By Kevin M

In light of the Thanksgiving holiday, we’re going to take a break from the regular fare of careers and money on this site. There are, after all, some things that are more important than money—and even careers! One of them is marked by this very holiday, but I think it often gets lost in the shuffle.

We’ll be sitting down to celebrate this holiday we call Thanksgiving, and what is it we will be thankful for? More specifically, who are we giving thanks to? Are we giving thanks to anyone?

The definition of “thanksgiving”

Maybe it would be best if we begin with a definition. Dictionary.com provides the following definitions of the term “thanksgiving” (little “t”):

“thanksgiving–noun 1. the act of giving thanks; grateful acknowledgment of benefits or favors, esp. to god. 2. an expression of thanks, esp. to God. 3. a public celebration in acknowledgment of divine favor or kindness. 4. a day set apart for giving thanks to God.”

Notice that though the word itself is a noun, each of the definitions given describes an action—the giving of thanks. More specifically, it lists a divine entity—even more specifically, God, or a “god”—as the object of that action.

When we give thanks, we don’t merely put ourselves into some sort of state of thankfulness, as though it’s some sort of zone we enter where we’re at peace with the world. No, we’re directing that act/emotion to a source outside ourselves—the source we identify as providing the bounty we enjoy.

The many distractions of modern life

What ever personal definitions we want to assign to it, what ever modern re-interpretations may be floating out there in the pop culture, the Thanksgiving holiday is a day set aside specifically for the purpose of giving thanks to that Higher Power.

It’s probably easier for us to deny that Power than at any other time in history. Surrounded by modern conveniences—cars, televisions, music, computers and videos, comfortable in our temperature controlled homes, and having access to a pill to cure what ever seems to ail us—we can insulate ourselves for the “need” for any help that others before us sought from the divine.

But do modern conveniences mean that there is no God? At what point in history were we able to break the historic chain of worship and turn to ourselves and the work of our own hands for all of our concerns? And when we come to the end of our lives, can we or our creations preserve our lives, or offer us eternal peace?

A song I learned in elementary school

When I was young, every year around this time of the year, we’d sing the following song:

“We gather together
to ask the Lord’s blessing;
he chastens and hastens
his will to make known.
The wicked oppressing
now cease from distressing.
Sing praises to his name,
he forgets not his own.”
–We Gather Together, by Edward Kremser

We learned this song and sang it in public schools! Merely a generation ago, the meaning of the Thanksgiving holiday was beyond question. It was a public holiday established for the purpose of thanking God for the many blessings He’d given us over the previous year, and even over our entire lifetimes.

What’s changed since then?

The object of my thanks this Thanksgiving

I don’t believe that anything humankind has done—or anything I’ve done personally—somehow means that God no longer exists. Not splitting the atom, landing a man on the moon or perfecting the microchip. While all those developments might impress the heck out of us, to an all powerful, infinite God, they’re the equivalent of ants stacking sand in a neat pile in the woods, and nothing more.

If we have any shred of belief that there is a God—even if we aren’t entirely certain of who He is and what function He plays in our lives—then we have to acknowledge His power over all things. Translation: all blessings come from Him, because nothing can be apart from Him.

Here’s my prayer of thanks on this holiday: I thank God in Heaven for the blessings He’s poured on me all of my life; for the troubles He’s seen me through; for the troubles He’s kept me from; for the time He’s given me in this life; for the people He’s enriched my life with; for the skills and abilities He’s given me; for the balance He’s instilled in the universe that sustains us all. I thank Him for Jesus Christ—His Son and my Lord and Savior; because of Jesus, no matter what I’ve done in the past, am doing in the present or will do in the future—my eternal destiny will remain ever secure.

Am I thankful for my country, my community, my family, my achievements and even the food I’ll eat on Thanksgiving Day? Absolutely! But all are components of the bigger picture blessings God gives us all our lives, often without us even noticing.

Thanksgiving is a prime time for each of us to take a break from our “busy lives” and consider the Eternal. If we’re truly thankful, then we need to seriously ask Who do we give thanks to at Thanksgiving?

PART 5 OF “OUR ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT GOD”

March 13, 2010

By Kevin M

“There are starving children in the world, so how can there be a God?”.

Have you ever heard that question, or a variation of it? Have you maybe wondered about it yourself?

If you’re not a believer, rest assured that even believers wrestle with this question. We see the same injustice and human misery that everyone else does, and yes, we struggle to come to terms with the existence of a loving God in the midst of it. But while as believers we may not fully understand what often looks from a human standpoint to be an apparent contradiction, we don’t allow it to be an obstacle to faith either.

That faith isn’t an abdication of rational thinking, but a willingness to accept some self-evident truths, including this one:

A true God does not exist to serve man

If you’re a believer, that’s a foundational concept. If you think that the proper behavior for an omnipotent God is to please us and make sure we’re always happy, then you seek that which can never be found within the scope of logic.

In 2 Corinthians 12:9, God addresses the Apostle Paul by saying, “…my power is made perfect in weakness”. Ouch! The human side of me, the side that demands earthly justice, doesn’t like that verse one bit! But as the du jour but redundant saying goes, “it is what it is”. I’m not God, I don’t make the rules, but I have to live within them nonetheless.

Some of the apparent conflict in this thinking is that non-believers don’t fully comprehend the concept of “salvation”. In the case of Christianity, salvation is other-worldly, referring to the spiritual saving of the believer for eternal existence with God.

That’s the very definition of faith, believing what you do not see. Most people have such faith in areas other than religion–think about the unbacked currency sitting in your wallet as an example, or our willingness to get into our cars and head for public roads where we’ll risk accidents, injuries or even death. Why do we do it? Because we have some sort of faith that it will be OK.

But back to God and weakness…if as Christianity tells us, that God is seeking man, why must he do it through human tragedy? I would submit that we only “see” God when we’re in a state of weakness and ready to bow down and to accept the unequal nature of the relationship. When we’re doing well, when we feel strong and self-sufficient, we only see ourselves.

When things are going our way, we even develop a heightened sense of our own goodness. How does God see this? Jesus gives us a clue in Luke 18:9-14:

9To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable: 10″Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11The Pharisee stood up and prayed about[a] himself: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. 12I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’

13″But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

14″I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

Do you see the consistency of this passage with the concept of human weakness? Only in humility can we even dare to come before God. Against the backdrop of this connection, human tragedy and suffering begin to look more consistent with the idea of a loving God. His purpose is to bring us to him, not to alleviate our suffering and to fix our problems, and it’s through that suffering that we can even begin to perceive him.

Jesus was not an earthly king

None of us can claim that Christianity has disappointed us by somehow not living up to its promise, because in truth it never promised us anything in this world beyond redemption in eternity. The perception that God exists primarily to solve the worlds problems is a man-made concept that isn’t born out in Scripture.

In the exchange between Jesus and the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, the Apostle John records that Pilate asked, “Are you the king of the Jews?” Jesus’ response: “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:33-36). I think that this exchange gives us a clear idea why the world functions as it does, and why it can even within the existence of a Sovereign God.

Jesus didn’t come to fix the world, to deliver us from our troubles, or even to bring peace on earth and goodwill toward men (the popular Christmas season phrase from Luke 2:14 is cut short, substantially changing its original meaning). Jesus came to reconcile men to God, that “…whoever believes in him (Jesus) shall not perish but have eternal life.”—John 3:16.

We don’t and can’t know the mind of God, but if we did we might come to realize why this is entirely necessary. Understand, I’m not saying that human misery will ever be OK—the Bible even says that God himself grieves over it—but we would come to accept it.

Jesus instructed his disciples that they would face persecution and death for his name’s sake, and yet none of them left the faith in favor of preserving their own lives. What hope was he offering them that kept them from deserting, even after Jesus himself faced public execution by the unspeakable sentence of crucifixion? What would motivate a group of people to face persecution and death for the purpose of advancing a new way of thinking?

A resurrection might do it.

If Jesus had power over death, and God promises us that hope through Jesus, is the human condition the real story, or is there something bigger in motion here?

The Utopian “faith”

The idea of a world without suffering is actually Utopianism. Dictionary.com defines utopian as 1. of, pertaining to, or resembling Utopia. 2. (usually lowercase ) founded upon or involving idealized perfection. 3. (usually lowercase ) given to impractical or unrealistic schemes of such perfection

Religions of all stripes, and Christianity in particular, have had to exist and even compete with Utopian ideas for thousands of years. It isn’t a true competition of course, because Utopianism is based on the notion of a perfect world. Christianity holds that the world isn’t perfect and never will be, and it is precisely this condition that Jesus came to deliver us from.

The job of the Christian is to seek a relationship with God through Jesus Christ, to bring other people into that relationship, with the alleviation of suffering as an effort that flows out of that relationship, not as a stand alone effort. Christianity’s primary purpose isn’t to address the human condition.

If that sounds hypocritical–and I’ll admit that if you’re a non-believer that might seem to be the case at some level–it’s also worth pointing out that no secular efforts have succeeded in alleviating suffering either. In fact, many of history’s most brutal dictators were worldly reformers bent on creating a more perfect world at any price, including human blood. Who can forget Hitler’s infamous claims of developing a “master race”, or the determination of the dictators of the old Soviet Union of engineering a “workers paradise”? Utopian dreams know no limits, and are doomed to fail because that isn’t the world we live in.

Humanity hasn’t done a very good job of alleviating suffering through secular channels, despite many public pronouncements and programs aimed at doing just that. Against that backdrop, faith at least offers hope to the downtrodden in a world that cannot save them. Would it be better to deny them that hope? Is anyone certain that hope isn’t real? What’s the evolutionary purpose of hope at all and why do we have it? Why do only humans have hope? Perhaps it’s because as the Bible tells us, we were made in God’s image.

Do we need a perfect world in order to believe in God?

There are basically two things we can do in regard to human suffering:

1) Pray that God will have mercy on the afflicted, and
2) Do what we can to help in the effort

On a personal note, I’ve found that the world is a better place and life is lived with more peace when we abandon the self-imposed fantasy requirement of a perfect world. Once we ditch our perfect world desires, we can see human misery for what it is, and within it perhaps we see the presence of an Almighty God.

I see the power of God in a world that often seems as if it’s descended into chaos. How is it that the human race, and even life itself, can survive our vast miscalculations, purges and boondoggles? We make much of the concept of synergy—the whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts—but does humanity really operate synergistically, or does humanity live in competition with itself? The evidence for competition is all around us, so how have we survived “survival of the fittest”?

Clearly a Higher Power is holding this ship afloat.

PART 1 of “OUR ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT GOD”

November 26, 2009

By Kevin M

Thanksgiving Day is a very appropriate day to launch the first post of the OutOfYourRut.com Faith Forum. It’s a day set aside in which we are to be thankful. But a relevant question today—in this largely secular era—is, to whom are we thankful? In the historical context, we all know what the answer to that question is, but what does it mean for us today?

Many argue that faith is personal, that it’s different for all people, and that we must respect people of all faiths, and even those of no faith at all. I agree on all counts. But in this forum, I will put forth my own set of personal beliefs—and those of anyone willing to add to the discussion—under the presumption that if you’re here reading this, you have at least some interest in matters of eternity.

As for my personal beliefs: I am a follower of Jesus Christ, also known as a Christian. Where possible, I will work within an understanding of Jesus Christ from a Biblical standpoint. I am not a minister or priest, not a Bible scholar and not a theologian. But I am attempting to use this forum to be what every follower of Jesus is called to be: a member of the priesthood of believers (1 Peter 2: 4-10).

If you have only a vague idea of what Christianity is about, or had training in it as child but drifted away, or might be curious, please entertain my discussion on the subject. The Christian faith is for anyone and everyone, but especially for those in a difficult place in life. The very mission of Jesus Christ was to reach out to the lost, to the hurting and to sinners. Each of us falls into every one of those categories at one time or another.

My direction—in this series at least—is to approach the discussion of Jesus from the outside in, that is, to analyze the many objections of him and of his teachings which prevent so many from accepting him for what he claimed to be: our messiah.

In this post we’ll begin with one issue which I think is foundational—ideas and comments that begin with the words: But I think God is…

Before we get into that analysis, let’s first spend some time pondering an issue that provides the entire reason such a discussion is even necessary…the rejection of Jesus Christ.

Why is Jesus Christ so “offensive” to so many people?

I can come up with two answers to this question; the first involves the judgment and hypocrisy that often comes from us Christians; we’re most assuredly guilty of this charge, but we’ll tackle that topic in a future post in this series. As to the second…

Do you believe that anyone has the ability to fortell the future? Some people believe in the prophecies of Nostrodamus, the 16th century French chemist who wrote of all sorts of predictions through his quatrains which many believe have come to pass. But here’s another prophecy from an even better known “prophet”, that has unequivocally come to pass:

” If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first…If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also” (John 15:18,20).

Those words were spoken by Jesus Christ nearly 2000 years ago, and they’re as true today as they were then. But why? Why did they hate Jesus then, and why is he still hated today? And since he departed the physical confines of the world nearly 2000 years ago, why does anyone care enough to be offended? Jesus didn’t come to rearange social orders, to topple governments or to change national boundaries. So what was it about him that so many found and still find so displeasing?

Here’s my theory… take a definate position on anything, and one thing is guaranteed: many people will hate you. Jesus was very definate, he spoke with the authority of someone who knows. But in our humaness, we don’t like definate, we prefer the wiggle room that uncertainty provides. People who are definate about things—especially in matters we can loosely call virtue—tend to make us nervous. Though we’re loathe to admit it, at the depths of our souls we’re only too aware of our shortcomings as human beings, of our guilt in the face of truth, and the more powerful the truth that one utters, the more repulsed we are at hearing it.

Does the fact that a teaching offends us make that teaching invalid? That’s what this series will attempt to analyze.

A more modern reason to reject Jesus

In today’s world, there may be an even more basic reason so many dismiss Jesus as irrelevant: fewer people believe in a “god” of any sort.

Previous generations lived a mere heartbeat away from death, and they knew it. It wasn’t at all uncommon for people who grew up before World War II to have experienced the death of an immediate family member, often a childhood sibling. It was hard not to cling to faith as the last, best hope.

But we’re largely insulated from that view of death—if not from death itself—by today’s complex global systems, public safety nets, medical advances, technological breakthroughs and the ever-present and increasingly convincing entertainment media, all of which combine to deliver to us a compelling message that we’re masters of our own destiny. This has become the ultimate “religion” of the 21st century. We don’t like to dwell on death, and like to think that one day death itself will be destroyed by our completely irrepressible, always advancing technology. As an extreme example, some people even choose to freeze their bodies at death, placing their hope in the fact that blessed technology will find a way to resurrect them to new life.

Jesus promised that if we believe in him, we would have eternal life. Eternal life with who? With God. He promised to bring us to glory. What glory? The glory of God. He promised that we’d be delivered from eternal wrath? What wrath? The wrath of God.

But if there is no God, there is no wrath, so why do we even need savior? A savior from what? The question of belief in Jesus Christ then, is even more basic than any objections to his claims and teachings.

Now, back to But I think God is…

OK, this has been an admittedly long wind-up to the main topic in the title of this post, but given the depth of the subject matter, the table first needs to be set and since this is the first post in the series, the intro had to be a long one. I promise to make my main points more quickly in future posts.

I contend that one of the core objections to Jesus Christ is either an absence of belief in a sovereign God, or a lack of understanding of the nature of God. That lack of both belief and understanding is in evidence in the way we speak of God. If we preface our discussions of God with “but I think God is…” what we’re really doing is opening the possibility of creating a God of our own choosing—making God in Man’s image. As a matter of pure logic, that thinking can’t be right.

This assertion starts with a mistaken premise: that the God of the Universe is (or must be) limited to what we think he is or should be. We’re making up our own God from, presumably, a long list of buffet table-like multiple choice items. Is that who God has to be, someone who fits our idea of who he is?

Assuming that were even possible, would a God constructed by any human being be remotely capable of being the God of the Universe? To think as much is a contradiction in terms.

So let’s flip the direction a bit. Rather than beginning a discussion of God with “but I think God is…”, let’s instead start by listing some things God isn’t, based on little more than logic:

God isn’t constrained by the limits of our understanding

God isn’t constrained by our ideas of right or wrong

God isn’t some sort of cosmic genie waiting to do our bidding in order to prove his existence or worth to humanity

God isn’t constrained by our understanding of science

God isn’t beholden to our individual opinions of who he is

God isn’t beholden to the court of public opinion or even to the court of human law

Some would like to believe in God, but want a god who will “behave” (according to the values of good and evil we hold important). As well intended as that may sound on the surface, it means only accepting a limited god. This is not at all unlike paganism, which established many gods, all of whom had certain powers and certain weaknesses. But those are not gods at all; they’re more akin to super humans. In our own day superhumans take the form of fictional characters present throughout popular culture today. We love power, but only when we think we can control it.

A true God is one who is beyond our imaginations and unconstrained by our personal preferences. In a world where we’re told—and even directed—to be masters of our own destinies, that’s a hard pill to swallow. A true God would have absolute power over us. That’s a frightening proposition isn’t it, maybe even more than we can stand.

But our fear doesn’t mean God doesn’t exist. Either he does or he doesn’t, but if he does, then yes, he has absolute power over us. Our choice then is either to believe or to reject the idea of an all powerful God, not to construct one of our preferences.

Only when we begin to grasp that concept do we begin to develop an understanding of who Jesus Christ is and why we need him. He is our path to that God who has absolute power over us.

If we’re serious about the searching for or knowing God—and we should be—we need to begin by asking the right questions and, more important, not running away from any answers we get.

What are your thoughts on this subject? Must God be who we think he is?

COMING UP NEXT: “MANY PATHS TO THE SAME GOD”