Trust in God Trumps Understanding, Lent Part 4

Spirituality Column #229
March 29, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Lenten Series 2011: Just Not That into God, Part 4
Trust in God Trumps Understanding
By Bob Walters

Some people are just not that into God because He’s too big to fully understand.

He’s infinite, eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent … and we’re not.

We seek the truth, chase the good, and pursue righteousness. God actually is all those things. He’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The “good” is all that resides in and with Him. His righteousness is the final answer.

In our humanness, we require an intellectual middle ground for discussion, rationale and knowledge. We crave to learn but we need context. We strive to form an opinion, find the logic, or settle an issue. God is different. Way different.

“My thoughts are not your thoughts,” God tells mankind plainly in Isaiah 55:8. God is so big He hides from knowledge as we define it. “God,” theologian Joseph Bottum notices, “reveals himself only to faith.”

As people we have a contradictory mix of good and bad in us. Our human truths have limits and conflicts. We debate righteousness. We divide our loyalties on a sliding scale of convenience between human concerns and divine providence.

On truth, good and righteousness, God is everything, but He’s not a mix of anything. He’s an absolute, not a sliding scale. We want logical answers, and God wants obedient faith. When we trust with faith, God makes sense. When we trust with logic, we trip over syllogisms.
For example: If God is everything, and evil exists, then God is evil. Blame God.

Wrong answer. Try it again with discernment and faith.

When we encounter evil – and evil assuredly exists – it is because something is in disharmony with the perfection of God. The starting point is: God is good and created a perfect world. Since the sin of Adam, “… the whole creation has been groaning,” we read in Romans 8:21-23. We’re in “bondage to decay.”

Examples are everywhere: an earthquake in Japan, a ruthless dictator in Libya, my friend’s baby granddaughter diagnosed with cancer. Our faith must surpass all understanding, trusting God to shoulder every tragedy borne of a fallen world, earthly sin or human mortality, and ultimately make the world right.

Make the world right. That was the work of Jesus Christ on the Cross. Trust in that, and God starts to makes sense. His ultimate, eternal compassion isn’t about the greatness of our understanding; it is about the greatness of God’s faithfulness.

Now that’s big.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) predicts that if we understood God, we’d want a bigger God we didn’t understand.

Blessings

Drive-By Disbelief in God, Lent Part 3

Spirituality Column #228
March 22, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Lenten Series 2011: Just Not that into God, Part 3
Drive-By Disbelief in God
By Bob Walters

The “Center for Inquiry,” a group plainly just not that into God, recently installed billboards around Indianapolis, Washington DC and Houston, Tex., exclaiming:

You don’t need God – to hope, to care, to love, to live. Livingwithoutreligion.com.

What a great discussion starter. It’s even better when transposed into a question: Do you need God? In a hundred different ways Jesus asks the same thing throughout the Gospel. The billboards are fascinating.

First, note that they contain no direct mention of Jesus Christ. The billboards merely and clearly target the Creator God. If they meant someone else, it would be small-g god. I wonder whether it was politeness or perspicacity (shrewd awareness) – it likely wasn’t faith – that led them to capitalize “God.” And if their main pitch is that God is insignificant or doesn’t exist, then they capitalize to patronize.

I mean, who would both admit capital-G God exists and claim He is unimportant?

Second, and however, these particular billboards obviously and especially target Christ because they appeared the first week of Lent, the purely Christian season preceding purely Christian Easter. Citing “hope” and “love” – two of the big three divine gifts (faith, hope, love) of 1 Corinthians 13:13 – it is a dead giveaway, so to speak, that denigrating Christ, the giver of all life, is central to cfi’s anti-religion pitch.

The group says, soberly, that the Lent timing is “just coincidence.” Whatever.

Third, the group’s logo is an inscribed circle surrounding lowercase initials “cfi.” A flame dots the “i.” A flame … symbolizing human intelligence? The eternal hope of the Holy Spirit? The eternal flame of Hell (capital H)? None of the above?

Fourth, the billboard logo says “Center for Inquiry.” The real cfi logo includes the unpunctuated motto: “Reason Science Freedom of Inquiry.”

Reason? They nullify the author of all reason, Jesus Christ.

Science? Ultimately science doesn’t replace God, it reveals God.

Freedom of Inquiry? Except … don’t freely inquire about God.

Jesus was big on free inquiry. He asked, “Who do they say I am?” “Who will cast the first stone?” “Do you love me?” When people asked Jesus questions, He typically answered in thoughtful and thought-provoking stories. He wanted us – then and now – to constantly inquire with our entire minds, hearts, souls and faith, “Who is He?” and “Do we need Him?”

These are questions we should never fear, tire of asking, or stop answering.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) believes it’s more of a “God thing” than a cfi “coincidence” that the billboards popped up now. PS - Following publication of this column, cfi responded that the flame in its logo "symbolizes the light of knowledge that science shines on the (dark) world." That, evidently, is what they believe.

Fact Finding vs. Faith Finding, Lent Part 2

Spirituality Column #227
March 15, 2011
Current in Carmel - Current in Westfield - Current in Noblesville – Current in Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Lenten Series 2011: Just Not that into God, Part 2
Fact Finding vs. Faith Finding
By Bob Walters

Some people just aren’t that into God because they are so busy fact finding that they ignore, shun, or ridicule faith finding.

Look at our educational system. Look at our legal system. Shoot, look at several aspects of our church system. Our modern culture is wired, networked, satellite-linked and surfing for a universe explained by facts.

Educationally, we shun faith, and I don’t mean prohibiting public school prayer. Schooling at every level, K-through-college, institutionally asserts that faith has no part of functioning intellect. Rubbish. Faith is, precisely, a function of intellect.

Legally, we expend enormous energies assessing the facts of various cultural conveniences, bringing our judicial system to the opinion that while it is not necessary to protect live, unborn fetuses or the “this-man-take-this-woman” institution of marriage, it is indeed necessary to protect itself from faith. Ten Commandments? Adios. Faith, you see, is “non-factual opinion.” It’s also the ultimate “inconvenient truth.”

Churches that are faith-based, faith-directed and faithful to the Gospel truth of Jesus Christ are awesome. Churches that survey the expediencies of current society and rewrite the truth of Jesus Christ into fashionably inoffensive – or incredibly fear-inducing – facts to better “market” or “sell” religion to “a non-believing world,” are awful, not awesome. Why go to church to find the “truth” if church is just as treacherous and self-serving with the facts as the rest of the world?

Truth is, the world’s game of facts is stacked against “the truth.” And by truth, I mean Jesus Christ. He’s the lightening rod of all lightening rods, and He’s the source of all truth, all light, and all joy that is truly worth having. That His “truth” doesn’t rise to the adequate level of “fact” in our public institutions is what day-by-day gives Satan hope.

Yet no matter what facts we find, the truth stays the truth 24/7/365: For His glory God loves us, Jesus Christ has saved us, the Holy Spirit is here with us, and the Bible tells us so. Amen.

Faith in just that much truth changes the complexion of every fact we can ever discover. Thinking we can reflect our own glory with facts is Satan’s most powerful weapon against us. Knowing in faith that all Glory is God’s, we discover the vast and true love, grace and beauty of God’s Kingdom; and it’s all around.

That’s the power of faith, and that’s a fact. Find it today.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) notes that cell phone texting and surfing has us all bowing our heads. How hard would it be to throw in a prayer of thanks to God once in a while?

I'm Just Not That into God, Lent Part 1

Spirituality Column #226
March 8, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Lenten Series 2011
I’m Just Not That into God, Part 1
By Bob Walters

We are conditioned by our culture to believe that God – especially the person of Jesus Christ – is merely one of life’s extracurricular activities, not the full-time source and center of our humanity and life itself.

There is doubt. God is OK but organized religion is a pain. Yeah I suppose there is a God but until He proves to me he or she exists I’m looking out for No. 1. When I sincerely tried to pray, I got no answer. What’s God ever done for me?

There is reason. Survival depends on my ability to reason, to choose and to judge right and wrong. I’m supposed to deny my powers of reason and “believe” in a God I can’t see? Who allowed his own son to be killed? Who needs a father like that?

There is precedent. I’m free, aren’t I? Don’t Bible-thump me with that Jesus nonsense. Arose from the dead? Loves sinners? Forgives even the stuff I’ve done? C’mon. I’m too smart for that. I know things. And don’t mix faith with public schooling. It’s my God-given right to have church and state separated!

“God-given?” Alas.

Truth is, people generally accept the existence of God. Survey after survey pegs “atheist” as identifying only four percent or so of the US population. Not that God tracks his ratings, He’s there whether we believe in Him or not. But our culture of media and personal esteem makes it far too appealing and easy for us to seek reality elsewhere.

I did that for about 30 years.

I never thought God didn’t exist. Nor did I think Jesus, the Bible and the church were all that important. Just a bunch of old characters, old stories, old thinking. Jesus was a good man, the Bible has lots of good advice … but, the center of all life?

I just wasn’t that into God.

Thing is, I realize now, I wanted to BE God. As I grew to understand that the job was already taken, Jesus – our human-divine connection with God – suddenly became very important.

Lent, the church season of Christ’s passion and sacrifice, begins tomorrow and ends at Easter. Traditionally, many Christians give up something for Lent.

To take the critical step of putting Christ in the center of our lives and recalibrating / downsizing popular culture, let’s give up trying to be God.

That job’s taken, and it’s a full-time gig.

Walters (email rlwcom@aol.com) will look at non-believers through Lent, urging believers not to give up on them.