Crossing Bridges

This blog is designed to give people an inner look at a devotional life. Taking time each day to spend time with the Lord. The hope is if you travel on this journey with Rev. Jacob Shaw, you may be more inclined to spend time with the Lord as well. I encourage the use of a devotional, a scripture reading and prayer, then finally some form of artistic mark to tie it all together. 

Today's devotional is taken from: Zacharias, Ravi. The Logic of God: 52 Christian Essentials for the Heart and Mind. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2019. [E-Book] Chapter 11: Crossing Bridges

Opening Thought: Well, there is a lot to cover today, buckle up! There are several points Zacharias makes that shift us towards a crucial difference between Christianity and other religions and other world views. I feel that this chapter would have made an amazing book, if it had been more flushed out.  Let us begin with the scripture used as it really does set the stage well.

The devotional begins with: Acts 17:22,28-29

Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ “Therefore, since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill.

Second Thought: The scripture piece is telling the history of Paul encountering a crossroads of religious elements. The people of Athens have a calling to seek God in their life but their methods of doing so are antithetical to the Christian worldview, i.e., idolatry.[1] This situation is arising because Christianity is growing with in three already present world views, Jewish, Roman and Greek. Idol worship was a common practice and even though this was strictly prohibited in Judaism, (for good reason), many people, including Jews would fall to this practice. Since Paul was preaching to the more Greco-Roman portions of society, it would not be surprising if those seeking to understand the worship of God may try to exercise that longing through methods that are familiar to them.

Zacharias brings the worldview and worldviewer analogy; every belief has a believer, and, in this chapter, Zacharias adds reason into the mix. This adds the clarification that what is considered reason and reasonable is going to vary between people. So, we end up getting a chain here: every person will have a world view, and these world views usually aim to answer questions about origin, meaning, morality and destiny. Now, I would add that since we are not in a bubble in our existence, we gain our beliefs from our experiences and internalization of mythology, philosophies, histories, culture, language, biology, and socio-political archetypes. This all means that the reasons and the reasoning which affirm our beliefs is going to be varied as well. Of course, our belief and reason will hold similar between each of us, but emphasis and detail to these reasons can be vastly different.

For example, going back to our scripture, the Judeo-Christian world view contains a law that you should not make idols. This idol law is not limited to carving of pagan gods, but also engraved images which as to point to the one true God of the Bible. When Moses comes down from the mountain and discovers the Israelites has built a golden calf, what most people do not realize is that the calf was not an idol that was just made up, but rather the Israelites has chosen an image to impose on YHWH. They believed they were worshiping YHWH but what they were really doing was worshiping their desire for YHWH to conform to their will and their desires. This is not the only way to commit idolatry, but you see the general point.

This is what is behind the law against idol worship. When you try to condescend God into a material idol, then what you do is you sacrifice the mystery and magnificence of God for something finite and material. And when you worship something as empty as the material, you ultimately just end up worshiping yourself, your primal urges, and your wants and greed. Idolatry is a slippery slope. So, Paul is encountering good intensions, because even misguide seekers of truth are still truth seekers. However, without the care for how the are exercising this and with what reasons and theology behind those intensions. Therefore, what they may end up with could end up could be errored.

Therefore, the examination of worldviews, both self and others, becomes so important for the religious, because the little details matter. There is a reason why the phrase, the devil is in the details” exists.

So, this begs the question, do all religion point to the same thing? I have heard this question much in my life, particularly from my parent’s generation (baby boomers). There is an idea that all beliefs and religions ultimately point or do the same thing when you boil the religion down to its basic parts, so it really does not matter what you believe. This reasoning to me is invalid and rather insulting because it minimalizes all religions to their superficial characteristics. This line of thinking has become so common for several reasons, (partly in my opinion as a result of a misguided Durkheimian approach to social science and anthropology which trickled down through the universities into mainline culture, also with the shift toward relativism which fueled an unhealthy fear of judgement and discrimination), but it ultimately became seen as rational thinking, even though it is built upon many misconceptions and troubling conclusions. By the time, the boomers were adults and society had become vastly secular, it was easier to tell their children that all beliefs basically were the same, because it was safer than their child possibly navigating into critical thinking or challenging peers. As religion, particularly Christianity, became less mainstream, it was even easier to say all religions were pointing to the same thing, and add that they were archaic from of truth seeker, which new methods had now developed for that purpose i.e., scientism, thus we can abandon them for the news ways of post-modernity, relativism, secularism, and self-affirming hedonism.

So as the general population moved away from religion and faith, they never considered that the details of the faith were what made them valuable and forgot them as if they were simplistic tools of unevolved people.

As I said, there is a lot to work with in this reading. The reason for that all this material is being unearthed by this passage is because what Paul was doing is critical thinking and apologetics. Now he was very pleasant about it, and Zacharias says this in the opening of this chapter, “I know firsthand [different worldviews] can be discussed without compromise and without animosity, with gentleness and respect.” However, if you are going to really believe in something and be in the world, you must be willing to think critically of yourself (humility) and of other (discriminably)[2] because if we do not, then we devalue what we are seeking: God.

Continual Work: We always make judgement calls when we make choices, have preference and where we draw the line. You would not just date or marry anyone, you would not just let any stranger into your house. In some ways our beliefs are choices, but often out beliefs just happen, we fall or are born into them. Therefore, if we are going to wave the flag of a belief, we should do the work of the belief, if we do not apply a bit of the critique, discernment, and discrimination to what we think we believe, then we do not know if our beliefs aptly answer the questions of origin, meaning, morality or destiny, nor will we ever seek to see if truth could be better discovered elsewhere.  

What Rev. Jacob is Working On: I am dyslexic, I think. Something like that at least. I have always struggled with writing and grammar. If you have read enough of my blog posts, I am sure you have caught some of my mistakes. (And if you do, please feel free to point them out to me, I take no offense in my errors being noted). I try to edit as best I can, but things still squeeze through. Sometimes in my head I also mix-up words, and I end up reasoning an association or meaning to a word that I find out later other people do not share. I think apart of the reason I like apologetics, systematics, and a healthy does of philosophy next to my general faith life, is because I am so used to having to reevaluate what I believe and speak. I want to find a balance in being a welcoming person for people, where people can feel safe in what they believe, but also a place where people can come to have their beliefs challenged.   

Rev. Jacob’s Scripture time: 2 Corinthians 4:16-18

Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day. For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.

When we think of the architype of greed and power, if you are like me you may think of Ebenezer Scrooge or Mr. Burns from the Simpsons. Greedy and frail old men sitting on a pile of money alone and in the dark. Now hold onto that thought for a little while. Prior to covid-19 I would often go into seniors’ homes for visitation, often the people who were in the senior or care homes, who were the most joyous, were those who had a strong faith which they could articulate beyond a statement of “I have faith”. Often these people would have terrible health issues, chronic pain, and or worse, but their faith gave them joy. The reason the figure of Scrooge and Burns are so powerful of an image is because we all know we are going to die. Our outer man, our worldly bodies, are temporary. Since we need to sustain ourselves physically to maintain living, we need to gather resources, take on responsibility and limit needless suffering, thus we become cultivators of the material. However, if we do not have meaning connected to that cultivation, that cultivation will strip us of our truest value, our inner man (our spirit). The shrill businessman sitting on a pile of gold is a great example because their efforts in life were so focused on the material reality rather than the spiritual reality, all their efforts were in vain. Now the great thing about the inner man, is that inner spirit can be renewed at any point. You could be 110 years old, miserable, and loathing the world, but if you open yourself up to the renewal of Christ, then you will be born a new spirit. That is why the transformation of Scrooge is so powerful, the man at deaths door can come to salvation and find peace and rejoice, despite making every wrong turn up to that point. In Christ we have that mercy, like the criminal on the cross beside Jesus, we can come to God right before the curtain closes and welcome that gift.

In my opinion and going back to my opening statement at the beginning of this blog, the wonderful and unique thing about Christianity is that Jesus Christ is the answer full stop. Zacharias says this too. He notes that as Paul is speaking to the Athenians what we are trying to get across is that unique thing about Christianity is that God seeks us.

Yes, it is great to seek God, and we can do that in out mind, feelings and works but it is in welcoming of God’s seeking of us that we begin to walk into the realm of humility, justice, mercy, and salvation. This is what makes Christianity special in my opinion. If we do as the Athenians or as Scrooge did in their stories, and mark our success as what we could cultivate, what we could make, earn, and wonder, then what we are worshiping and believing in is ourselves over God. 

One final thought for today, does this mean that we should not aim to seek God, or do good works. Not at all, this is where we see the subtlety of the Christians faith as compared to others. We should do all these things because they are right. The practice of goodness should never be performed for reward, nor salvation. We should do all these things because our creator implores us to. We should do all these things because they orient us to the beauty of the spiritual kingdom of God. We should do these things to because responsibility is a part of what it means to see the face of God, and that Christ has come to us, we echo back in celebration the glory and the mercy he has bestowed to us. We do all these things because it is a faith lived out.

Closing Words: I hope you enjoyed and were lifted by this devotional time; it is enormously important to take time for God each day. By doing so, you welcome God into your life, and in turn you will be able to better see the world through the eyes of God, rather than God through the world's eyes.

Prayer for your day: God, our words and thoughts can be like a labyrinth of twists and turns, let alone the vast collection of idea within our world. Sometimes we need to pause and just look at You, look at Your glory, like a toddler looking back to their parent for assurance as the explore the terrain of a new world. Remind our spirits of Your presence, let us be aware that You are here, through Christ Jesus, living, loving and suffering along side us. And, if we just grab hold of that, the world, material and spiritual will become so much clearer. In Christ name, Amen.

Artistic Close: This image is immensely powerful, partly because God hand is extended to us. It reminds that what we are seeking is the One who seeks us first and always.

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[1] Please note that the nuances of what constitutes idolatry is heavily debated as well. For example, Iconography is also debated whether it should be considered idolatry. Because this is so layered, I would not take anything noted at face value, rather as a snippet encouraging you to dive deeper into your study.

[2]Please not the word discrimination is used in the traditional sense where you critically decide upon one verse enough because of a reasonable determination that one hold a better value to you verse another. We discriminate in our preferences for food, clothing, entertainment, friendships, family, lovers and more. Discrimination is about critical preference. There is an association with the words “discrimination and discriminate” which ties it to a hate crime or racism, this is by no mean the use of this word in my blog.