A Rejection of Mediocrity

Dear Jess,

Thank you so much for asking me those questions. I will do my best to answer, but I know that my best cannot be quite good enough unless God helps me. I ask Him to help me explain this to you, and I ask Him to help you understand. James 1 says, “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given.” We know that God will give us wisdom when we need it.

Your question has a very simple answer: yes. Jesus forgives all our sin. But He doesn’t just forgive because He forgets that we sinned or pretends it isn’t a big deal. He forgives because He already paid for every one of our sins.

When Jesus died, He was paying for every time that you and I have ever lied or gotten angry or disobeyed. He suffered more than anyone else in history, because our sins were so, so bad.

Some people say that we are all really good, but that the little sins we do make us sinners. That isn’t true at all. We aren’t good. We are sinners, and we sin because of who we are.

Because we are so selfish and sinful, we deserve to have God throw us out. God does not need us. God cannot use sinful selfish people. Our selfishness makes us angry with God for no reason; we don’t want to do anything for God. God should really just get rid of us.

But the good news is wonderful! God is “rich” in mercy. Just like a rich person has enough money to do anything they want to do, God has enough mercy to do whatever He wants to do. And God is very, very rich in mercy.

We were so selfish and sinful that we could do nothing at all to impress God. We were like dead men. But God has enough love and mercy to do anything He wants to do. When we were weak and helpless, Jesus died for us. That is why God’s mercy is so perfect. Instead of forgetting about our sins, He took our sins away from us and put them on Jesus. Instead of the Father punishing us for our sins, He punished Jesus for them.

That takes a lot of mercy. But God’s mercy is even bigger than all of our sins. God does not want to save us from our sins and then let us continue being sinful. His mercy is big enough to come inside of us and change our hearts from the inside out. He kills our selfishness and sin and replaces it with a desire to love and please Him. This way, everyone sees how powerful and merciful He is, because He made terrible sinners into obedient children.

“All of us used to follow the desires of our sinful nature. We were objects of wrath because of who we were. But because of His great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even though we were dead. God did this so that for all eternity He shows how rich His grace is, because we will all see His kindness to us in Christ Jesus. We are God’s projects, given life because of Jesus, so that we can do good works that will glorify God.”

Because God saved us from punishment and saved us from continuing in sin, we love Him! “We love Him because He first loved us.” Because of how much we love Him, we don’t want to do anything that makes Him unhappy. We know that every sin we commit was paid for by Jesus, but we don’t want to sin because it does not please God.

God has already shown how rich His mercy is! Now, it is our job to show the world how powerful His love is. We have to show the whole world that His love is powerful enough to save us from our selfishness. We want to do good works that glorify God!

But it is not easy. While we are still alive on this earth, the sin that is still part of our bodies will keep on making us sin. But now, we have a desire to love God even though our bodies are still wicked. The Bible and the Holy Spirit help us to love God even though our bodies only want to sin.

As long as we are alive in these bodies, we will keep doing things that displease God. But we will do them less and less, because we desire more and more to please God.

“Thank God, that even though you were once slaves of sin, you have been set free, and have become slaves to righteousness! For just as you used to desire impurity and lawlessness, making you sin more and more, now you desire righteousness, which glorifies God! Those shameful things only would have led to death before. But now you have been set free from sin. This righteousness leads to eternal life! For the result of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

I have been saved for a while now, but I still do things that don’t please God. But I hate it! Even though sin feels good to my body, I don’t want to hurt God’s heart! I don’t understand my own actions. Instead of always pleasing God, I do the things I know God hates! But it is not my heart that sins; it is just the sin that is still present inside me. I want to do everything that pleases God, but I’m just not strong enough.

We are pitiful! But God uses the Bible and the Holy Spirit to deliver us little by little from our sinning. And even though we will continue to sin here and there, His mercy is strong enough to save us every single time.

If we say that we are following Jesus but do not desire to please Him, we are lying. If we desire to please God because we see how much He loves us, then He has promised to forgive us and make us clean from sin. Every single time. God is rich in mercy.

I pray that God makes this easy for you to understand! I love you!

Your big brother David

An acquaintance on Twitter (@RentAChemist) states,

I’d just like to note that one reason all of these contradictions in the Bible are suddenly coming out of the woodwork today after dozens of centuries of being ignored is because the Bible wasn’t taken as the literal, infallible, perfectly accurate word of God until the modern day.

Even Hillel the Elder, one of the men along with Xenophon of Athens, and likely some unnamed Stoics, Buddhist, and Hindi monks that obviously taught Jesus the things he used in his ministry had to say this of the Torah:

“What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.”

I’m guessing Jesus’ stance on the Bible is going to be identical: it’s metaphor. There was no Flood, no six day creation, taking those things literally robs them of their impact.

I’m familiar with that position, but I find it entirely untenable. Although the Roman Catholic cult fought tooth-and-nail against the primacy and authority of Scripture (how else could they expect to maintain control over the people through the papacy?), the reformers and saints throughout history were outspoken in their affirmation of Biblical historicity and reliability.

It is rather unlikely that the person of Jesus had any contact with Buddhists or Hindus during His ministry. However, it is quite obvious to anyone who pays attention to His teachings that He is entirely inconsistent with Stoic/Buddhist/Hindu teaching, as well as the bulk of rabbinical understandings.

• “Whoever seeks to save his life shall lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake shall find it.”
• “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father except through Me.”
• “Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
• “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about Me, yet you refuse to come to Me that you may have life.”

You are correct in part; Jesus did agree somewhat with Hillel (actually turning his words over upon themselves): “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.”

However, He disagreed with your conclusion:

• “Just as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be at the coming of the Son of Man. They were eating and drinking and marrying and being given in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ask, and the flood came and destroyed them all.”
• “But in the beginning, at the time of creation, God made them male and female.”

We do better to let Jesus speak for Himself than to assume we know what He believed.

Blessings!

The first sin that was ever committed, and every sin since, all sprang from pride.

“How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low! You said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God I will set my throne on high; I will sit on the mount of assembly in the far reaches of the north; I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.’ But you are brought down to Sheol, to the far reaches of the pit.”

That is what “Lucifer”, the “Day Star”, said in his arrogance. It was said also of Nebuchadnezzar, for he was fueled by pride similar to Lucifer’s.

Satan’s fall was not merely about getting worship due to God. It was about status. “I will set my throne on high.” “I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.” Satan’s pride deceived him into thinking that God was like him.

This is the lie that Satan has sold to hundreds of thousands of people through the ages. The Mormon heresy that Elohim was once a human who ascended to Godhood….Hinduism, which teaches that humans can achieve oneness with the Brahmin by repeated purification and reincarnation….Buddhism, which pretends that we can achieve divinity in meditation….all of these false religions preach that we can attain to Godhood.

It’s preposterous, of course. But it’s the lie that people tell themselves. “I can be like God.” When people create an idol of God with their minds—a God who won’t judge them for their sins—they are pretending that they can be greater than God.

Anyone who is foolish enough to believe that he can become greater than God is foolish enough to believe that he can bring God down to his level. This was the fallacy that Satan fell prey to when he tried to tempt Jesus.

It wasn’t just about worship. He was trying to get God to sin. He wanted to prove to the universe that God was no better than the angels. He had believed that from the beginning, and in the incarnation of Christ he saw his chance to prove it.

Of course, this only factored into God’s divine plan. Jesus proved Himself completely unsusceptible to temptation. The devil’s mind was again proven false. And because of this, it can be said (as Paul said): “For we do not have a High Priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.”

Here’s a question. If Jesus wasn’t God, and all Satan needed to “win” was for Jesus to sin once, why didn’t Satan simply say, “let me worship you”? It’s a lot simpler to receive worship than it is to give worship. And if Jesus wasn’t God, then receiving worship would have been a sin.

We who know God laugh at how preposterous it would be to imagine Jesus worshipping the devil. But unless Jesus was God, then He would have been sinning if He had allowed the devil to worship Him.

David

Working in a fast-paces restaurant half the week and living at a secular university invites a good deal of foul language. At times, it’s rubbed off on me. I’ve had to watch my language at times; now and then I let expletives slip under my breath. It’s one of many things I’ve been convicted about, and one of many things God is working on in my life.

I still use exclamations that make some people uncomfortable. “Gosh” is technically a euphemism derived from “God”, but it’s developed enough of an identity of its own that I don’t equate it with blasphemy.

“Gosh, these hot wings are amazing.”

But every now and then, so-called “minced oaths” are really inadequate. Particularly when I’m really glad at something God’s done. Things that He does deserve an exclamation of surprise more illustrative of awe. “Gosh, I’m blessed” is almost blasphemous in its disconcern.

Would it be less blasphemous (or altogether profitable) to use God’s name as an expression of the scale of awe and gratitude you feel for what He’s done?

“God, I’m thankful for grace.”

It’s one thing to use God’s name in place of a four-letter word. But reverse blasphemy poses an interesting question, I think.

David

Christians love to read clever anecdotes about how to overcome a particular besetting sin or thwart the schemes of the devil. Why wouldn’t we? This isn’t necessarily a method of doing that….but hopefully it will bring you a little comfort anyway.

The flesh — it’s a constant battle, isn’t it? We fool ourselves into thinking that our own strength will keep us righteous, but sin overtakes us nonetheless. We cry out with the Apostle Paul, “Oh, wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”

Our answer should be the same as his.

“Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! ….there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do.”

I was reading through part of Psalms when I recalled these words. King David wrote Psalm 18 as a celebration of God’s strength and the victory he’d been given over Saul and the rest of his enemies. Here’s an excerpt:

I love you, O LORD, my strength.
The LORD is my Rock and my Fortress and my Deliverer, my God, my Rock, in whom I take refuge, my Shield, and the horn of my salvation, my Stronghold.
I call upon the LORD, Who is worthy to be praised, and I am saved from my enemies.
The cords of death encompassed me; the torrents of destruction assailed me; the cords of Sheol entangled me; the snares of death confronted me.
In my distress I called upon the Lord; to my God I cried for help. From His temple He heard my voice, and my cry to Him reached His ears.
He rescued me from my strong enemy and from those who hated me, for they were too mighty for me.
They confronted me in the day of my calamity, but the Lord was my support.”

I don’t know about you. But I was never really able to identify very much with King David in passages like these. I’d never had to fight against people who wanted me dead. Usually, when I was in a bitter dispute with someone, I had been the one at fault. I didn’t ever have a time that I “pursued my enemies and overtook them, and did not turn back till they were consumed.”

But even so, the passage really resonated with me today. So I read it over again a few times. Re-reading scripture is a really good idea.

Then I saw the parallel.

“The cords of death encompassed me; the torrents of destruction assailed me; the cords of Sheol entangled me; the snares of death confronted me.”

“Oh, wretched man that I am? Who shall deliver me from this body of sin?”

The parallel continues.

“You have given me the shield of Your salvation, and Your right hand supported me, and Your gentleness made me great. You gave a wide place for my steps under me, and my feet did not slip.”

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.”

What peace and what blessing! “If God is for us, who can be against us?” The battle against the flesh isn’t a battle we must fight alone, or even a battle that we can fight alone; the battle is and always will be the Lord’s. And He is more than capable of defeating sin.

For me, it’s just an awfully beautiful sight to imagine:

“The Lord also thundered in the heavens, and the Most High uttered His voice, hailstones and coals of fire. And He sent out His arrows and scattered them; He flashed forth lightnings and routed them. Then the channels of the sea were seen, and the foundations of the world were laid bare at Your rebuke, O Lord, at the blast of the breath of Your nostrils.”

Don’t you see? This is what God does to our flesh and our sin when we give Him the reins of our life! Is there any conceivable way that we’ll be defeated by our own selfish lusts when the Lord of the universe is fighting for us?

“For You equipped me with strength for the battle; You made those who rise against me sink under me. You made my enemies turn their backs to me, and those who hated me I destroyed.”

Dear Christian: trust in the Lord, and lean not on your own understanding. Seek Him first and He will bear you up.

David

What does He know that we don’t
What grand design is this
To break apart hearts
Dashing our dreams
Making the precious obscene

In Him, our promise is true
In Him, all things are new
In Him, we can see
In Him, we’ll be
In Him forever secure

Someone asked me about whether healing services are Christian. Here’s a short summary of what’s wrong with the mindset of services like this….

There are people who are Christians who go to healing services. And they say that it’s a Christian thing.

But it’s not something that God encourages or teaches. People like to pretend that they can get things for themselves…health, wealth, or prosperity…by saying the right incantations or reading Bible verses in the right order. God isn’t impressed by those things. He’s not some big white-haired man in the sky, waiting for us to get the right sequence of phrases in order. He’s not controlled by us.

People who think they can control God don’t know God.

God’s will is a lot cleaner and straighter than ours. He uses joy and pain and health and suffering and wealth and poverty to glorify Himself. A healing service says, “God exists to make our lives happy; we just have to do the right things in the right order.” God says, “You exist so that I can use your life to bring myself glory…I will do what I will, regardless of what you think you’re doing.”

The people at healing services usually take pieces of Bible verses and twist them to make them seem like promises. Then they drum up a lot of emotion in the audience. They appeal to superstition and use cheap tricks to convince people that God is present…when He’s no where close.

No, I don’t expect that this title will win many points for popularity. Of course, it wasn’t exactly intended to.

iPhones are quite amazing…really, they are. My iPhone lets me do all sorts of things that would be terribly difficult without it. YouVersion.com has an app for the iPhone that lets you choose from a variety of plans to read through the Bible in a given time period. I read awfully fast, so I’m using the Bible-in-3-months plan. It comes to 12-16 chapters each day, which takes me about twenty minutes each morning, reading slowly.

The plan goes straight through the Bible continuously, so by Saturday morning I was already halfway through Genesis. There’s something really refreshing about plowing through Genesis at the beginning of the year…you can feel the Spirit renewing your mind. Genesis is full of beginnings – at least that’s what the little header in my Bible says.

There’s always a great deal of discussion, especially in Reformed and/or home schooled circles, over the proper methods and practices of romance. Josh Harris roundly condemned recreational dating as a means of finding a mate. The Vision Forum group, headed by Doug Phillips, teaches a strict concept of courtship mixed with a renewed patriarchy and restoration theology. Others simply discourage casual dating and encourage seriousness.

Wherever you may be on the continuum (or if you’re not particularly concerned at all), there are a few interesting illustrations of a “Biblical marriage” in Genesis.

I prefer to use the term “Biblical marriage” instead of “Biblical courtship” – it makes the focus a little stronger. And with this in mind, we approach the comedy of errors in Genesis 24.

I call it a comedy of errors simply because the premise seems humorous. “Servant, swear that you’ll set my kid up with a girl from a nice family.” “Okay.” ~long road trip~ “God, let’s get a girl that likes camels, okay?” “Hey – your daughter gave my camels water; can my boss’s kid marry her?”

And yet, what we see in this passage is, in fact, an arranged marriage. But it’s the good kind of arranged marriage: a God-arranged marriage.

I’d wager a guess that God’s design for marriage—the enduring union between a man and a woman—is just this. He wants marriage to be something He arranges.

In the story of Isaac and Rebekah, we can see three aspects of a real God-arranged marriage.

Trust in Providence

It started with Abraham trusting God (and I’d suspect that his brother Nahor, Rebecca’s father, had done the same). This kind of trust isn’t just an affirmation of belief; it’s the choice to believe that God will do what He has promised. Abraham instructed Eliezer his servant:

“The Lord God of heaven, who took from my father’s house and from the land of my family, and who spoke to me and swore to me, saying, ‘To your seed I give this land,’ He will send His angel before you, and you shall take a wife for my son from [my father's house].” (Genesis 24:7)

Abraham believed that God would keep His promise to make Abraham’s seed into a great nation. He knew God didn’t want his son to take a wife from the tribes that surrounded them in Canaan. He trusted God enough to send his servant on a rather long journey in pursuit of the woman God had for son.

What’s really interesting about Abraham’s trust, though, was that it did not extend to his own plan. He trusted God to provide a wife for his son, but he knew his understanding of God wasn’t complete. He knew that God could provide in a way or at a time that was unexpected. So he told his servant, “…if the woman is not willing to follow you, then you will be released from this oath.” Abraham believed God enough to trust that He would make the path straight.

Abraham knew he wouldn’t have to force God’s will into fruition. How often are we so sure of our own understanding of God’s will that we’ll ignore counsel or clear Scriptural directions to chase what we think God has…when the manner or timing is really a lot different than we expect?

Eliezer trusted God as well. Girls might not understand how hard it is for a guy to approach a pretty girl, but it really is. And Eliezer was a rather old fellow! It takes a whole lot of trust to say, “God, bring the woman to me, and I’ll trust that she’s the one.” It may have been tempting for him to have waffled around or tried to hunt down a nice-looking prospect on his own wisdom…but instead he trusted God. Later on, he says:

“And I said to my master, ‘Perhaps the woman will not follow me.’ But he said to me, ‘The Lord, before whom I walk, will send His angel with you and prosper your way; and you shall take a wife for my son from my family and from my father’s house.’” (verses 39-40)

Rebekah, Laban, and Bethuel also trusted God. “The thing comes from the Lord; we cannot speak to you either bad or good. Here is Rebecca before you; take her and go, and let her be your master’s son’s wife, as the Lord has spoken.”

Consent – both of the parents and of the bride

There’s another important aspect of a God-arranged marriage: consent. Not only is this naturally very important to the general peace and comfort of all involved, but in looking at this passage, it’s clear that parental consent is one of the things God uses to show that He’s ordained the thing. Eliezer recounts from Abraham’s instructions:

‘You will be clear from this oath when you arrive among my family; for if they will not give her to you, then you will be released from my oath.’ (verse 41)

Just as it would have been in opposition to God’s plan (not to mention foolish) for Eliezer to take Rebekah without her family’s consent, so it’s terribly foolish for a young couple to think that they have God’s will all figured out and subsequently ignore the advice of parents.

Another key point: the consent of the girl. After all, it’s her life they’re dealing with. “Then they called Rebekah and said to her, ‘Will you go with this man?’ And she said, ‘I will go.’” (verse 58)

But note that the girl’s consent came after God had already orchestrated the whole event.

True Love

“Then Isaac…took Rebekah and she became his wife, and he loved her.” (verse 67)

Genesis speaks of the love that Jacob had for Rachel, and it infers the love that Abram/Abraham had for Sarai/Sarah. But there’s something a little different about the love that Isaac had for Rebekah.

Abraham had the whole affair with Hagar, and he took a couple of wives after Sarah died. He had a couple of concubines as well. Jacob married Leah and Rachel and slept with their assorted handmaidens on a variety of occasions. Judah, later, would have a terrible time dealing with his daughter-in-law. But in all of Genesis, there’s no mention of Isaac loving anyone else but Rebekah.

A little glimpse of this can be seen a couple of chapters later. Like his father, Isaac has a beautiful wife and is terrified that the people he’s staying with will kill him and take her. So, as Abraham did, he says that she’s his sister.

“Now it came to pass, when he had been there a long time, that Abimelech king of the Philistines looked through a window, and saw, and there was Isaac showing endearment to Rebekah his wife. Then Abimelech called Isaac and said, ‘Quite obviously she is your wife.’” (Genesis 26:8-9)

The English Standard Version translates the Hebrew word/phrase tsachaq (“showing endearment to”) as “laughing with”. The King James Version translates it “sporting with”. Whatever it was, Abimelech was quite certain that the two were married. It’s one of the rare examples (outside Song of Solomon, at least) of the love and affection between a man and a woman.

Did you know that the word “kiss” is only used romantically two times in the entire Bible?

Isaac and Rebekah had something that is quite enviable: a God-arranged marriage. Its conception was marked by trust in God, mutual consent, and enduring love. Such a nice reminder of what God has in store for those who love Him.

David

God gave the Jews two signs to tell whether an animal was kosher, and therefore fit for food. There was an internal sign: kosher animals must chew their cud. There was an external sign: kosher animals must have split hooves. It is the presence of both signs that rendered the animal kosher.

Just as animals are either kosher or not, so men are either marked by the signs of redemption or they are not. In speaking of Jews themselves, Rabbi Moskowitz says:

“…a kosher Jew is marked by two signs. The internal: faith…[and]…prayer…. The external: the actual fulfillment of [God's requirements]. It is not enough to have one sign alone. The camel, which chews its cud but doesn’t have split hooves, represents those with internal signs while the [pig], which has split hooves but doesn’t chew its cud, symbolizes those that have only the external signs.”

This mirrors very closely the comparison of faith and works spoken of by Paul and by James under the new covenant:

What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him?” -James

“For by works of the law no human being will be justified in His sight…But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law: the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.” -Paul

We know that a man who has been born again will have both enduring faith and visible fruit. In the new covenant, again, we’re given two signs whereby we can tell a “kosher” Christian: their faith in Christ and the fruit of the work of grace in their life.

I thought that the analogy can carry a little further. A pig – with the external sign of split hooves – is like a man who takes pride in his works, trusting them to save him. A camel – with the internal sign of chewing the cud – is like a man who simulates a relationship with Christ by his own efforts but has no lasting fruit.

And just as it would take a miracle to change a pig or a camel into a sheep, so it takes the miracle of grace and imputed righteousness and salvation to change human “pigs” and human “camels” into sheep. Sheep that hear the Shepherd’s voice and follow.

There’s no continuum between split hooves and un-split hooves. There’s no “halfway point” between chewing the cud and not chewing the cud. And there’s nothing that an unclean animal can do to change itself into a kosher one.

If you’ve been born again, then thank God that He has miraculously changed you and given you faith to trust Him and the Holy Spirit to produce fruit in your life. Seek to display the fruit of your salvation however you can.

And if you are one who, like a camel, has all the right words and beliefs but no externally changed life to accompany it…or, like a pig, has the external show of good deeds but a heart that doesn’t yearn for the things of God…then seek the Lord while He may be found.

May God bless you this year.

David