For Penn Jillette, Who Rapes And Kills Everyone He Wants To

Magician Penn Jillette tells the story of taking a date to hear a lecture by a fellow atheist. When the speaker finished his talk and opened the floor to questions, the person next to Jillette’s date asked, “Well if there’s no God, what’s to stop me from raping and killing everyone around me?” Jillette’s friend raised her hand and quipped, “May I change my seat?”

Jillette says he gets the “What’s-to-keep-you-from-raping-and-killing” question all the time from religious people. It is a ham-fisted challenge to atheism, and Jillette has no trouble crushing it with rhetorical roundhouses. For example: “My answer is: I do rape all I want,” he told an interviewer. “And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine. I don’t want to do that. Right now, without any god, I don’t want to jump across this table and strangle you. I have no desire to strangle you. I have no desire to…rape you. You know what I mean?”

Yes, I do know what you mean, Mr. Jillette. You and I share a peaceful disposition. Neither of us wants, or has ever wanted, to rape or kill anybody. And we both find it disturbing that there are people who want to do those things. I suspect we also share a delight in stomping on ill-thought challenges to our philosophical positions with rhetoric that provokes laughter and applause from people who already agree with us. I heard that laughter from another interviewer to whom you made the same point, and I have seen the chorus of glad approvals in various forums from people who feel you have effectively dismantled a challenge that is silly, unconvincing, and self-indicting.

I would like to take your answer seriously though, because even if it was only intended as a shoot-from-the-hip “gotcha” it still merits thoughtful consideration. Your rape-and-murder rant (I don’t mean “rant” pejoratively – I love a good rant, and I do it all I want) gets to the heart of some things I hold dear about theism and moral reasoning.

I wish that rape and murder did not exist and that nobody wanted to do them. But they do exist, and the urges to commit them are more widespread than the acts themselves. This is a horrible fact, and no wishing or preaching can make it go away. Given that there are people out there who would rape and kill if they could, don’t you want them to believe there is a righteous God who would punish them (whether now or in the afterlife) for doing such things? I sure do. I want all potential murderer/rapists to become Christian theists - and heaven help us if they deconvert. You may not need a guardrail God to keep you on the narrow path of nonviolence and sexual benevolence. But some people do. They just do. The last thing they need to absorb into their twisted minds is a contempt for quivering faith in a holy God.

I agree with you that the implication that one might go on a killing raping rampage without a God to hold one in check is “the most self-damning thing I can imagine.” I would go further and say that self-damnation is an ancient and hallowed practice in Christian thought, and you are not the first to find it alienating and repulsive. We Christians are instructed to be cynical of human nature and deeply distrustful of ourselves. The natural self is “desperately wicked” (Jeremiah 17:9) and in need of daily crucifixion (Luke 9:23). St. Paul said “I know that nothing good dwells in me" (Romans 7:18). St. Peter said to Jesus, “Depart from me, I am a sinful man” (Luke 5:8). Isaiah said, “Woe is me, for I am condemned” (Isaiah 6:5). King David said, “I have been a sinner since my conception” (Psalm 51:5). Job said, “I despise myself" (Job 42:6). And so on and so on. Jesus even told a parable where the hero is not the man who congratulated himself on how good he was but the self-damning humble penitent who stared at his shoes and said, “God be merciful to me, a sinner” (Luke 18:13).

In the Christian tradition we are even taught to recoil from seemingly innocent statements like, “I’m glad I am not as twisted as that violent pervert.” Instead, we fear the possibility - however remote - that under different circumstances we might find ourselves in the shoes and uniform of a Nazi prison guard, and so we tremble, and plead God’s mercy. “There but for the grace of God go I.” “Let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall.” We learn sober lessons from countless fallen comrades, and some of us pray earnestly, as instructed by Jesus, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

When you tell a devout Christian that he has let slip an uncomfortably revealing and self-damning implication, I’m pretty sure he has already beaten you to that point.

But somehow everybody, Christian or not, manages, at times, not to do bad things. Why do we refrain from them? In the extreme case of rape and murder, you say you don’t do them because you don’t want to. I am sure that is true. I am also sure that that cannot be your only reason. You must have a back-up motivation. If you didn’t, then your date at the atheist lecture would have wanted to change her seat not because of the perversely oriented Christian on her right but because of the “I-do-whatever-I-want” atheist on her left.

Our desires change. They do not remain consistent over the course of a lifetime. Again, neither you nor I have ever wanted to kill or rape anybody. But what if – horror of horrors! God forbid! Perish the thought! – that were to change tomorrow? What then is our back-up motivation for doing good and not evil? Do we have one? Must the safety and well-being of our neighbors remain forever dependent upon the current state of our desires – amiable and innocuous though they have been till now?

Life experience has taught me the scorpion sting of that question. Because I have known people who broke bad - people who behaved well in their 20s and 30s but horribly in their 40s and 50s. In probing the mystery of middle-aged moral disintegration, one suggestion that I have heard deserves attention. There exist people who simply do what they want, and desire is their true moral lodestone. That is not a problem as long as the things that they desire are good. But what if their desires turn bad? Well, then they do bad things – and they do them with a transition that is shocking to us but seamless to them because their internal motivation remained constant throughout. I think for example of a couple physicians who served in far-off lands in the developing world, and were heroes to the needy. And then both coldly dumped their faithful wives when a younger prettier version came along - and neither man could understand why people made such a big deal about it. One way of understanding their behavior is to say that when they wanted to do something heroic and benevolent, they did; and when they wanted to do something dastardly and cruel, well, they did that too. Their moral compass never budged an inch from “I do what I want.”

It is a feature of Christian morality - and, I would argue, of universal ethical behavior – that sometimes we must do what we don’t want to do, and sometimes we must not do what we want to do. Put starkly, our desires are a moral irrelevance. Sometimes they correspond to the good and sometimes they don’t. When they do, all is happy and sweet. When they don’t, it becomes a duty to adjust them, to make them fit, to exercise our will to see if we can desire differently. But whether we succeed in that effort of the will or not, the good remains just as it was before, and does not give a hoot about our desires.

This fixed, immutable nature of good – sometimes affirming us, sometimes condemning us, sometimes standing with our desires and sometimes against them, always in relation to physical nature but never reducible to it – is an unavoidable Fact that has led many a reluctant soul to conclude that a righteous Creator is the author of it. Some even give in and allow that truth to change their hearts and govern their thoughts - like former atheist C. S. Lewis, who came to theistic faith “kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape.” That is, they come to believe in God not because they want to believe in him, but despite the fact that they would rather not.

Why Is My Atheist Son More Honest Than Ravi Zacharias?

My son ordered and ate a shawarma wrap, and when he went to pay for it with his debit card the card reader was down. The proprietor asked if he had cash, and he didn’t. So Peter said he would pay for it the next time he came in.

It wasn’t an establishment that he normally visited. But he came back later anyway, and when he did he told the proprietor to add 10 bucks onto his bill for the shawarma he had been unable to pay for previously. The man had forgotten about it, and did not seem to register what Peter was saying. So Peter explained it to him again, and my modestly-resourced, school-debt-laden son payed what he owed and walked away clean.

My son does not share my faith in God. But I rejoice in his honesty.

Peter’s shawarma incident came to mind as I contemplated the disquieting news of blatant lies perpetrated and maintained as policy on the part of evangelical organizations Focus on the Family (FOTF) Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, (RZIM), and the Billy Graham Evangelical Association (BGEA). It has recently come to light that FOTF represents itself to the IRS as a church, and RZIM and BGEA represent themselves as “associations of churches” (commonly known as denominations). These are lies. FOTF is not a church, and RZIM and BGEA are not denominations.

The motive for the lie is contested. A cynical possibility suggests itself: churches and denominations are not required, like other non-profits, to submit 990 forms that reveal the salaries of their pastors and executives. As a “church” or “denomination”, RZIM, BGEA and FOTF need not reveal how much they pay their respective presidents Ravi Zacharias, Franklin Graham, and Jim Daley. It is known to be a lot of money though. These men have gotten very rich off of Christian ministry.

Of course, none of these organizations has come out and said, “You got us. We decided to call ourselves churches so as to have the cover of IRS law that would keep donors from discovering how wealthy their gifts were making our executives.” Instead, they have presented less sinister-sounding motives. FOTF said it filed as a church to protect the anonymity of its donors, and to avoid having to comply with the Affordable Care Act’s mandate on coverage for contraception and other regulations. The BGEA said it wanted to avoid costs associated with filing 990s. RZIM said they were doing it because the BGEA and other organizations were doing it.

Let’s assume for the moment that these self-reported motivations are accurate (Gosh, it never occurred to us that now we wouldn’t have to report executive salaries! Why, that’s just an unintended consequence!). Fine. Let us say that we accept that. But the point stands. They are all still lying about their organizational status. Whatever their motive, it’s wrong to lie. Didn’t their parents teach them that? I haven’t (yet) gotten my atheist son to believe in God, but I am thankful to the God he refuses to acknowledge that a standard of integrity has filtered into him, and remains, and shows signs of its presence in a matter as simple as paying for fast food.

Christians must abide by the highest standards of honesty, integrity, and plain dealing. Those who do not do so must be held accountable by those who do. We Christians who value honesty must never broaden the platforms or amplify the voices of men and women who lie.

As I did a little digging in preparation for this essay I came across publically available evidence of the long history of lying on the part of noted Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias. His lies have been constant, deliberate, repeated, self-aggrandizing, well-documented, and utterly ministry-disqualifying. I maintain that any honest soul will agree with me wholeheartedly less than 20 minutes from now after simply watching the YouTube video “Lying For Lord Or Self? Hard Questions For Ravi Zacharias.” That video will lead you to others with even more damning evidence, but it is sufficient by itself to prove that Zacharias - like Bill Hybels and James MacDonald - is not a man of God. If you want to persuade an atheist of God’s reality, the worst thing you can do is give her a book by Ravi Zacharias. She will Google his name, discover his patterns of deceit, and have yet another excuse for being confirmed in her belief that God does not exist.

Zacharias is currently scheduled to speak in September at the Sing! 2020 conference in Nashville hosted by Keith and Kristyn Getty. I don’t know the Gettys, but I love them and their music and have no reason to doubt the authenticity of their Christian experience and testimony. My wife and I had the Getty/Townsend hymn “In Christ Alone” sung at our wedding. Are the Gettys uninformed about Zacharias’ disqualifying character issues? Can someone tell them? If the Gettys could spend just half an hour surveying the easily accessible information about Zacharias’ dishonesty and not in horror disinvite him to their conference, then with the deepest sadness of heart I will have to conclude, “I thought we were on the same page. I thought we were kindred spirits. I guess not.” Please, please, please, Gettys – not you too?

I have no definitive answer as to why my unbelieving son is more honest than celebrated apologist Ravi Zacharias. The question I pose in the title of this essay is rhetorical. But it is worth noting in passing that when a Christian is exposed as a habitual self-serving liar, there are people like me who speak up and say, “He’s not a real Christian.” But when an atheist lies, do his fellow atheists ever say, “There’s our proof – he’s not a real atheist”? I believe it would be wise to contemplate reasons for that disparity.

Meanwhile, fellow Christians, take a moment also to contemplate, in reverence and holy fear, this quote I read years ago in a sermon by C. H. Spurgeon:

If God has not made you honest, he has not saved your soul.

Followership

On a spring day during my junior year of high school my father dropped dead at work while fixing a radio. His last words reflected his cheerful stoicism: “Oh, it must have been something I ate.”

That was a Thursday. On Sunday the pastor of our church lauded Dad in the sermon, and revealed something that surprised me. “Whenever we took nominations for elder,” said Pastor Hutt, “Lowell Lundquist was at the top of everyone’s list.” But when he asked Dad to serve as elder, Dad would demur, saying, “I’m not a leader.”

Dad never told us that everybody wanted him to be an elder. That’s not the kind of thing he would have placarded. But I think he was wise to decline the honor of eldership. He wasn’t a natural leader. Control, influence, and power did not appeal to him, and he had little instinct for wielding authority. He could take orders but fumbled at giving them. He kept busy working and serving and lending support with diligence and goodwill and an easy smile. To lead effectively you may need to be a jerk sometimes, and Dad didn’t know how to be a jerk.

If you were a humble pastor trying to shepherd a church in good faith, you would kill to have Lowell Lundquist in your congregation.

Dad is my personal answer to the Leadership epidemic that has so enthralled the heart of evangelicalism in the last 30 years. I must step lightly here, because some of my best friends are leaders. And several colleagues whom I hold in high regard actually found value in those Willow Creek leadership extravaganzas that always made me want to barf. So, with a respectful nod to leadership-haunted friends, I just want to say, look, enough is enough. “Leadership” in the evangelical world has so exceeded its rightful bounds of emphasis and value relative to other Christian themes that it’s high time to rein it in. Boo leadership. Hooray followership.

We can’t all lead. Many of us are either morally or temperamentally unfit for it. It’s no shame to be temperamentally unfit for leadership. It is a shame to be morally unfit for anything.

Among the things that Willow Creek did wrong over the last few decades was to make an idol out of leadership. By 2000 the idolatry was so blatant that disgraced sexual predator Bill Clinton was invited to address leaders and wannabe leaders at the annual summit in Barrington. (Well, he’s a lying cad, but the important thing is, Oh, what a leader!) Founding Pastor (and similarly disgraced sexual predator) Bill Hybels caught flack for inviting Clinton then, and many godly people left. One who didn’t leave was co-founder (and, yes, again, disgraced sexual predator) Dr. Gilbert Bilezikian - the Steve Wozniak to Hybels’ Steve Jobs – whom Hybels elevated to sainthood status by unfurling a huge Bilezikian banner and leading a thunderous standing ovation for the scholar/pervert at the United Center in 2015 at the church’s 40th anniversary celebration.

Clinton, Hybels and Bilezikian are all despicable men who, for decades, thrust their middle fingers in the face of God and despised the call to holiness. But they were leaders, you see. You have to give them that, right? They sure could lead! And I respond with a paraphrase of St. Peter’s words to Simon the Sorcerer in Acts 8:20, “To hell with you and your leadership.”

At the "No More Silence" Conference in September 2019, former Willow Creek staff member Scott Dyer outlined in painful detail the strategy by which Hybels sought to pry Scott’s wife Vonda away from him. “He called me a B player and told her that she was an A player,” Scott said. Hybels suggested “She was a leader and I wasn’t, which at Willow Creek was about the worst thing that you could say about someone.”

Exactly. Scott Dyer understood all too well the culture of that place. The great sin was that of being perceived as having failed to lead. The disordered love and thirst for leadership poisoned the spiritual air of Willow Creek like mustard gas. I imagine that in such a setting a humble man like Lowell Lundquist would have been regarded as potential cuckold fodder.

After telling us on that Sunday of mourning in March of 1980 that Dad didn’t regard himself as a leader, Pastor Hutt continued, “Actually, Lowell knew what real leadership was all about. Jesus said, 'Whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave.' Lowell was everyone’s servant. So he was greatest leader of all.”

There it is. Do you seek great things for yourself? Seek them not. Blessed are those who, like my father, quietly follow, and follow, and follow, and never have the faintest clue that they are leading all the way.

Open Letter To Julie Roys

I thank God for you.

Your work exposing evangelical corruption is a godsend. May God prosper your ministry. I want all Christians to read your blog and follow your updates and listen with rapt attention to the talk you gave at Restore Chicago.

I know you have paid a heavy price investigating sin in churches like Harvest Bible Chapel and Willow Creek and in institutions like Moody Bible institute, Liberty University, and the Evangelical Counsel for Financial Accountability. And I know that this work came to you unbidden, that it is endless till Christ comes, and that you will need a special measure of grace to endure in tasks that, by the mercy of God, will lead to reform.

So thank you, I thank God for you, and I pray for you.

You have better things to do with your time than read the musings of a pastor-turned-manual-laborer on the evils besetting local expressions of Evangelicalism. But even if this essay never reaches your eyes and is only skimmed by a few friends of mine, it still seemed right to address it to you.

After missionary work in Colombia with Wycliffe I pastored two Chicago-area dying churches that ultimately failed. Many pastors here can tell you that, broadly speaking, when people left our churches in the 1990s they went to Willow Creek, and when they left in the 2000s they went to Harvest Bible Chapel (or to one of those churches’ satellites.) In smaller churches these people taught Sunday School or played the piano or served as deacons, but at Willow Creek and Harvest they typically sat in the audience and watched the show. While that sounds harsh, I’m afraid I know whereof I speak and can cite examples.

Willow Creek and Harvest imploded over the last year or so as the appalling behavior of their celebrity pastors Bill Hybels and James MacDonald became known. But these megachurches had been undermining other churches too for decades. As recently as two years ago a former elder at the small church I attended openly criticized the pastor and left for Willow Creek, and an influential deacon advised the pastor to listen to a message by James MacDonald to know what a good sermon sounded like. That deacon left too. The pastor is a friend of mine, and he is godly, humble, soft-spoken, wise, and theologically astute and orthodox. But as numbers dwindled and offerings declined the church let him go, and now he struggles to find a career. I offered to get him in at the chemical factory where I work, but he said he will need to make more money than that to support his wife and three young children, and I’m sure he’s right.

Church death and ministerial failure (I don’t mean moral failure but just the mundane failure to make a living) are complex phenomena with multiple causes that are all subject to the will of a sovereign God. That said, it can still be fairly observed that anyone who tried to pastor a church in the Chicago area in the past 30 years felt the influence of Willow Creek and Harvest like the manager of a Mom-and-Pop store feels the influence of Walmart and Amazon. Two near-orbiting energy-draining black holes.

I don’t mind the collapse of some churches and the growth of others as long as the gospel is faithfully preached and the spirit of Christ is earnestly manifested in the lives of its proclaimers. But such was not the case at Willow Creek and Harvest. I heard enough of Hybel’s teaching to perceive that the center of it was not Christ crucified but “Leadership” (or, more cynically, “Power and Influence”). With MacDonald it was simple greed and self-promotion.

But even where the preaching of these two men sometimes got it right, their personal lives were hopelessly corrupt. Both men lied, constantly, for years. Hybels seduced or tried to seduce multiple women – even to the point of deliberately alienating them from their husbands, and MacDonald’s hostile aggression makes the word “bullying” seem too mild a term for it. While allegations that MacDonald tried to hire an assassin on two separate occasions have yet to be confirmed by police, the character of MacDonald as revealed by intimate acquaintances renders these charges disturbingly credible. When confronted and exposed, both men denied everything, sought to discredit and destroy their accusers, and to this day have refused to repent, submit to discipline, or even acknowledge wrongdoing in any substantial way.

So let us think the unthinkable. The two largest and most influential churches in the Chicago area were led, for decades, by unregenerate men - damned souls, enemies of the cross of Christ who masqueraded as Christian brothers and in so doing sucked dry legitimate ministries and gave despisers of the faith a reason to scoff.

It may be objected that I dare not judge the hearts of men, and that I cannot set myself up as the arbiter of their eternal destinies. Fair enough. Hybels and MacDonald do not answer to me. To their own Master they stand or fall. Someday they and all other fallen preachers like Ted Haggard and Mark Driscoll and Perry Noble and Tullian Tchividjian – along with the rest of us - will stand before the judgment seat of Christ and render an account of deeds done in the body, whether good or bad. The prospect of standing before Jesus fills me with hope because of his mercy but also with dread because of my sin. Outraged righteously indignant accusers like you and me must ever look first to ourselves.

But Scriptural warnings not to judge lest we be judged (Matthew 7:1), to consider ourselves lest we also be tempted (Galatians 6:1), and to take heed lest we fall (1 Corinthians 10:12) must be weighed against companion Scriptures that say we will know them by their fruits (Matthew 7:16), that we are to test the spirits to see if they are from God (1 John 4:1), and that we must hand wicked professing Christians over to Satan (1 Corinthians 5:5; 1 Timothy 1:20) and refuse to sit at the same table with them (1 Corinthians 5:11). Among the reasons why “reconciliation” with Hybels or MacDonald is wrongheaded is that until these men acknowledge that they are not Christians (as Joshua Harris did), or repent, then fellowship with them is forbidden in the strongest terms. A couple months ago James MacDonald was welcomed into fellowship and allowed to teach at a retreat of New Life Covenant Church. By welcoming MacDonald, New Life Covenant revealed itself to be a fake church, and true Christians must flee it.

New Life Covenant says that it has 17,000 attendees.

In any institution or assembly there are always a few people whose behavior cries out for judgment, and recalcitrant transgressors must be fired, excommunicated, exiled, impeached, imprisoned or what-have-you. No community has ever been free of lethal contaminants. Even Jesus had Judas among his 12 disciples. But it seems that there is a certain point, a critical mass of corruption, beyond which you can no longer pick the few bad apples out of the barrel but have to start over with a new barrel. In 1900 engineers reversed the course of a Chicago River that had made a sewer of Lake Michigan and filled the city with stench and disease – but in 1986 no one could decontaminate Chernobyl. That city had to be abandoned in haste. I wonder: Is the state of evangelicalism today, in the form practiced by its biggest churches, more like Chicago of the 19th century or Chernobyl of the 20th?

I myself am as much a product of Chicago-area evangelicalism as anybody. My parents met and married at Moody Church, and I studied Bible at Wheaton College and ministry at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Though I’m no expert in anything and have never gravitated toward the center of any circle of influence, perhaps I’ve been around long enough to gain some sense of the spiritual landscape in the sector of Christendom with which I have been most closely associated. There is no escaping the conclusion that it’s just bad around here, really really bad, catastrophically bad, and the need for reform is critical. Though Hybels and MacDonald are gone, for example, their infection remains and their stench lingers. Anyone with biblical discernment who reads the Pastoral Search document that Willow Creek put out to find Hybels’ replacement can only shudder and say, “Oh for goodness’ sake, Willow Creekans, didn’t you learn anything?” And though MacDonald has rightly been fired and declared unfit for ministry, we still have not been entirely relieved - as you well know - of greedy belligerents who flourished in his shadow. Reform efforts remain compromised, and we’re still slouching toward Chernobyl.

I conclude my cup-half-empty lament with four items of input. For what they’re worth.

1) Keep slamming corruption. The work seems endless and hopeless, the bailing of a vast sea with one little bucket. But it must be done. For the love of God and for the sake of faithful brothers and sisters in Christ, it must be done. Every variety of ministry has its soul-wearying elements, its temptations to forebear - but it seems that the ministry of prophetic whistle-blowing is especially prone to them. You succeed in cutting out a tumor only to find that it has metastasized. You uncover so much wickedness that you teeter on the edge of cynicism and blanket distrust. You come to doubt yourself and your own worthiness to critique (which is a good thing, but still unsettling to experience and a potential silencer of righteous rebuke.) Your mind becomes so occupied with the muck of corruption that you find yourself gasping for spiritual air – as C. S. Lewis did when he wrote The Screwtape Letters and observed, “It almost smothered me before I was done.” But we’re all glad Lewis persevered through that dark cloud and finished the work. As God so calls you, do likewise. Do not grow weary in well doing.

2) Pray for cleansing and revival and reformation, and push for it in public prayers. Of course, this should go without saying. But I have been to enough evangelical prayer meetings and read through enough evangelical prayer lists to note with despair that they typically contain little more than references to physical ailments (“So-and-so is getting a hip replacement on Thursday”). So the prayers for renewal must be made deliberately. Urge them. By God’s grace I’ll do so myself tomorrow when my Sunday School teacher asks for prayer requests.

3) Do your part to dump the megachurch multisite model. I do not believe that evangelicalism per se is irredeemable. I am, and will remain, an evangelical Christian because I believe that the traditional evangelical understanding of reality is true, and evangelicalism’s interpretation of Scripture is best among the varying traditions of Christendom. I respect but dissent from the decisions of friends who got fed up with evangelicalism as they experienced it and fled to Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy.

To me the crisis of Western evangelicalism lies not in its traditional theology but in its de facto ecclesiology. A church is a gathering of God’s people in Christ, not a stadium with a star celebrity whose gifts and charisma attract a crowd. Megachurches of this model are seedbeds of spiritual corruption. Flee them. Never attend a church where the pastor lives lavishly, publishes (that is, has ghostwritten for him) bestsellers, leads cruises, gets interviewed by Oprah, has the ear of a president, or projects his image onto a screen so casual attendees in the attached coffee shop can catch the wave of his spiritual energy. How many of these celebrity shepherds have to be unmasked as frauds before evangelical sheep will realize that the system is unbiblical and corrupt? I will state the matter with unapologetic boldness: All multisite megachurches are spiritual Chernobyls. Evangelicalism is redeemable but megachurches are not. Run away. Attend a church where some humble, unassuming servant of God preaches verse-by-verse through the pages of Holy Scripture.

4) This last one is oddly specific. Go to YouTube and listen to D. A. Carson’s message “Leaning Forward In The Dark: A Failed Reformation. Nehemiah 13.” I do not know any better guide to the perils involved in seeking renewal and reformation among the people of God.

Four Under-Emphasized Things About Heaven

I would like to share with you four things the Bible says about heaven. These are not the only things. The list could be longer and arranged differently. But I have deliberately selected these four in order to challenge misapprehensions about heaven that appear in pop culture and that often affect the thinking of devout Christians.

1. Heaven is a place where God's will is done.

How do I know that? It’s in Lord’s Prayer. The disciples said to Jesus “Teach us to pray.” And he said, “When you pray, say this, ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. May your kingdom come, may your will be done on earth as it is done in heaven.’” There it is: we are to pray for God’s will to be done here just as it is in fact always done in heaven. Here on earth, God’s will is typically defied, resisted, held in contempt, and rebelled against. We ourselves defy the will of God every time we sin. For example, it is God’s will that we tell the truth, that we not be lazy and self-indulgent, that we honor our commitments, fulfill our promises, remain faithful to our spouses, that we show kindness to the weak and miserable, that we exercise self discipline so as not to become enslaved to vice, and so on. And it is the Bible’s sad verdict that everyone, without exception, regularly defies the good will of God. God’s prescriptive will for how we should behave is not done on earth by anyone.

And that could be cause for despair with regard to the world in general and our hearts in particular. But don’t despair. There is a place where God’s will is always done all the time. That place is heaven. In my own prayers, I often repeat the Lord’s Prayer and elaborate in various ways on its seven petitions. One of the things that I like to do now is to give thanks that when I am tempted to despair over the way people behave – they just won’t repent, they don’t even feel guilty, they have no sense of conviction about the galling, self-destructive, others-destructive patterns of behavior that characterize them, behaviors that can be perfectly obvious to their family members and peers - and then the thought haunts me about my own patterns of defiance, perhaps things hidden from me but very clear to others – in those moments of sorrow I can give thanks to God that it is not like this everywhere. Sin does not contaminate and spoil all of universal reality. There is a place where God’s will is done. In heaven, the angels and departed saints never cross their arms and glare at God in bitter defiance of what he ordains. They delight to do his will, and they always do it.

Heaven is a place where God’s will is done. Not your will, not my will - God’s will. Once you have that thought locked firmly in your mind, then dare to ask yourself this question, “Do I want to go to heaven when I die?”

Here is why I ask. If you spend your life defying the will of God, going your own way, not caring whether what you do pleases him, but caring mainly about whether you please yourself, fulfill yourself, do what you want to do, stay dead center in the comfort zone of your desires and ambitions and identity – then unless you turn around completely, you won’t like heaven. Heaven will be a very distasteful, alien place to you. If you are comfortable defying the will of God here, why would you think you will suddenly start liking it there? This is the place to be remade, the place to be born again. This is the place to learn to love that holiness without which no one will see the Lord.

Every pop-culture reference to heaven that I am aware of gets this feature of heaven wrong. And not just wrong, but backwards - 100 percent backwards. Pop culture makes of heaven a place where our will is done, and we get our wishes fulfilled. Heaven is even shaped and contoured according to our desire. Here are some examples:

In the 1998 film What Dreams May Come, Robin Williams dies and enters a beautiful place. His guide, Cuba Gooding Jr tells him, “You’re creating an entire world here from your imagination. Anything you want!”

In the 2002 book The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, a 14-year-old girl is murdered, goes to heaven, and gets exactly what she wants. Her intake counselor explains how heaven works: “All you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why – really know – it will come.”

In the 2013 apocalyptic comedy This Is The End. Seth Rogen and a buddy get raptured to heaven where Rogen’s first question is, “Is there weed in heaven?” A marijuana joint instantly materializes between his lips. And he says, “That’s insane!” and a friend says, “No, no, no. That’s heaven. Anything you can think of – it’s yours.”

More recently there is the song Fishing in the Sky, recorded by Travis Smith. Smith’s grandmother wrote the song 30 years ago. He made an arrangement for it and then posted a video of her listening to him sing the song for the first time. It’s a very moving video as she is overcome with emotion and weeps even as she sings along. The last I saw it had some 12 million views via Facebook.

Here are some of the words:

“When we get to heaven God will know just what we like.
He’s got a lake for me in my sweet by and by.
I’ll have a silver boat that sparkles. It will be lined with fleece of white.
I’ll have a rod and reel that’s made of gold. The fish will always bite.
I’ll have a cabin by the lake. Shade trees will grow so high.
There’ll be crickets and birds to sing when I’m fishing, fishing in the sky.”

That sounds like a fisherman’s (or a fisherwoman’s) paradise. “God will know just what we like,” the song says. For some that’s fishing, for Seth Rogen it’s marijuana, for Susie in The Lovely Bones it was a high school where she only went to art class. For the terrorists who flew planes into buildings on 9/11 it was 72 willing consorts. Or maybe unwilling powerless victims if that’s what got them really excited. Whatever you want, right? Whatever makes you happy.

Listen, heaven is where God’s will is done – not your will, my will, or anybody else’s will, but God’s will. Heaven does not shape-shift to conform to you. You soul-shift to confirm to it. I believe C.S. Lewis was right when he said in one of his letters, “Heaven is an acquired taste.” Thankfully we can get plenty of practice in acquiring that taste here by submitting ourselves to God and to his work of grace within us so that we can be transformed into the kind of person who will like heaven rather than be repulsed by it. Make it your prayer and your goal to be able to say with the King David, “I delight to do your will, O God” (Psalm 40:8). Because if you can learn to delight to do God’s will, then you will like the heaven that exists, and you will not be susceptible to that pop-culture abomination that would say, “I delight for you to do my will, O God, and I’m so glad that in heaven you will finally get it right.”

2. Heaven is a place where God is worshiped.

In Revelation 4 and 5 you have astounding imagery concerning what might be called the ecstatic celebration of God. I don’t have time to go through all those images even if I felt I understood them well. But let me just reference the concluding words of that text, which say, “The elders fell down and worshiped.” They worshiped God.

What is “worship” - what does that mean? In North American evangelicalism, the word “worship” seems to have been co-opted to mean the singing we do in church before the sermon starts. Which is why singers and musicians are typically called a “worship team”. I have also heard the word “worship” used as a virtual synonym for “praise”, “adoration”, and “exaltation”. Those words are definitely related and have overlapping semantic domains - but they are not identical. Of course there is praise, adoration, and exaltation in heaven, but here I will just focus on worship. Worship means, at its bare bones, to bow down. To incline your head, to kneel, to lie prostrate before.

When you worship anything or anyone, you are declaring the superiority of that person or thing. You are acknowledging your inferiority, your subjectitude, and declaring - by voice, posture, actions - that the person or thing to which you ascribe worship has authority over you, dominion over you.

Here we can contrast the word “worship” with some of the words with which it gets comingled and confused - like “praise,” “exalt,” or “glorify.” There are verses in the Bible (believe it or not!) that say that God will praise, glorify, or exalt certain human beings. For example John 12:43: They loved praise from men rather than praise from God. (Indicating that there is such a thing as praise from God.) John 5:44: You receive glory from one another but do not seek the glory that comes from God. (God will indeed glorify some people.) 1 Peter 5:6: Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, so that in due time he may exalt you. Sometimes God does the exalting.

So according to the Bible, God loves us, and he may exalt, praise, or glorify at least some of us. But God never worships us. That’s unthinkable. God never declares our superiority over him. He serves us, and has done so supremely in Jesus Christ his Son, but he never bows to our authority. We bow to his. We worship him. It’s all one way.

Now among human beings there is such a thing as mutual worship. A worships B and B worships A. A spectacular example occurs in the wedding vows written into the Book of Common Prayer ( 1549), which guided Anglican worship for centuries and probably still does in some places. The vows used to say things like “I plight thee my troth.” We’ve gotten rid of that because no one knows what it means. I myself do not know what “plight” means as a verb, and I don’t know what “troth” means – I’d have to look them up. But in those classic vows, something that the bride and groom say to each other is “With my body I thee worship.” That sounds crazy to modern ears. “I worship you with my body”?

But all that is is a vow to obey the implied commandment in 1 Corinthians 7:4, which says, the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. In Christian marriage, the husband and the wife say to each other “I no longer have autonomy over my own body. Even as personal a thing as my body I yield to you.” What could be more personal than one’s body? You could lose your home and your property and your job and your belongings, but at least you’ve still got your body, right? “My body at least is something over which I exercise control!” Well, no, not in a loving Christian marriage. Even that is yielded up in joyous mutual subjection. “With my body I thee worship.”

But there is something that even a traditional Anglican would never say in his or her wedding vows. There is something even more personal than your body, which is the thing that will survive your body’s death. Anglicans never said to their spouses, “With my soul I thee worship.” The soul, the whole self, must only worship God.

There is a quote attributed to 19th century novelist George MacDonald to the effect that you do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body. I believe that gets it right. We are souls, and as souls - with or without a body, as the case may be – we yield ourselves in subjection to God, and in heaven will have the delight of doing so without hindrance. There is so much here in our fallen world and in our fallen selves that gets in the way of worship, spoils it, makes it boring, tempts us to look inward rather than toward God. But in heaven, everything that can be called me – body, soul, mind, spirit, brain, habits, choices, identity, consciousness – everything bows before God in glad subjection.

Our worship song Shout To The Lord gets it right when it says, “Let every breath, all that I am, never cease to worship you.”

I have never seen a pop-culture reference to heaven that includes an acknowledgment of this fundamental feature of heaven, namely, the glad worship of God. In Philippians 2 it says that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, whether in heaven or on earth or under the earth, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. Every knee will bow, and those who are bowing their knees in heaven will know no greater joy.

3: Heaven is a place where God is known.

In Philippians 3:10 the Apostle Paul makes an interesting statement. He says, I want to know Christ. You scratch your head at that and say, “What do you mean, you want to know Christ? You already know him. You’ve met him and talked to him. You’ve written a bunch of letters about him and will wind up writing almost half the books of the New Testament about him. Don’t you already know him?” And the answer of course is yes, Paul knew him, but not as much as he wanted to. Not as much as he would have liked.

In 1 Corinthians 13 he compares his knowledge of Christ to seeing him through a dirty lens or a fogged-up mirror. In the Elizabethan language of the King James Version it’s Now we see we see through a glass darkly – so it’s not a perfectly clear image of Christ that we get here. But, Paul continues, then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

I heard Pastor John Ortberg say that while the Bible speaks often of “eternal life” – 45 times, by my count – there is only one text that gives a definition of eternal life. And it is John 17:3: Now this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom You have sent.

Eternal life is knowing God. That is not to say that eternal life is not also an endless state of comfort and bliss - it is just that that is not the direction the Bible chooses to go in the one passage where it actually gives a definition of the term. When it comes to defining eternal life, The Bible chooses to emphasize knowing God and his Son Jesus Christ.

4: Heaven is a place where God is present.

It may seem odd to put this last because it is a fundamental truth that is presupposed in my other three points. If heaven is a place where God is known and worshiped and his will is done, clearly he’s got to be there, right? Yes, but I am giving this point its own treatment and ending on it because it seems to me to be the most important thing about heaven and the thing that is so utterly neglected in the popular mindset about heaven. The neglect is so pervasive I have cause to think that the omission is not accidental but sinister.

The last 9 chapters of the book of Ezekiel describe in extraordinarily rich and symbol-laden detail what I and many scholars take to be a depiction of heavenly realities. It is a challenge to read, and I’m sure it was a challenge for Ezekiel to write it. Because how do you describe the indescribable? How do you then have it make sense to a 6th century BC Hebrew refugee in Babylonian exile? How do you explain general relativity and quantum mechanics to a 5-year-old?

Thankfully the last verse of the book, Ezekiel 48:35, provides the golden nugget, the bottom-line takeaway that hopefully even a fool can grasp. It says, The name of the city from that time on shall be, “The Lord Is There.” There it is - that’s what you need to understand if you can’t figure out anything else. The Lord is there.

Likewise today – let us move forward 2600 years - there are Christians who have different understandings of how the events of the last days will work out, in what order and according to what timeframe things will occur. But even if there are disagreements about the nature of, say, the rapture and the millennium, there is no disagreement about the bottom line in 1 Thessalonians 4:17: And so we will be with the Lord forever.

The main thing about heaven is that the Lord is there and that those who are in heaven are with the Lord.

That truth is presented in three passages in the New Testament that speak of the status of the believer immediately upon his or her death. Those passages are Luke 23:43, Philippians 1:23; and 2 Corinthians 5:6-8:

In Luke 23, Jesus tells one of the men being crucified next to him, “Today you will be with me in paradise.” Today – not thousands of years from now after your body is resurrected, but today. The man was going to die that day. And that day he would be not just in any old paradise but specifically a paradise with Christ. The Lord would be there.

In Philippians 1, Paul knows that he might be executed soon. But that does not bother him – in fact he says he would rather depart and be with Christ, which was better by far. Dying would mean that he would instantly be with Christ.

And in 2 Corinthians 5, Paul contrasts life with death by saying that if we are at home in the body (alive) we are away from the Lord, but if we are away from body (dead) we are at home with the Lord. The main thing about heaven, the thing that makes it heaven, is not bliss, endless duration, beautiful scenery, or meeting loved ones. The main thing about heaven is that the Lord is there. People in heaven get to see Jesus face to face.

How badly this truth is neglected and therefore must be all the more boldly proclaimed may be illustrated by a song from Canadian folk singer Roger Whittaker where he celebrates the beauty of Cape Breton, a National Park in Nova Scotia. I’ve never been there but I’ve seen pictures and it’s very pretty. He sings this line:

If my time could end perfectly,
I know how I’d want it to be.
God’s gift of heaven would be made up of three:
My love, Cape Breton, and me

I am indebted to my teacher D. A. Carson who said, “Oh dear Roger. You’ve just described hell.” If heaven is composed of three things, “my love, Cape Breton, and me,” what’s missing? Well for one thing, the multitude of the redeemed with whom we will be able to share our joys! But of course most importantly, Jesus is missing from that picture. If Jesus isn’t there, it means I’m in hell.

There is a fireball of a preacher named Paul Washer – he’s worth looking up on YouTube. He is fond of saying, “We all want to go to heaven, we just don’t want God to be there.” Plenty of people want the nice things God can give, but not God. Now if he can just give me nice things and lots of pleasure and then go away and mind his own business, then everything will be fine.

Recognizing this temptation to value God’s gifts over God himself, a pastor’s wife named Ann Ross Cousin penned these words in 1854:

The bride eyes not her garment, but her dear Bridegroom’s face;
I will not gaze at glory But on my King of grace;
Not at the crown He giveth, But on His pierced hand;
The Lamb is all the glory Of Immanuel’s land.

There is a danger in absorbing into our mindset pop-culture references to heaven like those in What Dreams May Come; The Lovely Bones; This is the End; Fishing in the Sky; and My Love, Cape Breton and Me. Because all those secular pictures of heaven lack God. Jesus is never there. And for that reason alone, they are closer to hell than they are to heaven. If I don’t see Jesus, it isn’t heaven. If God’s not there, I’m in hell.

I will close with this. In John chapter 11, we read the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead after he had been dead four days and his body had begun to decay. No one knows what Lazarus experienced in those four days. I deny that the experience of a man whom God knows he will resurrect in four days is necessarily the same as that of a man whom God knows he will not resurrect for thousands of years. So we don’t know. But whatever Lazarus experienced, it is a fair bet that when Jesus raised him Lazarus did not blurt out, “Oh come on Jesus, what did you do that for? I was enjoying such bliss and you brought me back here??? Thanks a lot!” No. A wise Professor, Michael Wittmer, pointed out that the first thing that Lazarus saw when he opened his eyes was the face of his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And that made that location at the tomb in Bethany, for Lazarus, in that moment, heaven on earth. There was no better place to be than in the presence of Christ. There is never, ever, a better place to be than that. Let us pray.

Father in heaven, Forgive us our sins by the grace you made available through the death of your Son Jesus on the cross, and give us that new birth by which we can become the people who live in your presence forever, and know you, and worship you, and delight to do your will. Amen.

When You Are A Guest Preacher

I do some guest preaching, and I have a few convictions about how to do it that I have distilled into three rules. If you are filling a pulpit, do the following:

1. Find out beforehand what previous preachers have talked about so that you do not duplicate them. This requires just a one-minute phone call or a two-sentence email. After you learn what has been preached on and what - if anything - is planned for the near future, then submit your text and theme and ask if you can preach on that. This is a duty so basic that you would think it wouldn’t have to be spelled out, but I’m afraid it does. Some years ago I preached from a text and the speaker who followed me (over whom I had no control and who never contacted me) preached from the same text the next Sunday. A few weeks ago I was dumbfounded by an even more egregious example. A guest preacher told us that he had recently filled a pulpit where he was informed that the two previous speakers had selected the same text that he would be preaching on. Undaunted and unashamed, he concluded that God must have really wanted the congregation to hear that text! No, no, no, no, no. What he should have thought was What is wrong with me? Why am I so lazy and undisciplined that I can’t even pick up a phone and ask somebody what was preached on last week? Why am I so contemptuous of congregations that I feel I can annoy and bore them and then blame my irresponsibility on God? God, help me to learn from this embarrassment and get it right next time.

2. Know beforehand how much time you are allotted, and abide by it. On countless occasions I have heard a preacher pause to ask, “How much time do I have left?” and when that happens I went to get up and walk out. Such a question demonstrates an inexcusable failure to prepare, and, again, contempt for the audience. It suggests that the preacher has so little regard for his own message that, oh, well, he could jabber on for another 20 or 30 minutes if he has to fill up the time - or he could call it quits right there. Whatever. With that question he has told you that there’s no beginning, middle and end to a reasoned discourse where one sentence builds upon another and the thoughts flow naturally to a predetermined conclusion. He's just winging it. The next time I hear that “How-much-do-I-have-left?” question, I may not be able to suppress the urge to shout out, “Your time is up NOW!”

3. When you get to the pulpit, start preaching.

I mean it. Just start preaching immediately. If the Scripture text has not already been read, then a good rule of thumb is that the first word that leaves your lips upon arriving at the pulpit should be the word “Our”, as in, “Our Scripture text is Matthew chapter 3, verses 13 to 17.” Read it, and then start expounding the text as if your life, and the souls of men, depended on it.

Do not introduce yourself. I know everyone does it, but it’s a mistake. Listen, miserable sinner: You don’t matter, God does. His Word does. Get yourself out of the way and let the Word speak. Remember the words of John the Baptist: “He must become greater; I must become less” (John 3:30) and the plea of Gentile seekers in John 12:21: “We want to see Jesus.”

Do not tell us about yourself (not even your name!), where you’re from, how many kids or grandkids you have, what sports teams you root for, what is happening in your ministry, what your feelings are about this weather we’ve been having, what your flight was like, or your impressions of the church sanctuary as you walked in. Stop it stop it stop it. Tell no jokes, engage in no banter, and bite your lip till it bleeds to keep yourself from droning on with the inane drivel that sadly characterizes just about every doggone guest preacher I’ve heard for the past few years. Shock your audience with the seriousness of your purpose by opening your mouth with the immediate, focused, unfettered proclamation of the Word of God.

Can I Know God Personally?

Can I know God personally?

Yes. But are you sure you want to?

I mean that question seriously. So seriously that I ask it of myself, and tremble in doing so. I do not take it for granted that I know God. Perhaps what I mean by that will become clear as I go on with this message.

I will begin with the stories of two men who thought they knew God but who came to a point in their lives where they weren’t so sure.

The first man was C. S. Lewis. Lewis was an atheist scholar who became a Christian in his early 30s. He then wrote many Christians works, including Mere Christianity and The Chronicles of Narnia. He had been a life-long bachelor until his late 50s. He then married a friend, Joy Gresham, who was soon diagnosed with terminal cancer. She was expected to die within weeks, but then made a miraculous recovery, and they had a blissful marriage. Lewis wrote, “Friendship gave way to pity which became love.” They loved each other dearly, and lived in the delight of unexpected life and unexpected romance. Then two years later the cancer returned, and she died. In the throes of his sorrow, Lewis wrote a classic memoir, A Grief Observed, in which he wrote the following:

Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be – or so it feels – welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?...Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not “So there’s no God after all,” but “So this is what God’s really like.”

Question: did C. S. Lewis know God? Please understand, he’s my idol. Part of me wants to ask, before answering too quickly the question “Can I know God personally?”, did C. S. Lewis know God personally? And if so, then how could he come to a point where he felt no connection with God whatsoever - or, still believing in God, could suspect that God was perhaps very different from what he had imagined him to be?

Second story concerns Gordon MacDonald. He was the pastor of an influential church in New England, eventually became president of the campus ministry Intervarsity. Around 1984 he was asked to be a candidate for head of an international Christian organization. I don’t know which one; he did not identify it. During the candidating process he later wrote that neither he nor his wife Gail had “ever asked God for omens or signs to determine future direction, but during these weeks, the dots seemed to line up. The books we read, the conversations we held, the prayers we prayed, the voice of God we heard in our souls – everything pointed to my getting this position. We felt God was saying, ‘This is going to happen.’” After his final interview when it had come down to him and one other candidate, his wife Gail said to him, “They’re going to ask you to be the next president.” He said, “That surprised me, because Gail is not prone to such pronouncements.”

So he prepared his resignation from the church he was serving, and called his staff together to tell them what was happening and that he would probably be moving on. Then he got the phone call telling him that the organization was going with the other candidate.

He wrote this:

Ten days later the full force of what happened crushed me. I submarined into the depths of disillusionment. At a subterranean level, I told God, “You’ve made a perfect fool of me. You drew me to the finish line and said, ‘I’m sorry.’ I no longer know your language. You speak a different language than I’ve been trained to understand.” I was questioning God, something I had never really done. I doubted whether it was possible to hear God speak.

I repeat my question: Did Pastor Gordon MacDonald know God personally? And if so, how could he be so baffled, so utterly wrong about what he presumed to be the leading of God that he could wind up saying, “God, you and I speak different languages. I don’t know yours. I have no idea what you’re saying.”

This problem is an old one. In Proverbs 30: 2-3 a man named Agur confesses, Surely I am too stupid to be a man. I have not the understanding of a man. I have not learned wisdom, nor do I have knowledge of the Holy One. That’s a strong statement from a teacher in Israel: “You’re asking me about God? What do I know about God?”

In response to the problem I have posed in these allusions to the experiences of others, let me offer a few thoughts arranged briefly under four headings.

First, knowing God is not the same as knowing about God.

We all know intuitively the difference between knowing someone and knowing about someone. I know some things about Lebron James and Meryl Streep and Joe Biden, but I don’t know them. And part of the proof that I don’t know them is the fact that they don’t know me. I could pick them out of a lineup because they are celebrities, but if you put me in a lineup in front of them, they would not pick me out as an acquaintance, and they wouldn’t know my name in the first place.

Likewise we can have significant knowledge about God the way we know about a celebrity, but not know him at all. The clearest indication of that is James 2:19 which says, You believe there is one God. Good! The demons believe that – and shudder. Demons are orthodox monotheists. There are no atheist demons. Demons are evil but they aren’t stupid. They even believe in the deity of Christ, his death on the cross for sinners, his resurrection from the dead. Their theological sophistication is advanced and accurate. But they do not know God. And just as Lebron James and Meryl Streep and Joe Biden don’t know me, so also, in the end, demons and all the damned will be declared unknown by Jesus Christ. That is shown to be the case in his awful words of judgment in Matthew 7:23: “I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.”

Knowing about God is not the same as knowing him. You can know a lot about God and still be an evil reprobate whom Jesus could not pick out of a lineup.

Number 2: Knowing God is not the same as understanding God.

Job 11:7 says, Can you fathom the deep things of God? Can you discover the limits of the Almighty? The answers to those rhetorical questions are no and no. God is beyond us. We cannot fathom his ways.

Isaiah 55:8-9: For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

An illustration might help convey that point. For those of you who have a pet dog, does your dog know you? Yes of course. The dog wags its tail at you and barks at a stranger. The dog knows what you smell like. We have all seen those videos of a soldier coming home from a tour of duty and the dog practically leaps out of its skin to welcome its master home. The dog knows its master. But does the dog understand its master? I little bit, I suppose. The dog recognizes its name when called. Maybe it knows a few simple commands – “sit,” “stay,” heel.” “Sic ‘im,” if it’s a warrior dog.

But ask yourself, does your dog know what you do for living? Of course not, it doesn’t have a clue. Does the dog know what you study in school? Your dog is illiterate. In this congregation I see Asian faces before me, and as an honorary Asian myself I get to stereotype. I bet some of you can do calculus. There may be some here who have solved differential equations, which is farther than I ever got. Well, your dog doesn’t even know the square root of 9. Your dog can’t add 7 and 4. And the gap between you and your dog’s comprehension of you is far, far narrower than the gap between God and your comprehension of him.

God is beyond our comprehension. You can believe in God, obey God, love God, and know God. But you’re not going to understand God fully, or comprehend more than rudimentary things about him. The Apostle Paul writes in Romans 11:33-34, Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor? Do not confuse knowing God with understanding God. The first is possible, the second is not. There will always be things about him that leave you stumped.

Number 3: Knowing God is not a matter of knowing what God is up to or what he is going to do.

There are exceptions to that, as when God reveals to a prophet some news about a future event and or reveals something about present or past reality which would normally be opaque. But more often than not, those things which are future to us or normally hidden from us remain hidden from us by God’s design and mercy. Both C. S. Lewis and Gordon MacDonald were mistaken about what they assumed to be God’s plan and purpose.

They’re not alone. King Josiah was probably the godliest of all 39 kings of Israel and Judah. He was a remarkable man. Do you know how he died? He got involved in a battle that frankly he should have stayed out of. Pharaoh Neco of Egypt went up to engage the king of Assyria, and Josiah went out to intercept him. It is recorded in 2 Kings 23 and 2 Chronicles 35. Josiah got killed in the process. Basically he made a mistake - he really should have stayed home. He wasn’t a bad man, he was a profoundly good man – but that did not keep him from being fundamentally mistaken about the victory that he seemed to assume that God would give him over Pharaoh Neco.

Great humility is in order for all of us lest we presume that our acquaintance with God makes us unerringly privy to the things that he is doing now or will do in the future. In James 4:13-15, Jesus’ half-brother James writes this: Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.”

Humility about human knowledge of the plan of God is reflected beautifully in one little word that St. Paul uses in Philemon verse 15. As he is writing a letter to reunite Onesimus with Philemon Paul writes Perhaps the reason he was separated from you for a little while was that you might have him back forever. Note that word “perhaps”. Paul does not say, “I know what God was up to in these circumstances. I’ve got it figured out.” No, he says, “perhaps” - “perhaps this is the reason.” God alone knows.

I try to be rigorous in my caution about statements that suggest that I know what God is doing and what his plans are. In 2003, after serving for some time as pulpit supply at Faith Bible Church I was called to be the pastor there. They had a ceremony installing me as pastor, and a Chicago area minister graciously agreed to officiate. He even wrote up a statement for me to repeat, kind of like a wedding vow. I wish I had a copy of it. Because I don’t remember the exact wording. But it was something along the lines of, “I know that God is calling me to serve this congregation as its pastor and faithfully to lead the people in proclamation of the Word and discipleship etc.” I contacted him beforehand and said, “I can’t say this, because while it does reflect my thinking, the truth is I don’t even know if I will be alive one minute from now. God has not revealed even that much to me, much less what his future designs are for this fellowship with me as its pastor. There is nothing in my theology that would make it impossible for an asteroid to wipe out the church building tonight! What I can say is “perhaps” and “maybe” and “if God so wills.” But I make no claims to be privy to the mind of God concerning his future plans in such matters. I don’t know him that well.

Does that mean that we never know the mind of God about anything? No, I would never go that far. I know it is God’s will that I not covet anything that belongs to my neighbor. I know it is God’s will that I not bear false witness, or be unfaithful to my wife, or steal, or that I take his name in vain, or worship other gods. I know it is his will that I love him with all my heart soul mind and strength, and that I love my neighbor as myself.

And that leads to my 4th observation about knowing God. My first 3 observations were all negative. Knowing God is not a matter of knowing about him. The demons know about him. It is not a matter of fully comprehending him and his ways. Nobody comprehends very much of him. It is not a matter of being confident in your own mind that you know what he’s up to and what he is going to do. The best of us make mistakes with those kinds of guesses.

My 4th observation is positive. Knowing God – knowing him “personally,” if you will - is a matter of obeying him. The Bible makes that simple point again and again and again.

In Jeremiah 22:15-16, Jeremiah is speaking to King Shallum (also known as Jehoahaz), who was a bad man. Shallum, believe it or not, was the son of Josiah, who as I mentioned before was the godliest king that Israel or Judah ever had. God speaks to Shallum through the prophet Jeremiah, saying, Your father did what was right and just, so all went well with him. He defended the cause of the poor and needy, and so all went well. Is that not what it means to know me? declares the Lord.

God equates doing what is right and just - for example, defending the cause of the poor and the needy - with knowing him. Josiah himself may have guessed very poorly about what God was up to. And as that battle against Pharaoh Neco went horribly wrong, perhaps as Josiah lay on the battlefield mortally wounded and bleeding out, he thought, “I guess I don’t know God after all. I don’t speak his language; he doesn’t speak mine. This didn’t work out the way I thought. Surely I am more stupid than any man and have no knowledge of the Holy One. If I knock on the door of heaven, will he hear me or bolt the door?” But whether he knew it or not, he knew God. His goodness, faithfulness, justice, fairness, and generosity were barometric indicators all proving that he knew God. And much more important, that God knew him, and would never say to him, “Depart from me you worker of iniquity. I never knew you,” but rather, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Welcome into the joy of your Master.”

Knowing God is a matter of obeying him. So many passages teach this. 1 John 2:3-4 says, And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments. Whoever says “I know him” but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him.

1 John 3:6: No one who lives in him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him.

Titus 1:16, speaking of the morally corrupt: They claim to know God, but they deny him by their works. They are detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work.

One more text with this theme: 1 John 4:7-8: Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.

Love of course is the principle commandment. Jesus said that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart soul mind and strength, and the second greatest is to love your neighbor as yourself. All the law and prophets hang on these two commandments, Jesus said.

I began this talk by referring to two men, C. S. Lewis and Gordon MacDonald, who both came to awful moments of despair where they both wondered, “Do I know God at all – does he hear me, do I hear him, have all my assumptions been wrong?” It’s a terrible place to be. But at this point in their lives, the paths of these two men diverged. C S Lewis said his prayers, went to church, remained faithful, trudged one weary foot after another in painful obedience to what he knew to be right, and in a short time he recovered his spiritual bearings. I wonder if in his moments of darkness he recalled his own words written some 20 years earlier in The Screwtape Letters, which is an imaginary correspondence from a senior demon who coaches his nephew, Wormwood, on the art of tempting human beings. In Letter number 8, Screwtape writes this,

Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

Gordon MacDonald, on the other hand, went and had an extramarital affair. He did this over a period of several months despite having pastored a church and serving as Chairman of World Vision and President of Intervarsity. He cheated on his wife. Let me be clear. We are to love God and love our neighbor. Adultery is a selfish act of hatred against God and neighbor. Adultery expresses hatred of God, hatred of one’s spouse, and hatred of one’s children. It is one massive middle finger stuck in the face of God saying "Forget you, God. I know what you said about faithfulness and keeping my vows, but I value my pleasure over my spouse, my kids, my extended family, my church, and you, and incidentally the person whose life and faith I am probably destroying by cheating with her or him."

So my question now is, which man knew God, Gordon MacDonald or C. S. Lewis?

When Gordon MacDonald thought, “God, you and I don’t speak the same language. I doubt it is possible to hear you speak,” somebody needed to slap him upside the head and say, “Of course he speaks your language, you fool! Haven’t you heard that he has said things like, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery'? How hard is that to understand?"

God can be known, but he can only be known through obedience, and he cannot be known apart from obedience. That is why I gave what may have sounded like a strange answer to the question, “Can I know God personally?” Yes! But are you sure you want to? Because knowing God will involve being fully conformed to his image and fully submissive to his will, and that will entail an often painful process that you and I as corrupt sinners cannot begin to imagine. Even so, there will be some who say, “Yes, I want that. I want God. I want to know him, even it hurts, even if it costs me something, even if it costs me everything. I want to know my Maker, and be just the way he wants me to be.”

For such people I have good news. God loves you, and he has scaled himself down to human form in the person of Jesus Christ who died in order to bear the penalty for sin and forgive sinners, and he rose again from the dead with the kind of resurrection life that he pledges to give to all who follow him. Earlier I compared us to a dog, a pet dog who frankly understands very little of its master, but knows its master well enough to recognize his voice, detect his scent, and wag its tail in ecstatic delight when the master comes calling. The Bible does not call God’s loved ones "dogs." It prefers the term "sheep," which are even dumber than dogs. But I don’t mind that veiled insult when I read the words of Jesus, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand.”

Let us pray.

God, thank you for making yourself knowable through Jesus Christ. Grant to those of us who lack it a thirst to know you more. Hold before us the delight of being conformed to the image of your Son through whom we will increase in knowledge, in grace, in truth, and in love. To your everlasting glory through Jesus, Amen.