Watching Fight Club (1998, Brad Pitt, Edward Norton) with a friend the other night, I enjoyed myself by analyzing it with fresh eyes in light of a better grasp of postmodernism than I had the last time I’d seen it (at least a year ago).

In particular, the following. Insofar as Jack (Norton, the unnammed narrator) must imbue his world with meaning as the Everyman struggling to survive in light of a bleak and godless present, and insofar as Durden (Pitt) as the Nietszschean übermensch becomes a kind of antiheroic leader/god-figure among the men of “Project Mayhem,” the scene at Paper Street Soap Company immediately following Bob’s botched mission to “destroy a piece of corporate art and trash a franchise coffee bar” gives a biting critique of progressive theology—whether it “means” to or not.

When Angelface issues a stern edict to “bury him in the garden” in answer to a frantic cry that “we have to get rid of the evidence—we have to get rid of the body,” this god-figure expresses deep disgust and horror.

Jack: What are you talking about? This is not a f—king piece of evidence! This is a person! He’s a friend of mine and you’re not going to bury him in the f—king garden.

The objection comes from across the table on which sits this fresh corpse: “But sir, in Project Mayhem, we have no names.”

This dark figure rounds on him seriously, finger quivering indignantly, accusingly: “No, listen to me. This is a man and he has a name, and it’s Robert Paulson, ok? He is dead now, because of us, alright? You understand that?”

After a brief moment of silence, the dead man’s partner chimes in with quiet reverence: “I understand.” Turning didactically to his colleagues, as though having taken on a role of priest-mediator between this revelation so seemingly dripping for them all with gravitas, the scene recalls pagan sacrifice rituals on which scrolls of law would later be based. “In death, a member of Project Mayhem has a name. His name is Robert Paulsen.”

The objector, now suddenly seeming as though recast as studious acolyte, quietly intones, “His name is Robert Paulsen.”

They all take up the cry for this the first true martyr of their gathering: “His name is Robert Paulsen. His name is Robert Paulsen….”

What do we see from this? A sardonic parody of the beginnings of tribal religion—and by extension, all religions, especially ones claiming progressive revelations (Christianity and Islam, e.g.). In the framework of postmodernism, Jack is only clinging to what he knows and is trying to make sense of the world around him; but as one of the founders of Project Mayhem, this everyman has taken on an incredible power for these men, his “followers,” who overinterpret simple statements and turn them into proverbs and parables.

This bleak picture of humanity seems characteristic of the late 1990s, now that we’re far enough from that decade to evaluate it at least a bit better in its historical context, with all its axioms, clichés, and presuppositions. In some sense, Fight Club is as clearly existential as No Exit or Edward Scissorhands, with an austerity of moral grounding that leaves man primal and with his own means of creating a meager truth for himself while he lives—and a bleak picture of the instinct to worship and sacredness that threatens to undermine this primal and paradoxically “higher” state of man.

Men do hear the calls of Christ, but they are willfully deaf, because they think he wants them to do something. But he does not want anything of you; he wants you to receive what he has already done. He comes laden with mercy, with his hands full of blessing, and he knocks at your door. You have only to open it and he will enter in, and salvation will enter with him.

It’s a real struggle, since we earn everything else, for good or for ill, to accept free grace as free. But that’s the gospel—right there, summed up.

On Joy & Sorrow
Our joy is like the wave as it dashes on the shore—it throws us on the earth. But our sorrows are like that receding wave which sucks us back again into the great depth of godhead. We would have been stranded and left high and dry on the shore if it had not been for that receding wave, that ebbing of our prosperity, which carried us back to our Father and our God again.

Tacitus tells us that an amber ring was throught to be of no value among the Romans till the emperor took to wearing one, and then immediately an amber ring was held in high esteem. Bereavements might be looked on as very sad things, but when we recollect that Jesus wept over his friend Lazarus, they are choice jewels and special favors from God. Christ wore this ring. Then I must not blush to wear it.

Our sorrows are all, like ourselves, mortal. There are no immortal sorrows for immortal souls. They come, but blessed be God, they also go. Like birds of the air, they fly over our heads. But they cannot make their abode in our souls. We suffer today, but we shall rejoice tomorrow.

The Quaker was right who, when he saw a lady fretting on the sofa some year or so after her husband was dead, still harboring grief without a token of resignation, said to her, ‘Madam, I see you have not forgiven God yet.’ Sometimes, grief is not a sacred feeling, but only a murmur of rebellion against the Most High.

On Works:
Many Christians appear to think that if they are just believers, it is enough. We do not in business think it enough if we barely escape bankruptcy. A man does not say, if his dear child has been ill in bed for years, that it is quite enough so long as the child is alive. We do not think of our own bodies, that so long as we can breathe, it is enough.

I remember a story of one, who remarked to a minister what a wonderful thing it was to see so many people weeping. ‘No,’ said he, ‘I will tell you something more amazing still, that so many will forget all they wept about when they get outside the door.’

To be unfeeling is to be unfruitful. Prayer without desire, praise without emotion, preaching without earnestness–what are all these? Like the marble images of life, they are cold and dead.

A hard-hearted Christian—is not that a complete contradiction? Must not our hearts have been broken before we could ourselves be penitent? And he who bound them up and healed them did not harden them with his gentle touch. I reckon that he gave them an additional tenderness by the very act of binding them up with his own dear pierced hands.

On Salvation (or, “Wait, I Thought He Was Baptist”):
I believe there will be more in heaven than in hell. If you ask me why I think so, I answer, because Christ in everything is to have the preeminence, and I cannot conceive how he could have the preeminence if there are to be more in the dominions of Satan than in paradise.

I rejoice to know that the souls of all infants, as soon as they die, speed their way to paradise. Think what a multitude there is of them!

It is said there is to be a multitude that no man can number in heaven. I have never read that there is to be a multitude that no man can number in hell.

Some of you could not be happy if you were allowed to enter heaven. Shall I tell you why? It is a land of spirit, and you have neglected your spirit. Some of you even deny that you have a spirit.

These are some I found encouraging and challenging, sometimes one more than the other; though ultimately the two are inseparable.

Avoid a sugared gospel as you would shun sugar of lead. Seek that gospel which rips up and tears and cuts and wounds and hacks and even kills, for that is the gospel that makes alive again. And when you have found it, give good heed to it. Let it enter into your inmost being. As the rain soaks into the ground, so pray the Lord to let his gospel soak into your soul.

—Spurgeon

I do not believe there is a single honest man living who, having once heard the gospel simply preached, does not in his conscience believe it to be true. I am persuaded that light will penetrate. There is such force, such energy in Christ, it must and will pierce through some crevice and convince at least a natural conscience. but this is the very reason why men oppose it. They do not want it to be true.

-> Vanity: desire for praise or adulation or worship; an excessive pride in one’s possessions or qualities.
-> benevolence: inclination to do that which is good, kind, and/or charitable.
-> praise: ascribe worth
-> worship: the highest form of praise

The one thing I would ask is, how would you picture a God who is not “vain”?
Doesn’t vanity conflict with benevolence?

No, because God is God. God is the only one who deserves our praise, adulation, and worship; and He is all-good. He not only loves it and deserves it when we worship Him, but because He gave us life and all things that we receive and enjoy, He rewards that worship by the innate nature of our relationship with God. It’s built in to us that it is immensely rewarding to worship our Creator. In fact, you might say that His “vanity” in this sense is an illustration of His benevolence, because through our praise and worship of Him, He pours out His love and blessing on us (that is to say, we are more attuned and able to receive it).

God deserves our praise also because different freedoms are intrinsic to the offices that different people hold. A gynecologist can go where a stranger can’t; a President can do what a civilian can’t; and cetera.

But even so, let’s take a closer look to see if God does indeed deserve our praise. Vanity and praise are both tied to worth. It’s not that praise itself is silly or unreasonable: we ascribe worth to that which we appreciate, such as saying “This CD is really entertaining [attempting not to confuse “good” here],” “That shot behind the three-point line at the buzzer was amazing,” and that sort of thing. We do that all the time. There are things in the world that have worth; only an extreme cynic would proclaim otherwise, and the burden of proof would fall to him or her. Thus, praise itself is rational.

There is a certain amount of praise that is appropriate–even due–each person. We have all done commendable acts, and we all deserve some praise. Our problem, the problem of vanity, is that we think we deserve a lot more than we do. Most of what we think we deserve actually came by accident: for instance, good looks. That’s why we call it ‘vanity’ most commonly when someone is puffed up about themselves, because that had nothing to do with them. There is a lot more accidental stuff than we’re often willing to admit that gives us a false sense of worth.

God is a different case than us altogether. Nothing about Him is accidental; all His works are of immeasurable worth, and He Himself is of immeasurable worth (along with immeasurable everything else!). Every good quality God possesses is absolutely, totally His own. Furthermore, let’s carry this one more step: we are given all the good things we have by God Himself. If you’re good looking, it’s because God made you that way; if you’re intelligent, it’s because God has given you a sound mind; if you have a lot of money, it’s because God has given you the power to earn it. Et cetera.

The irony in the question of whether God is vain is that if praise is rational, if there is anything worthy of praise, then God deserves it all because “He is the source of every good and perfect gift” (Jas 1). Furthermore, if God is indeed worthy of my praise, He is worthy thereof whether or not I’m blissfully happy, because it is His due.

Thus, not only is it not “vain” for God to want praise and worship in the sense that it would exceed His worth, but it is His right to demand it.

Technorati Tags: vanity, theology, apologetics, God

If the Bible is the main source of Christian knowledge on
God, a Christian theoretically would consider the Bible a
prime source of morality. That is, if that said
Christian believes his or her morality comes from the
Bible or Christianity.

The one and only source of knowledge of God is God Himself as He expresses Himself through the Word. Jesus is called the Word of God; so when we speak with Jesus in prayer, we are then also receiving the word of God, and a source of knowledge there also. God will never contradict something He’s already said–this is a crucial point–so we check out everything we hear in prayer with the Bible, so we know it’s accurate and sound. Let it never be said that God wants mindless flunkies who don’t question and are never skeptical: honest skeptics (those who want real answers and for whom their questions present genuine barriers to faith–and are not just an intellectual smoke screen that sum up to be an excuse not to have to believe in someOne that might change their lifestyles) are special in God’s sight. Luke the physician records, “Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.” Paul was a first-century theological teacher. Could they trust what he told them? They checked it out in Scripture to be sure. Now, why would they be more noble if God didn’t love and approve of people questioning Him? To ask God a question is to provide Him with an opening to display His wisdom and might in our minds, hearts, and lives–keeping in mind that this question must of course be genuine.

That’s a bit of a tangent, but I just wanted to make clear that (1) prayer and the spiritual ministry of Jesus is as important as the written Word; and (2) God rejoices over an honest skeptic.

That being said, if all of the
Bible reflects truth, how does one reconcile such
apparent contradictions? In my opinion, they serve as a
source of invalidation for the Bible. However, I’m
curious as to how a Christian approaches this issue.

I wonder at the objectivity of bringing a generalized claim to the floor without evidence, but to answer your question as to how a Christian approaches this issue–well, by taking each apparent contradiction in turn and seeking out the answer. God is not afraid of our toughest questions, although men (like myself) may not be adequate in speech or knowledge to convey the answers ourselves. “Seek and ye shall find….”

Technorati Tags: epistemology, Christianity, apologetics

I certainly found this to be true in my own life. I was sharing my testimony a couple of weeks ago and I realized that during those dark years of my early college career during which my ignorance of the eternity of “eternal salvation in Christ” I became an altogether reckless individual. As much as we Christians are bad about trying to earn our salvation and depending only half on His grace and half on our own “goodness,” hell hath no greater friend than the Christian who believes himself to have been forsaken. Thank God that His grace is beyond our power to throw away or nullify!

I posited the immutability of God, to which someone replied something to the effect that His laws sure have, so what does that say?  I answered that the spirit in which those laws were written has not changed; and that furthermore to interpret the OT and NT theologies as being temporally distinct is to tacitly admit that their Author has shifted views.  Thus began the discussion. [If you find an error of any sort, kindly bring it to my attention.]

[Someone] wrote on 2004/03/04 17:41 ET:

> So, you would agree then that eating shellfish is
> still an abomination to God?

For those of you who are unfamiliar with what [the questioner] is talking about, he cites Levitical law that prohibits the eating of pork, shellfish, and other certain meats and such things. This was highly important to the Jews before Christ’s incarnation.

You touch on an extremely important and very exciting point—! It is important to understand for what Levitical law was put into place, and why there were all these specific ritual regulations.

Follow me on this. God has made an everlasting covenant with those who love Him and believe on Him. The Lord is the author of life and of *diversity* and has chosen to exhibit and express His covenant of love to us humans in several different stages through the millennia, according to what we could best understand.

The Jews of Abraham’s day, and of Moses’ day, were a very sensate-focused people. They were good with their hands; hard workers, agriculturally and creatively; carpenters, craftsmen, everything. Even their language is highly concrete: there are no abstractions in the Hebrew tongue insofar as words are concerned—that is, they had not the words to express what we consider abstract concepts. Take, for instance, the alphabet. Each letter corresponds to not only a letter, but also a concrete meaning tied to a symbolic meaning that they could not otherwise express. The second letter, for instance, “Bet”—looks like the roof, floor, and side of a house, and it stands for “house” (how ’bout that!). Symbolically, it means “place of dwelling,” “shelter,” &c. Whole words were the same way. When in our language we read, “The Lord is slow to anger,” in Hebrew this reads “I AM [the name of the Lord] is slow to nose.” Slow to nose?! you might say. Yes, think about it: when you’re angry, you begin breathing more heavily and your nostrils flare! Other examples include “horn” for “strength,” and “breath” or “throat” for “soul.”

So what’s the point? Well, just as their language was highly concrete, so was their connection to understanding sin. Over and over in the Old Testament (and the New, for that matter!), there are places where God makes it clear that He desires for His people to abstain from immorality. Well, how does He convey that to a people who don’t have any abstract words? God wants to reveal His truth to everyone, so naturally, He will reveal it to His people however they can best understand. In the ancient Jews’ case, this was through physical actions of either Doing Something or Not Doing Something.

For instance, the reason Jews even today will on proscribed days eat only bread without leaven (yeast) is because yeast is given in the Bible as an analogy for sin. Yeast, like sin, works itself through the dough, ferments (rots) it, spreads like bacteria on a petri dish, and is dog gone near impossible to extract from dough into which it has been worked. So to make His people understand that they are to be set apart morally (”holy”) from those around them, and pleasing to Him, He would have them abstain from dough with yeast in it to remind them that they are to make sure their souls and lives did not contain sins that would end up destroying them.

So then! we come to the shellfish and unclean animals. Just as with other physical demonstrations of purity, outpourings of their spirits that they otherwise would have trouble expressing (i.e., verbally as we often do), God gave specific instructions for them to eat certain things and abstain from others, as further illustrations on a concrete level of spiritual truths that they would otherwise had immense trouble grasping. There were two categories of animals: those that were acceptable for eating and sacrificing to the Lord, and those that were not. The ones that were, were called “kosher”—that is, “clean” or “whole.” The ones that were unacceptable were called “treif”—that is, “unclean” or “ripped.”

Shellfish, pigs, vultures, spiders, flies, bugs, rats, and mice are example of these “treif”—unclean—animals. What these all have in common are that the eating thereof or touching of their dead carcasses (also forbidden by Levitical law) would have contributed exceedingly to the spread of communicable diseases. Pigs will eat anything on the ground, just about; shellfish are the pigs of the ocean; vultures scavenge the dead carcasses of just about any meaty thing; and bugs and spiders could not only sting/bite to death but were also (as now) carriers of various pestilences. So there are health concerns for the Hebrew people back in the day: God was giving them these strict dietary laws, in part, because by abstaining from unclean animals they would keep themselves healthy and from disease. These dietary laws are often still practiced by both Jews and Gentiles (non-Jews) alike today, because by doing so one will be quite healthy. (Don’t believe me? In the US alone, three of six [50%] of the most common food-borne parasites in humans are associated with eating pork, the animal considered among the “most unclean” by the ancient Jews.)

But of course, it doesn’t stop there! God was also illustrating concepts about spiritual health to His people. God’s chosen people whom He loves and who love Him are to be set apart morally, to not pollute their minds and souls with that which does not bring them closer to Him and help them illustrate His awesome love to those that don’t know Him. Eating with someone, or eating something, showed to the Jews an extremely intimate communion. To eat with someone was to commune with them on a level for which we in Western societies have nearly lost an appreciation. We are not to “eat” the spiritual “shellfish” of this world: we only allow our spirits to commune intimately with the “clean” spiritual food that feeds our souls and brings us closer to the glorious knowledge of our awesome and loving God. We are not to feast on “vultures”: not to take into our minds and hearts that which is dead and decaying, that which does not edify us to life and better understanding of Him. (Concrete examples might be participating in mockery and gossip, being around people who cast hateful curses all over the place, &c.) We are not to eat “spiders”: there are certain things to which each person is so morally vulnerable that to be “bitten” by them is to kill them spiritually—to deaden them to the voice of God.

What, then? you ask. Get to the point, Michael: has not God changed His mind, since you, even you, Christian, enjoy Irashiai Sushi Pub and Henry’s BBQ? And I answer thus. These dietary regulations served the purpose of keeping the ancient Israelites healthy both physically and spiritually. When Jesus came, He declared all foods to be “clean.” (Mt 7:14-23) This is because we (humanity) were at a level where we no longer needed physical restrictions to illustrate spiritual principles, and medicines and hygeine had begun to advance to the point that mortality would not necessarily be significantly increased by the partaking of certain foods. We can understand abstract concepts now, and we usually link abstractions with spiritual concepts though there is *not* a stepladder progression from concrete > abstract > spiritual, as some think (and I was once among them). Because we don’t need such constant, physical reminders of God’s laws as Christians—having God’s laws written on our hearts (Heb 10:16, Jer 31:33-34)—all foods are clean.

Take careful note, though, that God has not changed His mind in the slightest. Believers are still to abstain from spiritual “scavengers” and “spiders,” still to keep ourselves set apart from all the spiritual mud, gunk, nast, disease, and mind-numbing junk that this world throws at us. We are to live lives that please our loving and wonderful, morally perfect God. But we no longer are held to using our physical intakes as living illustrations of those truths. What has changed is neither the nature of God nor His morality for our lives, the lives for those who believe in Him—only the way in which that was physically expressed has been repealed to illustrate the powerful freedom that the Christian has in his Lord and savior.

Again, if I’ve been unclear, please let me know so that I can clarify; and, even though I love Judaic culture and language, I’m by no means an expert! Check this stuff out for yourself—and check out the Scripture verses, too. An onine, searchable, indexed Bible in 18 English translations (!) can be found here.

Technorati Tags: God, dietary law, shellfish, Judaica, Christianity, religion, immutability

But what about 0! ? Prima facie it makes sense that 0! would be 0, because 0*1==0, but it’s not. There is an explanation (which for the curious can be found here) as to why 0!==1, but I think we can all agree it doesn’t seem immediately intuitive.

This provides a funny, perhaps ridiculous, yet telling illustration of Creation. God created ex nihilo Being, i.e., all that exists, by speaking. If we may exercise a bit of comedic license, we can say that God shouted (!) at zero (nothingness) and 1 (Being) was the result; and at first it doesn’t make intuitive sense, but if we know the underlying algorithym (God’s character) everything just falls right into place.

You enter from the larger reality—in this case, the city of Columbia, SC or, more broadly, the state itself—and don’t quite know what to expect. You come in. There’s a lot of food the eating of which feels really great for that moment and the penalty for which is an expanding waistline and gastrointestinal distress the likes of which could fell pachyderms. There are many distractors: sirens blaring, lights flashing, rides running, workers shouting their a priori approval of your skills at whatever rigged game they’re standing before to entice you to spend wads of cash on meaningless oversized schwag that somehow seems really important at the moment. Everything seems urgent, controlled chaos. The amount of work it took to throw this expensive multifaceted party is almost inconceivable—and it’ll all be over in a few short days, mere moments in which children cry and laugh; in which children of all ages eat and overeat all sorts of things that even a McDonalds junkie wouldn’t touch more than once a year; in which fun will be had, people and jackets will get lost and found, and then—they’ll tear it down for another year.

And it hit me: the fair is like Creation. Insofar as we may attribute “labor” to omnipotent deity, God labored for six days to separate the waters, to scatter the stars in the heavens, to make plants and fish and man. People enter not knowing what to expect, get distracted by all sorts of things that at best don’t matter in the grand scheme of things, eat too much, are unhealthy—then POOF, everyone has to leave the fair sometime and go out into the larger reality, and at the end of time the fair is taken down, and that’s it. All that hullaballoo for just a short burst, in terms of the long run. (Of course if I held to the Greek conception of time, the analogy would go further: the universe would be remade and unmade, time without end, in a cyclical pattern. But I digress.)

HOUSE: … I convinced her she’d be better off without me.

WILSON: You’re an idiot. You don’t think she’d be better off without you.

HOUSE: Right.

WILSON: You have no idea why you sent her off!

HOUSE: —Don’t do this—

WILSON: This was no great sacrifice! You sent her away because you’ve got to be miserable.

HOUSE: That kind of psycho crap get your patients through the long nights? Or’s it just for you? Tough love make you feel good, helping people feel their pain?

WILSON: You don’t like yourself. But you do admire yourself. That’s all you’ve got, so you cling to it. You’re so afraid if you change, you’ll lose what makes you special. Being miserable doesn’t make you better than anybody else, House. It just makes you miserable.

House, M.D. is my guilty little pleasure. I don’t own a TV, and as a rule I don’t watch television. But between this and 24 the small screen has me locked in, at least when it hits DVD. Anyway, I enjoy House because of moments like this in which I not only love/hate the main character, but identify with him to the point that for a second I don’t know whether the look on my face is a grimace or a smile. I think many in academia (and diagnosticians on this character’s level are inevitably still academics, whether abiding in the ivory towers or not) fall prey to this; or at least, I have. This sense of being damaged and proud of it, jaded and happy about it. “Better because I’ve hit bottom.” Tyler Durden syndrome, or something. I wonder: is this a problem for psychologists or theologians?

Whence this kind of thing springs, too, is interesting; rage and retaliation are driven at base by honor, a sense of one’s own reputation and value in and of oneself over and above another person, or above their (negative) actions done to you. What makes Christ so radical is that He tells us to submit to His power and (only thereby) lay down that sense of selfish pride, the honor in oneself that makes us hold grudges and seek vengeance and nurse ill will and make the ones who did us wrong come groveling back to kiss our feet before they’re in our good graces once again. This is a huge part of the reason that to the Gentiles (Greeks especially), Jesus and His whole message were “foolishness,” that is to say, a laughingstock—because the thymos by which the Greeks governed themselves and their sense of self-seeking pride was the very foundation of personal dignity and warlike sensibilities. The Greeks were appalled to hear anyone known as “wise” to be telling them that they had to lay down their pride and vengeance voluntarily—since the only ones who did that were the ones who were too weak to fight in the first place.

“If men who are fighting hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows. But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.

What you don’t get from just that passage alone is that this is prescribed as a limit to vengeance, not a starting point. It was a pre-existing social practice in Israel and all across the world (cf. especially Homeric society in ancient Greece) that if someone hurt you, you hurt them back. If someone takes your eye intentionally and literally, aren’t you inclined to do more than just remove one of theirs? I humbly submit to you that, even today, when we are wounded—emotionally, physically, whatever—we are very tempted to take from the other person more than they took from us. Watch kids on the playground for an unabashed example: all things being equal, if Billy punches Tommy, Tommy will probably knock Billy to the ground, not just punch him in return. Same thing we struggle with today: if someone cheats you out of a few grand, are you tempted to settle out of court (or even in court!) about it “fairly,” or are you tempted to ruin that person professionally? If you are backstabbed, &c.

But taken as a limit, this seems almost as radical to their day and age as “turn the other cheek [when you’re insulted]” does to ours.

It occurred to me over the summer while I was taking a required low-level history course on Latin American civilization that what happened to the Aztecs is a picture of what is prophesied to happen to many—even some believers— in the “last days.”

The Aztecs built their capitol city, Tenotchitlan, on top of the previous civilization’s capitol city, out in the middle of a giant lake where now stands the region of Mexico City. Incidentally, the Aztecs also adopted the mythology of the older civilization as well, which included the ideas that, among other things, the following. They were living in the Fifth Sun, that is, the fifth epoch since the foundation of the world, and a time in which the world was said to end; to stave off the end of the world, they liberally sacrificed humans in the temple at Tenochtitlan.

Quetzalcoatl was the benevolent, bearded messiah-king who was to return with his men from across the eastern seas to save and rule his people, and he would be known by the sign of nothing less than the cross (+ or †)! When the handsomely bearded Cortes arrived in 1519 at Tenochtitlan with the Spanish army in tow, brandishing swords, shields, and breastplates marked with bright scarlet crosses and riding these foreign things the Aztecs had never seen (horses, as it turns out), they were allowed into the city gates with a timid Aztecan leader giving them the guided tour. It seems Moctezuma’s realization that Cortes was not the savior of the[ir] known world came only when he was captured by the gold-hungry Spanish.

Interesting what parallels can be drawn to us, who think of ourselves as so much better informed and more sophisticated….

And it’s struck me how stagnant I’ve been in my walk with Christ lately. Sharing one’s faith is a natural outworking of belief; but this isn’t just some mystical concept. There’s proof in any person who is genuinely selling you something because they believe in it, because it’s worked for them. I can tell you that 4 000+ GDUs daily of bromelain, an enzyme from pineapple, combined with a few drops of sublingual oregano oil and some echinacea/goldenseal combo have helped my sinus inflammation immensely; can I not also tell you the wonders Christ has accomplished in my life? I should be able to; and now begin once again.

It’s been a long time. Here’s to new beginnings and fresh starts that aren’t mere words.

(Not all from Spurgeon this time*!

* Most are. )

I have never learned anything from God except by the rod.

If the excuse for fainting be that the work is toilsome, that it is too much a drag upon you, why did you begin it? You ought to have known this at the first. You should have counted the cost. But let me add, the work was not toilsome when your heart was loving, neither would it now be so hard if your soul were right with God.

Satan always hates Christian fellowship; it is his policy to keep Christians apart.

Anything which can divide saints from one another he [Satan] delights in. He attaches far more importance to godly intercourse than we do. Since union is strength, he does his best to promote separation.

Foregoing quotations: Charles Haddon Spurgeon.

Pride is the last sin that dies in a child of God.—Rev. John Wagner, Christian Humility

It’s because it seems to me a sign of a lack of respect for the person as they are if someone dubs another with a nickname. It’s like the difference between “Jesus Christ per se” and “my Jesus,” to some extent—that’s not inherently disrespectful at all, just indicative of difffering worldviews, right? It doesn’t diminish the divinity or person of Christ to claim Him as one’s own. Same with nicknames, but in a way that might actually diminish that person.

For example. When I go to work at places, I often introduce myself as “Mike,” not Michael. Using my full first name gives a sense of intimate familiarity. There is to me a shaving off of part of myself to truncate my name; you shan’t know “Michael,” thinker, dreamer, writer, student, son … but as my coworker you will know the Mike that gets things done, the efficient and dynamic coder (or whatever) who will write programs for you and shoot the bull with you at lunch break. If we end up going for drinks after work sometime, call me Michael.

Same with the last name. There is one person on this earth who can call me “Phillips” without my taking offense, and that’s because she and I have been best friends for more than a decade. It’s used in the Army because it’s the closest thing you can come to a statistic; I remember wearing my father’s old, too-small black trench coat to my classes my freshman year of college because I was bedarkened of mind and affect, and didn’t want anyone to know me; “You shall know me as Phillips, not as your intimate colleague Michael.”

Understand, too, that I was given a ridiculous nickname in middle school, and some still call me by that; back then, it wasn’t funny, and it’s still not, but it does have enough time between the dubbing and the present to lend some joviality to the nickname.

On most forums or sites, you will know me as tek1024; tek as a truncation of my old ICQ moniker “Technophile,” lover of both technology and techno (music); and 1024 as the beautiful “round” number 2^10, representing my history in computer science and enjoyment of the different mindset of “hacking culture.” But even with this self-given nick, you don’t know me; you merely see a side of me, a splinter of myself that I present, like a résumé tweaked for a certain job description.

And there is a difference between nicks given to oneself and those given by others; but for me, they all signify a hiding of myself (if I coined it) or a “making less complicated than the whole” if given by another. For instance, my nickname from middle and high school describes that aspect of me that was the outgoing entertainer, the track-and-fielder, the high-jumper who jumped over the hoods of cars and beds of trucks for fun and amusement.

So it’s difficult for me when friends dub themselves differently, because I don’t want to come across as disrespectful. It’s only recently that I’ve been exposed to a nickname that empowers, that gives another meaning. A friend of mine has just such a nick she gave herself; it’s difficult for me to adopt it, not merely because of habit, but because something in me catches when tempted to say or type it: “No! I will respect you for who you are, all of you, by your full first name!” But it’s taken as more respectful if I do use it, in this case.

When it comes down to it, perhaps this giving of nicks to oneself comes from a desire to more accurately depict one’s full self, like the first name. As intimate as it may be for someone to call me by my full name, intimately, quietly, with the authority of our relationship, it is still only a designation, a serial number, until we reach Eternity.

Revelation 2:17 says of believers, “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes, to him I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, and a new name written on the stone which no one knows but he who receives it.”

In Hebrew, to name someone was to describe their essence; thus Jacob, for instance, was “the supplanter,” literally “One who grasps the heel,” and sure enough, not only was he the second-born grasping the heel of his brother at birth, but was by God’s own Providence the favored son on whom the blessing rested. In the same way, the Hebrews called God “Ha’Shem,” literally “The Name,” because to pronounce the very essence of God with unclean lips was very literally to commit blasphemy. Doesn’t it make you wonder what will be written on that white stone? When the Lord whispers in your ear, if you believe and persevere to the end, your full name, not a quasi-unique phonetic designation given by your biological parents, but your very essence intoned!—what will it say? It makes even our full names merely nicks we use for a while, shards of our whole selves.

For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may be recompensed for his deeds in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad. —2 Corinthians 5:10

It was to be a night for controlled revelry; my friend and his two roommates along with their sundry and respective ladies and I went to the local taproom-and-pizzeria, the kind of place with a bar full of local taps (sans liquor), billiards and darts, shuffleboard and various video games upstairs. The lower level served as a “family-friendly” eatery during the daylight hours, and a typically raucous bastion of refuge from dusk till the wee hours. We arrived on the cusp of that transition, ordering a couple of enormous custom-built pizzas and ice-cold pints of beer. I took the end seat near the aisle, across from my friend.

While waiting on our orders to come through, visions of Italian sausages dancing in our heads, we sipped our cold, dark pints and compared notes on the particular flavor profiles of the brews. Indulging briefly, sipwise per any new round, in the only means by which men can share beer—for the sake of gentlemanly education—we then quaffed them heartily between rousing discussions amongst us all about school, work, beer, relationships, nicknames, and the other fare whose romantic tint is never quite captured in the retelling (save for over a beer, with pizza, naturally).

As topics turned to familial relationships, our cheeks were flush with various microbrews, and laughter was the modus operandi in light of the conviviality of this particular occasion. All became bards, our hands players whose stage was the air before us in which to gesticulate; randomly one would interrupt the other with a more hilarious, more nuanced, more highly involved—and sometimes utterly distasteful—anecdote about themselves or a family member, or friends who were as family. At one point, the good brother, my friend sitting across the table, said something about his father’s propensity toward perfectionism and impossible expectations. Then he relayed something that struck me as particularly meaningful—particularly hurtful. It was only a momentary impression, a gut instinct, an intuition based on a flicker, as when the curiously informed of ancient visual arts discern with a squinting glance the counterfeit from the original. I couldn’t be sure then, amidst the pizza and cold, sweet beer; so it set me to thinking. I gazed beyond the wet black of the stout before me. My lips pursed, mind having turned from the process by which a beer can produce very little head and nevertheless not taste flat—to this at hand, to this pain to which my friend had become accustomed, the same sort of scar I bore; I wiped my brow with a foppish crimson sleeve….

“He’ll get his,” I announced decisively, brow slightly furrowed, silencing for a stunned moment the delightful chaos of jovial sentence fragments being slung across the thickly lacquered wooden slab of a table in response to my friend’s mention of extreme paternal idealism.

As is the case when anyone predisposed toward hilarity confronts absurdity, I became the fart among young children for having said as much, and in so serious a tone; they all gazed upon me with cocked eyebrows and incredulous half-smiles until bursting into laughter and asking where the hell I had come up with that in the midst of all this diversion. My friend laughed harder than them all, but because to him it wasn’t absurd at all.

You see, we’ll all have to stand before the judgment seat of Christ some day. Before “every tear” is wiped from our eyes, before we enter into the great beyond, we must pass the judgment in which our works and words are tested by fire. It always makes me think of the scene in Terminator 2 wherein Sarah Connor’s flesh is ripped off by a blast of nuclear radiation, but her bones cling to the fence until consumed by fire and ultimately torn and vaporized by the shock wave that has already torn down buildings and cars and people like vapor before her. That’s how we will be, in the day of judgment: we will stand before His glory, and “every careless word that people speak, they shall give an accounting for” (Matthew 12:36, Jesus Himself speaking), and as our works are ripped and burned along with our flesh, what will remain will be the simple acts of kindness, the lies, the wounds taken and received on a spiritual level. Remember a long time ago when your old friend from back in the day betrayed your confidences and cut you deep? No, you’ve long since incorporated that into your psyche, dealt with it to the best of your ability, moved on. Your hippocampus and neurons in the parahippocampal region have let those memories go a long time ago in favor of newer, more important things. But the memory of almighty God is not subject to neuroscientific inquiry. He will repay that old debt. Not only do I say so if he or she is a reprobate. The terrific glory of God will not be diminished by our being saved, make no mistake! The same God who drove the righteous prophet Isaiah to woe over his unclean lips unto death (6:5) is the one who lives today, still declaring, “Vengeance is mine; I shall repay” (Deuteronomy 32:35; Romans 12:19-21). That’s no empty promise, beloved.

And that also means that we, too, shall give an account. We won’t be damned for our offenses if true believers, that’s absolutely the case. But to suffer the gravity of having to account for a careless word to God! And who shall escape that? Shall you (1 John 1:8)? Isn’t a careless word the least of our offenses in the long run? “You don’t know what you’ve done to me! I —king hate you!”—wait, really? Wait a year, when the passions of the heart give way to the grace of betterment. “Ah, I’m sorry, I got carried away….” Fine. You’ve settled the score once through forgiveness; and Christ has forgiven you, too, if you’ve sought Him fervently (1 John 1:9). Yet it’s not as if that went unnoticed.

And so with my dear friend’s father, who demanded unreasonable things of him and hurt him with things asked. All those hurtful things that he wasn’t even aware of will come back to him on That Day. You see, we deaden our hearts and minds to the things that hurt others; betimes we even overlook those things that hurt the ones we love, not even willfully but because we are ignorant of the pain we have caused them. Yet this is the plight of the unjust ruler, too, who has deadened his ear to the pleas of the widow begging for justice; we are no better. So, we shall get ours just as much as our neighbor will get his. I must confess, I have grinned when I have thought of my enemies, the ones who’ve hurt the ones I love, when I’ve considered it; but Isaiah admonishes us against this foolishness (since we are always, too, the ones who hurt the ones whom others love!): “As often as it passes through, it will seize you; For morning after morning it will pass through, anytime during the day or night, And it will be sheer terror to understand what it means” (28:19). For this reason, we ought to pray for mercy. “You, why do you judge your brother? Or you again, why do you regard your brother with contempt? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God” (Romans 14:10).

I think of my own family in this; being no strangers to Wrath, are we exempt? Am I? Certainly not. Years ago, I had Matthew 12:36 taped to the back of my front door, so I’d see it every time I went out; but it became so heavy to me that I ultimately took it down, which was just as stupid as cursing in the first place. That verse coupled with ringings of the likes of John the Revelator’s vision (”I saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne, and books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life; and the dead were judged from the things which were written in the books, according to their deeds.”—20:12) ringing in my head were too much for me to stand.

A man I knew once was betrayed by a coworker whom he trusted, who gained just under today’s equivalent of $600,000 from a series of illicit transactions within his company that should have been the property of the man I knew. He was bitter about his loss for long, long after that, and the grudge destroyed his happiness for all that time. Was it worth it? I’m not that man; but I doubt so. But to put a price on happiness, on peace and joy, seems unwise; and since this was a genuine wrong, the right course of action would have been to pray for the poor bastard who got away with six hundred K and the weight of sin on his shoulders, it seems to me.

The only thing that can overcome the wrath of judgment is love. “We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this, love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment; because as He is, so also are we in this world” (1 John 4:16-17). I get so caught up in defending my own honor, as though I have any apart from Christ, that I forget this, and get angry.

But what good do we have that we haven’t been given?

So yes, it’s true that my friend’s father will get his; but it’s also equally true that I will get mine, for every word misspoken and every deed ill-done. To understand this brings terror; have I prayed for my friends, let alone enemies, today, so that we all shall persevere and have confidence in the day of judgment, as John admonishes? We can’t claim ignorance, can we? “You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, be on your guard so that you are not carried away by the error of unprincipled men and fall from your own steadfastness” (2 Peter 3:7).

Technorati Tags: judgment, Jesus, Christ, accountability, vengeance, rage, hatred, love, wrath, forgiveness