The Cross and The Rainbow

What is there that I can say about this weekend? For those of you who live under rocks the Supreme Court has made a decision that will affect the very fabric of America as a society. The decision the court made was to legalize same sex marriage across the US in all 50 states. Not only did they legalize same sex marriage, in doing so they have now made marriage a constitutional right. All of the  while the constitution being a document that doesn’t address marriage whatsoever.

For a person such as myself I take issue with the court's decision on the grounds that instead of the government staying out of the business of marriage in the first place, they have now directly inserted themselves inside of the issue. Now, please hear me out I am not saying that I am directly opposed to gay marriage. Being a Christian I do not support it in the sense that I won't vote for it at the ballot box, but the other side of my Christianity teaches me that my goal is not to dictate and reign in a society and force it to see the world the way that I see it. I believe in the sanctity of peoples free will, and that they are able to do what they will, until they surrender to Christ. Jesus told us to go out and make disciples of all of the nations, he didn’t tell us to go and subdue the nations. There is a major difference. There is also a difference between not supporting something and tolerating something. Two people who are near and dear to my heart are members of the LGBT community, both of them know where I stand personally, but they know that those fundamental beliefs do not mean that I hate them.

Unfortunately for many people in both camps (the LGBT community, and my brothers and sisters in Christ) have very skewed views on what it means to love something and someone, and tolerate something and someone. The best example of love that I can think of that applies to  members of both the LGBT and Christian worldview would be that of their parents. Your parents loved you and nurtured you as you grew up, but they had rules I am sure. And if you did not follow those rules there were consequences. There are also I am sure some things that you did in your childhood that your parents did not support. But that does not mean that they did not love you! As a Christian we are taught to love, but just because we do not support certain things does that mean that we do not love you.

The United States was started by a few groups of Christian pilgrims who traveled across the ocean in order to practice Christianity the way that they saw fit outside of the rule of the Church of England. Throughout the years relations between the colonies and England grew ever more strained, and a revolution occurred. These men who found themselves framing this new country were not all Christians, but they did establish and make decisions based off of a Judaeo Christian worldview. To deny the Christian roots of the United States of America would be an injustice and create a lack of understanding on what this country was founded upon. It could not exist as it is today if it was founded on a Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, etc. worldview.

I think for many people the reason for so much of the upheaval about the supreme courts decision is that they ruled in favor for a group of people who makes up 2% at the lowest and 8% at the highest of the population, over a group that makes up at least 95% percent of the population. A reason that so many Christians find themselves in a conundrum is because now the government has sanctioned something that many feel is diametrically opposed to their faith. That being said there is a fear that the government can now force Churches and pastors to participate in same sex nuptials. Some will ask “well wouldn’t the first amendment protect from that?” Well let me ask you a question. Has the government in the last 15-40 years seemed the least bit concerned with the constitution period?

For us American Christians this is the first time that we have found ourselves in a truly pluralistic society and it scares us! But should it? The world of the prophets was pluralistic, the world of Jesus Christ was pluralistic, and the world of the apostles was pluralistic. The Church throughout history has thrived in pluralistic societies, in the face of persecution, and even when all hope seems lost. Look at the Church in China for instance, it is illegal to even own a Bible yet against all odds the Church is exploding! The Bible teaches us that it is a blessing to find ourselves in the face of persecution, and that we should remain joyful at all times.

There are few times I can say that I am ashamed of America and it is coming to a time where I feel that I am and here is why. We are more concerned about the way that murderers who have ruined their lives die, than protecting the life of one who has yet to live it. We are more concerned about the government enforcing gay marriage, than the fact that ISIS, Islamic Countries, and Russia are killing homosexuals. We are more concerned with the fact that for the first time ever in America Christianity is facing a bump in the road than the fact that Christians and Jews are being crucified and slaughtered daily at the hands of ISIS. The issue of homosexual marriage is not the biggest issue facing the Church and the world today, yet we treat it as if it is the only thing that matters. We should be ashamed of ourselves. We should be ashamed for blatantly ignoring the heinous crimes and atrocities occurring all in the name of Islam, while being so quick to lambast Christians as bigoted and intolerant  because they don't agree with gay marriage. Are Christians killing people? Are Christians crucifying people? Are Christians throwing homosexuals off of rooftops? Do not be tempted to use the crusades as a scapegoat, because Jesus was no part of the crusades. As Christians we should be ashamed for spewing so much hate and anger, it is high time we take a good hard look in the mirror and ask if the face staring back at us is that of Jesus, and if it isn't then get to work.

If we can learn anything from the prophets, Jesus, and the apostles is that Christianity is terrible at affecting the society from the top down, but is extraordinarily powerful at affecting society beginning with the individual. Quite frankly if we as the church had been doing our jobs all along, we may not be where we are today. For better or worse this is where we are. To my Christian brothers and sisters, I love you. To those of you in the LGBT community, I love you, I may not agree with you, and you may not agree with me, but that is okay I am not asking you to agree with me, I would just ask for the same respect and understanding that you ask of me. I would also ask that the next time you throw around the term bigot that you take a look at yourself and ask are you also not willing to be open to other options and opinions because if not, you have become the very monster you have set out to defeat.

Moral Accountability

In today's Western society, there are few philosophies as aggressive to those who adhere to the Christian faith as what many philosophers and theologians have named "The New Atheism." This New Atheism owes much of it's increase in popularity to those intellectuals in the upper echelons of many academic institutions. People like Richard Dawkins, Laurence Krauss, Bill Maher, and the late Christopher Hitchens have done more to further the new atheism and have aided in promoting it's more aggressive nature. It is this aggressive side of the new atheism that I want to address in this post.

There are several issues with many of the attacks on religion from the new atheistic point of view because they tend to make assumptions and claims that just are not true. Here are a few examples, along with counter arguments.

• Religion does not promote and even harms scientific progress.
• This claim is just down right not true. Historically speaking many of the greatest early scientists and mathematicians were religious. Isaac Newton was a Christian, René DesCartes was a Christian, and many of the earliest advancements in Astronomy were made by Islamic astronomers.
• Religion is responsible for much of the death and war in the world.
• This claim is an over-generalization and is an attempt to reach into the past and assign the blame of the horrors of the Crusades on Christianity, when in all actuality the crusades spawned from the greed and human depravity that wormed its way into the early Catholic Church. The Crusades had nothing to do with the actual teachings of Christ and true Christianity. Perhaps a better argument against this claim is the fact that most wars and conflicts are due to resources, or in the case of Hitler and WWII the annihilation of a religious group among many other things.
• Religion no longer benefits society.
• My argument for this would simply be to point at just about any hospital and the fact that they all either have Saint, Methodist, or Baptist somewhere in the name.
• Religion (particularly Christianity) is an opiate to the masses used for control.
• Anyone who knows anything of Christianity knows that at its heart, it strips all control of the believer from any worldly person and hands it over to God. Standing up to the rulers of the world is a common theme from the Old Testament to the New. This is one of the many reasons that fueled the American Revolution. Christianity teaches that a man's life is not governed by other men, nor is it governed by themselves rather submitted to God alone.

Perhaps what is more frustrating than these claims is what I have found to be an underlying reason why the new atheism seeks to remove Christianity from the forefront of western culture and it is because Christianity offers a form of moral accountability. This is one of the main reasons that you see Christianity attacked over other religions such as Buddhism. Buddhism, at its core, is atheistic. The source of moral accountability comes from within. Therefore Buddhism is not a threat to the humanistic "do what thou wilt" mentality. The same can be true for the current "spiritualism" movement that teaches that the source of truth comes from within, taking God from transcendence and applying the divine to oneself. This is the tragedy of new atheism; to make man his own God, removing any form of moral accountability, therefore making all things permissible.

Many Atheists will disagree with me, and that is fine but it is the truth. As I stated in my last post, if all that we are as humans is the result of time, matter, and chance, just another link in the food chain, then morality is arbitrary. Survival of the fittest, if we are not in some way part of a bigger story, completely justifies, murder, thievery, lust, etc.

The world needs moral accountability that is transcendent from humanity. If man can create his own morality, then it would be ever changing, constantly molded and shaped in order to fit the mindset of any particular culture. The issue with this is just that. Without any transcendent moral accountability we become lost in the unnavigable waters of relativism without any point of reference. We become sailors without the north star to guide us home in the night.

I leave you today with the first portion of a hymn by Edward Mote:
My hope is built on nothing less
Than Jesus Christ, my righteousness
I dare not trust the sweetest frame
But wholly trust in Jesus' name
On Christ the solid rock I stand
All other ground is sinking sand
All other ground is sinking sand

The Problem of The Problem of Pain

Pain and suffering are perhaps the two most problematic issues for people throughout their faith journey. In fact the often controversial, evangelical news anchor Pat Robinson made headlines for a remark he made about the issue. As human beings we loathe discomfort. We didn’t like walking long distances so we learned to ride horses. Horses took to long to reach a destination so we invented the train and the automobile. Trains and automobiles took to long so we invented airplanes and helicopters.  Much of the technological advancement during our time has been because we have attempted to overcome our discomforts through innovation or the manipulation of our environment. Is it any wonder that the most difficult issues for people to reconcile with the Christian faith or any type of faith at all is that of pain and suffering?

I find it odd that human beings have a tendency to give moral identities to things that are amoral. Calling pleasure good and pain evil would be like assigning these identities to money. Money is neither good nor evil but can be used in either context. In the same way pleasure and pain are neither good nor evil but can be used in either context. Pleasure as it occurs in illicit scenarios would be evil, just like the pain or suffering you experience when exercising or getting a shot of medication would be good. If that we can posit that pleasure and pain are amoral then we can no longer assign the blame of evil to God or to say that because evil exists God therefore cannot exist. A problem when people do this is that when they talk about pain and suffering they are talking about a person. They are assuming that the human life has some sort of value and worth. On the atheistic worldview where man is nothing more than time + matter + chance where then does the worth of human life come from? I would posit that the only way human life can have any worth at all is if it is given to us by a transcendent creator. 

Isn't it ironic how people want to be able to be left to their own devices up until something tragic happens? At the point of crisis people tend to feel that they need some sort of intervention, be it divine or another source. A common question that is often heard is: “Why did God allow this to happen, if he loved me wouldn’t he not allow this to happen?” I believe that this is an unbiblical view of God’s character and nature. I can hardly recall any time in scripture in which God himself directly intervened in the life of man. More often than not God uses other means in which rectify a situation or scenario.

In the book of Genesis we encounter the characters of Adam and Eve, everyone knows the story so I will not go through all of the details but ultimately Adam and Eve fell into sin. This fall into sin resulted in the entire world being engulfed by it. This is what we call man’s “falleness” or the fallen nature of man. The entirety of scripture is an overarching story of God’s attempt to reconcile man back to himself after we separated ourselves through sin.  In this story of reconciliation there is one thing that becomes immediately clear, one of the only things that we as human beings are guaranteed to encounter during our lives is pain and suffering. Even Jesus himself was not exempt from the pain and suffering of our sinful world when he died on the cross.

Now many people will disagree with what I have to say next because it delves into a decades long debate but I am okay with that. The question that arises from the previous paragraph is why then does God allow pain and suffering to exist at all, and the answer to that is because that is what we chose. One thing that has become apparent in my life is that God is more than willing to allow us to do, as we will. He has given us a freewill, and he allows us to use it. In the very beginning we chose a path of separation from God, and left to our own devices we would choose it time and time again because sin has permeated the very fabric of our being. Human beings have an innate desire to do good, but we have a tragic flaw of consistently doing the wrong thing. So what then is God to do in order to reconcile this dichotomy in human nature? He sends his son to the earth in the form of a man, fully human and fully man, to suffer and to die on the cross. So that anyone who believes in him will inherit eternal life. Not by anything we can, have, or will do, but grace through faith in Jesus Christ. A common question that arises from this is why would God give us free will if he knows that some of us will choose the opposite of a life with him and the answer is because when we choose him it is an act of sacrifice and an act of true love. Take a marriage relationship for example. When you meet the person who you choose to spend the rest of your life with you are basically saying I choose you over every other man or woman in the world. You aren’t forced into the relationship; you are allowed to choose whom you spend your life with and that means more than loving someone who has no choice but to love you back. It becomes obligation rather than a sacrificial type of love.

Now you may be saying to yourself that this is all fine and dandy but it doesn’t change the feelings that come along with experiencing suffering and pain. The loss of a child or a loved one before they have had time to live a full life is perhaps the best example of the type of pain and suffering that causes people the most grief. These things are terrible, and it is a terrible thing that one should have to go through this. But to assign the blame of this on God is simply making him a scapegoat. Now don’t be mistaken I am not saying that because a person get’s sick or has a disease or what ever is a direct result of their sin. I am saying that it is a direct result of being born into a fallen world. I believe this is why in the New Testament one of the most common admonishments we find is that we should find joy in the suffering. Never do you see Jesus say if you follow me life will be easy and you will never experience pain again. In fact something that he does assure those who chose to follow him is that if anything,

life will get more difficult. But one thing that is for certain when the Christian encounters trials, suffering, and pain we can know that no matter what happens God is still God, and he can give us the strength to find joy even in the darkest places.

Advice for the Recent Grad, and the Rest of Us

With graduation happening at many high schools across the country and the recent graduation of my youngest sister I decided to take this week’s post in a direction that focuses on some advice that I want to communicate to her; that being said, this post is not going to be directed at her specifically but to everyone who is graduating or may be entering into a season of their lives in which there is drastic change. Though it is more focused on the graduate I believe that this post will benefit anyone at any stage of life.

Growing up in the great generation that society and the media has labeled “the millennials” we have quite a negative stigma that is directed towards us. This stigma says that we are all lazy, we are all dependent, and we are all entitled. Those in the older generation are very unsettled and uneasy about the direction the country will be heading once we come of influential age. The sad thing is that a lot of what they say is true; many of us are lazy, many of us are dependent, and have a sense of entitlement. But perhaps what is even sadder, is the fact a lot of what the older generation has done and the philosophies that have been carried over from the 60s-70s are what has shaped our generation. We grew up in a world where everyone got trophies just for “participating”, we have never been told no, we were told happiness is the end goal rather than the product of the end goal, we were told to not put limits on any aspect of our lives, our parents were told if they used corporal punishment it was abuse (and if they did use corporal punishment we would have trouble seeing the “grey area” in moral issues). If I keep listing things I could probably fill up several pages, and that is not what this post is about so I will move on.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that our generation has so many things stacked against us; that being said, there is a way to overcome this stigma but it requires changing your mindset from the conditioning that has taken place throughout our lives. Perhaps the first and most important piece of advice that I can give you is that your happiness is not the highest virtue of life. Happiness is not a goal to be achieved but is the product of achieving your goals. A good example of this alleged “truth” being false is to look at your parents. When people become parents their happiness gets put on the back burner and their primary objective is to ensure the well-being of their children. There can be no doubt that children can be a source of happiness in a parent’s life, but if a parent’s sole concern was their own happiness then what kind of life would the child have? Chances are that the child would be miserable and neglected. Don't get me wrong happiness is a great thing to have but it is something that we are never promised nor guaranteed. 

The second piece of advice that I can give you is to come to the realization that pleasure and pain are amoral; meaning pleasure is not necessarily morally good, nor is pain morally evil. Life is going to get hard sometimes, maybe even harder than you think that you can handle, and I am not going to say here that God won’t give you more than you can bear because that isn’t Biblical. But I have come to learn that from most forms of suffering there tends to be a lesson to be learned from it. Scripture says that from the bad things, God will work them towards our good. We are never promised that we wont go through tough times; in fact if we can learn anything from scripture it is that we can be assured that tough times will come. But when they do come, scripture shows us the right way to handle the obstacles that are thrown our way, and how to find joy in the suffering.

The third piece of advice that I would give to you would be to stop thinking about yourself as an island, because you are not. By this i mean stop allowing yourself to maintain the "me" mentality. When we enter into the “real” world post-high school and even college, we take on the role of a citizen, where the actions and choices that we make do not just affect only ourselves but everyone around us both directly and indirectly. Living life for ourselves ultimately ends in isolation. The concept of individualism is great but you cannot forget that you are an individual who is a part of family, state, country, etc. that is made up of other individuals. Every action that we make bears a consequence and it is irresponsible to not think of those consequences. If Christ only thought about himself and his well being I don't think that he ever would have went to the cross, but the amazing thing is that his thoughts and love for all of us are what drove him towards the ultimate sacrifice.

Finally, the last and perhaps most cliché piece of advice that I can give to you is to keep God first. As overstated as this phrase is, it carries more connotations than what one can perceive from the surface. Before we make a decision, and we pray and ask if what we are doing or about to do is keeping God first it affects the end result. It affects everything, and that is the beauty of it. It is a principle that can be played out in every aspect of our lives. It is a big world and the greatest way that I have found to maintain your sanity is by keeping Christ at the center. Entering into college and a world where you’re free from the rules of your parents, it can be easy to take the opportunity that is before you to rebel. But what is the purpose? Is it fun? Sure, but what are the benefits for your life in the long run? The truth is that there aren’t any good things that can come from living life in a way that is ultimately destructive. It doesn’t help you get a job, create healthy relationships, create a healthy lifestyle, or become successful. 

You are an adult now and the world is going to treat you as such. Don’t live up to the low expectations that the world already has for you.  Prove them wrong, there is nothing more fulfilling than being an overcomer, and that is what I believe our generation is. We are the generation that will overcome the lies that have been spoken over us, and the obstacles that have been placed before us. The only way that this will be possible however is if we realize that it is a tough world and we will need to be tougher. I leave you with a quote from the Apostle Paul found in 1 Corinthians 13:11 "When I was a child I spoke like a child, thought like a child, reasoned like a child. When I became a man(adult) I put away childish things."