Category: Religion

Blaise Pascal on True Jews and True Christians

Blaise Pascal on true religion and true believers

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Clergyman preaching in historic church with sunlight streaming through stained glass windows

I have been listening to Pensées, by Blaise Pascal on Audible Chapter 45, Section 610 has given me some food for thought that inspires this blog post. Pascal’s analysis may not be politically correct in the 21st Century, but he makes a sound point when we give him some grace.

Leading up to Section 610, Pascal makes the claim that anyone who understands the Jewish religion by its “course of forms” will misunderstand it. He interprets the Law by the prophets who “made it plain enough that they did not interpret the Law according to the letter.”

This distinction is not novel. Paul makes the same point in all of his writings. The Law was temporary. (Galatians 3:19) It was a tutor. (Gal. 3:24) Paul says the Law is just a shadow – specifically that the religious rules about food, drink, festivals, etc. are a shadow of the substance which is in Christ. (Colossians 2:16-17) Jesus, himself, said the religious leaders search Scripture for clues about eternal life, but Scripture bears witness to him. (John 5:39-40; see also Luke 24:27)

Pascal says the Messiah according to “carnal Jews” was to be “a great temporal prince.” They expected a good fortune for them in this life when the Messiah came. In the same vein, Pascal says, “Jesus Christ according to carnal Christians has come to dispense us the love of God and to give us sacraments that should do everything to benefit us without our help.” In other words, “carnal Christians” are also just looking for benefits from God.

Pascal concludes, “Such is not the Christian religion, nor the Jewish.” He says, “True Christians and true Jews have always expected a Messiah that would make them love God and, by that love, triumph over their enemies.” (607) He puts “true Christians” and “true Jews” on the same level. They desire and seek to know and love God for who He is – and not for what He can provide them.

Pascal says, “The carnal Jews hold a midway place before Christians and heathens. The heathens know not God and love the world only. The Jews know the true God and love the world only. Christians know the true God and love not the world. Jews and heathens love the same good. Jews and Christians know the same God. The Jews were of two kinds: the first had only heathen affections; the other had Christian affections.” (608)

Pascal says, among the Christians, the coarser-minded are the Jews of the new law. The carnal Jews looked for a carnal Messiah. The “coarser Christians” believe that the Messiah has dispensed them the love of God. True Jews and true Christians worship a Messiah who makes them love God.” (609) The difference is in desiring the good things God can give them versus desiring God who is good. In these ways, Pascal claims that true Christians are like true Jews, and “coarser Christians” are like the carnal Jews.

And this is where we get to the point. Pascal says that true Jews and true Christians have the same religion. The religion of the Jews seemed to consist of the fatherhood of Abraham, circumcision, sacrifices, ceremonies, the Ark of the Covenant, the temple, Jerusalem, and the Law of Moses. But, Pascal says the true religion of the Jews “consisted of none of those things, but only in the love of God.”

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What Good Is It to Know the Times and Be Found Wanting before Jesus?

The Sons of Issachar knew the times, but do we?

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The most well read article on this Blog since September of 2020 is Who Were the Sons of Issachar? And What Might They Mean for Us Today? I wrote the article in response to the charismatic prophets who were prophesying another Trump victory in the 2020 presidential election. At least one man prophesied that Trump would be elected president in 2016, and too many people to count were prophesying a second presidential victory in 2020.

The message floating in the charismatic ether in 2020 was about “knowing the times.” Knowing the times became a buzzword for having the inside track on what God was doing. It became a signal for those who knew God had chosen Donald Trump, and he was their man who they rallied around – like the Sons of Issachar rallied around David.

The “chiefs” of the Sons of Issachar were described as “men who understood the times and knew what Israel should be do” in 1 Chronicles 12:32 when they left King Saul’s army to rally around David, who was hiding from Saul in the wilderness. The implication was that embracing Trump for a second term would be “knowing the times” and doing what should be done – as ordained by God.

When I researched the Sons of Issachar and wrote the article, I noted that the Sons of Issachar were not the first people to gather around David. They weren’t even in the first wave of people who supported David. Though the leaders of the Sons of Issachar apparently knew the times, many other Israelites, including the sons of Benjamin (from Saul’s own tribe), had already rallied in defense of David. The Sons of Issachar were actually late to the party.

I don’t know exactly how we should parse that. Was “knowing the times” said tongue in cheek? Did the leaders have a hard time rallying their men to follow? (The Sons of Issachar were specifically the leaders of that tribe, unlike the descriptions of the other tribes that responded in greater numbers.)

Whatever was going on there, the author of those words in 1 Chronicles 12:32 had the benefit of hindsight. Those words were penned after Saul’s fall from grace and David’s rise to the power. The modern day prophets in 2020 didn’t know how the presidential campaign would play out, but they were certain “they knew the times.”

I was skeptical. It didn’t sit right with me, so I spent time studying the passage from which “knowing the times” came and seeking God on the subject. The article was written by me as a way of working out what I was seeing in Scripture and sensing in my own spirit as I sought to be guided by God’s Holy Spirit. Whether, I understood the times will be known only in time.

A year earlier (in 2019), the same crowd was describing Donald Trump as a King David (and later King Cyrus), but I was thinking that he was more like King Saul. (See Is Donald Trump the King We Wanted?) I voted for Donald Trump in 2016, but I didn’t feel good about it. I was disturbed by the fruit of his life – his sordid past, his bullying, his coarse talk, his ignorance about the Bible, and his demeanor – because none of it added up to reflect the kind of person Christ followers should follow.

I had given him the benefit of the doubt, but I was unsettled in my spirit. I had not yet thought to research what Jesus told us to look for in discerning false prophets – that we would know them by their fruit. I was torn.

I was mindful not to despise prophecy, but I recalled Paul’s admonition to “test everything.” (1 Thess. 5:20) I spent years testing, not letting myself completely dismiss Donald Trump as an imposter – a wolf in sheep’s clothing – but feeling the whole time like that is exactly what he was.

Paul’s admonition about testing everything may come from Deuteronomy:

“If a prophet, or one who foretells by dreams, appears among you and announces to you a sign or wonder, and if the sign or wonder spoken of takes place, and the prophet says, ‘Let us follow other gods’ (gods you have not known) ‘and let us worship them,’ you must not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer. The Lord your God is testing you to find out whether you love him with all your heart and with all your soul. It is the Lord your God you must follow, and him you must revere. Keep his commands and obey him; serve him and hold fast to him…. If your very own brother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you love, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying, ‘Let us go and worship other gods’ (gods that neither you nor your ancestors have known, gods of the peoples around you, whether near or far, from one end of the land to the other), do not yield to them or listen to them…. If you hear it said about one of the towns the Lord your God is giving you to live in that troublemakers have arisen among you and have led the people of their town astray, saying, ‘Let us go and worship other gods’ (gods you have not known), then you must inquire, probe and investigate it thoroughly.….”

Deuteronomy 13:1-4, 6-8, 12-14

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They Thought God Was Like Them

Examine yourselves to be sure you are in the faith.

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Smiling man with dark shadow holding a knife behind him

“But to the wicked person, God says:

‘What right have you to recite my laws or take my covenant on your lips? You hate my instruction and cast my words behind you. When you see a thief, you join with him; you throw in your lot with adulterers. You use your mouth for evil and harness your tongue to deceit. You sit and testify against your brother and slander your own mother’s son. When you did these things and I kept silent, you thought I was exactly like you. But I now arraign you and set my accusations before you.'”

Psalm 50:16-21

God’s Word is full of warnings to the wise. Take heed. God does not desire that anyone perish, but a day is coming when your life will end. A day is coming when this world as we know it will cease to exist. There will be a day of judgment for all of us.

God does not force us to love Him. He doesn’t require that we submit to Him. He gives us the terrible choice of determining how we will live. He will give us over to our desires on that day when we die, on that day when the earth ceases to be as we know it, and we will face the consequences of our choices – the way we chose to live – whether it be with Him or with our own selves at the center of our orbit.

These verses indicate that even a wicked person can recite God’s laws and claim to be in covenant relationship with God. Even a wicked person can claim to know Him. Jesus echoed the words of the Psalmist when he said,

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers.'”

Matthew 7:7:21-23

This word of warning applied to the religious. We can prophesy in God’s name. We can even drive out demons and perform miracles in God’s name. These signs do not make the person who performs them a child of God. Even false prophets are able to perform great signs and wonders. (Matt. 24:4; Mark 13:22)

Only the one who actually does the will of the Father is a child of God. (Matt. 7:21) Jesus said, “Everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock.” (Matt. 7:24) Any other way to live is like “sinking sand” as the hymn goes.

The danger we all face is our own self deception. Perhaps, this is why the Prophet said, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.” (Jeremiah 17:9) We cannot trust our own hearts.

Skeptics say that people have created God in their own image. That is true of the person who thinks God is just like them.

According to the writer of Psalm 50, wicked people who act wickedly can feel justified in their wicked actions, and God allows them to be deluded.

“When you did these things and I kept silent, you thought I was exactly like you.”

Psalm 50:21

They are encouraged by God’s silence that they are right in in what they think and do, but God’s silence is not a sign of acquiescence. God’s arraignment and accusations hang over their heads.

I am struck by the need to know God, to know His character, and to yield our assumptions about God to the truth of who God really is. God’s silence in our lives is not approval. God often remains silent. God is often hidden. He is like a treasure to be found. God urges us to seek Him because in seeking Him, we must set aside ourselves to learn who He is.

These verses remind me of Hebrews 4:12: “The word of God is sharper than a double-edged sword.” It pierces. It divides. It discerns the thoughts and intents of the heart. If the word of God is doing its job, it cuts, it penetrates, it divides. If we yield ourselves to the word of God, it does its surgical work in us. Bur, only if we truly yield ourselves to that process.

I have often thought that Scripture does this kind of work. I felt it when I first began reading scripture before I was even a believer. I recognized in that time that scripture was exposing me to myself, and that I had a choice. I could allow it to do its surgical work, or I could harden my heart and choose to see in Scripture what I wanted to see.

Many people have said in derision of Scripture that people can make it say whatever they want. They are right, of course. Like the wicked person who acts wickedly and embraces wicked thoughts, while thinking that God is just like them.

The height of pride is to think God is like us. God opposes the proud, but He gives grace to the humble.

My prayer today is that God would rebuke me as He needs to; that He would soften my heart and do His surgical work in me; that I would not be deceived by my own thoughts and think that God is like me. I pray that God would reveal Himself to me and that I would know God for who He actually is.

“so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love“

Ephesians 3:17

The Ugly Story of Gibeah: Don’t Look Away

When religious people lose connection with God

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I just finished reading Judges 19-21, and I want to look away. I realize, though, that looking away is exactly the thing I should not do. This story is meant to offend modern and ancient sensibilities alike. We dare not look away and move on without understanding the poignance and significance of this passage in the Bible.

It’s a good time to state the obvious: not all passages in scripture are prescriptive. In fact, many of them are simply descriptive – a statement of what actually happened.

Further, we should recognize that Hebrew Scripture works by burying commentary subtly into the text in ways that require us to question, dig, and pull it out. Scripture is like the buried treasure and the pearl of great price that requires effort to obtain. We are not robots or data receivers. We are living beings contending with a living God and a loving revelation that requires interaction.

Scripture is also brutally candid about the human condition and the human heart. The often repeated phrase, “There is no one righteous, not even one,” is borne out over and over again to be true. All of the Bible testifies to that fact.

Hebrew scripture builds on itself. The patterns and themes we see early on are echoed in later passages. We need to pay attention to the repeated patterns, because that is where the text is signaling that we should dig.

Scripture often confronts us in ways that are highly uncomfortable. If we feel disoriented reading it, that is not a failure of interpretation. That is the point.

“The word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.“

Hebrews 4:12

The closing chapters of Judges are not merely recounting Israel’s past; they are exposing what happens when a covenant people slowly, perhaps inevitably, detach themselves from the living reality of God while continuing to operate within the forms of religion. The religious structures are maintained, but the substance evaporates through spiritual neglect, idolatry (love of things more than God), and a failure to love others.

The Horror Is the Message

The brutality of Judges 19 is intentional. The narrative is crafted to unsettle us.

A Levite—one who should embody spiritual leadership—sacrifices the vulnerable to preserve himself. A town within Israel reenacts and surpasses the wickedness of Sodom. A woman is used, abused, and discarded,. And the response of the nation, though clothed in the language of justice, spirals into something equally disordered, brutal, and ungodly.

If we are tempted to distance ourselves from this story, we are already missing the purpose of the text. Scripture is not merely documenting their failure. It is revealing the potential trajectory of our own failings: the inclinations of the human heart untethered from right relation to God and people – the sin that is always crouching at the door, waiting to creep in, and ready to take hold … if we let it

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Making Sense of Science and Theism: Evolution, Engineers, and Category Errors

As the engineer is to a clock so is ___________ to the natural world?

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The first episode of the Uncommon Ground podcast with Justin Brierley is titled “What is Behind the Poetry of Reality?” The podcast features a conversation with Richard Dawkins and the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. Dawkins of New Atheist fame has a purely materialist view of reality – maintaining that reality is comprised only of materials things that operate on their own without the aid of God or any immaterial thing.

The discussion is amicable and informative, if not predictable. Rowan Williams accepts the evolutionary paradigm, but believes in God – an immaterial, personal creator of the universe. They seemed to agree on the science. The only difference is that Williams believes there is a God behind the science and the universe.

When Brierley asked Williams to summarize Richard Dawkins’ view of reality, Dawkins graciously conceded, “Rowan… understands so well that he can summarize what I think better than I can.”

Dawkins should be given credit for reading Williams’ recent book that was the backdrop for the discussion, but Dawkins admitted to being “baffled” by it.

Dawkins was unable to provide a cogent summary of Williams’ view of reality. He succeeded only in criticizing Rowan’s view, and Dawkins conceded, “I think Rowan understands where I’m coming from much better than I understand where he’s coming from.”

This reminds me of C.S. Lewis, who says that the Christian worldview can take in science into account, but a view of the world limited to the constructs of science cannot take into account Christianity. One is robust enough to hold the other, but the other is not sufficiently robust to do the same. (I have provided the whole quotation in its context below.)

I will admit that the robustness of Christianity to be able to make sense of science does not necessarily make it true. Conversely, the limited scope of science that is unable to account for Christianity does not necessarily make it untrue. If reality truly consists of nothing but matter and natural processes, then the limitations of science are the limitations of reality itself.

I think that reality is not sufficiently explained by science, which is limited to natural explanations. I am also fascinated with Dawkins’ attempt to explain his own worldview as follows:

“I see the world as a very complex thing, like a clock or like a car or like a computer, and, and in the case of a clock or a computer or a car, I know how it’s made. It’s made by engineers with drawing boards and they… put together the parts and, and those parts all work together. [T]he equivalent of the engineer in the world of nature is evolution by natural selection.”

I am an English literature major and an attorney. In both disciplines, the ability to draw connections, and distinctions, and juxtapositions between and among word meanings and concepts is essential. Attorneys are professionals in comparing and contrasting facts and circumstances to be to argue (consistent with clients’ interests) that laws either apply in the same way or do not apply in the same way to similar but different sets of facts and circumstances. Perhaps, this why I noticed that Richard Dawkins made a category error. Or did he?

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