Best of Cerulean Sanctum

Let’s Play “Spot the Heretic!”

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Balaam's Ass by RembrandtThis is the post wherein I make my secret confession before you all.

I've been a Christian for nearly thirty years. I've read a lot of books by a whole host of authors. And despite the fact that I'm fairly intelligent, graduated with high honors from probably the toughest Christian college in the country, and can use seven-syllable words with abandon, I don't read today's Christian writers much anymore.

Now I'm not speaking of Christian novels about young, chaste teachers coming of age on the Kansas prairie of 1880—aren't all Christian novels about that?—I'm talking about the non-fiction works of everyone from N.T. Wright to Brian McLaren.

If I were a proud man, I would attribute this to the lofty theological edifice I have constructed from bare rubble through my hard-won Christian discipleship. But I'm not a proud man; I'm simply a person like you who finds himself progressively confused by what passes for Biblical scholarship and discipleship lately.

Now with the Christian blogosphere filled from one end to the other with wild-eyed apologists, "remnant watchers," bell-ringers, deconstructionists, and self-christened "apostles for a time such as this," I've come to the conclusion that I simply can't parse it all. Yeah, this guy may be right and then he might not. She's got a good point, but arrived at it through a highly tortuous route that deviated through "Suspect City" to get there. And that guy in the corner always cries "Heretic!" over any idea that isn't his.

Sadly, there just isn't enough time in the day, so my only recourse is to ignore the vast majority of it. If it comes down to a case of discernment, perhaps the best discernment that a Christian in the 21st century can achieve is to always assume something's wrong unless it's been tested by time.

So that's my stance.

I used to help manage a Christian bookstore. I was the Bible and book buyer. Once you're in a position like that, you quickly attune your sense of smell to the stench of one lousy book after another grappling for bestseller status. I got adept at finding the stinkers before they found us. I attribute this to the Holy Spirit and to the spirit of our age.

The "spirit of our age" as I use it here is the quality of a book or set of thoughts that smacks of everything that is trending one way or another at this moment in time. Doesn't matter if it's right or wrong; in the end it simply won't last. Twenty years from now, no one will be referencing it for anything. It was dead on arrival, but the readers simply couldn't tell because the hype machine and word of mouth drowned out the naysayers.

Honestly, I think the Lord understands the dilemma of most earnest Christians today as they attempt to trudge through the mountains of half-baked theology and pseudo-spiritual tripe that get served to us on a sizzling hot platter—every single day. I believe that He knows it is far worse than in His own day when He battled the superstitions and mindless obeisance to the prevailing ethic of the land that relentlessly fought for the minds of His own disciples.

What is my out? Well, I'm hopelessly behind the times. I've said here before that most of the authors I read are dead. And that's my out. They're dead, no one is making big bucks off 'em, and yet their words last from one generation to the next. One set of Christians a hundred years ago read this stuff and found it spoke to the soul. And now another set today is reading it still because someone continues to be blessed. It won't crack the top ten on the bestseller list, or even the top ten thousand, but the words on those pages live. They give life and will do so until the day the Lord comes back—if, on that glorious and awful Day, He still manages to find enough people who take those old words to heart.

So I don't keep up with "New Think" for the most part. If I do mention a new book from time to time here, or mention a new blog that seems to have "it," then it's only because every reference in it goes back to someone from fifty years ago who could be trusted. I can tell you right now that Tozer, Ravenhill, Schaeffer, and a few like them can be trusted. Time's imprimatur has shown they can stand up and still speak the truth to a day and age where truth is so easily warped to be untruth that even the best of us can't always spot the mistakes.

I just can't filter it all; too much comes in. And while ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths pure is good enough for soap, it's not good enough for the Gospel. As for me, I'm simply not smart enough or spiritually adept enough to mercilessly spot the 0.56% impurity that exists in today's writings.

Are you?

{Image: Detail of Rembrandt van Rijn's "Balaam's Ass" (1626)}

The Reason the Church Exists

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Helping hands

For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who is not partial and takes no bribe. He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing.
—Deuteronomy 10:17-18 ESV

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.
—James 1:27 ESV

Recently, as I’ve sat at home and healed up from the numerous illnesses that have hit our family since Easter, I’ve had plenty of time to think about some of the comments I’ve seen left on various Christian blogs. One comment that repeatedly raises its ugly head goes something like this:

The reason this happened to you is that you didn’t trust God to provide for your needs.

On another blog, I left a comment that received this exact response. It wasn’t directed at me in particular, but was aimed at all those people who found themselves in dire straits and after much prayer, sought their own solutions, often through means that “aren’t Christian”—at least by the measure of the person leaving the comment.

I used to be one of those “faith bombers” who love to quote Scripture for the express purpose of making people feel bad about their solutions to tough problems. In many cases, a faith bomber proves his or her point by relaying a miraculous story of a specific answer to prayer that came about through direct intervention of God. The victims of the bombing are left to drown in the fact that the reason they did not receive a miracle was because they did not exhibit the same heaven-opening faith that the faith bomber did.

So there.

This post is an answer to faith bombers everywhere. It’s a wake-up call and a re-examination of how God works. It’s a message for every person who was ever tempted to bring a holier-than-thou attitude into the painful circumstances of someone in desperate need.

There have always been widows and orphans. The Bible repeatedly uses widows and orphans as a litmus test of need. To God, there is no one more needy than the woman who has lost her husband or the child who has lost one or both parents. God’s heart is always for them. Always.

Yet, we also know of orphans who die forgotten and neglected. We read stories of widows who live alone, who forget to pay the electric bill, then freeze to death in the emptiness of their little ranch house when the electric company turns off their power for non-payment. Just last year I read such a story of a woman who had been a Sunday School teacher for more than fifty years, described as a wonderful Christian woman who loved many, yet her fate was hypothermia and a lonely death in the darkness of her own home.

How can this be reconciled with a loving God whose heart is for the widow and the orphan?

Philosophers will argue for or against the existence of God. Some will scream about divine watchmakers who cast their creations onto beaches to be found and marveled at by the curious. For others, it is a question of evil and why it exists.

But what of this?

But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.
—1 Corinthians 12:24b-26 ESV

The suffering of fellow members of the Body of Christ is my suffering. It is your suffering. It is not just the suffering of those who were unfortunate enough to be receive it.

And here is where the great truth exists: God made the Church to be His means of delivering grace. As the Body of Christ we are to be the Lord to all people around us, no matter how deplorable their condition.

Can God feed the widow and orphan supernaturally by reinstituting manna that falls from heaven right into their hands? No doubt He could, but with His founding of the Church, we are the ones to feed them. It is our duty as the hands of God to deliver them food. This is the wisdom of God. This is religion that is pure and undefiled: that we look after widows and orphans and be the hands of God working to meet their need in the midst of their desolation.

My wife and I support a ministry called Voice of the Children. It started when one man walked into the sewers of Russia and brought the light of Christ to the scores of abandoned children that lived in the dank, black, disease-ridden bowels of his country. He understood that unless he, as a child of God, walked into that filth, children no one wanted would live and die there without hope. God enlightened his eyes to see that his hands were His hands.

To the so-called “Christian” who wounds the already wounded with the shrill words, “It’s because of your lack of faith…,” I say, “Heed your own words because it is you, and you alone, who have failed your brother.” All day long the Lord cries out for His people to be the instruments of grace to others that He has called them to be. He beseeches us to be that miracle in the life of someone who has lost hope and has no solutions. How long before those of us who ignore this calling fall prey to the vicissitudes of life and suffer this fate:

Whoever closes his ear to the cry of the poor will himself call out and not be answered.
—Proverbs 21:13 ESV

Shame on us! Shame on every person who thinks they are exempt from being the solution, instead tossing that miracle back to God, saying with the words of Cain, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” And the reply of God, the one so few are willing to hear is, “Yes. Yes, you are.”

Ford, GM, and the Church

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Car wreckThis last week, the corporate bonds of General Motors and Ford Motor Company were reduced to junk status.

Now becoming BB-rated or worse doesn't mean a company is about to go bankrupt. That said, having the bonds of two of America's largest companies reduced to junk status should give us pause.

I tend to carp on business issues here at Cerulean Sanctum, but for good reason. When people lose jobs, the Church in this country handles it terribly. Every family in a church needs an income. Many people in our churches spend more time at their jobs than anything else they do in a week, yet the Church in America's silence on the business world is deafening.

So why are churches not preparing for the next economic downturn? What do we have in place to ensure every family within our churches will be taken care of should financial disaster hit? Time and again I look around and see blissful ignorance rather than a discerning of the times. It's as if we can't possibly bring ourselves to mention the 800 lb. gorilla in the room lest it tear us to pieces. That kind of Pollyanna-ish thinking is not the wisdom of serpents, but of doves. The way I read the Bible, that's not what it says in Matthew 10:16. Too often the children of this world are more shrewd than the children of God. This should never be the case.

So we twiddle our thumbs and rest contented in our lack of preparedness to deal with bad economic times. It was only recently that we had a prolonged economic downtown. Half the people I know lost their jobs in that time, including both my wife and me. The number one prayer request in the church we attended at that time was for jobs, and yet the church did little to address the need.

Listen, God can take care of the widows and orphans on His own if He wants to. But He chose the Church to be His means of grace to those unfortunates. The Church needs to always have a way in place for whatever need is out there. And again, there is no more pressing need than for people to have jobs, or in lieu of this, have people who will draw alongside the unemployed, help them find work, or take care of their financial burden when there is no work to be found.

There is no reason why your church does not know where you work. There is no reason why your church has not identified individuals within your congregation who can make employment hiring decisions. There is no reason why your church is not collecting funds to sustain families within the church during a financial crisis. There is no reason why small groups are not considering ways to support each other should some in the group lose their jobs. There is no reason to continue to ignore alternative community living that can better buffer us Christians against hard times. Yet for some reason the numbers of churches doing this is pitifully small. This is something that should be occuring in every church. Not only that, but I believe that this should extend across state lines from one church to another. If we are not networked in this way, then the area of the country that suffers the worst downturn cannot be helped by the area that stayed relatively immune from it. If things got bad in Detroit should the car industry there turn south, would we expect only Detroit-area churches to bear that burden?

The Church of Jesus Christ should always be on the crest of the wave, not floundering in the backwash. We need sober-minded people to start working out these issues in every church in this country. Not only will we benefit those within our congregations by doing this, but as the supposed "ants" of this world, we must have a better answer for the unsaved "grasshoppers" out there than "Tough luck."

The Church shines brightest in the darkest times. Are we ready to shine that light?