Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Big Brained People and God

I have a really good friend who has been posting some interesting and challenging questions about God on Facebook. Some examples:
  • If the Bible is god's perfect word and the source of all morality, how do we justify or deal with the parts that are clearly immoral or that we could never support? And if we agree those parts do exist in the Bible, how can we go about picking which passages are acceptable and which are not?
  • Does free will exist in heaven?
One of these posts has 129 responses, and a lot of folks are FREAKING OUT! It's totally understandable because people don't like having their beliefs messed with. Many people have a genuine concern for my friend. They have a deep desire for him to really know God they way that they do, but don't really know how to get around his difficult questions.

If you have spent much time with me, you know that I love deep, theological conversations so I want to get in on the action, but first I want to throw a little essay in your face to maybe redefine the place these questions come from - a place of absolute intellectualism. I am a firm believer in intellectual purity and think it is crucial for people of faith to be able to explain their beliefs with integrity, but I want to adjust the lenses we sometimes use to look at God and the Bible a little bit.

Do me a favor, and click here to read John 9. It's okay, I'll wait....

Finished? Okay...

Jesus heals this blind guy in a way that has no precedent and makes absolutely no intellectual sense. Jesus could have just said a word and the guy would have been healed, but instead he makes spit-mud and rubs it in the guy's face. Crazy. Nobody understood it. The religious leaders couldn't make intellectual sense out of Jesus because his teachings didn't match the structures of law they had built up around themselves (and make no mistake, Judaism in those days had become a rigid intellectual and behavioral pursuit of learned men babbling and writing about deep scriptural truths while legalistically living according to the unspiritual structures of the law).

The religious leaders challenge the man Jesus healed. Bear in mind that this guy knows NOTHING about Jesus and probably very little about Jewish law. He was a blind beggar. Religious folks looked at his blindness as judgment for sin in his life. He had been blind since birth, so no one had ever even given this guy a shot. Unworthy since the day he was born. They ask him intellectual questions to challenge his experience with Jesus, calling Jesus a sinner because what happened doesn't fit with their worldview and therefore must be wrong. The man responds this way:
"I don’t know whether he is a sinner,” the man replied. “But I know this: I was blind, and now I can see!”
-John 9:25
He's saying this: I can't answer your intellectual questions. I don't know how Jesus' teachings square up with your Old Testament laws. I can't tell you why he did this or what it even means for me...or you. But I know this - before Jesus came into my life, it stunk. But now everything has changed for me. I can't explain it, but I know it's true.

Here's my point - the effort to take a purely intellectual approach to God and the Bible will always fail you. It will do nothing but drive you farther and farther away from the truth of who he is, because God didn't just choose to make himself known to us intellectually. There are spiritual and emotional aspects to our humanity, and God speaks to all of them. Not just one. People who only respond to God in crazy emotional ways are just as out of whack as those who take a purely academic approach. Any imbalance, whether emotional or intellectual, will fail to bring us the full truth of who God is.

Allow me to illustrate. If you are a parent, you love your kids. With all your heart and soul you love them. But ask yourself this question: why do you love them? Objectively and intellectually, are they any more beautiful than other children? Are they any smarter than other kids worldwide? Are they better behaved than all other kids? If we were to be purely academic we would have to be intellectually honest and admit that there are kids somewhere in this world who are prettier, smarter, kinder, more talented, funnier and more helpful than our kids. So why do we love them? I think it's safe to say that passed on genetic material isn't the cause of that deep parental love, so why do we love our kids more than all other kids in the world when there are other kids who on paper are objectively more worthy of our love?

That question can't be answered intellectually. True love goes beyond the mind. You love them because you love them. You can't understand that love intellectually. It's the same with God. He cannot be fully understood academically. The single mom who recently committed her life to Christ at our church doesn't know all the theological truth about God. She doesn't know all the history and context of the Bible. She just knows that Jesus has changed her life. She can't quantify it by defending Old Testament dietary restrictions. She just knows that she was blind, but now she can see. It's the same with all of us. Some of us can better explain the difficult questions of the Bible than others, but even if every one of us had that ability, intellectually understanding all the answers doesn't have the power to change your life. That only comes by having a real encounter with Jesus.

Where are you in all this? Are the hard questions you are wrestling with keeping you from letting Jesus rub spit-mud in your eyes? Is your pursuit of emotional spiritual experience keeping you from growing in Biblical knowledge of God? Are you willing to have that encounter with Jesus, whatever it means for your preconceptions about who he is?

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Don't Flunk Art Class

The Christian shoemaker does his Christian duty not by putting little crosses on the shoes, but by making good shoes.
-Martin Luther

There is something so true and powerful about this quote. It speaks right to the heart of art and creativity in the Christian culture that we live in today. Today, I can buy Christian music, movies, books, t-shirts, shoes, jewelry, diet plans, candy and comic books. I could probably go the rest of my life without consuming anything that wasn't made by and for Christians. What's crazy about the incredible statement Martin Luther makes about the Christian duty of creativity is that he said it 500 years ago. That's it, take a deep breath and contemplate that...500 years ago we were still dealing with issues of isolationism and Christian commerce.

I recently spoke at a youth convention about Christians and art. It was an exciting topic for me to tackle since I have been a musician and songwriter and because the Bible has a lot to say about art and creativity. In the Bible, the book of Ephesians has an unlikely, but Biblical view on how art intersects our lives as believers in Jesus.
For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.
Ephesians 2:10
First, God has a creative nature that he has instilled in each of us. What was the first documented thing God did in the Bible? He created. He made things. He imagined them up with his creative mind and gave form to the vision that existed in his heart. Then God created man as his masterpiece in his own image. We were created to create! We were made with the purpose of continuing the process of making and remaking the earth, and God has invited us to join him in creation by putting in us an undeniable desire to express ourselves by making things. Music, paintings, cabinets, cars, sculptures, computers, movies, toilets...all of these things were created by men who were inspired by the creative spark of the divine that God placed in each of us.

Secondly, art reflects the human condition. God created us anew in Christ Jesus. That means we weren't always perfect! We were messy and ugly and crude and broken. This is a big one, because as Christians we often expect all art to always sum up the gospel in a neat, tidy, positive little package, but the reality is that we live in a fallen world and were not always in God's good grace. We are imperfect people who need to be redeemed by a perfect God. Many Christians will produce art that is very inspirational and positive, but God didn't just make Christians in his image. People who don't know God have a divinely inspired creative impulse too, and way too often we reject and deny the true and earnest cries of those who are desperate and hungry for God just because they put their cries to the melody of a song or write them into a screenplay. We must be good judges of the media that we consume, but the Bible makes no distinction between secular and Christian life. Martin Luther knew this when he talked about the Christian shoemaker. There are full sections in the Bible where the writer is in a really dark place and doesn't mind letting God know about it.
You don’t let me sleep. I am too distressed even to pray! I think of the good old days, long since ended, when my nights were filled with joyful songs. I search my soul and ponder the difference now. Has the Lord rejected me forever? Will he never again be kind to me? Is his unfailing love gone forever? Have his promises permanently failed? Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has he slammed the door on his compassion?
Psalm 77:4-9
This passage is just one example out of many, but God doesn't seem to mind. In fact, he welcomes our honesty and transparency. The Bible says that he works through our weakness. In the expressions of our hurt, lostness and pain, the reality of our humanness is brought to the forefront. But so is the reality of God's grace and love in our lives.

Finally, our art is meant to reflect the glory, perfection and goodness of God. We were created to do good works that he planned in advance for us. This doesn't mean that everything we do has to have a cross stamped on it. It means that our art, whatever our creative endeavors are, should be good. The shoes we make should be the best shoes out there because we serve the best God out there. The music we write should be compelling and original because so is God. As followers of Jesus, nothing we create should be mediocre or irrelevant because God is neither of those things. When what we create is second rate, it paints our creator as second rate. God created us to do good things, not average or just okay things. Everything we do should be done as if it were for him personally, and if God commissioned me to write him a song you can bet I'd work my tail off on it.

Below is a great example of an artist who is a Christian creating compelling, professional and quality music (check it out and buy this record). Creativity matters to God, so it should matter to us. How can you improve the quality of what you make in life? How can you honor God with it in better ways? How can it reflect his true character and nature better?