The Throne of Mercy

Well, we have finally reached the last post in the informal series on the temptation of Christ. I suppose, alternately, that I could keep going or that I should have stopped awhile ago. In any event, I hope you can suffer through one more.

This post will have little to do with the actual scene of the temptation, though, in fact, this post is in every way contingent on the temptation. I am focusing again on the verses from Hebrews chapter four that I highlighted in the previous post. They are as follows:

Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. (4:14-16, ESV)

I have had verse 16 (the final sentence) memorized for years. (Perhaps I am about to highlight the importance of reading Scripture in its entire context and not merely picking verses out that sound nice.) There is a subtle problem, however, in reading verse 16 as if it does not follow immediately on the heels of verses 14-15 and, indeed, the entire preceding text of Hebrews. The problem is that I claimed verse 16 as truth after I had sinned. I would sin, want to beat myself up, but then be reminded that I can draw near to throne of grace with confidence and receive mercy and find grace. Boom. I feel better.

The context of the verse, though, does not speak specifically about the time after we have sinned, but the time before we sin, the time when we are struggling through the temptation. Verse 15, in all of its splendor, tells us that our high priest, Jesus, was tempted in every way we are and kept from sinning despite the temptation. Therefore, the contextual meaning of verse 16 is not that we will receive mercy and find grace after we have sinned, but that because Christ was able to stare down temptation and not sin we can now receive mercy and grace to help us in the time of temptation, so that we will not sin.

Now I want to be careful here about what I am saying and what I am not saying. I am not saying that God does not provide mercy and grace for us after we have sinned. He gives us grace upon grace and thanks be to God that he does. I am not saying that because we have this grace we can now be perfect. We are, in a sense, dualistic creatures, at war within ourselves. Perfectionism is nasty theology. What I am saying is that we are also met with grace before we sin. When temptation is pounding us and we just want to give in, we don’t have to. Because of Jesus we are no longer bound to sin.

This truth is all over Scripture, but it has overwhelmed me in the past couple of years. My assumption used to be that God’s grace was an after-the-fact type of grace. We sin and mess up and then go to God and he patches us up. Verses like this affirm that grace is also a before-the-fact type of grace. We are met before we sin and God tells us that because of Jesus we can find the grace we never could before to choose not to sin, to resist temptation.

This, perhaps, is the greatest lesson for me from the temptation of Christ. Because of Christ’s example in refusing to succumb to temptation, I am freed by his grace and sympathy to withstand temptation myself. I can change and choose the Father because the Son showed me the way.

The Temptation and the Incarnation

I am continuing here a short series on the passage in Luke’s Gospel recounting the temptation of Christ at the hand of Satan in the wilderness. The first post examined the propriety of Milton’s dubbing the event “paradise regained,” while the second post focused on this as a seminal moment for Christ discerning his divinity and calling. Perhaps he had discerned this before, but at the very least he left the wilderness with a clear sense of his calling as was demonstrated by his subsequent declaration in the synagogue in Nazareth. This should dismiss the more spurious understanding of Christ’s acknowledgment of his deific status promoted by Nikos Katzanzakis and the infamous Oliver Stone film “The Last Temptation of Christ.”

Moving on from there, I come to talk in this post about something a little closer to my heart: the way this event allows us to identify with Christ as our fellow man, and fellow sufferer in the face of temptation and the machinations of Satan.

For Christ was certainly tempted in the wilderness. The author of the Hebrews takes pains to make us assured of this: “Therefore, he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become and merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted” (2:17-18, ESV). And again, a couple of chapters later we read this beautiful passage: “Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in our time of need” (4:14-16, ESV).

Christ was not only tempted, but he was tempted in every way. Yet he did not sin. And he endured this, went through this, not only to make his Godhead true, but in order that it can no longer be said that he does not identify with us in our pains, temptations, and desires.

In the midst of Job’s hardships he put the following question to God: “Have you eyes of flesh? Do you see as man sees? Are your days as the days of man, or your years as a man’s years?” (10:4-5, ESV). This question was answered in the incarnation. Christ had fleshly eyes and endured the tumult of devouring time just as we must. Perhaps the most encouraging part of the story of the temptation is just this: Christ has been there. He was tempted in every way that I am. He knows what its like. He can no answer Job’s question, yes.

There is nothing approaching this in any other of the world’s faiths. God could not become like us and be tempted with the sins we are tempted with. The idea if blasphemous, irreverent. Yet the Bible tells us it also happens to be true. Therefore, we are able to bear up under this world. We have one who has gone before us to guide us and keep our feet from slipping.

The Temptation as Identity Confirmation

This is the second part of an impromptu series on the temptation of Christ in the wilderness as recorded in Luke’s Gospel, chapter four. The first post is immediately below and concerned the appropriateness of John Milton’s qualification of this event as the moment when paradise, lost in the fall of Adam and Eve, was regained.

This post will seek a way of understanding the divinity of Christ and perhaps how he himself understood it as he went into the wilderness. The Athanasian confession states the following*:

29. For the right faith is that we believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and man.

30. God of the substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds; and made the substance of his mother, born in the world.

31. Perfect God and perfect man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting.

34. One, not by the conversion of Godhead into the flesh, but by the taking of manhood into God.

Well, you get the point. Jesus was fully God and fully man. This is orthodox belief and has been for millennia. The question of how this actually worked, though, is perplexing and has been since the earliest Christians found this doctrine emerging in Scriptural texts. I am not here to iron out all of the historical minutiae surrounding Trinitarian belief and evidence, mostly because I am incapable of doing so, but the question most palpable for this post is how did Jesus understand his divine calling and his diving essence while he was a man walking the earth?

I think this is a question that merits some consideration, but it is also a dangerous question that can lead to idle speculation. One of the most famously controversial films of all time is Oliver Stone’s 1988 project “The Last Temptation of Christ.” The film was based on a book by Nikos Katzanzakis in which he meditated extendedly on this question: how did Christ understand his nature? Katzanzakis shows the perils of going too far down this road. He imagines Jesus being tempted before the cross to escape his impending death and marry Mary Magdalene and hunker down in the countryside and raise a family. I believe this is Biblically indefensible. Obviously, no one can say precisely how Christ labored through this issue and the heart-wrenching prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night of his betrayal shows that Christ longed for another way—you can believe all of this and hold to orthodoxy—but to imagine that he was almost drawn away from the cross because of a romantic attraction is nowhere evident. Rather, it is far more appropriate (and faithful) to imagine this time as Jesus agonizing over the fact that the presence of God the Father will be withdrawn from him for a time and the weight of the sin of the world will be heaped upon his back. This certainly seems more plausible to me.

Moreover, the story we are considering here, the wilderness temptation, helps move us toward an answer to this question. Immediately before his forty day fast and exchange with Satan, Christ has been baptized by his cousin John. The Spirit of God has descended in the form of a dove and the Father addresses him from heaven, declaring Sonship. Immediately following Jesus’ return to Galilee, he visits the synagogue in Nazareth, as was his custom, and reads to those assembled chapter 61 of the prophetic book of Isaiah, a text declaring the year of the Lord’s favor—a time when the oppressed will be liberated and the blind will be restored to sight. And then, with all eyes fixed on him, he makes the following declaration: “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (4:21). However Jesus understood himself as he was growing up in Galilee—despised by the community, being called a bastard, hearing his mother called a whore and his earthly father a fool, being talked about behind his back—it is clear at this point that he has a defined sense of who He is and what His purpose is on this earth. Indeed, his experiences in the wilderness no doubt clarified his sense of calling, confirmed his manifest perfection, his status as the new Adam. 

He might not have been eager for the cross, but he was fixed on his calling.

*source: www.reformation.org/documents

Paradise Regained

As many of you know I have a huge appreciation/ slight obsession with the English Puritan poet John Milton. There are many things I value in Milton’s writing, not least his ability to add clarification and depth to the Biblical stories. His eight volume personal Bible study, Christian Doctrine, is full of such examples. While I wouldn’t claim everything in his most famous poem Paradise Lost as being necessarily true, he illuminated the story of the fall majestically and added new gravity to the nature of “man’s first disobedience.” His follow up to Paradise Lost, the sequel if you will, was another poem titled, aptly, Paradise Regained. I had expected Regained to be about the passion story: the arrest, trial, death, and resurrection of Christ in Jerusalem. Rather than what one would assume, though, the poem is about the temptation of Christ in the wilderness at the hands of Satan.

I was reminded of this poem as I prepared the lesson for my house church meeting this week. We are going through the Gospel of Luke chapter by chapter and this week we covered the first part of chapter four. In the narrative of his life, this comes immediately on the heels of Jesus’ baptism by his cousin John. The Spirit of God has descended like a dove and the voice of the Father declared from the heavens that this is my Son and in him I am pleased. With this affirmation of his deity and vocation, the Holy Spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness for the purpose of being tempted. Scripture is nonspecific on the exact nature and timing of the temptation, alluding to temptation throughout the duration of his 40 day fast, but specifying three specific temptations at the end of his forty days. Christ endures the temptations of Satan, responds with Scripture to each, and Satan leaves frustrated to wait out a better time to seek out Jesus. Christ returns to Galilee and goes forth to start his public ministry.

I will be looking at this passage in a few different ways over the series of a few posts, but for the purposes of this first one, I was considering as I wrote the lesson whether or not I believe Milton was correct in labeling this event as the time when paradise was, so to speak, regained. In a way, the specific time when we can definitively say that paradise was regained is ambiguous and open to different options. It could be said that paradise was regained at the moment of the incarnation: when God became man the dye was cast and sin and death were destined to be defeated. This is true. It could be said to have happened when God the Father declared Christ’s deity. This is true. It could be said to have happened once and for all when Christ endured death on the cross and was raised through the power of God. All true.

Artistically, I think it is clear why Milton uses this event. Paradise was lost not when Adam and Eve were tempted to sin, but when they conceded to temptation and sinned. Temptation is not of itself sin; capitulation to temptation is sin. Therefore, this exchange in the wilderness, when Christ stares temptation down (and he was truly tempted as we shall examine down the road), represents the moment when the new Adam, Christ, overcomes the deficiency and sin of the old Adam. The string of constant human concession to sin was broken. Our new way of salvation was not yet made complete, but after Jesus refused to yield to temptation the certainty of this event was made manifest. If Jesus had given in and sinned, redemption would not have been possible. He refused, though, and the promise of restored paradise followed in his train.

Radical

One of the joys of the past few weeks free from school has been the chance to do an enormous amount of “fun” reading. Contrarily, one of the perils of graduate school is a profound amount of reading, oftentimes on subjects for which you care little.

The other day, my entire day (nearly) was consumed in reading Radical: Taking Back Your Faith From the American Dream, by a Southern Baptist minister from Alabama named David Platt. I can think of no other way to describe the book than as a punch in the gut, a wake up call, or some other similarly overused phrase.

From the title it is probably evident that Platt advocates a reconsideration of the American Dream, a Dream that all too often in our Christian culture has received merely a Christian spin on the secular convention. Platt accuses American Christianity of embracing many of the principles and the morality of American prosperity and the desire for bigger, newer, and more expensive things. This co-opting of a secular, capitalistic Dream is, as Platt argues, antithetical to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

It is ironic that though we claim to follow a man who owned no home, did nothing to secure a comfortable retirement for himself, and who promised his followers persecution and troubles in this world that we are  now more comfortable with McMansions and ideologies of prosperity than we are with serving the needs of the widows and orphans. The call of Christ is a call to take up a cross, daily, and follow him. The call of Christ is to be willing to lay down our lives that we keep them. The call of Christ is a call to go to the nations.

Platt is not a reactionary, and by affirming his central thesis I don’t want to appear the same way. I am not anti-American, or even anti-wealth. I believe this country has provided me with immensely valuable and rich opportunities that so many in the world can never hope to receive. One of the supreme blessings of my life is to have been born and raised in the United States and live a life more prosperous than 99% of the people alive on this planet today. However, I must believe that God has provided this country our extraordinary wealth and resources for something a bit more valuable and lasting than nice vacations, comfortable houses, and a new car every few years. God has given us a trust along with our wealth. From those to whom much is given, much is expected. Our resources exist for the spread of the gospel, to fulfill God’s purpose of taking the message of grace and salvation through Jesus Christ to every tribe, tongue, nation, and people. We abdicate that responsibility when we use our wealth to further our own ends.

What was most striking to me about Platt’s book, though, wasn’t merely that everything he was saying was true. What struck me most significantly was how poorly I emulate Christ, how little I desire what he tells me I ought, how little my dreams are his own. In other words, when the book began I found myself nodding along, agreeing that too many other Christians were living for the American Dream and they needed help finding their way back, but by the end, as I reflected on my own pursuit of the Dream with my own twist on it, I realized how far I have missed the mark and how I have done so in a subtle way.

There is a profound amount of arrogance within me. You see, I have given up on the conventional American Dream: I don’t care about owning the beach house, the mountain cabin, and the McMansion in the suburbs; I don’t care about owning the boat, the snowmobiles, and the luxury cars; I don’t even care particularly about vacations to fancy places or a well-stamped passport. But this doesn’t mean that I do not daily pursue my own version of the American Dream. I believe that Dream, in its starkest terms, consists in being an autonomous being, beholden to none, who can work out whatever their own conception of happiness happens to be as long as it doesn’t infringe on the happiness of the collective. So my Dream isn’t for fancy possessions and a massive bank account, rather, my Dream is for a little mountain cabin with a wood burning stove and with plenty of singletrack trails for trail-running in the summer and snowshoeing in the winter; a quiet life with a few good friends; a job teaching English and coaching cross country at this small mountain high school; an opportunity to run in some of the major ultramarathons across the country; a den in the cabin well-stocked with books; a nice marriage, a nice family, and a nice, comfortable existence.

And because that Dream is counter to the traditional American Dream I can imagine it is less pernicious for a follower of Christ than the more conventional Dream; I can imagine that I am somehow more righteous for dreaming this Dream than the person chasing wealth and all the accouterments of wealth. But I am not sanctified by being countercultural; there is nothing inherently valuable in a hippie spin, or an athletic spin, or an intellectual spin, or a hipster spin, or a mountain man spin on the American Dream. The Dream having more to do with our own wants and desires, our own autonomous will rather than a will in conformity with the God the universe who bought us with the blood of his Son, is exactly the problem. My goal, then, is not to reach for a more Thoreauian version of the American Dream, something quaint and simple, but to reject the idea of autonomy altogether. To reject my will for comfort and ease and to accept the life of discipleship. This is the calling of a follower of Christ. We are to be ready to go where he went and live how he lived.

Platt’s book has blessed me, then, not because it confirms what I think about others and their shortcomings. It has convicted me to face my own. To consider what I consider to be of more value than Christ, my ostensible treasure in the field. And, as Christ told us, I need to be more concerned about the plank in my own eye before I worry about the speck in my brother’s.

I Witnessed a Miracle This Weekend

Clara and I just got back from our final trip of my Christmas vacation. Our poor little Corolla went from Manhattan, Kansas to El Paso, Texas and back, Omaha, Nebraska and back, and finally to Denver and back. Hopefully it gets a couple month reprieve. Like our trip to El Paso, our trip to Denver this past weekend was prompted by marriage.

This wedding we attended this past Sunday was a miracle of God, and I mean that to be no exaggeration. The couple who tied the knot would never have ended up together apart from the grace of God and his goodness in both of their lives. I suppose this is true of every marriage, but it was particularly evident in this case.

We met Erica when she was a random dorm roommate of our good friend. She was fervent in her atheism when we met her, denying the existence of her creator. Over time she softened a bit and came around to some church activities but still kept her distance. At one point she decided that she wanted to follow Christ but the cost was simply too steep and she walked away. A couple of years later, when Clara and I had already moved to El Paso we attended our annual church conference and I was surprised to see Erica in attendance. Literally, I kept trying to convince myself from across the room that it wasn’t her. But indeed it was. She had counted the cost, decided that Christ was eminently worthy, and abandoned her old life to follow him.

Jon was one of the first people I met when I moved to Fort Collins to attend Colorado State as a freshman. I remember listening to punk music loudly in my Pathfinder and buying cigars with him on my roommate’s 18th birthday. Jon and I have a lot in common in many ways, but were never very close. Clara and he were good friends though and when Clara and I got together I got to know Jon better. He had come to follow Christ as a freshman at Colorado State but was struggling for many years to commit the rest of his life to following Christ. He had other ambitions which pulled at his heart. In our final years in Fort Collins it was rare to see Jon around church or church events and our communication with him waned. It was, therefore, much to our surprise when he came down to El Paso a couple of years ago on a short-term mission trip. In his time of straying he had never found satisfaction outside of Christ and had returned to following him.

Shortly thereafter Jon fell in love with Erica and told her so. She denied at him first, saying she did not reciprocate his feelings. Undaunted, Jon continued to love Erica and decided to give her time. Like Christ was persistent with both of them, Jon was persistent in his love for and seeking of Erica and she eventually came around. A couple of days ago I watched them pledge the rest of their lives to one another in marriage.

That story might not strike some as miraculous, but then they would be wrong.

Multiverse Theory and the Death of Philosophy

Stephen Hawking is that rare creature, a famous physicist. With the runaway success of his popular level treatise on cosmology, A Brief History of Time (1989), Hawking was thrust into the public sphere in a way that eludes most scientists, and, indeed, in a way that most scientists would probably not desire. While never clearly espousing belief in a deity, he included an ambiguous statement in A Brief History that caused speculation on his metaphysical beliefs: “If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason--for then we should know the mind of God.” Though the connotation of this statement makes it clear that he is referring to God only in a metaphorical sense, the door seemed left open for belief that Hawking entertained the idea of a God who perhaps had some part in the creation of the universe.

Last year, though, Hawking came out with another popular level book that seemed aimed at forever silencing the notion that belief in a creator God has an explanatory power for the state of the universe or is, in any way, necessary for the cosmos as it exists. Entitled The Grand Design and coauthored with Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking details and attempts to popularize a theory in theoretical physics called M-theory. Basically, what this theory postulates is that there are, in fact, an infinite number of universes. The idea here is to refute the argument for the existence of God based on the fine tuning of our universe, a view held by Isaac Newton who referred to our “strangely habitable solar system.” Given enough universes, anything is possible, and the factor of coincidence decreases sharply so that our distinctly life-allowing “planetary conditions” are “far less remarkable and far less compelling as evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us as human beings.” To quote in some length:

According to M-theory, ours is not the only universe. Instead M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing. Their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god. Rather these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law. They are a prediction of science. Each universe has many possible histories and many possible states at later times, that is, at times like the present, long after their creation. Most of these states will be quite unlike the Universe we observe and quite unsuitable for the existence of any form of life. Only a few would allow creatures like us to exist.

What binds this theory together, for Hawking, is the law of gravity. In an interview with the British daily The Telegraph, Hawking stated that “because there is such a law as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing.”

Let me just say, and this will probably not come as a surprise to anyone, my knowledge of theoretical physics is pretty sparse. My house church co-leader just received his PhD. in Theoretical Physics, so if you can learn through osmosis I have the subject down, but if not I am awash in ignorance. However, Mlodinow and Hawking make another bold statement in their treatise on M-theory and the unnecessary nature of God, and it concerns a subject where I have a little more experience: “Philosophy is dead.” Because the discipline has not kept pace with scientific discovery, “scientists have now become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.” How heroic. The problem with this triumphalism is that M-theory falls squarely in the realm of philosophical science. This is like a poet condemning Shakespearian verse in Shakespearian meter. You cannot claim philosophy is dead and then write a book of scientific philosophical speculation.

This is the case because the concept of multiple universes is by very definition beyond the bounds of empirical proof. As John Haldane explains in his review of The Grand Design, “There can be no empirical evidence in support of the hypothesis, nor could it be derived as a necessary condition of the possible existence and character of the only universe of which we have scientific knowledge.”  We can only ever know what is observable to us, according to the scientific method. Everything else has to be taken on some other basis, call it philosophy or faith. Scientific speculation that makes claims beyond proof, whatever it does accomplish, does not make science.