In my study of the book of Galatians last week something occurred to me that I don't remember ever giving much consideration before. It is that given the Bible's definition of idolatry, that scripture never really conceptualizes an "atheist".
After all, an "idol" is anything put before God. In other words, anything that I believe will bring me salvation- that is to say life or joy or fulfillment- whatever that thing is that I have made my savior and Lord- is my idol. Another way of saying it is that whatever good thing in my life has become the best thing in my life- has in affect become my idol, and therefore my Lord.
I know my idols by looking at my sin. If my sin is worry, it must mean that my heart is telling me that whatever I think I am losing I cannot live without. If my sin is bitterness, then it must mean that my heart is telling me that I have lost something that I cannot stand to lose. If my sin is some addiction, it must mean that there is something in the center that I cannot see myself living without.
The best way to understand my idolatry, therefore, is to ask myself what sin there is in my life that I feel like I MUST commit.
In this sense, we all have some god (little g) at the center of our heart and therefore we all have some "theos" controlling us, even if we tell ourselves and others that we don't believe in God. Our unbelief in the God of the Bible may well be true, but what the Bible teaches us is that even if we deny the THEOS, we all have some theos in the center of our lives, that has taken the place of the true one.
So, as the atheist says he does not believe in God, the Bible says that it does not believe in atheists.
Click here for an excellent synopsis of C.S. Lewis's journey from atheism to theism.
Friday, April 18, 2008
Thursday, April 10, 2008
glimpsing hell
None of us really knows what it is like to live one second outside of the presence of God. Even the most devout atheist is covered in some way by the common grace of God.
"In Him we live and breath and have our being" (Acts 17:28)
Therefore, every single person, no matter how much they may profess an ambivalence or even total disbelief in God, is still in a sense enjoying the effects of His covering grace.
In other words, no one really knows what it would be like to not know love or joy or laughter or oxygen or sunshine- at least not in this life. Because it is in Him that we have our "being". To not have Him is to come apart. Which is of course a good definition of death.
In death, a body comes apart physically. Similarly, to die spiritually is to come apart emotionally and to disconnect more and more from reality and from the life God gives.
Hell is the only one place that is totally void of the presence of God.
But there are places on the earth that are so spiritually dark it seems to me a person can at least get brief glimpses of what Hell would be like.
I think about the drive I took from Luknow to Motipur in India last October. On the way, I watched as a tuk tuk packed full of people side-swiped a moped driven by a young mother with two small children. The children and their mother all flew in different directions.
No one stopped.
Not the tuk-tuk.
Not the people driving by.
Not our taxi driver.
Not the bus driving past us.
Nobody.
"Why didn't we stop?" I asked our taxi driver.
"Too many people" he said.
As Thomas Friedman has said, "If you are one in a million in India, there are 10 million people just like you..."
Annie Dillard once reflected:
"Ted Bundy, the serial killer, after his arrest, could not fathom the fuss. What was the big deal? David Von Drehle quotes an exasperated Bundy in Among the Lowest of the Dead: “I mean, there are so many people.” One R. Houwink, of Amsterdam, uncovered this unnerving fact: The human population of earth, arranged tidily, would just fit into Lake Windermere, in England’s Lake District. Recently in the Peruvian Amazon a man asked the writer Alex Shoumatoff, “Isn’t it true that the whole population of the United States can be fitted into their cars?” How are we doing in numbers, we who have been alive for this most recent installment of human life? How many people have lived and died? “The dead outnumber the living, in a ratio that could be as high as 20 to 1,” a demographer, Nathan Keyfitz, wrote in a 1991 letter to the historian Justin Kaplan. “Credible estimates of the number of people who have ever lived on the earth run from 70 billion to 100 billion.” Averaging those figures puts the total persons ever born at about 85 billion. We living people now number 5.8 billion. By these moderate figures, the dead outnumber us about fourteen to one. The dead will always outnumber the living. Dead Americans, however, if all proceeds, will not outnumber living Americans until the year 2030, because the nation is young. Some of us will be among the dead then. Will we know or care, we who once owned the still bones under the quick ones, we who spin inside the planet with our heels in the air? The living might well seem foolishly self-important to us, if overexcited. We who are here now make up about 6.8 percent of all people who have appeared to date. This is not a meaningful figure. These times are, one might say, ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it? Are we not especially significant because our century is – our century and its nuclear bombs, its unique and unprecedented Holocaust, its serial exterminations and refugee populations, our century and its warming, its silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not."
Of course her point is that each of us has no value, really, unless there is a God who loves us.
Why worry about a few people on a moped in India? There are so many of them- "Too many" our taxi driver said. But the God of the universe died for each of them.
The extent of God's love is not just that God loves the entire world, but that He loves everyone in the world as if they were the only one to love.
It is His love that gives us our humanity. It is His grace that gives us our being.
How terrible to live without it.
But truly, there are places we can go in this world and see glimpses of hell. Some of them are very close to home. Like the religious compound in central Texas we've heard about this week where children were physically and sexually abused - all in the name of God.
I think about the YouTube video that came out recently that showed 9 teenage girls from Florida brutally beating a girl they had kidnapped and trapped so that they could film her beating and post it for all their friends to see on YouTube. What strikes me about the video was there was no justice, no love, no compassion, no one stopping the madness and saying, "Hey, this is wrong..."
Right there in Middle Class suburban America - a tiny glimpse of hell.
A few days ago I was talking to one of my son's friends who moved here a few years ago from Nigeria. "How did you get here?" I asked.
"We won the lottery" he told me.
His father won a visa lottery off a Coke bottle lid and his entire family was given the opportunity to begin a new life in America.
"I thank God every day for America" Rilwon told me.
"Really" I said, "why is that?"
"In Nigeria, the government is very corrupt- very selfish. Human life means nothing to them."
"That must have been very hard for your family, to grow up in a place like that", I said to him.
He told me about a time in his life when he was very young when he saw a man's corpse laying on the side of the road.
"The body was burst open", he said.
He looked at me, shaking his head. "Nobody cared enough about this man to stop the car and get out and dig him a grave..."
"No little kid should have to see such things", Rilwan said. "A person should not be left on the side of the road."
"It is only by God's grace that you know that to be true, Rilwan" I told him.
"In Him we live and breath and have our being" (Acts 17:28)
Therefore, every single person, no matter how much they may profess an ambivalence or even total disbelief in God, is still in a sense enjoying the effects of His covering grace.
In other words, no one really knows what it would be like to not know love or joy or laughter or oxygen or sunshine- at least not in this life. Because it is in Him that we have our "being". To not have Him is to come apart. Which is of course a good definition of death.
In death, a body comes apart physically. Similarly, to die spiritually is to come apart emotionally and to disconnect more and more from reality and from the life God gives.
Hell is the only one place that is totally void of the presence of God.
But there are places on the earth that are so spiritually dark it seems to me a person can at least get brief glimpses of what Hell would be like.
I think about the drive I took from Luknow to Motipur in India last October. On the way, I watched as a tuk tuk packed full of people side-swiped a moped driven by a young mother with two small children. The children and their mother all flew in different directions.
No one stopped.
Not the tuk-tuk.
Not the people driving by.
Not our taxi driver.
Not the bus driving past us.
Nobody.
"Why didn't we stop?" I asked our taxi driver.
"Too many people" he said.
As Thomas Friedman has said, "If you are one in a million in India, there are 10 million people just like you..."
Annie Dillard once reflected:
"Ted Bundy, the serial killer, after his arrest, could not fathom the fuss. What was the big deal? David Von Drehle quotes an exasperated Bundy in Among the Lowest of the Dead: “I mean, there are so many people.” One R. Houwink, of Amsterdam, uncovered this unnerving fact: The human population of earth, arranged tidily, would just fit into Lake Windermere, in England’s Lake District. Recently in the Peruvian Amazon a man asked the writer Alex Shoumatoff, “Isn’t it true that the whole population of the United States can be fitted into their cars?” How are we doing in numbers, we who have been alive for this most recent installment of human life? How many people have lived and died? “The dead outnumber the living, in a ratio that could be as high as 20 to 1,” a demographer, Nathan Keyfitz, wrote in a 1991 letter to the historian Justin Kaplan. “Credible estimates of the number of people who have ever lived on the earth run from 70 billion to 100 billion.” Averaging those figures puts the total persons ever born at about 85 billion. We living people now number 5.8 billion. By these moderate figures, the dead outnumber us about fourteen to one. The dead will always outnumber the living. Dead Americans, however, if all proceeds, will not outnumber living Americans until the year 2030, because the nation is young. Some of us will be among the dead then. Will we know or care, we who once owned the still bones under the quick ones, we who spin inside the planet with our heels in the air? The living might well seem foolishly self-important to us, if overexcited. We who are here now make up about 6.8 percent of all people who have appeared to date. This is not a meaningful figure. These times are, one might say, ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it? Are we not especially significant because our century is – our century and its nuclear bombs, its unique and unprecedented Holocaust, its serial exterminations and refugee populations, our century and its warming, its silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not."
Of course her point is that each of us has no value, really, unless there is a God who loves us.
Why worry about a few people on a moped in India? There are so many of them- "Too many" our taxi driver said. But the God of the universe died for each of them.
The extent of God's love is not just that God loves the entire world, but that He loves everyone in the world as if they were the only one to love.
It is His love that gives us our humanity. It is His grace that gives us our being.
How terrible to live without it.
But truly, there are places we can go in this world and see glimpses of hell. Some of them are very close to home. Like the religious compound in central Texas we've heard about this week where children were physically and sexually abused - all in the name of God.
I think about the YouTube video that came out recently that showed 9 teenage girls from Florida brutally beating a girl they had kidnapped and trapped so that they could film her beating and post it for all their friends to see on YouTube. What strikes me about the video was there was no justice, no love, no compassion, no one stopping the madness and saying, "Hey, this is wrong..."
Right there in Middle Class suburban America - a tiny glimpse of hell.
A few days ago I was talking to one of my son's friends who moved here a few years ago from Nigeria. "How did you get here?" I asked.
"We won the lottery" he told me.
His father won a visa lottery off a Coke bottle lid and his entire family was given the opportunity to begin a new life in America.
"I thank God every day for America" Rilwon told me.
"Really" I said, "why is that?"
"In Nigeria, the government is very corrupt- very selfish. Human life means nothing to them."
"That must have been very hard for your family, to grow up in a place like that", I said to him.
He told me about a time in his life when he was very young when he saw a man's corpse laying on the side of the road.
"The body was burst open", he said.
He looked at me, shaking his head. "Nobody cared enough about this man to stop the car and get out and dig him a grave..."
"No little kid should have to see such things", Rilwan said. "A person should not be left on the side of the road."
"It is only by God's grace that you know that to be true, Rilwan" I told him.
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