Knowing the will of God

Who wouldn't want to know the will of God, assuming you believe in him (he believes in you)?  Sad to say, though, this lament is common among Christians.  It need not be so.

The Bible speaks at length about knowing with clarity the will of God (Romans 12:2, 1 Thessalonians 4:3, 1 Peter 2:15, to name a few).  To know God and who he is through his biblical revelation and in the revelation of his Son, Jesus Christ, is to come to know the will of God.

As we go into this most splendid week, let me share the will of God for you at least this week:

In everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.

1 Thessalonians 5:18

Everything. 

Now you know his will.  You really want to do it?  I hope so.

Happy Thanksgiving from me and mine to you and yours!

Ecocatastrophe: Resolution

I'd like to say it's comical, but it's not.  Since starting this series (here-1, here-2, and here-3) which looks at the environment from a biblical perspective, the news outlets have coughed up insanity after insanity about the imminent demise of our planet due to human interference or misuse. 

A few weeks ago, wantonly driving golf balls into Loch Ness signalled our doom (here).  Yesterday, the solution to the global warming "problem" came in the guise of a condom (here).  You can't make this stuff up.  Other scientists can't figure out why it's so cold this year; it's like global warming has taken a time out (here).

With the scientific community evenly divided on what's happening to the earth (might I suggest, nothing), I prefer an objective look.  Forgive the analogy, but we're like rats in a maze trying furiously to figure out the maze from a very limited perspective.  The Professor stands outside ready and willing to give an answer if only the rats would listen.  So I defer to the Professor.

The analogy falls far, far short because God is not a professor merely hovering over a maze and watching the rats bash their little coconuts into the wall.  God created man in his image and as such, man has inherent, God-given value and worth.  God loves mankind.  He cares deeply for eachone.  On top of that, God gave man a task; he told man to fill the earth, subdue the earth, and have dominion of the earth--all the while, the earth would remain God's possession for which he would retain ultimate authority and responsibility.

Where does that leave us?  A couple of final thoughts:

1. The world around us should knock our socks off! The creation bears God's fingerprints all over it.  Wherever we turn, we see the wonder and majesty of God's creative powers.  We see the beauty of design from the microcosm of the cell to the celestial dance of the planets and stars.
2. The world without and the life within should open our eyes to the brokenness of man and of our world.  Death, destruction, devastation, disaster.  Everytime it happens, whether it's a fanatical demon blowing away his friends and coworkers or whether it's an earthquake burying thousands and leaving tens of thousands without a home, we come face to face with the rebellion of mankind before a righteous God and the curse underwhich the creation groans until the day of Christ's restoration.
3. We do our job in loving obedience.  Fill the earth.  Subdue the earth.  Have dominion over the creation.  What a delight!  Work is not meant to be a curse; it is our God-given task.  Before the Fall of man, God put Adam into Eden's garden to tend it and care for it.  We don't abuse it without thought for God emphasizes that "a righteous man considers the life of his animal" (Proverbs 12:10).  That doesn't mean he worships it.  That doesn't even mean that he spares it.  He is to be steward over the animal as he is to be steward over the earth (sorry PETA).
4. As we labor, we do not worry.  A farmer cannot bring the rain nor can he bring about the growth of his crop.  He can only do what he can do; God has promised to take care of the rest.  So we trust our lives to the God who cares for us and who loves us, and we trust him to keep the earth running through the seasons until the day of his return (Genesis 8:22).

The news declares today that global warming has pushed poorer women into prostitution and life-threatening jobs (here).  At the same time, international leaders are pushing hard for the ratification of Kyoto II in Copenhagen next month (here) while Steven Groves is warning about what such a climate treaty will impose upon our nation (here).  What's a guy to do?

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.  In all your ways, acknowledge him and he will make straight your paths.

Proverbs 3:5-6

Ecocatastrophes, part 3

Al Gore does have quite the resume.  How many politicians can boast the vice-presidency, the Nobel prize, an Oscar, and a Grammy.  While I remember nothing remarkable about his terms as our nation's Number-Two (which isn't a bad thing), the three awards heaped upon him came as a result of "An Inconvenient Truth," a film that arguably has served as the big shove the Green Movement needed to get governments to start enacting what they deemed environmentally friendly policies (a humorous sidebar on Al Gore's science here...good thing he's not Sarah Palin!).

So here we sit at the sunset of the twenty-first century's first decade with reptiles still striking us without warning on blue-sky days in our own home towns, and the planet's leaders gather to figure out what they will do about an issue that a pretty big chunk of folks thinks has no basis in science.*  Yesterday, I jotted about how there's the pretty big God who made the whole thing (here), and it seems pretty illogical that he would let a bunch of miscreants run it into the ground.  The Bible seems to say that, too.

Still, there's a unique and God-created and God-ordained relationship between man and earth.

Man is God's Appointed Steward of the Earth

The first unique aspect of man's relationship to the earth is that God created man from the earth (Genesis 2:7).  It is not surprising then that man should get what he needs for his physical survival from the material.

Second, while man was created from the ground, he is utterly set apart from the earth and all other created things because only man was created in God's image (Genesis 1:26).  Because of what God declared as he made man, man has a positional authority over the created realm.  Likewise, it is no surprise that for spiritual sustenance, man must depend on the One who breathed into him the breath of life and not upon the material world.

Third, God gives man marching orders (Genesis 1:28).

God blessed them; and God said to them,

1. "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth..."

2. "...and subdue it..."

3. "...and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth."

Here we see God giving man not only his innate positional authority but also a functional authority over the created realm.  God required three things of man none of which will make the environmentalist smile.

First, God required man to fill the earth.  How many folks are on the earth?  6.6 billion.  What's that work out to?  You could fit everyone on the planet into the United States (3.5 million square miles) and give them a plot of land about the size of an average yard (150' x 150') and still have space left over.  Are there overcrowded areas of the earth?  Yep.  Is the earth filled?  Nope.  Is there plenty of water?  Yep.  Do we have the technology to make inhabitable those places that have previously been deemed uninhabitable?  Yep.

We think we know better than God.  "Well, it seems we'd better stop making babies because we might chew up all of our (fill in your favorite natural resource here)."  Fill the earth seems to be throwing down the procreative gauntlet.  We just don't trust him nor do we take him seriously.

Second, God requires that man subdue the earth.  Think taming a horse or a team of oxen.  You break its wild nature and bring it under your authority to get it to do your will.  Think plowed field.  Scattering corn in the middle of a glen with associated rocks and trees will produce a meager return.  Clear the trees, remove the rocks and plow the soil and the return will be much sweeter. 

Third, God requires man to have dominion over the earth.  Man is not to coexist within nature.  Man is not to defer to a creek full of salamanders when determining whether to erect an apartment building.  He is to rule over the creation for his good and for God's glory.

Man is God's appointed steward of the earth.  It would be foolhardy to level a forest and to not replant.  At the same time, can you imagine the eco-nonsense that would surface if Gutzon Borglum lived today and wanted to carve four presidents into the side of Mount Rushmore?  He'd never get it done.  Imagine the legal gymnastics required today if you wanted to turn a mountainside into a ski resort...even if you owned the whole thing!  It's nuts.

When man rejects the position God gave him and lowers himself to the level of the rest of the created order, he rebels against God's given directives, and he soils the image of God in which he was created.  It was that image within him that caused John Merrick to cry out, "I am not an animal!  I am a man!" (The Elephant Man, 1980...great movie, btw).  Man must minister within the created realm to the glory of God, to order and lead the created realm, and to thereby provide for his existence.

So let's stop acting like jackasses.

Tomorrow, we'll wrap this thing up.

Ecocatastrophes, part 2

Greenhouse emissions, formerly known as exhaust and before that as smoke, will rip a hole in the ozone layer and the earth will burn up.  Or freeze.  Or burn up and then freeze.  Don't you know that the cooler summer experienced across the northern hemisphere is a result of global warming?

You've got scientists on both sides of this issue as annoying as a James Carville-Ann Coulter debate.  For a little sobriety, I'd like to invite you to hear what the Bible says.  Accurate in its histories and archaeologies.  Spooky on-target with its fulfilled prophecies.  Might be worth a hearing.  Away we go.

The first big point is...

THE EARTH IS THE LORD'S

Let's pretend I owned a really nice car, say a vintage 1977 AMC Gremlin with Levi bucket seats.  Let's say that one of my sons just turned sixteen.  Am I going to just pitch him the keys?  Bah!  I'm going to make sure he's got driver's ed under his belt.  I'm going to tell him about the idiosyncrasies in the automatic transmission and the fact that a key's already been broken off in the groovy hatchback.  And I'm going to tell him where he can and cannot go and what he can and cannot do with it.  If my son ends up wrecking the car, its not his insurance that covers the car, it's mine.

In a similar vein, the Bible makes plain, "The earth is the Lord's and all its fullness, the world and those who dwell therein" (Psalm 24:1).  This is not an isolated idea within God's word to us.  God cites his ownership of the world in choosing Israel as a special nation to himself (Exodus 19:3-6).  As he encourages Israel to follow his commands, he cites the earth and its blessings are his to give (Deuteronomy 10:12-15).  In the Psalms, he emphasizes that all the beasts of the field are his so don't try to impress him through sacrifices (50:10).

So if the earth is God's and not just his possession but his creation, isn't he going to take care of it with a bit more fervency and ability than I would with my Gremlin?

Consider, it's his to do with as he pleases.  He destroyed the whole thing once before and made provision to get it started up again (Genesis 6-9).  He has said that he will destroy it all again (2 Peter 3:10-13) only to recreate it sparkling new once again.  He withholds the rain and he calms the storms.  And he suggests that there will come a day when the earth will suffer cataclysms that will make the disaster films of this decade seem like kiddie stories (Revelation 6 thru 16).

Consider, too, that God made a promised to his creation, a promise I mentioned in an earlier post.  That promise is that he would not destroy the earth again by flood, and that

"While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease"  (Genesis 8:22)

He seems pretty clear that the seasons will continue.  It's not going to become like "The Day After Tomorrow" where the northern hemisphere becomes an enormous ice rink.

Consider, finally, that as he infused man's anatomy with a truly miraculous ability to heal itself, so he knit that characteristic into the fabric of the earth.  Consider the devastation of wild fires.  Permanent?  Not so much.  Think of the megatons of pollution belched into the atmosphere from a single volcanic eruption.  If the planet did not have the capability to scour its own skies, we would perennially look like Denver during one of its winter inversion days.  BLECCH!  Oil spills.  Damage?  Extreme.  Forever?  Certainly not.  It takes time, but the earth does tend to itself.

With that in mind and scouring the pages of the Bible, nowhere do we get any inkling that man will directly bring about the earth's demise.  It won't be hairspray.  It won't be two Suburbans in the driveway (I do have a motorcycle in the garage...do I get any green stamps?).  It won't be harvesting the rain forest.  No, man will not directly cause it, but he will indirectly bring about some amazing geological, astronomical, and meteorological events.  It will be his rebellion against God that brings that to pass and not his utilization of natural resources.

So if this is God's planet, what ought our response to that be?  Two come to mind

First, I don't have to worry.  Jesus Christ clarified that point in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:19-34).  If God takes care of the birds of the field, will he not take care of your needs, too?

Second, in not worrying, I trust God.  He is the provider.  Really, he should be man's focus anyway.  The creature should be seeking with the glee of a puppy what the Master would have me do. 

But did the Owner of this big, blue Gremlin give us any marching orders? That will take us to the third installment of Ecocatastrophes tomorrow.

Ecocatastrophes, part 1

Dmitri Medvedev stepped briefly out of Vlad Putin's shadow to make a statement about international environmental protocols that must be implemented or -- GASP! -- "this will have catastrophic consequences."  You couldn't even see his puppetmaster's strings as Medvedev did his eco-dance at the Asia Pacific summit in Singapore, but then we all know Vlad's not going to let his marionette stray far from script.

It's gotten so that you can set your watch by the surfacing of the weekly eco-catastrophe or gymnastics event needed to avert said catastrophe.  The fact that you have 19 nations gathered in one spot, this week has borne bushels lumpy fruit.  The Netherlands wants to impose a per-kilometer tax upon its people to limit driving thereby hoping to limit greenhouse emissions (here).  Great Britain is tinkering with a carbon allowance where if you consume too much carbon, you'll have to pay to get more carbon tokens put on your card (here).  And the biggest threat to the existence of life on our planet, at least in my mind, comes in the form of a dimpled, white orb.  Seems that golf balls, yes, golf balls will bring about man's demise (here).

So it's not terribly shocking to hear a world leader pontificate about how my errant drives could catapult us into oblivion.  "If we don't take joint action, the consequences for the planet may be very distressing to the point that the Arctic and Antarctic ice can melt and change ocean levels," said Dmitri (here).

It's not just Drudge, CNN, and Fox where we get persistently pummeled by this barrage.  Watch movie.  Last night, "The Day After Tomorrow" played for the 10 zillionth time.  Neat special effects.  Some cool storylines.  And enough hot air to resail the Hindenburg.  From kiddie movies (WALL*E...great movie) to not-so-kiddie movies (The Happening...bomb), we're confronted with "look what I did to me" (apologies to my friends whose skin crawls when they hear that phrase).  Even Star Trek IV tossed an enviro-harpoon when the fate of the world hung upon the fact that we'd killed off all the humpback whales.

While many voices toll the doom of our planet, many others chuckle at the antics of global-warming fanatics or they weep over how the prophets of doom and demise have been able to alter our way of living (here).  They can't both be right.  Either we total terra firma with Top Flite and Titleist, or things will go on like they always have (you think the 17th at TPC Sawgrass will fill up?  I'm sure there are pros that hope it will).

Might I suggest an alternative.  It's not really new.  It's been around since the printed word and even before that through the spoken word.  It comes from a voice as welcome in the public sphere as Sarah Palin would be as the keynote speaker for a NARAL convention.  God could turn the tide of an argument as early as the last century.  No, he wouldn't show up, but the testimony of the Bible, His testimony to His creation, would be cited for authority.  Knowing the history, I still don't know why we don't heed him anymore, other than we just don't want to hear what he has to say.

That said, I plan to take the next couple of posts to show a) why we don't need to fear Al Gore and Dmitri Medvedev and their Ouija boards of worldwide environmental disaster and b) why we ought not shrug our shoulders in complacency with regard to our place in this world.  I hope you'll hang with me.

Fourteen counts?

A day or so ago, Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison asked that Major Malik Nadal Hasan, the Ft Hood assassin, be charged with fourteen counts of murder instead of thirteen.  Pvt Francheska Valez died during the maelstrom.  So did the child she was carrying en utero.  Senator Hutchison cites Lacy's Law and Conner's Law as well as the Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004 to support her position.

Common sense would suggest she has a point.  Vengeance should ache to heap as much fury upon the head of Major Hasan as it could by adding any injury he did to anybody to the case against him.  I fear politics will ignore any indictment for the baby's death.  We'll see.

If the military does not execute this scum, it has no business keeping execution on its books as a possible consequence for crime.

I pledge allegiance

Much has been said, and we will say much more, about Major Malik Nadal Hasan's allegiance to Islam and how it conflicted with his allegiance to his uniform and to his nation (that's us).  It has opened a discussion that about which I have heard little.  What do we do when our relationship with God runs counter to what our government asks of us?

Houston, we have a problem.

More and more we find this clash amongst those who hold a strict Koranic view of Islam within non-Islamic societies.  Hence, Brits have kowtowed to Muslim immigrants and permitted Sharia within certain burroughs.  Hence, Muslim cabbies in Minneapolis needn't pick up passengers with seeing-eye dogs.  Hence, Muslim cashiers needn't check out patrons purchasing pork or Pabst Blue Ribbon.  Now we have soldiers who want to join the military but who want to take a sabbatical when they're fighting Muslims.

This God and country dilemma not only conflicts the hard-core Muslim, but it troubles (or should trouble) the Christian, too.

During the days of the Revolution, many Christian patriots loved England, but hated what the king was doing.  During the Civil War, many families were split north and south, with the north unable to abide slavery and the south unable to abide the erosion of state sovereignty.  During the World Wars, immigrants of most every Christian creed turned around to battle against their former homeland for the cause of freedom.

In the past, for those Christians who held to God as their highest allegiance, because of the Judeo-Christian bedrock upon which our nation was founded, they faced no conflict between God and country.  Serving one's country did not mean that one had to compromise in their service to God because the nation and its military stemmed from that firm foundation.  For those that examined the word of God, they did not find his principles nor his precepts violated as they took up arms against those America opposed even if they were Christians.  National conflict is a very different thing than personal conflict within the pages of the Bible.

But erosion has taken its toll.  Post-modern America has rejected its biblical underpinnings opting for a more secular function of government, culture, and international interactions.  As such, many Christians and many who serve in the military have begun to find themselves at odds with national policies.  Many find it repellent that we would allow our women to face the heat of combat.  Many grieve that the military is fast approaching the normalization of that which but a few decades ago was seen as deviance and contrary to good order and discipline.  Many wonder why we would kiss the ring of misogynist kings but would shun the only nation in the Middle East with a remotely free government.  Many cannot abide the legal killing of a child not yet born.

So like Major Hasan, many Christians find themselves at odds with God or country.

But there's a diametrical difference.  Christians do not turn their arms treacherously against their own.  They may have had to refuse their assigned duties.  They may have had to claim conscientious objector status.  Many face punitive action for not carrying out commands and orders, but to turn their weapons against their own is a repugnant and unbiblical idea.

As often as Islam is lauded as a religion of peace, there is much within a plain contextual reading of the Koran that would lead one not only to a position of conflict with one's nation but also to take up arms against that nation (slides 33, 34, 43, and 44 in Maj Hasan's PowerPoint presentation here exemplify this militant response).  You'll not find such militancy commanded of the Christian believer within a contextual reading of the Bible.

As our nation races faster and faster toward banishing any vestige of God from the public sector, the Christian will find himself more and more in conflict with the nation they have loved.  When those times come, the Christian would do well to follow the examples of Daniel's friends (Daniel 3, esp. vv. 16-18) and Peter and John (Acts 4:1-20, 5:29) by obeying God and submitting themselves to whatever consequence comes at the hand of the appointed governor (Romans 13:1-7). 

It has been in the persecution of the saints and the blood of the martyrs that the Church has flourished and God has been honored, not in the butchering of innocents or in the murder of comrades in arms.

QotD: Thomas Sowell

Sorry to go "Quote of the Day" on you two days in a row, but when Dr. Thomas Sowell dispenses his "random thoughts on the passing scene," I always find some 24-karat gems.  Consider,

It was fascinating to see Barack Obama warning us not to leap to conclusions about the killings at Fort Hood, Texas — after the way he leaped to conclusions over the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, when he knew less about the facts than we already know about the massacre at Fort Hood.

With regard to Maj. Malik Nadal Hasan.  No leaping was required.  He left a trail of 13 bodies.  And still we're asked to not connect the dots (here).

I wish I had come up with this one.  Prettier than a well-turned double play.

An e-mail from a reader says that liberals like to take the moral high ground, even though their own moral relativism means that there is no moral high ground.

To close, a creepy observation about the current state of Congress.

One of the few advantages to the country in having Congress overwhelmingly in the hands of one party is that the lack of need to compromise lets the leaders of that party reveal themselves for what they are — in this case, people with unbounded arrogance and utter contempt for the right of ordinary people to live their lives as they see fit, much less the right to know as citizens what laws are going to be passed by their government. The question is whether voters will remember on election day in 2010.

Let's hope so.

You can read the rest of his ruminations here.  In the meantime, let's see if I can come up with a coherent thought.

QotD: Just desserts

A true but difficult quote from Jay Nordlinger in this mornings "Impromptus" (always an enjoyable read...here...you'll find a funny joke in there, too) on the rumblings within the general populace regarding what's been going down in Washington.

...in a democracy, very often, people get what they deserve.

Um, ouch (though I contend we are a republic).

America's enemy...like it or not

Why do we genuflect to Islam?  When folks blow up abortion clinics or riddle doctors with bullets who perform such heinous procedures, the news media's immediate focus is upon whether his religion had anything to do with it, and if there was a hint of "Jesus Christ" anywhere in his motivations, that becomes the lead.  If the motivation behind a perpetrator of evil has a hint of Islam in it, that fact is ignored, buffered, or buried.

Mark Steyn exposes this double-standard and "the hole at the heart of our strategy" in the Global War on Terror in his eponymous article yesterday (here).  He notes,

...We’re scrupulously non-judgmental about the ideology that drives a man to fly into a building or self-detonate on the subway, and thus we have a hole at the heart of our strategy. We use rhetorical conveniences like “radical Islam” or, if that seems a wee bit Islamophobic, just plain old “radical extremism.” But we never make any effort to delineate the line which separates “radical Islam” from non-radical Islam. Indeed, we go to great lengths to make it even fuzzier.

 Steyn laments the media's dainty dances around the issue of Major Hasan's foundational worldview (Islam) and exposes their contentment with the his self-identified religious preference ("none").  But he did have a worldview.  And he did have a religious preference.  And they erupted with hellish fury.

...The pathologies that drive al-Qaeda beat within Major Hasan too, and in the end his Islamic impulses trumped his expensive Western education, his psychiatric training, his military discipline — his entire American identity.

How long will we pussyfoot around this IED before it blows up in our backyard? Ask the folks in Kileen, Texas.

Steyn recognizes,

The vast majority of Muslims don’t conspire to kill cartoonists or murder their daughters or shoot dozens of their fellow soldiers. But Islam inspires enough of this behavior to make it a legitimate topic of analysis.

And here's the rub:

What happened to those men and women at Fort Hood had a horrible symbolism: Members of the best trained, best equipped fighting force on the planet gunned down by a guy who said a few goofy things no one took seriously. And that’s the problem: America has the best troops and fiercest firepower, but no strategy for throttling the ideology that drives the enemy — in Afghanistan and in Texas.