Month: August 2013

Control, Insecurity, and the Human Condition
Copyright 2013 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

All human beings are “control freaks” to one degree or another. It is a function of the insecurity that came into our race’s existence after the catastrophe we call the Fall. In our fallen state we somehow feel like we will die inside if we are not in control of our own lives, and often also with much of what comes into contact with our lives. Actually the very opposite is true. It is only in surrendering control of our lives back into the hands of our Creator and Redeemer God that we are saved from the insecurity that stems from the very real prospective of both physical and spiritual death.

Insecurity is woven into the very fabric of the existence of sentient creatures that have corporately and willingly cut themselves off from the only Source of any real and enduring security. In every human heart there exists, whether consciously or unconsciously, a dread of loss, pain and, ultimately, of permanent retribution for our wrongs. One of the primary ways we try to ward off this rightful dread is through convincing ourselves that we are somehow the “masters of our own destiny.” This effort manifests itself in the drive to control our environment, ourselves, and others.

We can fool ourselves fairly easily into the illusion of control over our environment living in the 21st Century West. Comparatively few other generations in the history of humankind have had the daily experience of flipping a switch on a wall and instantaneously turning night into day or getting into a car and travelling many miles from the place of their birth. Only the last generation has had the astonishing ability to call up what seems like nearly the sum total of all human knowledge by plugging words into a search engine.

The spirit of our age also implies that, with the right amount of self control, we can become virtually whoever and whatever we want to be. “If we can dream it we can do it” is one of the most accepted illusions of democratic capitalism in an age of upward mobility and choice virtually unknown at any other time in history. The fact that an aspiring Olympic athlete can shatter a bone and be forever unable to compete or that an idolized actor can die in the same kind of car wreck as one of his or her fans always seems to be left out of the “human potential” equation. All the self-control and self-effort in the world cannot prevent an accident, or any other number of unfortunate circumstances, that can end a worldly dream in an instant.

Then there is the one kind of control that even our modern society generally disapproves of, but can also be part and parcel of warding off personal insecurity: the control of other human beings. This kind of control can range from the subtle power of emotional manipulation to the actual physical enslavement of another. Yet this kind of control is at least as problematic as the others because the controlled often break the bonds of the controlling, many times with disastrous results for the latter. It is not a permanent answer to insecurity either; only a good way to end up being hated or worse.

All of these types of control have some fatal flaws. They are derivative; meaning they are contingent on power that is not intrinsic, but given to us by dint of living in an affluent and technologically advanced culture. They are temporary; being liable to sudden and irrevocable loss through unforeseen circumstances. And they are often unethical; at least when achieved through the illegitimate possession of others.

But above all else they are all forms of idolatry that fallen human beings use to banish insecurity through the assumption of godlike powers; powers that we were never meant to have apart from being in right relationship with the one true God of the universe. We were not made to control anything apart from our role as regents over God’s creation, and that role is only legitimately reacquired through submitting our lives to Him through surrender to, and faith in, His Son Jesus Christ. It is in the salvation only He offers that we are truly set free from the insecurity we bequeathed ourselves through corporate and individual disobedience to our Maker.

There is no other way.

When Relationship is Not Enough
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

There is a tendency in the church today to put a great premium on the concept of “having a relationship with God”. In fact the phrase is so overused that it has become a cliché. It is true that Christianity is all about relationship, but a less popular word needs to be placed before that one before we can assume that the phrase is describing something real. That less popular word is “obedience”.

What does it mean to really be in communion with Christ? Christ Himself indicated that the proof of our love for Him was that we would obey His teachings in very practical and obvious ways in our lives. He did not say that we would do so perfectly, but He made it very clear that following Him would result in altered behavior. When we look at the way professed believers act in comparison with non-believers today it is clear that we are often not so different from the world in our actions. We expose ourselves to entertainment that fifty years ago would have been anathema to people who called themselves Christian, we sleep with our “serious” dating partners as if the bible sanctions it, we bow before the god of materialism in our consumer choices and, in our hyper-individualism, we steadfastly refuse to submit to even legitimate spiritual authority. All the while we talk about having a “relationship with God” as if just saying the words and singing in church make it true.

Much is said about legalism these days, but far less is said about license and the result is an American church that is spiritually anemic at best and slowly dying at worst. It is no doubt true that rules-based Christianity leads to phariseeism. Exterior adherence to rules that may not reflect truly biblical morality is a dead-end. Arrogant and narrow interpretations of God’s loving guidelines for ethical living certainly are not a fruit of the Spirit. But we have too often used repressive religious systems as an excuse to act in ways that do not honor Christ. Holiness is a word that many contemporary Christians do not understand and do not wish to understand because it implies that we might actually have to give something up to be in right relationship with God.

Strictly speaking even the demons “have a relationship with God”. In the Gospels they know who Jesus is and they speak to Him (and He speaks back, though not in a way any of us would want to hear directed at us). It is not enough to claim to know God. Our lives have to back up our words. No doubt we will sin. While perfect behavior is not a possibility this side of the Resurrection we had better stop kidding ourselves that we can operate like the average 21st century man or woman on the street and then justify it on the basis of being “free from legalism”.

Both the legalist and the libertine will have to give an account of their lives before God one day. It is imperative that we realize the pendulum too often swings towards the latter error in the present day American Church and then both corporately and individually seek the Lord’s face on how best to reverse the trend. The alternative is some form of judgment and, whether we believe it is temporal or eternal, such judgment is something to very seriously avoid.

Surfing into Danger: the Internet and Moral Relativism
Copyright by Shea Oakley.
All rights reserved

How do we stay spiritually uncompromised while living in the larger culture? This question has had to be repeatedly asked throughout the two millennia history of Christianity. It is a question that has always needed to be answered in fresh ways by the contemporary Church of its time. This has never been more true than now when our society is being so greatly impacted by a constantly morphing popular culture born of the technological explosion of the past quarter century.

Our communicative technological abilities have never advanced as rapidly as they have during this period. The primary example of what we call the “Information Revolution” is the computer. It wasn’t so long ago that no one had ever heard of the term “personal computer” much less the “Internet”. When I was twelve my father bought our family one of the first home computers. It set us back about a thousand dollars in 1980 and was obsolete within six months. That machine had a tiny fraction of the power of the one I typed these words on. There was much talk at the time about how microcomputers were going to revolutionize our lives but it was painfully obvious that our Radio Shack TRS-80 with its “Tape Drive” and 16K of RAM was just not going to do it.

Fast forward to today. The vast majority of Americans have either owned or at least operated one of these devices. They have become as common as the telephone or the TV. Computers of all sizes are now fixtures in America. What finally made these machines an integral part of our lives? The answer is the advent of the Web. The internet’s ability to open human beings to a new world of information and, perhaps more importantly, communication, has changed the Western World more profoundly than perhaps any other invention in recent human history save the airplane, radio and the atomic bomb.

One of the things the Internet has done is to create a new conduit for popular culture to flow into our hearts and minds, a conduit so powerful that it will most likely one day surpass the influence of television on our daily lives. Perhaps it already has. The TV is an incredibly powerful medium for communication but its communication is only one-way. By contrast the Internet is interactive, allowing for two-way communication as well as the selection and perusal of literally billions of bytes of information along with their accompanying images and ideas and here lies the rub. By so effectively opening up our homes to the surrounding culture the Net has made it far more difficult to be in, but not of, this world.

Much has been spoken about the struggles Christian men are having with internet pornography. The proliferation of sexually explicit material online continues and has created a multi-billion dollar industry. It is an obvious threat to Christian integrity and cannot be minimized as to its impact. But there are less obvious threats inherent in this medium as well.

The line is beginning to blur between our everyday lives and what might be called our virtual lives. On the net we interact not only with other people but, in a larger sense, with our fallen culture as a whole. The Net is the place to find a plethora of artistic, political, sexual, scientific and social crosscurrents. In one sense we have been given an incredible freedom to explore the meaning of our world and our own existence. Unfortunately that freedom can so easily lead to bondage.

The Internet is not immoral but amoral. In and of itself it is only an instrumentality; a device no doubt invented by sinful men but not an inherently evil one. We need to remember that truth in order to see this technological revolution in its proper context. The Web is morally neutral; it is those who use it who are the moral agents. That said; a huge portion of the internet is controlled by the enemy of our souls and not just the porn sites. He also uses the medium to influence us in other ways and not so obviously. We can easily allow this technology to put us into a sort of “trance of tolerance”. “How wonderful”, we might say, “to be able to sample from so many cultures and ideas”. The problem is that the spirit of moral relativism abounds online and at times it is tempting to take off our spiritual armor and electronically “slip into something a little more comfortable”. Add to this the tendency to surf for hours that many of us have and we soon find ourselves almost living a double-life, one real and one virtual. Often the virtual life ends up not being under the Lordship of Christ.

I have a small wooden cross that hangs from my old-style computer monitor. I put it there to remind me that there are places online I dare not go. The cross also reminds me that my electronic culture cannot be allowed to define or rule me. Only the Man who died on such a cross 2000 years ago can and should do that.

When Christians Despair
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

“Facing facts as they are produces despair, not frenzy, but real downright despair, and God never blames a man for despair…When a man gets to despair he knows that all his thinking will never get him out, he will only get out by the sheer creative effort of God, consequently he is in the right attitude to receive from God that which he cannot gain for Himself.”

-Oswald Chambers
Baffled to Fight Better

Certain strains of contemporary Christianity encourage people to never be anything but positive. Some very popular preachers and teachers who are media personalities have taken the New Testament, mixed in some currents of positive thinking, and come up with the idea that a true believer need never be depressed. Other voices go so far as to condemn those who have yielded to downheartedness for any length of time as being guilty of basic un-belief.

But a certain amount of despair, or at least the feeling of despair, is unavoidable in the life of many believers whose perception of this world is not completely shallow. We live in a veil of tears and the presence of Jesus Christ in our lives does not somehow render us impervious to sorrow.

Read the book of Job, Jeremiah, or any number of the Davidic Psalms and it becomes quite clear that some of the giants of the faith have experienced feelings of despair during their journey through a radically fallen world. For those who would counter that New Testament believers are somehow immune to such “dark night of the soul” experiences it might be instructive to read 2 Corinthians 1:8 in which the Apostle Paul writes of he and his companions being “so utterly, unbearably crushed that we despaired of life itself”. No, the coming of Pentecost did not erase the potential of even the redeemed heart to experience times of anguish.

Life in the here and now can be tragic. A believer may go through ordeals that are not capable of being overcome overnight by positive confession of out-of-context Scriptures, Spiritualized self-help bromides or any other pop-Christianity cure-alls. Neither will anything we can come up with on our own suffice. Some things in life must simply be endured and endured without immediate promise of relief. That endurance is only made possible by the sustaining presence of God’s grace in our lives. It is not that relief will never come but it will be in God’s timing and by His terms. This was one of the messages Job learned during his exceptional trial.

I say none of this to minimize the pain someone reading these words may be experiencing even now. I have known great pain and sorrow in my own life and no one has wanted instant relief like I have, at times, wanted it. But God’s sometimes painful redemptive purposes often do not contain an immediate escape clause no matter how much we beg and plead for it. What must be remembered is that He truly does know what He is doing with us and some day we will thank Him with tears of joy that he did not let us escape what was ultimately for His glorification and our true good. What He is working in us through times of terrible pain is achieving for us the very redemption of our souls.

Love and the Vulnerability of God
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

The willingness of unconquerable strength to make itself vulnerable, for the sake of love, is the essence of God’s incarnation in Christ. It was for intimate union with the only beings made in his image that the Sovereign of the universe so humbled Himself. If we have no inkling of how divine love compelled this emptying of divine power then we will have trouble knowing what makes the one true God different from all the other “gods” our race puts its faith in, and we will be profoundly the less for it.

Scripture tells us God is love. Love in its highest form is found in Him and all true love comes from Him. There is something we need to understand about love and, thus, about our Lord. Love is apparently more important to Him than power. If power alone was the concern of God He would never have incarnated Himself as a man. Such condescension would be unthinkable for a being that existed solely to rule and reign over his creation for the sake of ruling and reigning. The God of the Bible is all-powerful, make no mistake about it, but He is more than that. He also loves.

God wants us in deep communion with Him. He wants to know us and be known by us. He wants our purest affection to be for Him because His pure affection is directed towards us. In short He wants us to love Him and be loved by Him. Apparently the only way this could come about was for God to make Himself vulnerable to us and the only way that could happen was for Him to become one of us.

Perhaps this is because we could never fall in love with a God who remained completely different from what we are, who forever existed so high above us that we could have nothing in common with Him. Love, it seems, requires that its giver and its recipient share something essential. In Christ God shared in something essential, our humanity, and made it possible for us to fall in love with Him in a way we never could before.

What this required of our Creator was a, to us, incomprehensible descent. He emptied Himself of the full power of His Deity to be born in a stable in an obscure town in the backwaters of an empire. As far as physical and emotional vulnerability He incarnated Himself as much a human as any human he had ever made, even to the point of sharing in the danger of being rejected and killed by other humans. Why did God do this? He did it because any possibility for intimate union with us required it.

He did it because love requires such vulnerability. The possibility of love cannot be divorced from the possibility of rejection. An irresistible force cannot be resisted, but it cannot be freely loved either. Coercion and love are antonyms, “coerced love” an oxymoron. God’s love for us was so powerful that divine power itself had to be in some sense given up to enable us to respond in kind, and so it was when He came to earth in the form of the Son of Man.

It may be possible for human beings to worship any number of “gods” who are unwilling to pursue us so ardently, but it is impossible for us to be in reciprocal love with them. That kind of relationship requires a God Who both removes the stumbling block of power for power’s sake and Who risks rejection for the sake of His desire for us. Only the God of Jesus Christ fits this description and because of this only He is worth both knowing and loving with all our hearts.