Forgiving A Drunk Driver (August 28, 2005)

Two weeks ago a drunk driver careened down the street where I live, knocking down two curbside mailboxes (including mine) before plowing across my lawn and into the attached garage of my next-door neighbor. Then she backed up and sped off. Thankfully another neighbor gave chase and got her license plate number, and the police caught her shortly afterward. This happened about 5 in the afternoon.

My initial reaction was that I wanted her to spend a good long time in jail. Not because I lost a mailbox but because I really, really hate drunk drivers. They kill and paralyze and leave human vegetables in their wake. (I'm sure everyone reading this page knows at least a "friend of a friend" who is now dead or disabled due to some idiot's drunkenness.) I can sympathize with a wretched soul who just wants to drown his sorrows in booze for a bit (Proverbs 31:6: "Give wine...to those who are deep distress"), but if a guy drinks and then beats his wife, or drinks and then turns his vehicle into a deadly weapon, well then he can just rot in sewage-filled dungeon for all I care. Serves him right.

But I am a Christian and I am supposed to forgive, so after I settled down and thought about it I wrote the lady a letter saying I'd forgive her for destroying my mailbox, and pay for it myself, as long as she wrote me a letter of apology and promised to go to a church on Sunday. "What you did was dangerous and if there were any kids playing on that sidewalk you could have killed them," I wrote. "It is important for you to confess to God and stop drinking and get your life together." And I told her my prayers were with her and that I had many good friends who had stopped drinking and turned their lives around and found God.

Thank God she wrote back and sincerely apologized for her actions, and said she would go to (I think it's a Catholic) church that she and her family attend every Sunday. I wrote back saying the mailbox was all forgotten and I wished her and her family well, and that I'd keep praying for them.

We preachers like to draw lessons from everything (it's a habit, as well as a calling and a duty), so here are a few from my mailbox incident.

(1) We're supposed to forgive, but full forgiveness is conditional upon confession and repentance. If the mailbox mauler had not apologized, I would have filed the insurance claim and offered no more grace. Though our forgiveness should be immediate and aggressive and bounteous, it comes attached with a string of accountability that insists on penitence. My sister, for example, graciously forgave the young man who murdered her son (he wept in court and apologized in
person), but she has not forgiven the foul adulterous son of hell who abandoned her after 25 years of marriage, and who remains the world's biggest jerk. Her attitude is exactly as it should be.

(2) We can only forgive that over which we have jurisdiction. I can't forgive that lady for taking out my neighbor's mailbox or for damaging my other neighbor's garage. And she is still answerable to the law for multiple infractions. But I can forgive her for the small part of sin concerning which I was a victim. If I went beyond that (as Jesus did when he forgave people the sins they had committed against others), I'd be claiming to be God. See Mark 2:5-7. I think about this whenever I am asked to "forgive" someone who has done wrong but who has not really wronged me. The answer is, "I can't. It would not be right. I’m not God.”

(3) Finally, and trivially, try not to run over a pastor's mailbox. You might get forgiven, but you'll probably wind up as fodder for his sermon illustrations and "Pastor's Page" columns. That could be embarrassing.

When To Give Up (August 21, 2005)

When does the virtue of steadfast perseverance become the vice of fatal stubbornness?

Perseverance is a virtue, generally. God has put it in our hearts to admire those who stick it out in the face of adversity and refuse to give up. We cheer Winston Churchill's exhortation to students at the Harrow School in 1941: "Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never--in nothing, great or small, large or petty--never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy."

Never?

Jesus recommended yielding to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy when he said that if you've got 10,000 men and your opponent has 20,000, seek peace (Luke 14:31-32). That's conditional surrender.

He commanded his disciples to give up preaching the gospel when they encountered hostility: "When you are persecuted in one place, flee to another" (Matthew 10:23).

He commanded his followers to give up on people who continually rejected the grace of church discipline: "Treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector" (Matthew 18:17).

And the Apostle Paul commanded giving up on a marriage when an unbeliever abandons the Christian partner: "If the unbeliever leaves, let him do so" - 1 Corinthians 7:15 (The Greek verb is imperative - it is literally a command to let go.)

So not all perseverance is good - not even perseverance in a self-denying cause. Perseverance that results in disobedience to God's Word is simple stubbornness, and must not be allowed to flaunt itself as virtue.

But perseverance that is neither disobedient nor foolish remains a worthy goal. I have been asked once or twice if, because of grave family sorrow, I would like to take a leave of absence from (temporarily give up on?) the ministry. It is a fair question, but my answer (which I hope springs from perseverance rather than stubbornness) is, "Absolutely not." I am commissioned by God to peach the Word "in season and out of season" (2 Timothy 4:2) - and though now the season is one of hurricanes, my house should be able to stand if it is built on the rock and made of stone. How dare I flee inland now? What kind of testimony would that be? If ever there were an hour to stand my ground, this is it.

At the same time, I acknowledge that "standing one's ground" is only good when God commands it. May God give all of us the grace to persevere in that to which he calls us - and the wisdom to know when we are merely behaving like stubborn fools.

Do We Always Benefit From Suffering? (August 14, 2005)

Do all bad circumstances work out for our personal good?

Some Bible verses lead Christians to believe so. St. James writes, "Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything" (James 1:2-4). So trials help us to persevere and be mature. St. Paul writes, "We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose" (Romans 8:28). My mother always insisted, rightly, that "the good" of Romans 8:28 is defined in the next verse, "being conformed to the likeness of his Son." So in all circumstances, even bad ones, God does the good work of making those who love him to be more like Jesus.

I believe this. One qualification I would like to make explicit, however, is that it is not always our personal good that our trials and woes are bringing about. Maybe our bad circumstances are chiefly benefiting someone else.

After Joseph was nearly killed by his brothers, sold into slavery in Egypt, falsely accused of attempted rape and thrown into prison, he met up years later with these same brothers who had tried to ruin his life. By then Joseph had recovered, and, working as Pharaoh's right-hand man, administered a government food program during years of drought. He spoke graciously to his bad brothers, saying, "You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives" (Genesis 50:20). It is fitting that Joseph did not say, "God intended it for my good - now I'm rich and powerful because of what you did to me." That part seemed incidental. The main thing was that through the injustice he had experienced, starvation of the masses had been prevented.

Someday you may go through something profoundly unpleasant and it will be hard to conceive how it could ever be good for you - even in some ultimate, eternal sense. Let me encourage you to remember then that the good things that God is accomplishing in the world are not all about you. Your woes may leave you devastated, but still benefit other people in ways you could never imagine.

Missionaries Jim and Angela Beise are raising a severely handicapped child, Michael, along with their three "normal" children. But their three other children are not normal at all - they're exceptional. Angela writes, "My children are among the most unselfish people I have ever known. Brian, 19, Melissa, 17, and Rachel, 13, have made
sacrifices, too many and too big to count, for their disabled sibling. One would think that this would have made them bitter and discontented. Amazingly, it has done exactly the opposite. They are thankful, giving, and tolerant to difficult and unlovely people."

I do not know what good things God is doing in the soul of handicapped Michael. But I'll take his mother's word for it that through Michael's limitations God is perfecting his siblings. It works that way sometimes. Trials and sorrows and limitations that seem to do us no good at all might be God's perfect tools to do great good in others. We can thank him for that.

“He Probably Deserved It” (August 7, 2005)

Being a Christian involves abandoning what I call the "justice instinct."

The justice instinct is the assumption that life is ultimately, cosmically fair. It is reflected in the speeches of Job's friends, who knew that somehow Job had to be responsible for the horrors visited upon him. It is seen in the question of the disciples concerning a blind man: "Who sinned, this man or his parents?" (John 9:2). It is seen in the attitude of the crowd in Luke 13:2-4 that believed that victims of disaster and slaughter must have been "worse sinners than others." It is seen in the reasoning of Maltese islanders, who briefly thought that the Apostle Paul was a murderer because a snake bit him. (They changed their minds when he lived - Acts 28:3-6.) It is seen in the rapture of Captain and Maria Von Trapp, who in The Sound of Music sing to each other, "Somewhere in my youth, or childhood, I must have done something good." It is touted in the Buddhist doctrine of karma, which extends Newton's third law of motion to the moral realm: "Every (good, bad) action has an equal and opposite (compensatory, punitive) reaction." In Buddhism you get what you deserve. Even the Dalai Lama has credited his personal happiness to the karma he has accumulated through good deeds.

The justice instinct is a terrible mistake and must be renounced, but I think I can see why it has universal appeal. First, because it is just too painful to acknowledge that life is unfair. We feel no grief when a villain dies, but we feel terrible when a good man does. So our minds work hard to reduce the sorrow, and one method of anesthetizing the mental pain is simply to assume that the sufferer got what he deserved.

A second reason the justice instinct appeals to us arises from the moral intuition God has placed in our hearts that we ourselves ought to be fair. We should judge justly, rewarding good and punishing evil. But many make a logical jump and assume that the way we should behave correlates directly to way Nature itself in fact behaves. Such thinking either projects our morality onto Nature, which is silly, or projects Nature's cruelty onto our morals, which is evil. In the former, we dupe ourselves into thinking that Nature is as pleasant and as kind as we ought to be. (It isn't; as Tennyson noted long ago, Nature is "red in tooth and claw.") In the latter, we find Nazis concluding that since Nature rewards the fit and weeds out the feeble, it is our moral duty to give allegiance to powerful tyrants while killing off the retarded and disabled.

However "natural" it might be to expect Nature to mirror our moral sense of fairness, a few moments' careful reflection should be enough to show that it does not. Therefore, for truth's sake alone, we must discard the justice instinct and actively resist it. But let me suggest a few more motives, beyond mere Reason, for getting rid of it.

1) The justice instinct kills compassion. It mutes mercy by permitting the strong to think, "That sufferer must be getting what he deserves (though perhaps I don't know exactly what he did to deserve it). Who am I to oppose the faultless judgment of the cosmos?"

2) The justice instinct creates false guilt. The sufferer compounds his own misery by succumbing to Satan-inspired self-accusation, and perhaps is tempted to lie against the truth by confessing sins he is not guilty of.

3) The justice instinct encourages pride. When a man who has prospered attributes his good fortune not to God's grace but to some cosmic reward for goodness, then he is closer to the gates of hell than he is to the kingdom of heaven.

4) The justice instinct slams the door on the gospel of Jesus Christ. Something that has always made Christianity a "hard sell" is the fact that its hero was executed. If you assume universal fairness, then he must have done something terribly wrong to deserve death. But the Bible insists that he "knew no sin" (2 Corinthians 5:21); that he "committed no sin" (1 Peter 2:22); and that "in him is no sin" (1 John 3:5). Jews and Gentiles alike found the doctrine of crucified Perfection a contradiction in terms. It was a piece of foolishness, a stumbling block - who would ever dream of worshipping a God who gets crucified?

Only one who has disabled his justice instinct could manage to worship a crucified Lord. Those who persist in regarding present reality as "fair" will continue to stumble over the cross, and they will sin by judging people who are merely unlucky even as they praise people who are merely fortunate.