Discouragement in the Lord

Israel had just been defeated by the Canaanites at Ai, and Joshua was deeply discouraged. Although only 36 Israelites had lost their lives in this battle, it signaled the fact that Israel was not invincible. This sent Joshua into a tail-spin:

• Then Joshua tore his clothes and fell facedown to the ground before the ark of the Lord, remaining there till evening. The elders of Israel did the same, and sprinkled dust on their heads. And Joshua said, “Alas, Sovereign Lord, why did you ever bring this people across the Jordan to deliver us into the hands of the Amorites to destroy us? If only we had been content to stay on the other side of the Jordan! Pardon your servant, Lord. What can I say, now that Israel has been routed by its enemies? The Canaanites and the other people of the country will hear about this and they will surround us and wipe out our name from the earth. What then will you do for your own great name?” (Joshua 7:6-9)

Even worse than the fact that this defeat would have catastrophic effects on Israel’s Canaan campaign, it was discouraging for another reason. God had promised Joshua that no one would be able to resist him:

• No one will be able to stand against you all the days of your life. As I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will never leave you nor forsake you. (Josh. 1:5)

However, Ai seemed to make a mockery out of this promise. They had just stood very successfully against Joshua and his Israelites. How could Joshua ever trust in the Lord and His promises again? If God had let him down once, why not again and again? No wonder Joshua was devastated and even imagined that he had done something wrong by having the hubris to cross the Jordan, believing that he would conquer the Promised Land.

However, Joshua’s problem was that he lacked an important piece of the puzzle, and this lack prevented him from understanding the defeat. God explained to Joshua that Israel had been defeated because they had sinned by violating the command of God:

• The Lord said to Joshua, “Stand up! What are you doing down on your face?  Israel has sinned; they have violated my covenant, which I commanded them to keep. They have taken some of the devoted things; they have stolen, they have lied, they have put them with their own possessions. That is why the Israelites cannot stand against their enemies; they turn their backs and run because they have been made liable to destruction. I will not be with you anymore unless you destroy whatever among you is devoted to destruction. (Josh. 7:10-12)

Sin will interfere with receiving any of God’s promises. We cannot expect the blessings of God if we reject the Word of God. Actually, it was only one person – Achan - who had sinned, but his sin involved the entire nation of Israel. We are our brother’s keeper, and whenever we allow unrepented sin in our midst, we all suffer.

With this knowledge, Joshua was able to address the problem, and Israel was once again enabled to stand. However, sometimes it seems as if the Word of God has failed. Paul had warned the church that although the Word might seem to have failed, it really hadn’t. It only seemed to have failed because we have interpreted it wrongly:

• It is not as though God’s word had failed. For not all who are descended from Israel are Israel. Nor because they are his descendants are they all Abraham’s children. (Rom. 9:6-7)

In fact, God’s people have often despaired because it appeared as if God’s promises had failed. The Psalmist despaired as he viewed what had seemed to be the failure of the Davidic Covenant (Psalm 89). However, the Psalmist had regarding God’s promises too narrowly. We do the same thing and wrongly conclude that God has failed us.

Abraham had wrongly concluded that God had failed him. He had intervened with Yahweh for the salvation of Sodom where his beloved nephew Lot and his daughters resided. The next morning, he went out the mountain overlook to survey the fate of Sodom and the cities of the plain. They had been utterly consumed. In despair, Abraham packed his bags and never returned to that area, convinced that Lot and his daughters had also been consumed. As far as we can tell, Abraham never found out his God had rescued them.

Our Lord is more faithful than our discouraged eyes are able to perceive.

As we Think, so too Do we Live: The Case of Atheism

The way we think determines how we feel and respond to the world. A woman was convinced that the man at her door was a thief until she found out that he was the postman delivering a long-awaited package. When her thinking about him changed, so too did her feelings and her behaviors, and she happily greeted him.

This principle also pertains to our philosophical worldview thinking. If we believe that humans are just another animal, it is inevitable that this will color how we feel and treat the members of our species. Regarding the connection between our ideas and our behavior, evolutionist Karl Giberson, in Saving Darwin: How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution, wrote:

• [Evolutionist] Ernst Haeckel nudged the racism of the Third Reich along its malignant road by suggesting that the various human races were like stages in the embryonic development of the fetus…”You must draw [a line] between the most highly developed civilized people on the one hand and the crudest primitive people on the other and unite the latter with animals.” (76)

• How shocking it is today to acknowledge that virtually every educated person in the Western culture at the time …shared Haeckel’s ideas. Countless atrocities around the globe were rationalized by the belief that superior races were improving the planet by exterminating defective elements…there can be little doubt that such viewpoints muted voices that would otherwise have been raised in protest.

Meanwhile, many are singing the laurels of secularism, claiming that its denial of all transcendent moral truth has created a better world. I try to remind them of the unmitigated horrors of the secular-atheistic-communistic experiments. Characteristically, they respond:

• Secular atheism is merely the denial of any sky-daddy. It therefore has no impact on morality.

However, this denial has had broad philosophical implications, especially in the area of morality and the one hundred million exterminated under atheism. In fact, there isn’t even one example of a communist state which didn’t have an appalling human rights record. Why? Perhaps these communistic states where merely acting out their philosophical baggage. Here are some examples of philosophies that are almost inseparable from atheism and their moral failures:

Atheists are almost invariably evolutionists, and they require a creationism substitute  - the one that evolution provides. Rather than positing a sharp distinction between the human and animal world, the evolutionist sees a continuum which denies any meaningful man-animal distinction. Historically, blurring this distinction has had a profound effect on our treatment of humanity. Those who have been considered more evolved have received better treatment. Those considered less evolved have been treated more like the rest of the animal kingdom. Besides, if we are all animals, there no longer exists a rationale to oppose treating us as animals.

Atheists are invariably secular humanists. Consequently, there is nothing higher than human cognition, and so there is no higher transcendent truth to which to defer. Morality, therefore, is strictly a matter of human creation. As such, it changes and is relative to our culture. Because of this, it is hard to take our moral determinations very seriously. After all, they will simply change tomorrow. Why not get ahead of the changing fashions and create our own personal morality according to our own desires! This was exactly the tact of serial killer Ted Bundy:

• Then I learned that all moral judgments are “value judgments,” that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to be either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’…I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable value judgment that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these ‘others?’ Other human beings with human rights? Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig or a sheep or a steer? Is your life more to you than a hog’s life to a hog? Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more for the one than for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as ‘moral’ or ‘good’ and others as ‘immoral’ or ‘bad’? In any case, let me assure you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no comparison between the pleasure I might take in eating ham and the pleasure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion to which my education has led me – after the most conscientious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self. (Christian Research Journal, Vol 33, No 2, 2010, 32)

Although, the Maos, Stalins, and Pol Pots didn’t justify their moral innovations in terms of their personal pleasures, the absence of any higher moral truth similarly gave them the freedom to morally innovate.

Without any transcendent and absolute moral law, moral relativism becomes the default. Since moral law doesn’t exist, we create our own pragmatic set of morals. Consequently, the supposed ends will always justify the means – the most horrible human atrocities. Lenin had been asked, “What is the good and the bad under atheistic communism?” His answer reflected the thinking of other communists:

• Whatever promotes the Revolution is what is good; whatever interferes with it, that is what is bad.

Such pragmatic, non-moral-law thinking can be used to justify any moral atrocity and was routinely used in this way.

Atheists are materialists and deny the existence of anything outside of matter and energy. Consequently, humans are no more than complex bio-chemical machines. What then do we do with machines that don’t behave in ways we regard as useful? We either change them or destroy them, perhaps for their parts. Humans then become expendable in favor of the “higher good.”

In addition to this problem, materialists can find no basis for freewill if everything occurs according to physical laws. Consequently, our thinking and choosing is merely the product of prior bio-chemical reactions. This means that we are not morally accountable. One atheist friend confessed to me that he found this understanding very liberating, freeing him from feelings of guilt. However, we have been equipped with such feelings because they are socially necessary. Once dulled, we are free to act in immoral ways.

Atheists are also naturalists. This means that we are the product of chance and natural processes rather than of purpose and design. Consequently, the naturalist is not accountable to a Creator. He owes no allegiance to anyone, just to his own welfare.

Of course, the naturalist will protest:

• I feel grateful for my family and for my fellow human beings. I therefore feel that I am accountable to them. I don’t need God to be moral.

While many atheists might be sincere about their feelings, feelings and intuitions are not enough as the communist experiments have proven. We also have very negative feelings and even our wholesome feelings are subject to change. In light of this, we also require a mental rationale – a transcendent moral-law rationale – to decide among our competing feelings.

Atheism has big pockets, and these contain its many philosophical children, all of which undermine morality in any objective sense. However, most atheists distance themselves from communism in favor of some form of socialism, pointing approvingly to the successful secular Northern European nations.

There are a number of problems with these examples. Besides the fact that their fruits are beginning to sour, they certainly don’t reflect anything like the full-blown secularism of the communist nations where secularism has been militantly enforced, where pastors and priests had either been exterminated or sent away for “re-education.” Therefore, Northern Europe retains many vestiges of their Christian culture – the culture that had once made the West great.

P.Z. Myers, Human Life, and Bodily Fluids

Where our thinking goes – especially our thinking about who we are as humans - so too will go society.

• Last week the Telegraph reported that the remains of over 15,000 aborted babies have been incinerated as clinical waste over the past two years in the UK, with some of them having been used in “waste-to-energy” plants that produce power for heat:

In response to this news, evolutionist P.Z. Myers wrote:

• I’m not in the least disturbed by the fact that patients were not consulted on how their dead fetus was disposed. When you go in for an operation, are you concerned about what is done with the bloody towels afterwards, or how your appendix or tonsils or excised cyst are treated? Did you think there was some special room deep in the bowels of the institution where they were reverently interred, attended by a weeping chaplain who said a few kind words over your precious bodily fluids? Nope. They’re sealed up in a bag, dealt with according to appropriate protocols for medical waste, and incinerated. Get over it.

Myers refuses to acknowledge that there is a profound distinction between human life and body tissue, and this confusion will inevitably lead to profound moral and legal changes. It already has.

If there is nothing sacred about the pre-born, then there is nothing sacred about the post-born. As a result, certain lives are now considered expendable – the elderly, the mentally or physically impaired, and other social undesirables, mere “bodily fluids.” After all, if the pre-born are mere “bodily fluids,” why should these others be anything more than that!

And do not think that this slow erosion of human dignity will stop at voluntary euthanasia. If the elderly are nothing more than a sack of bodily fluids, how long will this society justify designating valuable resources for their care? Not long!

We are entering into a fearful new world in which our value is socially – not divinely – constructed, resting upon the whim or good favor of the social moment to determine our value. This value might rest upon some consideration of our intelligence, productivity, sexual vitality or even our party affiliation.

However, value can no longer rest upon the notion that we are all created in the image of God and consequently possess certain unalienable rights. Instead, secular materialism will find that it cannot sustain such a notion of equality. Why not? Materialism cannot provide a basis for equality. From a physical point of view, we are not equal. Some are educated and productive; others are not. Some are healthy and strong; others are not. Some are regarded as a credit to society; others are seen as an unwanted cost. What then becomes of our notion of “equal rights” if there is no true equality? Why should they remain equal? Perhaps those deemed with greater value should have more rights?

We may superficially affirm equality or something akin to “unconditional positive regard” (UPR), but it will become no more than a manipulative and disingenuous tool without the necessary rational and divine underpinning. The psychologist might continue to treat her client with UPR, but as a product of her society, she will increasingly see UPR as an insincere attempt at psychological manipulation. Eventually, cynicism will eat away at its core.

If human life is no more than bodily tissue, then it is just a matter of time until our morals and laws reflect this belief. Our hospital incinerators are just the beginning.

Carlton Pearson, Universalism, and the Denial of Sin

Life is endlessly challenging and also painful. How then do we make life livable? A popular solution is “self-love.” Universalist and former mega-church success-story, Carlton Pearson, claims that self-love has to be based on a god who is all-loving – one who would never un-love anyone:

• We are all sexual, sensual, social and spiritual beings. Finding our way through the long distance soul journey is an art, science and grace most struggle with all their lives. Sin consciousness, something Jesus never taught or encouraged, both prohibits and prevents self-love, something we must learn and re-learn to do, especially when we're brought up in a kind of "hate yourself" religious climate as many were and continue to be, whether, Christian, Jewish or Islamic.

Many Christians would have no idea what Pearson is talking about - “hate yourself religious climate.” Instead, we have found in Christ’s love and forgiveness the ultimate answer to self-contempt, assured that if He accepts us, we can begin to accept ourselves.

Instead, Pearson seems to think that once we become conscious of the enormity of our sin, we will automatically hate ourselves. Although this is a possibility when we fail to grasp the cross – the boundless extent of His love and forgiveness – denying sin consciousness is like denying physical infirmity consciousness. Instead, it’s important to know when we are sick so that we can do something about it. If the doctor tells me that I need cancer surgery, I would be foolish to deny it. Something worse would likely happen.

It’s also important that we have a conscience to tell us when we have sinned and hurt others. Maturity is a matter of owning our sin and confessing it. However, if we refuse to be conscious of our sins, they will merely fester as an untreated cancer, and our relationships will deteriorate.

I thank God for my sin consciousness and so does my wife. When I become impatient with my wife, I tell her that I am sorry and try to make it up to her. The effect is healing.

Pearson seems to be in denial about this very significant part of life and even the teachings of Jesus, claiming that “Sin consciousness [is] something Jesus never taught or encouraged.” This assertion is flagrantly off-base, as these few teachings from the Sermon on the Mount illustrate:

• “For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven. You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.” Matthew 5:20-22)

• “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.” (Mat. 5:27-30)

• “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.  Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’  Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’” (Mat. 7:21-23)

All of this makes me wonder whether our endless quest for self-love is merely the self-centered perversion of our me-generation. Achieving self-love is certainly nothing that comes naturally, as even Pearson seems to admit: “Finding our way through the long distance soul journey is an art, science and grace most struggle with all their lives.”

Perhaps this generation has encountered so many problems in trying to achieve self-love because it is not attainable through Pearson’s “art, science.” Perhaps instead, it’s a gift that comes from Christ, as Jesus suggested:

• To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples.  Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:31-32)

However, this gift of freedom does not come by denying sin but rather by confessing and turning from it, as so many millions have discovered. It comes from humbling ourselves to acknowledge our ugliness, only to find that we have been exalted in the process (Luke 18:14). I too have found great freedom in committing all of my sins, inadequacies, and failures to my Savior, who gladly receives them, shouldering my heavy burdens (Mat. 11:28-30).

In contrast, Pearson claims:

• Sin consciousness is something with which most hyper-religious people seem to be severely "afflicted" and must be treated as if it’s a life threatening disease. It causes more anxiety, fear and delusional thinking than most clinically diagnosed mental illnesses do.

Instead, it is the denied and untreated “disease” of sin that causes the “anxiety, fear and delusional thinking.” I know, because I spent years of my life talking to psychologists, all of whom told me that I was a good person and should love myself. However, we are not constructed in a way that we profit through false positive affirmations but through confronting the truth about ourselves – God’s truth.