March 2016 – sheaoakley.com

March 30, 2016shea No Comments

Our Darkening Age….and Evil’s End

The Enemy of our souls spends much of the time remaining to him trying to convince us that, somehow, God cannot win the battle between good and evil in the world. The darker the times get the more liable we are to believe him.

But our Lord, by His very nature, cannot lose.

Evil is an inherently finite distortion of the good. Its existence is only made possible by God’s decision to create self-aware beings with free will (from a biblical perspective we, along with the angels, would appear to be the only creatures so endowed.) God, in His perfect wisdom as God, created the conditions that made evil possible, but the power of that evil was confined to beings with no independent existence apart from their Maker. Evil, therefore, is only an intrinsically imperfect derivative of the good; a derivative embodied in creatures with finite power. Since God’s power is infinite, and His eternal nature is perfect goodness, He will have the final say over evil’s continued existence. We know from the eternal victory His Son achieved on the cross over both fallen human and fallen angelic evil that the ultimate temporal fulfillment of what was achieved at Calvary will be the final destruction of evil and all who choose to embody it.

What causes human beings, even Christians, to sometimes doubt this reality is the fact that another part of God’s plan is to work out His purposes through actions taking place over time. In other words He has chosen to work His final ends for this universe through history. For those of us who have suffered from the effects of internal and external evil it may seem cruel and incomprehensible that He did not banish evil from our reality a long time ago. From our position of being seemingly trapped in time this makes perfect sense, but the viewpoint of God is from eternity and that viewpoint is as far above our fallen, sinful perspective as the heavens are above the earth.

The Bible tells us that the final fruit of man’s disobedience (as well as that of the angels) will be a divinely-limited period on this planet when evil will greatly increase and seem to hold sway over the destiny of the entire human race. As we watch the news everyday it would certainly appear that this period is upon us. But the Bible also says that at the end of that period Christ, the Son of God, will return and rout all evil from the earth. As God in human, but now glorified, form King Jesus will put an end to history as we now know it. In its place will be the Kingdom of God, a Kingdom triumphant over all darkness. Evil, and its personification in Satan, will both be utterly and eternally destroyed by the one being Who has that capability.

Evil may seem to be having its day, but evil is actually in its last days. With this in mind may we all look to the soon coming King and turn from our own present evil to the divine remedy: repentance towards, and faith in, Him and Him alone

March 17, 2016shea No Comments

A Dirty Word in the Church

If you have spent some time in the contemporary Evangelical church you may have gathered that there are a number of “hot-button” words that are used more frequently than others. This is especially true of certain terms connected with efforts to exhort believers towards more holy living. One of these is “compromise”. I can think of few words in the lexicon of “Christianese” that convey more of a sense of distaste in the average conservative Christian’s heart than this one. In fact one might almost call it a dirty word.

For most human beings “to compromise” means to find a middle-position acceptable to two parties in conflict with each other with the goal of settling that conflict. Many non-Christians consider compromise to be a noble word; one indicative of mutual humility, the willingness to meet someone halfway in order to re-establish peace and balance in a relationship both parties consider to be valuable. While some non-believers may have disdain for this idea, and thus for the term that describes it, their motivation is often pride. For some compromise is equated with weakness and is simply out of the question in their human associations. These are often the people who leave a rather obvious trail of relational destruction in their wake. They would rather alienate family, friends and co-workers than give up any power in a relationship whatsoever. Such individuals usually end up more or less alone.

This brings us back to the use of the word in Christian circles. In our community the public use of the term “compromise” is usually in the context of the danger of making some concession to “the World, the Flesh and the Devil.” Any watering-down of the Gospel, any adoption of what is considered to be carnal behavior; any adaptation to the surrounding cultural milieu may earn the sobriquet of “compromise”. Nine times out of ten, if someone in a church publicly uses this word, its connotation is not only negative but often negative in the extreme. For instance to be labeled a “compromiser” is at best to be labeled a spiritual second class citizen and at worst a person on his or her way out of the faith.

Of course this negative connotation of “compromise” is not without some legitimacy. When someone is more interested in following the way of the world than the way of the cross that someone is a compromiser to the degree they willingly indulge in attitudes or behaviors that dishonor Christ. The first time someone came up with the idea of using this term to describe taking the easy way out and falling short of the mark spiritually they were not in the wrong. On the other hand whoever that person was probably did not know they were giving birth to a definition that would eventually become both overused to the point of cliché and wrongly used in inciting sometimes unnecessary guilt. They did not know that they were giving birth to one of the more effective clubs utilized by the more self-righteous among us.

The fact is that the word compromise is not used in the Bible to describe sin. In fact the word compromise does not, according to Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, appear in the Scriptures anywhere at all.

So it might be a good idea for some brave Evangelicals in the Church today to take the initiative to rehabilitate the term in question. We need to be reminded of the other use of “compromise” because the other use happens to be conducive to our sanctification. When two headstrong believers are butting those heads in unhealthy, pride-driven conflict both need to be gently urged to compromise. Ask any happily married Christian couple how they stay that way and they will tell you that reaching a compromise in an argument is often the only way to successfully resolve a difference. If the compromise reached in such a case is not a moral one than it is a blessing and a sign that two people are growing in Godly humility.

Personally I’d like to see the word gain a better place in our lexicon, for “compromise” to become a term more often used to describe how mutual humility can enhance human relationships then as a weapon to rebuke our brothers and sisters for falling into sins that we ourselves may be prone to.

Then maybe we will have one less dirty word in the House of God.

March 10, 2016shea No Comments

Giving, Receiving, and the Heart of God

God wants to bless His children. This truth can be difficult to swallow for those of us who have known grudging, conditional giving from important people in our lives and who, to whatever degree, have ended up embodying that kind of “giving” to others ourselves.

Giving for its own sake, giving that finds its fulfillment simply in blessing another, is rare among human beings. The fact of the matter is that much of the generosity human beings extend to one another has some condition to it. At the very least we expect to be thanked for our efforts. But even this “least” is indicative of giving to get something in return, and there are those who expect far more than that. The problem with this motivation is that people rarely are as appreciative as we’d like and over time whatever true generosity that was in our hearts begins to wane. Finally we can end up not wanting to give and if we continue to give at all it is with reluctance.

As with so many traits common to humanity this reluctant giving can end up being wrongly projected onto God; this despite it being clear from the Bible that our Lord never gives demanding something in return. If He did then it would stand to reason that He would never give a thing to the unrepentedly wicked, those whom He knows will never turn to Him. But as we read in both the Old and New Testaments God does exactly that. He causes the rains necessary for the harvest to fall on the righteous and the unrighteous alike. This is because it is inherent to His nature to give. God gives out of the overabundance of His infinitude, and He gives to all freely.

If the Lord is willing to do this for men and women who ignore Him or worse, how much more is He willing to do so for His children, for those who have embraced His Son? Yet many who bear the name Christian walk through life with a sense that their God is withholding blessing because He is somehow miserly or grudging towards them.

Now it is true that God often withholds certain blessings until we are truly ready to receive them. It is also true that our persistence in certain sins sometimes prevents us from obtaining what He may long to give us, but the bottom line is that the longing is there. In fact it hurts the heart of God when we sabotage our own ability to receive the good He wants to grant us. This is because He is the quintessential Good Father and a good father wants his children to fully enjoy all the good things he is able to provide for them.

We only frustrate the heart of God and impoverish ourselves when we limit our ability to take what He, by nature, loves to give. We must come to a place in our spiritual walk in which we willingly trust that God is not like those who have given things to us only to gain something for themselves. This is a matter of learning the difference between other people (and, for that matter, ourselves) and our Maker, a loving God whose perfect nature includes perfect motivations for giving. Thank God that He is willing to help us learn this lesson over time and with experience. Thank God that, along with being giving, He is also patient.

May it be that we all come to the place of receiving that which our good Father desires to bestow upon us, and may His true generosity finally make us truly generous as well.

March 4, 2016shea No Comments

One Way to be an Effective “Cultural Heretic”

It is no overstatement to say that our society has largely embraced, as an advance in human liberty, the wholesale rejection of moral constraints that guided Western civilization for most of its history. This is most obvious in the realm of sexuality but it also holds true when examining things as diverse as rampant materialism, violent entertainment, the legalization of marijuana, and no-fault divorce laws. In fact it is increasingly a “fait accompli” that the tipping point beyond which there is no coming back has already been reached. A Judeo-Christian civilization is dying.

It is to be replaced by one that exalts man as the measure of all things. In such a cultural environment it is becoming increasingly difficult to explain that the actual ramifications of such “liberty” are still, and always will be, the opposite of what so many people believe them to be. When fallen humankind is the arbiter of a freedom wrapped up in endless rights without moral responsibility the end game is slavery to the self. Such slavery has the byproduct of destroying the civilization that has enshrined it. Every decadent society in history that eventually died from moral license masquerading as liberation died because the growth of that license remained unchecked. As our culture continues deeper into the 21st century the signs of mortal illness are not hard to pick out and efforts to treat the symptoms rather than the disease continue unabated.

Biblical Christians living in such an age are called to point out this gradual self-destruction that cloaks itself in new “freedom” and that call remains even if fewer people are willing to listen. This is not easy as those who are given over to the current zeitgeist in the West become increasingly hostile towards anyone who dares question what “progress” is and what it isn’t (Witness the instant application of the term “hater” to the many people who still dare to question transgenderism. The truth is that I know of people of that conviction who might not bake a cake for a “gender-transition party,” but who would unhesitatingly throw themselves in front of a bus to save a pedestrian that they knew was transgender, whether they agreed with their lifestyle or not.)

The reality is that, whatever the resistance, we are still morally obligated to make some effort to speak against the cultural metanarrative in the hopes that some may hear. The following is one way to do this.

When I was a boy my parents, who were not religious by any stretch of the imagination, regularly told me that nothing is ever right just because “everyone is doing it.” They were warning me, of course, about the dangers of peer pressure being allowed to mold my developing moral compass but it seems to me that today this is a salient argument on a societal scale. A majority of Germans initially thought Hitler was going to be a great leader and many of those that voted for him in 1933 seemed to have no problem with the extreme anti-Semitism already evident in the Nazi party. The question then, as now, is this: since when is right and wrong determined by majority vote? By and large I think people sense it is not determined that way because of the conscience that God built into them. Even as an Atheist teenager I knew on some level that I could not effectively argue with my parent’s logic. Right and wrong had to have an ultimately objective basis or there was no such thing as right and wrong, and I was pretty sure there was.

This is, I believe, the beginning of a line of effective dialogue with people who take as “gospel” the idea that human happiness is dependent on being allowed to do most of the things their desires tell them are right (as long as they aren’t “hurting anyone” of course.) It is, admittedly, only a beginning. There are a whole arsenal of other arguments from the Bible, natural law, human history and just plain common sense that can be employed from there. The obvious fallacy of the majority determining what’s truly right also does not have to be the starting point. My only suggestion is that it might make, with the help of the Holy Spirit, one of the more profitable ones.

Whatever approach we take we need to be ready to be rejected for believing what we do in a world where the only absolute truth accepted seems to be that there is no such thing as absolute truth. In such a morally upside down environment, in which most people are marching in lockstep towards an eternal cliff thinking they are building a relativist utopia, we should not be surprised what awaits us. Those who want to walk in the opposite direction, towards the real life and freedom that come from living in congruence with the God of the cross and with virtues tried and tested over thousands of years, are anathema to the standard bearers of Progressivism. Expect to be treated the way they always claim we treat “heretics” because that is just what we are as far as many of them are concerned, cultural heretics.