The Gospel Coalition

“About six weeks ago, Mr. Ben Stein joined Dr. R.C. Sproul for a delightful and stimulating conversation about the current state of free scientific inquiry in academia.” Watch the video here.

(HT: Tim Challies)

Let’s face it—we live in a society fascinated with image and style. What we look like, sound like, and live like on the outside is very important to us. It’s important to us because pop-culture has convinced us that if we can “get it right” on the outside, all of our wildest dreams will come true. Three popular reality TV shows reflect this unadulterated fascination: Extreme Makeover (what we look like), American Idol (what we sound like), and Extreme Makeover Home Edition (what we live like).

There are many problems with our preoccupation with “style.” But perhaps the most detrimental one is that it leads very quickly to a restless, substance-less existence.

The greatest men and women in history have always been more preoccupied with substance (what’s on the inside) than style (what’s on the outside). Someone once said that the difference between image and character is just this: image is who people think you are; character is who you really are. In other words, image has everything to do with what’s on the outside (style), character has everything to do with what’s on the inside (substance). Os Guinness once defined character this way:

Character is the inner form that makes anyone or anything what it is—whether a person, a wine, or a historical period. Thus character is clearly distinct from such concepts as personality, image, reputation, or celebrity. Character is the essential “stuff” a person is made of.

This means that our fascination with image and style has nothing to do with being truly human. It has nothing to do with who we really are. A few years back even shock-rocker Marilyn Manson had enough sense to speak of how silly our fascination with image is in his song “Beautiful People.” Real life—true humanness—consists in so much more than what we look like, sound like, and live like. We are, according to Psalm 139:14, “fearfully and wonderfully made.” The reason we move restlessly from one image to the next and one trend to the next, is because deep inside we know there has to be more to life than style. Our souls cry out for substance. Because all human beings were made in the image of God, we know intuitively that we were created and designed for dignity, not vanity; substance, not style. “We were”, according to the rock band Switchfoot, “made to live for so much more”, but in our pursuit of image and style, we have lost ourselves. And as a result, we are restless, characterless, and understandably unsatisfied.

The good news, however, is that we need not remain lost and unsatisfied. Proverbs 3:5-6 says, “trust in the Lord with all your heart (the inside stuff) and lean not on your own understanding (the outside stuff). In all your ways acknowledge him and he will direct your paths.” This is where real life—true character—begins!

Os Guinness was recently interviewed for a full hour on C-Span Washington Journal about his new must read book, A Case For Civilty. You can watch the whole interview here.

Christ, the Lord, is risen today, Alleluia!
Sons of men and angels say, Alleluia!
Raise your joys and triumphs high, Alleluia!
Sing, ye heavens, and earth, reply, Alleluia!

Love’s redeeming work is done, Alleluia!
Fought the fight, the battle won, Alleluia!
Lo! the Sun’s eclipse is over, Alleluia!
Lo! He sets in blood no more, Alleluia!

Vain the stone, the watch, the seal, Alleluia!
Christ hath burst the gates of hell, Alleluia!
Death in vain forbids His rise, Alleluia!
Christ hath opened paradise, Alleluia!

Lives again our glorious King, Alleluia!
Where, O death, is now thy sting? Alleluia!
Once He died our souls to save, Alleluia!
Where thy victory, O grave? Alleluia!

Soar we now where Christ hath led, Alleluia!
Following our exalted Head, Alleluia!
Made like Him, like Him we rise, Alleluia!
Ours the cross, the grave, the skies, Alleluia!

Hail, the Lord of earth and Heaven, Alleluia!
Praise to Thee by both be given, Alleluia!
Thee we greet triumphant now, Alleluia!
Hail, the resurrection, thou, Alleluia!

King of glory, Soul of bliss, Alleluia!
Everlasting life is this, Alleluia!
Thee to know, Thy power to prove, Alleluia!
Thus to sing and thus to love, Alleluia!

Hymns of praise then let us sing, Alleluia!
Unto Christ, our heavenly King, Alleluia!
Who endured the cross and grave, Alleluia!
Sinners to redeem and save. Alleluia!

But the pains that He endured, Alleluia!
Our salvation have procured, Alleluia!
Now above the sky He’s King, Alleluia!
Where the angels ever sing. Alleluia!

Jesus Christ is risen today, Alleluia!
Our triumphant holy day, Alleluia!
Who did once upon the cross, Alleluia!
Suffer to redeem our loss. Alleluia!

–Charles Wesley

Please read this excellent article by the Founder and Director of Ransom Fellowship, Denis Haack. If you are unfamiliar with Denis or Ransom Fellowship, please familiarize yourself with both. Denis has been an astute cultural commentator for many years and his insights are always rich, devotional, and worldview expanding.

Justin Buzzard (a last name almost as bad as mine) posts on Tim Keller’s recent talk he gave at Google. You can watch the video of that talk here.

Kim Lawton of Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly recently interviewed cultural critic Dick Staub about his most recent book The Culturally Savvy Christian. I found one of his answers to be especially interesting. Kim asked, “How should I identify you religiously?” His answer was: 

[I am] a follower of Jesus. But here’s my basic theology in a nutshell: [Dutch scholar] Hans Rookmaaker said Jesus didn’t come to make us Christian, he came to make us fully human, and I think a full human being is a human being that is intellectually, spiritually, creatively, morally, and relationally alive, and the reason I think America is superficial both in its religion and its popular culture is I think we’re intellectually, spiritually, creatively, morally, and relationally superficial, and we were made for something more. So the idea of discovering what it means to be fully human is, I think, what Jesus was about, more than simply are you a Christian or not, and when we think in terms of Christian and not Christian, then we start thinking of Christians as just another voting bloc or another purchasing power, instead of people who like every other human being want to experience a fully human life.

You can read the whole interview here, but I would also love to know what you think about his answer.

Tim Challies reviews Bart Ehrman’s new book God’s Problem. Dr. Ehrman, a once professing Christian who is now a pronounced agnostic, is a New Testament scholar who chairs the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Tim says:

He states, for example, that even many years after leaving the faith, the possibility of hell continues to trouble him and that there are still nights where he wakes up in a cold sweat. He writes as well of how much he misses being able to offer thanks for all the good things in his life. As an agnostic he has no one to whom he can offer thanks and this is clearly a sad void in his life. There is something almost tragic in reading about his life after God.

Read the whole review here.

Here are some priceless quotes from C.S. Lewis on atheism. Although I have seen every one of these sentences before in their original contexts, I have to thank the most recent issue of Modern Reformation magazine for pulling them all together:

“Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning.”

“When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all.”

“Now that I am a Christian I do not have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable.”

“I believe in God as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

“A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic–on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg–or he would be the devil of hell. You must take your choice. Either this was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.”

The American Heritage Dictionary defines the word “luck” this way: “the chance happening of fortunate or adverse events.” At first glance this concise definition may seem helpful and harmless. But, in reality, it is neither. In fact, if someone would have told my wife on February 4, 1999 that her father’s untimely death was nothing more and nothing less then a “chance happening of an adverse event”, she would have felt both un-helped and harmed. She would not have been comforted or consoled in the slightest. To really believe that her dad’s passing was simply a stroke of “bad luck” would have been debilitating to her. In that moment, what she needed to know with complete certainty was that there was something, Someone, above and beyond “chance”, guiding and directing this heartbreaking event toward some ultimately good end. She needed to know that, even though this painful episode was impossible to understand or explain, there was purpose and meaning behind it. Luck, by definition, can provide neither.

Both the Old Testament and the New Testament make it very clear that there is no such thing as “chance” or “luck.” These are simply words that many attach to circumstances they cannot understand; circumstances that they know lie outside of their control. To say that someone “got lucky” or experienced “bad luck” simply means that something good or bad happened to this person that we cannot understand or explicate. Thankfully, the Bible gives us much more than this. It reveals a personal God who has always been and will always be in full control of all he has made. He is the King of creation who exercises power over all things. The Bible discloses a God who is both absolutely sovereign and absolutely good. He does not always explain his actions (he is under no obligation to do so), but he does make it clear that he has a perfect plan and he will work out every detail of that plan to completion. We have to remember that because we are both finite and sinful, we cannot fully understand or rightly interpret all of God’s ways. God’s ways are higher than our ways and his thoughts higher than our thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9). God has his secret purposes (Deut. 29:29) that we are never great enough to see, but the Judge of all the earth always does right (Genesis 18:25). This is our only source of hope and calm in times of crisis.

Amidst her pain, pain she had never felt this deeply before, my wife found intense comfort in the fact that, behind the tragedy of her father’s death, there was a trustworthy God who is always in complete control. Furthermore, she was reassured that, for all those who have found forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ, nothing is ever in the grip of blind forces (chance, luck, fate), but always in the hands of a loving heavenly Father. To this day, the truth that gets her through is the truth spelled out beautifully in William Cowper’s hymn, “God Moves in Mysterious Ways”: “Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, but trust him for his grace; behind a frowning providence God hides a smiling face.” Amen.