Monday, December 17, 2012

Massacre of the Innocents, Part II

Last Christmas season, I wrote an article called, "Massacre of the Innocents."  We learn in Matthew Chapter 2 of the horror caused by Herod as he ordered the slaying of all the boys younger than age two in Bethlehem and its surrounding areas.  He did so because he feared another Jewish king arising and taking power, as foretold by the Old Testament Prophets.  The wise men from the east, on their way to see the Christ child, stopped in Jerusalem and revealed to Herod of His birth.  This led to the slaughter of the children.

As we grieve for the loss of the children in Connecticut, we see then that such wickedness dates back thousands of years.  In fact, more thousands of years before Herod ordered the extinction of the Bethlehem boys, Pharaoh ordered a similar mass murder of all the Jewish boys in Exodus 1:16.  Speaking to the Hebrew midwives, he said, "When you do the duties of a midwife for the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstools, if it is a son, then you shall kill him," and when the midwives did not comply, Pharaoh commanded the Egyptians in verse 22, "Every son who is born you shall cast into the river."

The evil that befell Newtown, Connecticut then, has a long heritage.  Although we tend to think of such mass slayings as recent developments, a product of our times, the largest schoolhouse death toll in America occurred in 1927, when a deranged school treasurer blew up the school in Bath Township, Michigan, in what it known as the Bath School Disaster, killing 38 elementary school children and six adults.

Please do not misunderstand me.  I am not in any way trying to diminish the significance of last week's shootings.  What I wish to do is to show is that our little mad gunman is part of a much longer history of such terrible things, and although he is completely responsible for the carnage, with no excuse before God, he is not wholly responsible.

This may sound like a contradiction in terms.  He is completely responsible, in that his evil has no justification.  In his sick mind, he may have had a reason for doing such things, just as Herod and Pharaoh had reasons for their slaughters.  But there is no escape from the full culpability for his acts.  There is no partial blame here to be shared with others, no mitigating circumstances.  The shooter, who lived only twenty years on this earth, will now spend and infinite number of years condemned to suffering far greater than we can imagine.

Yet he is not wholly responsible.  We must remember who the ultimate foe is.  Satan, who induced the fall of man, is the author of evil.  He opposes God's goodness.  Jesus directly spoke to such people in John 8:44, " You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do.  He was a murderer from the beginning... he is a liar and the father of it."  There are numerous passages that describe Satan as the ruler of this world (John 12:31, 14:30, 16:11, Ephesians 2:2, II Corinthians 4:4), and he used Pharaoh, Herod, Judas, and the Newtown killer as his tools. 

There is no doubt that God our father is more powerful than Satan, and His Son Jesus Christ will one day vanquish Satan and there will be no more evil.  Until then, wickedness will arise from time to time as Satan inflicts these terrors upon us and our society.  I would suggest that Satan has far more experience, knowledge and skills than we do, and although we are compelled to resist him in any way possible, as humans we will not gain victory over him.  That victory belongs to Christ.

We will mourn the children of Newtown, and we should do all that we can to protect our little ones.  Despite all of our efforts to try and "understand" suffering and the motives of mad men, let us not forget that a determined devil will occasionally defeat all of our best defenses from time to time.  When people call for a "national conversation," there will be national discussions on gun control, mental illness, and school security, but don't expect a national conversation on God and Satan.

Monday, December 10, 2012

Debt Forever

I find it a really boring cliche when someone starts an article by beginning with the definition of a word.  You typically see it like this:

              Word--noun. 1. Blah blah blah blah, etc.

The writer then uses that as a springboard to begin discussing something related to that word.  Another similar method writers use is to begin with "Webster's Dictionary defines..."  Using either of these devices is to me a very unoriginal way to start off an essay, and the practice seems to begin in junior high school.

However, I do find the etymology of words interesting and I think it is very important to use words precisely.  In an effort to develop this post, I thought I would look up "gratitude" in the dictionary.  I went to three different dictionaries and kept finding "thankfulness."  When I looked up "thankfulness" I was told that meant "gratitude."  I kept researching to find some way out of this conundrum when I finally found a dictionary that offered an alternative meaning to "thankfulness" and that was "appreciative."  Then when I looked up "appreciative" they said that meant full of "gratitude."  So this really got me nowhere. 

Looking up the etymology of appreciate helped; this comes from the Latin appretiare, which means "to set a price to."  So when someone does something good for us, we are aware of its value.  Furthermore, another word associated with appreciate and thankfulness was obliged, which means "to put in one's debt by a favor or service."  Part of gratitude or thankfulness means that we are aware of the gift, but there is something of a debt involved, and this often is nothing more than taking that sense of gratitude and expressing it as thanks to the person who gifted us.  We owe the giver, in a sense.

So, in a situation where somebody gives us something as an act of generosity or charity, it results in gratitude, which often carries with it some form of a sense of debt.  And when God blesses us, we feel a sense of thankfulness, and we are aware that we owe him thanks. 

Yet when we feel entitled to something, somebody owes us.  It would seem to be human nature that we would prefer to be in a situation where someone owes us rather than we owe somebody else.  I would suggest that there has been a huge shift in our society in our way of thinking about these things over the last century.  People do not want to rely on charity or the good will of others, for that obliges them to be thankful.  They would much prefer to rely on an entitlement, for that means that someone else is indebted to them.  For many, this has resulted in the state providing entitlements, very much a twentieth-century development in our country, as opposed to individuals, families, and religious organizations providing for other's needs.  It is much more preferable to receive that to which you are entitled, than to pray for God's blessings and be indebted to Him or to the kindness of others. 

Nowadays, when we incur debts, we are bombarded by advertisements that tell us that we do not need to pay them.  It is our "right" to demand smaller settlements or reduced payments.  But if you stop to think about it, when a debt is incurred, somebody has to pay for it.  For example, if you owe a home mortgage and undergo a foreclosure, the first obvious fact is that the bank paid for the debt.  But a loss for the bank may mean lower salaries for its employees, or lower payments to its investors, or perhaps higher borrowing costs for the next family that wants to take out a mortgage.  If the bank goes under because of a lot of these losses, and the government steps in, then the taxpayers are stuck with the debt. 

It goes the same way with our standing before the Lord.  Romans 6:23 tells us plainly that, "For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."  As sinners, we create a debt, and the price of sin is death.  Somebody has to pay that debt, and for Christians that person is Jesus.  We are then indebted to God for the gift of eternal life because of the gift of His Son to us.  Many people in this world cannot stand the idea of being indebted to God, and think of Heaven as something that is owed to them because of the works they have done.  They say to themselves, "I am going to Heaven because I have done good things and am a good person."  They do not have a sense of gratitude but a sense of entitlement. 

Once the Christian understands their fallenness, their sinfulness, and the fact that there is no way they could pay that debt, and that Someone else paid it for them, then they can only feel gratitude.  I believe the growing sense of entitlement in our society at large has led us away from gratefulness, and that has led to a parallel lack of interest in a God to whom everything is owed.  One day, "at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, and of those on earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the Glory of the Father (Phil 2:10-11).  Then those who did not want to owe God anything will pay the eternal price, and they will realize that they could have had their debt paid, free for the asking. 

Sunday, December 2, 2012

Softcover Edition Now Available

We are pleased to announce that the softcover edition of Surviving the Suffering is now available at www.SurvivingtheSuffering.com for $14.99. Both the hardover and softcover editions will be signed by the author, and both will be available at our book signings at Olivia's in Eustis, December 15th and 16th, from 11:00 to 1:00.

God is Great while I am Grated

I grated my thumb last night.  Yes, that is correct.  I was finely grating a very hard block of Parmesan cheese with a hand grater, and I slipped and grated a good deal of skin off of my left thumb.  I then proceeded  to sin quite vocally and emphatically.  Multiple obscenities escaped my lips, rather loudly.  In fact, my three dogs took refuge in the next room under some furniture:





  Even after I confirmed that it was a survivable injury and that I would Survive the Suffering, I continued expressing myself for some time until I was able to stanch the bleeding with a Band-aid.

This carnage was certainly an unexpected shock.  I do a fair amount of cooking, and incurring small cuts and burns is nothing new.  I have never autograted before, however, and I was certainly surprised at how much it hurt.  However, it did not take long before I regretted my behavior and began the process of repentance.  One of the first things I realized was that God had allowed this to happen at an opportune time.

Although no surgeon wants injuries to occur to his hands, even minor boo-boos to our hands and fingers are more annoying to us than to others.  Each day we must scrub our hands several times with antiseptic soap and a scrubbing brush with bristles, designed to cleanse our skin of all bacteria.  An open sore or burn therefore gets punished quite a bit, and the regular abrading keeps the wound open longer than usual.  This accident occurred as I began a week off from work, so God, in His mercy, allowed this to happen during a time where the injury will be allowed to rest and heal. 

I have no excuse before the Lord for my language.  Jesus tells us in Matthew 15:11, "Not what goes into the mouth defiles a man; but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man."  And from Paul, "But now you yourselves are to put off all these: anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy language out of your mouth" (Colossians 3:8).  And even James weighs in on the matter: "Out of the same mouth proceed blessing and cursing.  My brethren, these things ought not be so" (James 3:10).

Jesus was even more emphatic elsewhere in Matthew: "But I say to you that for every idle word men may speak, they will give account of it in the day of judgment" (12:36).  So despite the fact that foul language is part of nearly every single movie made for the last thirty years, it is not something minor to our Lord.  One day I will stand before the Lord in full awareness of each and every word that I have spoken.  Among many other reasons, it will be obvious to everyone at that time that I am only in Heaven because of Christ's work on the cross. 

God knew that I would slip with that grater.  It was an opportunity for me not to sin, and I failed.  So now I have an open sore on my thumb and a bandage to remind me for the next several days of my sin, and I expect that I may even have a very small scar from now on.  I am not claiming that had I not uttered impure speech that none of this would have happened, only that I now have a physical reminder.  And certainly all injuries and scars are not due to personal sin; I give several people scars every day in an effort to save their lives from illnesses that are not part of God's chastisement.

Finally, it also occurred to me that although I grated my thumb, the words that came forth grated on God's ears.  He was offended by my outburst.  In His dwelling place, such language is not allowed.  I will not be allowed to carry such bad behavior into Heaven with me.  There will be more unexpected hurts in my life, each an opportunity to control my tongue.  May God bless me that I may not curse.