3 Points of Tension
Points of Tension Many of us have heard the story of the father who placed his little boy on a table and then told him to jump into his arms. As soon as the boy jumped, the father stepped back and allowed his son to fall flat on his face. As the son screamed in pain and looked at his dad for an explanation, the father said, "That was to teach you that you cannot trust anyone in this world."
Although this is an unpleasant story we must ask ourselves whether the father's conclusion is correct. Is it true that you cannot trust anyone?
I believe this is a dangerous half-truth. If the father was determined to teach this lesson, he could have pretended for a moment that he was going to drop the boy but then held him tightly while he explained the lesson he was trying to teach: It is always prudent to be cautious before trusting someone, because you don't always know whether they deserve your trust until it is too late. It is often not until the end of the journey that you learn the true character of your companion.
However, total skepticism makes life impossible. If you can trust nobody, you would never use any public transportation, never go to a doctor, never deposit money in a bank, never eat any food, never step foot outside your door— and on and on goes the list. In fact, you might become so paranoid that you're afraid to even trust yourself.
I have in my possession an authentic one hundred million dollar bill. When I hold it up before an audience, as I have often done, I always see the same expressions on the faces in front of me: "What's the catch?" I can almost hear them say.
Why are they dubious? First, because they know that no one in his right mind would walk around with one hundred million dollars in his wallet, and second, if he was foolish enough to do so, he certainly wouldn't broadcast it in a public meeting. I take a moment or two to listen to their speculations, as I insist that the bill is authentic. And it is authentic—an authentic
Zimbabwean one hundred million dollar bill. There's a nervous muffled laughter among the audience—there really is nothing funny about the pitiable plight of the economically plundered citizens of Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe's inflation rate is in the quintillions, and prices double there every thirty-two hours.
But the catch with this bill, although it is authentic, is what is written just above the denomination: Valid on or before December 31, 2008. Zimbabwean currency is reprinted every ninety days.
There is an old adage that asks, "If a Cretan tells you that all Cretans are liars, can you believe him?" I put a similar question to a reporter when I was interviewed about the present economic crisis. Before he began the interview, I asked him if I could pose a question to him. He was somewhat taken aback and seemed a trifle irritated. I asked him why we are convicting top executives of financial institutions for their relativism in financial matters when we have taught our students for years in all our colleges, including Ivy League schools, that ultimately there are no absolutes. Why are we judging them according to absolutes when we have told them that everything is relative and there are no absolutes?
Isn't that a fair question? It is cool in our society to ridicule those who hold to absolutes, yet we quickly turn on those who live by the implications of the denial of these same absolutes. In the West, for years we have believed implicitly, if
not explicitly, that moral boundaries matter, that life at its core is sacred, and that in matters of marriage and finance, a person's word should be trusted—until we lost ourselves in the swirling storms of the cultural challenges in the 1960s and everything went up for grabs as the status quo was challenged on all fronts. Those of us who were in college at that time were shaken by professors who encouraged students in no uncertain terms to challenge the establishment. Not only were buildings burned; a whole structure of values that had governed a culture for centuries was called into question and tossed out.
During that time and in the decades since, voices from both inside and outside have sounded our demise. Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn warned that the West is on the verge of collapse.
"Between good and evil there is an irreconcilable contradiction," he said, but he was dismissed as being an anticommunist ideological dinosaur.1 Now Solzhenitsyn's warning has caught up with us, and we are wondering what has happened. We have awakened from our self-induced lethargy to find ourselves under the authority of those who answered the call to rebel against all that we as a nation have stood for and believed in. Now, our culture's foundations are crumbling and prophetic warnings are doubly impugned when they are first unheeded and then forgotten when proven to have been justified.
We need to understand that the tensions of life will always be there, regardless of the options we choose to live by. Systems of values will always be on a collision course with one another, and we will always have to defend what we believe from the assault of a conflicting belief system. If we have no firm commitments and haven't already determined
which of our national convictions are nonnegotiable, our whole system will implode under the weight of momentary decisions.
It is critical, therefore, to preserve those convictions or values that have already been tested and have proven to be a firm foundation. Only then can we test conflicting realities against what has shown itself to be reliable so that the foundation is left intact. This is as true for individuals as it is for nations.
The writers of the Bible were not ignorant of these tensions, nor is the Christian faith a stranger to this challenge.
Jesus himself presented the conflict to us in stark terms in the account of his testing in the wilderness by the enemy of our souls (Matthew 4:1 – 11). In every instance, each temptation was a dangerous half-truth. "Change these stones into bread, and the masses will follow you," was the first challenge posed by the Tempter. It is interesting to note that the challenge was constructed to appeal either to his power or to his word. In fact, in his second temptation, Satan used the words "it is written" to challenge Jesus to demonstrate his autonomy from any transcendent limitations (verse 6). Though Satan used the line "Did God really say?" in the garden of Eden, he used the line "it is written" with Jesus in the wilderness. Satan knew that he couldn't challenge Jesus on whether God had indeed said something or not, so instead he tried to strip what God had said from its context. You see, for the follower of Jesus, the linear logic of belief goes something like this:
The character of God, in whom there is no contradiction, is unchanging.
He has demonstrated his character in his Word.
He has revealed his character through his Son.
He has established the church to live out those truths and
values.
Satan was smart enough to appeal to Jesus within that hierarchy, using the written word to appeal to the character of God and "reasoning" that the result would enlarge or benefit the church. Think of the greater number of followers Jesus would have had for a time if his appeal to them had been that he would provide for their basic necessities. Satan's temptation was on the basis of that to which Jesus was already committed
—the promises and the power of God. He weighted the challenge with the attraction of its pragmatic impact on the short term.
The seduction of the lie that God makes everything comfortable for us is precisely the reason many have been unable to face the tensions they experience in living the Christian life. Further, because the church has not always lived out the truths it claims to believe, doubt has been cast on the unchanging character of God. It is interesting that Jesus does not challenge the assumption of the appeal that many would have been drawn to him if he had promised to provide for their short-term needs. And it is important to note that he placed what was written (and that which Satan was trying to distort) in the larger context of the truth. In short, sound bites are not the story. If we do injustice to what is written, we end up making an unjust conclusion.
Satan began this temptation with the phrase "it is written," and Jesus responded with the words "it is also written"—not to engage Satan in an argument but to position the temptation of his own will against the standard of God's will and thus test all options against that reality. The definition of relativism is that the value of any moment or idea is based on the
circumstances that surround it or on the standard that is set by the majority. By definition, then, relativism is a slave to the moment. However, absolutes, which are true regardless of circumstances or popularity, make it possible for precommitted certainties to be the basis on which to interpret a specific moment or issue, giving value to all moments without sacrificing any.
There is an important application to this challenge to faith.
In intent, Satan's challenge to Jesus is little different from a question I have often been asked: "Since God is all-powerful and loving, why doesn't he perform an irrefutable miracle, like causing a shrunken arm to suddenly grow to full length or a limb to grow back? Why are all so-called miracles so subtle?"
The implication is that if God would do spectacular things, people would believe in him.
This is a valid question, and I assure you it is not one we Christian apologists haven't thought of. I believe there is an answer, which I will touch on later. But first let me get to the root of this problem—our desire for God to prove himself to us or validate our belief in him by performing miracles—as we struggle with various points of tension we experience in trying to live as a Christian.
IT IS WRITTEN—THE LARGER CONTEXT
A young student wanted to challenge the establishment in his institution, so as he was writing his doctoral dissertation, he would make a sweeping statement and footnote it by saying something like, "As told to me by the elevator operator in a restaurant." Then he would make another sweeping statement and say, "As narrated to me by a taxi driver who drove me to
the airport."
When his supervising professor read the first draft, he challenged the student. "What sort of academic paper is this?
You can't just make statements and footnote them with such second-rate sources as conversations in a taxi or in an elevator."
"Why not?" challenged the student. "Why is something more authoritative just because I found it in some article or in a book?"
The professor sat quietly for a while and finally said, "All right. We'll leave it as you've written it. Let's see what happens when you do your oral defense of this dissertation."
Sure enough, when he submitted the dissertation and defended it before the faculty committee, they approved it. He was called back to be informed that they had accepted his work. "There is only one small exception we would like to make," they said. "We are granting you your PhD but will not be giving it to you in writing. You'll just have to take our word for it."
He had made his point and lost. They made their point and won. Statements that are made may be either right or wrong, but if they are to be taken seriously so that they can be examined and evaluated, they must go beyond casual conversation. More often than not, that which people agree has ultimate value is put in written form and subjected to tests for veracity. So let us consider and evaluate this idea that an irrefutable miracle would better accomplish God's purpose for all time.
Suppose God restored the arms of an armless man, what do you think would happen? Of course, the person with new arms would run around showing off the miracle, and the miracle
would become the point of conversation on every talk show.
But what if he was so excited that he grew careless and stepped in front of a speeding car while he was trying to cross the road to show someone his new arms? What if he were crushed by an oncoming vehicle? Would he ask for another miracle, or would he be content to know that at least he had experienced a miracle once? And what about other armless people who hadn't been given new arms—wouldn't they begin to demand that if God is really who he says he is, he would do the same miracle for them out of fairness? Ah, so just one miracle wouldn't be enough. We would need multiple irrefutable miracles, and I also suggest that a few generations later, no one would believe the story, even if it were written down.
In fact, there is a similar incident recorded in the New Testament, and nearly two thousand years later many people do not believe it. After a man was given his eyesight by Jesus, numerous other interpretations of how and why his eyesight was restored were offered by those who heard the story.
The story Jesus told of Lazarus and the rich man is pertinent here. You may recall that the rich man died and was in eternal torment, separated from God, pleading with Abraham to send someone to moisten his tongue. But Abraham told him this was impossible because the separation after death is permanent, and no one can cross from one side to the other. So the man made another request—that someone warn his five brothers what was awaiting them if they did not make provision for their souls. Again his request was denied because, he was told, they already had Moses and the prophets who had testified to the options after death—and they could read what they had said. The rich man countered by suggesting that if
someone were to rise from the dead and go back to earth to warn them, they would listen. But Abraham replied that if they did not pay heed to Moses and the prophets, they would not give any credence to one who had risen from the dead (Luke
16:19 – 31).
During the time of Moses, indisputable miracles abounded, even through the agency of Moses himself, yet when it was time to finally cross the Jordan River into the land promised by God, even Moses' faith faltered. He was not at all sure that God was with them in this journey.
Virtually every great leader in the Bible struggled during times of testing or tension over what they thought God should do or say, even though they had recognized God's divine intervention earlier. If we are honest, most of us are no different today. You see, at first blush, the miracle seems the only way to win a following. But the fickleness of the human mind, our insatiable desire to always want "just one more," the everpresent reality of need, our desire to play God and hence to control God, the apparent "hiddenness" of God when we need him most—all these reasons that become even more urgent in intense situations make the plea for the arm to be reattached
"just this once" highly suspect.
On the other hand, what is left to believe if we dispense with God and the miracle of life itself? We argue for the existence of things and continue to believe they exist, even though they are mathematically impossible. We default to the belief that ultimate cause is something physical, even though no physical entity, however sectioned, explains its own existence. We hunger for love and meaning, even though we believe they are constructs of the mind and of culture or conditioning. We believe that only the empirical world is true,
yet we posit this belief in metaphysical terms. We believe that matter has produced mind but that the mind transcends matter.
We believe that everything that comes into being must have a cause, yet we believe the universe is causeless. We assume intelligence behind intelligibility—except for the universe. We believe in humanity's ability to totally transcend the mind but are forced to concede that we are subject to an unbreakable determinism. We deny the absoluteness of good and evil, yet we fill our prisons with relativists who have believed this— often highly educated and successful citizens.
I am compelled to ask you: Which position believes most in the "god of the gaps" and which position relies more on faith?
Jesus responds to Satan's challenges of what is written with the assumption behind what is written. Someone has said that a text without a context is nothing more than a pretext. The context of Jesus' revelation about what constitutes life— whether for the Christian or for the unbeliever—is unmistakable, and he has made it clear that if we do not understand the very context of why life is in the first place, we will never understand the text of how to live it out. I'll start with the basics.
WHAT IS WRITTEN RATHER THAN WHAT IS FELT
Some time ago, I was in the city of Tirana, the capital of Albania, which for decades has been considered the most atheistic country in the world. After a meeting where I addressed the members of parliament, I was invited by the curator of the national museum to visit the museum for "a surprise you do not want to miss." Having traveled for
decades, I have learned to be skeptical of effusive invitations that promise a "once in a lifetime" opportunity. His persistence and genuine sincerity led me to accept his invitation.
I arrived with my colleagues at the appointed time, only to be greeted by a roomful of people who were employees of the museum. The curator ushered me to the front of the room and asked me to share with the employees what I had said earlier before the members of parliament. For a moment, I was a bit frustrated that a carrot had been held out to me and that I had been manipulated into another speaking engagement. But he continued to assure me that a surprise of immense proportion awaited me. By this point I had given up on his promise, and so I spoke to the group before me out of my heart, knowing I was addressing people who had suffered under a dictator for many years.
After I finished, the curator invited me to sit at a table. In walked two or three men in police uniforms, followed by armed associates, and in their extended arms, as if carrying a fragile treasure, they carried and placed right in front of me manuscripts that were clearly very old. When I looked to the curator for an explanation, he told me that these were copies of the gospels personally translated and transcribed by Saint
John Chrysostom in the fifth century, in perfectly justified columns of gold ink.
For a moment I was too overwhelmed to speak. Then he told me these manuscripts had been discovered in the tenth century during excavations of the foundations of a church, and that they would have been destroyed by the previous regime had it not been for someone who had hidden them.
I began to read, and it happened that the text was the story of the woman who had poured out her "riches" on the
head and feet of Jesus, anointing his head with perfume, washing his feet with her tears and drying them with her hair
(Matthew 26:6 – 13). I have always found it interesting that Jesus said that wherever the gospel would be preached, the story of what she had done to him as an expression of her faith would also be told.
Here was a woman of ill repute who had heard of Jesus of Nazareth. Gathering her spoils, most probably gained from selling illicit pleasure, she risked being shunned by those in the room in order to be where he was, willing to put everything at his feet in order to gain his forgiveness and a new life.
This simple expression of repentance and love was made part of the gospel narrative to show both the shame of the human struggle and the glory of the mercy of God toward anyone who comes to him with a contrite heart. In her wildest imagination, this woman would never have thought that two millennia later, somewhere in a museum in an atheistic land, an Indian-born preacher would be reading her story copied by the hand of a translator who had lived four centuries after the event was recorded. In the mix of this story, all the tensions of the Christian faith come together—the power of the Word and its transmission of the story over time, forgiveness in the face of the blindness and pain of evil, the restoration of human dignity in the stranglehold of an undignified lifestyle, God's acceptance of worship from a sincere heart, the challenge to a culture that had marginalized womanhood at the hands of those who treated adultery as a one-person sin.
The skeptic responds with all the "contradictions" or shortcomings they see in the written narrative, the Bible.
Indeed, the literature shelves are full of books written by those who claim to have been believers, now turned skeptics, who
know enough of the Bible to attack it and hold it up for ridicule but never seem to have understood the revelation of God in its context. One must weigh their challenges seriously.
The term inerrancy is used by those committed to the Scriptures to mean that the Word as originally written was completely devoid of error because it was revealed by a holy and perfect God. Two arguments are generally raised against this claim. The first is that if the Scriptures were iner-rant only in their original form, which we do not have, what does it really matter anyway? To this I say that if the original revelation was imperfect, it would pose an even bigger problem. How would we be able to distinguish between what is perfect and what is imperfect?
The second argument used against the inerrancy of the original Scriptures is that if God was able to give a perfect revelation, couldn't he have also preserved it perfectly? Yet, more than three thousand years since the initial revelation, the farther into history we go as we discover older and older manuscripts, the fewer variant readings there are, even of miniscule differences. The beauty of revelation through human instrumentation is precisely the dialectic of God's way of working. The farther back we go, the greater unity of instruction we find to capture the story with power and relevance.
Any desire of those determined to undermine the Scriptures or smother the text has failed, and the Bible remains virtually intact. With all the polemics about how untenable some of the ideas in the Scriptures are, the critic repeatedly misses the larger point: How do the writings of forty authors in sixty-six books, living across fifteen hundred years, converge in the single person of Jesus Christ? The number of prophecies
both preceding and succeeding his birth, the nature of his teaching, the purity of his life, his incredible ability to connect all the dots in history, the physical nature of his resurrection, his persuasive teaching on the absoluteness of love based on God's eternal purposes, and many other specifics make the debunking of his person nothing more than a will to disbelieve.
This is why Jesus constantly chided his questioners, saying such things as "Have you never read in the Scriptures?" and "Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God?"
The written Word documented and certified exactly who this person would be, where he would be born, how he would be born, what kind of works he would do, what manner of death he would die, what manner of miracle his resurrection would demonstrate, and the signs of his return. The written
Word was finally embodied in the person.
A BRUTE PHYSICALITY WITH SUBLIME HUNGERS
We start with the written Word, and then we move to the immense struggle we feel over physical needs and emotional longings. We hurt, we hunger, we yearn, we cry, we laugh, we are disappointed. Even here, within the pressures of the tension between what we believe and what we feel, God meets us. We live in this tent of insufficiency. But what a tent it is!
The Scriptures talk about us being "fearfully and wonderfully made" (Psalm 139:14). Sometimes it is more fearful than wonderful. Indeed, it is reminiscent of the "fearful symmetry" that poet William Blake wrote about.2
I think back to a simple operation I had a while ago— simple in the sense that, for the expert performing the
procedure, it was a routine lami-nectomy on the disc between my vertebrae at L2 and L3. He assured me that it was routine and that he did not expect anything untoward. As it turned out, that which was supposed to take ninety minutes took twice as long. During the procedure, the fibrous membrane (the dura) covering and protecting the spinal chord ripped. That dural tear immediately put the surgical team in an emergency mode because the hazard of not repairing it properly and completely could have consigned me to a life of pain. When the doctor explained his challenge to me later, he said it was like "trying to sew wet toilet paper together." For three days I had to lie on my back to allow the dura to heal. For those three days medical team members visited me repeatedly to ask whether I had a headache and whether I could see. What a great day it was for me when they finally told me I could get up.
What a wonder is the fearful symmetry of the human body! It is intricately designed—fragile and resilient at the same time. The more intricate a system is, the more vulnerable it is to injury. Thus the nature of our struggle between what we believe and what we feel defies simplistic explanations. Our bodies and minds are easily destroyed. The memories carried within are often unrecognized until a point of collapse brings to the fore the memory of the tragedy that has already taken place.
The British newspapers some time ago carried a sad story of deep depression told by the wife of a husband who suffered a breakdown. This is Rebecca Mackenzie's story about her husband, Alasdair:
Early morning in November 2006 and I was enjoying the first night of uninterrupted sleep since giving birth to
my son Bruce two months earlier. Suddenly, the bed shook and I was woken by my husband sitting bolt upright in bed looking panic-stricken.
Instantly awake, I thought something terrible had happened to the baby, but as I checked the Moses basket at the foot of our bed, he was still sleeping contentedly.
I turned back to Alasdair and it was clear immediately that he was having some kind of crisis. He started crying and then, for two hours, my big, strong husband—a man with a black belt in karate—sat on the edge of the bed and rocked back and forth, sobbing like a baby.3
The rest of the story described the ordeals and trauma of this young family as the husband and father experienced a nervous breakdown. It was difficult to read without tearing up and at some level feeling the suffering of someone as she watched her loved one emotionally die before her eyes.
C. S. Lewis wrote the following:
Most of a man's psychological make-up is probably due to his body: when his body dies all that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best or worst out of this material, will stand naked. All sorts of nice things which we thought our own, but which were really due to a good digestion, will fall off some of us; all sorts of nasty things which were due to complexes or bad health will fall off others. We shall then, for the first time, see every one as he really was. There will be surprises.4
We often ignore the physical element of our makeup. But
we must accept what the human body is, as well as accepting our own limited abilities to correct a situation that has gone wrong in our bodies. And when our physical or mental frameworks are not functioning as they should, we usually feel it in our spiritual realm as well. I know many people for whom chronic depression has resulted from chronic pain. The body becomes the source of the spiritual struggle that ensues. There is no denying this.
Yet if we try to displace God from the process, we will be tempted to consider that which is aberrant, normal, and that which is normal, aberrant. Instead of recognizing that the imperfections we see in the makeup of the human condition are the result of aberrance, some argue that such imperfections could only have resulted from a random universe—and some conclude, then, that all of life is random. While physical illness may cause spiritual illness, the spiritual has a stand-alone capacity in and of itself. The default position of the heart and inclination of the will is against God.
Within this same imperfect physical frame are prompts that normally warn us that our natural desires for immediate gratification are really not for our ultimate good. How many times have we treaded into dangerous terrain, knowing deep inside that what we are doing is not right, yet rationalizing and arguing our way deeper and deeper along the path? How often does the appeal to the eye outweigh the caution of the soul?
How repeatedly do we fall for an enticement we know is a lie, convincing ourselves that this time it will turn out to be true?
How many disappointments and regrets must it take to prove that Scripture is right when it states there is a way that seems right to a person, yet its ends are the ways of death (Proverbs
14:12)?
Sometimes the temptations we battle are the result of inherited characteristics, as in the case of a child born as a drug addict or an alcoholic because its mother was addicted to drugs or alcohol. Carrying this thought a step further, we know that one's upbringing has a remarkable bearing on one's behavior. Being raised in a violent home increases the risk of becoming a violent adult. It amazes me that we readily accept as true the physical or emotional results of birth or environment and deny the possibility that our natural inclination toward what is spiritually wrong is by virtue of our human environment or culture. The very condition of humanity worldwide reveals a bent toward that which is destructive.
Instead of spending hours debating where Cain got his wife and what kind of fruit Adam and Eve ate, or whether the snake walked upright or crawled horizontally along the ground, can we not see the point of the narrative? The temptation in the beginning of creation was clear: By playing God, we redefine good and evil. In rejecting the voice of God and the boundaries he has set for us, we have made ourselves the master ethicists, and all categories become subject to our sovereign pronouncements. The point of the narrative is the propensity of humanity from the beginning to deny the warning and justify our own autonomy to become the ultimate judge of all reality. This choice to reject God's authority and replace it with our own is now an inherited characteristic with which we all must struggle.
I come from the East, and most Eastern teaching is done with stories. We learn to refrain from pushing the story to its limits but seek to get to the heart of what is being said. The parables of Jesus' day had this characteristic, as do proverbs.
You cannot drive in India without seeing proverbs painted on
rickshaws or buses, making some point of wisdom. We learn through proverbs, as we understand that narrative is different.
Stories that tell the truth can be replete with detail in order to get to the greater truth, but they are not trapped by the detail.
The Bible is a book written primarily in Eastern motifs, so in its own context let's see what the written Word says about the tension we face within these bodies that house us.
WHERE CHRISTIANITY "FAILS"
In the physical realm, we wrestle in three areas: the struggle for security, the struggle with pain and suffering and brokenness, and the struggle for sexual fulfillment. Let us take these one by one and see why we experience problems in living out the Christian faith. I will address the second struggle in greater detail in the next chapter.
Security The first is the struggle for security, which goes beyond the fear of violence. It begins with the longing for human touch, and it is an inherent need. The desire of a child for the arms of its parents is not something that is imparted. The same is said about people in their old age, that they long for the touch of a caring hand.
I once had a conversation with a therapist in my home city who, along with others, offers time and service several times a year to the neediest in society. On one occasion they brought in a vanload of young women from the inner city to pamper them with facials and massage therapy, just to let them know
they were cared for. As the therapist was using special oils to massage the deformed legs and feet of one of the young women, the young woman began weeping. Concerned that she had hurt her, the therapist asked if she was using too much pressure. "No," the woman said, "but this is the first time anyone has ever touched my feet." The therapist was moved to tears as well.
I recently read the story of a young man named Darren, who seemed to be incorrigible. He had been in many halfway houses that had given up on him and expelled him. In one place, the staff had gone on strike and refused to return to their posts until Darren was sent elsewhere. He was a master car thief and ran with a band of young teens that could break into any car and do with it whatever they wanted. They were brilliant in their ability to destroy. It was finally decided he would have to be sent to a juvenile facility because no one in any of the halfway houses had figured out a way to control him. Finally one experienced youth worker decided to take on the challenge of helping this young man change for the good.
The first week in his new home, Darren shattered all the windows after he somehow got his hands on a BB gun. After several weeks, the youth worker was on the verge of giving up.
Darren was told they really wanted it to work so they were laying down ground rules. If he violated them, he would have to leave. Darren made a valiant effort, but a couple of incidents happened that nearly pushed everyone over the edge. One of these incidents was a fight with another resident in the early hours of the morning that ended with Darren cornering the other boy with a weed cutter from the garden. Car thievery continued to provide his biggest thrill. One day, the youth worker saw five cars Darren had stolen and left in the church
parking lot.
Darren had never experienced a stable family life.
Abandoned as a young child, he had never learned to trust anyone. As the weeks went by, the chains of rebellion seemed unbreakable, in spite of a few hopeful moments. And then, one
Sunday afternoon, something changed in Darren. The youth worker had invited him to his house for dinner with his family.
At the appointed time, the man arrived with his four-year-old son, Michael, to pick Darren up for the outing. As soon as the little boy saw Darren, he ran toward him, wrapped his pudgy little arms around his legs, and gave him a big hug. As he proceeded to examine the contents of Darren's pockets, he found a big bundle of car keys. During the lunch, Darren allowed Michael to play with the keys. When the time came for Darren to leave and return to the facility, he looked at little
Michael and asked him if he would like to keep the keys, as Darren's gift to him. Michael was elated, completely oblivious to the fact that a life was being transformed right before his eyes. The inveterate car thief handed over the keys of his trade in an irresistible response to the embrace of unconditional love.
That afternoon, instead of heading out with his buddies to break into more cars, he headed to church and turned his life over to Jesus Christ. A hug from an innocent child melted a hardened heart.
In a world looking for security, if the church is going to be the church of Jesus Christ, it must learn the power of love before it is too late. To the man longing for a new arm, the disarming of a crime-bound young man and the new heart and mind given to him by Jesus may not seem like a miracle. But to the heart that once did evil and the hands that now spread goodness, it is the greater miracle.
This longing to be touched is also the reason many Christians question God when they struggle to live life well and in a manner that brings glory to God, especially when they are going through a time of darkness or fear. We would love to feel
God's arms around us. We would love to feel the embrace of the Almighty when we are feeling abandoned and alone. How many times have we wished we could just hear his voice? To the true seeker, sooner or later God comes through, even though his touch may not be recognized until much later. You see, instead of spectacular manifestations of power, the same
God who used the human hand to write the Scriptures and preserve the written Word uses the human touch of his children to restore broken lives around them. This is the way
Jesus conquers sin.
George MacDonald made the following observation:
Instead of crushing the power of evil by divine force; instead of compelling justice and destroying the wicked; instead of making peace on earth by the rule of a perfect prince; instead of gathering the children of Jerusalem under his wings whether they would or not, and saving them from the horrors that anguished his prophetic soul—
[Jesus] let evil work its will while it lived; he contented himself with the slow, unencouraging ways of help essential; making men good; casting out, not merely controlling Satan… To love righteousness is to make it grow, not to avenge it… Throughout his life on earth, [Jesus] resisted every impulse to work more rapidly for a lower good— strong, perhaps, when he saw old age and innocence and righteousness trodden underfoot [italics added].5
Pain and Suffering and Brokenness Consider God's intervention on three different occasions, as related in the New Testament. We read in the story of young
Saul of Tarsus, a terrorist committed to destroying the infant church, that Jesus met him in a spectacular appearance and asked him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" (Acts 9:4).
That encounter with Jesus turned Saul's life around, and he became the apostle to the world, eventually writing one-third of the New Testament. He was a self-declared enemy of God, yet God came to him in a dramatic fashion. I have stood on that Damascus road quite a few times. I have seen the wall that still stands in the place it stood nearly two thousand years ago.
Breathing threats against the followers of Jesus, Saul was brought to his knees in a moment, and history was changed.
Sometimes change comes that spectacularly!
In the second instance of God's intervention, we find the apostle Peter in prison and the church in Jerusalem gathered to pray for his release. The book of Acts tells us that an angelic
"visitor" came into the prison, freed him from his bonds, and led him past the guards and out into the streets (Acts 12:5 –
10). I have often wondered why the angel didn't lead him all the way to the prayer meeting, why he was left on his own to find his way there. He was the friend of Jesus, yet he was rescued from the prison and then left in the street to find his own way.
Does this "halfway" rescue sound familiar? How many times have we wished that God would take us all the way, not just half the way? But God has his plans and his ways, and he never violates the freedom of the person. Instead, he challenges us and invites us to trust him and surrender that
lesser freedom to his greater call. Sometimes the miracle is dramatic; sometimes it is a halfway miracle.
Finally, we read of Jesus on the path to Calvary. At the last moment, when his pain is at its worst and humiliation at its highest, Jesus cries out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46). He is the Son of God, left at the mercy of his enemies. This sense of abandonment by God seems to be repeated too often, and those who are the closest to him often appear to be least protected by him. Yet he still asks us to trust him, to believe that he is with us now as he works out his purpose in us and that he will be there for us at the end of the earthly journey. And I might add that at Jesus' worst moment, as he faced total abandonment by God—which because of him none of us will ever do—he was right in the center of the Father's will.
Some of us he meets in dramatic ways—often at the moment of our salvation. For others, it may seem that he is with us only halfway as we serve him in difficult circumstances.
And still others of us may not be delivered from our trials, even to the point of death.
But in all of these there is one common thread. For everyone—except Jesus himself, who established the church by his death—the church is always near at hand to extend loving care in his name. For young Saul there was Ananias, who cared for him in the aftermath of his encounter with Jesus
(Acts 9:17 – 19). Those very disciples whose lives Saul was seeking to destroy were there to lower him over an intimidating wall and enable his escape from the violent intentions of the religious zealots (verses 23 – 25). For Peter, the church was in prayer for him as he spent the night in prison, and they joyously welcomed him into their presence when he was set
free in answer to their prayers (Acts 12:12, 16 – 17).
The mission of the church is not only to bring people to God but to take God to those who are wounded by the experiences of life, to touch those who are broken, to bring healing to those with damaged emotions. Those of us in the church recognize and accept our responsibility toward someone whose trust has been shattered, as evidenced by the schools, hospitals, rescue centers, and missions established by the church over the centuries.
But what about when the church is responsible for shattering a person's trust? What about the judgment we too often exhibit toward fellow believers who have failed to live up to their own beliefs? What about the collective behavior of the church that leaves a person with no place to go for acceptance, for forgiveness, for love? What about when the response of members of the body of Christ to those whose trust has already been shattered is far from the way Christ responded to those who had failed or sinned or been failed by someone?
What about when that person whose trust has been shattered because of us turns his or her back on the Christ we claim to represent and walks away not just from the church but from God? What then? Christianity will seem to have betrayed those who turned to the church (made up of individual Christians) to receive a healing touch and found no help, no one to offer comfort. To the person who faces a dark night alone, feeling that Jesus has let him down and has not met him in the time of struggle, let me ask: Is it the Jesus of the gospels that has failed you, or is it the church that bears his name that has failed you?
In this physical world, the church is meant to be the hands, the arms, the heart of God. To those inside the church,
let me change the phrase "Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country" to "Ask not what God can do for you but what you can do on behalf of God." Pain can best be mitigated by the touch of another person.
Sometimes the touch of a Christian comes early, unmistakably, and with great effectiveness. At other times the Christian in our lives can carry us only halfway, and we are responsible to trust God to take us the rest of the way. And at still other times this touch comes at the last moment and proves that, though it seems often defeated, true faith will survive all the assaults of its opponents.
The man looking for a new arm may find that the love and care of the church brings him an even greater miracle—the miracle of new life in Christ.
Sexual Fulfillment There are both legitimate and illegitimate expressions of sexual desire. I want to first discuss the illegitimate expressions before turning to the legitimate expressions in the last section of this chapter.
Illegitimate Expressions As we begin to address the tension of the sensual, I don't need to belabor how many stumble in this area. The impulses of the physical, especially during one's youth or when one senses the departure of youth, are so common to the human experience that we wonder why God has created such a drive
within us without giving us the opportunity for fulfillment. And so we try to justify our mistakes. But have you ever thought it odd that we don't try to justify our illegitimate expressions of other passions or blame God for them? We might ask why God has allowed us to feel envious of people for the things that are not ours to have—but we don't. Or why God has allowed some people to experience racial tension when we know that racism is wrong—but we don't. Or why God hasn't made it easier to curb our appetites? In short, when it comes to sexual fulfillment, we try to excuse our indulgence because of desire and opportunity, but we will prosecute someone else who helps himself to our possessions by virtue of that same desire and opportunity.
Atheistic writers, such as Sam Harris, take religion to task for injecting guilt into the fulfillment of sexual desires. The sad truth is that they are partly right. These very days as I write, the news is filled with horrible pictures of a seventeen-year-old girl in Afghanistan who was flogged by a cleric for committing a supposedly immoral act—she was seen coming out of her home with a man who was not her husband. But as the real story was uncovered, it was discovered that she had been set up with this false charge by a spurned suitor who had taken offense at her rejection of his marriage proposal. Some critics of religion in general—sometimes of Christianity in particular— have made much of the guilt we encourage regarding sexual matters. Sometimes it is a valid criticism, for we often seem to reserve our loudest public condemnation from the pulpit for sexual issues.
The writers of Scripture, however, focus our attention on numerous other vices alongside inappropriate sexual behavior
—injustice, pride, greed, malice, hatred, uncontrolled tongues,
gluttony; the list goes on and on. Condemning sexual misconduct, we in the church have neglected to show why sexual deviations from God's prescribed way are so detrimental to an individual and to society. God has given us the gift of the intensity of passion within the context of the sacredness of love. Take away either the passion or the correct context, and you have something less than what God intended it to be.
After all, sexual drives and fulfillments are God-given. It is the one sensation we experience that God himself is free of, because God is spirit and not flesh. Essentially, he has allowed us to experience the maximum pleasure that the body is made for until the spirit becomes the essence and substance of our existence and sexual drives no longer hold sway over us. This amazing gift to experience sexual love is built-in only as a transitory expression. To make it the pursuit of life is to take that which is intended to be temporary and make it the ultimate pursuit. It is taking that which is sacred and making it commonplace. It is taking that which is designed to be fulfilling only in a restrictive sense and trying to make it fulfilling in an unrestricted sense. Such deviation of purpose is destructive to the very act and to the intent of the gift.
In a 2009 article in a British medical journal, a demand was made that the pope retract a statement he had made about how the use of protection in sexual intercourse increases promiscuity and therefore the risk of AIDS.6 In an effort to be objective, I will say that there may be more to what the pope said than was reported and that the journal may have some justification for its "outrage," but I want to pose a few questions: Would they have written an article taking any responsibility for a victim of AIDS who said he used the protections they endorsed and yet contracted it? Would they
have written an article decrying promiscuity and its impact on the accepted values of society? Would they have written an article about the betrayals and broken hearts and broken homes that are the result of promiscuity? No, of course not!
Some behaviors have become too politically volatile to write about honestly, even though the ensuing damage is ruinous both to the body and to society.
While the empiricist looks at science as an exact science and the social theorist and psychologist is engaging in behavioral science (admittedly somewhat less exact), the one dealing with spiritual and moral decay in a society is treated as the least exact in his or her descriptions or prescriptions. Jesus says that the person who ignores the most important things to focus on lesser things is, in effect, "straining out a gnat but swallowing a camel" (see Matthew 23:24). Scientists conveniently state that they only deal in facts. Are not the shattered lives and the emotional toll of guilt and regret also facts? Who should sit by the side of a child and tell them that their father has led a debauched lifestyle and paid the ultimate price? If all is simply matter and the so-called facts of science are the only facts that are important, why do we hunger for significance, for answers to our deepest questions, for hope?
A recent conversation I had with a film producer turned to the subject of violence as an art form. In a remarkable comment, he said that in our society we think something is violent only if it causes physical injury. "The worst kind of violence," he said,
"is that which destroys personal dignity, value, and worth while appearing to be benign because it is not causing bodily injury." He was right-on. This is precisely what happens when the sensual drives our motives and the worth of a human life is diminished with every indulgence.
Marriage and sexual expression were tied together in the teachings of Jesus. One may choose to challenge these teachings and even criticize them, but one can not deny that he taught them. To take sexual practices and denude them of their intended purpose is to create a society open to the risk of realities too numerous to mention. Just as love that is denied pleads for the touch of compassion, love that is abused destroys lives and ultimately destroys society. As G. K.
Chesterton said, "They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words—'free-love'— as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. It is the nature of love to bind itself."7 So if we feel that Christianity has failed us in this area because it has imposed a standard on us that we find difficult to keep, perhaps we need to listen to Chesterton, who wrote, "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried."8
The words of Francis Thompson in that memorable poem, "The Hound of Heaven," sum up well what I have been saying:
"All which I took from thee I did but take, Not for thy harms, But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms.
All which thy child's mistake Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:
Rise, clasp My hand and come…
"Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest, I am He Whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me."9
Too often we shun that which is meant for our good because we are afraid it will deprive us of what we think we really want. With incredible rancor and strong language, atheistic writers (Sam Harris, for example) castigate the church for standing in the way of sexual freedom, which really means personal inclination as justification for indulgence. Harris ought to at least be willing to draw a distinction between that which political and cultural freedom may illegitimately grant and that which religious freedom has the obligation to warn people about. The Bible does not mute its warning here. We are drawn like moths to the flame—toward that which often destroys. I do not know of anyone who died as a believer exercising self-control who wished he had been an atheist or had lived an indulgent life, but I have known many in the reverse situation.
Augustine said, "You [Lord God] have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you."10
Perhaps that is why a well-known Canadian broadcaster who once claimed to be a Christian and then renounced his faith was asked in his latter years what he thought of Jesus. "I miss him," he said. "I miss him."
Legitimate Expressions, Yet Unfulfilled Until now we have been reflecting on illegitimate expressions of sexual desire. But there are many who yearn for
legitimate sexual expression in marriage, and it has been denied to them. They are not wrestling against unsanctioned passions; rather, they deal with the natural God-given longing for touch and intimacy—a longing that remains unmet because they have not found that soul mate in life and face each day without the intimate touch that is part of marriage. This kind of longing, though often borne gracefully in silence, carries with it a deep sense of loss. A similar yet distinctive feeling is often present in a couple that longs to have a child but cannot have one, or in a marriage relationship where one partner has experienced a physical affliction that makes sexual love impossible.
I readily concede this is not my area of expertise, but I would be remiss if I did not at least seek to provide some helpful reflections. The simplest—almost escapist—answer is the possibility that this person is better off unmarried. I know that to most people in this situation, this seems like a nonanswer, a cop-out. But it also may be true. Let me use an illustration to contrast their situation with a hypothetical scenario that could have been painful.
Some years ago, I remember sitting in a plane for hours, waiting for a snowstorm to pass before we could take off.
Passengers started to complain and to get restless and even a bit unruly. Finally the captain's voice came over the public address system, saying, "Ladies and gentlemen, would you rather be down here wishing you were up there or up there wishing you were down here?" Suddenly everyone became more relaxed and waited out the storm patiently.
It may be that for some, the experience of marriage has been so painful that they would find themselves advising a single person that it is better to have not loved than to have
loved and been betrayed. There is certainly some truth to that.
But it doesn't alleviate the pain of being denied the legitimate sexual expression of love, and the question remains: How does one deal with such legitimate longings that are unfulfilled?
The story of God's plan for marriage is introduced by God's own assessment that it is not good to be alone (Genesis
2:18). The complemen-tariness of man and woman in God's design is clear and unmistakable. The physical, emotional, and psychological makeup of men and women is quite distinctive.
This is not to say that one is better than the other—smarter, emotionally stronger—but that by design, each is brought to their sublime distinction and greatest potential by the other, with womanhood drawing out the strength of manhood, manhood drawing out the charm of womanhood. Men and women each have a unique touch and desire to bring to their mutual relationship.
In the days of their pristine relationship before the fall, Adam and Eve were both unclothed. There was no sense of shame but a sense of sacred expression. Then they rejected
God's decrees as the desire for autonomy overrode God's warnings of its ramifications. They experienced shame for the first time, in response to a violation not of their marriage relationship but of God's authority. The incredible thing seldom expressed in this context is that by their rejection of God's law in their quest for autonomy, the very design of marriage was thwarted, and autonomy became an enslavement to the wrong desires.
So let us look at what is essential to marriage. In marriage, the most important things that are surrendered are autonomy and the isolation of fulfillment. This new relationship of two becoming one is no longer defined by what I want but what we
want; it is no longer what is good for me but what is good for us. There is submission to one another and a lack of embarrassment with the unclad body, because it symbolizes that there is nothing between the husband and wife, nothing
"hidden"—that there is, rather, total acceptance of each by the other. Inherent in the desire for each other is an unbreakable commitment to each other. You simply cannot have the love of the other without your commitment to the other. And this surrender of autonomy is accompanied by the exclusive expression of sensual touch.
But the price of rejecting God's law is that marriage is no longer the beautiful thing it had been intended to be. Instead, it has become a continual struggle of surrender, of trying to win the love of the one to whom that promise has been made. The direct result of throwing aside God's way in favor of our own way is that as a culture we are exactly the opposite of what marriage requires, if it is to be a perpetual state of delight as God intended. The sacrificing of autonomy and the exclusivity of commitment are the missing elements in human nature in virtually every area in which it is required for the sake of attaining something greater. Marriage has been redefined because God's place has been redefined. Commitment in marriage has suffered because our commitments to God have suffered. Marriage has become hard work, and that which has the potential to bring the greatest joy in life too often brings the greatest pain.
The church is supposed to be the bride of Christ. One look at that bride today and we have a glimpse at how the Lord himself grieves. Great change must take place if the bride is to be presented to her heavenly Bridegroom without spot or wrinkle and consummately surrendered to him.
In the old English usage, the marriage vow made by each partner was "With my body, I thee worship." In the temptation encounter between Jesus and Satan, Satan offered Jesus all the kingdoms of the world if Jesus would bow down and worship him (Matthew 4:8 – 9). If marital consummation is an act of worship, and if the ultimate seduction is false worship, I would dare suggest that those who are longing for a relationship of touch and intimacy—that lesser act of worship which is marriage—seek the greater form of worship until the day they can legitimately participate in sexual love. Perhaps this is why the women who came to Jesus with shattered marriages or profane entanglements fell at his feet to worship him. Their bodies had experienced the betrayal of false worship, and now they brought their temples in true worship before the living
God.
There is no answer I can give to those who find themselves in this position that will take away their longing for legitimate sexual expression. But maybe, just maybe, the greater pursuit will be devoting oneself to the worship of our Lord in spirit and in truth while not totally abandoning the hope that the temple of earthly habitation will one day experience this lesser worship. Until then, one can be sure that, though marriage offers the promise and potential of unparalleled bliss and fulfillment this side of heaven, the promises and dues of a sacred marriage are so immense and encompassing that they are hard to fulfill in completeness, and there are many marriages that should not have taken place.
Denied the full touch of exclusive love, these who live with disappointment in this area may well be the most Christlike people in the world today, people who desire, yet do not see immediate fulfillment but who know the touch of the Master as
they, with him, await the consummation at the marriage supper of the Lamb. More than anyone else, he understands the longing that is as yet unrequited. He must hold very dear those who grieve as he does, enduring the present sense of being incomplete in anticipation of the greater day of being totally fulfilled in his presence.
We may think that Christianity has disappointed us by making us wish we could feel God's touch or presence when we need it. We may be disappointed when we want to have what is not ours to have. But the reality is that the hands of God touch us through the lives of others he has made for that purpose, and the touch of God cautions us not to profane that which God has made sacred.
In Psalm 119:96, the psalmist says something quite profound: "To all perfection I see a limit; but your commands are boundless." At first reading, one might think it should be reversed—that to all laws there is a limit and that perfection is boundless. But a true understanding of the words of the psalmist reveals that when I do things God's way, even when it is hard, the delight I receive in return is limitless. When I do things my way, I exhaust pleasure very quickly. It is not that Christianity has failed to teach me how to delight in God's presence; it is that I have failed by seeking pleasure through godless ways or by resisting God's provision for me because it is not what I want.
C. S. Lewis's comment is appropriate: "You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body."11
Ponder that.