Apologetics

Slowly to Oblivion: How Christians Fall Away from the Lord, Part 1

Standard

Falling AwayNothing in the Bible should be more sobering than the reality that some people aren’t going to make it to heaven. Even more sobering is that some of them were once considered part of the in crowd.

Now some will protest that Scripture is clear that the saints will persevere. (Hey, that rhymes!) But it also seems clear that the Bible repeatedly notes that some who were at one point counted part of the group were not counted so at the end.

Something happened. Something undeniable.

Claim all you will that those who don’t make it were never part of the group to begin with, but there’s that daunting reality again that a lot of people who now seem out of the group were the same ones we once accepted readily as being in.

Once.

Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God.
—Hebrews 3:12 ESV

Throughout his writings, Paul used the term brothers to refer only to those who were in.

“Then they will deliver you up to tribulation and put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations for my name’s sake. And then many will fall away and betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.”
—Matthew 24:9-13 ESV

Context is king. In this context, the King of Kings is talking to the in crowd. They are the ones who will see their numbers dwindle and fall.

For it is impossible, in the case of those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, to restore them again to repentance, since they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm and holding him up to contempt. For land that has drunk the rain that often falls on it, and produces a crop useful to those for whose sake it is cultivated, receives a blessing from God. But if it bears thorns and thistles, it is worthless and near to being cursed, and its end is to be burned. Though we speak in this way, yet in your case, beloved, we feel sure of better things–things that belong to salvation. For God is not unjust so as to overlook your work and the love that you have shown for his name in serving the saints, as you still do.
—Hebrews 6:4-10 ESV

“…as you still do.” What matters in the end is perseverance, and it is clear that some who were once in may not persevere.

“And to the angel of the church in Sardis write: ‘The words of him who has the seven spirits of God and the seven stars. “‘I know your works. You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up, and strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your works complete in the sight of my God. Remember, then, what you received and heard. Keep it, and repent. If you will not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come against you. Yet you have still a few names in Sardis, people who have not soiled their garments, and they will walk with me in white, for they are worthy. The one who conquers will be clothed thus in white garments, and I will never blot his name out of the book of life. I will confess his name before my Father and before his angels.”
—Revelation 3:1-5 ESV

A name once written in the Book of Life has the potential to be blotted out if what was once alive becomes dead, if the works once started remain incomplete.

The one who continues to long to remain in Christ will remain there, for no outside force can rip us away from God. But we need to be careful of what we harbor within.

How can you and I fall away from the Lord? It’s scarily simple.

Hoard.

Hoard everything God gives you. Time. Goods. Knowledge. Wisdom. Love. Keep it all to yourself. Build barns and silos to store it all. And if you should dole out a tiny portion of what you have been given, make sure others know how generous you are in doing so. And make sure the knowledge you portion out is used to crush others who don’t have the silo full you do. Also ensure the pittance of love you offer has every expectation of being returned. Then when people don’t treat your generous gift with the appreciation you believe they should, horde more. And don’t ever repeat the mistake of throwing your pearls before those you deem “swine.”

Cultivate cynicism.

Knowing everything means suffering fools, of which there seems to be no end. The person who knows it all can see through it all. Every motive in others becomes clear. Every sell job known for what it is. The cynic claims to see all as it rightly is and calls it out from the lofty grandeur of self-deemed righteousness. Some go so far as to label this “discernment.”

Love only those who love you.

While you’re not casting your pearls of wisdom before swine, don’t give them your love either. Talk about those people. Make sure everyone knows who you think they are. Save your love for people like you; the right kind of people. And since there are usually so few who measure up, most of your love will eventually deepen into further self-love. Because it’s easier to love yourself and leave it at that.

Find a ghetto to dwell in—then never venture out of it.

Lutheran. Charismatic. Calvinist. Paedobaptist. Dispensationalist. And on and on. The Christian life contains all sorts of ghettos. Of course, the one you choose to live in is the best. The others contain nothing but error. Best not to visit them—ever. There’s nothing anyone in those other ghettos can teach you anyway. No sense risking damnation by checking out how the other half lives.

Fight every battle.

It doesn’t matter what the battle is, proving how right you are is all that is essential. Make sure everyone knows where you stand on every position. “Fight the good fight,” right? Take on your enemies and pound them into submission. And if it seems after a while that everyone else is the enemy, chalk that up to the rightness of your cause. Because anyone who is on the side of rightness will be persecuted—or so you keep telling yourself.

Pursue comfort.

Even though you’re fighting endless righteous battles, no need to work up too much of a sweat. Look after yourself. Make sure you have the best of everything. You’re a King’s Kid. You deserve the best. This is especially true of Americans. You’re pretty sure the American Dream is right there in the Bible, so it’s in your best interest to embody it.

Exude righteousness.

Practice your religion before others and make sure they know how well you are doing it and how poor their execution is. Talk about your spiritual giftings all the time. You’re a model. You probably even tithe your mint and dill, though others give you strange looks when you toss part of your spice rack in the offering plate on Sundays. What do they know?

Use the lingo of the in crowd.

When you talk about your religion, use the buzzwords. Often. Because nothing says you’re in like talking in the approved code. In addition, this is a good way to ensure the out crowd stays out.

Find ways around the must-do’s that only the noobs must attend to.

You’ve been around. You’re proven. No need to spend too much time attending to the basics, like prayer and Bible study. Or serving the downtrodden. Leave that to the new guys. You’ve got bigger fish to fry. Besides, you know it all and have done it all already.

Resist reproof.

And the noobs? Who are they to question you? Error is for the other guy. Really, the nerve…

Never question yourself.

Once you’ve arrived, why make trouble for yourself by checking to see if your destination is the correct one after all? The other guy is in the wrong place. He always is.

I’ve heard it said that sarcasm isn’t very Christian.

What seems to be not so Christian is to let oneself fall into the kind of delusion the sarcasm above attempts to pierce. It’s a common delusion though. What makes it really sad is that most people who need desperately to reverse course before they find themselves out of the in group will read that set of warnings above and resist reproof. Because error only and always dogs the other guy. Always.

I end by saying that to the person afflicted by the delusional thinking depicted above, all change is bad. And yet a great swath of Christianity in the West needs desperately to change. This doesn’t mean abandoning solid doctrine, just bad practice based on self-righteous misunderstandings of the words of God.

Too many of us have become the living embodiment of the Pharisees we mock. The mirror of Scripture and the inner prompting of the Holy Spirit should reveal us for what we have become.

Unless it is already too late.

***

Slowly to Oblivion: How Christians Fall Away from the Lord, Part 2

Mistakes As Sin: Does the Church Need a New Grace?

Standard

I keep wondering why the American Church seems to be having little or no impact on this nation. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that evangelism ain’t what it used to be. I’ve said before that in my younger days I was routinely approached by people trying to share Jesus with me, but that hasn’t happened in a long time.

Speaking of a long time ago, Cerulean Sanctum turns 10 this year, and back in the early days I wrote a post called “Whatever Happened to Sin?” The important line in that post stated the obvious: “In short, it used to be about sin.”

It used to be.

The Church’s main talking point was sin. Sin used to be obvious. We knew what sin was. And we knew who the sinners were.

Today, we think we know who the sinners are, but their sins are not always as clear as they once were. Or should I say that they aren’t so easily labeled sin as they once were.

Think about these “sins”:

The pharmaceutical company that releases a batch of tainted drugs that harm people.

The accountant who makes an error in a corporate spreadsheet that causes shareholder losses.

The bus driver who falls asleep, his bus careening off the road, killing a dozen passengers.

The politician who said one stupid thing amid a host of smart ones and derailed his election chances.

The school principal who responds to angry parents by banning a disputed book from a reading list, only to anger other parents.

People can do a million things right, but that one thing done wrong, that decision made in a flash and under pressure, comes back to haunt them. It’s what they fear more than the fires of hell when they go to bed at night.

Christians will argue that people have the wrong priorities. And maybe they do. Maybe the unbeliever SHOULD be more worried about the fires of hell.

But in a daily existence where every last one of us is bombarded by an endless series of choices our forefathers never had to contend with, most people are wary of every little decision they must make. Because we’ve ramped up the consequences of decision-making mistakes to a fever pitch.

I’d hate to be a doctor today. I can’t imagine the minefield most doctors must contend with. Make a tiny mistake—or even the patient perception of a mistake that actually isn’t—and you could be sued to within an inch of your life and lose everything you spent decades working for.

And it doesn’t have to be the doctor. It seems like each of us, no matter what our profession or life goals, is under a ridiculous amount of scrutiny, where even an innocent mistake can derail a lifetime of hard work, where the difference between success and failure may be one word more carefully chosen.

Beyond our own competency issues and the ever-present whip of punishment, what of the unforeseen?

I confess: I was an Enron investor. It wasn’t a lot of money, just $1,500, but I watched it vanish. I’d done all the research too. Even had a couple investment advisers commend the choice of that Houston company. 2+2=5All the stats about the company looked good. No one realized all the stats were lies foisted on the SEC by the company.

Life happens, right? It’s not always in your favor or mine.

But decisions matter, and sociologists are noting an increased fear of decision-making and a subsequent burnout with having to make an endless stream of choices daily. Each of those decisions may offer potential downsides, with the fallout from a mistaken choice not always obvious on the surface.

Sure, Boris Yeltsin wept from all the choices that bombarded him when he and George H.W. Bush visited an American supermarket. And yes, we have to contend with that decision overload every day.

But where is the grace for mistakes when making those decisions?

Also in the distant past of Cerulean Sanctum, I wrote “We Need a Gospel That Speaks to Failure.” More than at any time in history, I think meeting that need is critical.

It’s not that people don’t understand sin. It’s that we’ve conflated sin and mistakes. For the most part, the world at large can’t tell the difference anymore. Worse, we’ve elevated the cost of mistakes and we’ve made them the worse offense.

You make a goof at work that gets you fired and you yell at your kid because of it. The real sin is yelling at your kid, but the consequences of failing to carry the one that led to underestimating a project’s cost that dominoed into your job ouster seem far more oppressive and dire.

Or you chose the wrong major in college and spend the rest of your life in a series of dead-end jobs because of a decision you made at 18, when your head was full of Jell-O and your naiveté on overdrive.

Or you complimented that “nice” woman at work on her fashion sense and she slapped you with a six-figure lawsuit because of it.

Or all that you learned as a kid got turned upside-down by a changing society and you can’t adapt fast enough because none of your coping mechanisms work now that all the rules have changed.

Life is merciless anymore. There is no room for mistakes. Ever.

Can we blame people for thinking that maybe a mistake is worse than a sin? Or that we’ve made the two synonymous? And how can we get back to talking about sin, grace, and where people spend eternity if we can’t get past this issue of simple mistakes that carry nasty, earthly consequences?

We STILL need a gospel that speaks to failure. As far as I see, though, we don’t have one. The American Church continues to deal poorly with failure. Witness how church leaders who goof, whether by actually sinning or just making a simple mistake, often suffer the worst consequences of all and find the grace they heard about constantly now in preciously short supply.

Here’s the thing: What Jesus said about the measure we judge with being the measure we will be judged by extends beyond sin. If we hold every little non-sin mistake against people, that will come back to bite us some day.

I keep wondering if we Christians need to reexamine our theology to work up a new grace that addresses non-sin mistakes. Because, honestly, those mistakes trouble people immensely, and the guy who made the wrong choice of contractor in the heat of the moment and ended up costing his company dearly for that decision still needs grace for his mistake.

And if the Church can’t offer that kind of grace, who will?

42

Standard

If you are unfamiliar with the works of Douglas Adams, particularly his The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series of novels, the title of this post will be inscrutable. What it is supposed to represent is the answer to the most basic question of life, the universe, and everything. What does this crazy existence all mean? Well, 42. In one of the books in that series, that’s what a sophisticated computer the size of a planet determined was the answer. Then it complained about the question.

I talked one-on-one with Douglas Adams many times at MacWorld conventions. He was an official “Apple Master,” and oddly enough, he tended to seek me out rather than the other way around, perhaps because I worked for Apple and he was able to get tech info from me. Anyway, we seemed to keep running into each other. At one point, he was my favorite novelist. I also learned he was one of the foremost atheists and often spoke to atheist groups around the world. When I talked with him the last time before he died unexpectedly at 48, he was his usual frantic, overworked self. Too many irons in the fire and none of them heating properly. In short, 42.

As a Christian, I don’t share Adams’s worldview. However, 42 is as good an answer as most people will experience when it comes to trying to find meaning in life.

It’s not that life has no meaning. It’s only that you and I will drive ourselves insane trying to make sense of anything that happens in this life. Meaning is most definitely there, but not a single person this side of heaven will be able to scry it out.

The wisest mortal who ever lived had this to say about the question of what it all means:

Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun. So I turned to consider wisdom and madness and folly. For what can the man do who comes after the king? Only what has already been done. Then I saw that there is more gain in wisdom than in folly, as there is more gain in light than in darkness. The wise person has his eyes in his head, but the fool walks in darkness. And yet I perceived that the same event happens to all of them. Then I said in my heart, “What happens to the fool will happen to me also. Why then have I been so very wise?” And I said in my heart that this also is vanity. For of the wise as of the fool there is no enduring remembrance, seeing that in the days to come all will have been long forgotten. How the wise dies just like the fool! So I hated life, because what is done under the sun was grievous to me, for all is vanity and a striving after wind.
—Ecclesiastes 2:11-17 ESV

Many people would simply fall into despair at that point. But here’s the thing: While you and I may not understand from our limited perspective, God DOES understand. He gets it.

God says this:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
—Isaiah 55:8-9 ESV

Magic Eye imageGod alone has the perspective needed to make sense of the nonsense you and I experience daily.

We live something of a Magic Eye existence. Our world looks like so much chaos, yet there is order there that may escape us because our perspective is limited by our humanity. Only God sees order in the chaos.

I don’t know why some people seem to experience more than their share of chaos. I used to think those people were receiving an extra measure of character building to make them better than those who didn’t go through repeated trials. I don’t think that anymore.

Some things in life just are—at least from your perspective and mine. Trying to make sense of them will drive us insane, and yet people try. Christians especially try to make sense of life because we feel a need to have to explain everything about how God works to people who don’t know or understand Him. Frankly, we might as well try to blow out the sun, because all the explanation about meaning will only lead us to an answer as profound as 42.

It all comes down to this: The only way to navigate life is to have faith in God, to trust that He knows how to make sense of the senseless. Because He does. Even if He chooses not to share that with us. And knowing that truth is what separates the Christian from the atheist, even if they both ascribe to the same puzzlement about what it all means.