One year ago today, August 22, 2008, I tentatively published my first blog post.  Blogging has proven to be a good (although time-consuming) discipline for me, helping me to think through some important issues.  I’ve also made some good friends along the way, and enjoyed a number of thought-provoking discussions.

Discussion seems to me to lie right at the heart of blogging.  It’s a format tailor made for a type of interaction that has tremendous potential to benefit those who participate.  “Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another” (Proverbs 27:17).  Many times your comments have contributed more to a subject than my original post.

With that in mind, I decided to compile a list of the posts here that generated the most discussion in the past year.  I arbitrarily decided to draw a line at posts with 15 or more comments.  (I made one exception, excluding a post with 16 comments.)

Blogging is a strange thing.  I don’t consider very many of these my best or most well-written posts; yet, for one reason or another, they generated the most discussion.  Go figure.

Here’s the list, in chronological order from the oldest to the most recent, along with a brief note about each post.   The total number of comments and trackbacks on the post is in parentheses beside the link.

I hope you can take the time to read the comments left by others.  They really are what makes re-reading these posts worthwhile.  Feel free to add your own comments while you’re there, no matter how old the original post.

• Made for another world (15) I had only been blogging for a few days when this post attracted the attention of a very gracious, intelligent, and articulate atheist.  An interesting dialogue ensued.

• Ray Boltz announces he’s gay (16) I typed up this post within minutes of reading about Ray Boltz’s announcement.  Looking back at the post, I see that I interacted very little with commenters.  I regret that.

• Memorizing Scripture is hard on an old man (16) Ever since his expository series on the book of Isaiah, our pastor has urged the members of our church to memorize a specific passage of Scripture from each book he preaches on.  My memorization skills have eroded with time.

• Bruce Ware on the Atonement (29) A few thoughts on the extent of the atonement generated a lot of comments.

• Forgiveness and Corrie Ten Boom (31) To this day, this post is the most visited and most commented post on my blog.  It was part of a series on the subject of forgiveness.  See this page for the other posts.

• Is it necessary to believe in the resurrection of Jesus to be saved? (24) As a result of interacting with a friend of mine on his blog, I attempted in this post to elaborate on the answer I gave to a question he had raised.  Unlike most of the other posts on this list, I consider this to be one of the better ones, and one that prompted some important discussion.

• Giving “hot chocolate” a whole new meaning (27) This post and the comments were totally frivolous, but a lot of fun!

• Adoption and Infertility: An interview with my pastor’s wife (17) Over the last few years, my pastor and his wife have had their share of both joy and pain dealing with infertility and adoption.  My pastor’s wife talked about their experiences in a panel interview for an online magazine.

• Bertrand Russell’s darkness (19) This short post posed a simple question.  Three different atheists commented on this one, provoking quite a bit of discussion.

• Don’t tell the Bible what it can’t say (21) One of two posts on the subject of embracing biblical paradox.

• Recovering from a 5200 mile road trip (15) We took a rather spur-of-the-moment 5200 mile road trip this summer.  I hope to follow up on this post (eventually) with some pictures and details of the trip.

• To Every Human Being: “God Loves You” (26) Take the quiz!

To those of you who have befriended me and encouraged me to continue blogging, my heartfelt thanks.  Your friendship and your comments are always deeply appreciated.  To the rest of you, thanks for visiting.  I hope you too become a regular!

Paradoxes can be a great tool for parenting.

Last weekend, I had a lot of yard projects to get done, so I told my kids (ages five and eight) that we would be spending the day together working. They looked excited, and started holding out their hands at me. Somehow, without trying to, I’ve given them the impression that this type of work should always be compensated. Or maybe they’ve given themselves that impression, I’m not sure.

Either way, I found myself staring down at two very expectant youngsters. I didn’t want to pay them, so I proposed decreed the following:

1. Everyone who works will get paid (including Daddy).

2. The payment scheme will be as follows: I will pay my daughter $1.00 for her work. She will pay her little brother $1.00 for his work. He will pay me $1.00 for my work.

3. If any of us doesn’t work, that person will still have to pay, but won’t get paid.

We were left with the perfect paradox: everyone gets paid, but no one gains anything. And no one loses anything, either. And we all have a motivation to work. Most importantly, Daddy doesn’t lose his shirt on the deal.

I even promised to pay them upfront. Each child was excited to receive the advance, but looked dejected about having to give an advance to someone else. “Cheer up,” I said, “You’ve just been paid upfront for work you haven’t done yet.”

One child looked up at me with a mixture of awe and indignation and said, “But we didn’t get anything.”

“That’s the way it works,” I said. “Everyone who works gets paid. And if you don’t work, you’ll have to give back the advance.” (Some people say I’m an unfair Daddy – but remember, I provide all their food, clothing and shelter at no cost to them).

With the financial issue out of the way, the children worked vigorously and joyously. In the end, I told everyone they did such a good job, their pay was going to be raised to $100.00. They looked at me and said, “No thanks.” Ah, mission accomplished.

All of this got me to thinking . . . could this paradox of payment without gain have anything to do with the extent of the atonement, or the futility of our own works, apart from Christ? Or some other theological issue?

Doubtless, some theological arguments are a zero-sum game. But as my kids are learning, godliness with contentment is great gain (I Timothy 6:6).

-Derek

…a few more thoughts on embracing biblical paradox

Unless God has clearly told us what he will or will not do, it seems a little presumptuous (if not downright laughable) for flawed, finite beings like us to think we somehow intuitively know what the all-wise, all-powerful, transcendent God and Creator of the universe would or wouldn’t do.  In reality, our intuitions about God are marred by sin and limited by human nature, and therefore often unreliable.

A while back I came across a helpful comment by someone named India:

It seems to me that one of the surest ways to fall into theological error is to make an argument about what God would or would not do based on our own fallible conceptions of what a good God ought to do. After all, this is the same reasoning that leads atheists to reject God (because a good God wouldn’t permit evil) and universalists and annihilationists to reject the notion of hell (because a good God wouldn’t punish people eternally).

In a similar way, we should be cautious about making bold assertions that the Bible couldn’t possibly teach a certain doctrine, simply because we can’t imagine that it would.  John Piper said something that arrested me the first time I read my favorite book of his, The Pleasures of God:

My aim is to let Scripture stand–to let it teach what it will and not to tell it what it cannot say.

Wow.  How many times have I heard someone (in so many words) tell the Bible what it cannot say?  That sentence alone is worth the price of the book (and it’s nowhere near the best thing he says in it).  Piper continues:

For example, the statement, “God cannot choose individuals unconditionally and yet have compassion on all men,” is based on a certain kind of philosphical assumption, not on Scripture.  Scripture leads us precisely to this paradoxical position.  I am willing to let the paradox stand even if I can’t explain it.

Anyone, regardless of theological persuasion, can make this mistake.  Calvinists can make it.  Arminians can make it.  Those with Orthodox, Roman Catholic, or various Protestant backgrounds make it.  I can make it.  You can make it.

The bottom line is, we’re not as smart as we think we are.  Are we content to let the paradoxes of Scripture stand, even if we can’t explain them?

Speaking of Charles Spurgeon…

…he’s one of those guys who continues to speak long after his death.  Many Christian leaders (and laymen) readily acknowledge their indebtedness to Spurgeon.  Take Randy Alcorn, for instance.

If you don’t already know who Alcorn is, I’d like to introduce him to you.  In fact, when you finish with this post, you might want to check out C.J. Mahaney’s recent four-part interview with Alcorn:  Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.  Before you run off, though, I’d like to ask you to spend a couple of minutes with me here looking at one particular aspect of Alcorn’s theology that has a distinct Spurgeon-esqe flavor.

In a brief but excellent article on his website, Alcorn has compiled some of Spurgeon’s thoughts on our need as believers to embrace biblical paradox.  The article’s a gold mine of Spurgeon quotes on the subject.  Here’s an example:

Men who are morbidly anxious to possess a self-consistent creed, a creed which will put together and form a square like a Chinese puzzle, are very apt to narrow their souls. Those who will only believe what they can reconcile will necessarily disbelieve much of divine revelation. Those who receive by faith anything which they find in the Bible will receive two things, twenty things, ay, or twenty thousand things, though they cannot construct a theory which harmonizes them all. (“Faith,” Sword and Trowel, 1872)

That’s a good warning.  If you will only believe what you can reconcile, you have no choice but to disbelieve much of Scripture.  If you want everything neatly systematized, you’re likely to narrow your own soul.  I think the opposite is also true.  Believing everything the Bible says, even though we can’t reconcile it all, will enlarge our souls.

On a side note, it seems that Spurgeon doesn’t mean that there are some things that you or I may not be able to reconcile, but someone else may.  That’s certainly a possibility, but it doesn’t seem to be Spurgeon’s point.  He says, for instance, on the subject of human responsibility and divine sovereignty:

These two truths, I do not believe, can ever be welded into one upon any human anvil.

There are some things in Scripture, according to Spurgeon, that no one can reconcile.  Alcorn comes to the conclusion that…

…Our desire for logical consistency, as we understand it, can become our God. Then we, not Scripture and not God, become our own ultimate authority. We end up ignoring, rejecting, or twisting Scripture that doesn’t fit our chosen theology. On the contrary, our theology should be a reflection of Scripture itself, and wherever Scripture teaches apparently contradictory ideas, our theology should embrace those same ideas, rather than resort to a consistency which rejects part of God’s revealed Word.

You can read the whole article here; I highly recommend it.  (Derek, I think Randy Alcorn deserves one of your trademark THEOparadox t-shirts.)

In closing, perhaps some caution is in order.  We have to walk a fine line.  We should never abandon logic and reason.  We should always think hard about the paradoxes found in Scripture, and we should never stop asking hard questions about them.  At the same time, we need to heed the warnings of Spurgeon and Alcorn and others, and beware of making a god out of logical consistency.  Comprehendible gods are nothing more than intellectually sophisticated idols.

…to be continued

The most pointed words in the Bible on the subject of forgiving others come directly from the lips of Jesus.  They’re so pointed, in fact, that we’re tempted, for various reasons, to dull their razor sharp barbs.

I want to look briefly at two examples from Jesus’ teaching on the subject of forgiveness.  These are genuinely hard sayings—not in the sense that they’re hard to understand (they’re actually easy to understand), but in the sense that they’re hard to accept at face value, and hard to reconcile with other truths we hold dear.

The Unforgiving Servant

In Matthew 18, Jesus told a parable that’s familiar to most of us.  A servant owed his king a tremendous sum of money, well beyond his ability to pay, so he and his family and all that he had were to be sold in lieu of payment.  But he begged for mercy, and the king had pity on him and forgave his debt.

That servant promptly went out and demanded from a fellow servant repayment of much smaller debt that he was owed.  The fellow servant couldn’t pay and pleaded for mercy but was denied it and thrown into prison.

The king found out about it and was enraged.  The first servant was thrown into prison, where he was to remain until his debt was fully paid.  In essence the king reversed his original decision to forgive the debt.  And not only was his decision rescinded, but Jesus concluded the parable with these words:

So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.  (Matt. 18:35)

Dire consequences await us if we will not forgive our brothers from our hearts.

The Lord’s Prayer

If you grew up in church you probably know the Lord’s Prayer by heart.  You know the phrase, “and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”  But what I find even more sobering is what Jesus said immediately after the prayer, to underscore the absolute necessity of forgiving others.

For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.  (Matt 6:14-15)

If you don’t forgive, you won’t be forgiven.

Don’t you find yourself already wanting to soften the force of those words? Why do we feel compelled to revise Jesus’ teaching?  I realize those words stand in sharp tension (some would say as a paradox, i.e., an apparent contradiction) with other doctrines we hold dear, but why do we think we have to be more systematic or logically consistent than Jesus himself?

For whatever it’s worth, I have some advice.  Don’t change the meaning of Jesus’ words.  He knew exactly what he wanted to say, and he said it.

My Sunday School lesson last week concluded with some questions about the Incarnation:

Consider the remarkable truth that God becomes a human being in Jesus Christ. How do you respond to that fact? Does it still have power to amaze you? Is it so familiar to you that it has little impact?

It is a sad fact of our human nature that our hearts often grow dull.  We don’t feel the force of truth as we should.  In order to combat that tendency we need to meditate deeply on the stunning realities of Scripture.  The incarnation is exactly that sort of reality.  The new The ESV Study Bible, commenting on John 1:14, says,

This is the most amazing event in all of history: the eternal, omnipotent, omnipresent, infinitely holy Son of God took on a human nature and lived among humanity as one who was both God and man at the same time, in one person.

“The most amazing event in all of history”–that’s quite a statement, but I believe it’s true.  In the words of John Stott, “The paradox is amazing.  The Creator assumes the human frailty of his creatures.  The Eternal One enters time.  The all-powerful makes himself vulnerable.  The all-holy exposes himself to temptation.  And in the end the immortal dies.”

What would happen if we truly grasped the profound significance of the Incarnation?

We must both read and meditate upon the Nativity.  If the meditation does not reach the heart, we shall sense no sweetness, nor shall we know what solace for humankind lies in this contemplation.  The heart will not laugh nor be merry.  As spray does not touch the deep, so mere meditation will not quiet the heart.  There is such richness and goodness in this Nativity that if we should see and deeply understand, we should be dissolved in perpetual joy…

This is the word of the prophet: “Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given” (Isaiah 9:6).  This is for us the hardest point, not so much to believe that He is the son of the Virgin and God himself, as to believe that this Son of God is ours.  That is where we wilt, but he who does feel it has become another man (from Martin Luther’s Christmas Book).

Merry Christmas.  My hope is that all who read these words would find in Christ, this very day, a Savior from the terrible power and penalty of their own sin; and so find themselves “dissolved in perpetual joy.”