Is Christianity Too Narrow?

Is Christianity too narrow?

Yes. Christianity is much too narrow for most people.

I do not know if that is the expected answer for those who are participating in the Explore God program. Throughout the Chicago area preachers are considering 7 questions on consecutive weeks, and this is question number 4. There are program resources available for those who are preaching through this series. I made a decision, for better or for worse, not to consult them because it was important to me that this come straight from my heart and avoid all appearances of a canned presentation. Tomorrow I will go online and find out what other preachers are saying about this question. I am curious.

I know my answer is sobering and unsettling. But it is something that I see taught in Scripture explicitly again and again and again. Christianity is much too narrow for most people. I will outline five categories in which I find this to be the case.

One. It is too narrow for most rich people. Jesus said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” Of course that is an exaggeration, and a metaphor – but it is not meaningless. In the Bible, riches are a hindrance rather than a help toward membership in the realm of God toward which we are invited in Jesus Christ. The apostle Paul writes in 1 Timothy 6:9: “Those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.”

Of course it is not impossible for a rich person to be a saved Christian. It is just very difficult. Jesus said in Mark chapel 10:32, “How difficult it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” The next verse says that the disciples were amazed at his words. Maybe they were as amazed at his words as some of you are if you are hearing this for the first time. But there it is. The disciples were so floored by what Jesus said that he found it necessary to repeat himself. Here’s the text:

Mark 10:23-27: And Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How difficult it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” 24 And the disciples were amazed at his words. But Jesus said to them again, “Children, how difficult it is to enter the kingdom of God! 25 It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” 26 And they were exceedingly astonished, and said to him, “Then who can be saved?” 27 Jesus looked at them and said, “With man it is impossible, but not with God. For all things are possible with God.”

It is possible, but very difficult, for a rich person to be a true Christian. If you are rich, then for the love of God and the security of your soul, start being so generous with your wealth that you can no longer indulge yourself with needless luxuries. If you are not rich, do not envy rich people and do not long to be one of them. Most of those people are not disciples of Christ and have no share in his reign. Christianity is too narrow for most rich people.

Number 2: Christianity is too narrow for the proud.

The Bible says God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. It says that in James 4:6 and 1 Peter 5:5.

There is an experience that is common to many ministers or pastors. Because to some individuals we represent God, there can be a curious effect on their behavior when they discover our vocation. They start telling us their good deeds. One minister likened this to meeting somebody at a social function and discovering that the individual is a dentist. You say, “Oh you’re dentist. Very good. Well, I try to floss…”

It is comical of course when a person with a live conscience tries to persuade Reverend So-and-So that he or she is really a pretty good person. But on a more serious note, you hope that that attitude does not spring from a deeper and more diabolical pride that truly believes in one’s own goodness and is not afraid to tell God that.

In Luke 18 Jesus told the story of a man who went to the temple and told God how good he was. The man was careful to couch his boastfulness in the pious language of thanksgiving, but Jesus was not fooled by that. You know how some people will apologize for something, but do so in a way that really casts the blame on the victim? Well this man “thanked God” but did so in language that made it clear that he thought God should be thanking him. He said, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.”

Meanwhile the tax collector that the man referred to stood at a distance. He was too ashamed to approach. Jesus said that that man would not look heavenward, which was the custom when people prayed. Instead he looked down, beat his breast and said, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Jesus said that man went home justified. That man went home right with God - but not the man who bragged to God about his goodness. Then Jesus said, “All those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

I have noticed lately on social media a trend that I find problematic in this regard: people filming themselves doing good deeds. They will plant a camera at some spot or they will get a friend to hold the camera for them as they give a homeless man a shirt, or buy new a guitar for a street musician. They take a photo of the hundred dollar bill they just gave to a single mom waitress. Well. It is good to do good. And I suppose, generally speaking, it is better to film oneself doing good than to film oneself doing evil. But it is never good to fuel confidence and pride in one’s own goodness. That kind of blissful self-regard alienates you from God. Do not justify such self-promotion and self-aggrandizement with the convenient excuse, “This will inspire other people; I’m really doing it for their good.” Jesus said concerning people who call attention to their goodness that they already have their reward in full. He also said, “When you give, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.” Do not focus on your goodness. Do not set your eyes or the eyes of others on how wonderful you are being.

Christianity is not a place for people for people to celebrate their goodness but rather to repent of their badness. God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Christianity is too narrow for the proud.

Third, Christianity is too narrow for those who are only in it for the goodies.

My point here can perhaps best be expressed by what happens in John chapter 6. At the beginning of that chapter Jesus feels compassion for a crowd of people who have listened to him speak and are now getting hungry. He feeds them miraculously by multiplying two fish and five loaves that feeds 5,000 men plus women and children. The story of the feeding of the 5,000 is a famous miracle recorded in all four gospels - Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Less famous is what happens the very next day. The night following that feeding, Jesus and his disciples crossed over a lake, the Sea of Galilee. A huge crowd walked around the tip of the lake and met them on the other side.

Why did they follow him around the lake? Jesus told them why they did it in verse 26. He said you came here because “you ate the loaves of bread and had your fill.” They wanted him to do it again. They wanted another free meal.

Jesus did not give it to them. They were focusing on the wrong thing. He said in verse 27, “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you.” But they wouldn’t let it go. They came for a free meal, and one way or another they were going to get that free meal. "I mean for crying out loud, I skipped breakfast for this. What is Jesus good for if he’s only going to give us one free lunch? That’s it? No more? Well if that’s the way it is going to be, I'm out of here.” So they tried to goad him into doing it again with the most thinly veiled hint you have ever heard. In verses 30 and 31 they say, “What sign do you do, that we may see and believe you? What work do you perform? Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’” Hint hint.

They were saying, “Moses did it for 40 years. What about you? Let’s see you do that bread trick again.”

In the verses that follow, Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life.” If they were to believe in him and follow him, he would be their eternal nutrition - though on that particular day, they would have to go hungry, or perhaps go and buy their own food, or work for it.

The majority walked away. The great crowd evaporated. It narrowed down from thousands of people to just a handful. In verses 66 and 67 it says, "After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. So Jesus said to the twelve, 'Do you want to go away as well?'”

False Christians, as soon as they find out that they are not getting goodies, walk away from Jesus. The fact is, Christianity is too narrow for them.

If you go home and turn on your TV, you will find religious broadcasts by sons and daughters of hell, many of them millionaires, who make a point of tailoring their message to and extracting huge sums of money from the kind of people who walked away from Jesus in John chapter 6. That is, the people who came to Jesus merely for stuff. Food, healing, money, success, prosperity, blessing. “That’s it, that’s all I want. I want my best life now.”

Jesus preferred to have a small group of 12 who wanted him as their bread of life to having a throng of thousands who just wanted the stuff that his miraculous power could provide. Now that is a narrow subsection of the whole. When Jesus asked his small band of disciples if they wanted to leave also, Peter spoke for them and said, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.” So Christianity is narrow, too narrow for those who only want goodies - but it is not too narrow for those who believe that whether they eat today or not, Jesus is the Holy One of God, and he alone has the words of eternal life.

Fourth, Christianity is too narrow for those who will not have Jesus as their ultimate priority. In Luke 9, there is a quick series of three vignettes in which three people almost follow Jesus. They seem willing, as long as a few conditions are met. Perfectly reasonable conditions. But in each case, Jesus does not say, “Glad to have you aboard! I’ll see what I can do to accommodate you.” Instead he points out a competing interest that they have, and he demands total allegiance that supersedes all such competing claims.

I will read the passage and make a few comments. Luke 9:57-62:

As they were going along the road, someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” 58 And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” 59 To another he said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.” 60 And Jesus said to him, “Leave the dead to bury their own dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” 61 Yet another said, “I will follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” 62 Jesus said to him, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

Shocking. To the first man, Jesus says, “Foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” That is, even animals have homes, but I’m homeless. Are you willing to follow me even if it means you don’t know where you will sleep tonight? When push comes to shove, Jesus says, am I more important to you than a roof over your head? If you had to chose, which would it be?

For the next two individuals, it is important to understand the cultural context. One man asks permission to go home and bury his father. His father isn’t dead yet. He is saying "Let me take care of my dad until he’s dead and then I’ll be freed up to follow you." The next man says, “Let me first say farewell to those at my home.” Jesus does not forbid us to say goodbye to family members. I believe the man is saying, “Let me make sure it’s ok with my family. Family comes first, after all – Jesus, surely you understand that. But as soon as I run it by them, and they’re cool with it, I’m with you.”

Jesus won’t have it. He will not accept conditional disciples. There are people who seem ready to become Christians, but they come equipped with certain conditions. People who say, “Very well, I will follow Jesus as long as certain conditions are met. I need assurances of a roof over my head. I have certain obligations and dreams to fulfill and my Christianity can’t interfere with that. My family is important to me and they have to sign off on it, even if they don’t become Christians themselves. I will have to make sure I have their approval.”

When it comes to Christianity, it is important for you to understand that you are not in a position of power to lay down any terms or conditions. You have nothing that God wants. You cannot bargain with him. All you have are things he gave you in the first place. What you can do is surrender to him unconditionally, or you can walk away. Christianity is too narrow for any who will not surrender their lives to Jesus Christ unconditionally and acknowledge that he is top priority in all things.

Fifth, Christianity is too narrow for those who refuse to repent.

The first words of gospel preaching in the Bible are a call to repentance. If you want to be a Christian, if you are thinking about becoming a Christian, you are called to a lifetime of repentance, a lifetime of turning from sin. It will never end. Repentance is not something that you will do just one time and that’s it, you’re perfect and will never sin again. You may by God’s grace defeat alcoholism – praise God, you’re sober now. But there is still the porn habit to deal with. Or your viewing habits have been reformed, but you lie, and must learn to tell the truth even when it is to your disadvantage. Or you have become honest, but you’re mean-spirited and rude, and must learn kindness and goodwill. Or you’re so kind-hearted you wouldn’t hurt a flea, but you’re lazy and leave others to shoulder burdens that your irresponsibility has placed upon them. Or you don’t commit any particular crimes that wound people, but you leave undone a thousand good things that were in your power to accomplish.

As you get closer and closer to the light of Christ, those dark stains on your soul get revealed and you find more and more things that you need to repent of. This process in Scripture is sometimes referred to as being formed in the image of Christ. Galatians 4:19 the Apostle Paul writes, “My little children for whom I am again in the anguish of childbirth until Christ is formed in you!” And in Romans 8:29 he writes, "For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image his Son."

That is the goal, the hope, and the delight of every Christian – to be remade, reshaped, newly formed in the image of Jesus Christ. No matter how long it takes and no matter how painful it is. Christianity is too narrow for those who don’t want that and who make no effort to strive for it.

A number of times, in different sermons, I have alluded to a question that Stuart Briscoe asked a little girl: “If you had to choose, would you rather be happy, or healthy, or holy?” I keep coming back to that question. I ask it of myself. I have it mind to ask it of my grandchildren some day. They’re toddlers now. Maybe when they get older, and the occasion warrants, I would like to be able to ask them that, and see if perhaps a fire burns in their eyes, the desire for goodness, pure, firm, uncontaminated goodness – to have that, to be that – to have one’s evil and evil inclinations expunged. To be made clean, to be made good in the way that God desires us to be good.

That little girl answered Briscoe, “I know the answer is holy, but I’d really rather be happy.” It seems that she was part way there. Because at least she knew what the right answer was, the answer she would give if she were a better person. Perhaps she desires to desire to be holy.

For those who have no such desire, and no desire to desire it, Christianity is too narrow. Christianity does not allow space for continued, rebellious, defiant sin. Such people, according to 1 Corinthians 6, Galatians 5 and Ephesians 5, will not inherit the kingdom of God. Christianity does allow space for the heartbroken, grieving sinner who says, “God be merciful me, and by your grace remake me according to your will. And please keep doing that as long as it takes.”

One last thing. The most direct way to respond to the question “Is Christianity too narrow?” is simply to quote the words of Jesus in the passage in Matthew 7:13-14 where he frankly acknowledged it and explicitly taught that the way is narrow. He said,

“Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few."

Christianity is narrow. Jesus said so himself. But it is not too narrow for those who trust in him and turn their lives over to him. Though the way is narrow, Jesus also said, “I am the way, and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me.”

Believe in Jesus Christ, and for you the way will not be too narrow. Let us pray.

Father in heaven, I thank you for the great promise of Holy Scripture that “the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to strengthen to those whose heart is blameless toward him.” I pray on behalf of those like myself who need more grace than that, for we cannot say that our hearts are blameless. I pray for those of us who find ourselves wanting the delights of your providence but not the repentance of our sin, who dare to lay down conditions upon our discipleship, who reveal pride in our goodness but little shame over our sin. Grant to those who lack it faith in your Son Jesus Christ and an unquenchable desire to be conformed to his image. Thank you that Jesus came to call sinners like us to repentance and righteousness, and that he bore upon himself the curse of our sin so that by a miracle of grace we might be forgiven and cleansed. Amen.

Why Does God Allow Pain And Suffering?

Last week, about three hours after I finished my sermon, “Is there a God?” a 12-year-old daughter of a pastor dug her way into a snow bank about a half mile up the road from here. While she was playing in that improvised snow fort, it collapsed on her, and she died. As her parents worshipped God, he, unknown to them, was snuffing out the earthly life of their beloved daughter

When we consider the question, “Why does God allow pain and suffering?” we do so not merely as an academic question to satisfy our curiosity. We do so knowing what pain is, and we are aware that it surrounds us all the time - even if, in the present moment, we are not experiencing it ourselves. Therefore I believe that this subject must be approached with due gravity. There is a time to laugh, but this is not it. And I also believe there ought never be a spirit of contempt – something I have witnessed many times – a sneering, dismissive contempt for those who seek to come to terms with pain in light of deep questions about ultimate reality. Pain and grief are real, staggeringly real, and may God have mercy on our souls if our response to suffering involves anything less than sympathy, love, and the sharing of tears.

This question why God allows pain and suffering is often asked rhetorically by people who don’t believe in God. For them what lies behind the question is the assumption that if there were a God, he would not allow suffering. Since it exists, there can’t be a God.

This was at least part of the reasoning that led to the most famous deconversion of the 20th century, that of Charles Templeton. Templeton was a friend and colleague of Billy Graham. Like Graham he was a preacher who conducted evangelistic rallies in the 1940s and 50s. In the early 50s he hosted a religious television program. Then in 1957 he declared that he no longer believed in God. Later when asked about any pivotal moments in his deconversion he said, “I was reading LIFE magazine and there was a photograph in the magazine of a black woman in northern Africa and she was holding her dead baby in her hands and looking up to heaven. And I looked at it and I thought, ‘How could a loving God do this to this woman? How is it possible to believe that there is a loving or caring creator when all this woman needed was rain?’"

How does a Christian like me respond to that?

First of all let me tell you something I have noticed over the years concerning this objection to the possibility of there being a caring God in the light of such tragedies as the death of children. Again and again I have seen that these objections tend to come with greatest frequency, vehemence, and even anger not on the part of people who themselves suffered these horrors, but rather from people who, relatively speaking, have led pretty easy lives. Templeton himself is a good example. It wasn’t his child who died of starvation in an African famine. He had four children. I looked them up, and as far as I can tell they have had productive and prosperous lives.

It would have been interesting to ask the African mother of the dead baby if she believed in God. That I don’t know.

I have a friend, now retired, who grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in the 50s and 60s. In his neighborhood there were plenty of the older generation who were survivors of the Nazi holocaust. My friend noticed something extraordinary. He said, as a rule, generally speaking, the generation that experienced the holocaust believed in God. But the next generation, growing up comfortably in an American suburb with all their needs met and having no fear of Nazis – they were the ones where you found atheists saying, “How can there be a God – look at the holocaust!”

It is simply not the case that those who have suffered much are more likely to disbelieve in God than those who have suffered little. If there is a correlation, it runs the other way.

When the great tsunami hit the shores of southeast Asia on December 26, 2004, killing hundreds of thousands of people, columnist Eric Zorn wrote an essay that was unmistakably angry in tone and clearly contemptuous of those who exercised religious faith despite such a tragedy. Zorn specifically vented his anger toward those who thanked God for their deliverance from the tragedy. He wrote, “I can’t see all those dead kids and not wonder about the prayers of their parents that went unanswered, the hopes shattered, the lives in ruins.” He attributed to Christians the belief that prayers for deliverance and thanksgiving for it “suggest that those who suffer have it coming – that God was insufficiently praised and begged on their behalf - and that those who thrive are singled out for divine favor.”

In that diatribe that appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Zorn did make a parenthetical acknowledgement that he at least was viewing this tragedy “from the safety and comfort of a desk nearly 9,000 miles away.”

I believe that there was great significance, more than Zorn himself seemed willing to admit, in the fact he was sitting comfortably at a desk 9,000 miles away, maybe sipping a cup of coffee, working in a nicely heated office, and going home to a good place with heat and air conditioning and a fully stocked refrigerator, having access to superb health care whenever he might need it, and living out his days in the wealthiest and most comfortable nation that ever existed – and from that vantage point telling people How dare you trust in God, and pray to him and thank him – just look at all those poor suffering souls in Indonesia!

There is what I regard to be an echo of an insidious dynamic that we would do well to be aware of. At the close of my last sermon on the existence of God I talked about the natural and delightful urge to give thanks, to give thanks to a Personal Being for the joys and reliefs that we experience. That is an instinct that can be suppressed and has been suppressed successfully by those who have convinced themselves that there is no God to thank. But having suppressed thanksgiving in themselves, many such people will not rest until they have suppressed it in others too – to the point where your joyful thanks will be upsetting to them. They will find it unnerving and offensive. They may even attack it, try to make you feel guilty about it, and cloak their hostility in the garb of righteousness and moral indignation. “How dare you thank God for healthy children when other people’s children have died!”

Some time ago I saw a posting by an anti-religious zealot, a 3-panel poster. First panel, a pop star with the caption, “Thank you God for helping me win this Grammy award.” 2nd panel: a football player in the end zone with the caption “Thank you God for helping me score this touchdown.” Third panel, a starving African child. No caption. The message was, stop thanking God for these trivial things when other people lack basic necessities. That may sound like a noble sentiment, but please see where it leads. The ultimate goal is to ensure that no thanks be given for anything, ever. How can you thank God for healthy children when others’ children have died? How can you thank God for food when others starve? Do not thank God for sight, because some people are blind. Do not thank him for two good legs, because some people are paralyzed. And so on and so on till every last vestige of healthy, joyous thanks has been shut down, removed from the human soul, and we are all appropriately bitter on one another’s behalf.

I beg you not to be bullied by righteous unbelievers into forsaking the joys of a thankful spirit – especially when that metaphysical bullying comes from people who can be found on their vacations sipping mai tais on a beach in Hawaii and saying “Oh those poor starving Africans, how can anyone believe in God?”

Well, Martin Rinkhart believed in God, and he conducted 4000 funerals, including that of his wife, when plague struck his town of Eilenburg in 1637. Martin Rinkhart is the author of the hymn Now Thank We All Our God:

Now thank we all our God
With heart and hands and voices
Who wondrous things hath done,
In whom His world rejoices
Who from our mothers' arms
Hath blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love
And still is ours today

I don’t know how social relationships work in heaven. But I would count it an extraordinary privilege if I got a chance to look up and meet with Martin Rinkhart.

Of course the question still remains, “Why do Africans starve and local children die while playing in a snow fort?”

I don’t know – I cannot give a complete answer. If I could give a complete answer I’d be God. But the fact that I cannot give a complete answer does not mean that I cannot give a partial answer. There are a few things that I do know. There are some things relevant to this question that I can offer to seekers after God.

The first is to clear up an egregious misunderstanding, an absolute howler of a misapprehension concerning what the Christian faith teaches. In the column I referred to earlier Eric Zorn complained that Christian practice suggests that those who suffer have it coming and that those who thrive are singled out for divine favor. That is just not a Christian belief. In fact, frankly, it’s picking on the wrong religion. Christianity does not teach a simple karmic balance of good behavior rewarded and evil behavior punished. There is a different religion for that. When the Dalai Lama was asked the provocative question, “Do you thank the Buddha for the good things in your life?” he said this:

Frankly speaking, my own happiness is mainly due to my own good karma. It is a fundamental Buddhist belief that my own suffering is due to my mistakes. If some good things happen, that is mainly due to my own good actions, not something related to a direct connection with Buddha.

Now I have nothing against the Dalai Lama personally. He seems like a very nice smiling man. I do find appalling what he calls the fundamental Buddhist belief that one’s suffering is due to one’s own mistakes, and that when good things happen, that is mainly due to our own good actions. I am not a Buddhist, I am a Christian. And as a Christian I feel the full weight of the Bible’s words in Ecclesiastes 8:14 which speak of “the righteous who get what the wicked deserve, and the wicked who get what the righteous deserve.” That is what happens sometimes. In fact the primary tangible symbol of my faith is a cross - A Roman cross, an instrument of execution - where the only perfect human being who ever lived was tortured to death. The righteous one got what the wicked deserved. And in a mystery of unfathomable consequence that causes me to worship God, by that same cross, a wicked one, me, gets what the Righteous One deserves: eternal communion and fellowship with God.

It is frustrating to the point of exasperation when a fallacy that explicitly lies at the heart of another faith tradition gets attributed to Christianity, when Christianity repudiates it with wonder and awe and worship every time we gaze upon the cross.

Secondly: we must not assume that we know everything.

Part of the message of the book of Job is that our scope is limited, we cannot see things from God’s perspective, and we ought not claim to know what we can’t know. Perhaps an analogy will help.

You see a little girl, four years old, playing by herself. A full-grown man, with no provocation that you can see, appears suddenly, picks her up and tosses her violently, causing her to scream out, and become bruised when she falls to the ground. What do you conclude? The man is a monster, a psychopath perhaps. Someone rescue that poor little girl from that beast.

But you have only watched five seconds of an event through a narrow telescopic lens. What you did not see is that the girl was playing on a train track and a locomotive was bearing down on her. The man was rescuing her. Here’s something else you did not see – the aftermath when the train hit him rather than her. And he knew that the only way he could save her was by sacrificing himself. The man you saw was not a monster but the most courageous and godly man you ever would have known.

When Charles Templeton looked at a photograph of a dead baby and a despairing mother and concluded there was no God he had to assume that he had enough information surrounding that event to justify that conclusion. And that is assuming more than we can possibly know. For example Templeton had to assume that the child was not in heaven in the presence of God, perhaps, by now, joined by his mother in raptures of eternal delight. Templeton had to assume that that child, had he lived and grown, would not have become an abuser of women and a murderer. He had to assume that that photograph would not inspire countless acts of selfless giving and charity on the part of loving individuals who made better use of their lives than writing paperback thrillers of the sort Templeton eventually produced.

There is a vast amount of human presumption that is built into the conclusion that there can be no just and caring God when we have barely glimpsed a fleeting moment of time through the keyhole of limited perception. We do not see the bigger picture, and we cannot claim that we see it all. That would arrogant. Jesus once told a story – I think it’s a parable, but I'm not sure – of a fabulously rich man and a homeless beggar whose needs the rich man ignored. The rich man goes to hell and the poor man to heaven and a dramatic interchange ensues. That’s the story that comes to my mind when I imagine the African woman in that LIFE Magazine photo, now united with her son in glory, considering Charles Templeton and asking, “You rejected God because of us?”

My third point I will put in the form of a question. Do you like virtue?

Of course. Who doesn’t like virtue?

Now try to imagine an existence without suffering. Are you able to do that? I think I can imagine that. In fact I believe that is the case in heaven, where every tear is wiped away. There is something that is also true about heaven. The Bible says that no unclean thing can enter it. Sin cannot dwell there. All rebellion against the will of God is banished from heaven. That is why we pray in the Lord’s Prayer, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Heaven is the realm where God’s will is always done, rather than resisted and chafed at and disregarded. All the sins that cling to you must be burned off before you will be a fit candidate for heaven. We are allowed, under the sovereignty of God, to contaminate the earth in all kinds of ways, but we will not be allowed to contaminate heaven, morally or otherwise.

The place where we live now is not heaven. It is contaminated by sin, our own sins, and, I believe, the sins of spirits who preceded us, namely demons. We live in a fallen world.

What does goodness look like in a fallen world as opposed to an unfallen paradise? Well, in a fallen world, goodness necessarily takes on certain forms – forms that delight us and inspire us and that direct our minds to understand the character of God. And goodness could never take on those forms if there were no suffering for it to respond to. That’s why I started out by asking if you like virtue. Yes? Well pick a virtue, and ask yourself if that virtue could exist at all in a world without sorrow.

Compassion, for example. If no one suffered, there could be no exercise of compassion. There would be no such thing as pity.

Courage. There is no such as thing as courage in a world where no danger is faced.

Perseverance. There is no perseverance in a world without obstacles.

Resilience. There is no resilience, no bouncing back in a world where there is no misfortune to bounce back from.

Patience. There is no patience in a world where no circumstances require it.

Sacrifice. There is no beauty of love in a person sacrificing his own pleasures, or even his life, for the sake of others.

Help. The wonderful virtue of help. This Wednesday one of you might find yourself standing outside in -20 temperatures helping a hapless stranger with jumper cables start his car with your healthy battery. I give thanks to God for that. And I also know that there would be no such thing as the virtue of help in a world where no one needed it.

It is a given that we sin. It is a given that our world is fallen into corruption. Given that fact, that we live in a fallen, sinful world, thank God that there is also suffering, because without that, then in addition to the world being sinful, it would be a place without compassion, courage, perseverance, resilience, patience, sacrifice, help, and a host of other virtues that delight the soul and direct the heart to worship God.

The Bible says in Hebrews 8:5 that Jesus learned obedience through what he suffered. Superficially that seems like a weird thing for the Bible to say, because many times the Bible insists that Jesus never sinned at all. "He committed no sin," "He knew no sin," "In him was no sin," etc. So how can a sinless person learn obedience? In this way. There are certain commandments that you will never obey until suffering gives you the opportunity to obey them. How do you bless someone who curses you if no one has ever cursed you? How do you pray for someone who despitefully uses you until someone despitefully uses you? Only when certain kinds of suffering happen can certain kinds of obedience follow. Even perfection has to learn that obedience in the school of suffering.

Fourth observation. Another question: Do people come to God apart from suffering? If they never suffered, would they look to God?

Most people have seen the Christmas classic It’s A Wonderful Life. This past week I re-watched on YouTube the clip of Jimmy Stewart at the point of suicidal despair, praying to God at Martini’s tavern. A perceptive playwright gave Jimmy Stewart’s character George Bailey these words to pray: “God, God. Dear Father in heaven. I’m not a praying man, but if you’re up there and you can hear me, show me the way. I’m at the end of my rope. Show me the way God.”

Very interesting prayer. He begins by saying, “I’m not praying man…”. Why not? Why hasn’t he been a praying man? If prayer is a good gift that God has ordained for our delight and his glory, why hasn't George Bailey been a praying man? Well because up to this point in his life he hasn’t felt the need to be. Life in Bedford Falls working at the Savings and Loan may not have been the life he dreamed of, but it’s not so bad. He has satisfaction and health and friends and enough to get by and he’s married to Donna Reed for Pete’s sake. It is not until everything falls apart that his eyes turn heavenward to the God who made him and loved him and created him for the purpose of delighting in him forever. It took a crisis of suffering to get him to think about God.

I know that’s a fictional story, but it’s pretty on target with regard to a theme that dominates many peoples’ lives – that of ignoring God completely until tragedy drives them to their knees.

Let me tell you a real story. In the spring of 1985 I worked a grunt job in a warehouse for minimum wage as I prepared for further schooling and missionary service. The working environment was not morally inspiring, and the talk in the breakroom was not edifying to the soul. And at one point I prayed, “Lord, if there are any Christians in this place, please help me to find them.” Then one day I came into the breakroom and I saw a Bible on the table. So I sat down next to it and waited to see who was reading a Bible on break. Turned it was a couple black guys doing a Bible study together. We shared our stories of how we became Christians.

One guy, soft-spoken, with a look of maturity and peace in his eyes, said that his son led him to Christ. His son was four years old at the time, and had an inoperable brain tumor that took his life. But the man told me that his son was so happy with Jesus that he would go up and down the halls of their apartment building singing songs of praise to Jesus, and that he wanted the inner life that his dying son had. I might wonder, “God, isn’t there an easier way to bring a man to Christ?” But I’m not God, and I don’t see the whole picture, and I do know that for many people it takes the severest of sufferings to unite their souls to God for their own eternal good.

Finally, remember this. Suffering is not something that takes place outside of God and is therefore something that he conceivably could be indifferent to. The Bible says that God has tasted of suffering himself. No other faith tradition - whether theistic or atheistic - can say that Ultimate Reality is a loving participant in our pain. But the Bible prophesied that Messiah would be a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Jesus fulfilled that. He wept. He cried out in anguish. He was put on a cross for our sake and our salvation. You can’t tell him he doesn’t know what suffering is.

In the wake of the devastating carnage of World War I a man named Edward Shilito wrote a poem “Jesus of the Scars” in which he imagined a kind of wound-based communication between the Lord Christ and ourselves. That poem ends with these words:

The other gods were strong; but thou wast weak;
They rode, but Thou didst stumble to a throne;
But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak,
And not a god has wounds, but Thou alone.

Let us pray. Heavenly Father, Wounded God. May our scars, and the scars of Jesus, point the way homeward to our eternal dwelling place with you where every tear will be wiped away. In Jesus' name, amen.

Is There A God?

Is there a God?

Yes, there is a God. But how do I know that? Why do I believe that? The vast majority of humanity has always believed in some kind of deity or deities. But the vast majority has been wrong about a lot of things. A few hundred years ago the majority believed that the sun, moon and stars revolved around the earth, and they were wrong. Truth is never decided by majority vote. And there has always been a persistent minority that has denied the existence of God, and sometimes those who belong to this group ask believers like me to justify our faith, and tell them why they should believe in God.

For some believers - not all, but some - it puts us in an awkward spot. Not because we find it difficult to believe in God, but because we find it impossible not to. I will give you a light-hearted analogy. There is a scene in the film Liar, Liar where a lawyer finds out cannot lie, and this threatens to ruin him professionally. So he tries really hard to tell the simplest lie possible. He holds up a blue pen and tries to say, “This pen is red.” Hilarity ensues when he cannot do it. His mouth won’t utter the words, and his hand won’t write the sentence. In fact his own hand attacks him and writes the word “blue” on his forehead.

It is kind of like that for me. I am unable to disbelieve the existence of God no matter how hard I try. Now I will say something that may disturb some of you. There are times when I feel like I would like to be an atheist, but I can’t, I literally can’t – I cannot deny what I know to be true.

And when I read the Bible, it seems to me that it is written by people who share this perspective. The writers of the Bible never try to prove God’s existence either to themselves or to others. Even when there are terrible challenges in their lives to the point of turning their world upside down, they fit those challenges into patterns of thought that include God. For example, when Naomi loses her husband and her two sons and she returns to Israel as a widowed, childless poverty-stricken refugee, she does not say, “I guess there’s no God after all,” but rather, “God has afflicted me. God has made my life bitter.” When Job loses everything, he does not wonder why he ever believed in God in the first place. Instead, he wonders why God is treating him that way. He questions God, and he may be tempted to curse God, but he never seems inclined to disbelieve in God.

The Bible’s perspective is reflected in Psalm 14:1: “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” And in Romans 1 the apostle Paul maintains that the eternal power and divine nature of God are discernible from the created order. And Paul does not present this as a conclusion that you might arrive at if you assume some doubtful things. Rather, he presents it self-evident – an obvious truth that people suppress by wickedness.

For someone like me who regards the existence of God as self-evident, there can admittedly be some disconnect with individuals who say, “I just don’t see what you see; I don’t feel what you feel.” So here’s what I can do for the sake of the skeptic who really wants to engage me on the question of God’s existence. First of all, I would tell that person frankly that he or she would be better served not by listening to me, but by reading and listening to people who once shared his or her perspective. I refer to former atheists like scholars C. S. Lewis and Jay Budziszewski, and on the more popular level, journalist Lee Strobel and criminologist J. Warner Wallace. These are thoughtful individuals who traveled the road from disbelief to belief in God, and they are a thousand times better equipped than I to make the case to a genuine skeptic. And I’ll go one step further. I believe there Is value in reading the works of those who made the opposite journey, from theism to atheism. Which is why I have no problem telling a genuine seeker to go ahead and read Charles Templeton, Bart Ehrman and Dan Everett, to cite a few. Go ahead and weigh in the balance of your mind the thought journeys of those came to believe in God as opposed to those who came to disbelieve in him. And then in addition to that, I would say that you would be very well served to learn biographical details of these individuals’ lives – details which seldom appear in their defenses of or attacks upon theistic faith. I will leave that deeply suggestive hint hanging in the air.

The next thing that I can do for the skeptic is to say this. I have found that if I begin with the assumption that there is a God, and then I think as hard as I can and draw out implications and logical consequences of that belief, I often arrive at mystery. That is, I come to certain things that I cannot fully explain, questions that I cannot answer, things about which I can speculate and say, “Maybe it’s like this, I’m not sure.” One such mystery is, “Why is there suffering?” We will look at that next week.

On the other hand, If I begin with the assumption that there is no God, and I think as hard as I can, then in several areas I arrive at something that is not mysterious but contradictory and nonsensical. I arrive not at something about which I have further questions and doubts, but at things which I know to be false. I land on garbage which I could not will myself to believe no matter how hard I tried and no matter how advantageous it would be for me to adopt.

I will outline for you 4 areas in which I find this to be the case. In all 4 areas I am breaking no new ground, but merely trying to express in a crude and abbreviated way thoughts that have been covered in greater and more compelling detail by souls worthier and minds more capable than my own.

Argument number 1 is from cosmology. The fundamental question of existence is why is there something rather than nothing. Why does anything exist - why is there a universe, or, as the case may be, a multiverse?

There have always been two answers. Either God made it, or it just exists. I don’t find alternatives to those two views worth considering. Under either view – “God made it” or “It’s just there” - something somehow has to be uncaused. That is, something, somewhere has no explanation for its origin or coming into being. He, she, or it is the ground at which we start. This truth is what makes atheist Richard Dawkins’ question, “If God made everything, who made God?” so jaw-droppingly stupid that it makes you wonder if that man has ever read a book or thought deeply about anything. I know that is a pejorative charge, but I stand by it. The old, old question “If God made everything who made God?” presupposes a God who can be made. And traditional monotheists have never believed in a made God. In fact, we have a word for made gods – they’re called idols. We don’t worship idols. The God of traditional theism is by definition unmade, eternal – he simply always has been. Traditional atheism has countered, “No, the universe is what is unmade, eternal, it simply always has been.” It’s a standoff. Theists cannot reasonably ask atheists, “Who made your eternal universe?” And atheists cannot reasonably ask theists, “Who made your eternal God?”

But the standard atheistic view of an eternal uncreated universe hit a snag about 90 years ago when astronomer Edwin Hubble proved to the satisfaction of all unprejudiced observers that the universe is expanding. Further work traced that expansion backward in time to a single point, infinitesimally small, 13.8 billion years ago, when all of the sudden, bang! We had a universe. It was no longer possible to claim that the universe that we live in is eternal – that it has just always been here. No, that is not the case. It definitely had a beginning.

That discovery was a profound blow to the theory that the universe, being eternal – like the God of the theists - required no explanation. Then further advances in physics and cosmology made the problem worse. Because bit by bit it was learned that certain universal constants have exactly the values they would require in order for stars to form and galaxies to exist – that is, in order for there to be a universe as we understand it. These constants include things like the expansion rate of the universe immediately following the Big bang. The mass of the electron. The mass of the proton. The speed of light. The strength of gravity. The strength of the strong and weak nuclear forces. Planck’s Constant. Crucially, none of these universal constants arise by the laws of physics – they are what they happen to be and conceivably could be otherwise. They have been compared by theists and atheists alike to settings on a dial that have to be zeroed in on exactly the right number for each of those 25 or so constants in order for atoms to cohere or for galaxies to form.

In 2012 physicist Brian Green gave a TED talk that you can watch on YouTube. In it he refers to just one of these physical constants, the amount of dark energy in the universe. There is a dramatic moment when he clicks a button and the number for the amount of dark energy appears on the screen expressed in what he calls the relevant units. That number is 122 zeroes followed by 138. And Greene, who is an atheist, talks about the problem of explaining that number. The problem is that if it’s a tiny bit bigger, then the universe expands too fast for stars to form. If it’s a tiny bit smaller, gravity collapses the Big Bang back on itself – and once again, stars don’t form. To put the problem crudely, “Who set the dial at zero zero zero (pretend I’ve just said 122 zeroes) 138?” And while you’re at it, answer that same question for the two dozen or so other dials that have the same issue. The dial for gravity, for example. This is not like picking a number between 1 and a 100 and happening to get it right. It’s a lot finer than that. The precision has been illustrated this way. Imagine a ruler the length of the observable universe. (Long ruler!). It is divided into one-inch segments. The gravity dial for our universe is set at one particular point, let’s say out by the Andromeda galaxy or something. Move that dial one inch in either direction and life as we know it would be impossible.

So atheist cosmology took a very hard hit in the 20th century when not only was our universe proven to be non-eternal, but it was also shown to be very very very finely calibrated to produce the matter and energy that we perceive. Some astrophysicists, unable to deny the implications, became believers, like Allan Sandage, who labored away at the task of determining the age of the universe. He became a Christian around the age of 56.

I believe it is fair to say that all astrophysicists, whether they were believers or not, were aware of the challenge to atheism presented by the evident fine-tuning of the universe. Astronomer Fred Hoyle, for example, famously said, “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with the physics as well as with chemistry and biology.” More recently physicist Neil Turok has said, revealingly, “I would say the whole goal of theoretical physics has been to see how much we can understand without invoking someone twiddling the dials.”

So is atheism dead in the water among the physicists and cosmologists who are aware of the mind-boggling improbability of the fine-tuning of our non-eternal universe? No, not by a long shot. There is now one and only one refuge in which a non-theistic understanding of our universe survives. And it is in the theoretical construct of a multiverse. The theory of cosmic inflation proposed by Alan Guth of MIT coupled with string theory allows for the possibility, theoretically, of a practically infinite number of universes emerging, according to the common analogy, like bubbles in a bathtub. We happen to live in one of those bubble universes, but there are countless others. And yes, in those other universes you will indeed have different values for gravity and the mass of electron, etc. But those universes for the most part don’t amount to anything because stars don’t form in them, or maybe even atoms don’t form in them. But the bubble universe which by chance had all the right constants is the one where we find ourselves.

Is there evidence for a multiverse? No, there is not. The evidence for a multiverse is zero, zilch, nada, nothing. If you don’t believe me, for God’s sake look it up. The empirical motivation for belief in a mulitverse is non-existent. Its sole motivating force comes from a need to account for the fine-tuning of the universal constants without recourse to a supernatural super-intellect. That is the evidence – the mere fact that mind-based fine-tuning is philosophically unacceptable.

Now let me surprise you. If you were to ask me which view of reality is likely to be true, the universe or the multiverse, my money is on the multiverse. It’s a speculation, I know, but I come to it not means of scientific evidence, for which there is none, but by means of a fanciful extension of the classic ontological argument for the existence of God. I won’t go into the ontological argument. But in it, God is defined or imagined as “a being greater than which none can be conceived.” Let’s go with that assumption. Can I imagine a greatest possible being? Yes, I suppose I can. Which being seems greater, one that creates a universe or one that creates an infinite number of universes? I’d go with the second option. That seems to be a bigger God. If upon getting to heaven I’m able to ask God, “How many universes did you make?” and he says, “Just one,” I think I’ll be a bit surprised. “Really, just one?” “Yes, just one.” “Oh ok, well, that’s your call, obviously.”

Here’s my point. Nothing for me crucially depends on whether there’s a universe or a multiverse. But for atheist physicists - like Brian Greene, Alan Guth, Lawrence Strauss, Leonard Susskind - they must believe in a multiverse, not because of any evidence (which remains nonexistent), but because it gives them the only possible hope they have to account for this universe’s origin and fine-tuning while maintaining their prior faith commitment to philosophical materialism.

Then there’s the kicker. For me, even this escape hatch for atheism in the form of multiverse theory does not fulfill its promise to provide room for materialism. Because instead of believing in an impossibly fine-tuned-though-random universe, you must believe in something arguably more amazing: an eternal universe generator spitting out universes of varying physical constants till it gets a useful one. That’s a complex machine. To me all that does is push the problem back. Cambridge Physicist John Polkinghorne put it mildly when he said, “I don’t say that the atheists are stupid. I think that theism provides a better explanation.”

Argument number 2. The existence of rationality.

Let me approach this argument this way. Suppose I am having a debate with an atheist. What is happening in that debate? It would seem that we are both giving reasons for our beliefs and trying to persuade the other that our thinking is valid and the other’s invalid. We are saying that our perception is the one that matches reality and that the other’s does not. Perhaps we try to prove the other’s premises invalid. Or perhaps we say, “No, the premises are fine, but your conclusion C does not follow from premises A and B.” In other words, we are thinking and expressing thoughts.

Now let us suppose that atheism is true. In atheism, what is a thought? Think as hard as you can about what a thought has to be in atheism. In atheism all you have are matter and energy interacting with one another. In atheism, all thoughts are biochemical reactions. That is all that they can ever be. When I was a kid we would build volcanoes. You would get some sand or mud, shape it like a volcano with a depression at the top into which you would put some baking soda. Then you pour vinegar on top of that, and it would bubble up over the sides like lava. There was a chemical reaction whose evidence was the bubbling over. What happens in a chemical reaction is that electrons jump from the orbital of one atomic nucleus onto the nucleus of another atom. Or perhaps two atoms share an electron that formerly belonged to just one of them. And that’s it. That’s chemistry in a nutshell.

What causes electrons, en masse, to jump into new orbitals? Does Truth do it? Does it happen by rational inference? No. What causes them to jump is other physical causes – the proximity of other electrons, perhaps, or collision with a photon, or maybe a cosmic ray (a speeding atom fragment) bumps into it. In atheism, every thought you have ever had - including the thoughts you’re thinking now - whether you are Christian, atheist, brilliant, foolish, doesn’t matter – every thought you have had or will have, is completely determined by electrons in your brain moving to new orbitals in response to physical causes all of which are exactly as predetermined as the chemical reaction that takes place when you drop vinegar onto baking soda. The chemical reactions in your brain are more complex than our sandbox volcano projects, but they are every bit as physically determined.

And you thought you were rational. You thought you were thinking. You thought you were evaluating truth claims. Well ha! the joke’s on you. Because, in atheism, all your thinking has been done for you by electrons bandied about by forces you can’t control.

And it is here where I run into one of those snags where I would be forced to believe garbage if I were atheist. If there is no rationality, then why should I trust the rational inferences of an atheist? By his own admission, he’s not rational, he’s just bubbling forth words that are predetermined by the chemical reactions in his brain. To paraphrase Jonathan Edwards (the singer, not the theologian): “He can’t even run his own brain; I’ll be damned if he’ll run mine!”

I know that rationality is true. Therefore atheism can’t be. If you would like to explore this theme further, please, please, please read the first six chapters of C. S. Lewis's book Miracles.

Argument number 3 is cut from the same cloth as argument number 2, and so I will not pursue it in as great a detail. It is the argument from morality: the real existence of good and evil. We all know that there is such a thing as morality – good and bad, right and wrong. But there simply isn’t any way for atheism to ground righteousness or righteous indignation in anything substantial. Because at the end of the day all you have in atheism is matter in motion. Stuff bouncing off of stuff. And no amount of stuff bouncing off of stuff can produce moral obligation or moral depravity.

Joy Davidman describing her former outlook as an atheist wrote, "Life is only an electrochemical reaction. Love, art, and altruism are only sex. The universe is only matter. Matter is only energy. I forget what I said energy is only." She eventually figured out that that doesn’t work. Once you have convinced yourself that matter and energy are all that really exist, it is hard to articulate why you find anyone else’s behavior objectionable. How can a collection of atoms bouncing off each other ever be wrong? And if you yourself are a collection of atoms bouncing off each other, what gives you the right judge another bag of atoms? But every day without exception, on the news and on my Facebook feed, I see atheists expressing strong moral outrage against a variety of offenses, such as the exploitation of women, the rough treatment of immigrants or sexual minorities, the easy access to guns and the violence that results, the hypocrisy of depraved church leaders – and on and on and on. I have no objection at all to such expressions of moral indignation. I encourage them. I just want atheists to think deeply in their souls (yes, souls) about the justification for such anger. How can you, being just a complex configuration of matter and energy, find morally repulsive another complex configuration of matter and energy?

Jay Budziszewski in his essay “Escape From Nihilism” wrote this:

I ended up doing a doctoral dissertation to prove that we make up the difference between good and evil and that we aren't responsible for what we do. I remember now that I even taught these things to students; now that's sin.

It was also agony. You cannot imagine what a person has to do to himself well, if you are like I was, maybe you can imagine what a person has to do to himself to go on believing such nonsense. St. Paul said that the knowledge of God's law is "written on our hearts, our consciences also bearing witness." The way natural law thinkers put this is to say that they constitute the deep structure of our minds. That means that so long as we have minds, we can't not know them. Well, I was unusually determined not to know them; therefore I had to destroy my mind. I resisted the temptation to believe in good with as much energy as some saints resist the temptation to neglect good. For instance, I loved my wife and children, but I was determined to regard this love as merely a subjective preference with no real and objective value. Think what this did to my very capacity to love them. After all, love is a commitment of the will to the true good of another person, and how can one's will be committed to the true good of another person if he denies the reality of good, denies the reality of persons, and denies that his commitments are in his control?

Jay Budziszewski came to understand that right and wrong are not subjective illusions magically dreamed up walking bags of complex seawater known as human beings. "Right" or "good" is that which aligns with the character of God our Creator. "Wrong" or "bad" is that which rebels against him.

4th argument, to conclude: We all know that we need someone to thank. I guess I would call this the argument from universal gratitude.

Years ago someone wrote this to an advice columnist: "We are an atheist family, but having grown up with a prayer before each meal, I started to miss the ritual, especially once we had kids. It felt as if there was something missing, and I wanted to commence the meal with something, so now we do 'thankfuls.' Everyone (including children) states something for which they are thankful. This custom is very well received and enjoyed by all types of guests, and seems to satisfy the need to begin a meal giving 'thanks.'"

I agree with that atheist that there is a need to give thanks. That need can be suppressed, though it will take some effort. It can be denied completely, and leave a hole. Or it can even be indulged, laughably and illogically, by an atheist who gives thanks while simultaneously denying that there is anyone out there to thank. At this atheist family table it amuses me to imagine a small child furrowing his brow and asking, “Daddy, who are thanking?” “Shhh! Ixnay on odGay. Eat your kale.”

We must thank. There is a reason why we delight to do so. To neglect thanks is to refuse our invitation to the dance.

Charles Colson was an atheist/agnostic who back in the late 60s and early 70s was special counsel to President Richard Nixon. In 1966, seven years before he became a Christian, he took his sons out on a sailboat he had just bought. In his book Born Again he recounted something unusual that happened that day. Here is what he wrote:

As [my son] realized that he was controlling the boat, the most marvelous look came over his cherubic face, the joy of new discovery in his eyes, the thrill of feeling the wind's power in his hands. I found myself in that one unforgettable moment quietly talking to God. I could even recall the precise words: "Thank You, God, for giving me this son, for giving us this one wonderful moment. Just looking now into this boy's eyes fulfills my life. Whatever happens in the future, even if I die tomorrow, my life is complete and full. Thank You." Afterwards, I had been startled when I realized that I had spoken to God, since my mind did not assent to His existence as a Person. It had been a spontaneous expression of gratitude that simply bypassed the mind and took for granted what reason had never shown me.

Years later reason showed him the ground for a gratitude that in one shining moment he found he could not repress.

Give thanks, give thanks, give thanks. You know that you should, and you know that it would be in your own best interests to do so. Do not stifle the instinct for gratitude that a good God has place within your heart.

Romans 1:21 says concerning evildoers: “although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him”. That is, they went as far as to repress the thanks that would spring forth spontaneously from them and complete the delight that God intended for them. The result of such suppression is given in the rest of the verse, which says, “their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.”

Let us pray.

Creator God, it seems an impertinence to discuss evidence for your existence while every moment we draw breath with lungs you created and try to think worthy thoughts with brain cells you constructed. Thank you for making us and supplying us with everything needful to remain in everlasting fellowship with you. Deliver us from wrongdoing, twisted thinking, and the ingratitude and contempt for you that would render our minds futile and our heats eternally foolish and dark. Save us for our good and your great glory.

Does Life Have A Purpose?

Does life have a purpose?

We all assume it does. We may be wrong in that assumption, but nonetheless we go about our lives assuming that they have purpose, meaning, and rationale. We act as though we knew there is a good reason why we exist. I believe this is true even of those who explicitly deny that life has a purpose.

The simplest way to reveal the universal assumption of purposeful life is to point out that we all believe that murder is wrong. Everyone in every culture thinks that it is a sin to murder. Except for psychopaths – and even they tend to put up a fuss when you murder them. Now when I say “murder” I am not referring to euthanasia, mercy-killing, abortion, capital punishment, self-defense or warfare. For the sake of argument, let us put those aside and limit ourselves to clear cases of cold-blooded murder. If life is truly pointless, what’s wrong with taking it? Why punish murderers? Whether we admit it or not, we know that life is not pointless. There is a reason for it. There is a purpose to it. That is why you can’t just take it from somebody.

A second indication that we all regard life as purposeful is more subtle. I will summarize it this way. Even those who hold with great conviction that life has no intrinsic purpose inevitably strive to make up a purpose for it, as though they know in their hearts that they have a created a vacuum that has to be filled; they have opened a gap that was not there before that somehow must be closed.

This striving to create meaning in a meaningless world, or purpose in a purposeless existence, is the cornerstone of a philosophy known as existentialism. When I was young, I was force-fed existentialist literature till I had it coming out my ears. Here is one way to summarize existentialist thought: “Life has no purpose. Therefore, you must create your own purpose.” I will give you an example of this kind of reasoning from the late Harvard professor of Paleontology Stephen Jay Gould. He wrote:

We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a ‘higher’ answer — but none exists. This explanation, though superficially troubling, if not terrifying, is ultimately liberating and exhilarating. We cannot read the meaning of life passively in the facts of nature. We must construct these answers ourselves — from our own wisdom and ethical sense. There is no other way.

It seems to me that in that quote – and there are countless like it – Stephen Jay Gould has teed it up for us. He has constructed an argument that cries out for a response like the following: "Wait a minute. If life is an accident, if it just happens to be here, and there is no higher purpose governing it – no 'higher answer,' just a crazy bouncing of the lottery balls of history in the quantum fields of chance – and it could have turned out differently, but it didn’t, and here we are - and if we cannot discover the meaning of life because it is not there waiting for us to discover it, then, I ask, why construct an answer ourselves? Gould says we have to do it. He says, “We must construct these answers ourselves — from our own wisdom and ethical sense. There is no other way.”

I cannot for the life of me understand why then we need to construct any answer at all. Much less, as Gould says, construct it from “our own wisdom and ethical sense.” Where did that “wisdom and ethical sense” come from? Gould would have no answer to that, except to repeat, “Well, it comes from...where everything else comes from! It comes from a certain kind of fish fin. And an asteroid that knocked out the dinosaurs by sheer luck and enabled small mammals to survive, one of which became us. And then for millions of generations, the strong ate the weak.” If that is where my ethical sense comes from, then I suppose it must be ok for the strong to eat the weak. It must be ok for the powerful to oppress the inept and unfit to the point of devouring them. If the weak have no intrinsic purpose, because nothing has intrinsic purpose, then there is nothing to prevent me from declaring that their purpose is to provide me with calories, metaphorical or otherwise.

We all know that life has purpose – ready-made, intrinsic purpose that must not be violated for the sake of the pleasure and well-being of the strong. That truth is so deeply settled in us that if our philosophy denies that life comes pre-installed with a purpose, we rush to supply one ourselves in no time flat. We do this, it seems to me, without batting an eye, without pausing to reflect why we feel so moved to supply that missing purpose. It is like a man amputating one of his legs and then immediately getting himself a set of crutches or building a prosthetic replacement leg. If you ask him why he is doing that, he gives you a puzzled look and says, “Well I still have to get from point A to point B don’t I?” To which I would say, “Yes. I think that is what your now-severed leg was there for in the first place.”

I believe that the thing that really causes people to question whether they have a purpose in life is not their philosophy - which can be shockingly, even comically malleable and inconsistent - but rather, their experience. By experience I simply mean circumstances that hit them in the face and that cannot be eluded or batted away with self-contradicting rationalizations.

One of the experiences that causes people to question purpose is the loss of everything they thought they were living for. This happens to many poor, unfortunate souls. They suffer a tragedy that completely turns their life upside down, and they ask why they exist. The prototypical example in the Bible is Job. Job is presented to us as a man who had everything: wealth, family, good health, and a sterling reputation. Moreover, his good fortunate somehow did not corrupt him – we are told he was good, honorable, and generous. And then everything he had or worked for vanished. A series of tragedies wiped out his finances. His 10 children were killed in a tornado. He developed painful blisters all over his body. And his friends turned on him. They said, “You must have deserved it – you must be hiding something from us. It’s a good thing you got knocked off your pedestal.” And part of Job’s response to the loss of everything including his reputation was to say, “Why was I born? What is the point of my existence?”

He even expressed the wish to go back in time to the moment of his birth and erase it so that he could be non-existent. He said, “Why didn’t I die at birth? Why couldn’t I have been stillborn?” Then he generalized from his experience and applied it to all miserable people: “Why is light given to those in misery?” he asked. “Why is life given to the bitter of soul?”

Bitter circumstances have always prompted people to ask if their life has a purpose, and if so, what in the world it could be. I believe that horrible circumstances, such as those that Job experienced, are one way in which it is revealed to us not that we have no purpose but that our true purpose was something higher and grander than we ever imagined. We were right in assuming along with everybody else that we had a purpose, but we were wrong in assuming that that purpose could be exhaustively fulfilled in making money, having a good family, and living a long time in health and good cheer with friends who honored us and enjoyed our company. That won’t do it. The unexamined conviction that that must be the sum total of our purpose is unmasked as an illusion when tragedy strikes and takes it all away. Now where’s your purpose? Do you have a purpose that can withstand tragedy?

Interestingly enough, lesser purposes are also unmasked as an illusion when the opposite happens, and we get everything we ever wanted. You find this theme in the book of Ecclesiastes. In Ecclesiastes, King Solomon had all the resources that a man of that era could possibly wish for. He was so ridiculously rich that according to 1 Kings 10:21, all his drinking cups were made of gold. None of his utensils were silver, because silver was thought to be of little value in his day.

Having everything at his disposal and leisure time galore, Solomon went on a fulfillment quest. He decided, I’m just going to have fun. I will fill myself with pleasure every day. He wrote, “I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure.” He gathered a harem of a thousand women. He said “I acquired male and female singers” – so he had live entertainment on demand. Naturally he turned to alcohol. He wrote, “I tried cheering my heart with wine.” He indulged a life of wine women and song, and figured that had to work. Who needs to worry about a purpose if you’re just happy all the time?

But he hated it, and concluded, “Laughter is madness. And what does pleasure accomplish?”

At some point he knew he needed something meatier than pleasure, so he pursued a life of the mind. He wrote, “I turned my thoughts to consider wisdom,..I applied my mind to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under the heavens… I said in my heart, ‘I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me, and my heart has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.’” And it turned out that didn’t work either. He concluded, “With much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.” And as for his big pile of books he said, “The making of many books is endless, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.”

At one point he decided to pursue great projects. It is as though he figured, “I can’t just focus inward - the indulgence of my body with pleasure or the enrichment of my mind with knowledge. Let me focus outward.” He wrote, “I undertook great projects: I built houses for myself and planted vineyards. I made gardens and parks and planted all kinds of fruit trees in them. I made reservoirs to water groves of flourishing trees.”

Did that do it for him? No. He concluded, “Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind. So I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.”

Solomon’s feeling of disillusionment despite having and accomplishing everything he ever wanted has been experienced by countless individuals whom most of us would envy. A famous example is New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. He is rich, good-looking, married to supermodel Gisele Bunchen, has won the Super Bowl 5 times, and is widely regarded as the greatest quarterback, indeed the greatest football player of all time. After his third Super Bowl victory he sat down for an interview with Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes. In a revealing moment Brady said, “Why do I have three Super Bowl rings and still think that there is something greater out there for me? I mean, maybe a lot of people would say, ‘Hey man, this is what it is – I have reached my goal, my dream, my life is…[his voice trails off]. Me, I think, God, it’s got to be more than this.” Kroft asked him, “What’s the answer?” And Brady said, “I wish I knew. I wish I knew.”

He’s not alone. Comedian and actor Jim Carey hit that same wall. In reflecting on his success, Carey said, “It looks great when you’ve got a cool car and you’ve got good nice clothes and you’ve done something that people admire, but it can never fulfill you, you can never be happy. You know what I mean? It’s not where happiness comes from… I think everybody should get rich and famous and get everything they dreamed so they can see that’s not the answer.”

It is striking to me that whether you are Job with nothing or Solomon, Tom Brady or Jim Carrey with everything, you can wind up in the exact same place with the same line of thought, the same conclusion, and ask the same set of questions. “What am I doing here? Why do I exist? What’s my purpose? Do I even have a purpose? Why do my all efforts to create a purpose come to naught when I see them dashed to smithereens or fulfilled beyond my wildest hopes?”

I believe, and the Christian faith teaches, that you cannot create your own purpose. It will never work. But you can discover what your true purpose is. That is, the purpose that is already there can be revealed to you, taught to you, and you can act upon it and live your life in accordance with it. The difference between creating your own purpose and discovering what your intrinsic purpose is might be helpfully illustrated with reference to the Greek notion of logos.

The concept of the logos in Greek philosophy predates Aristotle, Plato and Socrates. It goes back at least as far as Heraclitus in the 6th century BC. The word logos in Greek can simply mean “word.” It’s the word for “word.” Or more deeply, “the message” or “the communication,” what something or someone is trying to convey. The root word logos survives in our words biology, sociology, meteorology, etc. Biology, for example, is the word about or the study of living things. What are living things, what function do they fill, what purpose do they serve? – that’s “bio-logos” or biology.

In Greek thought, in order to appreciate, comprehend or use anything rightly, you needed to understand its particular logos, or as we might say, its rationale, its proper place, where it fits – or, crudely, its operating manual. Tim Keller has used the example of a space heater which I will borrow and expand upon.

What is a space heater? It is an electronic contraption, maybe the size of a breadbox, and you plug it in to heat up the space around it if your central heating is inadequate.

Now suppose you come across a space heater and you don’t know or care what its true logos is – there is no operating manual for it - but you are going to create a purpose for it. Now you have a nail that you want to drive into a 2-by-4 plank. Could you use a space heater to accomplish that? Well you could try. It would be pretty awkward to pick up the space heater and bring it down on the head of a nail. It might kind of work. But you’re more likely to bend the nail or miss it or damage the space heater, and you will be frustrated over the inadequate completion of the task. Your frustration is a signal that you have missed the logos of the space heater. Or suppose that you want to reach up to get something on a high shelf. Could you step on the space heater for that? That might work, if you’re light enough and the space heater is sturdy enough – but again, you could very well damage the space heater if you stand on it, or worse, fall and hurt yourself. Now suppose that you have a rough idea that a space heater is not a hammer, it’s not a step-stool – it is used for heating. So your bathwater is too cold, and you plug in your space heater and bring it in with you to the bathtub. Now you’ve just electrocuted yourself.

It each case, with the nail, the high shelf, and the cold bath, the results are unsatisfactory at best and lethal at worst because you have not acted in accordance with the space heater’s logos. You don’t create a purpose for the space heater – it already has one, which is to heat space. That’s its rationale, that is what it was designed for.

Now we are ready to frame our opening question this way. Do human beings come equipped with a logos, a place where we fit, a usefulness toward some end that is real rather than illusory, a true purpose that can be fulfilled rather than a make-believe temporary fix that we invent for ourselves and that always seems to get unmasked as unsatisfactory and Not Quite Right?

We do have a purpose, and it is to glorify God.

In saying that our purpose is to glorify God I am not saying anything new. This is not an earth-shattering innovation, though it may appear as such to someone who is hearing it for the first time. All I am doing is affirming as true what Christianity and indeed theistic faith has always maintained at its fundamental core. Your purpose is to glorify God. And that includes everything about you. 1 Corinthians 10:31 says, “Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” The first question of the Westminster Confession of Faith is, “What is the chief end of humanity?” Or as we might say, “Why are we here? What is our purpose?” And the answer given, correctly, is, “Our chief purpose is to glorify God, and enjoy him forever.”

Lest there be any misunderstanding, it would be good to specify what we mean and don’t mean by “glorify” God. “Glory” in its most basic sense refers to shining, bright light shining. For example, in the Christmas account of Luke 2 we have the words, “The glory of the Lord shown round about them.” That is, the shepherds beheld something very bright.

When we glorify God, does that mean that we brighten him, that we shine a light on him to make him more luminescent than he already is? No. That would not be possible. God is already infinitely glorious. We cannot add to his glory or take away from it. An example of this principle may be found in Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. First he declared his purpose: "We have come to dedicate a portion of that field.” But then he corrected himself and said, “But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate -- we cannot consecrate -- we cannot hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.” That is, according to Lincoln, the field at Gettysburg was already as hallowed as it could ever be, and no words of his sprinkled on top of that could ever increase or decrease its glory.

But Lincoln could and did acknowledge the consecration, recognize the glory, and speak and act and conduct himself in accordance with it.

With regard to the inherent glory of God, we cannot increase it, but we can reflect it. C. S. Lewis wrote, “The sun is not brighter because a mirror reflects it, but the mirror is brighter because it reflects the sun.” Likewise, we cannot decrease God’s glory. Lewis wrote, “A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls his cell.”

If by word, deed and conviction you refuse to glorify God, you will be like a mirror that buries itself in the mud and says, truthfully enough, “I don’t see the light of God’s glory.” But that will only be because you have buried your purpose along with your soul. Your purpose in life – whether you know it or not, whether you acknowledge it or not, whether you fulfill it or not – your purpose in life is to reflect God’s glory back to him and toward all creation. You are a mirror designed to reflect the glory of God. That is your logos. By refusing to do that, you become – to draw from the other image I mentioned - like a space heater that never gets plugged in or that is put to some use alien to its nature. It will then be a matter of God’s severe mercy that you become frustrated in seeking to fulfill as ultimate any purpose other than the one for which you were made.

You were made to glorify God. Let me pile on the good news here. Glorifying God is something you can do at any moment, whether your dreams are fulfilled or they’ve all gone bust. Jesus said to his disciples in John 15:8: “By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit.” Please understand that “fruit” does not mean success. It means – as defined for us in Galatians 5:22-23 - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. That’s the fruit of the Spirit that glorifies God.

If you settle it in your mind that your one true purpose is to glorify God, and if it is not merely an acknowledgement of your lips but a truth known deeply in your bones, then you will be ready for every setback and disappointment that might otherwise cause you to question the point of your existence, and you also will be shielded against the deception that says that the fulfillment of lesser purposes will be sufficient for you.

The glad acknowledgment of one’s purpose to be that of glorifying of God is so all-encompassing that it includes not only all of life but even death. Even our death cannot elude the logos of glorifying God. When Jesus told Peter in John 21:18 that Peter himself would eventually be crucified, John says in the next verse that Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God.

So, today, for me, as far as I can tell, it seems to me that the best angle at which I can hold up my mirror to reflect the glory of God will involve finishing this sermon, maybe answering a question or two, eating some lunch, and going home and taking a nap, delighting in God for the pleasure that gives me. Tomorrow I am to glorify God by working in a chemical production plant with diligence and goodwill and a contented spirit. And some day, perhaps soon, I am to glorify God by receiving the diagnosis of terminal cancer or some such lethal ailment with the words, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” And, “See with what peace a Christian can die.”

On September 8, 2017, Jim Carrey made a surprise appearance at New York Fashion Week, and he gave a two-minute interview to E! News anchor Catt Sadler. You can watch it on YouTube. Carrey discoursed on the meaninglessness of Fashion Week and then on the meaninglessness of everything. He concluded with the words, “We don’t matter. We don’t matter. There’s the good news.”

That’s not good news. But more important than being bad news, it is false. There is good news, and it is real, and it involves the deepest truth of your existence. You do matter. You matter because God has designed you with the greatest purpose that any created entity can possible have, which is to glorify him.

Let us pray. Father in heaven, thank you for making us, and infusing us with a purpose greater than which none can be conceived for any created thing, which is to glorify you. Teach us to reflect your glory with courage, grace, goodwill, perseverance, and everlasting joy.

Women Preachers and Willow Creek

Tomorrow my friend Scott Polender gets to preach at Bethany Chapel in Wheaton on a text that includes these verses: “Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.” (1 Timothy 2:11-12).

That is an explosive passage, and I have been praying for Scott as he prepares his sermon. I don’t know what he is going to say. I do know that he will take these verses seriously – he won’t joke about them or skip over them or apologize for them – and he will thoughtfully integrate them with the rest of the verses in the context and with the Bible’s message as a whole. For that I thank God.

I believe it is possible for sober-minded Christians to arrive at different conclusions about these words from St. Paul. To paint with broad strokes, some will say, “These words are consistent with other Bible passages that promote male leadership in the home and in the church, and they are grounded in creation order. Therefore, women shouldn’t preach or hold the office of elder.” Others will say, “St. Paul also says to greet one another with a holy kiss [Four times! Romans 16:16; 1 Corinthians 16:20; 2 Corinthians 13:12; 1 Thessalonians 5:26]. And Jesus commanded his disciples to wash one another’s feet (John 13:14). We recognize these commandments to be culture-bound practices that do not apply to us directly today, and the same should go for what Paul says about women teaching and leading.”

I think that there are fair arguments on both sides. Here I will go no further than that. By “fair arguments” I do not mean “equally valid,” or, “there’s just no way to decide between them,” or, “they’re both wrong and I alone understand the true synthesis.” I only mean that a cordial, reasoned, and even passionate discussion can take place between Christians who differ on this matter without either side denouncing the other or evicting their opponent from the room. I have no more to say about the specifics of that debate.

But I do have something to say concerning responses to this issue that I find foolish, cowardly, uncharitable, or downright dangerous.

Foolish: “St. Paul was a misogynist, right?”

The charge of misogyny against Paul can really only be brought by someone who has not read enough of him to have earned the right to give an opinion worth hearing in public discussion. Two questions should be asked of anyone who would accuse Paul of misogyny: (1) Have you read all 13 of his extant letters? (2) Were you awake when you read them? A little digging into the Pauline corpus will reveal texts so stunningly respectful of women that one could scarcely believe a first century Jewish Pharisee wrote them apart from divine inspiration: “In Christ there is neither male nor female” (Galatians 3:28); “the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does” (1 Corinthians 7:4). Most impressively, Paul insists that a husband must love his wife enough to submit to death by torture for her sake (Ephesians 5:25). Let me be clear. Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump, and Bill Hybels are all misogynists. St. Paul wasn’t.

Cowardly: Just ignore the problematic Scriptures.

I think this is the majority position in evangelical churches today. There are countless churches where you could attend every Sunday for a decade or more and never once hear a sermon that included an exposition of the passage in 1 Timothy 2 that I will hear tomorrow. The preachers at these churches don’t want to offend people, and so they avoid hard texts. The most common way of skirting difficult passages is to preach sermon series with names like “Elevate” or “Guardrails” and then cherry-pick Scriptures that are amenable to whatever point the preacher wants to make. Now I will say something blunt and adversarial. Pastors who shun hard verses should resign from the ministry and pursue other callings. Don’t go to their churches. You don’t want a sniveling coward as your shepherd. Go to a church where the preacher goes verse by verse through books of the Bible, thoughtfully acknowledges Scriptural authority, and sometimes says things you don’t like.

Uncharitable: Impugn the motives of those who disagree with you.

This temptation is so natural and so universal that it must be consciously resisted. (Hang it all, some might say I fell into it myself in the paragraph above when I accused preachers of cowardice for never expounding 1 Timothy 2. “Hey, lighten up - maybe some of those preachers just haven’t gotten around to it yet. And maybe they will before they die of old age." Hm. Possibly.)

It is a special duty to do one’s best to refrain from assigning foul motives in an issue so fraught with passion and likely to trigger outrage. Ask yourself, “Did I come by at least some of my opinions honestly? Maybe my opponent did too.”

Downright Dangerous: Grant indulgences to powerful people who agree with you.

The number of women who have accused former Willow Creek pastor Bill Hybels of sexually inappropriate conduct has climbed to ten. He has denied all allegations. So at this point it is a he said/she said she said she said she said she said she said she said she said she said she said. He’s guilty.

In reading the testimonies of the women staff members that Bill hit on, I noticed that a particularly painful element of the harassment was the fact that he had been so "pro-women." They acknowledged that he provided them with valuable mentorship, that he had opened doors of ministry that had been closed to them in more conservative churches, that he busted the glass ceilings and empowered them in ways that previous generations of women had never known. He was an evangelical feminist trailblazer! How could he, of all people, first exploit, and then discard and slander, the very women who had been his valued partners in ministry?

Among the thousands of lessons to be learned in combing through the wreckage of Willow Creek Church is this: please be on your guard against people who agree with you and are in a position of power to give you what you want. By satisfying your thirst, they can tempt you to hold back from calling them out quickly for their crimes. It’s a common pattern. Harvey Weinstein gives a budding starlet what she craves – a movie role - and in the aftermath his own lawyer lamely points out, “Weinstein didn’t invent the casting couch.” Donald Trump gives some evangelicals what they want – say, conservative judges and tax reform – and some of them go and make donkeys of themselves by never noticing that the man is a son of hell.

Some people who disagree with you have good hearts, and some people who agree with you - and can even do you a lot of favors - have bad ones.

"Can You Prove That God Is Compassionate?"

Yesterday a friend asked me an intriguing question. He wrote, “If an unbeliever asked you to prove from your own life that God is compassionate and gracious, what would you say?” He clarified that he was not talking about spiritual salvation. That is precisely what an unbeliever would doubt or disbelieve. The kind of evidence my friend was looking for would come not from the pages of Scripture but from personal experience. Is it possible, looking no further than the scope of one’s life, to find reasons for believing in the compassionate nature of God?

I think that a certain kind of answer might be quickly exposed as problematic. For example, suppose I say, “Here’s how I know God is gracious. Nine years ago, in my loneliness and wearied despair, God brought to me a woman whose sweetness of disposition no fantasy could contrive, and she agreed to marry me, and I became the most happily married man I have ever known.” But another could answer, “Very well for you. In my case, my wife treated me with ever-increasing rude contempt until she abandoned me to pursue lovers. Where was your compassionate God then?” Or suppose I say, “About 15 years ago, I thought I would lose my son, because his depressions were so severe that they led to suicide attempts and repeated hospital stays. But God mercifully adjusted the chemicals in his brain, and now he is a married, productive father of two who has not slit his wrists in more than a decade.” Another answers, “Yes. Well. My son cussed me out and took his life.”

It is hard to imagine any blessing, any joyous reception of God’s grace, to which some understandably embittered soul might not respond, “But I experienced the opposite! If your good fortune demonstrates God’s kindness, doesn’t my bad fortune demonstrate his cruelty? Your circumstantial evidence gets you nowhere, because I can always summon counterexamples. Is it not better to say that God is capricious, distributing good luck and bad in approximately equal loads, and the only reason you think he is good is because you conveniently ignore his nastiness? Or maybe God is beyond good and evil, and our notions of ‘compassion’ and ‘cruelty’ are really just human constructs that we project onto a God who transcends morality. Or maybe there is no God, and our delights and our tragedies are random events that we try to infuse with meaning by attributing them to the kindness of a good God or the discipline of an angry one. But all three hypotheses – a capricious God, a morally transcendent God, or no God at all – fit the facts better than your “God-is-kind-because-one-time-he-did-this-terrific-thing-for-me.”

To be clear, I do believe in God, and I even believe that things like my happy marriage and my son’s psychological restoration are signs of his grace. But these are not events upon which I would base any argument if trying to reason with a skeptic. If I were a skeptic myself, I think that such reasonings would fall flat because of the counterstrikes I have mentioned above.

But there is still an argument from experience which my internal skeptic has never been able to answer. And it concerns the fact that there indeed exists such a thing as compassion. Compassion is real, undeniable; we have all felt it and witnessed it, and even, at some point, delighted in it with joy inexpressible. If you are of a certain turn of mind, that joy is never more than five minutes from you. You can experience it now by going to YouTube and watching the viral video of 50 moms lip-synching and signing “A Thousand Years” with their Down Syndrome children. When I saw that video the other day I wept, like everybody else, and I told my wife about it, and she said she had seen it already, but she watched it again, and wept again. Maybe some of the moms in that video shed tears of grief when they learned that their babies would have certain limitations. But they had their babies anyway, and loved them, and they go on loving them – and now their manifestations of sweet compassion provoke in us not tears of sorrow but tears of delight.

Contemplate that delight. Give it a good, honest philosophical rumination from as objective a standpoint as your subjective mind can attain. Where does your appreciation for compassionate grace come from? What set of circumstances characterize the universe (or multiverse) as you understand it such that there wells up within you a joy beyond words when you see compassion incarnated in a mom doting on her struggling child?

It seems to me that all the non-God hypotheses fail to account for this phenomenon. They require too much faith, and insist that we accept not merely paradoxical mystery but flat-out contradiction and nonsense.

Suppose God is there but doesn’t care. He does not delight in compassion, nor is he the author of it. All he did was make us and our habitat (who knows why?) and set us adrift in the cosmos to go do our thing. How in the world then, as offspring of this non-moral God, did we manage to invent goodness? How did the stream rise higher than its source? I cannot for the life of me believe that we ourselves crafted mercy from scratch - perhaps in the hope that we could some day present it to God and tell him how much it would please us if he got on board with it. But God would only do that if he thought mercy were a good thing, and how could he think anything was “good” if he himself were beyond good and evil? To think something good you must first have some kind of goodness yourself! I do not see how something like compassion could ever “arise” from a non-compassionate originating force. But I can perceive how it might descend to lower plains from an Original that is goodness itself.

The same sort of thinking applies to the hopeless task of accounting for compassion in a universe that has no Maker whatsoever. In a Godless universe, all acts of compassion (along with all concepts, thoughts and events of any kind) are reducible to matter and energy, which in turn are reducible to – what, exactly? A fluctuating quantum field that randomly generates bubble universes? Something like that, I suppose. Author and poet Joy Davidman outlined the creed she once held as an atheist in these terms: "Life is only an electrochemical reaction. Love, art, and altruism are only sex. The universe is only matter. Matter is only energy. I forget what I said energy is only."

It is indeed possible to see the compassion of Down Syndrome moms and our responsive tears as electrochemical responses grounded in nothing but a series of cause-and-effect events that go all the way back to the Big Bang, and that, given the way atoms necessarily respond to forces acting upon them, could never have been otherwise. Of course, exactly the same would be true of the actions of a murderer-rapist and of the revulsion and rage that characterize our response to him. Compassion and mercy and cruelty and malice all stand on precisely equal grounds in a cosmos without God, and there is simply no reason to say that one set of actions is “better” than any other.

It cannot be said too often that Friedrich Nietzsche understood this point with bracing clarity. As Tim Keller likes to point out, Nietzsche has never been answered. (Here I candidly admit that I am in part relying on Keller’s authority. He has read a lot more philosophy than I.)

So I make my appeal to what I think is the right instinct in all of us, an instinct that keeps bubbling up and that can only be resisted by a deliberate act of the will and convenient forgetfulness. Compassion is a real thing, and it is good, and there is a reason why it delights us that is not ultimately the same as the reason for the existence of things like malice and oppression. The simple truth is that compassion is an attribute of our Maker, and we delight in it because he does.

Once you have come to accept (whether by faith, revelation, or deduction) that God exists and that he is compassionate, then I think you are able to relish the significance of a story like that of Lisa and the rainbows.

On Mother’s Day 2001, Lisa’s husband suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack right in front of her. Russell Krausfeldt was just 40 years old, a good man much beloved by all who knew him. Their children were 14, 11 and 5. For many months afterward, Lisa would not wear makeup, because it ran when she cried, and she never knew when she would burst out in tears.

As you can imagine, Mother’s Days in succeeding years were very difficult for her. But a consoling sign came to her on Mother’s Day 2002. She saw a rainbow in the sky that day, and it pleased her, and she received it as a gentle indicator of God’s ongoing love in the midst of her trial. But God wasn’t done. The next year, again on Mother’s Day, she saw another rainbow. Then the year after that, the same maternal holiday arrived with a third consecutive rainbow – each one refracting to a widow’s eyes the light of God’s grace.

Lisa told me that by the fourth year she was a bit stronger and did not “need” the rainbow as she did on previous Mother’s Days. (Of course she looked for one anyway, but contented herself when they ceased appearing). Move ahead to 2009, when I met and courted her so quickly that poor Lisa got stuck with the task of informing friends and family that in a few weeks she would be marrying a guy none of them had heard of. Naturally they had questions and doubts. When she called Russell’s mother with the news of her sudden engagement, she found that she needed to defend the wisdom of her decision. “Are you really sure you want to marry this man?” In the course of this difficult conversation, Lisa happened to turn around and look out the window. There was a rainbow.

I know what that meant. God, in an act of gracious compassion, gave to one of his daughters the sight of four rainbows: three to comfort her in the loss of a good husband, and then an extra to encourage her in the acceptance of a serviceable one.