, responds to suffering it looks like rescue. To God, omnipotence looks like free relationship.

As if that were not enough, it's not just that God *will* not stop loving me; it's that he *cannot* stop while remaining what he is. That's the kind of love I need a supernatural revelation from God to believe. That's the love found in the gospel.

Love and Fear

I can't stand pat answers to problems. To me the message in a pat answer usually is, "I don't really care" or, "I don't know what to say, and I have to say something, so I'll say this". We throw poorly understood bible verses at people's pain to see what sticks.

How many times have I heard this verse in response to someone who's facing something scary, like just finding out he/she has cancer or something:

"Perfect love casts out fear!" (1 John 4:18)

In other words, don't be afraid! God loves you and that love takes the place of any fear you might have today! Isn't that encouraging?

Well, no. I still have cancer. It still sucks. Now I'm not only afraid, but I feel guilty for being afraid because I have obviously not understood something important about God's character. I have cancer, I'm afraid AND I'm a bad Christian. Great.

This is a perfect example of why reading (and quoting) scripture in context is important. Here's the context of 1 John 4:18:

"God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgement, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love."

Fear is not bad. Fear is not necessarily evil. If you're afraid of something scary (like cancer), that is not an indication that anything is working improperly. Fear can be a very useful thing. For example, if one is being chased by a large, hungry tiger, fear is an appropriate adaptive survival response. Your body responds to fear by producing HUGE amounts of adrenaline, which makes you more aware, increases blood flow to the muscles you'll need to fight or flee and increases the amount of oxygen you're processing so you can do all of this. Fear focuses your attention on the dominate issue at hand, literally blocking out almost all stimuli other than what you need to do what you're doing.

From a the point of view of mental health, being afraid of fear is a very sad state of affairs. That leads nowhere fast.

1 John 4:15-18 has nothing to do with that kind of fear. The fear addressed in this passage has to do with following God out of fear of punishment or judgment. You cannot love someone you're afraid of...not even God. ESPECIALLY not God. I anticipate the objection, "but what about the 'fear' of God?" That's a completely different word with a completely different meaning. It has to do with wonder and awe, not fear of what he'll do to you if you sin.

God's love overcomes all of that. The broader context of 1 John is...LOVE. We know that God loves us because he sent his Son as a sacrifice for our sin. That (and that alone) is the revelation of God's love for us. We love each other because we understand what that love has done in us; we change the way we live because we understand what that love has done for us. The one and only litmus test is love. This is not about punishment; this is not about judgement, because perfect love casts out fear.

I'm afraid of a few things today, and that's okay. I'm not afraid of being afraid. God has poured his love into my life. He is currently pouring it into me right now at this moment. In the immortal words of the Prophet (Bob) Marley, "...every little thing gonna be alright."

I am a Pharisee.

After some uncomfortable introspection, I have come to a painful truth. I am a Pharisee. To be more specific, I am an anti-Pharisee Pharisee. That's no better.

To me, the definition of Pharisaism is the pursuit of rightness rather than love.

Pharisees will argue endlessly because at their center is a desire to be better than you. We might wrap it up in pretty paper that says, "in defense of the gospel" or "standing for right doctrine" or "in support of proper biblical authority", but that only increases the obviousness of the arrogance underlying my attitudes. All of those things can defend themselves.

Pharisees draw their sense of of worth from their sureness that they know what is right and wrong, and from that high pillar are fit to find you wanting. They'll write a 10-page paper on the scriptural basis for the speck in your eye while ironically missing the fact that this very activity constitutes a log in their own.

Pharisees draw life from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil instead of drawing life from their Creator.

There are some circumstances where rightness is important, make no mistake. You need to be "right" when working out a mathematical sum, or when following a map. The same is true in Christian theology and doctrine in some cases. We cannot know where we are going or how to get there unless we make some distinctions between what is correct and what is not. However, something my church hears from me just about every Sunday, or pretty much any other opportunity I have to express it is this: we have to get the LOVE piece right, or everything else downstream is going to be messed up.

I've had the love piece wrong. I've crushed brothers and sisters in academic debate rather than denying myself or going out of my way to die to self-righteousness. I've found a place atop the philosopher's stump in the center of Rome instead of nailing myself to a cross atop Golgotha. I've become a technician of Greek and not a Pastor. I've become more interested in making sure you know how smart I am than making sure you know how loved you are.

If I have injured you, please accept this humble apology. God is dealing with me lovingly but firmly. As for every addiction, it is a dangerous thing to simply quit without a replacement plan. God is leading me toward a few spiritual disciplines to fill the void.

Jesus loved even the Pharisees, though I'm sure it was not his intention that they remain as they were. That makes me feel a little better.

Corinthians, unity and the Lord's Supper

There are passages in scripture that are hard for me to understand. I still don't quite get many of them, but once in a while one will come into focus after some work. 1 Corinthians 11:27-30 is one of them.

To put it very generally, chapters 1-10 are all about divisions in the church and the specific issues that are behind the divisiveness. Paul works his way around to a broad discussion of liberty, our "rights", and how we walk that out in the context of widely varying sensibilities. Paul is trying to build a cohesive, attractional community. He can't do that if believers are victimizing each other sexually, launching lawsuits at each other, disregarding each other's varying sensibilities and ignoring social issues that bear on politeness and modesty. So, the first 10 chapters are all about unity.

Here we are in chapter 11, which starts off with male/female social relationships. Paul gives instructions that would have been common to both Roman and Jewish moral codes in the first century, then addresses head coverings for women (hair length is an analogy). THE POINT IS MODESTY, NOT GENDER ROLES. Then comes the issue of the Lord's Supper, which was in that era a communal meal. People brought food that was typically shared by all. For the poorest among them, that might be the best meal they had all week, so it was a means by which they received care and support. It was also a symbol of the equality of all believers in Christ. Men, women, slaves, children, rich and poor all ate together. It was the only place in the Roman world where that was true. Paul clarifies the problem in the Corinthian church in 11:21:

"For when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry, and another becomes drunk."

The Lord's Supper has become yet another issue of divisiveness. People are separating along socio-economic lines and introducing aberrant behavior with causes further divisiveness. In 11:27 Paul says:

"Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord."

An "unworthy manner" means "divisively". Paul is telling the Corinthians that if they continue turning the Lord's Supper into exercise in socio-economic stratification, then they're not only defeating the purpose of it, but they are sinning against Jesus himself, who died for everyone. In 11:29 Paul says:

"Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup."

Compare that to the words of Christ in Matthew 5:23-26. I suspect that that was Paul's mindset while writing those words. He's saying, reject the social assumptions that produce divisions along the lines of social standing and economic power. Reject the behaviors that victimize others or cause unnecessary offense. Do not go to the Lord's Supper divided or you'll make yourself even worse than you were before (13:1?). That seems to form a cohesive argument from throughout the entire letter.

I know, probably completely uninteresting to anyone but me. It's my journal though. Enjoy the ride.

Will The Real God Please Stand Up, Redeux

I got quite a few responses on the journal entry on sovereignty versus suffering (Will the Real God Please Stand Up?), mostly centered around the idea of discipline. It's a very good point. I had to think about that for a while, because it's definitely biblical:

Deuteronomy 8:5 - Know then in your heart that as a parent disciplines a child so the Lord disciplines you. (Note the simile here: we're supposed to refer to our own experience of disciplining our children to find a clue about how God disciplines us)

Job 5:17 - How happy is the one whom God reproves/therefore do not despise the discipline of the Almighty. (Conviction and discipline are paralleled)

Psalm 94:12 - Happy are those whom you discipline, O Lord,/and whom you teach out of your law. (Discipline and teaching are paralleled)

Ephesians 6:4 - And, fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. (Provocation and discipline are contrasted to one another)

Hebrews 12:5 - My child, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord,/or lose heart when you are punished by him;/for the Lord disciplines those whom he loves,/and chastises every child whom he accepts.’/Endure trials for the sake of discipline. God is treating you as children; for what child is there whom a parent does not discipline? (Discipline and chastisement are the same Greek word. Though punishment and discipline seem to be paralleled, note that the specific "punishment" are "trials". The Greek word there means "persecution". God is not punishing; this is probably referring to the rash of persecution that ocurred in the years after the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD)

We could go on citing scripture, but this partial list includes passages from most of the major genre. It's a dependable cross-section, in other words.

First, let's look at the word "discipline". Good bible students always move from exegesis (what the text originally meant) to hermeneutic (how to apply it now) and not the other way 'round. So how is that word typically used, both in the bible and in Koine period literature? First, there are several Greek verbs used, and each has a different nuance. The one most commonly used is padeuo, which means "to discipline”. Another verb used is elegksu, which is used to mean “to reprove”, but most commonly means, “to bring to light or expose”. The last verb is mastigoo, which means “to whip” or “to scourge” most commonly. It’s the word used for the beating given those who were condemned to death (implying that death was too quick). “To discipline” is used far more than the others by a ratio of nearly 10:1. Also note that the other words are used in parallel with “to discipline”; they are amplifying the meaning of “discipline” in a poetic sense, and not necessarily to for the sake of accuracy. Furthermore, note the other words used in parallel: "to train" for one, "to teach" and also the imperative, “do not provoke”. A comprehensive reading of word usage and context would lead us to the conclusion that “to discipline” is the word carrying the force of God’s primary intention.

Staying with the verb “to discipline”, padeuo is used thirteen times in the New Testament; ten instances out of those thirteen mean specifically “to bring up”, “to instruct”, “to train”, “to correct” or something like that. Two times in means “to punish” and once it means, “to beat”. Padeuo almost always means “to discipline” in common Greek usage outside the bible during that period as well. When it was used to mean “to punish” in a physical sense, the subjects were human parents. The passages in the bible, the apocrypha and in Koine literature that use the word padeuo to mean "to punish" where God is the subject (the "punisher", so to speak) can be understood equally well (and I think better) by substituting the verb "to discipline". In other words, padeuo does not typically mean "to punish" when God is the one doing it.

Assuming that, let’s move on to the application. Consider what “discipline” means to us. First, discipline is a very different thing that punishment isn’t it? Discipline is intended to correct destructive behavior. Properly implemented, discipline should move a person from a negative place to a positive place. Discipline comes from a place of love, which always cares about the overall, long-term welfare of the beloved or else it isn't love, and it probably isn't good either. When used in the context of “Church discipline”, the goal is always reconciliation even when Paul uses it in the NT. Punishment can be a component of discipline, but isn't always. Actually, a parent who has to punish a child all the time is not a very good parent is he (assuming that the child isn’t suffering from a physical or behavioral disorder)? Why not? Because it's not very effective when it’s executed that way. The child quickly connects the punishment to the person meting it out rather than to the behavior that lead up to it. We never use punishment with adult sons and daughters do we? Why not? Because it’s humiliating, degrading and dehumanizing; it’s utterly counterproductive. If the adult child doesn’t trust the parent by that time, then no amount of punishment will convince him/her to alter the undesirable behavior.

The goal of parenting is to move beyond the punishment stage to the more productive kind of discipline, which involves allowing the older child to simply experience in a real way the full impact of his/her choices. When your 23-year-old son or daughter gets fired from a job because he/she couldn’t be bothered to be up on time you don’t call his/her boss and beg for the job back do you? Of course you don’t. You let them experience scraping by without any money for a while. Why? So that they’ll remember it the next time the alarm goes off and they're tempted to stay in bed. That’s what the Greek word for repentance (metanoia) means: “to think after”. The idea is that one experiences the consequences of one’s actions, then remembers those consequences when the opportunity to repeat the behavior arises. Then the second Greek word for “repentance” (epistrepho), which means “to turn around”, takes on a whole new meaning, doesn’t it? You think about what happened the last time, then turn around and walk in a different direction.

The bottom line is, I can’t say that God never punishes. His goal is the same as ours: to raise healthy, responsible, loving children. I suppose if we leave him with no other alternative, then he’ll do what he needs to do to get our attention. I would strongly assert that this is the exception and not the rule though. I think that scripture teaches this: if everything is occurring normally, God treats us like adult sons and daughters. He gives us freedom so that we can love him meaningfully, and then lets us experience fully everything that entails. God does not enable us in the way that we enable each other. He allows us to experience the real consequences of our behavior. Nothing in any of this implies that God kills our children, causes natural disasters, creates diseases or wills violence or anything like it in order to teach anyone "a lesson". That's not discipline. That's abuse, and abuse never changes or improves its object.

Many of us grew up with parents who were inappropriate to say the least, and some of them were abusive, violent and neglectful. When we say "punish", they hear "abuse". As a result, their experience of God is, "I'm not safe", and they never stick around long enough to get a more well-balanced perspective. We who have that understanding need to be loving toward the many who don't. We have a very unbalanced understanding of what appropriate punishment is in our culture, and I think it has partially to do with the framework with think we're exporting from the bible. God is not leaning over us waiting to lash out in punishment at the first available opportunity. He is correcting, instructing and training us. He is bringing us up like any loving father would.

Sociopathic Love

I love the Showtime series "Dexter". It's about a serial killer who works in the Miami police department doing crime analysis, specifically blood spatter (appropriately). As the result of a horrific event in his childhood Dexter is a classic sociopath. He doesn't feel emotions like the rest of us do. He doesn't really understand them. He doesn't have a "conscience" in the classic sense because "wrong" and "right" have no meaning. Dexter's adoptive father (who was also a Miami police officer) realized this early in Dexter's life and did everything he could to teach him how people work, how emotions play out and how to fake them convincingly to get along. He also taught him a series of "rules" so that he could indulge his murderous urges without causing much harm or getting caught. Now Dexter only kills other killers.

It's fascinating to watch Dexter walk out relationships. He doesn't understand what motivates people, but he is an expert observer of human behavior. He is a top-notch actor. He does and says all the right things at the right times, but Dexter is always sizing everyone up as a potential informant or a potential target. He's the perfect boyfriend, employee and brother, but something is not quite right. People walk away from even casual encounters with Dexter knowing that something doesn't add up.

We Christians are experts at faking relationships. We're well-trained in the fine art of smiling at people who disgust us. We're taught the Golden Rule early and often, and led to understand that this is the essence of Christian love. We are sternly instructed to live in sociopathic love, whereby we love everyone like Jesus did, even the people we hate. You don't need to "love" anyone so long as you act like you do. That's the important part. So put a smile on your face and get it done like Jesus would have.

It all starts with our perception of God and the way he loves us. This is the reason it's so important to understand the way he loves us: we will walk that understanding out with other people. If we perceive our relationship with him practically as an impossible attempt to live up to a set of arbitrary standards, then that will set the agenda in terms of our expectations of other people. If we view Christianity as a rigid set of rules or an inflexible moral code, then that's what we'll expect of other people. This is the meaning behind "forgive us our debts as we forgive those who owe us a debt". It's not "forgive or God won't forgive you", as though God's mercy is somehow dependent on our behavior. It means that the extent to which we understand grace will set the tone for every encounter we have from that point on. God's love will either be detrimental or transformational depending on our starting point.

If we live by rules and not by love then we are Christian sociopaths. We're Dexter, only the carnage is emotional and not physical. People will find us out, probably pretty quickly. People aren't as gullible as we think they are. They know when we're being nice because we have to or because we have an ulterior motive (to get them "saved", for example). The problem is not only that this behavior is ineffective. The bigger problem is that it's counterproductive. It actually pushes people further away from God than they were before.

In his book "A River Runs Through It", Norman Mailer writes that "we can love completely without complete understanding." I have yet to encounter a more biblical understanding of practical, realistic love than that. Love completely and don't worry about complete understanding.

Will The Real God Please Stand Up?

As a pastor I witness quite a lot of suffering. My wife and I are often among the first people contact after something terrible happens. At first there's just shock, numbness and disconnectedness. After the shock wears off and the real pain starts, people begin looking for answers. God is suddenly not who they thought he was. They want to believe that God is good in the same way he was before. They want us to help them understand how what they're going through is good and how it's God's expression of love for them.

The truth is, the honest response is usually this: there is no pat answer to be had. It's really going to hurt, maybe for a long time. There's no fixing it. There's no re-framing it. All we can do is bear community witness that it just flat out sucks. The worst thing that can happen often happens at this stage. People who should be relying on a loving God at this time more than any other find themselves unable to trust him because he's to blame for what happened. Their hearts cry out for justice. In the throes of their pain they ask, "How can I love a God who hurts me like this?"

The classic philosophical quandary is this: if God is all-knowing, all-powerful and all good, how can bad things happen at all? From a philosophical standpoint, evil should not exists if those things about God are true. Either that, or God is not good. The response to this quandary typically tries to clarify what we mean by the word "evil". After all, what seems evil from our standpoint might be perfectly good from the divine point of view. The problem with that answer is that it's a dangerous road to travel. At a certain point our good becomes God's evil and vice verse; at that stage God could just as well be a devil as anything else. The best we could say about him is, "we know him not". Furthermore, if we can know little or nothing about what is actually good or evil to God, then we have no basis for a moral framework of any kind. How would we know what is good or bad if not by discerning with respect to God's ultimate moral authority? That's a big, big problem.

Another response is a different kind of appeal to the divine viewpoint, where we say that from our limited point of view it is reasonable to say that we cannot possibly understand the affect our suffering has on other beings and other circumstances. Our suffering could produce good that we would never know about. We have the narrow point of view and God has the long view. It's like a tapestry that we're looking at from the underside, where it's all knots and tangles. If we were only able to look at it from the other side we'd see the beautiful design that's the result of all of those tangles. The problem with this point of view is that it's deeply unsatisfying. It's not something that you can live. It also runs contrary to the holistic biblical witness that this is, indeed a broken and hurting world in need of rescue. In other words, what we experience the bible verifies as true, but offers to permanent remedy aside from the new heaven and the new earth (Revelation 21).

A third approach is to postulate that a good God could allow suffering if this suffering acted to improve the sufferer. For example, many parents inflict physical pain on their children (spanking) knowing that the child will (ideally) be bettered by it. God sends us painful circumstances (or allows them) because they build trust in him and reliance on him. There are two problems with this theory. First, while the idea sounds good theoretically, our experience usually is that God's reasoning is not at all clear. In other words, people rarely know why it is that they're suffering or what they're supposed to learn as a result. Consequently, if God desires that we be improved but will not tell us what exactly the improvement should be, then the effect is usually exactly the opposite. People are less inclined to trust a God who they believe inflicts arbitrary suffering to build relationship.

Lastly, there's the idea that bad things happen to provide opportunity for God's glory to be revealed. No cost is too high (so it is said) if God receives glory. The problem with this is, it's really not biblical. Neither of the passages in the bible usually used to back it up (Job and John 9:1-5) are actually trying to teach that. The point to Job is in fact the chaos we live in, the affect the accuser (satan) has on our lives, and the way God wants us to respond to that. In the John passage the point is the healing of the blindness, not the blindness itself. Whenever suffering is addressed the overall biblical witness is that the universe is a complex place that only God truly understands. If God is glorified by our suffering, it is only incidental.

The thing is, most people can countenance the idea of suffering generally speaking; it's the meaningless suffering that throws us. It's the Holocaust or a child suffering and dying. It's an utterly senseless, arbitrary murder or an illness that comes out of nowhere and kills a person is his/her prime. It's a car accident or a natural disaster. It's the things that neither build relationship nor improve us, for which we will never have any answers.

There is another way to think about all of this, of course. What if we believed that God didn't do it at all? Of course, that would mean subscribing to a belief that God is not in control of every event all the time. That would mean believing that things happen contrary to God's will all day every day. But that's true, isn't it? God doesn't create, desire or will sin (Genesis 1:31). He created us for a relationship of love, and that requires real freedom, which comes with consequences that God must let us live with. Sickness and death are part of the fall, not part of God's perfect will for us (Genesis 4, Romans 6:23, 1 Corinthians 15:21). The accuser is alive and well, busy wreaking havoc in this world (John 12:31, 2 Corinthians 4:4, Eph 2:2).

What if we really believed that God doesn't want these things for us any more than we want them for us? What if we believed that he greatly desires to bring them to a halt, but that the only way to do that would be to sacrifice the only thing he desires even more, that more people might come to know him (2 Peter 3:8-9)? If we believed that then we could fully engage a loving, good God who suffers with us (Hebrews 2:18, Philippians 2:6-8), who can be relied on to step into our lives and live them with us. That God could bring healing into our suffering precisely because he didn't cause it. That God not only has the power to heal us, but has the desire to do it. For our part, we would become a people who did not try to reject the ambiguity of the world by finding God's will in suffering. Rather, we would work in the midst of the ambiguity of the world to apply God's will to suffering.

God is our advocate and comforter. He is not a rule book, a rigid morality code or an encyclopedia. He can be trusted to love us intensely and dynamically, running to our rescue when we need him most. This is the God of scripture, who tells us we can trust him. He will never leave, forsake or forget us (Jos 1:5, Is 49:15-16). He loves us and moves heaven and earth to bring about the best (Jer 29:11-14, Rom 8:28).

This is not a new view of God; it is God has he reveals himself in Christ. This is all we can ever know of him. This is God who will stop and nothing, who will go to any lengths to rescue us. This is the real God, who lays his hands on you and tells you that everything will be alright...because it will.