You Are What You Love

Psalm 115:8 They that make them (Idols) shall be like unto them; Yea, every one that trusteth in them.

“God has made humans to reflect Him, but if they do not commit themselves to Him, they will not reflect Him but something else in creation. At the core of our beings we are imaging creatures. It is not possible to be neutral on this issue: We either reflect the Creator or something in creation…. All humans have been created to be reflecting beings, and they will reflect whatever they are ultimately committed to, whether the true God or some other object in the created order…. We resemble what we revere, either for ruin or restoration.”

G. K. Beale

We are imaging / reflecting creatures. This is why I say humans are chameleons, for they will reflect whatever culture that they are set against. When living in a pagan culture this explains why it is so important to not be conformed to the pagan culture but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. The problem with the Church today is that it is reflecting and mirroring our pagan culture. This is why Churches that refuse to address the Public Square, because their theologies do not allow them to speak to the public square, will soon enough die out. Those churches will die out because their members will incrementally conform to the Spirit of the age since those Churches are ultimately committed to making sure that their members live in a zeitgeist that reflects one form of idolatry or another.

The Relationship Between Fearing God, Walking In God’s Commands And Meaning

The name of God occurs in Ecclesiastes no fewer than 37 times and that in such a way that the naming of Him is at the same time the confession of Him as the True God, the one who is Exalted above the world, the Governor and the Ruler over all. And so while the Teacher in Ecclesiastes draws out the vanity of searching for meaning apart from God, he constantly returns to the idea that “Fearing God” is the beginning place where meaninglessness (vanity) might become meaning.

Ecclesiastes places the command “Fear Thou God” (5:6-7, 12:13) in the foremost rank as a fundamental moral duty. Fearing God is central to happiness of men (8:12-13). Man’s final destiny is based upon the necessity of man to fear God (7:18, 11:9, 12:14). Ecclesiastes contemplates the world as one that was Created by God as very good (3:11, 7:29) and as arranged and directed that men might fear God (3:14).

And this fear of God that is put forth so clearly finds its concrete meaning at the end of the book.

“Fear God and Keep His commandments.”

There is thus struck a natural relationship between a life that is supercharged with meaning, fearing God, and walking in the ways of God’s commandments. Distinctions may be drawn between these three realities but they can never be divorced. No one can say that they fear God and not walk in the way of His commandments. Similarly, no can say they have found meaning in life without fearing God. Just so, fearing God, and having meaning exhibits itself by walking in God’s commands.

Ancient Egypt & Communist Russia — A Unifying Thread

Yesterday I was doing some reading on the religions and philosophies of the Ancient world. I came across an explanation of the Egyptian Ma’at religious / philosophical systems.

“The concept of the State was a necessary corollary in the total cosmic ideal of ancient Egyptian culture and religion. And central to the idea of the state was the divinity of the King. ‘The State was not a man made alternative to other forms of political organization. It was god-given …. it continued to form part of the universal order. In the person of the Pharaoh a super human being had taken charge of the affairs of men….’ In consequence the service of Pharaoh was a religious, not a purely secular function, and sense of duty was strengthened by faith. The ancient Egyptian’s culture was a slave culture, one of absolute servitude to the power and authority of the King…. The fiat word of Pharaoh could brook no opposition. The life of the Egyptian was in the hand of his king as in the hand of his god…. It is not strange, then, that his conception of Ma’at (right order) should be viewed more in terms of what it is not, than of what it is; that he should be more concerned with what threatened to destroy it than what justifies its nature and existence. Ma’at has been established. That is axiomatic. The wise man will live so as to not upset the rule of the right order. He will bow in submission to Ma’at. He will submit unreservedly to his god-king….

Simply put, Ma’at was an order that could not be violated with impunity.

Michael Kelly
The Burden of God — pg. 34-36

This social order philosophy was known as Ma’at. The Ma’at system, as the quote above indicates was a slave system. In the pecking order in Ancient Egypt all were the slaves of someone above them in the pecking order and Pharaoh was the Slave-master of all. (Though one might argue that Pharaoh himself was slave to a religious / philosophical social order he knew was not true.) The Pyramid thus becomes the perfect symbol of Ma’at because in the Pyramid you have the pinpoint apex of the triangle representing Pharaoh as at the top of the religious / philosophical social order and everything under the apex of the Pyramid triangle serves and supports the Pharaoh apex.

As I was reading the above quoted description suddenly my reading on the Communist show trials of the 1930’s came to mind. Here were many of the Old Bolshevists who created the Soviet Ma’at system revealing their loyalty to the religious / philosophical order confessing their guilt even though they were clearly innocent f the charges preferred against them. All they had was the Ma’at State. That was their reality. They could no more deny the Communist State then they could deny themselves. If the State said they were guilty then they must be guilty.

And though the Bolsheviks insisted they were Atheists it is clear that they viewed the State and the Party as god walking on the earth. As such, if their god, as apotheosized in Stalin, said they were to be shot for false crimes committed against the party then they would go to their execution singing songs of praises.

Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938) was one such example of this. Even though Bukharin wrote a series of very emotional letters to Stalin protesting his innocence and professing his love for Stalin, in his final plea the Old Bolshevik who worked with Lenin to establish the Soviet Ma’at State could explain,

“For three months I refused to say anything. Then I began to testify. Why? Because while in prison I made a revaluation of my entire past. For when you ask yourself: ”If you must die, what are you dying for?” – an absolutely black vacuity suddenly rises before you with startling vividness. There was nothing to die for, if one wanted to die un-repented. And, on the contrary, everything positive that glistens in the Soviet Union acquires new dimensions in a man’s mind. This in the end disarmed me completely and led me to bend my knees before the Party and the country.”

This is nothing but Ma’at speak. All in the Party / State. Nothing outside the Party / State.

Stalin had become the new Pharaoh (God-King) and all below him would serve him as slave, even if that meant bowing to the Pharaoh’s desire for Bukharin to lie in order to support the god-king’s false accusation.

But shed no tears for Bukharin. The man sowed the wind and he merely reaped the whirlwind.

For he wounds, but he binds up; he shatters, but his hands heal.

They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.

“In this world of sin no Christian individual and no Christian organization can be positive and constructive till after it has been negative and destructive. To deny and ignore this fact is to deny or to ignore the fact of sin.”

Cornelius Van Til
Essay On Christian Education, p. 187

When I was a lad I contracted a serious infection. This infection required the scrubbing of my wounds until they bled followed by the administration of the proper ointment on the bleeding wounds. To this day the memory of those scrubbing sessions jolts me upright. And yet, without the cleansing work of the scrubbing, the ointment could not have done its work. The medicine that was intended to heal could not work until I was first wounded.

In many quarters of the West today the Church is deeply wounded. There are no solutions that do not start with being scrubbed of her infected wounds. And because of the necessity for her wounds to be scrubbed (the negative and destructive work that Van Til speaks of) she will not submit and so will not be healed.

“Come, let us return to the LORD; for he has torn us, that he may heal us; he has struck us down, and he will bind us up.” Hosea 6:2

Prayer

God of all sufficient grace, be so kind as to wound us that we might be healed. Cease not with thy severe mercies that lead us to rejoice in thy tender mercies. Deliver your church from being stiff necked and cause us to yield to your hammer blows of grace as you shape us on the anvil of thy rough kindness.

In Christ’s name,

Augustine On God’s Providence

“It is the LORD of hosts whom you should regard as holy. And He shall be your fear, And He shall be your dread. Isaiah 8:13

“And even if the demons have any power in these matters (events of history), they have only that power which the secret decree of the Almighty allots to them, in order that we may not, set too great store by earthly prosperity, seeing it is oftentimes vouchsafed even to wicked men like Marius; and that we may not, on the other hand, regard it as evil, since we see that many good and pious worshipers of the one true God are, in spite of the demons, pre-eminently successful; and, finally, that we may not suppose that these unclean spirits are either to be propitiated or feared for the sake of earthly blessings or calamities; for as wicked men on earth cannot do all they would, so neither can these demons, but only in so far as they are permitted by the decree of Him whose judgments are fully comprehensible, justly reprehensible by none.”

Augustine
The City Of God — pg. 66

In Seminary I was taught that the Devil was God’s devil on a leash. This is exactly what Augustine is articulating here. We have no need to fear that which either wicked men or wicked spirits can do to us, who are God’s people, for whatever comes to us needs come to us through the hands of our loving benevolent Father whose every action towards us is one of Fatherly compassion and tender mercy.

Second, note Augustine intimates that we would do well to be careful in judging our estate or the estate of others by circumstances. Providential ordering that looks to be good on the surface happens to wicked people and providential ordering that looks to be good on the surface happens to God’s elect. We can not look at a persons prosperous circumstances alone and adjudicate a person’s standing with God.

Third, Augustine reminds us that we should not be consumed with concern regarding demonic beings he obviously holds to exist. It is somewhat refreshing to read of Augustine’s conviction that Demons exist. The Church in the West today is so caught up in the Scientific nature of Modernity that we forget that their is a very real spiritual realm that doesn’t answer to the cold scientific calculations of Modernity.

Still, despite his conviction that Demons exist, Augustine reminds us that Demons are not to be propitiated (appeased) or feared. Men ought to only fear God. If men will fear God and move in terms of His Law-Word, resting in His favor, what need is there to be consumed by either evil men or evil spirits?

Fear of anything or any one in the created realm is an act of Worship and so a violation of the 1st commandment. When we fear anything or any one but God we are guilty of having a god before God that will be able to, because of our fear, command our allegiance and control our behavior. Such command and control is the essence of worship. Such fear of wicked men or demons is a sin that needs to be repented of. It is a sin I repent of constantly.

As God’s Holy elect we need daily to pray that God would grant us the grace to only fear Him. As frail and weak humans we are prone to allow our fears to push God out of our reckoning and so to not venture out in obedience to Him. Men that cannot overcome their fears are men that are compromised before they begin.

Prayer

Almighty Excellent and Sovereign God we pray that thou would make us a people who fear only you. Grant us grace to understand that there is a Spiritual realm that is very active but at the same time grant us grace to remember that thou art the absolute ruler and commander over this Spiritual realm. Teach us we pray thee to take delight in reality of thy Sovereign decrees that rules over the affairs of men. Remind us that thou art a God who is favorably disposed towards us at all times, for the sake of thy and our Redeemer — the Lord Christ. And being confident of your favor aid us to not fear any lesser being.

In Christ’s name

Amen