God’s Jealousy, Part 1

Having recently studied and spoken on God’s Jealousy, I thought I would take time to put down in written form some of what I shared with the good people who were willing to listen to me.

In James 4:4-5 we encounter some unusual language.

“You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. Or do you think Scripture says without reason that he jealously longs for the spirit he has caused to dwell in us?”

Specifically, the words adulterous and jealously seem strangely out of place. The context makes it clear that physical adultery is not what James is currently addressing, and the idea of God as jealous is not a common one in the New Testament. So how do we make sense of this? What is James trying to say?

Interestingly, the only other place in the NT where adultery is used in a clearly non-physical way is in Matthew 12:39, where Jesus says “A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.” Even more tellingly, the parallel passage in Luke excludes the word adulterous from the same phrase. Luke 11:29: ^“As the crowds increased, Jesus said, “This is a wicked generation. It asks for a sign, but none will be given it except the sign of Jonah.”

This underlines the Old Testament roots of this language and metaphor. Because why, you say? Well because Matthew was written to a Jewish audience that would immediately have connected the adultery language to those scathing passages in Jeremiah and Hosea with which they were familiar. Luke’s audience, however, was primarily Gentile, and would not have made that connection (thus, I’m assuming, he left it out to avoid the confusion).

So to the Old Testament we must go! We begin all the way back in Exodus 20, in the smoke and thunder of Mount Sinai. In delivering the second commandment, God explains the prohibition of images by saying “for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God.” Remember that these words, spoken by the Lord, are some of the very first revelations of himself to his people, who at this point did not have the written law, and were only now receiving the tablets of stone. God is explaining to them what kind of God he is, in contrast to the gods of Egypt or Canaan.

Follow the story to Exodus 32 and we find that the people, having waited 400 years for rescue in Egypt, couldn’t wait the full 40 days for Moses to finish up his business on the mountain. They violate the second commandment in creating and worshiping the golden calf, and then when Moses comes back down the mountain he is, as they say, not impressed, children. Kind of like when I stomp down the stairs and find the kids’ playroom looking like a tornado, a bomb, and a group of chimps had a rave, except very much more so.

So in Exodus 34:14 God says “Do not worship any other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.” He has gone a step further from using jealous as an adjective to describe himself and has made it a proper noun – God’s very Name. Jealous. In the next verse, he describes the pagan worship of the Canaanites by saying “they prostitute themselves to their gods and sacrifice for them.” This use of sexual language to describe religious practice begins a long theme winding through the whole of the Old Testament, even if at this point it isn’t clear what exactly is meant, but it is growing clear that there is a link between God’s jealousy, the covenant, and this language of sexual sin.

We find the same language used in Deuteronomy 31 to describe Israel’s future covenant unfaithfulness. “And the Lord said to Moses: ‘You are going to rest with your ancestors, and these people will soon prostitute themselves to the foreign gods of the land they are entering. They will forsake me and break the covenant I made with them.'” Here we see that this language of prostitution is clearly linked to breaking the covenant – an important clue as to the full meaning of this metaphor.

As with so many Biblical themes, what we find in seed form at the beginning of redemptive history grows and unfurls as that history progresses. At this point it would make sense to come away thinking what does this mean?; but further revelation, especially through the prophets Hosea and Jeremiah, will make it crystal clear.

And that’s what we’ll look at in Part 2.

Powerful Video about Pornography, Sex Trafficking, and the Gospel

This video accomplishes a not-so-easy task: To evaporate the notion that there is no inherent connection between the casual user of porn and the sex-trafficking industry. Most young men don’t want to see this strong tie, but the more we put this kind of truth out there in the cultural marketplace, the harder it will be to justify the kind of porn use which is so thoughtlessly expected, excused, and joked about today.

Some day I will write a post about feminism (as if one will settle the matter!), but suffice it to say here that on a number of issues we have reason to applaud their efforts and cheer them on; likewise I wonder if, despite our many and profound differences, they would nevertheless encourage this kind of project?

Check out this filmmaker’s website and consider making a donation.

Of Interrupted Date Nights and Spiritual Pathologies

We had it all planned out:

A stay-at-home date.

Toddler-Not-Sleeping-Kids-Asleep-Freedom

Put the kids to bed at 8pm sharp, dress up a little bit (as in something you could wear to an upscale mall but which would make you look only slightly overdressed at Wal-Mart), throw some product in the hair, get out the coffee and chocolates and curl up on the couch to watch a mutually favorite show; which, I don’t know about you, but that in itself is nearly a miracle – usually there is some measure of compromise from one party which will be leveraged later when the viewing options are discussed anew. In this case, we were watching the HBO Sports special series 24/7 NHL Road to the Winter Classic, the fourth and final episode. The reason we both love this show is that it happens to feature both our favorite teams: The Toronto Maple Leafs (hers) and the Detroit Red Wings (his).

Things were just lovely for the first while, and then we heard our 3-month old daughter crying continually for a few minutes. Finally Kaitlyn got up to go and get her, but as these things go, the girl quieted down at that very moment and my wife stood listening just outside the door and then we looked at each other and shrugged and she came back to sit down. About 37 seconds later our daughter was screaming again and Kaitlyn went to get her.

Sit. Rep.: Extraction successful, but child #2 still fully awake and witnessed the entire scene. Given the child’s current mental capacity for comprehension, logical inference, and imitation, we have only a few minutes before child #2 attempts a re-negotiation of bedtime terms.

We resumed watching the show and then about ten minutes later we heard the kids’ bedroom door open. I got up quickly to intercept child #2 before he could come out and decide for sure that he was going to join us, but as I thought about how ridiculous this date was already, I decided to throw in the towel and bring him out with us too, to watch the last few minutes of the show.

d6246b414629f0e32275455b582fd99b08bb1392a82217db8239de06ca7907c1

We all had a good laugh and then after a while we chucked those kids back into bed. That’s when we shut off the TV and really started talking. What a thing. It really is remarkable how long the substance of life and relationships can be kept beneath the surface by the tag-team of responsibilities and distractions. Run around for most of the day caring for two kids with runny noses and dirty diapers and empty stomachs and then when the few spare moments come you turn to a book or a computer or a TV show to relax and before you know it it’s 11:30pm and the whole thing is slated to start again in less time than it takes to be rested enough to face it all. It’s enough to leave you out of breath and begging for more punctuation.

So that’s why it was remarkable to have long uninterrupted conversation with my wife on the couch. We talked about life, our goals for this coming year, and our feelings about where we’re at as a couple and as a family. We talked about faith and our relationships with God, the striking difference between the palpable intimacy we felt after our conversions and now. It was good, very good.

And then Kaitlyn said that she had read something yesterday on facebook that had been oppressing her ever since, and as she said this, tears came to her eyes. It was a quote from that venerable 19^th century theologian, J.C. Ryle, that I had also read. It is basically a clarion call to fight against any spiritual apathy. It is an excellent quote from an excellent teacher and preacher of the Bible, but – and this is where I’ve been going with all of this – in my wife’s case it was being used to beat her down and condemn her. Here’s a woman who sacrificially loves and serves her children and husband from dawn til dusk and has a profound love for God and the Bible, but who is also seriously sleep-deprived, prone to processing things emotionally, has a tender conscience, and is still recovering from a severe burnout in ministry. All that to say, she is ripe for discouragement.

She shared with me that she had recently been enjoying a measure of peace, learning to rest in God’s grace, and that through this quote she felt she was being told that all that peace and grace she was enjoying was not rightfully hers because she wasn’t fighting enough. But as she told me this, she also realized that the voice was one of condemnation, not loving conviction. It was life-robbing accusation, not life-giving correction. And with that distinction clearly made, the source of it all was evident.

When I first became a believer, I devoured books, articles, and sermons like a Grizzly bear with a glandular problem devours salmon; or, apparently, like I devour White Cheddar Quaker Crispy Rice Cakes when I’m writing a blog post at midnight. I just could not get enough, and the more intense the better. My kindred spirit during this time was my cousin Joel, and we were always on the hunt for the next hammer-dropping, pride-shattering sermon to rock our worlds. After a while we came to see that there was an imbalance in our pursuit. He put a name to it and called it an addiction to conviction.

It was a pathology born out of a personal zeal for growth and a love for good teaching, especially reformed teaching which places a heavy emphasis on the holiness of God and conviction of sin (and rightly so, I might add, for these are the necessary preconditions for spiritual renewal). At that point in my life, one of the main ways that I felt assured of God’s working in me was when I felt convicted, guilty, and humbled. The problem was that I was exposing myself to so much conviction-inducing teaching that it was really impossible to even begin to process all of that truth, internalize it, and make the necessary course corrections in my heart and life. Make no mistake, that is hard work.

I can imagine that to many people this would seem like a strange problem to have, but from what I’ve seen it’s not as uncommon as we might think, especially among younger people.

There is something in the desire to have a teachable heart that can make us vulnerable to the evil one’s ministry of accusation and condemnation, especially if we have a lingering insecurity about God’s unconditional love for us.

Many a Christian has been brought low to a state of weakness and defeatedness that was neither born of the Spirit nor led to growth in grace because the whole thing wasn’t rooted in the gospel. If feeling convicted and guilty is a way to ingratiate ourselves to God, then there can be no fruit in it because in its essence it is works, it is meritorious, it is anti-gospel, and it calls for that searing insight from the apostle Paul: “if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!”

Let the seeds of conviction and zeal and sanctification be planted not in a dry bed of insecurity and doubt but in that fertile soil of a heart fully resting in the irrevocable forgiveness we have for all our sin and the unimpeachable righteousness which is counted as ours.

Thoughts on Typical Churches from Richard Lovelace, Part 3

Continuing from the last two posts…

“Their religious lives, however, do not satisfy their consciences at the deepest level, and so there is a powerful underlying insecurity in their lives. Consciously they defend themselves as dedicated Christians who are as good as anybody else, but underneath the conscious level there is a deep despair and self-rejection. Above the surface this often manifests itself in a compulsive floating hostility which focuses upon others in critical judgment. Thus a congregation of Christians who are insecure in their relationship to Christ can be a thorn bush of criticism, rejection, estrangement, and party spirit. Unsure in the depth of their hearts what God thinks of them, church members will fanatically affirm their own gifts and take fierce offense when anyone slights them, or else they will fuss endlessly with a self-centered inventory of their own inferiority in an inverted pride.”
Richard Lovelace, in Dynamics of Spiritual Life

Thoughts on Typical Churches from Richard Lovelace, Part 2

“Sometimes with great effort [church members] can be maneuvered into some active role in the church’s program, like a trained seal in a circus act, but their hearts are not fully in it. They may repeat the catchwords of the theology of grace, but many have little deep awareness that they and other Christians ‘accepted in the beloved.’ Since their understanding of justification is marginal or unreal – anchored not to Christ, but to some conversion experience in the past or to an imagined present state of goodness in their lives – they know little of the dynamic of justification. Their understanding of sin focuses upon behavioral externals which they can eliminate from their lives by a little will power and ignores the great submerged continents of pride, covetousness and hostility beneath the surface. Thus their pharisaism defends them both against full involvement in the church’s mission and against full subjection of their inner lives to the authority of Christ.”
Richard Lovelace, in Dynamics of Spiritual Life

Thoughts on Typical Churches from Richard Lovelace, Part 1

I’ll try and post a few paragraphs this week from Lovelace’s chapter “Renewal of the Local Congregation” in Dynamics of Spiritual Life. This is a major book for me, and I’ll be drawing from it a lot. I am planning on writing a thesis paper for my undergraduate theology degree on the fundamental principles that he puts forth in this book.

In this section he is outlining the goal of seeing congregations revitalized by God, but first sets out to paint a picture of the typical congregation. This was written around 1979, but it might as well have been written last year.

In most cases what [pastors] confront is a style of living very unlike the spiritually vibrant mission station described at the end of Acts 2. The “ultimate concern” of most church members is not the worship and service of Christ in evangelistic mission and social compassion, but rather survival and success in their secular vocation. The church is a spoke on the wheel of life connected to the secular hub. It is a departmental subconcern, not the organizing center of all other concerns. Church members who have been conditioned all their lives to devote themselves to building their own kingdom and whose flesh naturally gravitates in that direction anyway find it hard to invest much energy in the kingdom of God. They go to church once or twice a week and punch the clock, so to speak, fulfilling their ‘church obligation’ by sitting passively and listening critically or approvingly to the pastor teaching.
Richard Lovelace, in Dynamics of Spiritual Life

1984… and the Gospel

Ever since we moved into our new apartment here in Cambridge, we’ve been reading a lot more. I think it has to do with how comfortable and at-home we feel here compared to the place we were in for the summer. Knowing we were only there 3 months made it really hard to feel settled. And it was dark with small windows and cold floors – not exactly the kind of place that lends itself to quiet, comfy evenings on the couch with a book.

I just finished reading the political classic 1984 by George Orwell. If you’re not familiar with it, check out the wikipedia article, which aptly describes it as a “dystopian novel about the totalitarian regime of a socialist Party.” As far as politics go, I am a self-labeled cotton-headed ninny-muggins, so I don’t have much to say about Canadian politics or “how an offshore corporate cartel is bankrupting the US economy by design,” nor how a “worldwide regime controlled by an unelected corporate elite is implementing a planetary carbon tax system that will dominate all human activity and establish a system of neo-feudal slavery.”

Anyways, one thing that struck me was the part where the main character, Winston Smith, first has a sexual encounter with Julia. Any such relationship is strictly forbidden in that society. He asks her if she has done this sort of thing before, and she says that she has done it many times. Orwell writes, “His heart leapt. Scores of times she had done it: he wished it had been hundreds – thousands. Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope. Who knew, perhaps the Party was rotten under the surface, its cult of strenuousness and self-denial simply a sham concealing iniquity.” Winston then tells Julia, “I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don’t want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.”

An early edition of 1984 by Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell

Now why does he hate purity and goodness? Does he have a devil-like hatred of purity and goodness, where his soul is so distorted and evil that he just hates anything which is right and good? I don’t think so.

All through the book he deeply rejoices in all kinds of things which are truly good and right – the beauty of nature, the song of a bird, a good cup of coffee. No I think the reason he hates purity and goodness is because of the hypocritical veneer of purity and goodness that the “Party” had.

I couldn’t help but see the parallels between this and some Christian environments. When Christian ‘righteousness’ is represented, taught and demanded by a hypocritical leadership, those under that leadership grow sour to such ‘righteousness.’ Having been exposed to a diseased version of righteousness, they then become allergic to anything which smells of it.

Can we be surprised by statements like “I hate purity, I hate goodness!” when the only supposed purity and goodness they have seen has been the impure, bad version of it. Likewise, can we be surprised when scores of people are turned off of Christianity when some of the most prominent and well-known leaders of Christianity turn out to be living lives so crazily out of line with the most basic teachings of Christianity?

From the extreme examples like evangelical super-pastors in sex scandals and Catholic priests involved in systemic child sexual abuse to the more mundane hypocrisy of legalistic church-folk, it all contributes to this effect.

The world of 1984 is a world run by the legalistic elder-brother (of Jesus’ parable in Luke 15) where younger-brother tendencies are illegal and punished by death. The problem is that the younger brothers can see through the fake facade of the elder brothers.

Without the gospel, all the state-enforced morality in the world can never produce an ounce of true goodness.

Without the gospel, the elder brother is lost in his morality, religion, and self-righteousness; and the younger brother is lost in his immorality and rebellion.

The sad part is when the younger brothers reject Christianity because they only know the Christianity of the elder brothers – and who the heck wants that?

Once again, the gospel breaks through every human system and offers the only true hope for humanity.

My Testimony (in 3 minutes)

This is what I read before the church on July 25th when I was baptized.

Hi, my name is Phil Cotnoir, and I was born and grew up in a loving Christian family. As I grew older and continued attending church and youth group, I came to the conclusion that I was a Christian, but just not a very good one. This is because I never read my Bible or prayed by myself at home. It’s not that I hated God or the Bible, I just found video games and sports far more interesting. I see now that my desire to live a good Christian life was not the result of the Holy Spirit moving in my heart, but it was due to the fact that in my family and church social group, that was the expectation. On a purely social level, it was expected and rewarded to act like a Christian, and so I did. It was out of self-interest, not out of my love for God.

As I grew older and went to High School, I began to struggle with and eventually became addicted to pornography. I was truly a slave to this sin, and I continued to be in slavery to it until Jesus – the Son – set me free, and then I became free indeed. But I am getting ahead of myself. This part of my life was hidden. I was one person at church and at home, and quite another at school with my friends, and then quite another still alone in the darkness of my private thoughts and life. It was during this time that I was baptized the first time. I wanted to get baptized because, again, that is what people my age were expected to do, and my brother was getting baptized, so I did too.

Things started to turn around in the Spring of 2003. I was driving home from school, when after a moment of inattention I plowed my car into the back of an SUV, making it roll over three times on the highway. By God’s grace no one was hurt even though both vehicles were totaled. I started to really ask myself if I was sure I was saved. What if I had killed someone? What if I had died? Over the next few months God revealed to me that I was not a true Christian.

On the night of September 21, 2004, God chose to open my eyes. I realized for the first time the depth and weight of my sin, as well as the holiness of God. I knew these things before, but that night they became incredibly real to me. I remember being overwhelmed with how sinful, rebellious, and proud I was – and I knew that if I died in that moment, and stood before God in all of his blazing perfection, I would have nothing to say for myself. All my good works seemed like straw next to the mountain of my guilt – and even my good works had been done for my glory, not God’s. Yet I was a very good person in everyone’s eyes. So if you think your good works will appease God, I feel compelled to tell you that you are incredibly mistaken. Like me, you don’t realize the depth of your sin OR the intensity of God’s holiness.

But as I realized these things, I suddenly felt how desperately I needed a Savior. And that is when I really understood why Jesus had to die on the cross. Nothing short of death was needed to pay for my sins; and nothing short of Christ’s perfect life was needed to clothe me and make me able to stand before God.

Since that night God has radically renovated the inner parts of my life. The next day I remember thinking “So this is what it feels like to ‘walk in the light.’” By God’s grace alone, I have been brought from darkness to light, and from death to life.

For the past 5 years I haven’t been sure whether I should get baptized again or not. But after Pastor John made it abundantly clear at the last baptism that if you came to Christ after you were baptized, that you needed to be baptized again, I decided to go through with it. So that is why I am here. Oddly enough, my Dad also came to know Christ after being baptized, in fact he was already a deacon and treasurer when he was born again. He was baptized a second time as well. I guess it’s something of a family tradition now…

In conclusion, I just want to say: We have such a wonderful, powerful, precious and beautiful Lord and Savior in Jesus Christ. I implore you to put all your hope and trust and faith in Him today.

There is Nothing God Cannot Ask of Us

The moralist and legalist pays his taxes and demands his rights from God. There are certain things God cannot ask of him. The gospel Christian has come to understand he deserves nothing good, and so relinquishes any concept of rights before God. In the gospel, there is nothing God cannot ask of us.

This is why the legalist cannot handle too much suffering. It is essentially a breach of what he thinks is the deal or contract between him and God.

Any insightfulness in these words should be attributed solely to Tim Keller.

Thoughts on Hamilton Impact

This past week, our church was running Hamilton Impact – a one-week intensive Evangelism training program. Three churches in Hamilton partnered together to make it happen: West Highland Baptist Church, Hughson St. Baptist Church, and Lightway Church – which is a plant out of Hughson. These events started in Toronto, and are a partnership between a church and Operation Mobilization, which provides teaching on evangelism and various world religions. For example, this week we studied Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Roman Catholicism, and visited a mosque, a Sikh gurdwara, and a Hindu temple. In the evenings the participants go door-to-door in the neighbourhoods around the partner churches and go through a simple survey with people which often leads into spiritual conversations and an opportunity to clearly share the gospel.

I learned a lot this week. First, I learned that door to door evangelism, despite suffering from a major image problem, does work. I was able to clearly share the gospel with quite a number of people that I’ve never met, leave quality literature with them, and have truly meaningful interactions that I would never have had in the normal course of my daily life. We are still compiling statistics, but it was pretty clear that the more affluent and more Canadianized the people were, the less they were open to talking. But thankfully the neighbourhoods around Lightway and Hughson St. are full of an amazing diversity of peoples from literally all over the world. This kind of diversity can be easily found in Toronto, Vancouver, Hamilton, Montreal, and other major gateway cities in Canada. It seems to me that these people are for the most part not on the radar of conventional churches in those cities.

During the week we met people who had Christian neighbours and yet who did not actually know what a Christian Bible was, who Jesus is, or anything else at all about Christianity. And, even more amazingly, they were eager and curious to find out more about this Jesus.

I have read and listened to a lot of pastors and urban church planters in the USA and have actually never heard anyone mention reaching out to Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, or Buddhists. After this week, I’m blown away by that fact. I don’t know the demographics of American cities, but it’s quite possible that they don’t nearly have the immigrant population that we have in Canada. If that’s the case, then we Canadians need to make sure we don’t take all our cues from our American brothers, but that we seek the Lord and develop strategies that are appropriate and effective for our specific context. More and more, I am convinced that the Canadian context demands that churches in the cities be intentionally multi-cultural, and very discerning to avoid causing unnecessary cultural offense. Christians need to be educated about other cultures and other religions, and taught to extend hospitality and love to new Canadians. Instead, I often see fear-mongering and ignorant email chains about how the Muslims are taking over our government and schools. We need to do better than this. As one participant this week commented: ignorance breeds fear and intimidation, but knowledge brings empowerment.