You’re Gonna Have to Serve Somebody
Everyone is either a slave to sin (John 8:34) or a has been freed to be a slave of Christ (John 8:36). Sin is a cruel taskmaster, one that only takes, dehumanizes, and robs people of the joy they seek. Christ is a good master, who is gracious to His servants (Matt 11:28-30), prays for His servants (Rom 8:34), delivered His people with His own blood (1 Peter 1:18-19), and who is not ashamed to call us brother (Hebrews 2:11).
In the modern spirit of “expressive individualism,” the most important virtues are those of self-determination and liberation. The biblical notion of obedience seems absurd: why would someone submit their will to another? Yet Exodus paints a picture where submission to another is an inevitability. Considering the entire narrative, the story begins with Israel in slavery to Pharaoh. He “ruthlessly made the people work as slaves,” and “made their lives bitter” in hard service (Ex 1:13-14). As a result, the people “groan because of their slavery” and cry out for help (Ex 2:23). What Israel wants is deliverance from bondage to Pharaoh.
What may surprise modern leaders is that release from Pharaoh is not merely liberation for the purpose of autonomy. The Israelites are not rescued so they can decide who they want to be. Rather, deliverance is for the sake of being in submission to another master. Israel is delivered from bondage to Pharaoh that they might become slaves of God.
In His instructions regarding future Passover celebrations, Yahweh says, “and when you come to the land that the LORD will give you, as he has promised, you shall keep this service (the Passover meal). And when your children say to you, ‘What do you mean by this service?’” (Ex 12:25-26, emphasis added). The Hebrew word for ‘service’ (aboda) is the same word used for describing the slavery Pharaoh forced upon the Israelites.[1]
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Can Beauty Lead Us to God?
Written by David A. Covington |
Sunday, April 16, 2023
We skim now on the surface tension between two cultural impulses: our inclination to rely on facts, doctrines and arguments to ballast and direct wandering affections; and our inclination to rely on aesthetic impulses toward beauty to move us and others toward God. Each inclination is half right, but each hides a lie we treasure: that we are naturally qualified, without regeneration, to recognize God’s truth or his beauty.Something attracted us today—a suggestive scent, a lovely turn of a phrase, a surprising smile, a generous deed, an elegant idea. Do you remember yours? For me, it was a sip of wine-in-the-making, sweet as the juice, and sparkling as champagne, like the “new wine” in Jesus’s parable. We answered with a smile; its delight reminded us of a similar one just last week. Again, we are attracted; we move closer.
If attraction to beauty leads us toward God, then we can follow our attractions and let our neighbors follow theirs, confident that when beauty stirs us, our responses move us in the same God-ward direction.
A painter friend asked me last week what I was writing. When I explained, she wondered aloud, “If beauty could lead us to God, why isn’t everyone a Christian?” There must be more going on here.
In a media rich age, we are readier than ever to look to beauty as a lever of cultural influence, particularly in discipleship, evangelism, and apologetics. Many are setting aside the levers of evidence, facts, doctrine, and reason, and looking around for a new tool. An old friend, the power of beauty and our attraction to it seems to pull us even before truth’s persuasion kicks in. Beauty’s compelling power, especially when paired with emotionally rich liturgies, music, and devotional habits, marks a path to God that promises to out-perform hobbled doctrines and closely reasoned arguments. Stories stir us. Narrative, literary approaches, and the arts enjoy a surge of interest, while catechisms and systematic theology hobble at the rear.
And why not? God, the creator and source of all beauty, is himself beautiful. His creation stirs admiration for itself and its maker. “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps. 19:1). People, too, can make the beautiful—a wine (I can hope), an algorithm, a hymn. God, who everywhere reveals his glory in created beauty, attracts people through this beauty. Some will see and turn to him. Does beauty lead us to God?
Leads Where?
Beauty is everywhere, even in its conspicuous absence. It always leads people. Where? It can lead anywhere. Differing tastes can account for some of this diversity. Individual senses of beauty differ, as do cultures, regions, and eras. Even an individual’s tastes fluctuate day by day, even hour by hour, and develop with years. How can we account for subjective tastes without denying beauty’s obvious solidity? And how can we account for objective beauties while respecting diverse and dynamic tastes? Neither objectivity nor subjectivity alone can finally explain beauty and give us confidence to follow its pull. Beauty may lead us toward God, but at least as often away from God. Even our attractions to beauty draw us to other gods.
Beauty appears often in Scripture: sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes mysterious. People’s taste for beauty figures even larger. The Old Testament frequently says, “in your eyes,” or “in his eyes” to highlight different assessments of honor, justice, truth and beauty, between person and person, and between people and God. Subjective and contradictory human differences, though inescapable now, might find growing agreement if our senses of beauty agreed more closely with God’s. Three obstructions, though, hamper us from sharing God’s taste for beauty.
Three Beauty Blockades
“Stolen Water is Sweet”— Our Taste is Twisted
Eve saw the beauty—“delight to the eyes”—of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil twice: once, before her disobedience, she saw it through God’s eyes, sharing his enjoyment of it, his law about it, and his purpose for it. Then, believing the Serpent, she saw the beautiful fruit alone, excluding God’s vision—the first private indulgence. The beauty that Eve and Adam saw and shared with God one day, the next led them away from God. We follow in their footsteps, seeking the beautiful in our own eyes, as if our tastes, our perception of beauty, were reliable, undamaged by their rebellion, or our own; as if redemption, while needed to restore our sin-twisted sense of truth, were not really needed to restore our sense of beauty.
“He Had…No Beauty”— God Hides His Beauty
Some biblical beauty cameos look deliberately obscure. If we relied on our natural sense of beauty to draw us to God, what must we make of Lot’s nearly-fatal choice of the sumptuous Jordan Valley, leaving dusty Canaan to Abraham? A puzzling preference for the aesthetically inferior pops up often in the OT: Jacob opts for livestock that is streaked or spotted; Leah the plain-looking bears Jacob more children than beautiful Rachel; God preferred David the punk kid to Saul the tall, dark and handsome, and even to David’s showy older brother, Eliab. “The Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.”
God even hides the beauty of his chosen Servant: “…he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, no beauty that we should desire him.” And so it proved; people who saw the Son of God in the flesh noted how unimpressive he looked. Paul, too, looked unimpressive, and knew it: “…his bodily presence is weak, and his speech of no account.” Sin has twisted our taste for beauty, and God seems to prefer the ugly, even hides his beauty deliberately. Could beauty’s pull on us meet any worse troubles?
“A Fragrance From Death to Death”— Satanic Blinding
The Enemy “has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”
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Rev. Cotton Mather and the 18th-Century Battle Over Smallpox Inoculation
It is unknown how many people died of smallpox in the 3,000 years it has likely infected humans, but it has been estimated in the 20th century alone to have killed more than 300 million people. How do you fight something that terrible and seemingly unstoppable? In hindsight, the answer seems pretty straightforward: Start with a basic knowledge of the principles of immunity.
Smallpox constituted one of the worst of viral plagues experienced by humanity, and it was indeed a terrible disease for many who contracted it. After an incubation period of 7-19 days, those infected experienced an initial fever accompanied by body aches for another 2-4 days. Sores began to form in the mouth, then spread to the face, extremities, and the whole body within 4 days, and filled with liquid and pus. In people that survived this viral onslaught, their sores began to crust over, forming scabs that could result in scarring for life. It is unknown how many people died of smallpox in the 3,000 years it has likely infected humans, but it has been estimated in the 20th century alone to have killed more than 300 million people.
How do you fight something that terrible and seemingly unstoppable? In hindsight, the answer seems pretty straightforward: Start with a basic knowledge of the principles of immunity. For centuries, people understood that individuals who acquired many diseases become immune to getting them again, but what they didn’t understand is that immunity could be induced in order to protect individuals who never had the disease.
This began to change, possibly in the 16th century, when the technique of variolation, derived from the Latin name for the virus, Variola (meaning “spotted”), began to be adopted in the west (its origin is unknown). With variolation, scabs of smallpox sufferers were ground up and dried, then exposed to naive (i.e. never infected) individuals by rubbing on the skin or by small circular needle perforations on the back of the hand, or in some cases, sniffed into the nose or on cotton placed into one nostril.
Those that received the inoculation mostly experienced a mild form of disease, with a transient fever and a small number of pustules at the site of inoculation, and upon recovery were ‘forever free from fear of contagion’, as Boston minister Cotton Mather wrote around 1714, after being convinced by his African slave, who had been variolated. The procedure was not without risks; variolated individuals were still contagious, and it was estimated that 1-3 out of one hundred died from a more severe form of the disease due to the inoculation. However, this was a substantial improvement over the maximum 30% mortality of natural infection, and the procedure gained acceptance and was employed in England by the early 18th century.
Yet variolation was still treated with suspicion and hostility in much of the rest of Europe, as mentioned by Voltaire in his Philosophical Letters, published in 1734:
It is inadvertently affirmed in the Christian countries of Europe that the English are fools and madmen. Fools, because they give their children the small-pox to prevent their catching it; and madmen, because they wantonly communicate a certain and dreadful distemper to their children, merely to prevent an uncertain evil. The English, on the other side, call the rest of the Europeans cowardly and unnatural. Cowardly, because they are afraid of putting their children to a little pain; unnatural, because they expose them to die one time or other of the small-pox.
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The Power of the Two-Parent Home
Scientific research is valuable insofar as it can reinforce the truths of the Bible and principles of natural law; namely, that when we observe the way the world works (and does not work), it becomes abundantly clear that marriage matters for human flourishing almost more than anything else.
Humanly speaking, there is nothing more important for personal well-being, positive social behavior, and general success in life than being raised by one’s biological parents committed to each other in a stable marriage. Over the past forty years, a vast body of research has demonstrated conclusively that children are deeply affected by family structure and that married parents are best for children. Any efforts — whether governmental, educational, or ecclesiastical — that mean to encourage human flourishing must take this reality into account as both an explanation for many societal ills and as a means to the end of hoped-for societal health and vitality.
Not a Myth
Family life in America has changed dramatically in a relatively short period of time. In 1960, 73% of children lived with two parents in their first marriage. By 2014, less than half (46%) of children were living in this type of family. Conversely, the percentage of children living with a single parent rose from 9% in 1960 to 26% in 2014. An additional 7% of children now live with cohabiting parents. Moreover, the increase in non-traditional family arrangements has coincided with the decoupling of marriage and childbearing. In 1960, just 5% of all births occurred outside of marriage. By 2000, around 40% of all births occurred outside of marriage (a percentage that has held steady over the last twenty years). As of 2014, 29% of births to white women, 53% of births to Hispanic women, and 71% of births to black women were out-of-wedlock. In the span of only 60 years, what were once considered exceptional family circumstances have become the norm.[1]
Given the changing portrait of the American family, it is not surprising that many people believe — or, given the uncomfortable prospect of implicitly judging others, feel compelled to say they believe — that there is no difference between one parent or two parents when it comes to raising children. According to one online survey, “more than 70% of participants believed that a single parent can do just as good a job as two parents.” Further, 60% of women “agreed that children do best with multiple adults invested and helping, but that two married parents are not necessary.”[2] Christina Cross, writing in the New York Times, went so far as to decry “The Myth of the Two-Parent Home,” citing evidence that black children in two-parent families still fare worse than white children in two-parent families.[3] But Cross’s argument fails to take into account how much better all children do in two-parent families compared to one-parent families of the same race. The percentage of white children living in poverty goes from 31% in families with only a mother, to 17% in families with only a father, all the way down to 5% in families with a married couple. The same percentages for black children go from 45% (mother-only), to 36% (father-only), to 12% (married couple). We can lament that black children in two-parent families are still 2.4 times more likely to be in poverty than white children (12% v. 5%), but we should also observe that white children raised by only a mother are 2.6 times as likely to be in poverty as black children raised by two parents (31% v. 12%). While there are still advantages to being white in this country, he much bigger advantage is being raised by two parents. It is better in America to be a black child raised by two parents than to be a white child in a one-parent home. The breakdown of the family is not a black problem; it is a problem wherever two-parent families decline and single-parent households become normalized.[4]
Family Structure and Child Well-Being
The conclusion that children raised by their biological, married parents do better, by almost every measure, has been proven in hundreds of studies over the last several decades.[5]
One of the best and most concise summaries of the academic literature comes from a policy brief published in 2003 by the Center for Law and Social Policy.[6] Citing a 1994 study by Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, the 2003 brief notes that children who do not live with both biological parents were roughly twice as likely to be poor, to have birth outside of marriage, to have behavioral and psychological problems, and to not graduate from high school.[7] Another study found that children in single-parent homes were more likely to experience health problems, such as accidents, injuries, and poisonings.[8] Other research found that children living with single mothers were five times as likely to be poor.[9]
Importantly, not all types of single-parent households fare the same. Children of widowed parents, for example, do better than children in families with divorced or cohabiting parents.[10] Children of divorce are two-and-a-half times as likely to have serious social, emotional, or psychological problems as children from intact families.[11] Likewise, children in cohabiting families are at a higher risk of poor outcomes in a host of economic and emotional categories. Critically, these poor outcomes are not erased when the single-parent family is better off financially.[12] Marriage is the issue, not economics. In short,
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