hughbiquitous

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.

…I have learnt that a man is not in any difficulty in making a reply according to his faith which he ought to make to those who try to defame our Holy Scripture. When they are able, from reliable evidence, to prove some fact of physical science, we shall show that it is not contrary to our Scripture.

— Augustine, On the Literal Meaning of Genesis

It was intriguing to see this headline: US Scientists Close to Creating Artificial Life. From the article:

US scientists have taken a major step toward creating the first ever artificial life form by synthetically reproducing the DNA of a bacteria, according to a study published Thursday…

The bacteria, which causes certain sexually transmitted diseases, has one of the least complex DNA structures of any life form, composed of just 580 genes.

In contrast, the human genome has some 30,000.

While it’s an impressive technical feat, calling it “creating life in the lab” is quite a stretch. It reminds me of this old joke:

One day a group of scientists got together and decided that man had come a long way and no longer needed God. So they picked one scientist to go and tell Him that they were done with Him.

The scientist walked up to God and said, “God, we’ve decided that we no longer need you. We’re to the point that we can clone people and do many miraculous things, so why don’t you just go on and get lost.”

God listened very patiently and kindly to the man and after the scientist was done talking, God said, “Very well, how about this, let’s say we have a man making contest.” To which the scientist replied, “OK, great!”

But God added, “Now, we’re going to do this just like I did back in the old days with Adam.”

The scientist said, “Sure, no problem” and bent down and grabbed himself a handful of dirt.

God just looked at him and said, “No, no, no. You go get your own dirt!”

Al Mohler:

The rhetoric of the race — and the rhetoric of many evangelicals — is disturbing.  This race is important and necessarily so.  We are talking about the next President of the United States, after all.  But evangelicals have invested far too much hope in the political process.  No government can make people good, transform humanity, or eliminate sin.  The political sphere is important, but never ultimate.  Jesus Christ is Lord — and He will be Lord regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.

Randy Pausch has pancreatic cancer. This man, about ten years my senior at age 47, is on his way to death’s door. As I write this, he has perhaps months to live. Seemingly healthy, he has relocated his family from Pittsburgh, where he is a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, to his wife’s hometown of Norfolk, Virginia, so that she and his three children will be in a better situation when he inevitably passes.

Dr. Pausch has gained his moment of fame because of his “Last Lecture,” which is in wide circulation on the Internet (it’s about 90 minutes long; see below). As I thought about his remarkable composure—forbearing any comment on the attendant spiritual exigencies—I found myself pitying him, counting myself blessed to have such good health and to be so much better off.

Then I was reminded of Jonathan Edwards’ Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God:

It is no security to a natural man, that he is now in health, and that he does not see which way he should now immediately go out of the world by any accident, and that there is no visible danger in any respect in his circumstances. The manifold and continual experience of the world in all ages, shows this is no evidence, that a man is not on the very brink of eternity, and that the next step will not be into another world.

So while I am sobered by the grave situation Randy Pausch finds himself in, it gives me greater pause still to consider that I have no reason whatsoever to think I will outlive him.

Précis

Preferring anything more than God is evil; righteousness entails a preference for God above all else, including obedience. Thus an indicator of a saved person is the taste for joy in God; its absence is an indicator of deadness in sin. Therefore, fighting for joy is essential, because eternal life is on the line.

A chief difficulty is that joy cannot be willed; it is received freely as a gift, but we are responsible to possess it. We are instructed to actively do something passive. The remainder of the book will address this difficulty, but there are three parts to the answer: First, the fight for joy itself is a gift. Second, we put ourselves in the path of God’s blessing. Third, the fight for joy is a fight to see; a clear vision of the truth inevitably leads to a right response.

NB

Margin notes from chapter 3:

• The theme of irresistible grace runs throughout this chapter. Joy is the inevitable result of God’s grace when it is clearly seen and freely received. (cf. p. 44, “Seeing Christ is what leads to enjoying Christ;” see also quote on pp. 35-36 below.)
• I really like Piper’s phrase “idols of delight” (p. 36) to describe loving the gift more than the giver. God’s gifts must lead us to delight in him.
• I also like his phrase “alien joys” to describe the desires of our fallenness.
• Piper is giving yet another call to actively do something passive. This makes me think he’s right on. God is always calling us to that sort of thing (cf. Eph. 5:18, “Be filled with the Spirit,” etc.)
• Just as we cannot choose our beliefs (doxastic voluntarism), we cannot choose our joys.
• The fact that we’re fighting for joy shows that we have tasted joy in God. The fight for joy in God may be thought of as a fruit of the Spirit.

Quotes

• Always you renounce a lesser good for a greater; the opposite is what sin is… The struggle to submit… is not a struggle to submit but a struggle to accept and with passion. I mean, possibly, with joy. Picture me with my ground teeth stalking joy—fully armed too as it’s a highly dangerous quest. (p. 32, quoting Flannery O’Connor)
• Loving Jesus, not just “deciding” for him or “being committed to him” or affirming all the right doctrines about him, is the mark of a true child of God. (p. 34)
• The issue of salvation is loving or hating the light. Love darkness, or love light. That’s the crisis of the soul. But what is love for darkness? It’s preferring darkness, liking darkness, wanting darkness, running to darkness, being glad with darkness. But all of that is what Jesus demands for himself: “Prefer my light, like my fellowship, want my wisdom, run to my refuge, be glad in my grace. Above all, delight in me as a person.” Look around on all that the world can give; then say with the apostle Paul, “My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better” (Phil. 1:23). That is what it means to love Christ. And to have no love for him is to be accursed. (p. 35)
• This is what Satan desperately wants to hide from the eyes of our hearts—a spiritual sight of Christ’s glory in the gospel. Not just facts, but the beauty of the facts. (p. 35)
• The saving response to this spiritual apprehension of glory in the cross of Christ must include a pleasing sense of Christ’s beauty. It is inconceivable that faith would find Christ distasteful. It is inconceivable that the regenerate heart could look upon the glory of Christ in the gospel with indifferent or negative affections. (pp. 35-36)
• Saving faith involves no less than being glad to have Jesus himself for who he is. It could not be otherwise, if the aim of God is to glorify his Son. If Christ is followed only because his gifts are great and his threats are terrible, he is not glorified by his followers. A defective lord can offer great gifts and terrible threats. And a person may want the gifts, fear the threats, and follow a lord whom they despise or pity or find boring or embarrassing, in order to have the gifts and avoid the threats. If Christ is to be glorified in his people, their following must be rooted not mainly in his promised gifts or threatened punishments, but in his glorious Person. (p. 36)
• Eternal life is laid hold of only by a persevering fight for the joy of faith. (p. 37)
• There is a devil-may-care, cavalier, superficial attitude toward the ongoing, daily intensity of personal joy in Christ, because people do not believe their eternal life depends on it. (p. 37)
• The Christian life… is an earnest warfare from beginning to end, and the war is to defend and strengthen the fruit-bearing fields of joy in God. (p. 37)
• The person who will receive the crown of eternal life is the person who successfully endures trial—that is, the person who fights for joy in the pain of loss and gets the victory over the unbelief of anger and bitterness and discouragement. (p. 37)
• Worship services, Bible studies, prayer meetings, and fellowship gatherings in many churches do not have a spirit of earnestness and intensity and fervor and depth because people do not really believe that anything significant is at stake in the fight for joy—least of all their eternal life. The all-important priority seems to be cheerfulness, even jollity. (p. 38)
• Maintaining joy in God takes “work”; that is, it’s a fight against every impulse for alien joys and every obstacle in the way to seeing and savoring Christ. (p. 39)
• Joy happens in the heart spontaneously. You don’t get up in the morning feeling blue and then immediately experience joy simply because you decide to. If you are tired when you wake up, you can force yourself to throw your legs out of bed. But if you are gloomy and discouraged when you wake up, you cannot just start feeling happy. Joy is not in the power of the will the way physical motion is. (p. 40)
• How does the fact that joy is a free gift of God relate to our responsibility to have it? One of the reasons we experience joy in God as spontaneous is that it’s a gift. And one of the reasons we must fight for it is that we are responsible to have it. So the questions are virtually the same: How do we fight for something that is spontaneous? And, what can we do to obtain a totally free gift? (p. 40)
• Our fight for joy does not coerce God to give the gift of joy, but puts us in the path where he has ordained the blessing to come. I say it carefully, lest I sound as though joy can be demanded from the Almighty. It is a fruit of the Spirit that grows on the tree of faith (Gal. 5:22); it is not a wage God must pay for our work or for our fight. That God ordinarily gives joy when we walk in certain paths is no guarantee that he will do so according to our timetable. (p. 42)
• We should fight to walk in the paths where he has promised his blessings. But when and how they come is God’s to decide, not ours. If they delay, we trust the wisdom of our Father’s timing, and we wait. In this way joy remains a gift, while we work patiently in the field of obedience and fight against the weeds and the crows and the rodents. Here is where joy will come. Here is where Christ will reveal himself (John 14:21). But that revelation and that joy will come when and how Christ chooses. It will be a gift. (p. 43)
• The fight for joy is first and always a fight to see. (p. 43)
• The fight does not undermine the fact that joy is a gift and a spontaneous experience. The joy that comes from seeing beauty is spontaneous no matter how hard one fought to see. The fighting does not cause the joy. Seeing causes the joy. And it does so freely. There is no coercion. No one stands before a beautiful sunrise and says, “Now I worked hard to get up this early; you owe me happiness by your bright colors.” No. We stand there, and in humility we receive. And if the joy comes, it is a gift. (p. 44)
• The essence of the Christian life is learning to fight for joy in a way that does not replace grace… Our joy in [Jesus] will be the greater because we see him as the one who gives both the joy and the strength to fight for it. (p. 44)