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 - Endorsed - Indifferent - Contested
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| The Nashville Statement
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Name:Daniel
Home: Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
About Me: I used to believe that evolution was reasonable, that homosexuality was genetic, and that people became Christians because they couldn't deal with the 'reality' that this life was all there was. I used to believe, that if there was a heaven - I could get there by being good - and I used to think I was more or less a good person. I was wrong on all counts. One day I finally had my eyes opened and I saw that I was not going to go to heaven, but that I was certainly going to suffer the wrath of God for all my sin. I saw myself as a treasonous rebel at heart - I hated God for creating me just to send me to Hell - and I was wretched beyond my own comprehension. Into this spiritual vacuum Jesus Christ came and he opened my understanding - delivering me from God's wrath into God's grace. I was "saved" as an adult, and now my life is hid in Christ. I am by no means sinless, but by God's grace I am a repenting believer - a born again Christian.
My complete profile...
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Daniel's posts are almost always pastoral and God centered. I appreciate and am challenged by them frequently. He has a great sense of humor as well.
- Marc Heinrich
His posts are either funny or challenging. He is very friendly and nice.
- Rose Cole
[He has] good posts, both the serious like this one, and the humorous like yesterday. [He is] the reason that I have restrained myself from making Canadian jokes in my posts.
- C-Train
This post contains nothing that is of any use to me. What were you thinking? Anyway, it's probably the best I've read all day.
- David Kjos
Daniel, nicely done and much more original than Frank the Turk.
- Jonathan Moorhead
There are some people who are smart, deep, or funny. There are not very many people that are all 3. Daniel is one of those people. His opinion, insight and humor have kept me coming back to his blog since I first visited earlier this year.
- Carla Rolfe
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| When Assyria was God's Rod... |
In Isaiah 10 our Lord spoke about the coming judgment of Israel through the prophet. He explained in vivid imagery that nothing remained for those who stood condemned, but the coming condemnation. In this case, God was going to rouse Assyria against Israel (Judah). To frame this judgment, the Lord says through Isaiah, that Assyria doesn't intend to be God's rod of correction; that they are merely another wicked nation and that this plundering of Israel is merely an expression of their own corruption. Once God has used the Assyrians to judge Israel, He will then judge Assyria.
Consider the walled corridor that connects a holding pen for cattle to a killing floor beyond. Once an animal begins to walk in that corridor the narrow walls keep it from turning around. It goes to the killing floor on its own initiative. The Assyrians were acting in accord with their corruption - God wasn't imposing some new corruption upon them in order to force them to come to Israel - rather God was directing their path towards Israel so that their corruption was spent serving God's purpose. It isn't that God was forcing them to be wicked, it is that God was directing their wickedness at Israel in order to judge Israel. In His mercy, He chose to prune Israel by the hand of the Assyrians, rather than wipe her out altogether.
How did Paul say it? All things work together for good to those who love God and are called according to His purpose. Calamity, however, isn't always judgment. Job was the most righteous man on the earth (in his day) according to the Holy Spirit, and yet calamity befell him - not as an act of judgment or chastisement, rather as an appointed calamity through which God's sovereignty and man's depravity were put on display resulting in the glorification of God, and the rewarding of a humble servant who remained faithful throughout the trials that befell him.
Providentially, our Lord is working all things together for good for us - even if he does so by means that shake our understanding. Sometimes our pace slackens for so long, that unless the Lord prunes us, we would stop altogether. He doesn't have to bring a wicked nation against us, it could come through sickness or financial upheaval - but even if He does, we can rest knowing that whatever the Lord allows to happen in our lives, He does do so out of loving concern and not out of wrath or malice. The Lord chastens those whom He loves. I would hazard this guess, that He never "over" chastens. When He allowed Assyria to come down on Israel, I think it was because anything less would have meant losing Israel altogether. Just as we sometimes have to amputate limbs to save the body - so too chastisement, which is always intended to "save the body" (as it were) can be quite severe - but as I suggest, never more severe than is required.
My point in the post today however is that the Assyrians didn't have a clue they were acting in accord with God's will. They were simply acting according to their nature. Not that God desired them to be wicked - that is, it wasn't God's desire that they be corrupt and rebellious, but rather even though God allowed them to continue in a rebellion that was never His desire, yet this same rebellion could not hinder God's plan, and taking their rebellion and corruption, God used it to bring about good - that is God used it to chastise the nation of Israel in order to bring Israel again to a place of genuine repentance. In this we see the complexity and majesty of the divine will.
The Lord wasn't controlling the Assyrians like robots, but allowing their sin and corruption to be the means of bringing Israel out of rebellion and idolatry and into repentance. Not mind control - but simply a demonstration that: no matter what individuals or nations do (according to their own will) God can and does use them in spite of their personal rebellion, to bring about His will.
One might argue that because scripture says that God desires that all men everywhere repent - that there is some contradiction here. If God desires all men everywhere to repent, that includes the Assyrians. So how can God desire for the Assyrians to repent on the one hand, and use their impenitence on the other, to bring about His will? Wouldn't that require God to desire both repentance and impenitence from the same people?
The answer lies in understanding the difference between what God prefers, and what God allows. God really would prefer it if everyone repented, but God has chosen to allow sin in the world. Sin by definition is disobedience and rebellion. God has chosen to allow disobedience and rebellion. The point is, even after allowing disobedience and rebellion - God's plans cannot be thwarted,
I love that the Assyrians were clueless in that even though God was wielding them like a weapon against Israel, they thought they were just going around and plundering and pillaging. They would have denied that God was involved in their activities, they even denied that the notion that the God of Israel was the one and only God, and yet...Labels: sovereignty |
posted by Daniel @
6:15 AM
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| What does the size of the earth tell us? |
As I was riding the bus yesterday morning, I imagined some fruit being entirely consumed by a fungus. I thought to myself, at some point, there would be no more fruit left, but only fungus - and at that point the fungus would starve and die. I happened to be listening to an R.C. Sproul lecture as the thought was passing through my head, and R.C. was talking about how in 1950 the world population was two billion people, and how in 50 years it has tripled to over six billion people. As the two thoughts knit together in my thinking, I realized that because the world is limited in size and resources, if it weren't for death we would already have run out of both resources and room in and on planet earth.
That in and of itself is no great revelation, but coupled to the notion that if procreating beings did live forever on a finite globe, or even in a finite universe - eventually their infinite capacity to procreate, and inability to cease to be, would consume and fill completely whatever space their was.
Given that this is not only so, but inescapable so, it follows that God, having created Adam and Eve with procreative power, and having placed them into a finite reality, must have done so fully aware that the world He set them on could not contain both them and their progeny.
In hindsight, it strikes me that sin (and through sin death) was something God knew was going to happen even before Adam was ever created.
Now, this is no revelation to me, as I have believed this ever since I came to understand that it would be impossible for a truly sovereign God to "surprised" by sin - which means that God not only anticipated sin, but that this creation was designed to accommodate it.
We who believe in God's sovereignty and control do not charge God with creating sin, because we understand that sin has no substance - it is rebellion: the absence of obedience, and through that rebellion a departure from God who cannot rebel against Himself. To rebel against God is to play a note that isn't on the score - it doesn't change the score - but cannot be reconciled to the score having departed from it. So God did not "create" sin, for it required no act of creation. We speak in terms of God "allowing" sin, for God could have prevented it - but most Christians think of sin as a tragic accident. We see that it was a cosmic failure, we see that it has eternal consequences - the magnitude of such a fall is open for all to see, and the only way most of us can process such a thing is to presume that it could only have been an accident because no "good" God would have planned it.
Yet creation itself testifies that far from being caught off guard by sin, far from failing to prevent it - God actually built creation around the certainty that sin would come.
Thoughts?Labels: sin, sovereignty |
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posted by Daniel @
7:23 AM
9 comment(s)
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