Christian Advantage? (3)
In
the battle against sinning we feel sure that the Christian has an
advantage over everyone else. Taking that to be true, how are we to
explain it?
It’s
commonplace to read that God gave the Torah as covenant law to Israel
and they weren’t able to keep it but that in the prophets God promised a
time when he would send the Spirit (via the Messiah) and that would
transform them so that they could/would
keep it. [Ezekiel 36:26-27 illustrates the point made.] We hear that
Moses was sent with law without grace and Jesus brought grace. The
difference, many writers have assured us, is the presence and absence of
the Spirit. Israel didn’t have it and the Christians do. [Click here for another view.]
If that were true then not only would Israel be incapable of keeping God’s covenant, the Christians would (not just could) keep it by the presence of the indwelling Spirit of Jesus Christ.
But for numerous reasons that view won’t work—won’t work at all.
The
Hebrew writer was speaking of pre-Christ Jews when he extolled their
lives of courage and devotion to God by faith (Hebrews 11). He didn’t
see the ancient people as unable to live gloriously before God and he said he didn’t have the time to list the names of those he could have listed who did
live gloriously before God. When it came to living out lives of faith,
the Jesus-believing Jews he was writing to were no better than their
ancient and worthy predecessors. In fact, the Jesus-believing Jews who
had the Holy Spirit (see Hebrews 2:1-4 and 6:4-5) were being called to
renew their faith and loyalty to God in light of the example of ancient
Jews who, many people tell us, didn’t have the Holy Spirit. How do we account for that?
It’s
true of course that the Hebrew writer pointed out Israel’s consistent
and persistent failures but we’re not to deny the reality of tens of
thousands down those years who were devout lovers of God and who
remained faithful to him. But more to the point, the Hebrew writer
doesn’t suggest that Israel as a nation was unable to live by God’s covenant Torah—they weren’t unable, they were unwilling.
It wasn’t that God gave them an “unkeepable” Torah and then condemned
and punished them for not keeping it. Their crime as a national unit was
that they refused to give God what they could and should have given
him—loving loyalty! Click here. We’re not to think the failure of Israel as a nation
meant that every individual Jew was a wicked apostate. The Lord God
aided the ancient Israelites by his Spirit and as a nation they could
have lived faithfully before him as a long line of glorious individuals
did, and they wouldn’t do it.
Nor
are we to think that the names listed in Hebrews 11 were some special
group, given a sort of “second blessing,” an extra “charge of divine
power” to enable them to be faithful—an extra charge that God didn’t
give to the rest of the nation. That won’t work!
If
the people he was writing to in Hebrews had that extra divine charge
they wouldn’t have been in the process of apostasy; they’d have been as
faithful as the ancient worthies the writer lists. If they didn’t have
an extra divine charge then he was using the divinely charged list in a
devious way. “Look at all these ancient worthies; they’re your examples;
they’re just like you and yet they remained faithful”—when all the
while they were not like his readers.
None of this makes sense.
Whatever
advantage Christians have in the area of moral capacity and
strengthening, it’s nothing like some “spiritual magic,” some “Holy
Spirit energizing”—an electrical charge for the “spiritual muscles”.
There is no divine wand-waving, no mystical infusion of direct
spiritual/moral power, no ceaseless miracle-working that makes the
Christian impervious to temptation.
And
whatever advantage they have, masses of them aren't convinced they have
it as they will tell you themselves. Whatever advantage they have makes
them no better than ancient pre-Jesus worthies. Whatever advantage they
have at the simple "moral" level, a host of them compare unfavorably
with many of the non-Christians they live among.
Write me and explain that to me.
and eyes like something from a Batman movie, it is no surprise that the editors of New Scientist
used the term “alien” in its description of the cuttlefish; the animals
do look bizarre—plain and simple. Make no mistake, however, these
creatures are anything but simple. In fact, just above the cuttlefish
was the cover title, “Alien Intelligence: Secret Code of an Eight-Legged Genius” (Brooks, 2008, emp. added). Michael Brooks, author of the feature article, declared that the cuttlefish is “the world’s most inventive mollusk” (2008, 198[2653]:31, emp. added) with a “sophisticated
system for talking to one another” (p. 28, emp. added). Scientists have
documented “around 40 different cuttlefish body patterns, many of which
are used to communicate with other cuttlefish” (p. 29). At other times,
cuttlefish send “tailor-made” signals to predators (p. 29, emp. added).
to
change to red, it sends signals from its brain to its “pigment” sacs
(called chromatophores) to change to red. Cuttlefish can hide from other
sea life by changing to the color of sand or seaweed. They can also
appear as a strobe lights, blinking “on an off” very quickly. So
extraordinary are these “masters of camouflage” (p. 28) that government
researchers are even “looking into the possibility of copying cuttlefish
camouflage for use in the military” (p. 31). Researchers are enamored
with “how cuttlefish achieve their quick and convincing camouflage” (p.
30). Nevertheless, “[i]t’s highly unlikely that anyone could achieve
that same level of camouflage” (p. 30). Scientists admittedly find it
difficult “mimicking the colour-matching abilities of the
cuttlefish...and its texture-matching ability, which utilizes the
muscles beneath it” (p. 30). In fact, “[n]o one knows
exactly” how cuttlefish match their backgrounds so effectively,
especially since “[e]xperiments have shown that cuttlefish don’t look at
their skin to check how well it matches the background” (p. 31, emp.
added). What’s more, if, as scientists believe, this animal is
colorblind, only seeing in shades of green (p. 31), how does it always
choose the color most helpful (like changing to the color of sand when
on the ocean floor)?
