Where It All Began

Meditation For the Lord's Day

We have been working through a most remarkable book.  Written by Alex Motyer, it is entitled, Look to the Rock: An Old Testament Background to our Understanding of Christ (Intervarsity Press, 1996).  It is full of profound observations.  Here is one of them:

In . . . Genesis 3:9, 10 there is the matter of a bad conscience.  We are not told how the man and the woman greeted the Lord's earlier visits to them.  However, the air of easy delight that breathes through the narrative in Genesis 2 suggests that, when God spoke to the man about his place in the Garden and the law under which he was to live, and when he shared with the man and woman the divine ideal of marriage, they stood in his presence with open minded pleasure. 

Now, however, that fear of God which is henceforth to mark human reactions to his appearing--that moral fear which cries out 'I have seen him; I will die'--has entered the world.  Never again can humans stand unafraid before God.  Yet it is not the awesomeness of his presence that warned the first couple of this, but the inner voice of conscience: it was now natural for them to be afraid of God. 

Genesis 3: 7-10 lays the groundwork for all human ills in a fallen world; we are dislocated within ourselves, dislocated from each other, dislocated from God.  Personal fragmentation, social tension and spiritual alienation are now the parameters of life upon earth. ( p.119)

Daily Meditation

Original Sin: Man V. God

C. S. Lewis

Traditional doctrine points to a sin against God, an act of disobedience, not a sin against the neighbour. And certainly, if we are to hold the doctrine of the Fall in any real sense, we must look for the great sin on a deeper and more timeless level than that of social morality.

This sin has been described by Saint Augustine as the result of Pride, of the movement whereby a creature (that is, an essentially dependent being whose principle of existence lies not in itself but in another) tries to set up on its own, to exist for itself. Such a sin requires no complex social conditions, no extended experience, no great intellectual development. From the moment a creature becomes aware of God as God and of itself as self, the terrible alternative of choosing God or self for the centre is opened to it. This sin is committed daily by young children and ignorant peasants as well as by sophisticated persons, by solitaries no less than by those who live in society: it is the fall in every individual life, and in each day of each individual life, the basic sin behind all particular sins: at this very moment you and I are either committing it, or about to commit it, or repenting it.

From The Problem of Pain
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis The Problem of Pain. Copyright © 1940, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright restored © 1996 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

The Great Lie

Believing Your Own Press . . . Or Not

What did the Enlightenment gurus really believe about human nature?  Remember that the philosophes of the period had faces set like flint against religion in general and Christianity in particular.  Virtually all that was evil in the world, they argued, could be traced back to religious superstition.  "Enlightenment" meant casting off the darkness inflicted upon to the West by the Church.  

But what would replace the Ten Commandments?  No problems at all.  Get rid of religion and mankind would return to his natural state of moral, spiritual, and intellectual innocence.  J. H. Huizinga summarises the Enlightenment world view:

Utopian Madness

Verging On Insanity

The old saw about the genie being let out of the bottle has it that once out, the genie can't be returned; it remains wildly uncontrollable.  Once out, bad consequences follow.  

There is a strong body of evidence to demonstrate that "assisted suicide", when legalised, is just such a genie.  Now, of course, nations that make assisted suicide legal always comfort themselves with the platitude that their particular version will not be misused by the unscrupulous.  After all, the fomenters and the legislators mean well.  They are only thinking kindly of the person suffering as they die.  Their version of assisted suicide is a law of love, dripping with compassion and pity.

But these folk are wilfully naive.  They do not operate on the premise that "the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked", but rather its opposite: viz, "the heart is truthful above all things and comprehensively righteous."  Given the supposed universal righteousness of men, of course it's reasonable to expect everyone will use a law permitting assisted suicides for the sole and only purpose for which it was intended, which was to reduce the suffering of the dying.

But which premise about men is true?

Decay and Rot Is A Perpetual Norm

A Perpetual Fifth Column

It has been said that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.  Why?  The presumption behind the adage is that men are not just corruptible, which alone would be sufficient reason for eternal vigilance, but that men are prone to corruption.  Given half a chance the ever nascent spectre of the Lord of the Flies emerges from a putrescent carcass.  We must needs be vigilant precisely because the risk of tyranny is real. 

Not that this should surprise us.  All Nature is in decay in one way or the other.  Steel rusts.  Foundations rot.  Rivers flood.  Species die out.  It's no surprise, therefore, that the human species would be prone to decay and retrogression.  It's what made the Cold War a very real threat.

G. K Chesterton takes this a stage further.  He suggests that the threat to human liberty is that liberty itself allows--even promotes--decay and rot from within.  A previous generation's glory becomes the downfall of the next.  Our glory becomes our next curse.  It is for this reason that eternal vigilance is required.  He cites some historical examples of liberties producing tyrannies in fast order:

Too Right!

I Was Born This Way

One of the weasel words employed by homosexual apologists is that for some, same sex attraction is "natural".  By which is meant that some people are born to be homosexuals; they are wired that way.  To which we respond with a firm affirmation: of course homosexuals are wired to be homosexuals.  For them it is natural.  When they enter into homosexual thought, desires, social patterns, expectations, activity, and even more permanent relationships they are acting naturally, according to their natural inclinations and desires.

That's precisely what the Apostle Paul means when he says, "The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned."  The natural person has his natural heart set on things which are opposed to the Spirit of God.

Consider the person who seeks justifies his adulterous lechery as he leers at others by claiming it is natural.  Our Lord, recognizing the depravity that either rules or insinuates itself into every human heart, condemned such desires, their very naturalness notwithstanding:

But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. (Matthew 5:28)

Woe to him who would retort:  "How dare Christ criticise or condemn the natural desires with which I was born.  I have been wired this way.  It is natural.  It is not just harmful, but positively evil to require me to deny who I am."

Arrogance and Irrelevance

Born That Way

It never ceases to surprise how many Unbelievers fail to understand Christians and the Christian faith.  Clearly there are exceptions--some signal and helpful.  But most Unbelievers cannot escape the cocoon of their own Unbelieving perspectives.  When they confront Christians their arguments amount to a bewildered and annoyed "why can't you think and act like everyone else--that is, like us"?

Why indeed?  Homosexuality right now is a touchstone for highlighting the ignorance of Unbelief when it comes to the Christian position, doctrine, and teaching on homosexuality, in particular and sexual sin, in general.  Unbelievers almost universally assert that homosexuality is genetic: people cannot help be what they are born to be.  To oppose or resist homosexuality is as foolish and blind as opposing blue eyes or red hair.  They cannot conceive why Christians do not grant this.  They are take offence at Christians because they refuse to think in the categories and gratuitous assumptions of Unbelief.  A most bizarre situation.

We will attempt a Christian reply to such nonsense shortly, but firstly, here is an example of that which we speak.  The Guardian, ever a champion of Unbelief, carries a column by Peter Omerod on why discrimination against "Christian homosexuals" must stop!

Waking the Dead

I . . . Found Myself a Christian

The name of one Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad (August 12, 1891 – April 9, 1953) lies in obscurity today.  The reasons are not hard to find.  Back in the day--the "day" of the twilight years between World Wars I and II--Joad was active in prosecuting socialist, pacifist, and eugenics causes.  He was a member of the intellectual elite in Britain that took the perfectibility of man seriously.  At the height of his public popularity he was as famous as George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell.

But, he had one great lacunae--towards the end of his life he became a Christian. To an Unbelieving  generation this was unforgivable.  That one of their heroes, an uberman, should defalcate to the other side was an inexcusable betrayal.  Hence Joad now lies in obscurity.  Who ever now would mention him alongside Shaw or Russell?

Christians, however, should never forget such things.