Best of Cerulean Sanctum

Witch Hunt

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Joan's pyreI’m getting really fatigued. Mad, too. If this is all the Church is in this country, then we’ve lost the whole point.

What I am referring to is the increase in witch hunts that are breaking out in the Christian blogosphere. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t tolerate horrid doctrine. But neither do I tolerate people with perfect doctrine who can merely point fingers and do little else. Anyone (and I’m including myself here) can be a critic, but very few people can be a means of grace that helps people dying for help.

So here’s what I’m saying in a nutshell:

  • If you insist that people must be exactly {miscellaneous Christian necessity}, but you are doing nothing concrete to help them achieve {miscellaneous Christian necessity}, then SHUT UP.
  • If you believe that {miscellaneous Christian ministry/teacher/author/pastor} is doctrinally wrong in some area, take a moment to ask if what he/she/it is saying in another area is something you need to hear before you call him/her/it heretical, or else SHUT UP.

I’m not willing to do the millstone thing. Have I done it in the past? Even on this blog? Probably. But folks, if we are truly going to be the Church, then we have got to start burying the hatchet in something besides each other, especially if we can only point out problems, but have no solutions. That kind of hypocrisy gets us nowhere.

Here’s a case of what I am talking about.

I am no fan of the Emerging Church or Postmodern Christianity, or whatever you want to call it. It’s got profound flaws. But I am not going to rip them up one side and down the other just for existing because they have several points of contention that we should hear. You can point out every single lousy doctrine in the Emerging Church, but what about some of the issues they are raising in areas like Christian stewardship of God’s Creation, justice for the poor, simple living, making people a priority, or making choices to live in places that are not upscale or safe because they would have no Christian presence otherwise? Honestly, has anyone in the Evangelical, Reformed, Mainline, or Whatever Church who has ripped the Emerging Church lately taken one second to say, “You know, they do that a lot better than we do. Perhaps we need to improve in that area,” or is it just one tirade after another, with closed ears and a heart unwilling to take the correction God may be doling out through the equivalent of Balaam’s ass?

A simple pass through the Lord’s chastising of the seven churches in Revelation 2-3 shows that He rewarded both good doctrine and good works. He chastised those churches that lacked in either of those two. The lesson is clear: You have to have both good doctrine and good works. I see no lack of good doctrine in the Christian blogosphere, but many of us may be lacking in the works department. Like I’ve said before, Jesus does not call us to be a good apologist or a good servant of others, He calls us to be both. You may be the greatest Web apologist out there, but if you don’t clothed the naked, what good are you? Likewise, you may be out on the street every day doing good works, but if the Christ you’re sharing with someone else isn’t the Christ of the Bible, what good are you?

As for witch hunts, everyone reading this now is a (figurative) witch. Why? Because some Christian out there is going to find something wrong with your Christianity if he or she looks hard enough. Now how many of us want to be under that withering, soul-killing magnifying glass day in and day out? I don’t. I can’t possibly please every single faction or fraction of Christianity out there no matter how bullet-proof my doctrine or actions are.

Can we ease up on the witch hunts for a while? Can we start finding out what is good, perfect, noble, and pure and start emphasizing those things, making them happen in the lives of people who truly need them? Too often we come to those blessed things not for what they are, but for what they are not. If we can only think of “good” as being “not bad” or “pure” as being “not corrupted,” then we have lost the mind of the Lord.

The Least-Believed Verse in the Bible

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In the past few days it appears the Spirit has wanted me to blog about the supernatural. I wrote about demons on Saturday, Pentecost and the Holy Spirit on Sunday, and on Monday the tendency of some Christians to believe that God no longer speaks to individuals.

Bible imageMonday’s post felt incomplete, so I feel compelled to expand it to discuss the fascination some Christians have with deflating everything supernatural, be it inside the Church or outside. And even though there are some naysayers who want to cast doubt on the very miracles that Jesus performed, I would offer that even for Christians who believe in the innerrancy of Scripture, especially those in the rarified air of nationally-known preachers and teachers, this is the least-believed verse in the Bible:

Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him.
—Mark 11:23 ESV

From the lips of Jesus Himself and yet so many of us rush right over that verse and automatically filter it through our newfangled Western Scientific Rationalism Sunglasses, so we see it, but we don’t believe it. “Mountains cast into the sea just by believing? I know that’s what it says, but—”

Talk about big “buts!” I think for most of us who have been around for a while, Mark 11:23 merits a logical explanation that goes something like this: “You know, the Bible does contain hyperboles. Jesus was just being hyperbolic. He’s such a card! You ever see a flying mountain? C’mon!”

Now I’ll be accused of faulty exegesis by most of the people who read this blog, but I’m going for it anyway because I don’t believe the following verse has merely the traditional exegesis so often given it. I think Paul is saying something even more startling:

But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be…lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people.
—2 Timothy 3:1-2a,5 ESV

Traditionally, the meaning of “denying its power” has solely been attributed to justification and sanctification, God’s powerful transformation of children of damnation into Children of God. I will not even begin to question that interpretation. However, I also believe that this passage is a cautionary bit of advice to Timothy by Paul concerning those people who would handcuff God’s supernatural power operating in the lives of believers. And those supernatural powers extend to raising the dead, speaking in tongues, healing, and all those other numinous manifestations of God’s power working through the lives of believers, and which operate within God’s justification and sanctification of those same believers.

I find it odd that many who would lessen God’s ability to do such things today love to equate preaching the Word with prophesying. And while I am perfectly comfortable with them believing that, I am mystified as to when preaching passed away when those other gifts supposedly ceased. Preaching/prophesying is listed as one of those supernatural gifts of the Spirit we find in 1 Corinthians 12, though I didn’t know that it or its well-loved compadre faith bit the dust with John’s last breath, yet some would have me believe that.

Although I suspect those same folks would argue they fully believe the least-believed verse in the Bible, they have a funny way of showing it by their tendency to use tangled arugments to mock anyone who might still believe that the Lord can raise the dead today just as He raised Lazarus. And while many are willing to suspend disbelief when it comes to the Earth being created in only six days, somehow a modern day Lazarus-like resurrection just ain’t possible.

I’m really getting fed up with anti-supernaturalists who want to have compartmentalized “miracles” on their own terms and not God’s. If God wants to blow through Bob Jones University and blast everyone there with the gift of tongues, well, stranger things have happened—and God was in control of those stranger things, too.

J.B. Phillips wrote a book with one of the greatest titles ever: Your God Is Too Small. I can’t help but believe that a deity who no longer speaks to people in his own voice, who can do no more miracles, who was once mighty but is now routinely outdone by Satan’s counterfeit parlor tricks is just that small. And perhaps our problem is that we so easily put qualifiers on a verse like Mark 11:23 that we’ve created for ourselves a convenient god that is pleasurable in his smallness, convenient enough so that he does not ruffle our little kingdoms more than he ought, and while a tad bit idolatrous, looks enough like the big “G” God of the Bible that few people will notice his impotence.

That is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. If we really wanted to know why the Church has become a joke to most people I think its largely because too many self-professed Christians believe in a handcuffed God who closely resembles the god of Deism, a god who stepped back and never again brought his superatural touch to mere mortals. This is a god easily encapsulated and who bears a too comfortable resemblance to you and to me. Who wants a god that pathetic?

I don’t know about you, but I want a big “G” in my God.

God Is Still Speaking

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IlluminationThis is a response to Steve Camp’s post “Worship Wars.” While I greatly respect Steve’s teachings in general, I believe there is a problem with his limited view of God’s speaking to people today. The underlying idea he expresses is that God ceased to speak to us once the canon of Scripture was closed. This perspective is very common and I hear it all the time in the Christian blogosphere, but I contend it makes Christianity into a dead religion that was codified in a book by a God who once spoke, but does so no longer.

At issue is this quote from Steve’s article:

Worship cannot be about my feelings or personal moorings based on what I think God is mystically communicating to me in a supernatural way.

While it is true that feelings cannot be the basis for worship, what God is communicating to us when we are communing with Him is critically important, especially if that communication is “supernatural,” as Steve puts it. Steve limits what God can say only to what He has chosen to have written down in the Bible.

I start my response with a man who intimately knew God in a way that few do today:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God—John 1:1

An intelligent, plain man, untaught in the truths of Christianity, coming upon this text, would likely conclude that John meant to teach that it is the nature of God to speak, to communicate His thoughts to others. And he would be right. A word is a medium by which thoughts are expressed, and the application of the term to the eternal Son leads us to believe that self-expression is inherent in the Godhead, that God is forever seeking to speak Himself out to His creation. The whole Bible supports this idea. God is speaking. Not God spoke, but God is speaking. He is, by His nature, continuously articulate. He fills the world with His speaking voice. One of the great realities with which we have to deal is the voice of God in His world. The briefest and only cosmogony is this: “He spake, and it was done” (Psalm 33:9). The why of natural law is the loving voice of God immanent in His creation. And this word of God which brought all worlds into being cannot be understood to mean the Bible, for it is not a written or printed word at all, but the expression of the will of God is the breath of God filling the world with living potentiality. The voice of God is the most powerful force in nature, indeed the only force in nature, for all energy is here only because the power-filled Word is being spoken.

The Bible is the written word of God, and because it is written it is confined and limited by the necessities of ink and paper and leather. The voice of God, however, is alive and free as the sovereign God is free. “The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life” (John 6:63). The life is in the speaking words. God’s word in the Bible can have power only because it corresponds to God’s word in the universe. It is the present Voice which makes the written Word all-powerful. Otherwise it would lie locked in slumber within the covers of a book.
—A.W. Tozer, excerpt from the chapter “The Speaking Voice” from The Pursuit of God

Agree or disagree?

Does God not still speak to us? If He does not, then what is the purpose of having the Holy Spirit placed in us if God did not intend to continue to speak through His Spirit? The Spirit is more than a stamp of salvific approval on the Christian. If He were only that, then there would be no reason for Him to be a living Person. Stamps do not speak, only persons do.

And what of inspiration or the words of a preacher like Whitefield brought to life by the unction of the Spirit? If God does not still speak, then there is no sense for us to be Christians any longer, for all inspiration is lost. It may have been codified once, but there is nothing more to say, therefore there would be no reason for us to speak a single word to anyone, preaching going the way of the dodo. Anyone here believe that to be true?

While I greatly respect Mr. Camp, he may one day come up against a person who meets the very criteria Camp himself sets forth, someone who is delivering the voice of God. What then?

Why are we so very afraid that God may still be speaking? Why should we be afraid of the Voice today? The Spirit blows where He wills; does He do so no longer? If He still does, would He come without a message? By no means! Because it is the very nature of God to always be speaking.

You could open your Bible anywhere and find God speaking to His human creations, but the one I choose here is God speaking to His wayward prophet Elijah. After God’s trouncing of the prophets of Baal through Elijah and the subsequent destruction of the Baalites, Elijah fears for his life and takes off into the wilderness, hiding from King Ahab and his wicked wife Jezebel:

Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, “So may the gods do to me and more also, if I do not make your life as the life of one of them by this time tomorrow.” (3) Then he was afraid, and he arose and ran for his life and came to Beersheba, which belongs to Judah, and left his servant there. (4) But he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness and came and sat down under a broom tree. And he asked that he might die, saying, “It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life, for I am no better than my fathers.” (5) And he lay down and slept under a broom tree. And behold, an angel touched him and said to him, “Arise and eat.” (6) And he looked, and behold, there was at his head a cake baked on hot stones and a jar of water. And he ate and drank and lay down again. (7) And the angel of the LORD came again a second time and touched him and said, “Arise and eat, for the journey is too great for you.” (8) And he arose and ate and drank, and went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb, the mount of God. (9) There he came to a cave and lodged in it. And behold, the word of the LORD came to him, and he said to him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” (10) He said, “I have been very jealous for the LORD, the God of hosts. For the people of Israel have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword, and I, even I only, am left, and they seek my life, to take it away.” (11) And he said, “Go out and stand on the mount before the LORD.” And behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind tore the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. (12) And after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire the sound of a low whisper. (13) And when Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. And behold, there came a voice to him and said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” (14) He said, “I have been very jealous for the LORD, the God of hosts. For the people of Israel have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword, and I, even I only, am left, and they seek my life, to take it away.” (15) And the LORD said to him, “Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus. And when you arrive, you shall anoint Hazael to be king over Syria. (16) And Jehu the son of Nimshi you shall anoint to be king over Israel, and Elisha the son of Shaphat of Abel-meholah you shall anoint to be prophet in your place. (17) And the one who escapes from the sword of Hazael shall Jehu put to death, and the one who escapes from the sword of Jehu shall Elisha put to death. (18) Yet I will leave seven thousand in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth that has not kissed him.”
—1 Kings 19:2-18 ESV

Notice a few things concerning Elijah and the Lord here:
1. Elijah was consecrated to God in the same way as we read in Romans 12:1 (“I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.) He was a true worshiper of God.

2. Even though Elijah trusted God, he was afraid and depressed enough to die. While we don’t associate fear and depression with faithfulness, there was no doubt that God still considered Elijah faithful and still spoke to Him in a personal way.

3. God spoke to Elijah through the exact means needed to reach him. God’s tenderness is shown to the prophet. And while we are not to base our worship on feelings, God is mindful of the emotional state of His prophet and takes this into account in the way that He deals with His servant.

In light of this encounter, should any of us believe that God does not speak to us in the same way that He spoke to Elijah? As true worshipers, is the depth of relationship we have with God somehow capped so we can never experience the level of intimacy that Elijah experienced when God spoke to him in the whisper? Are we somehow perpetually lesser servants of God? I see nothing in the Bible that says that God cannot speak to me in the same way that He spoke to Elijah, even when I am afraid or depressed, just like the prophet. Why should we limit God? In fact, with the Spirit of God actually indwelling us, I believe that our potential for intimacy with God, to have amazing conversations with Him, are even greater than in the days of the Old Testament when God would periodically dwell on people rather than remaining in them.

Therefore, not only does God speak, but He speaks personally. He speaks to each one of us. His intimacy is with each one of His children, those who bear the Holy Spirit within. And not only does He still speak, but He speaks to our need, our place in Him, and in measure to our ability to respond. If Steve Camp has any fair remark it’s that too many self-appointed and highly immature “mouthpieces for God” want to talk when they should be listening, allowing God to mature them to the point where He will truly use them to speak if He wills. However, that fair criticism is used in a blanket way to establish a rule by which no one can ever relay the voice of God for an individual or group in the moment. By Steve’s rule, God would never speak in the way that He does here:

While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.”
—Acts 13:2 ESV

If that kind of speaking is out today, then how are we to function as a Church?

Lastly, as the bearers of His Light, that Light speaks out from us to those in the darkness. Even our lives can be the words of God to mankind. Because God is still speaking, we should not be surprised when the person sitting next to us on the bus hears the Lord’s voice in our very countenance.

So if God is still speaking, the only question that remains is, Are we listening?