Author: Matt Powell

Suffering?

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I think it was Karen Jobes in her commentary on 1 Peter who said she thinks Christians sin as much out of a desire to avoid suffering as they do to gain pleasure- maybe more so.  I think that’s right.  And that kind of sin is a lot more subtle.  The overt sins that I commit because they feel good, like drinking that extra glass of whiskey or surfing the web when I should be working, those are more obvious and tangible.  But the sins I commit out of a desire to avoid pain- not dealing with difficult problems, not dealing with difficult people- can be kind of invisible without careful self-reflection.

But we’re supposed to suffer in this life.  That is the nature of the Christian walk in a sin-cursed world.  And it seems apparent to me that if someone doesn’t have much suffering in their lives, it is probably because they are insulating themselves from it.  They are not loving the hurting; they are not exposing themselves to the messiness of human relationships; they are interacting only with those people they most enjoy and not the difficult situations that family and church force on us; they are not sacrificing of their material goods for others; they are spending their lives pursuing material things and pleasure, and not the things of God.

How often have I been the rich man dining while Lazarus was suffering outside?

Is that Really Faith in Jesus?

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Are you a Christian?  Do you have faith in Jesus?  You do?  Good!  I’m glad to hear that.

But… is that really true?

What do you spend your life pursuing?  What are the things that need to happen in order for you to have the life you want, or deserve?  What are the things that you think need to happen for the country to be what it ought to be, or the world?

If there’s something in any of those slots other than Jesus- I’m concerned you’re not really understanding fully what faith is.

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Human Flourishing and God’s Right

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All sin is contrary to human nature.  All sin is destructive to our bodies and souls.  God’s law is not a set of arbitrary hoops for us to jump through to prove how much we love Him, but rather the very definition of what we are.  It is an owner’s manual for being a human being.

But there’s a risk here.  It is tempting to focus entirely on this aspect of sin, out of a hope that we will offend people less.  If I can tell people that the reason they shouldn’t do something is because it is bad for them, they might be more inclined to accept that, instead of an appeal to God’s bare right to command.  And Scripture certainly does talk about sin this way- “Why do you labor for that which is not bread?”  But far more commonly, Scripture talks about sin as something that offends a holy God.

It is so easy to become man-centered, so easy to get focused on me and what I want and what will give me the life that I want to have.  And certainly, a life following God is far better for my happiness and prosperity than a life in rebellion against Him, and that is true both now and in eternity.  But it must actually be a life following God, and that means establishing first of all that God has a right to be followed, a right to be worshiped and obeyed, regardless of people’s offense.  If people reject the idea that God has that right, then no talk of “human flourishing” is ever going to win them over.

“He that loves his live will lose it, but he who loses his life for My sake will find it.”  In other words, our great welfare comes when we stop worrying about our welfare, stop worrying about what is good for us, and start focusing on what God has commanded.  We will only truly understand God’s law when we understand that it is His Law, and even if it were just arbitrary hoops for us to jump through, He would have every right and we’d better get to jumping.  And only when we do, when that becomes our mindset, we will discover how much human flourishing there really is to be had in following God’s law.

The Truth Will Set You Free

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Most of you under 30, you don’t understand.  You don’t get that the life you live didn’t just happen- it was the product of sacrifice and discipline that others made on your behalf.  What we had in America was rare in the world, very rare, and it still is.  People left Europe and Asia in droves because in Europe, in Asia, everywhere in the world, everytime you turned around you had to ask someone for permission to live.  They came here because in America they were free- free to worship, free to work, free to enjoy the fruits of their own labor without having to pay off some fat duke or bishop or petty warlord for the privilege of breathing their air.

The problem is, that those people are here too.  They are constantly tempting you- free birth control, cheap student loans, cheap housing, universal health care- tempting you to give up your freedom for false promises.  They don’t actually want to give you anything.  They don’t care about you.  They just want to trick you into giving them the reins, so just like in the old days they can dictate where you live, what you do, who you worship.

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“And He Shall Rule Over You”

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ISIS was in the news today for shelling an elementary school killing nine girls.  It was an all-girls school.  They did this because they are opposed to women learning anything, and this is because women learning and being able to have ideas of their own is contrary to the understanding of societal stability and peace that lies at the heart of Islam.  Islam is a religion all about hierarchy, all about knowing one’s place.  One major Islamic terrorist group, “Boko Haram,” is so fundamentally opposed to the education of women that this is what their name means- “Western-style education is haram, forbidden.”

Such a thing as a terrorist group bombing schoolgirls or kidnapping and forcing them into marriages is deeply shocking to us, of course.  And it should be.  But it shows just how much progress has been made by the Christian worldview.  For this view of women was absolutely universal in the ancient world before Christ’s coming.  Women were not permitted to worship different gods than their husbands in the Greco-Roman world.  Aristotle did not believe that women were capable of rational thought. Plato’s view, that they might be capable of some amount of rational thought, was considered radical.  Hindus view even the highest-caste woman as a lower form of life than the lowest-caste man.  Buddhists believed that being a woman was punishment for past sins.  Even today the life of a woman in most places in the world is beset with injustice and oppression.

This is not an accident.  Continue reading ““And He Shall Rule Over You”” →

Why do I always have the plank and my brother always has the speck?

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“And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye?  Or how can you say to your brother,`Let me remove the speck from your eye’; and look, a plank is in your own eye?  Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” (Mat 7:3-5 NKJ)

One thing that used to bother me about this passage was the absolute way Jesus speaks here.  How does He know it’s only a speck in my brother’s eye that I’m trying to get out?  Why am I the only one with a plank in my eye?

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How Can Feminism Achieve Its Goals?

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Men are physically stronger and more aggressive than women, and that is never not going to matter.

Feminists have often wanted to promote better treatment for women, and rightly so.  Abusive treatment toward women has not been exactly rare.  It has been normalized in most cultures.  Christianity teaches the absolute equal dignity and worth of women, and in all societies where Christianity became influential, treatment of women improved.  But this better treatment has to come from an internal, sincerely believed ideology that changes the behavior of men, because of my first point.  Only if men believe that women are deserving of better treatment will women actually be treated better.  It is civilization and the rule of law that protects women from the evil treatment of men, and civilization and the rule of law is supported by men.  Specifically, men with guns.

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Is the Gospel Enough for All Sin?

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Continuing on the same subject as the last post– here is Jeff Crippen saying that abusers never get saved:

To many people, this fact seems disturbing. I mean, can’t Christ change anyone? Aren’t we as Christians supposed to “have faith” in the Lord’s ability to give anyone a new heart and do whatever we can to lead such people to salvation in Christ? Christ gives a new heart to anyone who calls upon Him in real faith and repentance. But abusers don’t do so. For all their common claims that they have changed, that they have really repented, for all the crocodile tears they shed, they do not humbly come to Christ in genuine faith, exercising real repentance. Crush them, winnow them, sift them all you like, their folly is not going to depart from them.

That must have been disturbing news to David and Saul of Tarsus.

I see this author being quoted and recommended a lot in Reformed circles, by people who understand the gospel.  This is hard for me to understand.

 

Scapegoating, Victimhood and Abuse

Matt Powell, , 15 Comments

*Updates below

Rene Girard died a couple of days ago.  I’ve read one of his books, “I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning From Heaven”, and it was incredible.  It showed how ancient religions all heavily depended on the scapegoating mechanism, the random selection of some sacrificial victim on which to place the blame for the problems of the community, and lynching him.  This lynching has a powerful effect on making the community feel like their problems were ameliorated and thus creating catharsis and solidarity, that the problems of the community really do feel like they are solved, and thus the lynching was justified.  So this lynching over time takes on mythic proportions, and are reenacted in sacrificial ritual.  Very interesting.  Girard shows how Christianity upends the whole scapegoating mentality, showing that the problems of the community are not due to evil outsiders but the sin in our own hearts.  The envy and covetousness that rules in all our hearts and causes our communal conflicts escalates and escalates, until it’s all located on one bad person- usually some victim already culturally accepted as a suspect- a creepy old woman, a foreigner, a Jew, a homosexual, etc, and sacrifice him.  It’s a bit beyond the scope of this post to do justice to Girard’s insights, but I highly recommend his books.  Girard really should be viewed as one of the seminal thinkers of the 20th century.

What Christianity points us to is the problem of sin and covetousness in our own hearts which feeds the conflict in our communities and the scapegoating mechanism that keeps it at bay.  God takes the side of the victim, shows him to be innocent.  Christ Himself is the ultimate example of this, the truly innocent victim that by His sacrifice takes away the sin of the world, and fully exposes the scapegoating mechanism in the process.  The result has been that Christian society, unlike other societies especially of the ancient world, has always been intensely concerned with the innocent victims of society- the poor, the slave, the woman, children and the like.

I raise this because of the way I see a lot of people talk about abuse and victimization today.  Girard points out how the devil’s tactic, his own scapegoating mechanism having been thoroughly exposed by Christianity, is to try to use Christianity’s very concern for victims to create a new set of scapegoats.

Continue reading “Scapegoating, Victimhood and Abuse” →