http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/14783018/why-do-we-call-jesus-the-son-of-god
John Piper is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books, including Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist and most recently Providence.
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Thomas Was Not Judas: Counsel for Those Who Doubt
What do you do when you are genuinely uncertain about your faith?
Some people deny that doubt can ever be sincere since general revelation makes God’s existence plain (Psalm 19:1; Romans 1:19). But the Bible nowhere promises that God will be equally clear to every person at every moment.
Faith often involves moments of angst. Some coming into Christianity struggle deeply before finally breaking through. Many believers experience the “dark night of the soul” — moments or even seasons of anguish when the sense of God’s presence is removed. Think of the many psalms of lament (e.g., Psalm 22; Psalm 88) or C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed. In my YouTube ministry, I’ve discovered that many younger people feel this way right now.
The world is filled with uncertainty and gnawing anxiety. Many people are open to believing in God, maybe even desiring to believe — but they still feel stuck in uncertainty. So, what do you do when your confidence about God is above 50 percent, but under 100 percent? Or how do you help a friend in this circumstance? Let me first offer some encouragement, and then some counsel.
Uncertainty Doesn’t Mean You’re Fake
In the church, we often struggle to know how to help doubters. Sometimes we give the impression that a genuine believer won’t have any doubts. But this approach doesn’t seem to be biblical. Some of the apostles themselves doubted — even while seeing the risen Jesus (Matthew 28:17)! And Jude 22 commands us to “have mercy on those who doubt.”
“God uses our uncertainty to produce humility in us, and along with it, an awareness of our need of God.”
If you struggle with doubts, remember: Thomas was not Judas. Thomas doubted, but Judas betrayed. These are not identical.
I do not say this to minimize the significance of your doubts. Some doubt is sinful, and almost all doubt is painful. In my observation, however, some believers are afflicted with an exquisite sense of shame and self-reproach about having doubts. As a result, they might keep them secret, and they might wonder if they don’t have true faith at all.
So, remember: genuine Christians in the Bible struggled with real doubt. And Thomas was not Judas. Don’t be harsher in evaluating your spiritual status than Scripture is. In fact, if we will continue to walk in the light to the best of our ability, God can actually use our uncertainty for good.
God Can Use Uncertainty for Good
There are many pieces of advice I give to those struggling with doubts. Having a friend to talk to is crucial, for example. So is keeping up spiritual disciplines (particularly prayer, Scripture reading, and corporate worship). Our spiritual life and our community powerfully shape and reinforce our beliefs. But here let me focus on one strategy that I believe is particularly neglected: we need to reflect theologically on our uncertainty. We need to develop a working framework for how to understand doubts and their role in our life.
When I was in college, I struggled with an acute sense of frustration at the uncertainty of life. I resonated with the emphasis in existential philosophy that we are hurled into existence, but simultaneously ill-equipped for existence. No one gives you an instruction manual when you are born!
One night in December 2005, I wrote this in my journal:
The only thing worse than the pain of life is its utter randomness. We are hurled into consciousness and struggle without any explanations or answers to accompany them. Life is like a test which we are forced to take, the answers to which are impossible for us to know. The blanks with which we fill in the questions of life are at best guesses, and usually merely unexamined prejudices. Life is like a battle which we are forced to fight, but the objective of which is unclear to us. We are hurled into the contest, but unsure of what is required of us. We sense that we must strive, but are unsure to what end we strive, or by what means. The great dilemma of life is not its failure or pain, but its uncertainty and chaos.
There was one thing, however, that never occurred to me: What if this very situation, and the struggle involved in it, has a purpose?
Pascal on the Hiddenness of God
A breakthrough came when I discovered that my struggle was not new. Some of the great Christian minds of the past had agonized over it. The great seventeenth-century thinker Blaise Pascal, for example, famously emphasized the hiddenness of God and the resulting anguish:
Nature has nothing to offer me that does not give rise to doubt and anxiety. If I saw no sign there of a Divinity I should decide on a negative solution: if I saw signs of a Creator everywhere I should peacefully settle down in the faith. But, seeing too much to deny and not enough to affirm, I am in a pitiful state. (Pensées 429, quoted in Christianity for Modern Pagans, 213)
But for Pascal, this very state of affairs exists for a reason. God uses our uncertainty to produce humility in us, and along with it, an awareness of our need of God: “It is not only right but useful for us that God should be partly concealed and partly revealed, since it is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his own wretchedness as to know his wretchedness without knowing God” (Pensées 446, 249).
According to this way of thinking, if God immediately answered our every doubt, this would not be productive for us. We might know God but relate to him in pride and complacency, which would not actually touch our area of need in relation to God — namely, our sin and resistance to him. As Pascal writes elsewhere, “God wishes to move the will rather than the mind. Perfect clarity would help the mind and harm the will” (Pensées 234, 247).
Light for Those Who Wish to See
I realize this idea can be frustrating for people to hear. But think about it: How do we know that certainty is what we really need? If we are brutally honest, we will probably realize that we often fail to act on what we do know. Perhaps the nature of God’s revelation — partially hidden, yet manifest through creation, conscience, and Christ — is actually best suited to our true condition.
After all, God is interested not only that we believe in him, but how we believe. If he overpowered our resistance with frequent overt miracles, this would probably result in a “thin theism”: we would begrudgingly admit his existence while wishing it were not so. Meanwhile, for those who seek God, God has not left himself without testimony. Pascal is helpful again:
If God had wished to overcome the obstinacy of the most hardened, he could have done so by revealing himself to them so plainly that they could not doubt the truth of his essence, as he will appear on the last day. . . . This is not the way he wished to appear when he came in mildness, because so many men had shown themselves unworthy of his clemency, that he wished to deprive them of the good they did not desire. There is enough light for those who desire only to see, and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition. (Pensées 149, 69)
Walk in the Light You Have
In the meantime, what should we do? Pascal counsels us to make a choice. Make the best decision we can in light of what we do know. Make a wholehearted existential commitment to the truth as best as we can see it, walking in whatever light God has granted us, trusting that the remaining darkness will not last forever — that in fact God is at work through it.
So, Christian reader, when you struggle with uncertainty, do not lose heart. Keep pressing forward. God is at work in the midst of your struggle — and he will faithfully sustain you until the day you stand before him, face to face, with all uncertainty left behind forever.
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When God Became Heaven for Me
The gospel is not a way to get people to heaven; it is a way to get people to God. (God Is the Gospel)
People often describe pivotal moments in their lives as “the day when God turned my world upside down.” Some experience, some conversation, some trial radically reshaped how they viewed themselves, their lives, their relationships, and the world around them. Well, in my sophomore year of college, God turned heaven upside down for me.
I grew up in a Christian home with loving Christian parents, and had been a Christian myself for a number of years at that point in college. I read the Bible and prayed most days. I was part of a faithful Bible-preaching church and was surrounded by mature and intentional Christian friends. I was even doing ministry among high school students, sharing the gospel and discipling them in the faith. And then, in a moment — in a sentence — God suddenly flooded the gospel with new meaning, new colors, new intensity and joy.
To draw me deeper into the gospel, though, God had to first confront me, but it was the sweetest kind of confrontation, the most satisfying kind of rebuke. The sentence tackled me where I sat and has never let me go.
Christ did not die to forgive sinners who go on treasuring anything above seeing and savoring God. And people who would be happy in heaven if Christ were not there, will not be there. The gospel is not a way to get people to heaven; it is a way to get people to God. (God Is the Gospel, 47)
Question for Our Generation
The gospel is the way to get people to God. The gospel is the way to get me to God. It was the kind of rare epiphany that is both devasting and thrilling. Devastating, because you realize just how much you’ve had wrong until now. Thrilling, because you have stumbled into a land you’d never seen before, an ocean you’d never sailed before, a favorite meal you’d never tasted before.
God is not just the only way to heaven; he is what makes heaven worth wanting. He is the great meal. He is the wild and wondrous ocean. He is the treasure hidden in the field and the pearl of great price (Matthew 13:44–46). John Piper presses home the surpassing gift of God himself with a haunting question:
The critical question for our generation — and for every generation — is this: If you could have heaven, with no sickness, and with all the friends you ever had on earth, and all the food you ever liked, and all the leisure activities you ever enjoyed, and all the natural beauties you ever saw, all the physical pleasures you ever tasted, and no human conflict or any natural disasters, could you be satisfied with heaven, if Christ were not there? (God Is the Gospel, 15)
“God is not just the only way to heaven; he is what makes heaven worth wanting.”
Could you?
Could I? That was the question that turned heaven on its head for me. Could I be content in a heaven without Christ? And if not, if Christ really was what made heaven an eternity worth wanting, why wasn’t I doing more to know and enjoy him now on earth?
Who Is Heaven?
“The gospel is not a way to get people to heaven; it is a way to get people to God.” But what does God say? Does he talk about himself, the gospel, and heaven that way?
The apostle Paul knew that God was the greatest gift of the gospel. “Whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him” (Philippians 3:7–9). The real treasure, the one that surpasses all others, is to know him, to gain him, to have him.
Why did Christ die on the cross? The apostle Peter says, “Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18). He suffered, bled, and died not just so that we might be forgiven and relieved of hell, but so that we might have God. The worst consequence of sin is not the fire, but the separation (2 Thessalonians 1:9). Hell will be agonizing and miserable for many reasons, but none more than being deprived of God himself. The damned will still experience the presence of God (Revelation 14:10), but it will be in horrifying wrath, rather than in grace and joy. They will never have God.
“The real treasure, the one that surpasses all others, is to know him, to gain him, to have him.”
The redeemed, however, sing, “I will go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy” (Psalm 43:4). “You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Psalm 16:11) — not only joys and pleasures beside him or around him, but above all, joy in him. He is the joy. He is the pleasure. His presence is paradise — and it would be so even if everything else we loved and wanted was taken away.
And, in Christ, we experience that presence in part even now. Yes, our remaining sin and the consequences of sin interfere with that experience, but when God is our joy, we taste real joy now. We savor pleasures in everyday life now, pleasures that will last forever. And so we pray prayers like Psalm 42: “As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God” — not for deliverance, or forgiveness, or healing, or provision, or relief, or reconciliation, but for you — “My soul thirsts for God, for the living God” (Psalm 42:1–2). Not for the good and perfect gifts God gives, but for the far better gift that God is.
Heaven of the New Heavens
As we wait and long for heaven, many of us have clung to promises like Revelation 21:4: “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” No more tears, no more death, no more mourning or crying or pain. We can hardly imagine the sweetness of these absences — a whole world without shadows.
Heaven, however, will not be defined by absences; paradise will be defined by an all-satisfying presence. When God becomes heaven for us, verse 3 rises and eclipses even the precious promises of verse 4:
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. . . . And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.”
What’s better than a world without sin, sorrow, and death? A world with God. Yes, he will wipe away our tears. Yes, he will heal our wounds and cure our diseases. Yes, he will finally do away with that awful enemy, death. But those blessings, while infinitely great, will be as puddles next to the ocean of having him and being his. A God capable of drying every tear under every eye will be our God. A God capable of curing every cancer will give himself to us — even us. A God capable of emptying graves and overthrowing death will live with us, and for us, forever.
Don’t let all that God can do for you blind you to all that he can be for you. Don’t spend so much time splashing in puddles that you never get to see the ocean. Don’t settle for any offer of heaven that doesn’t have him at the center.
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What Is the Futility of the Human Mind? Ephesians 4:17–24, Part 2
http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/14821305/what-is-the-futility-of-the-human-mind
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