Month: March 2024

Our faith isn’t always tested in the good times; our faith is tested during trials and times of challenge.

When we ask, “Where are you, God?” and hear crickets chirping, that’s when we’re left to decide. Will we believe anyway–cultivating a more mature faith? Or will we decide He’s not there, falling back on all the voices we’ve heard in the past?

Sometimes we can see the temptation at work in these moments; sometimes we can’t. We take forward steps and backward steps (and side steps and missteps), but we’re growing when our number of forward steps become greater.

Taking that forward step is your faith in action.

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1. Angels are personal beings:

(a) They have intellect (Matt.28:5; 1 Pet.1:12).

(b) They have emotions (Job 38:7; Luke 2:13; 15:10)

(c) They have will (Jude 6).

2. Angels are spirit beings:

(a) They exist as spirits – not with material bodies (Heb. 1:14).

(b) An angel can be in only one place at one time (Dan.9:21-23; 10:10-14)

(c) Although they are spirit beings, they can appear in the form of men (in dreams – Matt.1:20; in natural sight with human functions – Gen.18: 1-8; 22: 19:1; seen by some and not others – 2 Kings 6:15-17).

(d) They cannot reproduce (Mark 12:25).

(e) They do not die (Luke 20:36).

3. Angels have communicable attributes in a degree greater than man but less than God:

(a) Angels are more knowledge than man (Matt.24:31; Luke 1:13-16) but less than God (Matt.24:36).

(b) Angels have more power than man (2 Pet.2:11; acts 5:19) but less than God.

4. Angels are organized and ranked.  One “archangel,” Michael is named (Jude 1:9).   There are also “chief princes” (Dan.10:13), “seraphim” (Is.6:1-3) and “cherubim” (Gen.3:22-24).

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In good times it’s easy to talk about faith. It’s easy to see why we believe and encourage others to “keep the faith” when they’re feeling down. But what about periods of prolonged suffering or surprise attacks?

How do we keep the faith in tough times?

I pondered this question just yesterday. After a long stint of peace and tranquility, yesterday proved challenging with flaring emotions, less-than-graceful communication and the temptation to — yet again — go over details.

Even with all the reading, all the praying and all the practice of trying to stay peaceful, yesterday was overwhelming, and I found myself begging God to drop me a line.

Nothing happened.

I prayed over and over for Him to bring relief and change the scene. Nothing. I felt discouraged, depressed… and impatient. Why wasn’t He answering my prayers? Why wasn’t He showing Himself? And then I remembered something: We grow in our faith, and it takes time. The struggle strengthens us.

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Posted on 23 Apr 2012 by Truth in Reality

I.  The Existence of Angels

1.  The Bible assumes the existence of angels:

(a) 34 books – of 66 – in total refer to angels.

(b) Christ taught their existence (Matt.8:10; 24:31; 26:53 etc.).

2.  The Bible describes their creation:

(a) Angels were created by God (Ps.148:2,5; Col.1:16).  Only God had no beginning (1 Tim.6:16).

(b) Angels were created before the world and man (Job 38:6,7).

(c) Angels were created holy (Ezek.28:15; Jude 6).

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Similarly the challenge to assess the Toronto Blessing by its fruits can be met. We need to take seriously Jesus’ warning about the plausibility of false versions of Christianity: “For false Christs and false prophets will arise and show great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect” (Matt 24:24).

But again, as one writer has already observed, it is difficult to assess a movement by its fruits when the fruit is still green. How difficult can be seen in the case of the Quakers, who were people of strong Christian conviction and powerful social witness in their day. Today, however, Quakerism is the refuge of those who want not merely a religionless but a doctrine-less Christianity.

And yet it could be argued that the long-term decline of Quakerism was inherent in its early doctrine. We must recognize from history that a movement may have a powerful – even beneficial – impact in the short term and yet be disastrous in the long term because of its fundamental theological weaknesses.

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Finally, Lewis warns that inattention is the greatest enemy to the pleasures of God because, over time, we fail to see what we see. Like an old bungee cord, our senses become slack — our vision veiled by familiarity. What we once enjoyed with assiduous attentiveness soon fades to the background like art on a hallway wall. Traherne warns us, “The most beautiful object being always present, grows common and despised. . . . Were we to see it only once, that first appearance would amaze us. But being daily seen, we observe it not” (65). In our fallen state, the current of human sensibility ever drifts toward this negligence.

Let me try to prove this. Have you walked past a tree today? Did you see it? If you’re like me, you didn’t even notice. But what a fantastic work of the triune imagination. This star-powered wood-tower becomes a pillar of Eden in summer, a heaven-high flower in fall, a snow-robed statue in winter, and a living signpost of hope in spring. Just imagine a world without trees! Yet we observe them not.

Just here, the poets are so helpful because, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge explains, poetry aims to “give the charm of novelty to things of every day . . . by awakening the mind’s attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us, an inexhaustible treasure” (Biographia Literaria, 208). Poetry — perhaps preeminently — arrests our attention and helps us savor the pleasures of God.

The Psalms do this so well. These inspired poets awaken us to men that bear fruit like trees (Psalm 1:3), to the sun that runs across the sky like a giddy bridegroom (Psalm 19:5), to the moon and sundry stars that hold court at night (Psalm 136:9), to wind heaped up in heavenly storehouses (Psalm 135:7), and, of course, to the sea, that fathomless playground of Leviathan (Psalm 104:26). In this theatre of glory, we shall never starve for want of wonders. If we had but Spirit-opened eyes, we would out-awe the angels. “The real labor,” according to Lewis, “is to remember, to attend. In fact, to come awake. Still more, to remain awake” (Letters to Malcolm, 101).

The pleasures of God are good — in the full, fat, dripping sense of the word — but they require work. Joy is indeed a difficult discipline. Greed, self-centeredness, and the relentless pull of inattention constantly creep in and cut us off from divine delights. Therefore, Traherne exhorts us, “Apply yourself vigorously to the enjoyment of [God’s world]” (63).

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According to Lewis, the wrong kind of attention also distracts us from the pleasures of God. He explains that this kind of attention subjectifies pleasures. It turns from the sunrise (the object) to try to see what’s happening in me (the subject).

We’ve all had the experience of turning inward to grasp a feeling only to have it slip through our fingers. I suspect this dynamic is often at the root when Christians struggle with assurance. A saint looks inward to find evidence of faith and discovers faded footprints in the sand because his gaze has left the object of faith. He has ceased to attend to Christ.

Pleasures, just like faith, are object dependent. When you stop looking at the sunrise to ask, Am I really enjoying it? you lose the whole pith and pleasure of the sunrise. Thus, self-focus, the wrong kind of attention, can gut the pleasures of God. This scoliosis of the soul can be traced right back to the garden, which led the ancients to call man homo incurvatus in se — man bent in on himself. So, how do we become unbent?

Ultimately, only the Spirit of God can rip our attention off self and rivet it on God. But Traherne provides a way to act that miracle: lose your “self” in wonder. “When you enter into [God’s world],” Traherne writes, “it is an illimited field of Variety and Beauty: where you may lose yourself in the multitude of Wonders and Delights. But it is a happy loss to lose oneself in admiration . . . and to find God in exchange for oneself, which we then do when we see Him in His gifts, and adore His glory” (9). Childlike wonder crowds out selfishness and makes room for divine pleasures to enchant us to God.

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Lewis starts with low-hanging fruit: greed. Why? Because greed corrupts the pleasures of God by seizing them in degrees, times, or manners outside of God’s design. We are all prone to wander into those wonderless sins.

Greed is a scaly beast. It stashes and hoards and sleeps on treasure. Greed is always hungry, always demanding more. Lewis calls this the demand of Encore. That fatal word encore knows no boundaries. It recognizes no proper times or rhythms. It always overeats. It loves to say “just one more.”

Unfortunately, almost all of our consumer society aims to allow us to demand encore in a voice that cannot be gainsaid. And the dragon fusses — and fusses loudly — if the demand is denied. Yet Lewis doubts that God ever fulfills this desire for encore. “How should the Infinite repeat Himself? All space and time are too little for Him to utter Himself in them once” (35). Ironically, the demand for encore is too easily pleased! God wants to give more than we desire to get. How many present pleasures do we render rotten by demanding again and again what God once gave?

But greed does not always announce itself in fire and destruction. Perhaps the sneakiest form of greed comes when we use God’s gifts without enjoying them for what they are, giving no heed to what Lewis called “the quiddity” of things (Surprised by Joy, 244). When we indulge this form of greed, we force honey to school us about wisdom without ever actually tasting the honey-ness of honey (Proverbs 24:13–14). We order birds to soothe our anxiety without ever delighting in bird-ish beauty (Luke 12:24). We close the sun into the classroom of theology without ever basking in his sunny glory or his Eric-Liddell-like delight (Psalm 19:5). We should delight that things are before we seek to use them. As Chesterton once said, we must take fierce pleasure in things being themselves. Here there be pleasures the dragon never knows.

God is eternally, graciously, stunningly generous with his pleasures. The daily sunrise says so. And as Thomas Traherne — who was one of Lewis’s great inspirations — points out in his book Centuries, we are not yet nearly as happy as he means us to be. What an antidote to sticky fingers, the itch for encore, and the pragmatic misuse of God’s good gifts!

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