Attempts at Honesty

Reflections on the interplay of the Bible and Culture

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On the need for the intercession of saints

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Sister Marianne CopeI read the article in the Huffington Post entitled Marianne Cope, Catholic Nun On The Verge Of Sainthood and I feel the need to respond.

I do not have a problem with honoring those who have served God well during their lives. God does this when he refers to himself as the “God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” in Genesis 3. By this reference, God honors the forebears of the nation of Israel. So if my Roman Catholic brothers want to pay special honor to some who have served well, I have no argument against that.

I do have a problem with the teaching that it is necessary or appropriate to ask the saints to intercede with God. What is being said about the character of God when this is taught? Whether it is intentional or not, God comes off looking like a grumpy old miser who has to be coaxed into granting a petition. Or perhaps God is uninformed or misinformed about the situation and the saint is there to set him straight. Is God only able to handle petitions one at a time and therefore it takes the pull of a saint to jump the line, like slipping the maître d’hôtel a $20 bill to get seated faster?

I don’t intend to be flip, nor do I intend to be disrespectful. Yet, I think it important to point out that this portrayal of God does not match with what I see in Jesus. Jesus said, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). Can anyone read the Gospels and think that Jesus is unwilling to grant requests or provide healing? Can you point to one story where Jesus needed prompting by the Disciples to meet a need?

Paul tells us in 1 Timothy 2:5 that Jesus is the only mediator we need, saints are not required for intercession. In Matthew 6:9 Jesus us teaches us to pray directly to the Father.

One of the best ways to drive efficiency in business is to eliminate the middle man. Whenever possible, I prefer to go direct to the manufacturer. Why would we not go directly to God when we have been given a command to do so from Jesus?

I am open to being corrected if I have misunderstood or offered an incorrect portrayal of the Roman Catholic idea of sainthood. Please feel free to offer correction in the comments.

Confessions of a functional atheist

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GraveyardOne of the accusations against Christians is that we have a psychological need to believe a fantasy. In other words, the atheist thinks that we make up a belief in God to provide comfort against the unknown. Our belief in God is like whistling as we pass through the graveyard. It doesn’t provide any real benefit but it makes us feel better.

Honesty (the premise of this blog) requires that I get something out in the open. There are times when I don’t want God to exist. It would be oh so much more convenient if he did not and I could do whatever I want. There are times when I want to be god and I don’t want anyone telling me what to do.

This is the atheist position. The position that does not want God to exist and refuses to see any evidence that would point to God. I see this as more of a will issue than an intellectual one. My intellect tends to go where my will leads it. I often remember a line I heard a long time ago,

“a man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still”

God tells me to forgive, even when I don’t want to forgive. God tells me to love when I would rather hate. God tells me to respect when I feel disdain. God tells me to give when I would rather take. God tells me to value others above myself. All of these commands are difficult and I sometimes do not obey them. In those moments when I refuse obedience, I become a functional atheist; I act as if God does not exist.

Too often we see this in the church. Pastors and elders have to deal with people who write off Scriptural commands with the magic words, “it’s all in the interpretation” or “not everyone agrees with such a literal understanding.” Jesus predicted that some would fall away because of the demands of the Christian life (see Matthew 13:3-9). At one point in Jesus’ ministry his disciples referred to his teaching as a “hard saying” (John 6:60). When you examine Christianity in its entirety, it is sometimes very inconvenient.

We serve a God who does care how we behave. We do not serve a semi-senile grandfather God who always pats us on the head and says, “that’s nice.” We serve a God who demands holiness, a demand so important to him that he sent Jesus to provide for us the means of obtaining holiness.

Every moment of the day, I must choose to live according to my belief or to deny my belief in God. By God’s grace, most of the time I choose correctly and move toward deeper relationship with him. Yet, there are times when in my pride and stupidity I choose badly. When I choose badly, I am then given the opportunity to repent and choose well (1 John 1:9).

I believe in Jesus Christ because he provides the best explanation of the world I see around me. I believe in him because I think that he is indeed the truth (John 14:6). Sometimes, it is a very inconvenient truth and I do not live up to it, yet it remains the truth.

You may choose to disbelieve but please make that choice based on an accurate understanding of Christianity. Too often those who oppose God present a caricature of Christianity, a straw man easily knocked down. The real thing is far more elaborate and far more beautiful than the caricature.

Hunger and Thirst for the Right Thing

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#8 in the Sermon on the Mount Series

Matthew 5:6 reads this way in the NASB:

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

Hunger is Natural

In this Beatitude, the word translated hunger speaks of an avid, strong desire. The word translated thirst speaks of intense longing. Hunger and thirst are part of our common experience of life. They are drives that are built into us so that we draw in the water and nutrition we need to keep our bodies going.

Jesus uses language that we can all understand. All of us have experience hunger for food and thirst for water. As he did with the woman at the well in John 4, Jesus is pointing us beyond our natural hunger and thirst to a higher spiritual reality. He is saying that in the same way we need food and water to be physically healthy; we need righteousness to be spiritually healthy.

The verbs translated hunger and thirst are in the present tense. Jesus is not referring to an event in the past on which we can rest our hope, nor is it an event only in the future. The present tense indicates current, ongoing action. He is saying, “Blessed are those who continue hungering and thirsting after righteousness.”

What is Righteousness Anyway?

Growing up, I always understood this beatitude to be encouraging us toward right actions. In other words, hunger and thirst after doing the right thing. I now think that this is not the primary emphasis.

Keep in mind that among the hearers of Jesus were the Pharisees. They would hear this beatitude and think themselves to be already achieving this. They did many “righteous” acts. Yet later in the sermon, Jesus tells us that “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:20) So, this beatitude cannot be primarily focused on righteous acts.

What then is the righteousness to which Jesus refers? The righteousness we are encouraged to pursue is right standing before God. This is a righteousness that begins on the inside and works its way out in actions.

Righteousness has three aspects:

  1. Right legal standing before God – those in Christ have been declared righteous (Romans 8:1)
  2. Right heart attitude (see Psalm 51)
  3. Right actions which result from 1 and 2 (see James 2:14-26)

The Source of Righteousness

The Apostle Paul, in Ephesians 2:1-10, tells us that we are born dead in our “trespasses and sins.” But through faith in Jesus Christ, God gives us spiritual life. As a result, we are no longer trapped in our selfish, sinful lifestyle. We have the option to use the freedom given to us to walk away from our sins.

Apart from Christ, we may clean ourselves up on the outside, but we would then be like the Pharisees who were condemned by Jesus as “white washed tombs” (Matthew 23:27). A whitewashed tomb may look nice on the outside but inside it is full of rottenness and decay.

Jesus Christ is the only source of true righteousness available to us.

The Promise

Jesus tells us that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be filled. The word literally means eat until full.

This filling is a certainty because anyone who has this desire has Jesus waiting to embrace him. There is no chance of rejection. If righteousness is your desire, if you’re tired of your current lifestyle and want something better, Jesus will accept you. Jesus invites all who are “weary and burdened” to come to him and he will give them rest (Matthew 11:28). There are no exceptions, no-one is rejected.

I love that no matter how bad I mess up, if my desire is for righteousness, that desire will be satisfied. It will be done, not in my strength, but by Jesus Christ. Paul tells us in Philippians 1:6 that God began the process in me and he will see it through to the end. I do not have to worry about the outcome, I simply need to trust in God and he will direct where and how I should go (Proverbs 3:5-6).

Are you hungry and thirsty for righteousness? Jesus is waiting for you.

Thoughts on Prayer inspired by C. S. Lewis

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C. S. Lewis ends his essay entitled The Efficacy of Prayer in a collection entitled The World’s Last Night: And Other Essays with these words:

“If we were stronger, we might be less tenderly treated. If we were braver, we might be sent, with far less help, to defend far more desperate posts in the great battle.”

School PrayerIn the article, Lewis builds a case that while there is mystery in prayer, one thing we do know is that prayer is not a means of tapping into a genie god that gives us whatever we want. By its very nature, a petition is a request of someone, a request that can be granted or denied based on the wishes of the one being petitioned. We are not guaranteed the request and a denial does not indicate a lack of love on the part of God.

To support his point that a denial does not indicate a lack of love, Lewis uses the example of Jesus in Gethsemane. In Matthew 26 and Mark 14 we find Jesus praying to avoid drinking the cup of God’s wrath on our behalf. He feared the suffering that was to come, yet was resigned to follow the father’s will. It was God’s will that Jesus would go to the Cross to accomplish the Salvation that was planned from eternity.

God, in his mercy and wisdom, does allow us to participate, through prayer, in the accomplishment of his will. In the course of that accomplishment, we are sometimes privileged to see answers to prayer that defy explanation as coincidence. Often it is those who are young in the faith, parying with innocent boldness, who see the most striking answers to prayer. Their immature faith is nurtured by these prayers.

In contrast to this, it seems that mature Christians are sometimes stretched in their faith by trials when it seems as though God is unwilling to grant their petition for relief. God, in his wisdom knows where the believer is and what he can handle (see 1 Corinthians 10:13). Paul prayed three times to be relieved of his “thorn in the flesh,” a petition that was not granted (2 Cor. 12:7). In the case of Paul’s thorn, God thought it necessary to allow it to remain to increase Paul’s understanding and dependence upon the grace of God.

I am encouraged in that when I find myself in circumstances which seem desperate, and in which God seems to delay in responding, I am better able to remember that I am not abandoned. I can also be confident that God is using the circumstance to build spiritual strength in me.

The desperate posts in the battle can be lonely and hard, but God knows what he’s doing and he chooses well. Why then am I so reluctant to volunteer?

What about you?

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