On what we don't know… (II)

Themes: Apologetics, Forgiveness, On Knowing God, Prayer, Sin

How do we not know what we are made to know?

‘If humanity is made for the knowledge of God, why is it that many people do not feel the need of this knowledge, or seek God out?’
Original Post

We need to step back again for a moment. It seems at this point every step forward needs careful prodding with the toes first to make sure we are on firm ground.

To say ‘I know’, could equally be a statement about facts or about relationships.
“I know how many elephants live in the zoo” and “I know Bob the Elephant keeper” are two different forms of knowledge.

In the Biblical world view (and increasingly in the post-modern world view) both these forms of knowledge are bound together. There aren’t any such things as ‘Facts’ bare, naked, and objective. There are only interpreted facts, given in relationships, through testimonies, and in the context of experiences.

Our lack of knowledge of the ugliness and evil of sin, and of our dire need for restoration to friendship with God, is an ignorance of certain primary facts about the world and it is ignorance of our primary relationship.

In every sense our knowing is broken.

How did this come about? How did knowledge get broken?

If Christ is the self-evident Word of God, [the way in which God is known] why do so many people reject him? The answer lies in original sin, that original rejection of God’s word by Adam in which the whole human race is involved.
Graeme Goldsworthy, According to Plan, p. 60

It is interesting to note that the first time Knowledge is mentioned in the Bible it is not in the context of the relationship between Humanity and God. It is in the description of the forbidden tree as ‘the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’.

(What a strange plant, was it a weed?)

It certainly wasn’t an Apple Tree – this tree has no species, it is unique – named for its unique fruit. This is the tree – the fruit of which gives knowledge of good and evil.

As Adam stretched out his hand to take and eat he was wreaking a change upon the world that was profoundly to do with knowledge. Human rebellion against the word of God had fundamental consequences for our knowledge because, at this one point above all others, our knowledge-as-facts and our knowledge-in-relationship was intimately bound together.

There is a long history of speculation about what it means to have the ‘knowledge of good and evil’. Some have understood this to mean factual knowledge, i.e., what good and evil are, (what the rules are). Others have taken this knowledge to be experiential, having the first hand experience of good and evil. Still others have taken this to have some sort of sexual referent.

The difficulty for all these understandings is that later in the Genesis narrative we hear God saying,

“Since man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:22 HCSB)

The forbidden knowledge at the heart of human rebellion seems to be, knowing good and evil, as God knows them.
What is God’s knowledge of good and evil?
God’s knowledge is autonomous knowledge. It is not knowledge of what is good and what is evil as defined by ‘the moral law’, it is not experience of good and evil (God has no evil in him).
God’s knowledge of good and evil is the knowledge that defines good and evil.
God knows good and evil because he decides what good is, and what evil is.

For Adam and Eve to eat this deathly fruit was an arrogant grasping at the prerogative of God.
Rather than to continuing to know God (and through knowing God to know the world)
Adam and Eve sought to know like God.
Humanity sought to decide for itself what good is, and what evil is.
They did this, first, by deciding that it was good for humanity to eat a fruit of which God had said, ‘don’t eat!’

The knowledge of good and evil is a colossal thing. It is fundamentally a narrative, a system of meanings that locate our identity and purpose. This narrative had begun with the First Word,
“Let there Be…”
…And there was.”
God had given us identity and purpose. He told us the story into which he had placed us.

But in the Fall, Adam substitutes his own story, a new framework of meanings, and thereby deafens himself to the word of God.

The conclusion of this long answer is that our darkened understanding of who we are (that we are fallen) is a consequence of our grasp for moral autonomy. We have so thoroughly substituted our own definitions of good and evil, which is to say, our own fundamental narrative, that we cannot correctly identify our state from God’s perspective.

And all this is a very long winded way of restating Paul’s conclusion in Romans 1.

“For though they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God or show gratitude. Instead, their thinking became nonsense, and their senseless minds were darkened.” (Rom 1:21 HCSB)

Which finally, wearied I’m sure, and very much overdue, brings us back to the really important question:
How do I show my friend that our rebellion against God is horrifying, evil, and disgusting – not just intellectually credible? And how do I do it with humility and gentleness?

We live faithfully, in faith, with faithfulness.

We trust and remain loyal to the Creator who is alone able to utter those decisive creative words that can utterly alter our thinking.
This trusting of God is expressed in speech, life, and prayer.

No actions on our part alone can bring a fellow human to knowledge of God,
but they are the vehicles through which the Creator God has chosen to express himself.

So we trust God through speaking the truth, which is ultimately the true story, the gospel announcement of the Death and Resurrection of God’s King through which the God’s Kingdom has come, meaning that the hour of judgement is at hand, though there is salvation for those who seek it.
Already it is an incomprehensible story.

And in the light of this story we will live incomprehensibly. As the Christian begins to comprehend the world and our place within God’s future, our values and priorities are derailed from the tracks in which they used to run. Certain things which appear to others as insane sacrifices are now ‘worth it’ for the Christian. The shape of our thinking is changed, the centre of our hope moves forward.
For the person who is not a Christian, watching as these lives are lived, they do not make sense, the Christian life will be simply incomprehensible.

And we pray. This sounds like such a weak answer after such a long build up. However, I’m more and more convinced, through reflecting on God’s word and seeing my own perversity, that unless God acts to change something in our perception of the world we can never see him. Our minds really are darkened – this is not just a nice turn of phrase.
Unless God gives us the interpretive key, this world-of-a-text remains a mystery, indecipherably encoded.

No one comes to know the truth about God or themselves without God taking a prior action to give this knowledge. The individual is powerless. In fact, all the individuals involved, other than God, are powerless. We are as equally powerless to stir up another person from their blind danger as that person is themselves.

Which is why we are to be humble and gentle in our prayers, and in our speech and action.

In our humble prayers we admit before God that we are unable to save the people that we love but that we trust that he can and that he desires to do so.

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Sydney Harbour Bridge – Sermon in Steel

Themes: On Power, Sin, Sydney

The Sydney Harbour Bridge is a remarkable structure. I can never see it without feeling a little awe-struck. Les Murray once remarked upon the way it continually sneaks up on you in the city, it peeks in between buildings so that you see it in places that you would never expect.

It’s size makes it a sublime object, something that mixes beauty and terror. It is easily the largest man-made structure I have ever seen, the awareness of which is heightened by an ability to see all of it at once from many points around the Harbour. It so surpasses the scale of any individual human being that it becomes difficult to comprehend it as a human object, that is, as our creation.
The viewer almost wants perceive the Bridge as a natural phenomenon, a force of nature. Yet, it is so obviously a human construction. The steel, the riveting, the angular lines, all make any retreat from its human origin impossible.

I find that a part of me is always left thinking, “What have we done?” And I feel winded, like I’ve been punched with a double-combination-fist-full of Amazement and Terror.

I’m amazed at human creativity and power, I’m terrified because, even in our comfortable and protected lives, we know more than enough about the human capacity for evil. These two things don’t make for a happy prospect, as the history of the 20th Century eloquently gives testimony.

The Harbour Bridge was built during the Great Depression by men who had been through the horror of World War One, and then the shame of being unable to provide for their families as the economy crumbled. It stood then as a potent symbol of human achievement in the face of adversity and played its role in the optimistic ‘Modern’ story about Scientific Progress, with humanity as the central character.

Now we live in an age of undreamt prosperity…
… and pessimism.
The optimistic story of ‘onward and upward’ proved to be a rationalist fairytale.
The greater our technological achievements became, the greater our capacity to destroy, and in our depravity, to enjoy the spectacle of destruction.

The Bridge is a Steel Rainbow hung in the sky as a reminder of our inherent power, given from the Creator. But unlike the Creator’s Rainbow that reminds us that he will be faithful to his creation, our Steel Rainbow gives no such assurance. As humanity we are always a moment away from another betrayal of the creation, of our own role in that creation, and ultimately of our God who created us.

And the greater we develop our power and creativity the more terrifying the scope and potential of that betrayal becomes.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported a little bit of Governor Marie Bashir’s speech at the ribbon cutting ceremony. She described the bridge as a “sermon in steel” which showed what Australia could do.
“It will never date, never grow old,”
“It has become a structure for all time.”

It is a Sermon in Steel, the kind of sermon that rightly leaves the hearer deeply troubled.

But the Good News is that it is emphatically not a structure for all time. There will come a time when the Sermon in Steel, the word of our glory and disgrace, will be silent.

The New Creation may well have Bridges, but they will be testimonies to the Creator’s Spirit, not to any ‘human spirit’.

And so, the Sydney Harbour Bridge is 75 Years Old, but it is not a structure for all time.

It is a structure for our time.

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Covered with Shame

Themes: Forgiveness, Sin, T-Shirt

Recently a man was refused entry to a Qantas flight to London because he was wearing a T-Shirt that said “World’s No. 1 Terrorist” and included a picture of George Bush. (If you’re interested you can find the story here.
When the revolution comes, we will definitely be announcing it through T-Shirts…

The truth is, that when people have something to say, they often do say it with a T-Shirt. I can’t think the number of different T-Shirts I have worn for Christian organisations, all with some little thought provoking message. Campus fellowship groups should band together and start a screen printing company.

That’s all intro to an interesting experience I had a couple of days ago.

I sat down at a table to chat with a bloke, he looked me up and down and said “that’s a bit pretentious”. He was referring to my T-Shirt.
I was wearing an Oxford T-Shirt, it has a great big golden Oxford Logo on the front. I’ve never been to Oxford, let alone studied there. The t-shirt is a gift from my parents-in-law on their last visit. From the muffled groan when I unwrapped it, to this conversation, the T-Shirt has caused me nothing but grief. Not that I don’t like it, it’s just that I can’t wear it without feeling like a goose. Anyway, in this particular situation the rebuke wasn’t warranted.
But the truth is, I’m a pretentious person so the words weren’t wasted.
I name-drop with the best, I show off and compete.

That’s not my point.

It’s this, after our conversation I found myself standing in a large group of Christians singing the words from On Christ the Solid Rock I Stand. I burnt with shame, and then we sang the lines
No merit of my own I claim,
But wholly lean on Jesus name.
I was ready to tear the offensive thing off my chest and put a match to it. I could have sworn that the T-Shirt was constructed from woven Uranium and was burning into my skin. I felt every eye in the rows behind burrowing into my back, and every mind whispering ‘sinner’. I was covered with shame…
I honestly felt something like this, although in the calm light of reality, I know that it was all just in my head. No one else really cares that much.

During that song I discovered a little of what it would be like to walk around with your sins published to the whole world. Imagine condensing your sinfulness for a day and screen-printing it on a shirt. Covering yourself with shame, without any way to avoid the glances of the people you encounter. Some people have to live like that…

Actually, all of us live like that before God. There aren’t any frills or fabric that can stop his gaze from penetrating our hearts. He sees my sin as clear as if I wore it on my chest. Wearing that T-Shirt at that moment just made me more fully aware of the way I’m clothed before God all the time.

Or would be, if not for the clothes swap I did with Jesus.

“For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” (Gal 3:27 HCSB)

I can’t begin to say how great a comfort it is to know that God doesn’t look at me and say ‘pretentious’.
He has every right.

Instead I’ve got the t-shirt printed ‘righteous’, and the label which reads ‘made on Calvary’.

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