Monday, August 12, 2013
352 - Identifying the Problem
Spirituality Column #352
August 13, 2013
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville
These days it’s wise to pick one’s fights about truth carefully.
Tell me that my physical body inexplicably crawled out of the evolutionary ooze, and I’ll know I’m sitting in a public school or university science class that insists the Bible must be ignored while the class still can’t tell me how life actually happens.
Fine.
Suggest that my mind is a collection of random neural firings and experientially acquired self-serving compromises, and I’ll recognize the soft-headed but tyrannical idiom of modern social science promoting the pompously politically-correct (if comical) conundrum that individually we hold no intrinsic divine personal worth whatsoever (i.e., “we are just a collection of atoms”) but concurrently possess undisputed personal mastery over morality (i.e., “You can’t judge me!”).
Whatever.
But beware: It’s a mistake to scoff at God. The Bible is especially and specifically hard on scoffers (2 Peter 3:3, Jude 1:18), noting that they are among God’s signs of the end of times. Also, know that God scoffs right back (Psalms 2:4, 59:8). It makes rational and reasonable sense to me that God will have the last laugh.
And know also: Our identity in Christ is no laughing matter.
Popular “truths” dismiss Christ and promote man. And often we can do little with this secular hue and cry other than simply to sigh and bear it, resolved to abide in Jesus Christ, the Bible, the Church and the fellowship of believers, and to Witness the Word wherever possible. It’ll take mankind-at-large some time to recalibrate and prioritize its unique, person-by-person identity in Christ balanced against man’s frenzied excitement of scientific discovery, technical progress and intellectual free-for-all.
Excitement and discovery are terrific, but writing God out of the script is unwise. It undercuts our ultimate, individual, human identity. That identity, our Godly soul, is something that thin, inward-focused pop spirituality cannot explain. As wide swaths of science, philosophy and culture frantically conspire to expunge God, reasonable mankind will ultimately and undoubtedly ask, seriously, “What is this mysterious thing inside me that makes me seek something bigger than my own being?”
“And, by the way, What is my own being?”
The only Person with good and final answers to our ultimate identity, the only identity worth knowing and sharing, is the unique, creative person/community of the Holy Trinity – God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Jesus, we learn in John 14:6, is the only way to know our true identity. That’s the identity, and the grace, larger than ourselves we find nowhere but in God’s love.
Any other way is a false and lesser path not worth fighting for.
Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes that God’s ideals and grace do not change, and that’s the truth.
August 13, 2013
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville
Identifying the Problem
By Bob WaltersThese days it’s wise to pick one’s fights about truth carefully.
Tell me that my physical body inexplicably crawled out of the evolutionary ooze, and I’ll know I’m sitting in a public school or university science class that insists the Bible must be ignored while the class still can’t tell me how life actually happens.
Fine.
Suggest that my mind is a collection of random neural firings and experientially acquired self-serving compromises, and I’ll recognize the soft-headed but tyrannical idiom of modern social science promoting the pompously politically-correct (if comical) conundrum that individually we hold no intrinsic divine personal worth whatsoever (i.e., “we are just a collection of atoms”) but concurrently possess undisputed personal mastery over morality (i.e., “You can’t judge me!”).
Whatever.
But beware: It’s a mistake to scoff at God. The Bible is especially and specifically hard on scoffers (2 Peter 3:3, Jude 1:18), noting that they are among God’s signs of the end of times. Also, know that God scoffs right back (Psalms 2:4, 59:8). It makes rational and reasonable sense to me that God will have the last laugh.
And know also: Our identity in Christ is no laughing matter.
Popular “truths” dismiss Christ and promote man. And often we can do little with this secular hue and cry other than simply to sigh and bear it, resolved to abide in Jesus Christ, the Bible, the Church and the fellowship of believers, and to Witness the Word wherever possible. It’ll take mankind-at-large some time to recalibrate and prioritize its unique, person-by-person identity in Christ balanced against man’s frenzied excitement of scientific discovery, technical progress and intellectual free-for-all.
Excitement and discovery are terrific, but writing God out of the script is unwise. It undercuts our ultimate, individual, human identity. That identity, our Godly soul, is something that thin, inward-focused pop spirituality cannot explain. As wide swaths of science, philosophy and culture frantically conspire to expunge God, reasonable mankind will ultimately and undoubtedly ask, seriously, “What is this mysterious thing inside me that makes me seek something bigger than my own being?”
“And, by the way, What is my own being?”
The only Person with good and final answers to our ultimate identity, the only identity worth knowing and sharing, is the unique, creative person/community of the Holy Trinity – God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Jesus, we learn in John 14:6, is the only way to know our true identity. That’s the identity, and the grace, larger than ourselves we find nowhere but in God’s love.
Any other way is a false and lesser path not worth fighting for.
Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes that God’s ideals and grace do not change, and that’s the truth.
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