One of the most asked questions about Christianity goes something like this:
If Jesus is the only way to heaven, what about the people who lived before Jesus was born?
A corollary question is: What about the people who have never had an opportunity to hear about Jesus? I am no biblical scholar, but I have wondered about these things myself. Continue reading “What about People Who Never heard of Jesus?”
On my way into the office this morning I heard a story on the radio. A man with a strong southern drawl called in. (It is a nationally syndicated show – no southern drawl here in northern Illinois).
He said he did maintenance work, and a lady he knew asked him to do some work on her home. He did the work, and when he finished, he told her the cost was $60 even. She asked if she could pay him by the end of the week, and he agreed.
She called him a few days later and apologized. She said she just did not have the money to pay him and asked if he would take her husband’s mandolin instead of cash. She was obviously sincere so he took it.
He did not know how to play the mandolin so he took it to someone he knew and offered to sell it. The other gentleman got very excited and said he would definitely like to buy it. The maintenance man said, “Just give me a fair offer”; and the other man said, “I’ll buy for it $2000!”
The maintenance man decided to go back to visit the woman who gave the mandolin it to him to tell her that he sold it. He hoped she would not be upset because it had been her husband’s.
When he arrived at her house, he told her that he sold it. She only asked, “Were you able to get your $60 for it?” With that, the man handed her an envelope. When she opened, her eyes welled up with tears, and she began to sob.
When she composed herself, she explained that her husband had passed away, and the reason she did not have the money to pay him for the work he did was because she still owed money on her husband’s funeral which she had been paying a little bit at a time.
She asked him to wait right there at her front door while she went inside. She returned with the latest invoice from the funeral home. It was $1940. Exactly what was in the envelope!
I have been reading through Genesis the last couple of weeks. In reading the stories of Abraham, Isaac and Isaac’s twelve sons, who would become the twelve tribes of Israel, I have been impressed, negatively impressed, with them as people. I must not have really noticed before their blemishes.
Abraham, the father of faith, lied about his relationship to Sarah, not once but twice. When Abraham visited Egypt, and the Pharaoh’s princes were struck by Sarah’s beauty, Abraham instructed Sarah to say she was his sister so they would not kill him. When Pharaoh found out, he was appalled and let her go. Years later, when Abraham was living in the land of the Philistines, Abraham openly declared Sarah was his sister. After King Abimelech discovered the truth, he was equally taken aback. Why did he lie about it? It hardly seems like a noble thing to do. I would call it cowardly.
After Abraham was told by God that he would bear a son and his descendants would become like the stars in the sky, a number of years went by. Sarah then offered her servant to Abraham, and the servant, Hagar, gave birth to a son, Ishmael. Such an act violating the marital covenant does not sit well with a twenty first century reader. It was also not God’s plan. God’s plan was to give Abraham a son through his wife, Sarah.
Isaac, of course, was the son God promised. He, too, seemed less than sterling as a man of God. He followed his father’s footsteps in deceiving the same King Abimelech that Rebekah was his sister, when she was his wife. Like father like son.
Isaac had twin sons, and he favored the oldest, Esau. God blessed the younger son, Jacob. How could Isaac have gotten it wrong?
As for Jacob, he deceived his father for the blessing that his father thought he was giving to Esau, and he did it with his mother’s help. In his old age, Jacob had become blind. Rebekah put Jacob up to pretending to be Esau to receive his father’s blessing. Deception seems to run in the family.
All of this has been unusually unsettling for me for some reason. I have stewed on it for days. Today it struck me that anyone looking at my life would be equally unsettled (or more I dare say). I am no example to follow. I have made many mistakes in my life, too numerous to count. I have done many things of which I am not proud, and my thoughts are another matter altogether. Why should I expect anything other than humanity from these men of old? The amazing thing is that God chose them!
Clearly, it was not their spotless virtue that is the testament of their lives. It was their faith. They heard God. They responded to God. They honored God with sacrifices and pillars and altars where they went. They believed God when He spoke. They lived their lives in deference to God. They relied on God. Their faith was counted to them as righteousness.
My take away is that these men were in right relation to God. I take comfort in that, even if I am bit unsettled by their weakness and humanity, as well as my own. I am in good company, but more importantly, I am reminded of the importance of living a life with an attitude toward God.
Just four years ago, a good friend of my son – a coach, a mentor, a teammate, a friend – died. Unexpectedly, he died. He was the epitome of strength and character, the product of hard work, moral fiber, faith and overcoming determination. He was a leader. He was a wrestler.
He was an overcomer. He fought off cancer and epilepsy in high school to place 5th as a senior in the Illinois State Wrestling tournament.
He was Jake Curby.
He coached my son to a runner up finish in the national Greco Roman wrestling tournament, and my son became his teammate at the Unites States Olympic Education Center. There Jake was a mentor, a beacon pointing the way to top of the Olympic ladder that Jake was climbing. From overcoming leukemia to 5th in the State wrestling tournament, from high school wrestling to earning a spot on the United States national team at 66kg in Greco Roman wrestling, Jake showed the way by doing it himself.
Jake Curby Climbing the Olympic Ladder
Jake returned from wrestling in Russia in January of 2010. He had jet lag from the time change. He was tired, but could not sleep. He went and worked out at the new senior level Greco Roman training center in Boise, ID where he was starting his final ascent to the top of the Olympic mountain. He returned to his home after the workout, and he died….
It was sudden and shocking. He was a specimen of strength, physical, character, emotional and otherwise. He had not had an issue with epilepsy for years. It seemed he had conquered that opponent, but he was worn out that day, tired and stressed by lack of sleep. Death came like a thief in the night and took him from us.
It was devastating to the USA Wrestling community, to the kids he coached, to his teammates and friends, to his family – to his fiancé – to all who knew him and celebrated his life. Few people at the age of 25 have the impact that Jake had, and few have been missed as much by so many people. He was the living example of a great human being with rock solid character and full of life.
Jake’s example lives on. His short, but full, life continues to be a source of inspiration for aspiring young people – not just wrestlers, but anyone who has a dream and dares to chase it. The Curby Cup that Jake’s father and mother and family and friends and the greater wrestling community have put on every year in the Chicago area is a testament to Jake’s life and the impact he has had on people. It is a marvelous event pulling in the best Greco Roman wrestlers in world to take on the best in the United States.
No one knows the day or hour that each person will breathe their last on this earth. There are no guaranties. What we do with the time that we have, the impact we have on those around us and how people remember us is our legacy. Jake is gone, but he still inspires. His sister, Courtney, has captured that sense of sacred time wonderfully in this short video.
Whether we live 25 years or 100 years, we all have the same end awaiting us. The time we have is a precious gift. There is no promise it will be easy. In fact, it most likely will not. It is in the striving, in the overcoming, in the courage to press on and to achieve the most that can be achieved with the raw material we have been given, that the fullness of being human is reached.
We live not as islands, as John Dunne penned, but are connected to the mainland of humanity. In all that we do, every single thing, we are influencing those around us for better or worse. Jake showed what it is like to live with a higher purpose and to dare to dream and chase those dreams with passion, determination, humility, good humor and grit.
Jake also showed the value of faith and the freedom that comes from leaving the things that we cannot change to the God who made us. That is the freedom that allows a person to run unhindered toward the goals before them without the baggage of worry, doubt, regret, fear or a hundred base emotions that pull at most of us like a pack of dogs on the hunt.
In the end, however, all of our human striving is empty, the medals and trophies and accolades are meaningless, without a connection to the God who made us. We can not take those prizes with us when we shuffle off these mortal coils…. but there is a better end awaiting us: a new beginning.
The gift of life that we have in jars of clay is a shadow of the eternal life that is promised by the God who dared to shed his own heavenly glory and walk humbly among us, suffering and dying a cruel death to show us that even death, itself, cannot hold Him…. And He offers that same gift to us.
The challenges and troubles believers face in this life are working in us an eternal glory that outweighs them all. We should all dare to dream of great things, but do not neglect to hitch those dreams to greater, eternal things. Our days chasing these earthly dreams will end. Jake’s dream ended, but a far greater glory awaited him and awaits us who set our hearts on God.
Jake Curby – Tribute to Wrestlers
I have seen videos, books, and social media posts claiming that “no one can remain an atheist” after viewing this, or reading that, or considering something else. As with any hype, the assertion is simply not true. Claims of indisputable truth will always fall short. This has never been more true, perhaps, than now in the Internet age.
Even so, people watched Jesus perform miracles in their presence, and they did not believe. What proof is there today that could be more indisputable than the miracles Jesus performed face to face with people?
We are quick to dismiss the miracles 2000 years later. We are not as ignorant or as gullible as people in the 1st Century. We question what people saw; we question the authenticity of the accounts; we question when they were written; we question the motives of the writers; we question whether the person, Jesus of Nazareth, ever lived at all; and we question whether miracles are even possible. The basis for skepticism seems much more compelling today than it might have been at the time of Jesus.
To be sure, there are plenty of reasons to believe that such a man lived, that he claimed to be the Messiah and that he died by crucifixion. Even some non believers accept the historical accounts. There is good proof of the historical accounts, as far as historical accounts go.
There is also good reason to believe that Jesus was who he claimed to be. A very small group of people claiming to be eye witnesses of his life and resurrection from the dead literally changed the world. The gospel that Jesus preached has spread throughout the known world. People today claim spiritual experience with that same God Jesus described, including miracles, speaking in tongues (described in the Book of Acts) and other things. No doubt there are charlatans too.
Richard Dawkins explains spiritual experience as “hallucinations”. Some people are certainly delusional, but that is small segment of society. You can visit them in mental institutions. You know who they are; they are “not quite right”; they are divorced from obvious reality. Hallucinations do not explain the believer who has had an encounter with God.
On the other hand, it could be said of a materialist like Richard Dawkins that he clings to intellect. He demands proof of the infinite that a finite being cannot get ones hands around. Does it make sense for one person, as small in the universe as a single human being, to cling to finite intellect as the total explanation of reality? Even the entire population of people and all of mankind together are utterly infinitesimal in the vast universe that we know, not even considering the rest that we do not know. It seems quite foolish to think that all of reality, as vast as we know it to be, can be measured by our own finite understanding.
Further, those who reject faith and spirituality outright reject any basis to understand it. C. S. Lewis, in his autobiographical account, spoke of the rationalism that he had come to embrace, as a young man that “it might be grim and deadly but at least it was free from the Christian God.” Reflecting back, he recounts that he had rejected a God and spirituality that he did not understand and did not see accurately.
There are some religious people who have not employed the intellect God has given them. On the other end of the spectrum are people who have put everything in the intellectual basket. Both extremes seem clearly prone to error. We are intellectual beings; but we are also spiritual beings. The very fact that people have had spiritual experiences and have innately believed in something Other than the material world and our own finiteness since the beginning of recorded history suggests the reality of such an Other.
If reality were limited to things we can measure and know with our minds, how would we even have the sense that there is something else? If this life is all there is, and therefore all we can know, why do our “minds” wander so easily to imaginings of something else?
Many great writers and great writings in history reveal an occupation with longings and musings of life after death, immortality and other worldliness; it is one of the more prevalent themes of great works of art, even if sometimes reflected from the point of skepticism. The fact that people have had such conceptions suggest some strain of reality to them. How could we conceive of something that is utterly unreal?
An accurate view of the mechanics of the world in which we live comes into greater focus with each discovery. Those discoveries have debunked and called into question many uninformed beliefs, superstitions and mythologies, but they do not rule out God the Creator, the Supreme Mover. In fact, the complex yet intricate order of the world suggests a great intelligence behind it.
The collective intellectual knowledge of people has grown and been refined over thousands of years, from fire to quantum physics. Many people point to the Old Testament as “proof” that the claims in the Bible are unreliable and based on crude and inconsistent principles. The same people would not say of science that our understanding of the material world should be dismissed merely because our scientific forefathers were inaccurate in their understanding 4000 years ago. Does it seem credible that man has grown so much in scientific understanding, but not in spiritual understanding? The Bible purports to reflect a history of God’s revelation to people and the growth of people in that revelation over a long period of time.
Intellect, a finite intelligence, alone does not provide an accurate or complete understanding of human life, let alone “reality” or even the material world. The longing in the human soul for something greater, something beyond, something not quite attained is sufficient proof for me that there exists something greater, beyond and ultimately attainable and “knowable”.
Just as questions about the material world point to facts that are not yet known , so the longing that is the collective experience of human kind suggests an Object of that longing that is not yet completely known.
I doubt there is any proof that will convince every person of the existence of a God so great that He is beyond the known, expansive universe that we cannot see to the end (or the beginning). I suspect the unconvinced are driven by motivations and inclinations we cannot see, like the Pharisees in whose presence Jesus performed miracles in His time. God and miracles do not, did not, fit into the worldview, preconceived notions and the investment of personal energy into those things. As with C. S. Lewis, who found relief in materialism from the wrong notions of God he rejected as a child, materialism today provides similar relief from whatever boogeymen gods a person has rejected.
To those who have witnessed the miracles, who have embraced a God who reveals Himself to people, who have experienced the Other, the object of human longing, if only through a glass darkly, the glimpses are sufficient proof.
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