For unto you is born this day . . .

"Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. . . ." And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!"  (Luke 2:10-14)


An article by Stephanie Samuel in the online Christian Post today gives Christians a pause for reflection. The article, titled, "Author: Most Evangelicals Believe Good People are Heaven-Bound," has some interesting quotes (you can read the whole article by clicking on the name of it above). Some of the things it says are (the words in #s 1–3 are quotes from the article):

1) The majority of Protestants and evangelicals believe that good people and people of other religions can go to heaven, according to author David Campbell. . . . surveys of 3,000 Americans, used to write the book, show that American people of faith, though devout, are very tolerant. So much so that most believers also believe that good people, despite their religious affiliation, can go to heaven.

2) Campbell . . . explained at a Thursday discussion of his book that the numbers can be explained with the “Aunt Susan” theory. Aunt Susan, he said, is the nice family member who is well-loved and is an all around do-gooder. “You know that if anyone is destined to go to heaven, it’s Aunt Susan,” described Campbell. However, Aunt Susan is of another religion. Rather than condemn that person to a lost eternity, Campbell said, most American believers choose instead to believe that that person is heaven-bound.

3) Land lamented that more evangelicals are being taught the doctrine of universalism. “It’s emphasized from the pulpit; it’s emphasized in the seminaries,” he decried. Universalism is the theological doctrine that all people will eventually be saved despite a relationship with Christ.

My Thoughts: This survey raises some interesting questions around Christmas that the Evangelicals who this describes need to answer. The first of these is, "Then what was Christmas, and ultimately the cross, about?" If a Savior was given to us, and that Savior was God's Son, and God allowed Him to suffer so ultimately for us, then why did that happen if there were other ways? How can anyone believing in Jesus as Jesus describes Himself believe that if there was any other way to save us that God wouldn't have taken that path?

Another question is about God's Word. Do you believe it is His Word or not? If you are going to pick it apart and decide arbitrarily which parts you believe and which you don't then who are you to state John 3:16 with confidence, or how do you possibly offer confident hope to someone contemplating suicide or struggling with hopelessness? 

Another question, equally relevant around Christmas, is, "What were we being saved from if all people end up in Heaven?" It is amazing to me how reluctant most Christians are to talk about things God was not hesitant or apologetic talking about—Heaven, Hell, fear of God, sin, holiness, condemnation, redemption, etc. It doesn't mean that we should talk about these things with a pointing and "in their face" finger, from a platform of arrogance, but we are very remiss if we don't share what God openly shares, and do so from a place of humility and love because we know that, but for Christ, we, too would be separated from God in Hell forever.

Christmas is a message of great joy! Indescribable joy! All Heaven declares the glory of God and the news! Why? Because the bad news is so bad. Because man is sinful and fallen and there is not one good among him according to God's Word. Because eternal separation from God, in Hell, is a fate to wish upon no one. Because we were helpless to save ourselves, but God came and saved us. He didn't steal us from the devil on some "Underground Railroad" smuggling us away—He recognized Satan's lawful right to us as his slaves and He bought us from him, and the purchase price was His Son's blood . . . the only innocent blood that could be shed in another's place because we were all guilty and condemned to die anyway.

Glory be to God in the highest! He has saved us, and He has given us His precious Word to show us the way and to make sure we understand that His Way, through His Son, is the only way—and that is the message of Christmas! God, please help us to stand strong in your Word, to not be ashamed or apologetic of what you are not ashamed or apologetic of, to be filled with joy at your message, and to shed it abroad with all love and humility.

Darkness and Light — Part I

Yesterday we went to the east side of the Pinnacles National Monument with our youth group. It was a really special day. We got there a little after 10 am, and then hiked up through the natural caves created by large rocks covering parts of a canyon. At the top we stopped and did a little study by a small reservoir and then came back down for lunch and heading home.

At the top, for our study, I began by asking the youth what they could turn on in the dark parts of the cave to help them. The answer was their flashlights, or "light." I then asked what might happen if they walked in the dark without their light and we came up with answers like falling, getting hurt, getting lost, dying, etc. I then asked them, as we sat out in the beautiful sun, to turn on the dark. The blank looks said it all—you don't turn on dark, you just remove light and what is left is dark. Dark is the absence of light. Remember that for what follows . . .

When Jesus came Matthew 4:12-17 tells us He fulfilled Isaiah's prophecy that the people who live in great darkness have seen a great light. In Luke 1:78-79, Zechariah, John the Baptist's father, filled by the Holy Spirit, prophesied, "because of the tender mercy of our God, whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace." [boldface is mine]

I asked the youth what the land was like when Jesus came, and the answer, according to the Bible, was that it was in darkness. So, I asked, does that mean the sun wasn't shining? Obviously, the answer is "no." This is a description of spiritual darkness, and based on what we talked about to start—darkness is the absence of light. Who is the light of the world? Jesus. The people lived in a spiritual darkness, absent of God (they had plenty of religion, just not God).

Light and dark are big words in the Bible. In the English Standard Version there are 88 different uses of a variation of the word "light" or "dark" in the Gospels, alone—and almost all of them have to do with light in the sense of illumination, not weight. If it is true that darkness, in a spiritual sense, is the absence of God, then we would expect to find Hell described like that. Sure enough, in multiple places, it is the place of "outer darkness." To the contrary, if God is light and light chases away darkness, then we would expect to find Heaven a place of tremendous light. Hence the words of Revelation 21:22-25, "And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there." [again, boldface is mine]

So, darkness is the natural state without the addition of light. When we walk in darkness we get lost, hurt, and even die. This is the condition of man until the light comes in and shines in the darkness. I'll talk more about darkness and light and walking in them in the next post, but for this one simply reflect on the fact that, absent of light there is darkness. It is the natural condition. You don't need to do anything to make it dark. You do need to apply light to remove the darkness. So many people who don't know Jesus seem to believe that they are on a road and one day they have to choose Heaven or Hell, God or not. The reality is that all are on the road to Hell. It is not one we choose. It is our natural path. We are all absent of God and in the darkness. We must choose to apply the light to get out of the darkness, and that light has a name. It is not some mystical idea of "light" or "God." It is Jesus who said, "I am the light of the world."

Sinners and An Angry God . . .

Today, July 8, marks the anniversary of Jonathan Edward’s 1741 delivery of probably the most famous sermon ever given in America, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Sadly, most Americans (even Christians) know little more about the mighty move of God in the 1700s that we call the Great Awakening (or the great man of God named Jonathan Edwards) than the biased, slanted, out of context excerpt that they have read in a English class as a brief excerpt of his sermon. I believe that we can, and should, grow tremendously by studying the lives of men and women of God—a great "cloud of witnesses"—who have gone before us, to help us understand their victories and falls, and the part WE are playing in the move of God’s Kingdom across the ages.

While I do not share all of John Piper’s theology, I admire his heart for God and his biographies of great men of God. Rather than try and come up with my own words about Jonathan Edwards, I find it easier to quote from him (with permission). Information about links to Piper’s biographies is given at the bottom of this post.

In his 1988 teaching at the Bethlehem Conference for Pastors called The Pastor as Theologian:
Life and Ministry of Jonathan Edwards, Piper, asks:

Does any of us know what an incredible thing it is that this man, who was a small-town pastor for 23 years in a church of 600 people, a missionary to Indians for 7 years, who reared 11 faithful children, who worked without the help of electric light, or word-processors or quick correspondence, or even sufficient paper to write on, who lived only until he was 54, and who died with a library of 300 books—that this man led one of the greatest awakenings of modern times, wrote theological books that have ministered for 200 years and did more for the modern missionary movement than anyone of his generation?

Though I know that the following excerpt from another point in Piper's teaching is long, I encourage you to chew the solid food and read it through and meditate on it:

And for many text books, Edwards is no more than a gloomy troubler of the churches in those days of Awakening fervor. So what we get as a sample of latter-day Puritanism is an excerpt from his sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." Perhaps one like this,

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousands times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.

And so the kids are given the impression that Edwards was a gloomy, sullen, morose, perhaps pathological misanthrope who fell into grotesque religious speech the way some people fall into obscenity.

But no high school kid is ever asked to wrestle with what Edwards was wrestling with as a pastor. When you read "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," you see quickly that Edwards was not falling into this kind of language by accident. He was laboring as a pastor to communicate a reality that he saw in Scripture and that he believed was infinitely important to his people.

And before any of us, especially us pastors, sniffs at Edwards' imagery, we had better think long and hard what our own method is for helping our people feel the weight of the reality of Revelation 19:15. Edwards stands before this text with awe. He virtually gapes at what he sees here. John writes in this verse, "[Christ] will tread the wine press of the fierceness of the wrath of God the Almighty."

Listen to Edwards' comment in this sermon,

The words are exceeding terrible. If it had only been said, "the wrath of God," the words would have implied that which is infinitely dreadful: but it is "the fierceness and wrath of God!” The fierceness of Jehovah! O how dreadful must that be! Who can utter or conceive what such expressions carry in them?

What high school student is ever asked to come to grips with what really is at issue here? If the Bible is true, and if it says that someday Christ will tread his enemies like a winepress with anger that is fierce and almighty, and if you are a pastor charged with applying Biblical truth to your people so that they will flee the wrath to come, then what would your language be? What would you say to make people feel the reality of texts like these?

Edwards labored over language and over images and metaphors because he was so stunned and awed at the realities he saw in the Bible. Did you hear that one line in the quote I just read: "Who can utter or conceive what such expressions carry in them?" Edwards believed that it was impossible to exaggerate the horror of the reality of hell.

High school teachers would do well to ask their students the really probing question, "Why is it that Jonathan Edwards struggled to find images for wrath and hell that shock and frighten, while contemporary preachers try to find abstractions and circumlocutions that move away from concrete, touchable Biblical pictures of unquenchable fire and undying worms and gnashing of teeth?" If our students were posed with this simple, historical question, my guess is that some of the brighter ones would answer: "Because Jonathan Edwards really believed in hell, but most preachers today don't."

But no one has asked us to take Edwards seriously, and so most of us don't know him.

Most of us don't know that he knew his heaven even better than his hell, and that his vision of glory was just as appealing as his vision of judgment was repulsive.

Most of us don't know that he is considered now by secular and evangelical historians alike to be the greatest Protestant thinker America has ever produced.

How would you describe to someone the fierce reality of hell and God's wrath toward sin? How would you magnify the vastness and depth and majesty of God's love apart from contrasting it to His wrath and hell's awful reality? Does it worry you to turn someone off by talking about hell and God's wrath? Does hell's awful reality, and the fact that it is the destination of the majority of people you meet, bother or motivate you? Does eternity, or does your present comfort, drive your choices and how you spend your time? Do you share the Gospel as a way for people to have a better life, or as salvation from hell?

These are all questions worth pondering in our hearts—questions we all probably need to ask ourselves and meditate on. Time is short. How will we spend it, and whose approval and pleasure will drive us as we move through it? Jesus says that those who are worthy of Him will, daily, deny themselves and take up their cross and follow Him. To follow means to go where He goes, to do what He does, to say what He says. Jesus talked a lot about hell. Should we be talking more about it? And, truly, can we fully appreciate God's love and Heaven's glory and the cross' majesty and horror apart from honest consideration of Hell's terror, God's wrath, and sin's cost?

Credit: The quoted text above is by John Piper. © Desiring God. Website: desiringGod.org.

Note: I wrote about Piper’s biographies, and gave a link to them, in my Feb. 9, 2010 post, “Velvet Mouthed Preaching” which you can view by clicking here, or by navigating through the blog archive in the column on the right.

Esther . . . Part 3

Here are the traditional birthday "nose to nose" pictures from the Pinnacles for this year. It was a beautiful day and we made it to the top in time to have an awesome lunch and take some great pictures from up there before heading back down and then driving up to my folks to enjoy the last hours of my birthday around their fire, together. What a great day, thanks for all of your good wishes and prayers!

Here's another Esther thought: From Esther's place of intimacy with the king she was positioned to save a people. It was a chance that involved risk for herself, but, as Mordecai told her in Esther 4:14 ". . . And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?"

As Christians, with access to the King's voice and heart, we have had our eyes opened to the eternal realities of heaven and hell, and the glorious news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ for the salvation of men. We are offered the anointing of the Holy Spirit to empower our ministry (even Jesus said He cast out demons by the Spirit of God) and we are given the commission (really a command) by Jesus to go in to the world and make disciples, operating in His name.

Our eyes have been opened to the great, eternal truths, and we have been placed where we are for such a time as this. We operate from our place of intimacy and favor with the king in an effort to save a people. We have been given both the terrible revelation of eternity without God that so many around us are headed toward, and the most amazing revelation of eternity with God that we know the key to. It may involve great risk to ourselves, but we can't keep that to ourselves simply to protect ourselves. Like Esther, we have a call upon our lives and we must decide---do we play it safe to protect ourselves while others around us perish when we might have done something about it, or do we take the risk and answer our call and step out to save a people?