Elisha, God’s Servant, is Dead
Let us answer the call of the Lord, serve our neighbors with love, and fear, trust, and love the Lord above all else. Then, we shall take up the mantle of Elisha, answer the call of the Lord, carry out the work of the Lord, and hear at the end of our days, just as certainly Elisha heard, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”
Then Elisha died, and they buried him. And the raiding bands from Moab invaded the land in the spring of the year.
II Kings 13:20 NKJV
During a recent sermon on Isaiah 38 and the sickness of Hezekiah, our church was reminded of the reality of death for the enemies of God as well as for the friends of God. “Death spread to all men, because all sinned.” With only two exceptions among mortal men, Enoch and Elijah, all who ever lived eventually died. Where are Abraham, Sarah, Moses, Joshua, Rehab, David, Jeremiah, Esther, Daniel, Peter, Mary, John, Paul, and the whole host of Bible era saints? They are not with us for they have gone to sleep in the Lord. They have died. Likewise, Elisha, faithful servant of God for more than sixty years, eyewitness to the great miracles of God in Israel, preacher of the Word of God, defeater of the Syrian armies, counsellor to kings, watchman over the church of the Lord is not with us for Elisha died, and they buried him.
The death of a faithful example in the faith should cause us to analyze our own lives. The Lord has appointed for men once to die and afterward the judgment. The Day of the Lord is hastening on.
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Growing My Faith in the Face of Death
I found that to embrace God’s greatness, to say “Thy will be done,” was painful at first and then, perhaps counterintuitively, profoundly liberating.
I have spent a good part of my life talking with people about the role of faith in the face of imminent death. Since I became an ordained Presbyterian minister in 1975, I have sat at countless bedsides, and occasionally even watched someone take their final breath. I recently wrote a small book, On Death, relating a lot of what I say to people in such times. But when, a little more than a month after that book was published, I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, I was still caught unprepared.
On the way home from a conference of Asian Christians in Kuala Lumpur in February 2020, I developed an intestinal infection. A scan at the hospital showed what looked like enlarged lymph nodes in my abdomen: No cause for concern, but come back in three months just to check. My book was published. And then, while all of us in New York City were trying to protect ourselves from COVID-19, I learned that I already had an agent of death growing inside me.
I spent a few harrowing minutes looking online at the dire survival statistics for pancreatic cancer, and caught a glimpse of On Death on a table nearby. I didn’t dare open it to read what I’d written.
My wife, Kathy, and I spent much time in tears and disbelief. We were both turning 70, but felt strong, clear-minded, and capable of nearly all the things we have done for the past 50 years. “I thought we’d feel a lot older when we got to this age,” Kathy said. We had plenty of plans and lots of comforts, especially our children and grandchildren. We expected some illness to come and take us when we felt really old. But not now, not yet. This couldn’t be; what was God doing to us? The Bible, and especially the Psalms, gave voice to our feelings: “Why, O Lord, do you stand far off?” “Wake up, O Lord. Why are you sleeping?” “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?”
A significant number of believers in God find their faith shaken or destroyed when they learn that they will die at a time and in a way that seems unfair to them. Before my diagnosis, I had seen this in people of many faiths. One woman with cancer told me years ago, “I’m not a believer anymore—that doesn’t work for me. I can’t believe in a personal God who would do something like this to me.” Cancer killed her God.
What would happen to me? I felt like a surgeon who was suddenly on the operating table. Would I be able to take my own advice?
One of the first things I learned was that religious faith does not automatically provide solace in times of crisis. A belief in God and an afterlife does not become spontaneously comforting and existentially strengthening. Despite my rational, conscious acknowledgment that I would die someday, the shattering reality of a fatal diagnosis provoked a remarkably strong psychological denial of mortality. Instead of acting on Dylan Thomas’s advice to “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” I found myself thinking, What? No! I can’t die. That happens to others, but not to me. When I said these outrageous words out loud, I realized that this delusion had been the actual operating principle of my heart.
The cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker argued that the denial of death dominates our culture, but even if he was right that modern life has heightened this denial, it has always been with us. As the 16th-century Protestant theologian John Calvin wrote, “We undertake all things as if we were establishing immortality for ourselves on earth. If we see a dead body, we may philosophize briefly about the fleeting nature of life, but the moment we turn away from the sight the thought of our own perpetuity remains fixed in our minds.” Death is an abstraction to us, something technically true but unimaginable as a personal reality.
For the same reason, our beliefs about God and an afterlife, if we have them, are often abstractions as well. If we don’t accept the reality of death, we don’t need these beliefs to be anything other than mental assents. A feigned battle in a play or a movie requires only stage props. But as death, the last enemy, became real to my heart, I realized that my beliefs would have to become just as real to my heart, or I wouldn’t be able to get through the day. Theoretical ideas about God’s love and the future resurrection had to become life-gripping truths, or be discarded as useless.
I’ve watched many others partake of this denial of death and then struggle when their convictions evaporate, and not just among the religious. I spent time as a pastor with sick and dying people whose religious faith was nominal or nonexistent. Many had a set of beliefs about the universe, even if they went largely unacknowledged—that the material world came into being on its own and that there is no supernatural world we go to after death. Death, in this view, is simply nonexistence, and therefore, as the writer Julian Barnes has argued, nothing to be frightened of. These ideas are items of faith that can’t be proved, and people use them as Barnes does, to stave off fear of death. But I’ve found that nonreligious people who think such secular beliefs will be comforting often find that they crumple when confronted by the real thing.
So when the certainty of your mortality and death finally breaks through, is there a way to face it without debilitating fear? Is there a way to spend the time you have left growing into greater grace, love, and wisdom? I believe there is, but it requires both intellectual and emotional engagement: head work and heart work.
I use the terms head and heart to mean reasoning and feeling, adapting to the modern view that these two things are independent faculties. The Hebrew scriptures, however, see the heart as the seat of the mind, will, and emotions. Proverbs says, “As he thinketh in his heart, so is he.” In other words, rational conviction and experience might change my mind, but the shift would not be complete until it took root in my heart. And so I set out to reexamine my convictions and to strengthen my faith, so that it might prove more than a match for death.
Paul brand, an orthopedic surgeon, spent the first part of his medical career in India and the last part of his career in the U.S. “In the United States … I encountered a society that seeks to avoid pain at all costs,” he wrote in his recent memoir. “Patients lived at a greater comfort level than any I had previously treated, but they seemed far less equipped to handle suffering and far more traumatized by it.”
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Why Ayaan Hirsi Ali Became a Christian
Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Monday, December 4, 2023
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is concerned with how the West is dismantling its traditional cultural norms and with what it intends to replace them. Others have said similar things before. Philip Rieff and Sir Roger Scruton are two that come to mind. But the impression both of them leave is that, yes, they think God is a very good idea for grounding a civilized culture, but they are not entirely sure that he exists. What Ali has done is taken the obvious—and indeed necessary—next step: She sees the necessity of a sacred order and is not afraid to say so. It will be interesting to see if those others who have so astutely analyzed the sicknesses unto death that grip the West at the moment will follow her lead.Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim and now a former atheist, recently declared that she has converted to Christianity. This is a cause for great rejoicing.
It is also a fascinating sign of the times. Her published account of why she is a Christian is somewhat odd, given that it mentions Jesus only once. It is, however, unreasonable to expect a new convert to offer an elaborate account of the hypostatic union in the first days of faith. This is why churches catechize disciples: Conversion does not involve an infusion of comprehensive doctrinal knowledge. And whatever the lacunae in her statement, the genuineness of her profession is a matter for the pastor of whatever congregation of Christ’s church to which she attaches herself.
Here is what makes her public testimony a sign of the times: She states that she converted in part because she realized that a truly humanistic culture—and by that I mean a culture that treats human beings as persons, not as things—must rest upon some conception of the sacred order as set forth in Christianity, with its claim that all are made in the image of God. “Western civilization is under threat from three different but related forces,” she writes. These are resurgent authoritarianism in China and Russia, global Islamism, and “the viral spread of woke ideology.” She declares that she became a Christian in part because she recognized that “we can’t fight off these formidable forces” with modern secular tools; rather, we can only defeat these foes if we are united by a “desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition,” with its “ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom and dignity.”
The last few years have seen a number of unexpected voices strike hard against the mores of our time, particularly in the realm of sexual ethics and its close relative, the ethics of embodiment. Mary Harrington has written against the dehumanizing tendencies that lurk just below the surface of a society that sees transgenderism and transhumanism as legitimate. Louise Perry has pointed out that, despite its own propaganda about itself, the sexual revolution is very bad news for women and for children. Conservative Christians have, of course, been saying such things for years.
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Dr. Palmer Robertson’s Speech at the 2022 GA Supporting the Adoption of Overture 15
Overture 15 from Westminster Presbytery asked the PCA General Assembly to amend BCO 7-4 by adding the following sentence: “Men who describe themselves as homosexual, even those who describe themselves as homosexual and claim to practice celibacy by refraining from homosexual conduct, are disqualified from holding office in the Presbyterian Church in America.” The GA approved this as wording on June 23, 2022, which will be sent to the PCA Presbyteries for ratification. During the debate Dr. Palmer Robertson made the following speech which many believe put the proposed amendment is a helpful context. Read the speech below and/or listen to the it here.
Mr. Moderator, Palmer Robertson, Piedmont Triad Presbytery.
We could quote a famous statement, “There is a tide in the affairs of men,” and say there is also “a tide in the affairs of churches.” And that tide rises when the culture demands a response.
Over the past 25 years I have had the privilege of serving in a country in Africa where the parliament passed the death penalty for homosexuality, which is somewhat an extreme. Coming back every five years over these last 25 years, I have seen the drift. First, all the sitcoms of one year were homosexually oriented. Not just many sins, not different kinds of sins, but specifically homosexual sin. Then there was laughter—the introduction of laughing over this matter. Not of any particular sin except homosexuality. And then I come five years later and now there’s a celebration of a marriage, here and there, of homosexuals. Specifically, that particular item.
And now we are moving toward a position in which it would become very difficult, and in some countries, in England (where I have visited on occasion) to even read the Apostle Paul, Romans Chapter 1, in public, and you can be arrested.
What is it in Romans Chapter 1 that is stressed so strongly here, as Paul is trying to establish the need of humanity? He says, “Therefore,” and he begins to specify; and what is it that he specifies? “God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. Men exchanging their natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion” (Romans 1:26-27).
Mr. Moderator, you never hear the word “perversion” anymore. It used to be that you could speak of “sodomy” and “sodomites.” That is a specification of a sin in the Old Testament that is just as relevant for today. And though, with all love, and here, if we are to say those who are captured by this sin, then we must speak that wonderful word, the first word of salvation, which is “repent.” Repent of what? Repent of that specific sin that is the one that is pressing the wedge between truth and behavior and untruth in the totality of our culture today.
And so, Mr. Moderator, I would urge you to respond…you know, in history, you will see that there is this floating, this movement along in history. And then somewhere, something cuts the line and says, “this far and no further.” And then, everyone reads the history and says, “Why of course, that line should have been drawn right there.” And that’s where we are today. Somewhere we must draw the line about this specific item of homosexuality. And if we are to draw any line in the public eye, it would be with respect to the ordained minister of the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. And therefore, Mr. Moderator, I would speak in favor of this amendment.
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