April 26, 2012 – sheaoakley.com

Wounded Healer or Wounding Judge?
Copyright by Shea Oakley.
All rights reserved.

How often do Christians wrongly judge one another? All too often. Self-righteousness manifests itself in believers across all levels of Christian maturity. I suspect that even the most spiritual among us still sin in this way on occasion. We know from Scripture that by doing so we are in danger of being judged ourselves. This is bad enough, but what of the person being judged? Someone may feel as though they are dying emotionally and spiritually and instead of imparting the healing love of Christ we kill them a little more.

Among religious people of any belief system it has been said that only Christians “shoot their own wounded”. To be sure this is an overstatement but it is sometimes all too accurate in the Church. Our ego-driven, and patently false, sense of righteousness leads to the condemnation of others. We usually think of this sin as being one against God and that is certainly true but, as stated, it is also destructive to those being judged. Whether it is withholding fellowship for non-biblical reasons or openly accusing another believer without justification the result is much the same: unnecessary pain for a fellow child of God.

Much needed restoration can be limited or even destroyed when we attack someone who may not be so much in sin as in weakness or infirmity. The wounds this life brings can often lead to behaviors which might appear more sinful than they are. As an omniscient and just Judge, only God knows where weaknesses end and sin begins. We dare not presume on that exalted knowledge or, more importantly, on the Exalted One Himself.

Even if the one judged truly is in a sinful state the accuser cannot know the whole story behind it. Again it is an issue of not understanding, and perhaps not wanting to understand, how much pain a person may have endured in life through no fault of their own. That pain is fully known and taken into consideration in God’s eyes and heart alone. We can and should only confront a fellow Christian when love for that person is strongly present. Otherwise that which we presume to say about the person’s character may only hurt and destroy them, and that surely is not the will of God.

Nature and Beyond
Copyright 2012 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

C.S. Lewis once wrote the following about God’s earthly creation and its role in the Christian journey:

“We are summoned to pass in through nature, beyond her” he said, “into that splendor which she fitfully reflects.”

Lewis was an inveterate nature lover. He spoke often of his walking tours through the English countryside and the blessing they invariably were to him. I suspect that many of the great sages and mystics of the Christian faith have had similar points of contact with the natural world in whatever part of the earth they were destined to inhabit during their own pilgrimage through this life. In recent years I, too, have fallen in love with the “direct creation” of God, the term I use to describe nature as opposed to the material utilization of nature that results in manmade things. Actually what has occurred in my life of late might better be called a “re-falling” in love as I sense that awe and wonder in the presence of the direct handiwork of God was something I intensely knew once before, in childhood, without knowing it was of God.

At the risk of an unintended pun it is “natural” for human beings, and especially for those who know God in a personal way, to be caught up in the glories of the animate and inanimate things that our Lord has chosen to populate the world we presently co-inhabit with them. Whether it is through common or saving grace men generally have some sense, be it conscious or unconscious, that nature is redolent of its Creator. It is His presence in the natural realm that gives it the compelling sublimity and mystery that we sense when we take in a spectacular sunset, or the rush of falling water, or the sight of the wind gently swaying a tree branch. In some paradoxical fashion God inhabits His creation even as He stands definitively apart from it. The handiwork of the Holy One somehow seems to be a dwelling place for Him as well and this, I suspect, is why those of us who worship the God of the Bible often feel closest to him when we are in the midst of the beauty of the world He directly created.

Of course, as with all things in this fallen world, nature has its dangers.

One of the most difficult things for the Christian who loves those sunsets, waters and swaying trees is the recognition that evil still exerts its malign presence on the natural world. The handiwork of the holy is also the temporal home of disorder, chaos and even cruelty. We see this in blights and parasites, in the devastation of extreme weather, even in the fact that some of the “higher” non-human predators have been observed to kill their prey for sport rather than consumption. The fall of man has spoiled the pristine perfections of nature and this will remain a sad and enduring fact until the return of Christ sets all things right.

In the meantime this unfortunate truth is used by God to inoculate His children against the pantheism that seems more and more ascendant in the West today. Through the ugliness of nature at its fallen worst we are reminded that it is not good in and of itself. The goodness and beauty it retains it only through the preserving presence of God in this short period during which He has temporarily let evil have a continuing presence on the earth. We who apprehend the truth of the Biblical narrative regarding the age we live in are not easily caught up in the reverence of nature as a god. We see and deeply appreciate its loveliness, we even see a divine presence in it as the Holy Spirit allows, but we do not hold the illusion that nature’s remaining goodness is either complete or somehow self-generated. We may love the creation but we do not worship it. This caution is always tonic, especially when it comes to how Christians interact with non-believers who may also love nature but, in addition, have unhealthy illusions about it that lead to an inordinate love of the creation for itself alone.

That said, believers have reason to put nature before their physical and spiritual eyes often. One reason, among others, is that direct creation is so much bigger in physical scope than we that it can provide a particularly profound comfort. In pondering the natural realm we may find a release from ourselves, a blessed re-focusing on something larger than self and, in the midst, Someone Who is infinitely larger. Focusing on the physical world reminds us of a spiritual world that is far greater. I believe that this is what C.S. Lewis meant when he referred to passing “through nature” on the way to a deeper communion with the God Who is not only its Creator but it’s Master and ours as well.

In the same essay of his with which we began Lewis says that someday we will find the final redemption of nature to be a part of our own. He writes that we “will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch.” Lewis seems to point us towards a future when we will somehow become perfectly intimate with fully redeemed nature as a byproduct of becoming perfectly one with our Lord. For those of us who are coming to love nature in proper proportion to our greater love for God this is a future to be very deeply desired.