Man is Greater Than the Angels
God in making us out of nothing for the glory of His name has provided for His covenant children something they could never do for themselves. If that is not worth praising the LORD in worship, in our lives, and by laying all things at His feet than we’ve missed the point of the Gospel.
Today in our lesson from the Larger Catechism we are continuing to learn about the nature of God’s grace in His work of making all things of nothing. I think sometimes we gloss over just how incomprehensible it is that our Lord has taken that which does not exist and made it to be. The very fact you are reading this and I am typing this is wholly because God is God and we are not. Our totality is dependent on the nature of Jehovah. It’s part of why we must be obedient unto Him in love. We owe everything to Him and as Stephen Charnock makes clear we become practical atheists when we sin primarily because we act as if we can live without and against the world He has made. That is why it is vital for the Christian to be grounded in the work of creation and worship at the opening chapters of Genesis as God reveals Himself to us in His labors in the space of six days. Likewise there is an important distinction, as we touched on last week, between angels and man. It is not just false, but demonstrably so that we become angels, for our Lord has constituted a difference between us in the very first moment of our being made. Angels are made to worship, to “execute His commandments”, but they are not made in His image. There are all kinds of ways that reality informs our lives. Why do we protect life for instance? Because all human beings are made in God’s image and worthy of service. Before we get too much more into that let us go ahead and take a look at our LC Q/A’s for today:
Q. 15. What is the work of creation?
A. The work of creation is that wherein God did in the beginning, by the word of his power, make of nothing the world, and all things therein, for Himself, within the space of six days, and all very good.
Q. 16. How did God create angels?
A. God created all the angels, spirits, immortal, holy, excelling in knowledge, mighty in power, to execute His commandments, and to praise His name, yet subject to change.
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Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age
The heart of the book is comprised of five chapters that each address a different digital liturgy. Here James means to help us understand both the content our technologies are preaching to us and the ideologies they are fostering within us. “The question is not, Is this technology shaping me right now? The question is, How is this technology shaping me right now?” And so he writes at some length about authenticity, outrage, shame, consumption, and meaninglessness—each of them a readily identifiable aspect of life online.
There are books you may be drawn to, but probably do not actually need to read. (Seriously, at some point you need to stop reading books about methods of prayer and just pray!) Then there are other books you may not be particularly drawn to but probably ought to read. Among these are books on technology, and especially the new digital technologies that have come to dominate our lives. I’d wager that your phone is in your hand at least several hours every day; I’d wager that you are on social media at least every few hours, often without even thinking about it; I’d wager that you communicate with others through your devices on a near-constant basis. Would it not be important to do some reading about these technologies, about how they are functioning in society and the church, and about how they may be quietly transforming you? What else could form such an important part of our lives yet receive so little attention?
Samuel James’ Digital Liturgies is meant to help you think about these technologies and the social internet they enable. For these are not harmless or inconsequential tools. Neither can they be exactly compared to any tools that we have previously experienced in human history, for they alone provide a “disembodied electronic environment that we enter through connected devices for the purpose of accessing information, relationships, and media that are not available to us in a physical format.” Our use of these technologies and our increasing immersion in them essentially brings us into a whole new kind of world in which we leave aside so much of what makes us who we are.
“Rather than being a neutral tool, the internet (particularly the social internet) is an epistemological environment—a spiritual and intellectual habitat—that creates in its members particular ways of thinking, feeling, and believing. It’s true in one sense that the web is a tool that responds to its users’ desires.
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The Moral Decline of Elite Universities
Harvard, Princeton, and Yale were originally founded as seminaries. They are seminaries once again. The doctrine they embrace is both insecure and oppressive in its prohibition of insiders and outsiders from pursuing free inquiry. Rather than wrestle with hard questions about human dignity, individual agency, and speech, many in the Ivy League seem poised to double down on fanaticism. Cults tend to excuse their failures: The world is ending, but our mystic math was a little off. As this crisis unfolds, America’s elite academics are tinkering with their doctrinal formulas. Rather than abandon their theology, they’re attempting to rejigger the charts and reweight the numerology.
In the spring of 1994, the top executives of the seven largest tobacco companies testified under oath before Congress that nicotine is not addictive. Nearly 30 years later, Americans remember their laughable claims, their callous indifference, their lawyerly inability to speak plainly, and the general sense that they did not regard themselves as part of a shared American community. Those pampered executives, behaving with such Olympian detachment, put the pejorative big in Big Tobacco.
Last week, something similar happened. Thirty years from now, Americans will likely recall a witness table of presidents—representing not top corporations in one single sector, but the nation’s most powerful educational institutions—refusing to speak plainly, defiantly rejecting any sense that they are part of a “we,” and exhibiting smug moralistic certainty even as they embraced bizarrely immoral positions about anti-Semitism and genocide.
Despite the stylistic similarity of these two images, they had a substantive distinction. Yes, both sets of presidents sat atop sectors experiencing a collapse of public trust. Higher education commanded the confidence of 57 percent of Americans a mere eight years ago, but only 36 percent of Americans by this summer, and a steeper decline is likely coming as a consequence of the grotesqueries of the past two months. And yes, both sets of testimonies—of the tobacco executives, and the elite-education executives—revealed a deep moral decline inside their respective cultures. But here’s a difference: The tobacco executives were lying, and subsequent legal discovery showed how extensive their understanding of nicotine was. The three university presidents, however—with their moral confusion on naked display—were likely not lying; instead, we saw a set of true believers in a new kind of religion.
It is important to note that the three presidents who testified before Congress—Liz Magill, who subsequently resigned as president of the University of Pennsylvania; Sally Kornbluth, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Claudine Gay, of Harvard University—didn’t open themselves up to perjury charges. Instead, they revealed themselves as having drunk the Kool-Aid of a new and cultlike worldview. Along with so much of higher education, especially outside the hardest of sciences, they have become acolytes of a shallow new theology called “intersectionality.” This is neither a passing fad nor something that normies can roll our eyes at and ignore. As Andrew Sullivan presciently predicted a mere six years ago, the tenets of this all-encompassing ideology have quickly spilled beyond trendy humanities departments at top-30 universities, and its self-appointed priestly class tried tirelessly to enforce its ideology.
At root, intersectionality teaches that the relative victim status of various groups is the deepest truth, and this framework must drive our interpretation of both natural and built reality. Truth, moral claims, beauty, dignity, the explanatory value of a research insight—all of these must be subjugated to a prior determination of the historical power or powerlessness of certain sociological categories. This victimology decrees that the world, and every institution therein, must be divided by the awakened into categories of oppressors and oppressed. Immutable group identities, rather than the qualities, hopes, and yearnings of individuals, are the keys to unlocking the power structures behind any given moment: All the sheep and goats must be sorted.
The bullying certainty of this belief system is indeed boring, but that is not to say that every move is predictable. For instance, depending on their skin tone, sexual orientation, or religious views, tenured Ivy Leaguers earning five times the median American income may be categorized as oppressed. Conversely, depending on their skin tone, sexual orientation, or religious views, janitors at Walmart may be considered, within the intersectionality matrix, to be irredeemable oppressors.
By way of disclosure: I am a university president turned United States senator turned university president again. The institution I now lead, the University of Florida, faces all sorts of challenges, and Florida is the site of important battles about the responsibilities of academia to our society. As a public university, our incredibly talented and dedicated faculty aim to provide an elite education that promotes resilience and strength in our students so that they are tough enough, smart enough, and compassionate enough to engage big ideas in a world where people will always disagree.
Growing up, I idolized Martin Luther King Jr., who championed universal human dignity with clear-cut moral authority. From memory, writing in a jail cell in Birmingham, he synthesized, refined, and applied the Western canon’s greatest philosophers, from Socrates to Abraham Lincoln, to America’s predicament. While damning the original sin of white supremacy, he consistently offered hope that our country could overcome injustice with love. It’s gut-wrenching to think that America’s greatest civil-rights leader—one of the greatest Americans in the country’s entire history—would have his “Letter From Birmingham Jail” criticized and dismissed for citing only dead white males if it were written today. Too much of elite academia cares little for universal human dignity, leaves no space for forgiveness, and exhibits no interest in shared progress.
Today, free will, individual agency, forgiveness, personal improvement, and healthy cultural cross-pollination are all obliterated by omnipotent determinisms. This is why academics at the Smithsonian created a graphic for children that portrayed America as an irredeemably racist society, asserting that “rugged individualism,” “the nuclear family,” and “hard work” are “internalized … aspects of white culture.” The message is clear: Success is always a privilege given, never the result of hard work; virtues such as self-reliance are unattainable for minorities.
These elites believe that the world must be remade. Since the beginning of time, oppressors—the “privileged”—ran roughshod over the oppressed or marginalized. Now oppressors must be brought low to atone for history’s sins. It is a faith without guardrails, without grace, and certainly without reconciliation. It requires a life of moral struggle against the devil and the world, but with no eschatology of hope. There is no heaven coming here.
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The Poetry of Jesus in “The Rich Man and Lazarus”
Jesus continues His use of the foil technique in the second scene of the parable. Both characters have died, and their positions begin to invert. The Rich Man is “buried” while the Lazarus is “carried by angels” (22). The Rich man, who once enjoyed a life of comfort, is in Hades in torment. Whereas Lazarus is now at Abraham’s side enjoying heavenly prosperity. (23). Remarkably, we see that the Rich Man has now become the beggar, asking for a single drop of water to cool his tongue (24). Jesus’ ability to teach in parable and via contrast is brilliant.
For centuries, scholars have debated whether Jesus’ story of the Rich Man and Lazarus is a parable or an account of a true, historical narrative. Thankfully, regardless of whichever side of the fence one falls on, it doesn’t change the clarity or the message of the story. Both hermeneutical approaches yield clear warnings about the eternal consequences of sin and the hope we have in the gospel, as preserved in Holy Scripture. Truly, the perspicuity of God’s Word is a gift to His people!
One of the primary arguments of those who hold to the historical narrative point of view is that Jesus uses specific names in the text. Such is not the case for Jesus’ other parables. Instead of proper names, characters are usually given descriptive archetype titles such as “The Dishonest Manager” or “The Prodigal Son”. The giving of proper names is a compelling argument for this historical point of view. Yet, despite this fact, I still hold firmly to the notion that this story is indeed a parable. Why? Because of Jesus’ spectacular use of poetry. This has been overlooked by some commentators. One of the amazing things about studying scripture is that highlights the infinite breadth and brilliance of Jesus.
The Juxtaposition of Characters
Juxtaposition is a powerful communication tool. By contrasting two, unlike things, we glean more than looking at these things by themselves. This is exactly what Jesus uses in the parable of The Rich Man and Lazarus. The two characters rely on each other to teach the message of the parable. Notice that while Jesus never directly condemns the Rich Man’s actions, He manages to effectively build a case against him by holding him up against his counterpart, Lazarus. Truly, this is brilliant storytelling. Writers sometimes refer to this type of juxtaposition as a “foil”. Meaning, that the two main characters and their qualities are only rightly understood when they’re placed side-by-side.
Jesus tells us that the rich man is clothed “in purple and fine linen” and that he “feasted sumptuously every day” (Luke 16:19). How about Lazarus? Comparatively, Jesus tells us that instead of being covered with clothes, he is covered with “sores”, and that instead of feasting he is starving. It says he “desired to bed fed with what fell from the rich man’s table” (16:21). The Rich Man’s behavior, when isolated, is hardly compelling. Yet with the juxtaposition and plight of Lazarus, the heinousness of the Rich Man’s crime is displayed. He is a self-absorbed man who lacks compassion and kindness.
I’m reminded of Proverbs 14:31, which reads, “Whoever oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God.” The Rich Man has greatly neglected his poor neighbor and his conduct has shown contempt for God. The Rich Man has sinned against a holy and just God.
The depth of the crime is emphasized when Jesus adds the interesting element of the dogs in verse 21. Jesus says, “Moreover, even the dogs came and licked his sores” (16:21). In this culture, dogs were viewed as little more than troublesome scavengers. The Jews looked with disdain upon dogs; they were among the dregs of animals. Again, Jesus uses distinction to point out how wicked the Rich Man was. The detestable dogs demonstrate more kindness and compassion towards Lazarus than him.
Jesus continues His use of the foil technique in the second scene of the parable. Both characters have died, and their positions begin to invert. The Rich Man is “buried” while the Lazarus is “carried by angels” (22). The Rich man, who once enjoyed a life of comfort, is in Hades in torment. Whereas Lazarus is now at Abraham’s side enjoying heavenly prosperity. (23). Remarkably, we see that the Rich Man has now become the beggar, asking for a single drop of water to cool his tongue (24). Jesus’ ability to teach in parable and via contrast is brilliant. In just a handful of verses, largely via juxtaposition, Jesus paints a poignant picture of two men, their lives, and their eternal states.
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