Email Forwards...

When will email forwards stop? This one actually made me laugh though. Wow. Enjoy!

____________________________________________________

A father wanted to read a magazine but was being 'bothered' by his
little girl. She wanted to know what the United States looked like.
Finally, he tore a sheet out of his new magazine with the map of the
country on it. Tearing it into small pieces, he gave it to his
daughter and said, 'Go into the other room and see if you can put
this together. This will show you our whole country today'
..............

After a few minutes, the daughter returned and handed him the map - - correctly fitted and taped together. The father was surprised and asked how she had finished so quickly. 'Oh,' she said, ' on the other side of the paper is a
picture of Jesus. When

I got all of Jesus back where He belonged, then our country just came together.'

The God I Don't Understand

Christopher Wright has written a few books of note; most recently The Mission of God, and Old Testament Ethics for the People of God.

His newest work, The God I Don't Understand is an honest, personal wrestling with some of the tougher issues of the faith. He works through the issues of evil, the destruction of the Canaanites (which I've never seen written about at any length), the how, why, and what's of the cross, and the "cranks" that ruin the beauty of the new creation by speculating absurd theories and reading the book of Revelation how it was never meant to be read (i.e. dispensational premillenialism).

Wright was at the National Pastors Convention this past February and unfortunately they had him scheduled the last night of the conference. After Rob Bell, after Bill Hybels, after Will Willimon. Not a great spot to be when everyone is already tired from the rest of the week.

About 15 minutes into Wrights lecture (it wasn't really a sermon) an exodus of pastors began as they just didn't have the mental energy to put into it that was necessary. I felt horrible for Christopher Wright because it was good stuff, just difficult after a week of being mentally stimulated. His sparsely attended bible study early the next morning was one of the most beneficial times of the week as he talked about Job and the problem of evil for 45 minutes in a way that had never crossed my mind. In any case, I would recommend this one if you've got some time this fall. Here's a taste...

“God with his infinite perspective, and for reasons known only to himself, knows that we finite human beings cannot, indeed must not, “make sense” of evil. For the final truth is that evil does not make sense. “Sense” is part of our rationality that in itself is part of God’s good creation and God’s image in us. So evil can have no sense, since sense itself is a good thing.

Evil has no proper place within creation. It has no validity, no truth, no integrity. It does not intrinsically belong to creation as God originally made it nor will it belong to creation as God will ultimately redeem it. It cannot and must not be integrated into the universe as a rational, legitimated, justified part of reality. Evil is not there to be understood, but to be resisted and ultimately expelled. Evil was and remains an intruder, an alien presence that has made itself almost (but not finally) inextricable “at home”. Evil is beyond our understanding because it is not part of the ultimate reality that God in his perfect wisdom and utter truthfulness intends us to understand. So God has withheld its secrets from his own revelation and our research.”

Personally, I have come to accept this as a providentially good thing. Indeed, as I have wrestled with this thought about evil, it brings a certain degree of relief. And I think it carries the implication that whenever we are confronted with something utterly and dreadfully evil, appallingly wicked, or just plain tragic, we should resist the temptation that is wrapped up in the cry, “Where’s the sense in that?” It’s not that we get no answer. We get silence. And that silence is the answer to our question. There is no sense. And that is a good thing too.

Can I understand that?

No.

Do I want to understand that?

Probably not, if God has decided it is better that I don’t.

So I am willing to live with the understanding that the God I don’t understand has chosen not to explain the origin of evil, but rather wants to concentrate my attention on what he has done to defeat and destroy it.

Now this may seem a lame response to evil. Are we merely to gag our desperate questions, accept that it’s a mystery, and shut up? Surely we do far more than that?

Yes indeed.

We grieve.

We weep.

We lament.

We protest.

We scream in pain and anger.

We cry out, “How long must this kind of thing go on?”

And that brings us to our second major biblical response. For when we do such things, the Bible says to us, “That’s OK. Go right ahead. And here are some words that you may like to use when you feel that way.”