For God So Liked the World

One of the first religious books I remember reading was CS Lewis' The Four Loves. Lewis describes four kinds of love based on four Greek words for love--Sturge, Eros, Phileos, and Agape.


Here they are in grossly oversimplified terms.

Sturge is a passing enjoyment, such as "I love baseball" or "I love chocolate."

Eros, is a sensual, consuming passion, obsession, or addiction.

Phleos is friendship love, the love in commonly shared relationship or experiences.

Then there is agape love. This divine love is only possible fully through Divine intervention. It is a sacrificial love, as Christ loved on the cross. It is not a love because of liking anything about a person, but liking in spite of everything unlikeable about a person. This love is the blessed, chaste love of a true saint.

When I read that book, I wanted to be a true saint. (I still do, though I have never achieved it.) This was the love I longed to have--a love that does not depend about liking anything about people, but only depends on the love God has for poor lost sinners such as ourselves.

Agape love is not so much an act of he heart as of the will. It is, as Finney put it, a "decision to seek the highest good of another." I can decide to love my enemy, and seek his highest good without having to like him. Agape love is sacrificial, giving ourselves to others.

That was my understanding in my days of youthful idealism.

Since I have grown older, though, I have come to realize that agape love, though it may be the highest, is not the only kind of love God wants us to have for others. Agape allows us to love people we do not like. But it does not settle the issue of whether or how we should also like them.

We need to be careful about "sloppy agape." That is a general and ideal love, but not personal and specific. It is not enough tolerate the lost, but to welcome them. We may claim we love a person in Jesus, while detesting everything about them. This kind of love is not love at all, but paternalism and condescension--a misuse of the doctrine of Christian charity.

A purely ideal concept of love lacks both passion and staying power. We may be able to love those we do not like, but we cannot keep it up for long. Sooner or later, no matter how pious we may act, our love needs to grow into real, honest affection or it will not last.

Think about broccoli for a moment. Many people hate broccoli. (Not me, I actually like it.) Those who hate broccoli may be determined to eat healthy, and they know broccoli is good for them, so they force it down their throats. But how long can they keep doing this without either developing a taste for it, or dropping it from their menus?

Or take marriage. A person may marry another as a result of prearranged marriage or out of a sense of duty. But unless that person develops a geniune liking for their spouse, that marriage will be unsatisfying for both. This is not to suggest that people should divorce if they do not feel love, but rather that we find something likeable about our spouses if we do not already have it. If ideal love does not turn into honest affection, then that marriage is doomed.

We can suppress our feelings, but it will wear us out in the end. No one can work at something they do not like to do forever without respite. We will not stay with people we honestly do not care for, without making them and us miserable. At some time, our feelings will conquer us.

This idea of liking as well as loving is absolutely essential for the spreading of the Gospel. For hundreds of years we have been preaching evangelism. Also for hundreds of years, the majority of Christians have simply ignored the call. They love the world, in a spiritual sense, and do not want to see others go to hell. But they do not like the world. Many Christians find the current age so abhorent that they want nothing to do with it. They move into fortresses of their own making, isolating themselves from "sinners" so they will not be contaminated by the things of the world, whether or not that world has anything to do with the gospel itself. We make excuses for hating the world around us, condemning aspects of music, dress and language that do not fit our cultural, non-spiritual norms. We do this to further emphasize our differences with the culture around us. We do this for the same reason teenagers of my generation wore their hair long or dressed in miniskirts--because we wanted to be different from our parents' generation. It's not that we didn't love our parents and grandparents. We just didn't like them, or anything about them. As we grew up, we learned better, when our children did the same to us.

John 3:16 begins "For God so loved the world." God does not just love the world, he honestly likes it. God may not like what the world does or what it believes, but God, like the parent of a rebellious teenager, sees something of Himself in them. He experiences genuine affection for us, as well as loving us in an esoteric sense.

Many Christians cannot grasp this. That is because many of us have an "all or nothing" mentality regarding our likes and dislikes. If we do not like a man's politics or religious opinions, we drop him in a bin in our mind that is labeled "Don't like." If we agree with a person, we drop him in the "like" bin. I don't believe God thinks this way. He recognizes the fact that there is very little difference between those we like and don't like. We have the same DNA. We were created in God's image. We are affected by the same sinful nature. There are actions, ideas, and attitudes which we should not like, that's true. But it up to God to decide who is or is not condemned in their sin. Even in the worst of us, there is something to like and admire.

Phileos love, that is friendship love, is built on commonalities. Our common interest, passions, and failures make us far more like each other than different.

We share similar interests. Among men, it may be more effective evangelism goes on at the lake or on the golf course than in the church. Christians who golf with non-Christians forge a friendship which provides a bridge for the Gospel to get to their hearts. Those places where we share neutral activities with others--the gym, the mall, or the marketplace, become those places where we come to like unbelievers, which leads to loving them. Some Christians are more afraid of unbelievers affecting them than they are excited about affecting unbelievers themselves. We share the same passions. Not long ago, I was asked to hold a funeral for a relative of someone in my church who had been a lesbian. The grief of her "significant other" was no less real than our grief for a spouse. Pain is pain no matter who has it. A sensitive, caring believer will recognize the pain in others, whether or not that pain is theologically justified. Jesus wept over Lazarus, even though He was about to raise him for the dead. He did not chide Mary and Martha for their lack of faith. Our own pains enable us to understand the pains of others.

We also share the same sins. We once lived in the same apartment building with an unmarried couple who were addicted to drugs. We got to know them and talked to them about their problem, even though we never used drugs. But I found that my own struggles with food were not that different in form from their struggles with drugs. It differed only in consequence and intensity.

We believers are comfortable with the fact that we are sinners. We just don't like to admit we have sinned, or have anything in common with those we consider to be really bad sinners. Our sins are small, but their sins are big. We regard ourselves as sinners in a general, esoteric sense, but do not like to admit to any particular sin. Yet it is our admission of our fallenness and failures which helps the unbeliever believe that God means it when he says "I forgive." It is our failure, not our successes that give us the ability to befriend the lost. We were lost, and now are found. We still sin, but we still find grace.

God doesn't just love the world. He likes it. He enjoys the enjoyable things about it, even though he hates the things that are broken. If we follow in His footsteps, then we ought to do the same.

barack

The next name in our hall of fame of faith is Barak. Again, Barak seems to be an odd choice. It’s not that Barak isn’t a mighty warrior, but Barak is not the most important person in this story. That honor goes to a woman named Deborah.


Let’s look at the story.



Judge 4: 1 After Ehud died, the Israelites once again did evil in the eyes of the LORD. 2 So the LORD sold them into the hands of Jabin, a king of Canaan, who reigned in Hazor. The commander of his army was Sisera, who lived in Harosheth Haggoyim. 3 Because he had nine hundred iron chariots and had cruelly oppressed the Israelites for twenty years, they cried to the LORD for help.

Judges is a book that tells the same story over and over again. God’s people would forsake Him. Then God would allow them to be persecuted and punished by some other country. Then God would raise up some judge who would lead them and save them. This leader would rise up against Israel’s enemies. Then that leader would leave the scene, and the cycle would begin again.

Barak was a mighty warrior. But Barak was not a judge. Deborah was the judge. So why is Barak mentioned in the hall of fame of faith and not Deborah? It cannot that she was a woman, since Rahab has already been mentioned. So why Barak?s

There is an answer to this. But before we get into that, let’s look at the situation.

Jabin was no ordinary enemy. Jabin had ambition beyond just raiding his neighbors. Jabin wanted to retake the northern part of Canaan for his own, and drive the Hebrews out.. To do this, Jabin got some powerful allies. The first one was Sisera, the war chief. Sisera was not from Canaan. The most likely nationality for Sisera was Hittite or Hurrian, since it mentions that Sisera had nine hundred iron chariots. The only country that had iron chariots at this time were the Hittites. Other countries had weapons of bronze. Iron sliced bronze like butter. Sisera commanded nine hundred of these machines. They were an Eleventh Century BC. Weapon of mass destruction.

Ancient writings still echoe the fear people had towards Sisera. The Midrash--an ancient collection of Jewish writings outside the Bible--say that Sisera’s voice was so loud and powerful that it could shake walls and slay wild animals. He was a frightening and formidable foe.

4 Deborah, a prophetess, the wife of Lappidoth, was leading Israel at that time. 5 She held court under the Palm of Deborah between Ramah and Bethel in the hill country of Ephraim, and the Israelites came to her to have their disputes decided

On the other side was the prophetess Deborah—a holy woman against an unbeatable army. Deborah did not have any real authority except moral authority. Her judgeship probably did not even extend to all welve tribes, but just two or three.

Sisera had nine hundred iron chariots, but Deborah had the living God of Israel.

Here’s what Deborah did.

6 She sent for Barak son of Abinoam from Kedesh in Naphtali and said to him, "The LORD, the God of Israel, commands you: 'Go, take with you ten thousand men of Naphtali and Zebulun and lead the way to Mount Tabor. 7 I will lure Sisera, the commander of Jabin's army, with his chariots and his troops to the Kishon River and give him into your hands.'"

Barak was a strong man—the best that Israel had to offer. But even Barak did not want to stand up against Sisera.

Barak was a humble man—not in the sense that humility is misused today, but in its original sense. Humility is not self doubt, nor is it pretending to be less that we really are. Humility is an honest assessment of our abilities, when compared to the absolute strength of God.

When we pretend we can’t do what we can, that is not humility. Humility is when we do what we can, with the understanding that we cannot do everything. It is knowing our place in the universe, that we do not rule it. There is always something bigger than we are.

Barak knew he was strong, but he knew he could not defeat Sisera alone

8 Barak said to her, "If you go with me, I will go; but if you don't go with me, I won't go."

9 "Very well," Deborah said, "I will go with you. But because of the way you are going about this, the honor will not be yours, for the LORD will hand Sisera over to a woman."

Barak would not go unless Deborah went with him. He knew that he needed God on his side, and Deborah was his connection with God.

This is why Barak made it into the hall of fame of faith, and not Deborah. Of course the prophetess had faith. She was constantly in communion with God. But here was a strong man, a soldier, who understood that God was bigger than he was. He was willing to take a risk and go up against the greatest enemy of his time, provided he knew that God was going with him.

Pride is the enemy of faith. Pride is the presumptuous belief that we can handle things without God’s help.

We don’t like to admit we need help. We refuse to look at road maps because we do not want to admit we are lost. We insist on taking care of ourselves when we are too weak to do it. We don’t want anyone messing with our business. The think of this as virtuous self-reliance, but really it is is pride—one of the seven deadly sins. It is called that because our pride can kill us.

Pride destroys us in three ways. First it destroys us because it keeps us from facing the truth about our predicament. We don’t want to admit we have a problem. We avoid going to the doctor in the mistaken believe that we don’t know about it, it won’t hurt us. We don’t want anyone pointing out our faults.

Second, it kills us by making us unwilling to seek help. Pride isolates us from others. No man is strong enough to face the dangers of the world without God’s help and the help of other people.

Third, pride destroys us because it causes us to jealously insist on getting credit. In a prideful person’s heart, it is more important who gets the credit than that the job is done.

Deborah announced to Barak that he will not get the credit for destroying Sisera. Actually a little woman named Jael will be the one to kill Sisera, not the mighty warrior Barak. It is not Barak who is listed among the judges, it is Deborah. God wants to make sure that He, not Barak, gets the credit.

After Deborah agrees to go, then Barak lays his plan, using the skills he has.

So Deborah went with Barak to Kedesh, 10 where he summoned Zebulun and Naphtali. Ten thousand men followed him, and Deborah also went with him. . . .

12 When they told Sisera that Barak son of Abinoam had gone up to Mount Tabor, 13 Sisera gathered together his nine hundred iron chariots and all the men with him, from Harosheth Haggoyim to the Kishon River.

Barak chosesthe location of the battle—Mount Tabor. This is a brilliant plan. Mt Tabor is a mountain that juts up out of the flat terrain of the Jezreel valley. Like Stone Mountain in Georgia, Mount Tabor is a horst, a slab or rock that is pushed up out of the ground by techtonic movements. It is a cone of solid rock, which is so high that today it requires a four-wheel drive vehicle to reach the top. It has thickly wooded, rocky sides on all sides. Furthermore, it is on the border of three different Israelite tribes. In order for Sisera to take it, he must fight three different battles at once with three different tribes. This make a prolonged siege out of the question.

Sisera cannot use his chariots. They will not go up the mountain. If the tries to drie them put the mountain, it is simple for the Israelites to rain down rocks and arrows on their heads. All they can do is abandon their chariots and attack on foot.

When Sisera’s troops abandon their chariots, then Deborah and Barak command theirs.

14 Then Deborah said to Barak, "Go! This is the day the LORD has given Sisera into your hands. Has not the LORD gone ahead of you?" So Barak went down Mount Tabor, followed by ten thousand men. 15 At Barak's advance, the LORD routed Sisera and all his chariots and army by the sword, and Sisera abandoned his chariot and fled on foot. 16 But Barak pursued the chariots and army as far as Harosheth Haggoyim. All the troops of Sisera fell by the sword; not a man was left.

Barak is a hero of faith, because he understood the meaning of humility. He was a great warrior, not because he thought he was strong, but because he understood that there were limits to his strength. There was no limits to God’s strength, though. difference between faith and presumption. Presumption is thinking we know what God will do next, and acting upon it. Faith is learning to wait for God to show us the way, before we run out in our own direction.

There is a story later in the Bible of a king who acted on presumption. His name was Josiah. Josiah heard the Egyptians were passing through their territory to fight a battle with the Assyrians, far to the north. The Judeans had no love for the Assyrians, but they did not like a foreign army passing through their land. All Josiah’s spiritual advisors told him to let it go, and not attack the Egyptians. Josiah would not listen. He stubbornly held on to the belief the he knew what God wanted. As a result, he was killed, his army was slaughtered, and Judah was sacked by the Egyptians.

We must act, but only when God leads.

Our dog is in obedience school. Recently we learned how to keep a dog from pulling on the leash. The dog pulls on the leash because the dog thinks she knows where you are going, nad she is in a hurry to ge there. When we more in random directions first, then the dog learns not to assume she knows what the master wants, but to wait until the master commands.

We are like that. We go along thinking we know what God wants. But suddenly, God takes us in a random direction. We must follow closely behind Him, or we will get lost.

Are you following the Lord today, or are you thinking the Lord is following you? Are you doing what the Lord commands, or presuming upon your own knowledge. Proverbs 3:5-6 says “Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Lean not upon your own understanding. IN all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will direct your path. Let He be your guide. Listen to what God says, and you can win over any enemy. Follow your own understanding, and sooner or later you will fall. Only through the mercy of Jesus Christ can we be saved, and find a way out of the problems we face.

Gideon

What does a man or woman of faith look like? Faith has nothing to do with appearance. Any ordinary man or woman can do fantastic things if he trusts in God, even for a little bit.


Of all the people mentioned in the hall of fame or faith, Gideon is probably the most flawed. Even so, Gideon became for a period of time, one of the judges of Israel, and a man. Gideon is to us both a positive and negative example. We learn as much from his failures as from his success.

We read about Gideon in Judges 6 and 7.

1 The angel of the LORD came and sat down under the oak in Ophrah that belonged to Joash the Abiezrite, where his son Gideon was threshing wheat in a winepress to keep it from the Midianites.

Gideon was from the tribe of Manasseh and the family of Abiezer--not a very distinguished family. His father Joash was not very distinguished, either. Gideon was for his part an undistinguished son.

When we first meet Gideon, he doing something that probably seems odd. He is threshing wheat in a wine press. Threshing was the process of separating the kernels of grain from the wheat stalks. The thresher wraps a sheet around the wheat and pounds it on a rock until the grains separate from the stalks. Then he throws what remains in the air. The wind carries the husks away, leaving only the grain. This is usually done outside where there is a good wind.

A wine press is a circular stone vat. It would not be the best place to thresh wheat, since there would be little wind, and you would probably get grape juice all over your wheat.

So why is Gideon threshing in a wine press? He does not want anyone to see him, lest someone steal his grain. Specifically he is afraid of a people called the Midianites.

At one time, the Midianites were the friends of the Israelites. Now they were their worst enemies. They were desert nomads, who came upon the tribes of Israel like locusts, stealing their crops and goods, and disappearing into the desert again. In Gideon's time, they have become very strong, and deeply feared. No one could stop them, they pillaged wherever they chose.

Then Gideon hears a voice 12 When the angel of the LORD appeared to Gideon , he said, "The LORD is with you, mighty warrior."

Wait a minute. This has to be a mistake. If Gideon were a mighty warrior, he wouldn't be threshing wheat in a wine press. He'd be daring the Midianites to appear. There is no way that anyone would mistake Gideon for a mighty warrior. Yet God sees a mighty warrior in him.

Faith in God doesn't make any practical difference in our lives if we have no faith in ourselves. God may see in us a mighty warrior, but if we do not believe it about ourselves, then we will act like a wimp. The faith to do great things is tied to our faith in ourselves.

This may sound like some new age or positive thinking kind of philosophy, but it is thoroughly based in a Biblical understanding of our nature. It is based upon the sovereignty of God. If God says we are mighty warriors, who are we to doubt His word? If God created us, and if He has promised to give us the strength to endure, then we should also believe that God has in fact given us sufficient gifts to do it, or will give it. To say we are not good enough to do what God says it so call God a liar. We cannot have faith in God without also believing in ourselves.

Immediately, Gideon starts giving God excuses.

First, he says, "God doesn’t care about us.".

13 "But sir," Gideon replied, "if the LORD is with us, why has all this happened to us? Where are all his wonders that our fathers told us about when they said, 'Did not the LORD bring us up out of Egypt?' But now the LORD has abandoned us and put us into the hand of Midian."

Gideon's reaction has been broken in spirit. When thrown into catastrophe our first reaction is to say "God doesn't care about us." Gideon's family had lost most of their crops. The winepress is empty of grapes, because the Midianites took them all. They left some bread, but the took all the joy of the wine with them. What is left is meager and grim.

It is easy to give in to doubt, but it is also the worst thing we can do. Without God, there is no security, not meaning, and no hope. It is also incorrect. God really does still care.

14 The LORD turned to him and said, "Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian's hand. Am I not sending you?"

God in effect said to him. "You say I have abandoned you. I gave you the greatest thing in the world for fixing your problems. I gave you you." Gideon had forgotten that even though he had lost much, he had much, and what he had was sufficient emerge victorious in the crisis.

Gideon was discouraged. Courage is the confidence that we can endure and withstand whatever comes our way. Gideon could only see the obstacles. He had abandoned his goal.

Second, Gideon said "I'm too weak."

15 "But Lord," Gideon asked, "how can I save Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family."

16 The LORD answered, "I will be with you, and you will strike down all the Midianites together."

Self doubt equals God doubt. We do not success because we do not believe we can.

Gideon's excuse was that he came from the weakest tribe in Manasseh, and that he was the least in his family. So what? God was still with him.

It's the mathematics of heaven. If finite power is added to God's infinite power, and that is not enough, then is God’s power really infinite. If we are weak and God is strong, then won’t God’s strength completely cover our weaknesses, with infinite power? God says the one thing that can calm us. "I will be with you."

Gideon's third excuse is "But God, how do I know it's really you?"

17 Gideon replied, "If now I have found favor in your eyes, give me a sign that it is really you talking to me. 18 Please do not go away until I come back and bring my offering and set it before you."

.And the LORD said, "I will wait until you return."

Is this is really an angel? Gideon demands proof before he proceeds.

This argument with God is probably Gideon's most rational. It is , however, the mt dangerous and most devastating. We are paralyzed by doubt not just from doubting God’s existence, but from doubting that a specific word from God is really meant for us. If God sent us a letter, we would probably think the mail carrier put in the wrong mailbox!

But God has prepared a surprise for Gideon.

19 Gideon went in, prepared a young goat, and from an ephah of flour he made bread without yeast. Putting the meat in a basket and its broth in a pot, he brought them out and offered them to him under the oak.

20 The angel of God said to him, "Take the meat and the unleavened bread, place them on this rock, and pour out the broth." And Gideon did so. 21 With the tip of the staff that was in his hand, the angel of the LORD touched the meat and the unleavened bread. Fire flared from the rock, consuming the meat and the bread. And the angel of the LORD disappeared.

Gideon sets up an altar, but he does not burn the meat. The angel touches the rock it is on, and fire comes out.

Think of how many times in the Bible God reveals himself in fire.

• To Moses, God appears in fire from the bush.

• To Israel, He appears in fire from a cloud.

• To Elijah, God appears in fire from the sky.

• To Gideon God appears in fire from a rock.

• In Acts, God appears in fire from the heads of the apostles and prophets.

• On the road to Emmaus, the two disciples who met Jesus said they knew him because their hearts burned within them.

God reveals Himself to us still in fire. He puts the fire of the Spirit in our hearts.

Fourth, Gideon fears God more than he loves Him.

22 When Gideon realized that it was the angel of the LORD, he exclaimed, "Ah, Sovereign LORD! I have seen the angel of the LORD face to face!" 23 But the LORD said to him, "Peace! Do not be afraid. You are not going to die."

Verse 22 sounds like a statement of faith, but look closer. He is afraid to be with God. He is sure that God will kill him.

Many who fear God and are too afraid to approach Him. This is not faith. It is just another kind of self-doubt. If we allow our fear of unworthiness to keep us from approaching God, then we can never effectively serve Him.

When I was a boy, I used to see The Wizard of Oz on television every year. I loved the movie up until the part where they meet the Wizard, and that great floating head appears. It scared me so badly that I would leave the room.

But by the end of the movie, though we see that the Wizard is not scary at all. He is a kind and generous man. The big head just there to frighten away those who did not belong there. The real Wizard welcomed them into his presence.

Many people have much the same reaction to God. God really is great, majestic, and fearsome. But do not think that He is inapproachable. He's also good. If God were truly inapproachable, no one would want to be in his presence. We would serve him in fear, like slaves. But God cares about us, and wants us to love Him back. Being God fearing is not enough. We must also have a relationship with Him. That is impossible if we are too afraid.

Those who are His people, His servants, have nothing to fear from Him. They are the ones who are specially blessed out of the whole world. They are His children.

24 So Gideon built an altar to the LORD there and called it The LORD is Peace. To this day it stands in Ophrah of the Abiezrites.

When he lost all his excuses, he got peace.

I wish I could say that Gideon remained faithful all his life, but he did not. He vacillated all his life between faith and doubt. That is the beauty and the glory of God. In order to receive, God's peace, we don't have to have faith yesterday. We don't even have to have faith tomorrow. We just have to believe today. God can uses even struggling and doubtful Christians.

Don't be fooled by the Devil's lies, or blinded by our own self doubt. God is still capable of using you, if you will only believe Him for today.

Potholes

It's been a while since I wrote in this blog, but for those of you who might be interested,  Let me tell you a little of what's going on. 
In January,  Joy and I bought a new car.  It was a 2009 Toyota Prius hybrid.  I have enjoyed driving it,  especially when I was driving past my friends at gas stations paying exhorbitant amounts for gas. 
I believe God let us to buy that car when we did.  Our original intention was to buy it in April of May, but since we bought it then,  we have evaded some of the gas headaches others have endured.  By April,  there is no telling how much higher the price of a hybrid might be.
Right now, though I am not driving it. i am driving a rental car.  Last Wednesday, on a major thoroughfare in Lancaster, SC,  I hit a pothole, which contained a large sized rock laying on the road.  The rock damaged a strut and the gas tank of my glorious new car.  It is at the shop while my insurance company and my mechanic decide upon the price of repair. I am convince that upstate South Carolina is the  ancient pothole spawning ground. 
In the meantime, I am in  a Jeep Patriot which is good ride, which downs gas like a drunken sailor downs whiskey.  I want my car back.
This whole incident reminds me of the paradoxical nature of faith. If I believe that God led ut to buy the car at the right time, then I must also believe that God let us ht the pothole.  As tenpting as it is to think that God gives us wise decisions but not potholes, the logic of it just does not hold up.  He gives both--the good and the bad. 
I will say this.  I have been at peace about the pothole incident. So tar, the insurance company has been outstanding in their treatment of my claim.  (I won't menton the company, but I will say it is one that is particularly fond of lizards and cave men)   It's been something of an adventure to driving a new car, and our tax refund came earlly enough to pay the deducable. That is also God's hand, I suppose. 
Sometimes, God helps us miss the potholes of life. Other times, He lets us hit them. But whichever way, He never leaves us.  One way or another, He's still in control.