The Way, Truth, and Life
Written by Reuben M. Bredenhof |
Saturday, August 27, 2022
It’s not enough to have found the way to God, knowing who Christ is. It’s not enough to have learned much truth about God. We also need someone who can make us alive. And this is who Christ is: “I am the life.” He restores our life to how it was always meant to be: enjoyed with God, even in his very presence.
Someone’s last words are important. When a loved one speaks just before he passes away, you should listen carefully.
This is what’s going on in John 14. Jesus is with his disciples in the room where they have celebrated one last Passover. But celebration is far from their minds, for the Lord is about to be betrayed and arrested. Soon He’ll be dead. The dark shadow of the cross is looming over his words in verse 6,
I am the way, the truth, and the life.
The next days were going to be unspeakably painful. Yet it had to be this way: the cross was needed because our sin had estranged us from our holy Creator. Our unholiness meant we were banished from God’s presence and barred from ever coming back on our own. Only God could open another way. So on this night before the cross, Jesus announces the gospel by saying that He is “the way.”
We get a picture of this from the ancient world. Imagine a powerful king seated on his throne. Access to his presence is carefully controlled by one of his officials. Not just anyone can approach—and certainly not uninvited. If you dared to come near, it’d probably mean a summary execution.
But supposing that the king had a cherished son, he would put aside the requirement. No permission needed: his son could freely enter. And even the friends of the son, if they accompanied him, could go in to see the king.
That’s who Jesus is: He is the beloved Son. And when we sinners go with Christ, He is our way back to the heavenly Father.
When Jesus says, “I am the way,” He says He is willing to take us by the hand and bring us into God’s presence, even into the glory of God’s holiness. Because Christ died for sin, the way to God is now open.
You’re allowed to pray to God whenever you want. You’re allowed to meet with God in worship every Lord’s day. You’re allowed to hear God’s voice in the Word as often as you open it.
There is just one requirement to go this way: be united to Christ by faith. Remember who was allowed to go in and see the great king: only those who are the friends of the son.
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Christian Reformed Church Renewal Movement Stands Against LGBTQ Theology
One third of the Calvin University faculty signed a statement opposing the Human Sexuality Report. All One Body has released a series of talking head videos of therapists, social scientists and pastors discrediting the Human Sexuality Report. Synod 2022 meets June 10-16 at Calvin University and will likely be monumental. The Abide Project’s stated goal is to adopt the Human Sexuality Report and hold all church leaders to the historic biblical view of sexuality.
The Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRC), a 200,000-member denomination in the United States and Canada, now has a renewal movement named the Abide Project.
Organized in 2021, the Abide Project seeks “to uphold the historic, beautiful, Biblical understanding of human sexuality in doctrine, discipleship, and discipline” in the CRC.
Once forbidding movies, card-playing and dancing, the CRC has drifted leftward in recent generations. Across the past decade, the push for full inclusion of LGBTQ members has gained momentum and prompted the organization of the Abide Project.
The focal point of contention is a report adopted in 1973 by synod (the CRC’s annual assembly and highest body of authority). The report says believers with same-sex attractions are to be fully accepted in the church, but declares homosexuality to be “a condition of disordered sexuality” and “Homosexualism – as explicit homosexual practice – must be condemned as incompatible with obedience to the will of God as revealed in Holy Scripture.” This has been the official position of the CRC since 1973.
At Synod 2011, an overture asking to reexamine the CRC position on homosexuality was voted down. The overture came from Classis Grand Rapids East, the regional body of churches surrounding the CRC headquarters as well as the denomination’s educational institutions in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Shortly after Synod 2011 voted down the Grand Rapids East overture, a group called All One Body emerged to promote full inclusion of LGBTQ persons in the CRC.
All One Body hosted events at Classis Grand Rapids East congregations. Speakers called into question the CRC position on homosexuality. Professors presented on new scientific findings. Ex-members identifying as LGBTQ spoke about the hurt-feelings over the 1973 position.
As national polls tipped in favor of homosexuality and same-sex marriage became legal in more locations, another regional group of churches (Classis Zeeland) asked Synod 2013 for guidance on how to apply the 1973 stance on homosexuality in the changing society. Some synod delegates seized the opportunity to amend the request for guidance into reconsidering the whole topic from scratch. However, amendments from the floor were defeated. A committee was tasked to give guidance on applying the current stance. But when members were chosen to fill the committee, the vast majority were pastors and scholars with an LGBTQ-inclusivist view.
The committee of nine divided along ideological lines, producing majority and minority reports. The inclusivist 7-person majority report’s advice stretched the CRC stance on homosexuality as far as possible. The 44-page report made passing references to only four Scripture verses, frequently stressed the complexity of these issues and contained thinly veiled disparagements of the 1973 position. Dividing marriage into civil and religious unions, the majority report said ministers could perform same-sex civil ceremonies as long as the ceremonies were not religious.
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Won’t Get Fooled Again
[The public] assumed that the Centers for Disease Control knew how to control disease and that scientists and public-health officials would provide sound scientific guidance about public health. Those were reasonable assumptions. They just turned out to be wrong.
More than a century ago, Mark Twain identified two fundamental problems that would prove relevant to the Covid pandemic. “How easy it is to make people believe a lie,” he wrote, “and how hard it is to undo that work again!” No convincing evidence existed at the start of the pandemic that lockdowns, school closures, and mask mandates would protect people against the virus, but it was remarkably easy to make the public believe that these policies were “the science.” Today, thanks to two years of actual scientific evidence, it’s clearer than ever that these were terrible mistakes; yet most people still believe that the measures were worthwhile—and many are eager to maintain some mandates even longer.
Undoing this deception is essential to avoid further hardship and future fiascos, but it will be exceptionally hard to do. The problem is that so many people want to keep believing the falsehood—and it’s not just the politicians, bureaucrats, researchers, and journalists who don’t want to admit that they promoted disastrous policies. Ordinary citizens have an incentive, too. Adults meekly surrendered their most basic liberties, cheered on leaders who devastated the economy, and imposed two years of cruel and unnecessary deprivations on their children. They don’t want to admit that these sacrifices were in vain.
They’re engaging in “effort justification,” a phenomenon famously demonstrated in 1959 with an experiment involving a tame version of a hazing ritual. Social psychologists Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills offered female undergraduate students a chance to join a discussion group on the psychology of sex, but first some of them had to pass an “embarrassment test.” In the mild version of the test, some students read aloud words like “prostitute” and “petting.” Others had to pass a more severe version by reading aloud from novels with explicit sex scenes and lots of anatomical obscenities (much more embarrassing for a young woman in the 1950s than for students today). Afterward, all the students, including some who hadn’t been required to pass any test, listened in on a session of the discussion group, which the researchers had staged to be a “dull and banal” conversation about the secondary sexual behavior of lower-order animals. The participants spoke haltingly, hemmed and hawed, didn’t finish their sentences, mumbled non sequiturs, and “in general conducted one of the most worthless and uninteresting discussions imaginable.”
But it didn’t seem that way to the women who’d undergone the severe embarrassment test. They were far more likely than the other students to give the discussion and the participants high ratings for being interesting and intelligent. The experiment confirmed the then-novel theory of cognitive dissonance: the young women didn’t like thinking that they’d gone through an ordeal for the sake of a worthless reward, so they avoided this mental discomfort (cognitive dissonance) by rewriting reality to justify their effort. Other studies showed the same effect in people who had undergone real-life initiation rituals to join fraternities and other groups. The more effort involved in the initiation ritual, the more valuable seemed the reward of membership.
Researchers also reported that “shared dysphoric experiences” produced “identity fusion” within a group, making members more loyal and more willing to make further sacrifices for their comrades. Thus, fans of English soccer teams who suffered together through a losing season were more devoted to one another than were fans of a winning team, and members of Brazilian jujitsu clubs who endured a painful graduation ceremony—walking a gauntlet while being whipped by belts—became more willing to make charitable donations to their club than were members at similar clubs with less extreme ceremonies.
If one brief bad experience can transform people’s thinking, imagine the impact of the pandemic’s ceaseless misery. It’s been a two-year-long version of Hell Week, especially in America’s blue states, with Anthony Fauci and Democratic governors playing the role of fraternity presidents humiliating the pledges. Americans obediently donned masks day after day, stood six feet apart, disinfected counters, and obsessively washed their hands while singing “Happy Birthday.” They forsook visits to friends and relatives and followed orders to skip work and church. They forced young children to wear masks on the playground and in the classroom—a form of hazing too extreme even for Europe’s progressive educators.
Some Americans refused to submit to these rituals, but their resistance only intensified solidarity among the faithful. The most zealous kept their masks on even after they were vaccinated, even when walking alone outdoors. The mask became their version of a MAGA hat or a fraternity brother’s ring; some have vowed to keep wearing theirs long after the pandemic. They’ve already called for permanent masking on airplanes, trains, and buses, and they’ll probably clamor for more school closures and lockdown measures during future flu seasons.
Facts alone will not be enough to change their minds. To undo the effects of the hazing, we need to ease their cognitive dissonance by showing that they’re not to blame for their decisions. The mental mistakes were not made by citizens who dutifully sacrificed for two years. They assumed that the Centers for Disease Control knew how to control disease and that scientists and public-health officials would provide sound scientific guidance about public health. Those were reasonable assumptions. They just turned out to be wrong.
After a great disaster, the traditional response is to appoint a blue-ribbon panel to investigate it, and a bill has already been introduced in Congress to create a Covid commission. In theory, this could be a worthy public service, allowing experts to sift the evidence impartially and determine which strategies worked, which ones failed, how much needless damage was done—and whom to blame for it. But in practice, which experts would the current Democratic administration or Congress appoint? Presumably, the pillars of the public-health establishment—the same luminaries whose advice was followed so calamitously the past two years.
Before Covid, the United States drew up plans for a pandemic and maintained the world’s most lavishly funded scientific and medical institutions to deal with one. When the coronavirus arrived, the leaders of those institutions should have identified who was at serious risk and who wasn’t and adopted proven strategies to protect the vulnerable while doing the least harm to everyone else. They should have monitored the effects of their policies and adjusted them based on what they learned. By honestly communicating the risks and considering the overall public good, they could have tamped down needless fear and united the country behind their efforts.
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Don’t Say “They”
No one should be required to express fidelity to academic queer theory. Those of us who care about actual pluralism should resist this form of narcissism-fueled political theater. If unconventional pronouns have any room in our society, they must be uttered in the context of civic friendship based on trust, self-restraint, and mutual respect. Above all, nonbinary pronouns must be strictly voluntary, and there should be no penalties—social or legal—for those who dissent from their underlying ideology.
The Biden administration has announced a series of policy initiatives in support of “transgender, nonbinary, and other gender expansive” Americans. Among these is that Americans will now be able to have “X” as the gender listed on their passports—a benefit for those who self-identify as neither male nor female.
Nearly two dozen states and the District of Columbia have already implemented similar measures for state-issued documents. In 2019, the New York City Commission on Human Rights issued a legal guidance that requires employers, landlords, and providers of public accommodations to use a person’s preferred name and pronouns, irrespective of the sex “assigned” to that person at birth. This includes not only “she” for men who identify as women and “he” for women who identify as men, but also honorific titles such as “Mx” and individual pronouns such as “they/them” and “ze/hir.”
According to the Williams Institute, 1.2 million adults in the United States self-identify as nonbinary. For Americans under 18 that figure is likely much higher, given recent data showing that over 20 percent of Generation Z (born after 1997) identify as LGBT, compared with 10 percent of millennials and 4 percent of Generation X.
Progressives tend to believe that this sudden rise in numbers reflects a society more welcoming to people “born that way,” but a more plausible explanation is that young people are responding to new social cues and incentives. Teenagers are now regularly told that being “cisgender” (identifying as male or female according to reproductive traits) means conforming to social expectations, while identifying as anything else reflects nonconformity, authenticity, and courage. Given this messaging—and the fact that, unlike homosexuality, which entails sexual feelings and behaviors, one need only to declare oneself nonbinary to be nonbinary—it is a wonder that merely 20 percent of youth regard themselves as part of the alphabet coalition. In any case, the Biden administration’s actions add further confusion to a conversation already characterized by shallow thinking and badly misunderstood research.
Start with the fact that what makes most transgender people transgender is precisely the fact that they conform to gender conventions—albeit those of the opposite sex. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders lists conformity to “stereotypes” as a relevant criterion for diagnosing childhood gender dysphoria. Federal courts have ruled that transgender boys really are boys, and thus deserve to use the boys’ restrooms at school because they look and behave like typical boys. If gender is an “identity” wholly independent of reproductive traits (of which there can be only two complementary sets), then there is no logical reason that there should be only two gender identities. Indeed, there would have to be as many gender identities as there are people, since each person’s way of expressing gender is unique and irreplaceable. As one federal judge conceded in a rare moment of candor, restrooms separated by male and female “gender identity” rely no less on stereotypes than does the conventional practice.
This presents a problem for the notion of gender identity used by diversity trainers, academic bureaucrats, federal judges, mainstream progressive and LGBT advocacy groups, and Democratic Party leaders: that gender is a core, immutable, and socially valuable aspect of the human person. According to superstar academic and godmother of queer theory Judith Butler, gender is not an innate property but a system of social oppression that gains legibility through repetitious “performance.” “Gender identity” is a “regulatory fiction,” Butler writes. A girl who seeks hormones and surgeries to make her body conform to social expectations regarding the male sex is not being a brave nonconformist but “submitting to the norm of the knife.” She is perhaps even more conformist than her “cisgender” peers considering the pain she is willing to endure to “pass” within the traditional “gender binary.” Feminists and gay rights advocates have echoed this line of argument.
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