God's power made perfect in weakness (even in this small way)

It is Easter Monday. The last day of the Easter period (mainly noted here because Easter Sunday is a bank holiday and so it stands in lieu of a proper day off for most people). And me and my family have been sick the whole way through!

I preached on Maundy Thursday evening (on Jesus' comments about washing from John 13) and Good Friday (on the three crosses and respective responses of two criminals either side of Jesus). If you are interested, you can listen back to those here and here. 

I had planned to speak on Easter Sunday about Matthew's account of three very different responses to the resurrection event. Sadly, having croaked my way through Good Friday (I edited out the coughing fits for the online upload) it all proved too much and a contingency speaker was drafted in last minute on Sunday morning (who I am told did a stellar job). Instead of sitting under some uplifting ministry on the resurrection of Christ, I had the joy of sitting in a medical walk-in centre - wife and son in tow - to find out whether we had an infection that required antibiotics or just a horrible virus that we had to wait out (for those that care, it was the latter - which really stinks because not only is it hanging around but there is nothing we can adequately medicate with either!)

But here is what encouraged me. I felt totally sick and ill, had to help look after my family who felt much the same, and had no hope of preaching Sunday morning (that's not the encouraging bit). I also know the gentleman who stepped into the breach to cover the preaching was not looking forward to delivering an off-the-cuff word or having to deliver my poorly planned, inadequate notes that he wouldn't get sight of until about 10 minutes before the service started (his servant heart and willingness to do so is more encouraging but that's not quite it either). What was so encouraging is that despite every reason for everything to fall apart, the church was full, the service went ahead and the word was well received.

Often what we plan to be great isn't as great as we might hope. Other times, what doesn't go to plan at all and ought to be a disaster is no such thing. I am reminded time and again of Christ's words to the apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 12:9 “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” You don't get much weaker than a preacher that physically can't deliver the sermon and a stand-in working from notes he has neither seen nor prepared!

And what more appropriate day than Easter Sunday for such things to happen. What looked like a disaster to the disciples on Good Friday, the death of their Lord on a shameful Roman cross, proved at Easter Sunday to be the plan of salvation God had ordained before the foundation of the world. What would have never been the plan of you and me was the appointed means by which God brought salvation to the world. What, by rights, should have been a total disaster and the end of the Jesus cult was God's greatest glory and the beginning of his 2000 year old church.

All that is to say, what may appear disastrous and seem destined to failure may be the very means by which God brings glory to himself. Whether that is in the small (or slightly bigger) parts of a church service or in the huge, grand sweep of salvation-history, God chooses the weak things by which to glorify himself. He chooses not to conform to human convention and wisdom. He chooses a virus to knock-out a church pastor and stop him preaching the word in order to glorify himself through another man taking his place and doing a far better job because he is almost certainly relying on the Lord in a way this pastor probably wasn't going to because his "power is made perfect in weakness".

Heaven Tourism is bunk & how we can be sure if God is speaking

I was delighted to read that LifeWay, a major Christian bookseller, has taken the decision to no longer stock books that come under the genre of Heaven Tourism. You can find out about why here.

As pointed out here and here, there is really only one reason why Heaven Tourism books keep being published. Money. There is a great demand for them and Christian publishers often make a calculated decision to stock them.

So, if you are offered a copy (or tempted to buy one), here are a few reasons to reject as nonsense any book claiming insight into Heaven from the perspective of one who has been and come back.

The Bible says it is made up

"No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known." - John 1:18

"No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man." - John 3:13

"it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment" - Hebrews 9:27

Although the Bible clearly shows that some people had visions of Heaven, there are no examples in the entire corpus of biblical writing detailing anybody having gone to Heaven and come back. The above verses make clear that the Bible gives no room for anybody to go to Heaven and come back. 

God has been pretty clear in his word. Apart from Christ, nobody has seen God fully and nobody has been in his full and direct presence, and come back to Earth to tell the tale. If we accept the word of these Heaven Tourism books, we effectively say God is lying to us.

The accounts are not consistent with Biblical teaching on Heaven

There are only four biblical writers who record visions of Heaven (Isaiah and Ezekiel in the OT; Paul and John in the NT). Of those four, only three tell us what they saw. In each case, the focus is on the glory of God (Isaiah 6:1–4; Ezekiel 1, 10; Revelation 4–6). Similarly, in each case the reaction to God's glory is fear and shame.

Contrast these accounts with the jejune and mundane accounts we are given in Heavenly Tourism books (things like picnics, games, juvenile attractions, familiar faces, odd conversations, and so on). Note the reactions of the individuals to the events happening around them; to being in the very presence of holy, almighty God.

Beyond this, as Tim Challies points out, "Those who have a biblical understanding of life and death and heaven and hell will know that for a person to die and visit heaven, to experience sinlessness and the presence of Jesus Christ—for that person it would be the very height of cruelty to then demand that they return to earth."


These accounts call us away from scripture & bring dishonour to God

Not only do these accounts not tally with what scripture actually says, they call us away from scripture altogether. They encourage us to take the word of a man (or child) over and above the word of God. They don't simply lead us to call God a liar if we accept them, they lead us to dishonour God altogether.

Jesus says "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed" (John 20:29). Our hope is not in the word of a child, a doctor, a minister or anyone else who claims to have been to Heaven. Our hope is in the words and person of Jesus Christ as revealed by God in his word. Faith is believing in the word of God as true and without error. To then be convinced of the reality of Heaven based upon these Heaven Tourism books is to say you need more proof than God has given. It is to say the Bible is not sufficient for matters of faith, that God has not given us enough to warrant belief in him. Again, Tim Challies rightly says "you dishonor God if you choose to believe what the Bible says only when you receive some kind of outside verification."

These accounts are obviously falsified

The Bible insists such accounts cannot be true, they do not accord with biblical visions of Heaven nor of biblical teaching about Heaven and they draw us away from God's prescribed method of revealing himself to people. All of that should be cause enough for us to recognise these accounts are certainly not reliable. It is reason enough to consider them to be falsified (whether purposefully or not).

But if that's not enough, then consider the fact that some of these accounts have been recanted by those who wrote them. Alex Malarkey, co-author of The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven, has since claimed he made up the whole story (see here, here and here amongst others). Malarkey makes clear he did not die and he never visited Heaven. In fact, he made it up because he thought it would garner him some attention.

Such things are not limited to Heaven Tourism books. The Christian world is replete with stories of children (and adults, to be fair) making professions of faith, seeking baptism, giving testimony of how God has spoken to them for a variety of reasons despite none of it being true. Sometimes it is attention seeking, other times to fit in with what others do around them or it could simply be to please a dominant person/voice in their life. 

We are wont to believe people at face value without ever seeking to ask the serious, and necessary, questions we must. Does God speak today? Yes he does. Does that mean we cannot question any person who claims "the Lord said to me..."? Absolutely not. 

The Lord most usually speaks through his word. Even there we need to be careful that we have understood and applied it correctly. Anybody bringing testimony apart from the Bible must surely be held to a higher standard still. That is not to say such testimony cannot be true but it is to say we cannot be sure it is true unless it is verifiable and closely tied to scripture itself.

In Tim Keller's book Prayer he offers this story that illustrates the point well:

If we leave the Bible out, we may plumb our impressions and feelings and imagine God saying various things to us, but how can we be sure we are not self-deceived? The eighteenth-century Anglican clergyman George Whitefield was one of the spearheads of the Great Awakening, a period of massive renewal of interest in Christianity across Western societies and a time of significant church growth. Whitefield was a riveting orator and is considered one of the greatest preachers in church history. In late 1743 his first child, a son, was born to he and his wife, Elizabeth. Whitefield had a strong impression that God was telling him the child would grow up to also be a “preacher of the everlasting Gospel.” In view of this divine assurance, he gave his son the name John, after John the Baptist, whose mother was also named Elizabeth. When John Whitefield was born, George baptized his son before a large crowd and preached a sermon on the great works that God would do through his son. He knew that cynics were sneering at his prophecies, but he ignored them.

Then, at just four months old, his son died suddenly of a seizure. The Whitefields were of course grief-stricken, but George was particularly convicted about how wrong he had been to count his inward impulses and intuitions as being essentially equal to God’s Word. He realized he had led his congregation into the same disillusioning mistake. Whitefield had interpreted his own feelings—his understandable and powerful fatherly pride and joy in his son, and his hopes for him—as God speaking to his heart. Not long afterward, he wrote a wrenching prayer for himself, that God would “render this mistaken parent more cautious, more sober-minded, more experienced in Satan’s devices, and consequently more useful in his future labors to the church of God.”  

The lesson here is not that God never guides our thoughts or prompts us to choose wise courses of action, but that we cannot be sure he is speaking to us unless we read it in the Scripture.

The resurrection and the grounds of Christian hope

Good Friday is the day we remember the death of Christ. As I commented here, the cross is neither the object of our faith nor the basis of our hope. Rather, it is the place at which Jesus fulfilled the work of his mission and secured the salvation of all who believe in him.

Easter Sunday is the day we remember the resurrection of Christ. Unlike the cross, the resurrection is the basis of Christian hope. In Romans 8:24, Paul reminds us "hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees?" As such, the Christian hope is by definition some future event or happening for which we wait.

As Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 15:20 "Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep". Firstfruits signal the start of a harvest and prove there is more fruit on the way. If Jesus' is the firstfruits of those who have died, his resurrection must signal more of the same to come. The resurrection acts as God's pledge to all believers that they will be raised to glory. Jesus rose as the firstfruits of the resurrection of all believers to come. According to Paul, the basis of our hope rests on the historical event of Jesus' resurrection.

If one can disprove the resurrection, one can destroy the Christian faith. Christian belief rests on the historical resurrection of Jesus. Without it, there is no future hope. Jesus did not rise, he is not in glory and  no believer is going to be there with him for eternity. Evidently, this is what the apostles themselves recognised when they returned to the very jobs from which Jesus first called them in the aftermath of the crucifixion.

The question that remains is this: what best accounts for the empty tomb? What best accounts for the sudden emergence of the Christian church? What best accounts for the willingness of the dejected followers of Jesus suddenly being willing to die for a faith based solely on the resurrection of their Lord? 

The evidence for the resurrection is quite astounding. The points of agreement among scholars on the basic historic facts surrounding the resurrection are enormous (see here for an outline of this). If the answer to the above questions is that Jesus actually, bodily rose from the dead then Christians have remarkable grounds for their current faith and future hope.

Mark Steel is half right... nobody will abandon religion simply because an atheist bangs on about science

I generally like Mark Steel. He is usually funny and happens to take a political stance in his comedy that appeals to such as me. I was interested to read his piece in today's Independent in which he (rightly) argued nobody is going to abandon religion simply because "some atheist is banging on at them about science".

Steel is apt to recognise religious belief - as with almost any other firmly held position - is more than a mere matter of assent to facts/ideas (delete according to your predisposition). He comments, "dealing with the intricacies of people’s ideas requires more than yelling science at them" and offers the example of the anorexic who believes they are fat to underline the point. What passes as obvious for one may seem totally irrational to another specifically because of the intricacy of belief and the presumed facts each one of us deems "properly basic".

He correctly points out the issue with the modern atheist appeal to heinous acts committed by those who profess religious belief. He states: 

isn’t it the actions of these people that are vile, not the religion itself? Unless your attitude is: “Those priests are a disgrace. They sexually abused children, covered it up for decades, then to top it all they give out stupid wafers in their service. How sick can you get”?

This point rather hits at the heart of the issue. Richard Dawkins has argued the heinous acts of several atheist dictators had nothing to do with their atheism whilst simultaneously wishing to maintain the heinous acts committed by Roman Catholic priests were somehow prompted by their religion. For many of the New Atheists (cf. Christopher Hitchens' God is not great: how religion poisons everything), the attitude is precisely the one stated above.

Nevertheless, it is nice to see Steel observe "I spent a morning at a Sikh temple recently, where 4,000 free meals are provided for anyone who wants one" whilst pointedly remarking "if you turned up at Richard Dawkins’s house with 4,000 mates, I’d be surprised if you all got a meal out of him".

For all that, Steel's piece is to be commended. It is funny, endearing and recognises the truth that religious belief - in fact, belief of any sort - is more complex than simply assenting to a series of ideas. Somebody once remarked (and I forget who it was now, so I can't honestly credit it), the means by which we reach conclusions is a convoluted and intricate exercise influenced by many things. Reason is merely the device we use to convince others we are right. Often, we expect others to conclude  by reason alone when, for most of us, it is but one of many tools we use to reach conclusions.

Here, however, is where I think Steel is a little unfair. The very title of his piece presumes that the religious are scientifically deficient. Equally fallaciously, he tacitly gives rise to the view that science is the primary form of knowledge (as opposed to other areas that handle issues science cannot and upon which science is often based e.g. philosophy). For all his denunciation of Richard Dawkins, his concern is more that Dawkins patronises believers, has a problem in principle with all religion and clearly ignores the good that many religious believers do. This rather conveys the belief that atheists are the guardians of science and reason whilst believers - who should nevertheless be entertained in their fanciful views so long as they do no harm to others - are not. Steel's concern is not the specific beliefs of Richard Dawkins but the patronising and/or aggressive rhetoric he employs. It is not his views with which Steel finds a problem but the tactics Dawkins uses to convey them. Ironically, this is rather patronising.

Steel says he finds the "contradictions of religion" confusing - as well he should! The example he cites of a guru continuing to fight a battle having had his head chopped off plays directly to our Western, post-enlightenment sense of that which is "properly basic". Of course that could never happen, says Steel, but look at the good these Sikhs are doing in a community setting, offering meals to people. It's the as-long-as-they're-doing-no-harm form of patronage; "yes, their views are ridiculous but look at the lovely things they do as a result"! At least Dawkins doesn't patronise like that.

It is true that belief is a complex thing and represents more than mere assent to a set of ideas. It is also true that reason is but one of many tools we use to reach conclusions. However, that does not mean religion itself is baseless and one must park one's reason to be a believer. I equally don't believe a guru fought a battle after his head was chopped off. That's not because I simply dismiss it as something that could never happen (a position Philosophical Naturalism and Atheism are forced to hold). Rather, if there are good grounds to believe in a God (and, without rehearsing them all here, I believe there are) all sorts of possibilities are open to us. Nevertheless, I don't believe this did happen because of the positive reasons to reject it (again, all of which I will not rehearse here).

By contrast, Christianity is not a religion beget by presumption and story-telling. Scripture itself records God inviting us to "reason together" and the very basis of Christianity - the spark that ignited it as a movement - was based on the evidence for the resurrected Jesus Christ. Throughout the New Testament, the Apostles argued that their hope - and the whole basis of Christianity - stood or fell on the proof of that one fact. Establish the resurrection as a fraud (as many have tried) and Christianity dies overnight. Establish it as fact (in my view, the historical facts are extraordinarily compelling) and Christianity is based on far more than presumption. It compels us reasonably, philosophically and historically.

Where Steel is undoubtedly correct, it will take much more than atheists banging on about science to convince religious believers to abandon their beliefs. Interestingly, Christians recognised this fact long ago. Whatever the compelling reasons for Christianity (and I believe there are many), Blaise Pascal noted nearly 400 years ago, in his Pensées, that reason was but one step (and not even the first one) on the road to belief. No doubt this is where New Atheism is going wrong, merely "banging on about science", but is probably where a lot of modern evangelical Christianity gets it wrong too.

Why the Christian can celebrate this Easter

Here are the words of Paul, speaking about the resurrection and its importance to the Christian faith:

Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied. (1 Cor 15:12-19)

Paul is clear that without the resurrection the Christian faith is meaningless and Christians are the most sad of sad cases.

Fortunately for the Christian, Paul goes on to say "But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep (1 Cor 15:20)". Indeed, there are good grounds to believe that Jesus Christ really did rise from the dead. William Lane Craig offers evidence for the resurrection here and John Stevens explains some of the implications of this glorious truth here.

There are plenty of reasons for the Christian to rejoice this Easter. Nevertheless, let the final word go to Peter:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. (1 Peter 1:3-5)

What makes Good Friday good?

As I commented here:

To them [the disciples], at that time, this [the cross] was disastrous. However, [Giles] Fraser is entirely wrong to suggest that the cross, "celebrated as a moment of triumph", is "theologically illiterate". He claims the end of the story does nothing to change this fact. However, the cross is a moment of triumph specifically because it is not the end of the story. Indeed, this is why Paul and the other apostles pinned their entire claim of Christian faith on the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

 Rather than flesh out those details myself, why not read this and this.

So, what makes Good Friday good? The resurrection of Christ. What makes the resurrection of Christ of any value? The events of Good Friday. We cannot have one without the other.

The apostles rarely taught about the cross without mention of the resurrection. Worryingly, our gospel preaching often considers the cross whilst simultaneously ignoring the resurrection altogether. How often does the resurrection feature in your gospel preaching? Does the resurrection even make any difference to your gospel preaching? The apostles were clear that it should make all the difference in the world.