Penitent Disciple

This song kind of sums up where I’ve been for a while now. I’m praying that God continues to provide the sliver of hope found in the final verse, because my tank is pretty much empty.

It’s enough to drive a man crazy, it’ll break a man’s faith
It’s enough to make him wonder if he’s ever been sane
When he’s bleating for comfort from Thy staff and Thy rod
And the Heavens’ only answer is the silence of God

It’ll shake a man’s timbers when he loses his heart
When he has to remember what broke him apart
This yoke may be easy but this burden is not
When the crying fields are frozen by the silence of God

And if a man has got to listen to the voices of the mob
Who are reeling in the throes of all the happiness they’ve got
When they tell you all their troubles have been nailed up to that cross
Then what about the times when even followers get lost?
‘Cause we all get lost sometimes…

There’s a statue of Jesus on a monastery knoll
In the hills of Kentucky, all quiet and cold
And He’s kneeling in the garden, as silent as a stone
All His friends are sleeping and He’s weeping all alone

And the Man of all sorrows, He never forgot
What sorrow is carried by the hearts that He bought
So when the questions dissolve into the silence of God
The aching may remain but the breaking does not
The aching may remain but the breaking does not
In the holy, lonesome echo of the silence of God

The Protestant Reformation of the 1500s was more or less centered around five issues (or guiding principles), now known as the “Five Solas” (in their original Latin terms):

• Sola scriptura (Scripture alone) – The Bible is the one, ultimate authority in all things. Everything else, including church tradition, leadership and policies, are subservient, and are subject to continual correction and reformation by the Word of God. And we all, as a priesthood of believers (1 Peter 2:1-10), share in the responsibility to do that.
• Sola fide (faith alone) – It is through faith in Jesus alone that salvation comes, not by works. Although good works should be a natural by-product of a real and vibrant faith, it is the faith itself that saves.
• Sola gratia (grace alone) – Salvation is an undeserved gift, offered by a God who is simultaneously loving, holy, and righteous. There’s nothing we can do to “earn” it.
• Solus Christus (Christ alone) – Jesus alone is the path to God and to heaven. There is no other way. And there is no other (human) mediator required to access the throne of God.
• Soli Deo gloria (to the glory of God alone) – Everything in our lives should be done to glorify God. Not for our own interests or glory, and not to satisfy or impress anyone else, including the church hierarchy and leadership.

Looking around at our culture, across the entire spectrum of the church in 2020, those Five Solas don’t seem to be enough to stave off the idolatry that’s happening in both the left-leaning progressive side of the church and the right-leaning evangelical side of the church. I think maybe we need to add a sixth Sola:

Sola Deus (God alone), or maybe it should be Unus Deus (One God). There is only one God, and that one God should be the only thing that truly gives us meaning, the only thing worthy of fierce allegiance, and the only object of our hope.

It’s not money or “stuff”.
It’s not a celebrity.
It’s not a gender or racial identity.
It’s not a politician.
It’s not a political party.
It’s not America or the Constitution.

It’s the one, eternal God, creator of the universe, all-knowing, loving but also righteous and holy, who will bring an end to all of those false gods just listed.

It’s good and proper to be engaged in the here and now, but in all the passion and noise and scrum we’ve lost sight of the eternal. Let us all fix our eyes ultimately on eternity, and on the eternal truths given to us in the word of God as our guide along the way.

Author Jared Wilson has an article up today on the growing effort to remove the true meaning of the cross from our understanding of the Christian faith. It’s a damnable trend, and it’s happening not just in individual churches, but increasingly by the leadership of entire denominations – ones with names like “Presbyterian” and “Methodist” and “Lutheran”.  It minimizes the seriousness of sin, rejects the biblical notion of God as a sovereign, holy, and righteous Judge of every eternal soul, and is actively leading people away from the very reason Jesus came to earth.

“If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them if a large millstone were hung around their neck and they were thrown into the sea”. – Jesus, in Mark 9:42

Here’s the article:

The Satanic Doctrine of a Wrathless Cross

So, a little over a year ago, I started diving deeper into studying God’s word, and the things of faith in general. Since then, I’ve been slowly building a theological library, almost entirely of used books – for the most part gently used (but, sadly, not always) – that I’ve found for cheap. I’ve stumbled upon (or been led to?) some great finds.

Then last summer, in searching for a way to read some of the resources included with my old Windows 98-era Quickverse Bible study program, I discovered e-Sword.

This past December, one of e-Sword’s sister sites, which offers a limited set of commercial add-ons for e-Sword, had a “12 Days of Sales” event leading up to Christmas, and there were some pretty great deals. So the lion’s share of Christmas money ended up getting directed toward that site.

One of the resources I picked up for e-Sword is called the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. It’s quite voluminous – in print it consists of 29 hardcover volumes (at a price of around $900!). The ACCS is basically a specialized take on an already-existing 38-volume collection of writings from the early church fathers, covering the Ante-Nicene, Nicene, and Post-Nicene periods of the early church. That set features the writings of a variety of early church leaders and theologians, from Clement of Rome (fl. cl. 95) to John of Damascus (c. 645-c.749), and includes church fathers such as Origen, Hilary, Jerome, Chrysostom, Cyril, Theodore, Augustine, Chromatius, and many others. That original 38-volume collection was compiled by a theologian named Philip Schaff in the 1800s, and is in the public domain. Those 38 volumes are available as a free download for e-Sword (though, interestingly, competitor Logos Bible Software charges $99 for it).

The ACCS, published in the early 2000s, does something very cool. Using the existing writings of the church fathers, it takes their mentions of particular passages of scripture and organizes those excerpts from their writings into a commentary form. So, for example, if you’re studying the book of Acts, it lists all the comments made by the various church fathers about passages in Acts, in scriptural order. Using e-Sword, if you click on a verse in the Bible pane, the Commentary pane will show what, if anything, the church fathers had to say about that verse.

The scripture commentary in the ACCS is qualitatively different from the modern commentary resources I also picked up during the holiday sales (as well as from the commentaries I’m able to use from my old Quickverse software, and the other Windows XP commentary software I found that features Zondervan’s Expositor’s Bible Commentary series and NIV Application Commentary series). With those early church writings coming from several hundred years before the enlightenment, the ACCS isn’t in the analytical/critical style of modern commentaries. The perspective of the early church fathers hadn’t been colored by modernity, or postmodernity. It’s much more devotional in nature. While some of them occasionally veered a bit beyond the bounds of what eventually became the more formalized and refined theology that guides orthodox believers today, it’s a fascinating – and profitable – look into the theological and devotional perspectives of people who lived much closer to the time of Christ and the apostles.

Christmas season sales allowed me to get the ACCS for e-Sword at a fantastic price. And I can already tell it’s going to be a great investment.

As 2020 is still unfolding, I’m trying something new for my devotional time in the morning. For most of 2019 I used Oswald Chambers’ ‘My Utmost For His Highest’ and Tim Keller’s daily devotional on the Psalms.

This year, as part of my goal to engage scripture more consistently, I’m taking a stab at scripture journaling – simply recording thoughts while reading and pondering scripture. I’m clearly not alone in this notion, as there’s a pretty wide selection of “Journaling Bibles” that one can purchase. But in the limited research I conducted, none of them appeared to have all that much space for notes. Besides, I have a variety of perfectly useful Bibles already.

So I’m using the fairly basic and slim Bible I have on my desk in my den/office. For a journal, I’m using an A5 (roughly 5.25×8.5) sized “bullet journal” I picked up a couple of years ago. I’d decided, after messing with it, that I wanted something smaller and more portable for an actual bullet journal, and went with an A6 (roughly 4.25×6) size for that purpose. (I may post more in the future about the basic, non-artsy approach to bullet journaling I’ve adopted).

But the A5 size turns out to be great for scripture journaling. It’s a standard dot grid, hard cover bullet journal that lies flat for writing, especially after a proper break-in. (See bullet journal creator Ryder Carroll’s quick video on breaking in a new journal). The A5 journals can easily be had for $5-$8 on Amazon.

I’m starting with Romans. My approach is to take a relatively small section of scripture each day. I don’t have a schedule of readings, or a target date to get through a certain book of the Bible. I’m just taking it one day at a time.

We’ll see if I can stay consistent with it, but so far I’m enjoying it. My handwriting is pretty hideous, but this exercise is really meant for my own growth, so it really doesn’t matter.

Christ Jesus…being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death — even death on a cross!
Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
(Philippians 2:6-11)

I almost never watch the local news (and I avoid cable news, since I can almost feel myself getting dumber every second I spend watching it). But one evening this week I turned on the local news during dinner.

I took note of two back-to-back car commercials. One was a national commercial for Honda, replete with cars zipping through winter scenery while a gospel-sounding choir sang an alternate chorus of “Joy To the World!” in the background. The other was an area Mazda dealer touting their year-end sale, with one of the owners/spokesman enthusiastically saying “It’s the reason for the season!”.

It’s been clear for a while now, to those paying attention, that Christianity has become primarily a cultural artifact – as opposed to a deeply held and Biblically-based conviction – for a majority of the population. This isn’t particularly surprising given the trends in church attendance and affiliation.

Yet perhaps even more telling is that even though an ever-shrinking majority of Americans still respond to pollsters as espousing Christian faith, more in-depth polling reveals that a fairly small percentage actually hold to Biblically orthodox Christian beliefs. Scratch the surface, and we find that a growing number of them – including many who do attend church on a semi-regular or regular basis – really subscribe to what sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton identify as moralistic therapeutic deism. MTD is characterized by the following beliefs:

1. 1. A God exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
   2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
   3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
   4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
   5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

This is, of course, significantly contradictory to scripture. Scripture doesn’t call God’s people to be “nice”. It calls them to be obedient – to submit their wills, their thoughts, their lives, to God and His truth, as revealed in His word. (Of course, in doing so, we should love others with the love of Jesus. But a reading of the gospels pretty quickly shows that this love isn’t always warm and fuzzy). And scripture does not teach that “good” people go to heaven. Jesus himself said “No one is good – except God alone” (Mark 10:18, Luke 18:19). Instead, scripture teaches that those who accept and believe (a belief that involves the act of dying to oneself) in Jesus’ atoning sacrifice for their failures and sins will find passage to heaven (John 14:6). Now, that’s viewed by many as kind of a harsh and exclusionary statement from Jesus. But believers must resist any worldly instinct to soften it.

To be fair, I can’t completely fault church-goers for not being able to discern between biblical truth and pop-psychology-style theologies like MTD. Solid expository preaching from scripture isn’t practiced from a lot of pulpits. And even among those who do use expository preaching, an increasing number are using texts that are essentially a deconstruction of God’s word (such as the New Testament translation of David Bentley Hart). And it’s a practice that began some time ago. In the early 1900s, theologian Abraham Kuyper noted a trend of Biblical criticism being replaced by Biblical vandalism, carried out by theologians and professors who claimed to be seeking God’s truth, but whose hearts were hostile and defiant towards God’s word.

At any rate, those who recognize the trivialization of the true Christmas story in our culture, and are genuinely saddened by it, appear to be few (and becoming fewer, even among self-professed Christians).

And on an even deeper and broader level, if current cultural trends continue, those who hold to orthodox Christian beliefs – about the authority of scripture, about sexuality, about where we take our cues for our beliefs and attitudes, etc. – won’t just be in a minority. We are going to increasingly be on the “outs” in our culture. Called names. Reviled. And according to Jesus’ own words, that’s to be completely expected.

I think that’s why, lately, I’ve come to appreciate the Biblical images of God’s people as exiles. The prophet Jeremiah, speaking to the people of God as they were being carried off into captivity in Babylon (in this case, as punishment for their disobedience) admonished the people as they were getting ready to begin their lives as exiles: “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile”.

The apostle Peter talks of God’s people being exiles scattered among the provinces. Foreigners. Strangers in the land.

It strikes me as an apt metaphor for orthodox believers today. Live as exiles. Hold the Word of God in the highest regard. Read it, study it, and keep it as your guide and rule. Do not adopt the values of the culture. Yet at the same time, seek to be a blessing to that culture – even if the culture reviles you.

So that’s going to be my mindset in the coming days and years.