Paul Miller writes:
The difficulty of coming just as we [to prayer] is that we are messy. When we slow down to pray, we are immediately confronted with how unspiritual we are, with how difficult it is to concentrate on God. We don’t know how bad we are until we try to be good. Nothing exposes our selfishness and spiritual powerlessness like prayer (A Praying Life, 31).
((Ringing . . .))
Dad: Hello
Me: What is Cardinals nations going to do?
Dad: Look, if Pujols goes to another team, I am done with Major League Baseball.
Me: Come on, Dad. We were Cardinals before Pujols and we’ll be Cardinals after Pujols.
Dad: No, it’s not that. It’s what Major League Baseball is doing to the game. Who do these people think is paying the salaries? The insanity has to stop.
Me: Y—
Dad: Baseball used to be a common man’s game. The fans are paying for this. The fans can’t even afford to go to the games anymore. Pujols turns down 28 million dollars a year and there are many Americans out there who can’t even find a job. And 28 million a year is not enough for him. Really?
Me: Ri—
Dad: I’m done with it. I am going to straight college baseball. I am going back to T-Ball. That’s my game now. That’s where it’s true.
Me: You’re right. I’m with you.
Dad: Yeah, well what we really need to be concerned about it what’s happening in Egypt. You know, Iran is provoking Israel by sailing some warships through the Suez Canal.
Me: Oh, really?
Dad: Yeah, a loaf of bread will cost a day’s wage. Not to sound all doomsday or anything. But we’re not headed in a good direction.
((Pause))
Dad: We have to just trust in the Lord.
. . .
“What can flesh do to me?” It begs perspective. Really, we ask, what can flesh really do to me? . . .
Here is a helpful post by Paul Tripp—
Trading One Dramatic Resolution for 10,000 Little Ones.
An excerpt:
And what is he doing? In these small moments he is delivering every redemptive promise he has made to you. In these unremarkable moments, he is working to rescue you from you and transform you into his likeness. By sovereign grace he places you in daily little moments that are designed to take you beyond your character, wisdom and grace so that you will seek the help and hope that can only be found in him. In a lifelong process of change, he is undoing you and rebuilding you again—exactly what each one of us needs!
Yes, you and I need to be committed to change, but not in a way that hopes for a big event of transformation, but in a way that finds joy in and is faithful to a day-by-day, step-by-step process of insight, confession, repentance and faith. And in those little moments we commit ourselves to remember the words of Paul in Romans 8:32—
He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us, how will he not also with him freely give us all things.
Faith is Not Merely Cognitive
Our trusting only in Jesus and not trusting in other things is deeper than our mental calculations. John Piper is very helpful on this point. Faith is so intertwined with the affections. Believing is treasuring and delighting in an object, both for the pleasure the object possesses and for the pleasure the object brings (and these are not so neatly divided).
Faith in the Gospel
Piper construction in God is the Gospel articulates an important point. The gospel would not be good if it were not for God. God is the gospel. Forgiveness of sins, escape from wrath, eternity in the new cosmos—all these things are good benefits that would be empty if it were not GOD himself whom we “get” in the gospel.
How Do We Think About Idolatry?
Now, how does Piper’s construction add up with the idolatry construction within the gospel-centered movement (GCM)? The idolatry construction does not make the idol and the pseudo-savior the same thing (because it never is).
If my idol were the approval of man then the savior that accomplishes that idol is something different, such as, the refusal to disagree with people (i.e., spineless compromise). I would put my faith in compromise because of the pleasure it brings in procuring man’s approval.
Saving Faith Is Different . . .
The Savior in whom I put my faith is also the God to whom I am saved. Jesus, the second Person of the Holy Trinity, is both the means and the end. I trust in Jesus for the pleasure he possesses and for the benefits he brings. The pleasure that he possesses is not different from the pleasure he brings. For what he brings is fellowship with his person all in all—the triune God.
Still thinking . . .
“You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace.” (Gal. 5:4)
Whoever seeks justification by anything other than or in addition to Christ has severed themselves from him. Those in Galatia who are seeking their salvation in circumcision are not depending on circumcision alone, but circumcision as an additional requisite. Jesus will have no sharing. Faith does not work that way. If justification comes through the law (or anything else), even if it’s partially through it, then Christ died for no purpose (Gal. 2:21).
I think that many of us get this, or at least we’ve heard it before. We “know” that we are saved (reconciled to God) only by faith in Jesus. And therefore we put our faith in Jesus alone, or at least we do cognitively. But this “putting our faith in”—believing, trusting, etc.—it is not a merely cognitive exercise.
Our trusting only in Jesus and not trusting in other things is deeper than our mental calculations. John Piper is very helpful on this point. Faith is so intertwined with the affections. Believing is treasuring and delighting in an object.
Although we may not cognitively be believing something other than Jesus, what do our affections suggest?
This can get complicated. Simply, we should understand that faith in Jesus means something more than cognitive comprehension. It must mean loving and treasuring and delighting. And since faith must mean those things then we should think in those terms concerning our war against idolatry.
I am thinking through how to understand Piper’s construction of faith and the categories of idolatry explained in the gospel-centered movement. Saving faith in God is different than our idolatrous faith. More rambling on that soon…
Matt Perman has put together a great post from his message at Desiring God’s Friday morning chapel. Matt is giving the biblical, gospel-centered case for why justification by faith grounds and leads to effective action for good.
The Spirit rested upon Eldad and Medad and so they prophesied. As this was reported to Moses, his assistant Joshua insisted that he stop them. Moses responds: “Would that all the LORD’s people were prophets, that the LORD would put his Spirit on them!” (Num. 11:26-30).
Moses’ desire for Israel is a precursor to the New Covenant sounded forth by the prophets (Jer. 31:31; Ezek. 11:20; Joel 2:28). Moses himself speaks later in the same way of a day when the LORD would affect in his people to desire to love him from a circumcised heart (Deut. 30:6). As Sailhamer points out, “Moses longed for a much different community than the one formed under the Law of Sinai. He longed for a community led not by a man like himself but a community mediated by God’s Spirit” (126).
As Moses is leading the people from Sinai there is an inclusion of him pleading with “Hobab the Son of Reuel the Midianite” to join them (Num. 10:29-32). Part of Moses’ persuasion for Hobab to join Israel is that “the LORD has promised good to Israel” (10:29). Moreover, in his second attempt to persuade, Moses says, “And if you do go with us, whatever good the LORD will do us, the same will he do to you” (10:32).
There are two significant messages to point out in this little narrative: 1) Moses is evangelizing the nations; and 2) Moses is preaching the gospel by the Abrahamic Covenant.
It is important to note what we are told about the man invited to join Moses. Hobab is a Midianite, a Gentile. Moses’ persuasion for him to join Israel is a invitation for a Gentile to inherit all the promises that God has given to them.
This invitation is directly connected to God’s promise to Abraham. In his offspring will all the peoples of the earth be blessed (Gen. 12:1-3). Moses is himself exemplifying faith in the promise. By his faith in the promise to Abraham, he is calling on a Gentile (and the reader) to follow him in the same faith.
“Know then that it is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham ”(Gal. 3:7)
Henri Blocher, Evil and the Cross, (Leicester: InterVarsity, 1994)
The standard question at the core of the evil and theology is how evil can exist in the same reality of an all-good, all-powerful God—or as Blocher writes, “a God who is good and sovereign cannot permissively decree that the creature shall choose against the Creator” (100). Some attractive reasoning puts forth the idea that an all-good God is too good to let evil exist and an all-powerful God is strong enough to bring it to an end. Based upon this reasonable premise, a few options emerge:
1) God is wholly powerful, but not wholly good
2) God is wholly good, but not wholly powerful
3) God is neither wholly powerful nor good.
It is this “intuitive” premise that allows humans to so commonly speak of evil as a problem. It is a baffling reality that many thinkers that ventured to understand. Henri Blocher writes,
Finally, the question of the victory of evil, a question that is both existential and religious, deserves to be called the ultimate question, if it is not the first. For a humanity that is overwhelmed by suffering (evil endured) and guilt (evil committed), that is the question that matters (13).
In his book, Evil and the Cross: An Analytical Look at the Problem of Pain, Blocher considers three different solutions of human reason to the existence of evil—optimisim, pessimism, and dualism. Blocher traces these solutions throughout major theological and philosophical attempts explain evil. The tensions that are difficult to hold together in each of these attempts is the evil of evil, the lordship of the Lord, and the goodness of God (100). Blocher analyzes the three approach in light of this immovable criterion.
Blocher critiques optimism to be too caught up in evil as non-being and therefore is devoid of respecting the “spontaneous sense of evil” (14). He writes, “The strategy consists of erasing and blurring the most scandalous aspects of evil, and choosing a perspective which appears to diminish the anomaly” (19). Leibniz is included in this category by trying to rationalize the presence of evil in this world by make this world necessarily the best world possible.
While Blocher appears to agree with the Augustinian explanation that sin is the privation of good, he is leery of views that can “water down” the severity of evil (cf. 31). He highlights the “bite of non-being” and insists that such an understanding does not let evil off the hook. He writes, “as privation, evil exists in things: ‘the paradox of evil is the terrible reality of its privative existence’” (27).
In chapter two Blocher considers the explanation that connects the reality of evil to the libertarian freedom of the will. In this category he mentions A. Plantinga and Paul Ricoeur and shows how such a view explains how evil arises from freedom. He also gives considerable attention to John Hick and his thesis of soul-making. The plight of such a view is that it credits evil as purpose for human’s maturity. While such a position hopes to free God of being the cause of evil, it actually fails. He writes, “In spite of his monotheistic stance, the impossibility of God’s creating persons that are morally perfect turns out to be well and truly a limitation on him” (56).
Diletical reasoning, in chapter three, is set in its Hegelian context and thereby exposed of its hollowness. Blocher includes Moltmann and Barth in this category, and while their work is aesthetically satisfying, he is unconvinced of its accuracy. However, a point of praise and learning among such thinkers is the Christological concentration and focus on the cross. Blocher writes:
The dialectical solution to problem of evil has merit in reminding us that God is able to turn the work of evil human beings to fulfill his own designs, to make it serve the good, most notably the supremely evil act of the crucifixion of the Son. But as for the problem itself, it is a pseudo-solution which is more perverse in the way it (falsely) excuses evil, than those solutions that appeal to universal order and to the autonomy of human freedom (83).
Blocher puts forth his own position in chapter four as chapter five elaborates the position in light of differing eschatologies. Important to his position is the unwavering recognition that evil really is evil. He writes:
The fact that evil is vanity (‘awen) and the lack of something good (i.e. privation) does not remove the weight of sin, for evil makes use of the substance of created goodness, which it turns and reverses for its own purposes against that entity’s Creator. Such is the weight of untruth, borrowed from the truth that it has travestied and perverted. It is a hideous reality which draws down upon itself the judgment of God (87).
Blocher does not go beyond his critique of the three categorical approaches in an attempt to give an explanation for evil. He concedes that such an explanation is impossible. He writes, “For pilgrims such as we are, there is no rational solution to the problem of evil: the theoretical problem of the origin of evil” (101). Blocher calls evil a mystery—the great mystery—and is content to leave it there. “Evil is not there to be understood, but to be fought” (103).
Although he is content not to explain evil, neither does he leave the reader hopeless. Blocher goes to the cross to harmonies the three points of the “T”—the evil of evil, the lordship of the Lord, and the goodness of God. This is the high point of the book and of the history of the world. Blocher writes:
The sheer and utter evilness of evil is demonstrated there: as hatred in the mockery of the criminals who also hung there; as hateful in the weight of guilt which could be removed only by the sacrifice of the Lamb of God . . .
The complete sovereignty of God is demonstrated there: all this happened ‘by God’s set pupose and foreknowledge’ (Acts 2:23), for it was necessary that the Scripture be fulfilled. Those which bore witness to the destiny that the Lord had assigned to his Servant . . .
The unadulterated goodness of God is demonstrated there. At the cross, who would dare entertain the blasphemy of imagining that God would, even to the slightest degree, comply with evil? It brought him death, in the person of his Son. Holiness stands revealed. Love stands revealed, a pure love; there is no love greater (104).
I appreciate Blocher’s treatment of such a significant subject. His insistence on the primacy of Holy Scripture is wonderful and his passionate disapproval of excusing the evilness of evil is mobilizing. I embrace Blocher’s position as my own—accepting the Augustinian explanation that evil is the privation of good while also maintaining the force of evil in its perverting work. The ultimate answer to the existence of evil is the cross of Jesus Christ and hope that evil will one day be brought to its consummate end—indeed is now being brought to an end.
The implications of such a position are specific and weighty. If God is conquering evil, has conquered evil, and is currently using his Church to affect such a purpose, what is my role in regard to the suffering of the world? As one writer put it, “the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” By God’s grace, as reconciled sinners gladly brought into the supremacy of Christ, we must not “do nothing.” Our call is action in the world. “Evil is not there to be understood, but to be hated.”
“Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good.” (Romans 12:9)
