It's All About the Name

Pay attention sometime to all the times in the Bible when God says he will do something or not do something for "his name's sake" or "because of his great name."

Do you ever stop to wonder why God does what he does? What is his motivation? What is the primary motive behind everything?

It is his Name.

God's Name is his fame. It is his reputation. It is that by which he is known in the universe. You and I use language like this all the time. We may say of someone, "So-n-so is an honest man. He has a good name in this community." Of course we are talking about someone's reputation.

Well, God's primary focus is his own reputation--his own name. And if you think about it, God's name is the most important thing that there is.

Just as it is our primary duty (and love's great longing) to give all glory, praise, and honor to God . . . and it is, you know . . . so it is God's primary righteousness to give all glory, honor, and praise to himself. It would be sinful for him to do anything less. And by very definition God cannot sin.

This is a lot to chew on. A whole lot. And it's pretty chewy stuff. It's not milk, it's meat. But I want us to meditate on it because it is truth and it is the kind of truth that can mean a paradigm shift in our lives and in our thinking once we grasp it. Yeah, it's a game-changer. Why? Because, if we're honest, we're all naturally self-absorbed people and we tend to think everything is about us. It is so ingrained we tend not to even notice it.

But it's not about us, it's about his Name.

Consider again: for us, it is wrong to be self-absorbed. Why? Because we are not God and there are more important things than us in the world. Can that be said about God? No. So for God, it is the opposite. If anything were to be more important to God than his own glory it would be sinful on his part.

God will not act contrary to his name, nor will he act in a way to defame his name. Conversely, everything God does brings honor and glory to his name and was designed for that purpose.

I will give one example and let it go for now. But look for me to give many, many examples in the near future. I won't even take the time to break this passage down right now, but I promise to in the next day or so. Here it is:

Isaiah 48: (ESV)
[9] “For my name's sake I defer my anger,
for the sake of my praise I restrain it for you,
that I may not cut you off.
[10] Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver;
I have tried you in the furnace of affliction.
[11] For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it,
for how should my name be profaned?
My glory I will not give to another.

A Godward Focus

While contemplating what should be the focus and emphasis of this blog it occurred to me that the blog is supposed to reflect my life as it is. This is how I originally viewed it, as sort of a launching ground for whatever happens to be on my mind. What usually occupy my thoughts are ideology, theology, basketball, and my family (in no particular order). Now, what occupies my mind and what should be occupying my mind at any given moment are not necessarily the same thing. How this blog helps me is that it confronts me with what I need to be thinking on and writing about. It helps me to focus on what is important. While not all of life is church, per se, all of life should be Christ. And while not all of life is worship, all of life is worship. In other words, and I should blog on this at some point, our separation of the spiritual from the secular is an artificial distinction. For the Christian, all of life is spiritual, even the most mundane elements.

Which brings me to my point, I think. If all of life is about God, then God should be the focus of my life, and thus God should be the focus of this blog. That doesn't mean I won't be posting about politics or basketball or whatever else. What it means is that in any posts of that nature there will be an attempt made to think and write about them with a Godward focus. It also means that the main thrust of my theological writing will be how to help us think about God and view the world through a God-first mindset.

The purpose of the universe, after all, is to bring glory to God. It is all about Him.

Acts of the Apostles, the Early Church, Jews of the 1st Century, etc.

I correspond with my Sunday School teacher from time to time and the following post is gleaned from one of the emails I sent to him awhile back pertaining to our studies in the book of Acts. I hope it makes sense.

I wrote:
Anyway, I wanted to throw some things at you about Acts, the early Church, the Jews of the first century, the whole circumcision controversy, and why those Jews rejected their Messiah. That's way more of a bite than either one of us could chew in one sitting, but there are a couple of things that the average modern reader doesn't quite see or get that make the whole thing more understandable. Most of this you probably already know and some of it you may have already covered in class before I got there, but let's start anyway because it is interesting and important.

The religious Jews of Jesus's day were strong, strong, strong in their ethnic pride, probably stronger than anything we could compare them to in modern times. A lot of this had to do with their history between the Testaments.

Ever heard of a man named Antiochus Epiphanes? He was a Greek general, ruler, and descendant of Alexander the Great. He had conquered Palestine, sacked Jerusalem, appointed the high priest that he wanted, and then, in 167 BC, when he became angry and suspicious, he went on a murdering spree killing some 80,000 Jews--men, women and children--in a four-day span. This is recorded in the Maccabees. He then proceeded to desecrate the Holy of Holies by sacrificing a pig on the altar, following this up with the outlawing of such quintessentially Jewish things as sabbath-keeping and circumcision. Several Jewish mothers who had defied this law against circumcision were paraded through town with their infants at their breasts and then pushed off the city wall to their deaths. Many such atrocities were committed including the burning of sabbath-keepers--I could go on.

All of this served to solidify his victims in their zeal for those rites which made them uniquely the children of God. Thus, when we get to the New Testament, these Jews are brazenly proud of their nation, their law, their religion, their circumcision, their Jewishness. No one was going to take that away from them and they despised these foreign intruders and everything about them.

According to Alfred Edersheim, Jews of the first century were so proud of their ethnicity and their homeland that immediately upon return from a Gentile-occupied territory they would ceremoniously shake the dust off their feet, not wanting to pollute their own holy land with dirt from the Gentiles. (Sort of gives you an enlightened perspective of Jesus's command to his disciples to shake the dust off their feet when leaving the house of anyone who would not receive them in his name, does it not?)

What did they think of Gentiles? Gentiles were dogs. And "dog" was the worst pejorative you could call anyone. With that in mind take a fresh look at a passage like . . .

Mark 7:

[24] And from there he arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon. And he entered a house and did not want anyone to know, yet he could not be hidden. [25] But immediately a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit heard of him and came and fell down at his feet.

[26] Now the woman was a Gentile, a Syrophoenician by birth. And she begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. [27] And he said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.” [28] But she answered him, “Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs.” [29] And he said to her, “For this statement you may go your way; the demon has left your daughter.” [30] And she went home and found the child lying in bed and the demon gone. (ESV)

Tyre and Sidon were heavily populated with Gentiles and this woman was a Gentile. She begs for Jesus's help and he responds to her the way any Jewish rabbi of his day would have--he gives her the Jewish attitude toward Gentiles . . .

And he said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.”

The "children", of course, are the Jews and the "dogs" are the Gentiles.  This is a test.  She, as a Gentile, has approached a Jewish rabbi seeking a miracle.  Will she get it?  Will she pass the test?  How will she respond?

But she answered him, “Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs."

She responds in humility and faith.  She is undeserving and admits as much, yet she asks anyway. Her request is based, not on her own merit, but on the mercy and goodness of the Giver.

(There's a lesson in that, though none of it, of course, has anything to do with your Sunday School lesson--ok, maybe a little--but I get easily sidetracked.)

My point is that pride was the sin of the Jews of Jesus's day.  It blinded them to what God was doing at the time.  True, they expected their Messiah to come very soon. They may have understood Daniel's prophecy of 70 weeks, even. They knew the times and seasons, but they expected the Messiah to come, partly, because they believed they deserved him. He was going to come and throw off this Gentile rule and re-establish the throne of David in perpetuity. Now was the time.

O come, o come Emmanuel

And ransom captive Israel.

They had no idea of their spiritual destitution. Neither did they understand the nature and scope of the Messiah they were getting. Their hatred of Gentiles blinded them, even, to the numerous passages indicating the world-wide messianic kingdom that was coming. What they got was the opposite of what they wanted in almost every respect.

But there was one more thing about Jesus that sealed the deal for why no self-respecting Jew would ever follow him, something that should be obvious but doesn't even stand out to you and me. Something that was a complete deal-breaker for them. You might already know what it is, but I'll save it for the next email.

Alfred Edersheim--19th Century Jewish/Christian Scholar

One of the books I am reading right now is Sketches of Jewish Social Life by Alfred Edersheim. I cannot overstate how valuable Edersheim's scholarship can be to understanding the Bible, especially the New Testament. When we pick up the Bible, even the New Testament, we are reading a Jewish book, written by Jewish authors steeped in Jewish culture and history, men who followed first-century Jewish thought patterns. It is essential to understand this, and them, in order to more fully understand what they wrote. As I read this book, passage after passage of the New Testament is revealed in new light and old familiar passages become fresh and interesting again as I realize I never quite fully grasped them before. Perhaps I will give an example or two of this later.

Here is a bit about Alfred Edersheim copied and pasted from his Wikipedia page:

Edersheim was born in Vienna of Jewish parents of culture and wealth. English was spoken in their home, and he became fluent at an early age. He was educated at a local gymnasium and also in the Talmud and Torah at a Hebrew school, and in 1841 he entered the University of Vienna. His father suffered illness and financial reversals before Alfred could complete his university education, and he had to support himself.

Edersheim emigrated to Hungary and became a teacher of languages. He converted to Christianity in Pesth when he came under the influence of John Duncan, a Church of Scotland chaplain to workmen engaged in constructing a bridge over the Danube. Edersheim accompanied Duncan on his return to Scotland and studied theology at New College, Edinburgh and at the University of Berlin. In 1846 Alfred was married to Mary Broomfield. They had seven children. In the same year he was ordained to the ministry in the Free Church of Scotland. He was a missionary to the Jews at Iaşi, Romania for a year. On his return to Scotland, after preaching for a time in Aberdeen, Edersheim was appointed in 1849 to minister at the Free Church, Old Aberdeen. In 1861 health problems forced him to resign and the Church of St. Andrew was built for him at Torquay. In 1872 Edersheim's health again obliged him to retire, and for four years he lived quietly at Bournemouth. In 1875 he was ordained in the Church of England, and was Curate of the Abbey Church, Christchurch, Hants, for a year, and from 1876 to 1882 Vicar of Loders, Bridport, Dorset. He was appointed to the post of Warburtonian Lecturer at Lincoln's Inn 1880-84. In 1882 he resigned and relocated to Oxford. He was Select Preacher to the University 1884-85 and Grinfield Lecturer on the Septuagint 1886-88 and 1888-89. Edersheim died at Menton, France, on March 16, 1889.

His writing is not just educational, it is also devotional, as befits the Christian writing of his time-period. His most famous work was/is The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah. I have this one also, as well as his The Temple--Its Ministry and Services and Bible History--Old Testament. When I am finished with Sketches of Jewish Social Life I am going to pick up Life and Times.

Here is an interesting note from Sketches:

'A few further quotations bearing on the dignity of labour may be appropriate. The Talmud has a beautiful Haggadah, which tells how, when Adam heard this sentence of his Maker: "Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee," he burst into tears. "What!" he exclaimed; "Lord of the world, am I then to eat out of the same manger as the ass?" But when he heard these additional words: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread," his heart was comforted. For herein lies (according to the Rabbis) the dignity of labour, that man is not forced to, nor unconscious in, his work; but that while becoming the servant of the soil, he wins from it the precious fruits of golden harvest.'--Alfred Edersheim, Sketches of Jewish Social Life, Updated Edition, Hendricksen Publishers, p.176

Science Does Not Have All the Answers

Toward the end of the eighteenth century a certain philosophy started coming into vogue known as materialism. Materialism is the belief that the only thing that exists is matter, and that all things can be explained (including life, and consciousness) by the material the universe is made of and its interactions. It is a product (or its popularity at least) of the Age of Reason--though I would argue that it is the product of poor reasoning. As a philosophy, it undergirds most modern scientific thinking and secularist thought. In short, it is the atheist viewpoint.

Let me be clear that I am speaking in general terms and trying to keep things simple for a blog post. The concepts brought up in the first paragraph of this post alone could keep the curious reader occupied for years. I do not wish to over-generalize, I am sure there are exceptions (involving cognitive dissonance, in my opinion), but understand that modern scientific thought is founded on materialism as a philosophy and that materialism at its heart is the rejection of a Christian viewpoint, even a theistic viewpoint.

No, I did not say that all scientists are atheists and, no, I did not say that science is opposed to Christianity or vice versa. What I have pointed out, however, is why there has been so much tension between the scientific and Christian communities for the last 150 years or so. The scientific community as a whole embraced materialism around 150 years ago and that philosophy has been at its base ever since.

Pointing that out, however, is not the purpose of this post. The purpose of this post is to demonstrate that there are questions which science cannot answer, legitimate questions for which the scientific method is inadequate. These questions do not lend themselves to ordinary scientific means of testing and observation. They go beyond science in that sense. But, for all that, they are not illogical or unreasonable, in spite of what the atheist community would have us think.

In fact, it is the opposite. The idea that the only things that are real are things which can be tested and observed through the five senses is absurd on the face of it. It is wholly unreasonable to assert that no other dimension of reality exists beyond the observable simply because we have no means of observing it. In fact, it is arrogant.

Now, let me quote myself from a previous post:

We have a universe. That universe consists of matter and energy. It consists of space and it consists of time. It consists of life. What caused those?

Science cannot answer that, but that does not mean that there are not other means of coming to those answers. Nor should we dismiss any means of inquiry beyond the scientific as purely fanciful thinking . . . as many atheists do.

To me, this is what makes a guy like Richard Dawkins look the most ridiculous, for he is guilty of doing just that.

Who Made God? - The Cosmological Argument

Who Made God?

It is a question often asked by children but seldom asked by adults. It is a good question, nonetheless, for it presumes something which I would like to discuss in this post. What it presumes is known as causality or what you and I know intuitively as cause and effect.

How and why are questions we have been asking since we were old enough to speak. The very questions themselves demonstrate this intuitive knowledge of cause and effect within us. There is a reason for everything, and just as there is a reason for everything there is also a reason for everything to be.

We know this both intuitively and by our experience. Every effect must have a sufficient cause. Things do not happen for no reason. Effects do not spontaneously come into being. There is a cause. How did this milk get on the table? It was spilled when a glass was knocked over. How did the glass get knocked over? It was knocked over by Jimmy's elbow when he was reaching for the mashed potatoes. How did the milk get in the glass? It was poured there by mom. Where did she get it? She got it from the gallon jug which was in the refrigerator. How did the jug get into the refrigerator? Dad brought it home from the store and put it there . . . and so on ad infinitum.

How long could we play that game? How far back does our chain of cause and effect go? That is the question at hand and the answer to that question is a valid, effective, and reasonable argument for the existence of God.

For the universe to exist there must be a sufficient cause outside of that universe to account for its existence.

Either that or you must confess that there is an infinite chain of cause and effect, that we could play our little game for eternity and never come to a first cause. But would that be logical? Theists contend that it is not and here is why.

I pose the question to those who might contend that there is no first cause, that our chain of cause and effect goes infinitely into the past. What caused that chain of events? Something did. An infinite series with no beginning involves a contradiction. It goes against the assumption that allows for the existence of the chain in the first place, to wit for every effect there is a cause.

We have a universe. That universe consists of matter and energy. It consists of space and it consists of time. What caused those?

While science cannot answer that, philosophy says that something must have caused them or they could not be.

And that is where it stands. Either you believe that matter is eternal, that it has always been (for it cannot have spontaneously generated), or you believe that there is an extra-mundane cause that brought it into being. The same for energy, time, space, and life, for none of those things can be explained as having been spontaneously generated without a cause.

An infinite chain of cause and effect is a logical absurdity. If a chain of three or four events cannot exist without a sufficient cause then no chain of events can exist without a sufficient cause, even if it is a chain of a million or a billion or a trillion events. As Charles Hodge put it,

"Nothing multiplied by infinity is nothing still. If we do not find the cause of our existence in ourselves, nor our parents in themselves, nor their progenitors in themselves, going back ad infinitum is only adding nothing to nothing. What the mind demands is a sufficient cause, and no approach to it is made by going back indefinitely from one effect to another. We are forced, therefore, by the laws of our rational nature, to assume the existence of a self-sufficient cause, i.e., a Being endued with power adequate to produce this ever-changing phenomenal world. In all ages thinking men have been forced to this conclusion. . . . The theistical argument is, that if everything in the world be contingent, this eternal and necessary Being must be an extra-mundane First Cause."

Which brings us back to our original question. Who made God? And the answer to that question is that no one did, for he is the Uncaused First Cause. Without him nothing else in the universe makes sense. Without his existence, nothing else can exist. While everything in our universe is contingent, he is the Something standing outside that universe which is self-existent and contingent on nothing else.

A Prayer of St. Augustine

I read Augustine's Confessions a couple of years back.

I think we miss out if we only read modern writers. According to St. Paul, God has gifted his Church throughout the ages with apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers (Eph. 4:11). Thanks to the gift of writing, we can profit today from individuals whom God graced hundreds of years ago. These were gifts to the Church and there is wealth in what they left behind for us--spiritual wealth.

A book like Confessions is a gold mine. It has historical value, it gives insight into the thinking of the early church, it challenges us to step outside our neat little boxes and see what God has been doing elsewhere and at other times.

Two things stood out for me as I read Confessions. Those two things were humility and faith. If you think about it, both are the products of a closer relationship with God. A proud man cannot, dare not draw nigh to God. The closer one gets to God, the more about oneself is revealed. We cannot help but be humbled in the presence of the Thrice Holy One. And when we are humbled, we have no choice but to look to Him in faith. When we are far from him, in our pride we think we are sufficient. Drawing nigh to him, we see our insufficiency and are driven to depend upon Him. To whom else can we turn?

Holiness is not an action, it is a relationship. We are only holy in relation to how close we are to Him. He is our holiness.

Nothing in my hands I bring
Simply to the cross I cling
Naked come to thee for dress
Helpless cry to thee for grace
Foul, I to the fountain fly
Wash me Savior, or I die

I did not intend to preach a sermon with this post. I intended to point to something said by St. Augustine way back in the day, something I copied down to remind myself of from time to time. Here it is:

Let me know Thee, O Lord, who knowest me: let me know Thee, as I am known. Power of my soul, enter into it, and fit it for Thee, that Thou mayest have and hold it without spot or wrinkle. This is my hope, therefore do I speak; and in this hope do I rejoice, when I rejoice healthfully. Other things of this life are the less to be wept for, the more they are wept for; and the more to be wept for, the less men weep for them. For behold, Thou lovest the truth and he that doth it, cometh to the light. This would I do in my heart before Thee in confession: and in my writing, before many witnesses.--Confessions of St. Augustine, Book Ten, chapter 1.

(Scriptures referenced: 1 Cor. 13:12; Eph. 5:27; Ps. 116:10; Ps. 51:6; John 3:20)

Meditate on that and make it your prayer.