Ctrl+Z: Whatever happened, happened

*image courtesy of thesaint at stock.xchng

I was thinking today about mistakes.  I hate mistakes, especially the ones you just can’t fix.  For example, I was in downtown Richmond this afternoon and unwittingly parked illegally.  It was a “No Parking Zone,” but only from 4-6pm.  I saw the sign, thought I was out of the tow zone, and even backed up one parking meter to get further away from that scowling white sign with its slashy circle of scorn.  Alas, I was apparently in the tow zone, and it was 4:15.

Of course.

Now, there’s no going back.  I have no defense.  There’s no wiggle room, there’s no making up for it, there’s no making it all go away.  Instead, sixty of my hard-earned dollars will be painting a bench somewhere downtown or helping to pay some civil servants salary, probably the one who wrote my ticket.

Thankfully, we have the universal reset button: Ctrl+Z.

Yes, the “undo” feature started as a handy ability on word processing that has now spread to nearly every program I encounter.  Accidentally delete a paragraph?  Undo!  Accidentally delete the pictures of your kid’s first birthday?  Ctrl+Z!  It’s truly an amazing function, and has become so ubiquitous that sometimes it’s hard to remember that it only works on computers.

I’ve often wished that life had an undo function.  I’ve wished that I could simply stroke a few keys and find myself five minutes in the past, or maybe a whole day, with the chance to do it all over again.  Like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, I’d know how I failed the try before, and could do it again and again until I got things juuust right.

Until Google/Apple/Facebook/Skynet/Big Brother finds a way to implement an actual undo button for life, or we all find ourselves sucked into/uploaded into the cloud, we have to live with our analog mistakes.  Now, this is a biblical blog (biblog? no, sorry, that’s dumb), so you might think this is where I pull out the Jesus card like this…

Jesus is the Eternal Undo Button!

But, you’d be wrong.  And that’s ok, because you’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and darn it people like you.

No, that’s not the point I’m going to make.  Ok, that’s half true.  Jesus does take away your guilty standing as a rebel against the King of the Universe, don’t get me wrong.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean a cosmic “undo” for all those who believe.  Sometimes, there are long-lasting effects of sin in your life that simply won’t go away.  (Note I used “won’t” not “can’t.”)

It goes like this…

When you put your faith and trust in Jesus, a few things could happen: God could remove all traces of a particular sin in your life, including guilty standing, temptation to repeat, and negative consequences. Or, God could remove the guilt of your sin but not the consequences of your sin.  You see, the guilt part is integral to salvation.  In fact, it’s what you’re believing when you put your trust in Jesus: that He can and will forgive you of your sins and restore your right standing before God if you will believe.

The other stuff, is not as sure.  I’m sure you know or have heard of someone who came to Jesus and immediately put down their drugs, promiscuity, Disney movies, and all other forms of evil in their lives without ever looking back.  They experienced no withdraw symptoms, never had a second thought, and could march right back into the bar/strip club/theme park without fear of relapse.  Praise God, He is still at work and does mighty things for the glory of His Name!

However, sometimes God chooses, for reasons we don’t know, to not deliver someone as radically and instantaneously.  I would argue that this is the norm.  God gives us the words of Paul to put off the old self and put on the new (Ephesians 4:22-23).  Therefore, we are urged to work together with God through the power of the Holy Spirit to strive towards obedience in this particular area.

Also, sometimes the consequences of our sin will not be removed.  God has built into the fabric of the universe a cause and effect system that goes beyond physics.  What we plant is what we will harvest (Galatians 6:7-9).  This is the biblical counter to “what goes around comes around” or karma.  The difference is that God can override this, and it doesn’t apply to our eternal state if we are in Christ.  What it does apply to is our life in the here and now.

Lead a promiscuous life and you might end up with a disease.  God can heal you of that, but it’s neither a guarantee nor the norm.  God may bless you with a wonderful marriage down the road with a pure and holy sex life, but you may not ever get certain images out of your head.  Murder someone, and God can and will forgive you for your sin.  That doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t go to jail.  Lie through all your B.C. years, and people might have a hard time believing you when get all truthful on them.

Just because we’re Christians doesn’t mean that we’re somehow exempt from the real world.  There are still consequences to our actions.  God may choose to supernaturally override the norm, but don’t count on it in every case.  We don’t have an “undo” button for life, and this is the only shot we get on this earth.  We will be judged for what we do here, and there will be no going back.

Whatever happened, happened.

Bible in 90, Day 66: Jonah asked for it, Nahum got it

Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk

image courtesy of matthains at stock.xchng

Five prophets, one day – that’s what I’m talking about!  The longer I do it, the more I love the Bible in 90 Days Challenge!

VeggieTales has a great song at the end of their Jonah movie.  The chorus goes something like this:

Jonah was a prophet, ooo ooo!

But he really never go it, sad but true!

If you’ve been watchin’ you can spot it!  A doodely doo!

He did not get the point!

They make a great point, those signing vegetables.  God sent Jonah on a mission of mercy to call Assyria to repentance by preaching God’s coming wrath to its capital Nineveh.  You know the story – God calls boy, boy runs away, boy gets on boat, other boys through boy off the boat, fish eats boy – your basic ingredients for an awesome Sunday School lesson or feature film.  While in the belly of the great fish (the Bible never calls it a whale), Jonah repents and God commands the fish to spit him up onto dry land.  Jonah receives the mercy he wasn’t willing to offer the Assyrians.

Jonah keeps his word and preaches to Nineveh.  Based on his actions in chapter 4, it seems that he was hoping his preaching would not be heeded by the Ninevites, but it was.  The king himself repented and commanded the people to seek God’s forgiveness.  God sees their turning away from sin and toward Him and forgives them, not bringing the disaster He had threatened.  After receiving mercy from God himself, you’d think that he would rejoice at the repentance of Nineveh and God’s great mercy toward the people.

Instead, Jonah’s ticked!

He’s actually angry that God made him preach to Nineveh because he knew that God is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love (4:2)!  He gets all suicidal and mopey, crying over the death of his shade tree/weed.  It’s funny, we normally leave the story of Jonah right after people repent, because this is the happy ending.  But where the Holy Spirit leaves the story is with Jonah whining and God telling him how messed up it is that he’s crying over the death of a plant but doesn’t care about the lives of over 120,000 people in Nineveh.  For Jonah, God’s forgiveness just wasn’t fair.  The Assyrians were just too wicked to forgive.

Later on, Assyria turned back to its wicked ways and God send Nahum to preach their coming destruction.  Because of their endless cruelty (3:19), God wiped them out with the Babylonians.  Many of the atrocities that the Assyrians had subjected other cities to during their hey day were brought into the walls of Nineveh.  The scene is horrific, but is very much the same as what they had done throughout the years to other nations.  Because they did not turn to God this time, His judgment, not His mercy, fell on Nineveh.

What Jonah asked for, Nahum got to see.

Is it right for us to expect God to hold others to a different standard than we hold ourselves to?  Paul tells us that we are to forgive as we have been forgiven (Ephesians 4:32).  Our sins against God are much greater than any sin someone could commit against us.  For that matter, if God forgives someone, how can we withhold our forgiveness from them?  Are we more offended than God?  God tells us that we don’t have to worry because ultimately He will settle all accounts (Romans 12:19).  This was true of Assyria – in the end they got what they deserved.  Each of us will stand before God and give an account, and if we don’t have the forgiveness of Christ we will be punished accordingly.

Let’s not put ourselves above God’s judgment by withholding forgiveness from those who’ve wronged us.  Let’s be willing to forgive, and not presumptuous about our own right to be forgiven.  Let’s learn the lesson that Jonah didn’t: God will have mercy on whom He will have mercy (Romans 9:15; Exodus 33:19).

originally at Words of Reason

Bible in 90, Day 60: God has no grandchildren

Ezekiel 13-23

image courtesy of gundolf at stock.xchng

Congratulations!  Today we hit the 2/3 mark!

There’s an interesting passage in chapter 18 of today’s reading.  God lays out a few hypothetical lives spread over  three generations.  First is a righteous man who does what pleases God.  This man is commended by God.  Next is his son, who is wicked and lives nothing like his father.  He is condemned by God.  Third is the grandson who returns the family to his grandfather’s ways and lives a holy life.  He is commended for his actions, not condemned by his father’s.  Last is an unrelated man who turns from his wickedness back to God and is forgiven of his past.

God makes it clear here that each man stands before God on his own.  The son is not given credit for his father’s good deeds, and neither is the grandson punished for his father’s wicked deeds.  God had established this rule earlier in the law (Deuteronomy 24:16).  Elsewhere, there are passages that seem to contradict this (Leviticus 26:39; 2 Kings 15:9; Exodus 20:5), but these seem to be best understood not as a direct punishment of one generation for the sins of another as much as the tendency of one generation to fall into the same sin patterns as another.

This same principle is still in effect today.  A child who has parents that are completely opposed to God or religion can still put their faith and trust in Jesus.  My faith in Jesus Christ will not save any of my children.  The combined faith of my wife and I will not save them.  The only good that our children get out of us being Christians is that they will hear the gospel from a very early age and will hear it often.  My faith in Jesus makes me a child of God (John 1:12, 1 John 3:1-2).  But, there is an interesting truth within Christianity.

God has no grandchildren.

Each person stands before God on their own.  The faith of your parents will not grant you any forgiveness of sin.  But, like the fourth man in the passage today, anyone who turns from their sin and comes to God through Jesus Christ will find forgiveness and life.

Let’s never rely on the faith of our parents, or anyone else for that matter.  Just because our parents, or spouse, or even our children go to church does not mean we are right before a holy God.  Instead, let’s realize that apart from Christ, we are all headed in the wrong direction and turn to Him in faith.

originally at Words of Reason

Bible in 90, Day 39: Let God arise!

Psalms 1-24

*image courtesy of melisbfly at www.sxc.hu

Did you catch it?  Over and over again in our reading today, a word kept popping up.  I thought I knew exactly what I was going to write about after the first psalm today, but then I heard it.  I kept hearing it.  This word kept finding its way into the text.

Arise.

The writers (David mostly) kept calling upon God to arise (Psalm 3:7, 7:6, 9:19, 10:12, 12:5, 17:13).

).  What exactly does this mean?  Often in the Scriptures, when we “see” God, He is seated on His throne as we’ve discussed before.  Now, when a great king rises up out of his throne, you can bet something interesting is about to happen!  When the King of the Universe rises up out of His throne, the whole of creation pays attention.  David calls upon God to rise up against His enemies on behalf of His people.

Sometimes people have trouble with these psalms.  They are called imprecatory passages, passages where someone calls upon God to deliver judgment on someone else.  The problem some people have is that it doesn’t seem to match up with the God of love that they picture.  But if you read your Bible (and that’s what we’re doing these 3 months!), you discover a different picture of God.  He is a God of judgment as well as love.  He is a God of wrath as well as mercy.  In fact, one of God’s essential attributes, one that is discussed uniquely in the Bible might surprise you.

Holy, holy, holy.

God is holy above all else.  Nowhere in the Bible does it say that God is love, love, love; or grace, grace, grace; or peace, peace, peace.  The only adjective used in this way is “holy.”  God is love (1 John 4:8, 16), and His love is a holy love.  God gives grace (Proverbs 3:24, James 4:6, 1 Peter 5:5), and does so in a holy manner.  God’s chief attribute is His holiness.

God’s holiness includes His hatred of sin and injustice.  Because of this, He judges sin and sinners.  Peter warns us against forgetting or denying God’s judgment (2 Peter 3:3-9).  He reminds us that God’s judgment will come, and it will be fierce.  God is a just God.  In the end, all the accounts will be settled, and things will be made right again.

This is why I don’t have a problem with David’s words.  We as Christians are supposed to pray for our enemies and bless those who curse us.  However, David appeals to the justice of God, and this is okay.  We should always pray for sinners to be saved, but we do so understanding that those who do not accept Jesus are rightfully condemned and judged (as would we be if we did not accept Jesus).  God is a God who judges sin and corrects injustice.

The good news is that God is also a God who saves.  While we all deserve the wrath of God because of our sin, Jesus died in our place to pay the penalty for us (Romans 6:23; 1 Peter 2:24; John 3:16-17).  But, rest assured that one day God will arise in judgment.  He will set the record straight.

Let God arise!

*originally at Words of Reason