Category: Morality

Did Jesus So Judge the World that He Came into the World to Condemn It?

When Jesus called us to follow him, he called us to adopt his posture toward the world.

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I am writing today about something I have written before, but I think it bears repeating. I have not stopped thinking about it since these words from Paul virtually leapt off the page when I read them a few years ago:

“What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside.”

1 Corinthians 5:12-13 (emphasis added)

How many times had I glossed over those words without really seeing them? Did he really mean that? We are not to judge people outside the church? Isn’t that exactly what we do?

I have kept going back to Paul’s admonition often since that day. I didn’t see it right away, but I eventually noticed that Paul echoed the very words of Jesus in that statement: Jesus said,

“If anyone hears my words but does not keep them, I do not judge that person. For I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world. There is a judge for the one who rejects me and does not accept my words; the very words I have spoken will condemn them at the last day.”

JOhn 12:47-48 (emphasis added)

Elsewhere, Jesus said, “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” (John 3:17)

If Jesus bids us to follow him, should we not adopt the same posture toward the world? It is the same posture Paul admonished the Corinthians to model toward those outside the Church: Do not judge them because they have a judge! (And it isn’t us!)

Paul

1 Corinthians 5:12-13

What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church?

God will judge those outside

Jesus

John 12:47-48

I have not come to judge the world.

There is a judge for the one who rejects me.

When adopt the posture Jesus had toward the world and the posture Paul tells the church to adopt, we are freed up from the responsibility to judge so that we can love. Even if the world goes its own way, which it will, we can love the world. Even if the world hates us, we can still love the world.

We are free to preach good news to the poor, to give sight to the blind, to set the oppressed free, and to proclaim the favor of God to all who will receive Him. This was how Jesus characterized what he came to do when he read from the Isaiah scroll in his hometown synagogue, sat down, and said, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4: 21) This is our ministry also, if we will follow him.

We don’t have to be in the business of judging the world because the world has a Judge. We can leave that to God. In fact, it isn’t an option. It is God’s rightful place to judge, and it isn’t our place.

That means it isn’t up to us to make the world conform to the law of God. We are not responsible to require godly behavior and biblical morality from the world, and it isn’t our business to do that.

Rather, we are to love the world, though people in the world are yet sinners. We can do that because Jesus loved us and died for us while we were yet sinners.

“Are you not to judge those inside?” says Paul. The world has not subscribed to Jesus, but we have. Judgment begins in the house of God because Jesus counts on us to be the light and salt of the world. If we lose our flavor, we cannot be who God calls us to be.

Who among us were able to conform to the Law before Jesus? None of us! Which is why we needed him. We are saved by grace through faith, and not by anything we could do. The world, likewise, cannot conform to God’s law apart from Jesus. This is why the world needs a Savior: because it has a Judge.

Why, then, would we try to impose godly behavior and biblical morality on the world through human, legal means when the world is incapable of conforming to God’s law apart from Jesus?

Jesus sends us into the world as his ambassadors just as he came into the world: not to judge the world, because the world already has a judge. He sends us out as ambassadors not to condemn the world, but but to save it.

If we can adopt this posture toward the world that Jesus adopted and that Paul admonished, we can be unified in that purpose and calling of Jesus even in our own differences about how the world ought to operate. We can love each other as fellow ambassadors of Christ and give each other grace in the areas in which we disagree.

Our primary focus should be the purpose and focus of Jesus – not to condemn the world, but to save it by proclaiming good news to the poor, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and the favor of God’s love toward all who will receive Him. Everything else fades in light of that purpose and calling.

Jesus said, the world will know us by our love for each other. (John 13:35) Let us so live, then, that the world knows us for our love for one another and our love for the world that Jesus loved!

Our Post Enlightenment, Neo Religious World and the Proof of God

Not all truth is known through scientific inquiry and method.

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Reading of Voltaire in a salon in Paris

As often happens with me, the things I have been listening to and reading have converged in a meaningful way. Whether we attribute these “convergences” to God’s presence in our lives or dumb luck, pure happenstance, or “coincidence” is a matter of speculation and faith.

Whatever you want to call it, I take special notice of these things. I pay attention. I take them seriously, and they become signposts on my journey through life.

Perhaps, I am just being a good attorney. I am trained to find harmony and contrast in nuanced fact patterns and to apply legal principals to them. Finding harmonies and contrasts and applying spiritual principals to them operates in the same vein. That’s the way my mind works.

Yesterday, I listened to an interview of Jonathan Pageau by Justin Brierley. Pageau is an interesting character and a critical thinker. His recent conversation with Brierley inspires my writing today.

Raised in Montreal influenced by French Catholicism in a French Baptist Church community, Pageau has moved over to Eastern Orthodoxy by way of 4-year and 3-year stints in the Congo and Kenya. He has an undergraduate degree in postmodern art. He returned from Africa to obtain a degree in Orthodox Theology and Iconology from Sherbrooke University in Quebec. Along the way, Jonathan Pageau has become a cutting edge Christian thinker who is in demand as a speaker.

One line of discussion caught me ear in the interview with Justin Brierley that I want to explore. The subject touches on post-Enlightenment, neo-religious thinking and the proof of God.

Continue reading “Our Post Enlightenment, Neo Religious World and the Proof of God” →

Comments on Why God Became Incarnate and Died for Our Sins

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Daniel Mann does a good job of explaining Why Christ, as God Incarnate, Had to Die for Our Sins. In reading his explanation, my mind goes to statements like God’s “transcendent love” and “total abhorrence for sin”, God’s “righteousness” and “divine forbearance” for sin, and the price that had to be paid “to satisfy God’s righteous character”.

Daniel describes his own reaction to these concepts formerly, as a non-Christian. He felt God was a “deceiving sadist” until one day he realized that Jesus was God incarnate, that God did not merely sacrifice a created being – God sacrificed Himself in human form!

Indeed, that is the central point of Christian belief, which is described beautifully and poignantly in Paul’s letter to the Philippians (2:5-8):

In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:

Who, being in very nature [form of] God,
    did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
    by taking the very nature [form] of a servant,
    being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
    he humbled himself
    by becoming obedient to death—
        even death on a cross!

These things would be small consolation, also, if not for the victory on the other side of the cross (Phil. 2:9-11)

Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
    and gave him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
    in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
    to the glory of God the Father.

That Jesus was fully man and fully God incarnated into a man is key to the understanding of Christianity. That God is three “persons” in one is also key, as it provides some explanation how God can incarnate Himself into the form of a man and die (in human flesh), though God remains self-existent and eternal, the Creator (and not a created being).

Not that there is no mystery in this. I concede this is hard for creatures who are limited dimensionally to wrap our heads around these ideas.

Finally, it explains how (and why) death to Jesus in the flesh had no power over him. As God incarnate, death “could not hold him”. (Acts 2:24)

But, I am not writing to clarify these aspects of Christian doctrine. I want to focus on Daniel Mann’s personal revelation that Jesus was God incarnate, and his death was voluntary – God sacrificing Himself, and not God sacrificing some created being.

This realization made all the difference for him. When he really understood this distinction, he began to see the love of God that was demonstrated in that act of self-sacrifice – something God did not have to to, but He did it for us because He loves us.

Other people, I know, are not convinced. Indeed, if a person understands Jesus to be human only, and not God incarnate, the story makes no sense.

Another stumbling block is God’s “abhorrence for sin” and the need to satiate a “righteous” God. These Christian concepts are foreign territory for many people. Why, if God is so loving, does He demand sacrifices for sin?

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People Are Enslaved to Whatever Defeats Them

God saves us to set us free from sin. We are meant for a freedom that empowers us to be good, knowledgeable, self-controlled, enduring, godly, filled with brotherly affection and with love.

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The words that have become the title of this blog piece struck me in my daily Bible reading this morning. They are pulled from 2 Peter 2:19. I highlighted them in my digital Bible app.

We may tend to focus on the more encouraging provisions of the Bible and gloss over provisions like the one I am quoting here, but the Bible is a double-edged sword. It sometimes cuts to the marrow. It discerns and reveals the thoughts and intents of the heart. It is living and active… if we let it in to our hearts to do its job.

I am convicted today, as I should be, and I am encouraged, because God, the Father, disciplines His children whom He loves. God watches out for the ones He loves. He warns us when we are straying into dangerous territory.

If we are paying attention and willing to respond, these warnings will protect us. If we rush headlong ahead, not heeding the warnings, as we are apt to do, we find ourselves entangled in difficulties that can threaten to undo us if we fail to repent and turn around.

Even then, the going can be difficult. Bad habits are easy to form and very difficult to break. If we go too far down the road with them, we find reversing course to be very difficult, indeed. Forming new, good habits is many times more difficult than the path we followed into those bad habits.

Bad habits are easy to form because they come from a place that is instinctual. They are outgrowths of natural tendencies of people who simply do “what feels good”.

Bad habits form from desires that are common to people – not necessarily bad desires. Evil isn’t a thing in itself. Evil is the corruption of good. Bad habits for when we seek to satisfy our desires in the easiest, most accessible, self-centered and least beneficial ways.

For instance, loving God and loving our neighbors – the two greatest commandments of God – are wrapped up in loving ourselves. If we don’t love ourselves, we have a hard time loving others. If we love others, we usually have an easy time loving ourselves. Loving God and loving people are intimately related to loving ourselves.

The popular idea of “self love”, getting some “me time”, and “focusing on myself”, however, can be a corruption of what is basically good. We are naturally self-centered. We naturally love ourselves more than others. When Jesus told us that we should love our neighbors as ourselves, he was implicitly acknowledging the fact that we are naturally focused on ourselves and our needs.

We instinctually love ourselves and seek what is best for us. We have to be purposeful, intentional and self-sacrificing to consider others, and especially to consider others ahead of ourselves. It isn’t natural, and, therefore, it isn’t easy.

Loving others isn’t hating ourselves; it’s learning to love others on the same level as we love ourselves. It is thinking of others on the same level as we think of ourselves.

Many people today are self-loathing, which is also a corruption of what is good. People who loath themselves are equally as self-absorbed as people who are corrupted in self-love.

We are made in God’s image, so to loathe ourselves is to loathe the very image of God. We shouldn’t confuse loving our neighbors as ourselves with loathing ourselves.

Self-loathing is a kind of self-centeredness. People who are self-loathing are self-absorbed in a negative way. Self-absorption and self-focus are a corruption of what is good, regardless of whether the result is pleasurable or painful.

The words of Jesus are transcendent. They direct our eyes away from ourselves to God and to others. When Jesus says, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light”, he is speaking to the reality that our self-focus (the burden of the self) traps us into unhealthy and ultimately destructive behaviors that are more of a burden than a help to us.

Such is the burden of sin. When we are unable to overcome sin, we are enslaved to it. As Peter says, “We are enslaved to whatever defeats us.” And so, I have come back to the focus of this blog piece: these words in 2 Peter 2:19.

Continue reading “People Are Enslaved to Whatever Defeats Them” →

How Should Christians Live Out the Gospel in a Post Roe v. Wade World?

What does God do with babies who die in the womb?

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Davide French has expressed some of my own angst at the news that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in a recent article, Roe Is Reversed, and the Right Isn’t Ready. Like him, I have championed the pro-life cause. My wife and I marched in Washington. We protested at an abortion clinic. We supported a crisis pregnancy center. I have largely been silent, however, for the past 30 some years.

In 1988, the year I entered law school with two children, financial difficulty, and a very uncertain future, my wife became pregnant. It was the most difficult year of our lives. She was severely sick, living in a strange place 1000 miles from her family under extreme pressure.

When the doctor told her the baby tested positive for spina bifida, and she should consider an abortion, she changed doctors. I supported her fully. We were committed to life.

My son who was born in 1989 is 33 years old now. He bears the scar tissue at the base of his spine where his spinal cord once looped outside his spinal column. He was born that way – with the scar tissue, healed over, fully formed and perfectly healthy.

He became a champion wrestler, All-State, many times All-American, many times national finalist, multi-time national champion. My wife might not have been born if abortion was legal in 1961, and my son would not have been born if we we listened to our doctor.

We were very fortunate, and we are very grateful, and I realize the story could very well have been different. Many people are not as fortunate.

There is a constitutional issue with abortion, a moral issue, and then there is the issue of how the body of Christ demonstrates God’s love in this broken world. I have some thoughts on each of these issues, and I feel compelled to weigh into these turbid waters despite my hesitation.

The constitutional issue has been settled… for now. As an attorney and having studied the Roe v. Wade decision in law school, I can say with some degree of confidence that it had thin precedential support. It’s foundations were shadowy and wispy as a matter of constitutional jurisprudence, relying on a medical understanding of the day, and not legal principles, to shore up a lack of solid, legal precedent.

In the David French article he quotes Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg who seems to admit the same point. She once “declared Roe ‘breathtaking’ and warned that ‘Doctrinal limbs too swiftly shaped, experience teaches, may prove unstable.’” Her prescience was accurate. It stood for one year shy of 50, but those doctrinal limbs have given away under their own weight.

“The Court’s job is not to determine which rights we should possess but rather which rights we do possess,” says French. (Emphasis in the original) So, it should be. So, the Constitution is written. So, the jurisprudence informs us.

Lawmaking is the province of Congress, not the judicial branch. Ironically, though, the instability of that decision haunts not just the left today. Framed on the back of a politically motivated opinion for which little precedent existed for support, that one decision has greatly politicized the Supreme Court to our jeopardy.

That most people perceive the opinion that struck down Roe v. Wade as a political accomplishment is proof, and that should not be comforting news. A Supreme that can be lobbied and jockeyed and filibustered to do the majority’s bidding is a threat to freedom and sound government.

And, of course, the recent decision was just as political as the decision it overturned – maybe more so. The Court that decided such a progressive decision as Roe v. Wade was largely appointed by conservative presidents. Richard Nixon appointed Justice Blackmun, who write the majority opinion.

There was a day when Presidents made an attempt to appoint the most impressive legal minds to the high court. Confirmation hearings focused on their credentials and legal acumen. The justice appointees and the senators who vetted them knew well and respected the value of impartiality that is essential to true justice. In an odd way, Roe v. Wade, penned by a conservative appointee is proof.

For the last 40 or more years, however, most confirmation hearings on appointments to the high court have been political circuses. No question is off limits, including the direct question of how a justice will decide an issue that comes before him or her. It no longer matters that the Rules of Professional Responsibility that govern all judges forbids that very thing.

Pro-life champions are notching the recent decision as a win, but the battle rages on. This decision pushes the battle to the legislatures of the 50 states.

More fundamentally, though, pro-lifers may have won this battle, but the Republic may be losing the war. The more our Supreme operates by political fiat, the less stable we become.

As for morality, it seems that many people assume the pro-life position is a religious view. While many religious people are pro-life, many religious people are pro-choice also. I have seen many of my religious friends categorically criticize the decision in the last few days.

At the same time, the pro-life crowd includes non-religious people, including atheists, like Kelsey Hazzard, who says, “The abortion industry would have you believe that people like me do not exist.” Reducing the abortion issue to a religious category is scapegoating and insulting to people who claim not to be religious.

No other modern issue offers less common ground for compromise. A fetus is either human life with intrinsic value, or it isn’t. A women’s body is either an inviolable vessel subject to her self control, or it isn’t. A fetus in a woman’s womb is part of her body, or it’s an unborn baby with separate and distinct personage, value, and legal status.

I find the arguments for life to be compelling, but the arguments for choice are compelling also. The stories are real. The fact that women, alone, bear the burden of the consensual (or non consensual) act of sex is reality.

A man can and often does escape all responsibility, but a woman has nowhere to hide. The fact that man are not compelled by the state to bear their responsibility is criminal.

Yes, many states have laws on the books that allow a woman to prove paternity and make the man pay support, but that’s on her dime! Some local prosecutors will take those cases, but those positions are too few, too overworked, and have insufficient resources to take on all cases.

I have slowly come around to an uncomfortable angst on the morality of abortion.

Thirty four years ago, our conviction about what we should do when faced with the probability that we might have a physically deformed child was unwavering. We chose to protect the life God gave us. I still think abortion is morally wrong.

It doesn’t matter whether that life might be deformed or have down syndrome. It doesn’t matter what the economic, social, and other circumstances are. I am not saying there are no exceptions, but most exceptions do not justify taking a life.

This is the black and white, analytical position I believe in, but I know the challenge is not in the black and white, but in the grey. The exceptions to the rules are always where the difficulty lies. Life is complex, and complexity is nuanced.

I am not going to say much more about the morality. I know where I stand, but I know good people who share my faith – people I have prayed with – who do not share my position.

About 18 months go my view of things shifted through the unlikely coincidence of my annual Bible reading and a serendipitous sermon on Sanctity of life Sunday. (See Thoughts on the Sanctity of Human Life….” I hope you will take the time to read it, because it informs my questions to the body of Christ.

Does God hear the cries of unborn babies? Does God hear the cries of women who have been abused and misused? The answer is certainly, “Yes”.

There are people on both “sides” of the abortion story. I believe Scripture warns us about our focusing on the “sides” and urges us to consider the greater purposes of God. Do you remember what the angel of the Lord told Joshua, when Joshua asked which side he was on? Go ahead and check it out.

Do you think God rejects innocent babies who have not yet taken a breath? How you answer that question may well reveal how you perceive God.

How you answer that question likely influences how you respond to this issue. Read Exodus 2 and Exodus 3. Whose cries does God hear, and what cries prompt Him to respond?

I hope you don’t gloss over these questions. I hope you wrestle with the implications. Who is it that God is concerned about? And why?

Go back to the question about how God handles the death of an unborn baby who has yet to take a breath. Does He receive them? Or does He reject them?

I urge you not to gloss over these questions.

How we answer them informs how the Church should orientate itself on the issue of abortion. Our answers suggest the priority of our focus and how we should live out the Gospel on this issue.

How we do that individually is a matter of the gifting God has giving each of us, the burden He has put on our hearts, and the leading of the Holy Spirit. We will only make our way forward as the salt and light God intend us to be with much prayer and humility and trepidation.