Jesus

The Loss of Innocence

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Bratz—JadeI live in an area of the country that suffers from “chronophobia,” the fear of keeping up with the times. LA is about eight years ahead of us, and even our major Midwestern neighbor to the northwest, Chicago, is about five. I can’t point to the chapter and verse, but it’s a foregone conclusion the Rapture for righteous Greater Cincinnatians will occur at least three years after the fact.

When you live in a “backward” area, things that are “forward” startle you. I was jolted this last week by a seven-year-old boy in Kroger yelling to a woman who was clogging up an aisle, “Get out of my way, you fat f***.”

Besides being glad that my son was not with me to hear that, my unconscious response was to run the mental wayback machine to California, 1996. My wife and I were new arrivals, but we understood the vibe well enough to know we were “not in Kansas anymore.” The tape ran and ran, but I don’t remember kids in the Valley launching a tirade like the one I’d just now heard.

Still, it had to come from the coasts. Doesn’t that kind of filth crawl Godzilla-like out of the Atlantic and the Pacific, aiming to meet in the heartland, like some hell-tinged rendition of the driving of the golden spike?

I was in the new Wal-Mart about a half hour from us (tore down the regular “Center” and replaced it with a “Supercenter”) and was fascinated by the 40″+ flat panel displays strategically placed throughout the store playing “The Wal-Mart Channel.” A video by some new teenage singing sensations was looping, young people re-enacting everything they’d seen in Mountain Dew commercials throughout their young lives.

I could not stop watching that loop. This time my son was with me, pulling my arm with both hands, near-screaming, “Daddy, let’s go!”

There, in the eyes of those kids.

If you’ve ever seen the open eyes of someone freshly deceased, then you’ve seen that look. There’s nothing there in those eyes. Emptiness defines them. Even a child knows that something is missing when he or she sees the eyes of a corpse.

Those two dozen teens in that music video loop channeled that same deadness. Behind the eye liner and mascara was a vast nothingness.

After my son was practically biting my thigh trying to get me to stop watching corpses dance to the music, I could not stop staring at the under-20 crowd that filed past me everywhere we went the rest of that day. How had I—for so long—missed the ungrateful dead?

It’s miserable spotting a worn fifteen-year-old suburban girl you know could teach a fin de siècle Parisian hooker a thing or two. Madonna may have been a tramp in my era, but this girl is something altogether different. She may not even be human, at least as we define it. I’ve seen mannequins with more expressive faces. If there was a soul in that kid once, it vacated a while ago.

But more than anything else, I want to apologize to that zombie of a girl for my generation. We let her generation down. Our harebrained youth ministry experiments, our obsession with our careers, our self-centeredness—we allowed the Enemy to gut them while we slept on our watch.

Or maybe I’m missing the point. Maybe we did care, but we got stuck fighting so many endless battles against wickedness that we had to compromise somewhere. The low-rider jeans were too trivial to fight. It could be something worse; she could be doing crystal meth.

I just can’t get over the vacant stares.

What’s the entry point for death in our children? One day our sons are playing in the sandbox with their Tonka trucks and our daughters are having tea time with their stuffed animals, then the next they’re passing around rubber wristbands that signify what sex acts they’ve successfully completed, or strangling each other to the point of passing out—for the “fun” of it.

Sunrise, sunset, swiftly fly the years.

Sure, we’ll get some PhD pedagogue regaling us with tales of the Dark Ages and the need for kids to grow up fast back then, but childhood today seems to be measured in seconds anymore. When girls in the first grade consider Barbie a toy for preschoolers, and boys have abandoned G.I. Joe as young as six, maybe picoseconds would be a better measure of the length of childhood.

It gives me the willies to think of my own son encountering one of these kids who’s a fifty-year-old in a ten-year-old’s body. I used to think they only minted those out on the coasts, but when I hear a seven-year-old neighborhood boy calling an adult woman a “fat f***,” I’ve got to wonder if someone’s firing up a local franchise.

The soap hasn’t wound up in anyone’s mouth around here, yet. I’m not looking forward to that day. My son got out some Blue’s Clues tapes the other day and watched them almost nostalgically, eyes wide and still sparkling. I watched with him for a few minutes. Though I knew he wouldn’t want to stop watching, I let him go, even if knew he’d ultimately sit there for two hours. Why? Because the precious gift that God has bestowed on him is indeed that.

And once you’ve lost it…

Spirits, Sin, and Sickness

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'Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils' by Wm. BlakeI was thinking about starting a series on the tough topics we avoid in our churches, but rather than putting them all together under one title, I thought I’d just post them when they happen. If anyone wants to link them together as they periodically occur, that’s great. That way if some pressing topic arises or I’m not able to come up with good material, people won’t ask what happened to the series—always embarrassing for us conscientious bloggers! 😉

Before we get into this topic, I do want to post a disclaimer: What follows does NOT imply that every sickness falls into the situations I’m discussing. So if you have a particular affliction or chronic illness, this may not apply to you at all—or it may. That’s for you to determine before God. I’m just putting this out there because the biblical precedents exist.

Now [Jesus] was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. And there was a woman who had had a disabling spirit for eighteen years. She was bent over and could not fully straighten herself. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said to her, “Woman, you are freed from your disability.” And he laid his hands on her, and immediately she was made straight, and she glorified God.
—Luke 13:10-13 ESV

Anyone who’s been a Christian for any length of time will soon understand that the American Church has a number of different facets. Denominationalism has splintered us into thousands of fragments. Stay in any one fragment too long and all the other fragments begin to look odd, as if they’re not all pieces of the same stone.

Those from a charismatic background are familiar with the kind of situation depicted in Luke 13. Others may not be. However, it’s this kind of encounter that tests whether our fragment is open to something more or closed down to unfamiliar realities.

Jesus confronts a woman who has been crippled by a spirit. The Greek word is pneuma, the same word for “wind” or “spirit” that we see throughout the New Testament. This woman was a child of the Covenant; she is in the synagogue. If she had not been Hebrew, the synagogue leaders would not have allowed her to be there as she would have been unclean and would have made their place of worship unclean.

She was afflicted by an evil spirit that caused her physical disability. She did not, however, share the characteristics of those who were literally possessed by demons—she was in her right mind, was able to move under her own will, and was not self-destructive.

Still, she was hurting. We don’t know how she got in this state, but it’s clear that there was a spirit that affixed itself to her in such a way that she suffered physical problems. Jesus released her from this.

The other day, my son and I were in my truck when we pulled up behind an ambulance. Snake on a poleHe remarked that the ambulance had blue “snowflakes” with snakes on them. I tried to explain that symbol to him based on its occurrence in Numbers, but that passage is a tough one to exegete for a five-year old:

From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom. And the people became impatient on the way. And the people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we loathe this worthless food.” Then the LORD sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many people of Israel died. And the people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned, for we have spoken against the LORD and against you. Pray to the LORD, that he take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. And the LORD said to Moses, “Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.” So Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on a pole. And if a serpent bit anyone, he would look at the bronze serpent and live.
—Numbers 21:4-9 ESV

The people sinned by grumbling and ingratitude. Physical affliction swiftly followed. Some died. Others sought out God’s cure; theirs was an unusual repentance: look at a bronze snake on a pole and be healed.

The result of sin was physical affliction. Some might consider the fiery serpents to be demonic in nature, some might not. Regardless, the point is clear.

Later on, God makes this promise to the Hebrews:

And the LORD will take away from you all sickness, and none of the evil diseases of Egypt, which you knew, will he inflict on you, but he will lay them on all who hate you.
—Deuteronomy 7:15 ESV

Who are the recipients of this promise of illness? Those who do not follow the ways of God.

We have the example of King Uzziah:

But when he was strong, [Uzziah] grew proud, to his destruction. For he was unfaithful to the LORD his God and entered the temple of the LORD to burn incense on the altar of incense. But Azariah the priest went in after him, with eighty priests of the LORD who were men of valor, and they withstood King Uzziah and said to him, “It is not for you, Uzziah, to burn incense to the LORD, but for the priests the sons of Aaron, who are consecrated to burn incense. Go out of the sanctuary, for you have done wrong, and it will bring you no honor from the LORD God.” Then Uzziah was angry. Now he had a censer in his hand to burn incense, and when he became angry with the priests, leprosy broke out on his forehead in the presence of the priests in the house of the LORD, by the altar of incense. And Azariah the chief priest and all the priests looked at him, and behold, he was leprous in his forehead! And they rushed him out quickly, and he himself hurried to go out, because the LORD had struck him. And King Uzziah was a leper to the day of his death, and being a leper lived in a separate house, for he was excluded from the house of the LORD. And Jotham his son was over the king’s household, governing the people of the land.
—2 Chronicles 26:16-21 ESV

Uzziah was stricken with illness because of his sinful arrogance. We see a similar incident when Gehazi has a row with Elisha and is struck with leprosy:

He went in and stood before his master, and Elisha said to him, “Where have you been, Gehazi?” And he said, “Your servant went nowhere.” But he said to him, “Did not my heart go when the man turned from his chariot to meet you? Was it a time to accept money and garments, olive orchards and vineyards, sheep and oxen, male servants and female servants? Therefore the leprosy of Naaman shall cling to you and to your descendants forever.” So he went out from his presence a leper, like snow.
—2 Kings 5:25-27 ESV

Paul writes on this subject in the New Testament, too, showing how sin can cause illness:

Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died.
—1 Corinthians 11:27-30 ESV

That’s a hard passage to ignore.

Sin and sickness are intrinsically woven together. The New Testament shows this particularly well when Jesus meets up with the paralytic in one of his earliest and most famous healings:

When Jesus perceived their thoughts, he answered them, “Why do you question in your hearts? Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven you,’ or to say, ‘Rise and walk’? But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he said to the man who was paralyzed—”I say to you, rise, pick up your bed and go home.” And immediately he rose up before them and picked up what he had been lying on and went home, glorifying God.
—Luke 5:22-25 ESV

The interplay here of forgiveness of sins and healing is quite powerful. We see this elsewhere in James, one of the most powerful statements on healing in the New Testament, but one we don’t often believe:

And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.
—James 5:15 ESV

Again, sin and sickness are tied together, as are healing and forgiveness.

Let’s go back to the woman in Luke with the afflicting spirit…

Besides sin, there is a demonic component to sickness. Those who commit sinful acts are prone to demonic activity. Paul confronts the sexual immorality of a man in the Corinthians church by offering this:

When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus and my spirit is present, with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.
—1 Corinthians 5:4-5 ESV

Later, the apostle confronts another two:

This charge I entrust to you, Timothy, my child, in accordance with the prophecies previously made about you, that by them you may wage the good warfare, holding faith and a good conscience. By rejecting this, some have made shipwreck of their faith, among whom are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have handed over to Satan that they may learn not to blaspheme.
—1 Timothy 1:18-20 ESV

Matthew Henry’s commentary argues that this delivery into the hands of Satan makes these men prone to whatever Satan may bring their way. He especially notes that sickness and attacks in the flesh are to be expected. And though Job was blame-free, his own experience with Satan proves one of the means of demonic operation is physical illness:

And the LORD said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil? He still holds fast his integrity, although you incited me against him to destroy him without reason.” Then Satan answered the LORD and said, “Skin for skin! All that a man has he will give for his life. But stretch out your hand and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face.” And the LORD said to Satan, “Behold, he is in your hand; only spare his life.” So Satan went out from the presence of the LORD and struck Job with loathsome sores from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head.
—Job 2:3-7 ESV

Spirits, sin, and sickness—they all go together.

Now some will protest saying that it’s not always that way. They’d be right, too. Sometimes an illness is just an illness, the result of no singular act of sin, no demonic affliction, but the simple truth of living in a fallen world. There certainly is truth to that, too:

As [Jesus] passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.”
—John 9:1-3 ESV

We see righteous King Hezekiah sick and ready to die, though not due to any particular sin:

In those days Hezekiah became sick and was at the point of death. And Isaiah the prophet the son of Amoz came to him, and said to him, “Thus says the LORD: Set your house in order, for you shall die, you shall not recover.” Then Hezekiah turned his face to the wall and prayed to the LORD, and said, “Please, O LORD, remember how I have walked before you in faithfulness and with a whole heart, and have done what is good in your sight.” And Hezekiah wept bitterly. Then the word of the LORD came to Isaiah: “Go and say to Hezekiah, Thus says the LORD, the God of David your father: I have heard your prayer; I have seen your tears. Behold, I will add fifteen years to your life.”
—Isaiah 38:1-5 ESV

This is why discernment is called for when dealing with sickness.

But for the purposes of this post, I wish to stick with the kind of illness that has as a spiritual component to it that can be traced back to sinfulness, particularly willful sin.

Too many of us don’t think about our sicknesses this way. When we suffer physical ailments, we are too willing to make the cause viral, bacterial, or just the vicissitudes of life. Outside of charismatic circles, too many Christians don’t like to think about an evil spirit underlying a specific illness. Attaching our sickness to sinfulness in our own life isn’t a commonplace belief in some parts of the Church. We’ve seen what the Bible says, though.

Some afflictions are readily tied to sin. Any doctor worth his medical degree will tell you that gluttony and sloth contribute to heart disease and adult-onset diabetes. Sexual immorality leads to a litany of STDs. Every day the newspapers and TVs trumpet some new reason for why we’re sick, and often the diagnoses go back to sins of omission and commission.

Most are obvious, but some may not be. Is it possible that the startling rise in casual porn use may be responsible for the equally startling rise in GERD (acid reflux disease)? Or that depression might be linked to having a judgmental or critical spirit? Or that arthritis might be due to envy? Is it that impossible to believe that our afflictions have a spiritual component, that evil spirits may bring certain afflictions (like that of the bent woman in Luke), or that we suffer needlessly through some of our illnesses because we refuse to repent of besetting sins?

I believe we must ask these questions, but not enough churches are led by people willing to ask them. And if the leaders of those churches don’t ask, how many of their congregants will?

Our response must be discerning. We must rely on the Holy Spirit to reveal these things. His promise is that He will. Just as Jesus was able to discern different kinds of evil spirits, so must we. It is our responsibility before God to confront what lurks behind an illness (be it sin, the demonic, or a combination of both) and shine the healing light of Christ upon it.

We mustn’t settle for what the naysayers are telling us. We must test these things against the Scriptures and by the Holy Spirit. At least as I see it, the Bible is very clear on this issue. If we take the Scriptures for what they say, we just might see more miracles.

We may even find ourselves healed in the process.

Hyperbolic Missionary Tales and the Exalted American Christian

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Normally, I don’t sweat the titles of posts much. However, I thought about this one a lot. Why? Because it says something about where many Christians in this country are today.

But what do I mean by that snarky title? Let me explain by telling five missionary stories.

Story 1:

    A team of young American men are ministering in SW Asia. Evangelizing door to door down a street, they are cautioned by residents to avoid what looks like an empty brownstone. Fearless, they enter the building and note that no one seems to live inside. As they climb the steps, they note Bible verses scribbled on the wall, but certain words in them are wrong. Only when they reach the top apartment do they find the building’s sole occupant: a bent old lady. The woman invites them in, and they begin to share the Gospel. Immediately, one of the missionaries has trouble breathing. Another feels hands around his throat, but there is no one behind him. Another feels something hit him forcefully. The room’s temperature drops. Unable to breath, the one young man falls to the floor and suffers respiratory collapse. The men gather up their fallen friend and beat it out of that apartment. Some have to be hospitalized. Later, they regroup after realizing they’d had an encounter with the demonic, bringing in some older men who have encountered this type of dark power before.

Story 2:

    Another team of missionaries in Asia have been working in a village for some time, but have had no success in converting the villagers. One day, a man comes down from one of the nearby mountains, walks into the village, starts preaching and healing the sick, and the entire village is converted. The man goes back to the mountain, leaving the missionaries to tend the new flock.

Story 3:

    A teen is part of a 10-day mission trip to Russia, but is bedridden after picking up the flu. She spends her entire trip unable to leave the hotel. On her last day there, while everyone else is getting ready to pack, she ventures out for what will be the only time she’s been outside the whole trip. Brokenhearted, she sits on the curb and asks God why this happened. A woman comes by and the Lord tells the teen to go talk with her. She walks over to the women, and despite not knowing any Russian at all, opens her mouth to speak , only to find she is speaking to the woman in a language she doesn’t know. The woman begins to cry, says something to the teen, and gives her a handshake.Back in the United States, it’s a couple months before the youth minister at the church receives a letter (and a translation written by another person) from a woman in Russia who says she had met a teen from the church. That teen had approached her on the street and—in fluent Russian—told her the story of Jesus and what He had done for the woman. The woman had gone home, prayed to accept Christ, and had started to tell everyone she knew about Jesus—all thanks to the fluent Russian-speaking girl from the church.

Story 4:

    A missionary team is preaching to a large crowd in Africa when a wailing family brings in a woman who has obviously been dead for a few days. The family says that if what the missionaries are preaching is true, like Lazarus, this woman could be raised to life. The team is taken aback, but all eyes are on them, so they begin to pray. Soon, the presence of God is heavy on them and they see the dead woman’s eyes flutter, then open. Minutes later, the woman is on her feet praising God.

Story 5:

    A missionary plants a church in a burned-out Eastern European town. One day, a man with AIDS comes in and requests prayer. The church leaders pray and the man is healed. This starts a revival in that town, especially among AIDS sufferers, who are healed of the disease by the laying on of hands.

We’ve all heard missionary stories, right? But do we believe them?

Now I ask you, can you spot the true story among the false ones?

Over my nearly thirty years as a believer, I’ve heard my fair share of firsthand missionary stories. I never fail to be enthralled by these tales, and have long wanted to do missions work myself. Just this last Saturday, Missionary to HawaiiI had folks from my church praying that one day I’d have the opportunity to serve as a missionary in some capacity.

Besides the accounts I’ve heard in person are the amazing adventures of missionaries that I’ve read in books. It’s hard not to be caught up in the glory of God’s working in amazing ways in countries whose culture is not far removed from the kind we see in the Book of Acts.

So have you separated the real stories from the false ones yet? Tell you what, I’ll save you some time by telling you that they’re all true. Not only did I hear them firsthand, but I personally knew most of the missionaries involved. Amazingly, one of the stories (#2) I’ve heard from more than one source, happening 0n two different occasions in two different places. And story #4 had video corroboration!

The problem with these stories is that too few Christians are ready to believe they’re true.

I don’t know when American Christians (and Western Christianity, for that matter) got so smug, but we’ve somehow convinced ourselves that we’re the final measure of ALL THINGS CHRISTIAN. We live our comfortable lives in the U.S. free from the burden of believing that anything supernatural occurs anymore, so when we hear these kinds of tales from missionaries—tales that are quite commonplace, actually—we chalk it up to some kind of hysteria. We find ways to explain those stories away. The woman in story #4 wasn’t really dead, even if the missionaries claim rot had set in. The teen in story #3 actually said something to the Russian woman in English and just forgot about it later on. People just don’t come out of nowhere and heal people. A revival featuring converted AIDS sufferers who are freed of the disease? No way.

All I can figure is that those kinds of stories scare the average American Christian. We don’t want to think the demonic is real or that healings and evangelism go together. We don’t see that kind of stuff at home, so why should we believe it goes on in backwater nations? We want to live our Christian life out of our head knowledge about the Faith. We don’t want to confront the truth of these wild stories spun by people laboring in Third World countries because if we do, that truth asks something of us, challenging our careful, comfortable existences. Too many Christians in the West want to make liars out of missionaries rather than accept their tales as true and be forced to deal with the ramifications.

This is not a post about charismata or the continuationist/cessationist battle, but a wake-up call to Westernized Christians that we are not the be all and end all of Christianity. In fact, I would argue that we Christians in America are woefully behind the leading edge of what God is doing around the globe. In fact, the Lord may even have passed us by and gone on to those places in the world that aren’t so cocksure of being the top of the spiritual foodchain.

When missionaries tell us the kinds of stories I shared above, do we really believe them, or do we make them out to be liars by brushing off their encounters with the miraculous power of Jesus Christ?

When did we Christians in America become the sole measure of true faith?