Be Ye Thankful
From the Hosts
Like us, the Israelites were prone to grumble, rather than being thankful to God in the midst of trials. Saying "thank you" might seem like a little thing, but Romans 1 shows us what's really at stake. Not only is thanklessness a sin for which we need Christ's forgiveness, thanklessness begets all sorts of other sins and confusions. After all, to be thankful is at root simply to acknowledge that God is God and He is good to us.
This Episode Features: Thankfulness; Emily Issues A Retraction; Shutting Up; All The Things; and Duct Tape Vs. Gaff Tape.
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson, here with Greg Uttinger.
We’ve been talking about the Israelites’ time in the wilderness, when they came right up to the Promised Land and said, “Oh, nope. That looks scary,” and God said, “Okay, into the wilderness with you for 40 years.” We talked last week about how God used that time to prepare the Israelites for the Promised Land.
Now, the trials are always for our good, but the attitude of us during the trials sometimes needs some work, and so it was with the Israelites. We’re told how they grumbled in the wilderness and, rather than being thankful to God, they questioned him and turned away from him repeatedly, and he showed his might to bring them back.
This thanklessness idea we see again in Romans 1 and it takes kind of a surprising turn in Romans 1. Greg, do you want to show us where we go?
Sure. This is a passage that anyone who’s studied total depravity or Christian apologetics or epistemology ends up in again and again. I know I’ve taught through it lots and lots. We all know the previous verse, “The just shall live by faith,” but then Paul goes into this –
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.
For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful…
…but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves: Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator.
There’s more and we can come back to it or not, I don’t know, but it’s interesting in this time of profound theological teaching that Paul lays out before us we come to, “and they weren’t thankful.”
Sometimes we think, sure, we ought to be thankful. We ought to thank God before every meal. We grumble a lot, but that’s kind of a side issue. We want to talk about basic epistemology, apologetics, and how we know God, and what the unbeliever knows of God and all that stuff. And yet Paul, right in the middle of this, plops down on this issue of thanklessness.
And thus to many it seems out of place, but Paul doesn’t think so. First of all, what he says is what I just read. “God’s wrath is revealed even from heaven” – from the heavens, from the skies – “against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness” – and the word for hold is ‘hold down or suppress.’ They have it, but they try to keep it out of sight, even to themselves. “Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God has shewed it unto them.”
God reveals himself in the world around them and in man himself. The heavens declare the glory of God, all the people see his righteousness, and many like texts, but also man being the very image of God inevitably reveals God to those around him and to himself.
So the argument, “Show me proof for God” – look into your heart. The argument is never and should never be over whether or not God exists. As far as God’s concerned, that’s a given. Everybody knows God exists. The problem is what you do with that. Do you embrace that? Are you thankful for that fact, or are you dissatisfied with God?
For the invisible things of him – some render that his invisible attributes, things that are true of God – from creation or since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things or by means of the things which he has made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.
His eternal power, the sovereign power of God and the fact that he is God and he is distinct from his creation, there is a God and we aren’t him, and he has sovereign power – that, at the very least, every man is confronted with. Every man in his own heart and his own conscience knows this, because if he didn’t then he wouldn’t be a sinner. You can’t sin against a God who, as far as you’re concerned, doesn’t exist.
Maybe you can work around “Well, ignorance of the fact of God is no excuse,” but the Bible never describes sin as simply breaking rules we didn’t know were there. Sin is consistently described as a hatred of God, rejection of God, rebellion against God, willful breaking of his commandments. And if man really didn’t know that God existed – “There’s a God? I never knew!” – that would change the game, but Paul says that’s not the way it is.
There is within man and in the world around us, just as it stands, sufficient evidence. We don’t have to look into microscopes. We don’t have to look through telescopes. We can just breathe, as you say, feel our heartbeat, see the world around us, and we’re face-to-face with God.
The unbeliever may ask, “Well, how is that? I don’t see that.” No, you do actually see that, and your every choice reflects that fact. Why is it that you’re getting angry about this God person anyway, if he really doesn’t exist? If someone were to come up and say, “Ra is angry with you” or “Santa Claus is angry with you,” you’d laugh it off. “No, there’s no such person.” But you start saying, “The God of the Bible is angry with you” and we start getting indignant. We get angry. We don’t want to hear that. That matters. Why does that matter? Because we know it’s true.
So when we start out as apologists trying to prove the existence of God, what we have in fact have already admitted is, “Well, maybe you don’t know. Maybe it’s not clear. Maybe the proof isn’t there. Maybe we have to add something on top of that. We have to have clever arguments and a chain of reasoning or some kind of historical or scientific evidence and then you’ll become personally accountable before God,” which is what it comes down to.
I don’t know that all apologists have actually thought through to that. They understand that people say they don’t believe in God and they try to present the evidence, but do they understand that when you do that, what you’re saying is these people really aren’t accountable, not in any full sense, because they really don’t know God’s there.
The Bible itself never assumes that. The fool may say in his heart “There is no God,” but that doesn’t mean he actually believes it or acts like it. Every time a man says, “I remember…” – really? What is this memory thing you speak of and how can you trust it?
“But I love her! It’s important to me.” Why? What do you care? What is this love thing?
Throughout the day we’re constantly calling upon things that assume the existence of a sovereign creator God, and then we turn around and say, “But he doesn’t really exist. Yes, all these things that I say I believe and that I do and that are important to me, yes, theoretically they all assume a sovereign God,” because they’ve never really thought through that. But, “No, I don’t believe in God at all. Never thought about it once. Absolutely foolish.” Mm-hmm.
So it behooves us to both answer the fool according to his folly, and answer the fool not according to his folly. Augustine is fantastic at this, of course, being Augustine. In City of God, he puts aside all of the philosophers essentially, except for Plato. He’s like, “Plato’s the best you’ve got. I’ll deal with him. The rest of you step aside.”
He uses Plato with great respect, not belittling Plato, as it were, but saying, “Look, this is what you know. Look further. This already tells you all you need to know, but let me tell you about Jesus.” But at the same time he’s forcing Plato to see the inconsistencies in his own worldview.
Paul says, “Such are without excuse,” but as you say, is there any point in conversation? You alluded to the two verses from Proverbs –
So we’re not to descend into the fool’s folly by pretending that it’s legitimate. “Wow, you’ve got a point there. I don’t know, this is hard but maybe we can reason our way…” No, don’t do that. But on the other hand, we don’t want to leave him thinking that we’ve got nothing to say.
What we have to say ultimately is the gospel. What we have is sort of the jujitsu move of, “Let me show you what you actually say, act on, believe, and do on a regular basis, and show you that you already believe in God. Now, having done that and having admitted your own sins, let’s show you the Savior.”
So we do engage in conversation, but it’s not one where we’re foolish enough to admit, “Well, you have a point. I can see how you would think that God doesn’t really exist, but let me supply an argument that will one-up God’s revelation of himself in creation and in scripture.”
It’s rather arrogant on our part to think that we can outdo God. We need to simply get out of the way, as it were, and let God’s general and special revelation do the work, but even that process of getting out of the way will require a great deal of wisdom, a great deal of prayer and thought, knowing what to say and what not to say, and how to present the obvious.
Self-evident would be a better word. The Declaration speaks of truths that are self-evident. It doesn’t mean obvious. It means that if you deny them your system crashes and burns. The evidence itself is within the statements. You can’t deny this and go on having any kind of system.
Christianity is self-evident. That is, if you deny it, you don’t have anything left. If you have no absolutes, then simple things like truth, knowledge, memory, love, and morality are gone, and you’re left with, “Well, I believe this because I want to believe this and I have absolutely no reason for believing it, but it’s what I’m going to believe and you can’t convince me otherwise.”
“You realize that you just signed off your love for your family, your sweetheart, patriotism, any convictions about what the past or future may hold, meaning, truth – any kind of absolute you just rejected.”
“Which includes anything you say from this point you’ve admitted is not in any sense absolutely true. Why are we having this conversation at this point? You’ve got nothing left. If you want to be a babbling voice that has nothing to say, God leaves you that. You can be a fool until Judgment Day, but that’s where this goes.”
In the passage it says – “Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful.” What’s the spiritual spring of all this? It’s not an intellectual mistake. It’s not that they took a wrong turn on a priori versus a posteriori or some such thing. It’s real simple. God presented himself in his world and said, “Here I am,” and they said, “Nah, not good enough for us. Your creation isn’t good enough. Your law stinks. The attributes you describe are unreasonable. What you ask from us is ridiculous.” Grumble grumble, grumble grumble, grumble grumble, grumble grumble.
In American Gospel, one of the speakers – and I don’t remember the young man’s name, but in some respects I appreciated him because he was by far the most consistent, and thus was no longer a Christian. He’d given up the faith. He said, “As I was thinking through what god I could get along with, I kept reinventing God and I came up with some great gods. The last one I came up with, he was excellent. I mean he was just like me. And then I realized that that doesn’t work, and I gave up the whole god thing.”
There’s a tragic realism there we need to weep for. I’d love to talk to this guy and point out to him what he’s doing, but that’s where he’s left. He’s left with, “Well, I invented God all I could and kept trying to invent a God I could get along with and that I could appreciate, and in the end the one I got was so like me it really didn’t help at all, so I just junked the whole thing.”
That’s what Paul begins to describe. Because they were thankless, that left their hearts, the center and core of their personality and being, dark. They claimed to be wise, but they in fact were fools, incapable of interpreting God’s creation, his revelation aright. They changed the glory of God into an image. They started making images, idols. It says, “They changed the image of God into an image made like to corruptible man, to birds, to four-footed beasts and creeping things.”
There’s a sort of devolution here. They start with images of God, and then go on to birds, which at least fly in heaven, then we go to four-footed beasts and eventually creeping things, snakes and dung beetles and things like this. It’s sort of what Van Til called devolution – that’s not the word he used – into the void where you keep sinking down further and further until there’s nothing left, because you have no absolutes.
You have nothing to hold onto. You have no claims to say, “This is better than that.” You keep reinventing God in search of something you can trust and love and be happy with, and you’re never satisfied and it just gets worse and worse and lower and lower and lower.
You can see that in the Greek deities and the atomizing of it. You’ve got the god that guards the door, but then you’ve also got the god of the lintel and the doorjamb and the floorboards. It’s like, “I thought we had a god to guard the door, but apparently he needed some help.”
Yeah – the god who helps you plant the seed and the one who brings it to spring up and the god who’s responsible for the budding and the flowering and the fruit and the harvesting. Yet, are all of these gods individual gods? Are these all faces of one spiritual yet impersonal divine force?
The Greeks themselves, and Romans, were not terribly clear about all this, and yet they went freely to temples and bowed themselves to images, which they knew were manmade. They were bowing down to things that they knew humans had made.
And, of course, the prophets are full of mockery of these things. Isaiah is the greatest. I ran across it in Hosea the other day in Bible study, this constant theme, “It’s the work of a workman. What do you think you’re doing?”
“The rest of that wood went into the fire to cook your hotdogs, and you’re worshiping this other piece of wood from the same log.” It doesn’t make sense.
No, it doesn’t make sense. It’s insane. It’s irrational in the truest sense of the word, and in a sense they know what they’re doing. Now, they can justify it. They can say, “No, you don’t understand. This itself is not the god. The god is behind it, in it, through it, under it, whatever. This is merely our point of contact.”
“Well, that’s a nice philosophy, but anybody who watches you will see you bowing down to a piece of wood. They don’t see you bowing down to some spiritual power someplace else.” And as you play this out in your lives, this is practically what it becomes until you get to the point where the ordinary believer identifies the two.
Do you remember the old TV series Dragnet? Jack Webb plays Sergeant Friday, a cop. I’m pretty sure it was Dragnet, although it might have been Adam-12, since Jack Webb had a hand in both. A church has its little baby Jesus stolen from the crib on the eve of Christmas, and it’s a big deal because they always celebrate with this little baby Jesus and make a big deal of him. They can’t imagine why anyone would steal him, if it’s an act of vandalism or what.
This runs throughout the show as a minor theme and as a plot thread, and at the very end it turns up in the little wagon of some small boy who says, “Well, I didn’t mean to hurt anything, but I promised the baby Jesus if he did X for me I would give him a ride in my new wagon, so I was just keeping my promise,” and everybody smiles, except it’s not that funny when we get to the point where people actually think that these things we’ve made with our hands are, for all practical purposes, God, or God is so thoroughly identified with them that we can treat this thing as if it were God.
Anybody who’s studied even a little bit of cultural anthropology or any good missionary stories will see that that’s what happens. It may be that the philosophers amongst them make the fine distinctions, but ordinary people don’t.
The Bible is not mistaken. It’s not ignorant. You were referring to the passage in Isaiah about how you cut down the log and from some of it you make an idol and some of it you make a fire to roast and you cook, as you say, your hotdog, and you don’t have the sense to see that this is the same log.
The Bible is not ignorant here. The Bible is not written by ignorant men who didn’t get it. They knew exactly what the mystics said, they just didn’t believe them. What they looked at was what you actually did, and what you actually did was bow down to a log, a stone, a stump.
So there’s this ongoing attempt in terms of this thanklessness. “I don’t like God. I am not thankful for him. I will now generate my own god out of my own heart. I will create god in my own image and I will fall down and worship my own creative ability.”
Of course, man is worshiping himself in the thing that he has made. Of course, what he finds out is the only answers he gets back from it are the ones he put into it, and that otherwise it does not move, it does not speak.
As Augustine points out, “Rome, you had these great gods and you think that everything went wrong because you deserted them? These were the gods that Aeneas had to rescue from fallen Troy because they couldn’t walk? Great gods you’ve got there.”
Read the poets. Read Homer. Read Virgil. They have no question about it. These were the gods that they were moving. Whatever the connection, it is close enough that to move the idol is to move the god. If the idol is destroyed, the god loses his presence and power, which is one of the few reasons for reading the classics, actually, so you can let the pagans talk by themselves and stop listening to people touched by Christian society trying to re-interpret it in the light of Christianity.
That reminds me. I wanted to retract my statement that Augustine said Virgil was trash. It was a gross over-simplification at best, and a misrepresentation at worst. I take it back.
When you said that I was caught off a little bit. You’ve been reading Augustine more than I have lately, so I didn’t know if I’d missed something. But by the time we get to Dante it’s all about Virgil and Aeneas and all of that. Augustine much preferred the Roman classics to the Greek classics. He spends a lot of time on that in his Confessions, but that’s a side issue.
Let’s come back again to this idea of being thankful. To show how deep the idea runs in Reformed theology, the Heidelberg Catechism is divided into three parts – 1) knowing how great my sin and misery are, 2) knowing how I’m redeemed from my sin and misery, and 3) knowing how to be thankful to God for such redemption.
The Christian life it sums up as simply thankfulness, so it’s not a minor strain. It’s not simply one fruit of the spirit among many others, something we can diminish or largely ignore in our imperfect spiritual growth. The Bible highlights it, and Reformed theology has always highlighted thankfulness as, in many ways, the heart of the Christian life, as worship.
I guess we need to think about what it means to say to God, “Thank you.” It means God is right and we’re wrong. It means that even though I didn’t enjoy this, God has a purpose in it for me that supersedes my understanding, my willingness to endure it, my definition of good and bad. I have to lay all that down.
To be thankful is to set aside my opinions, my attitudes, my preconceptions, my willfulness, and say to God, “I don’t completely get it, but thank you, because I know you’re right. I don’t really know how or why right now, because if I were God I would do this,” but let’s praise the Lord I’m not God, and God knows better and I can be thankful that he does.
You can think here of the book of Job. Job in the end, borrowing a line from Bug’s Life, says, “Shutting up,” because sometimes we have to do that in order to be thankful. We have to shut up and simply acknowledge God’s right and God has done us great good. We don’t understand the extent of that good, and we won’t this side of glory, but we can begin to work on it.
As we look at Israel in the wilderness, of course they had huge problems with that. They didn’t like the food. They didn’t like the laws. They didn’t like the leaders. They didn’t like the environment. You can go down the list of all the things they complained about. There was not a whole lot left they didn’t complain about, which is to say they were complaining about God attribute-by-attribute.
One of the amazing stories that comes out of the wilderness experience, and not because of the miracle but because of the people’s reaction to the miracle, is when Korah (Dathan and Abiram) rebel against God, and it ends with the earth opening its mouth and devouring them.
You’d think, “Okay, that kind of settled it.” In fact, Moses’ point was, “If these men died the death of all men, then God has not sent me. But if God does a new thing and the earth opens its mouth, then you better know,” and that’s what happens. And yet the next day we read that the people woke up and began to grumble and said to Moses and Aaron, “You’ve killed the people of the Lord.” What?
They’d grown up in Egyptian culture, which was drenched in magic, so they had simply concluded from their point of view that Moses was simply a better sorcerer than anyone they’d met, and he’d done some really cool stuff and a lot of it had been helpful, but this was too far because these were God’s people. What?
“Well, you know, there’s this promise that God made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, which means we get a free ticket to do what we want and be where we ought to be, and you’ve just done nothing but try to elevate yourself among us. You’ve made yourself altogether a prince and a judge over us. We never agreed to that part of it, and now you’re killing people! That’s just unacceptable! We’re not going along with this anymore.”
God responds, not with another – well, he threatens it, “Get out of the way. I’m going to kill them all” – but in the end his response is a parable of resurrection. “Take this stick that’s dead. Now watch it come to life. Watch it bear leaves and fruit in the hands of this man. That’s the guy I want to represent me.”
The people don’t wholly embrace it, but it does shut them up for a while. Their final response is, “If we perish, we all perish. Whoever comes anywhere near this holy Lord God perishes, so we perish with the perishing.”
“Well, apparently that is what you were told up front, once you projected the Promised Land,” but still there’s not the note of thankfulness. “Oh Lord, we could have been amongst those that the earth swallowed up. Thank you for not doing that. Thank you for bringing us here. Thank you for Moses. Thank you for the miracles you’ve done by it.” No, that’s not what the response is.
To read through Numbers is in some ways very discouraging, because you keep thinking, “Look, you had the evidence as to who this God is and to how he behaves and to what he requires of you. You’ve seen his mercies. On the way to Sinai you did a lot of stupid stuff, and you know what? God withheld his anger, he withheld his threats, he just got you to Sinai and gave you the priesthood, gave you the tabernacle, gave you the law. Then he started cracking down on things and he could have wiped you out so many times.”
There’s no thankfulness, no acknowledgement that, “Yeah, we’re wretched sinners and we really deserve death. Thank you, Lord, for saving us, for keeping us alive, sparing us, bearing with us.” Numbers is the non-thankfulness book, which is why we’re talking about it here.
You said early on that God puts us in the wilderness to prepare us for what comes after, and the wilderness can have two effects on us. We’ve seen that in the younger generation it served as sort of a boot camp and prepared them for hard things. They learned to say of this hard thing, “This is the hand of God. We will submit to it.”
The older generation did nothing but complain. The wilderness experience, the hard things, they bring out what’s in our hearts. They strip away the things of the earth – civilization, superficial virtue, pretensions to godliness – and they leave us complaining and griping and whimpering and all of that. And as the catechism would say, that’s not how you live the Christian life.
The catechism focuses upon, first of all, the 10 Commandments, not as a way of salvation but as a way of saying thank you to God. Then secondly on prayer, which it calls the chief part of thankfulness which God requires. It’s not enough simply to do the acts, but acts need to be interpreted.
Imagine just receiving an incredibly costly gift. What’s the first thing you should do? Saying thank you would be a good start. Then to put your life to poor use after receiving that gift – like somebody pays for med school for you or something – to go and then use that med school education to do nothing, not to use that education, or to kill lots of babies – you can imagine how the person who paid for med school would feel. “This is the thanks I get?”
Exactly. And the other part is you take the wonderful gift and you look the person in the eye, say nothing, and walk off, and then you go off and you build a wonderful career.
No. The giver is left thinking, “But did you appreciate it? Do you understand I’m the one who gave it to you?” We want to hear thank you, and the desire to hear thank you is rooted in our relationship with God. God wants to hear thank you. He wants us to interpret our actions by the act of thanksgiving, so that on a weekly basis at the very least, and preferably from day to day, we’re constantly coming to God and saying, “Thank you. Thank you for the good things. Thank you for the trials.”
“I thank God for the mountains. I thank him for the valleys. I thank him for the storms he’s brought me through.” That came out of the ‘70s, I guess, the realization that there’s all kinds of things that we should thank God for, and not all of them are pleasant. Not all of them feel good.
We can look at the Psalms. There’s thanksgiving in them, but when David was on the run, thanksgiving was not always right at the tip of his tongue. He had to pray through that and sing through that and get to the point where he could realize, “This is good. This is from the hand of my Heavenly Father,” and as Job says something like this, “I will come out shining like gold.”
God uses all of these things in our lives, and he does it without asking our permission, and that’s offensive to us. We need to humble ourselves and simply say, “You’re God. You know better.”
Another hymn from the ‘70s – “Let it rain, let it pour, let trouble keep knocking at my food.” Really? I’ve sung that song a lot of times and I stopped and asked myself, “Do I really mean that? Do I really want trouble knocking on my door?” I finally answered, “No, I don’t,” and yet we know from scripture that that’s one of the ways that God sanctifies us. He puts us in hard places where there is no earthly comfort, and the only comfort can be from him, or he’s the only source of provision. Then we need to be thankful.
It’s easy to be thankful when everything is going right, or at least to say the words of thankfulness. I suppose that’s a real question. Is it easy to be thankful when everything is going great? Or do we assume, “My right hand and my arm have gotten me all this stuff” and then throw God a thank you because that’s what you do. That’s still not really being thankful, not having a heart of gratitude to what God has done and who God is.
I think that’s the thing we’re spinning around right now. It’s not that they simply didn’t appreciate the specific acts that God had done for them, but they didn’t like God. They just were not thankful for God in his essence. They wanted a different god. The God that their fathers had told them about cramped their style. He was offensive. There was not enough elbow room in the universe with this sort of God. This sort of God could not exist. It was logically incompatible with their way of life and their way of thinking.
For this, Paul says, “And so since they reinvented a god – they looked at God and came up with a new god,” you think about it epistemologically and that’s huge. I can look at a non-God and say, “That’s God.” I can look at a dung beetle and say, “God.” I can look at a piece of wood and say, “God.”
God says, “Fine. You want to be that stupid? Let’s see what else you can do. Can you look at someone of the opposite sex? Can you as a man look at another man and say ‘woman’? Can you lose gender identity because you just don’t know anymore? Can you tell the difference between mercy and murder? Between a piece of tissue and a human being?”
We look at our culture around us, and how many things do we believe or more and more take for granted that two generations ago everyone would have laughed at? “Of course, you don’t do that. That’s stupid,” and yet step-by-step we have lost our ability to distinguish one basic fact of reality from another.
You can think here of 1984. Freedom is slavery. Peace is war. War is peace. There were the slogans under that regime, where the attempt is to simply redefine everything in favor of the new order, and people buy into it because they’ve lost all reference points. Having denied God, having rejected the God the Bible reveals, they’re left with ashes. They’re left with a handful of sand.
Paul, as he works through the rest of the chapter, talks about some of these things. Let me read a little –
For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:
And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly…
…and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.
And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenant breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.
I doubt that anybody ever started out in their life as a small child saying, “My goal is to be full of debate, deceit and malignity,” and his mom pats him on his head and say, “Great goals, junior. Go for it! I hope you succeed in all of them.”
These are not generally things we like, and yet Paul says that once man rejects God and starts pointing at cows and pigs and says, “That’s God,” God says, “Fine. If you can’t tell the difference between God and a creature, you’re not going to be able to tell the difference between a man and a woman. A woman will not be able to tell the difference between the proper use of her sexuality and abusive situations which she will accept for money,” and so on.
Then this whole list of all these other things follow. Broken epistemology leads to broken ethics. It leads to embracing all these things proudly. It says that the people realize these things are worthy of death, but they not only do them, but they have pleasure in them who do them. We pay to see them on the movie screen. We reject God and then we receive all these things and we applaud and clap and whistle.
Yet in most cases if you stop people and said, “Why are you paying to see this? Why are you applauding this? Why do you think these people are good?” if you get them away from their support group and from all their friends and they probably won’t have an answer.
“Obviously, because you don’t have intelligence to mean anything. Your value system won’t allow for it. There is no good or bad in your system. There is no meaning, so you can’t mean anything. You just go along with the ethical herd and commit the same monstrosities, same atrocities that everyone else does, because it starts from you wouldn’t say thank you to God. You wouldn’t humble yourself before your Creator, before his sovereign providence and simply accept him and say ‘Lord, your will be done.’”
I was listening to someone who was talking about mental health over the past year and some of the ways you can try to stay with it and stuff. One of the things was writing down things that you’re thankful for. It wasn’t like two or three, it was like 25 every day, and 12 of those should be about the things that you’re mad about in your life. I think there’s something to that.
There’s that old song from White Christmas, “Count Your Blessings,” and there have been Christian imitations of it, but that puts some teeth into it. Give thanks for the things that make you mad, that stir you up, that get your dander going.
Again, it’s easy to be thankful for the things that are smooth and easy and pleasant. Hey, if God gave me $2 million dollars I could spend all afternoon thanking God, no problem. If God gives me cancer, that would be a little more difficult. But again it’s about priorities. Do we really trust God to know what’s best for him, the universe, and us? What happens when we don’t think that God knows best? The ramifications are extreme.
Here’s a side thing. I was talking to a young man the other day about the sovereignty of God, a very polite young man who I really appreciate. He was having this traditional struggle between the freedom of man and the sovereignty of God. He was walking down the traditional path, clicking all the traditional buttons as he went.
He said, “I know God can do all things. Does that mean that he does do all things? Does he really control all things?” and he was very open to what scripture said, but it’s one of those things you think through as you’re going.
I explained to him, “What happens if there’s something here that God doesn’t control? How little is too little? At what point do you say, ‘Oh, that’s insignificant. God doesn’t need to control that.’”
Really? The cells in your body – does that matter? The five minutes by which you miss your flight and end up not going where you could have gone, and all the ramifications that come from that? That person you ran into who breathed in your face and you became very sick – where exactly do we have the omniscience and wisdom to say, “This is so little a thing that it doesn’t affect the future and doesn’t affect the universe”?
And if it does, unless we accept with great gladness God’s sovereignty over this – I’m glad that God controls all the asteroids and that he’s not planning on sending any smashing into the earth anytime soon. I’m glad that God controls diseases and that not a single one is going to get to me that God hasn’t planned to get to me.
That doesn’t mean I have the freedom to be stupid about it, but having said that, it’s not this big huge monster that I need to cower under because God’s got it. “Whatever evil He sends upon me in this vale of tears He will turn to my good; for He is able to do it, being Almighty God, and willing also, being a faithful Father.”
“Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord.” We have to keep saying that, and as we do it alters our thinking and our perceptions and our valuations. We in consequence become different people. We don’t have the same immediate snap judgements about things because we know this is God.
Sometimes you hear the phrase, “That was a God thing.” I’ve got news for you, everything is a God thing.
All the things are God things. All the things come from his fatherly hand, and for this we need to be thankful. When we fail, we do disservice to God and also injure ourselves. We set ourselves up for a spiritual fall because over against thankfulness is idolatry. Once you start not thanking God, you start rearranging in your mind who and what God is and can be.
“Well, since God just did, the pressing question now is who exactly your god might be.”
Our Pilgrim fathers declared a day of thanksgiving when they came to these shores, and there have been secularists who have attacked this and said, “We know so little. All we know is that they set apart a day for thanksgiving. How is that anything even remotely religious or worshipful or anything?”
Well, they weren’t thanking the nameless faceless universe, I can tell you that much.
Nor were they thanking the Native Americans, for that matter. That’s something that’s actually showed up in children’s books. It was an opportunity for them to thank the Indians. I’m sure they were polite about it, but that’s not it. The Calvinist tradition – and they were Calvinists, by the way – holds thankfulness very central to the faith.
To say that these men and women thanked God publicly means they exercised a religious function before the watching world and weren’t embarrassed by it. They thought that was a priority, in fact their chief priority, to say thank you to God. That is worship, even if our secular friends don’t always understand what in the world we’re doing.
I have one, and I don’t think I’ve recommended this before. It’s G.K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man.
Now, I don’t recommend it without some severe qualifications. Chesterton doesn’t claim to be an anthropologist or archeologist or anything. He takes for granted, “This is what you say caveman was like? Alright, let’s just assume you’re right. Let’s see what we know about cavemen. Let’s go look at the caves. What do we find? We find incredible beautiful art work, and some of it religious in nature. So what do we know about caveman? 1) He was a man. 2) He was religious. 3) He was an artist. There you go. That’s kind of what humanity is, so we’re not seeing any evolution here.” He goes on and talks in various directions about these kinds of things, approaching evolution from a very different sort of direction, I think, and also talking about the flow of history.
My qualification is when he gets to Rome, and Rome’s war with Carthage, he’s all in favor of Rome because, although Rome had bad gods, Carthage worshiped demons that demanded the murder of their children, and that is so much worse than what Rome had that we should all stand back and applaud Rome.
Well, G.K. Chesterton is a Roman Catholic and at least from Dante on, if not earlier, there has been this idea that God prepared secular Rome so that he could turn it over to papal Rome so it could be the birthplace of the church of Rome, yada yada yada, so Chesterton is affected by that.
Rome had its demons. You want to argue that Carthage’s demons were worse? You may be onto something but that doesn’t change the fact we’re still dealing with demons here. That’s certainly how Paul looked at it, so there’s that.
Chesterton, of course, is always witty, unafraid to maintain his Christianity before a hateful world, and generally worth our time. So with some qualifications, The Everlasting Man. What have you got?
I have McGyver. That’s been our TV show that we watch occasionally, and I’d never seen it. I watched the pilot of the reboot a couple years ago, just because I thought it was bizarre that there was a reboot. Richard Dean Anderson is the main character and he’s a special agent and he’s the guy who can make a bomb out of a paper clip. It’s cheesy in the best way. It’s just by and large pretty wholesome and fun and cute. It’s not as theological or deep or interesting as The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton, but you don’t always want something theological and deep.
Recommendation: The Everlasting ManNo, you don’t. Sometimes you just want something to relax your mind. And of course, he is the poster child for duct tape.
Oh yeah, that’s true. I noticed he was using gaff tape in one episode, though, and I was like, “That looks like…” I mean gaff tape is, in most use cases, superior to duct tape in my opinion.
We should tell people that Bryan is on vacation and should be back, Lord willing, soon. I always hate it when people disappear from programs and you wonder, “Hmmm.”
Oh yeah. Bryan did not get canceled. He did not get put on a bus and shipped out of town, although he took himself out of town.
Thank you so much for listening. We appreciate you tuning in. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thanks to our financial supporters. We appreciate you keeping the show rolling. If you’d like to join their number, by the way, you can visit our website: anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion. You can send us an email at [email protected]. See you next week.