I know I need to live by faith.  It goes with being saved by faith. 

And the size of my faith may play a role in my being saved, given what Jesus said about having faith the size of a mustard seed.  I know, too, that I need to grow in faith.  That’s because some people have strong faith and others have weak faith.  I hope, eventually, to be buff in my faith.

Some people believe that we can lose our faith—and, with that, our salvation—and others insist that real faith can never be lost.  Which, by the way, creates some serious insecurity if I’m not sure who is right.  I’ve also heard that faith comes by hearing the Word.  Which makes me feel guilty because I hardly ever listen to radio or downloaded sermons, let alone Bible CDs.  So that makes me sort of a once-a-week listener.  More flabby than buff.

Another way to think about faith is to treat it like a thermometer just outside a window: it has a freezing mark, and sometimes the ‘red’ temperature stuff is above that line, and sometimes below it.  So if that’s how faith works in salvation, sometimes I’m in the ‘saved’ zone and at other times I’m below the line.  So, using this analogy, I need to know how I can raise the temperature high enough to keep my faith above the freezing mark.

I hope you get the point by now, that we need to ask a bottom line question: what is faith? 

I’m serious about the question.  Faith is a favorite jargon term among Christians because it serves as the keystone in the chief arch of our pantheon of Christian ideas.  Paul, for instance, tied faith to salvation in Ephesians 2:8—“For by grace you have been saved through faith.”  Yet from that quote we find another word—grace—is tied to faith.  But let’s not lose our focus on faith.  If grace sets up faith, how much grace is needed to get faith right?  And who supplies the grace?

From many conversations and much reading—which set up my litany of loose thoughts cited above—I’m convinced that for most people the real meaning of faith is about as sure a thing as our grasp of what a duodenum is and how it works.  Aren’t these things we just need to take by faith?

And that apparent throw-away thought—‘to take it by faith’—is more important than it might seem at a glance.  In the middle ages most scholars assumed that faith is a realm of “non” or “super-rational” realities, while reason deals with our tangible realities.  That notion grew from Bible texts such as Paul’s claim that “we walk by faith, not by sight” [2 Corinthians 5:7] and the descriptive summary in Hebrews 11:1 that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”  This set up a stubborn divide in Western culture, active even today, that faith is simply a matter of the heart—a subjective realm—and reason is the reliable realm where meaningful—“objective”—conversations occur.  And never the two shall meet!  Yet there are those among us—believing philosophers—who are trying to bridge that gap by proving that faith can be aligned with reason if we work at it long enough!  But I’m increasingly convinced they’re chasing an empty goal because they’ve embraced a medieval miscue.  It is useless to treat faith and reason as separate spheres of knowledge: both are rooted in Christ as a reality for our subjective devotion to embrace.

So how can we answer our question?  What does “faith” and its identical twin, “believe”, mean? 

The answer is, “ask Jesus”!  It was his ambition that we believe and thus find salvation—the fourth gospel says as much as it summarized his ministry: “these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” [John 20:31]

A crucial story in Christ’s ministry related to faith is found in John 3, just prior to the well-known verse 16.  There, in verses 14-15, Jesus alluded to the events of Numbers 21 when Moses had a bronze serpent built.  People, bitten by venomous snakes in the wilderness, needed an immediate antidote.  Moses gave them the model with a simple promise: look at the bronze serpent on its pole and be healed.  Jesus offered this as the model of faith.  It explained his own ministry.  A day would come when he would be lifted up on the cross.  And there he would cure death. 

The point Jesus was making is that faith is simply a gaze in response to his invitation.  Dead hearts are healed by looking to Jesus on the cross in the same way a struggling, snake-bitten Israelite in the Sinai wilderness who looked at the bronze model was healed.  Is the gaze something purely inward and subjective?  For the dying Israelite a look at the bronze model was an objective reality!  And faith was a supernatural link to God’s promise—God had promised, “look and live” .  So, in that sense, Jesus offered a very tangible and objective basis for salvation: “look and live.”  His promise is the basis for our looking, and he is the one who brings new life into being—in our being “born again” [and “from above”].  All of this is addressed in John 3.

It’s not as if this insight was lost on the disciples of Jesus.  Paul, for instance, was confident that those he was writing to had faith, but he also promised them that “I do not cease to give thanks for you . . . . [or to pray that] the eyes of your hearts may be enlightened . . .” [Ephesians 1:15 & 18]  They could “see” already, but there was still more to see.  Faith is ultimately a focus on one who is, for now, “not seen”—namely Jesus who awaits us beyond the cross, in heaven.  Listen to the writer of Hebrews who wrote of faith as our vision of Christ in chapter 12:

. . . let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

To place this in the broadest context possible, think of faith as the antidote to what happened in the Garden of Eden.  Adam and Eve both trusted God as their Lord and delight.  At least they trusted him until the serpent invited them to trust another source of “truth” in Genesis 3—namely himself!  The serpent, while God was away from the Garden, challenged both God’s character [“did God really say . . . ?”]  and God’s word [“you will not surely die”].  After a brief time Adam and Eve both entrusted themselves to the serpent’s leadership, based on his words.  And, with that, they no longer trusted God.  They were no longer people “of faith” and their bond with God was broken.  They believed a lie from the Liar rather than the truth of the Truth.

So, with a delightfully ironic plan, God is now in the process of winning people back from the Lie and into the Truth by offering the promise: “For God so loved the world that he sent his one and only Son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”  Here is the cure to the problem of Sin.  Jesus became Sin for us.  So that we look to Jesus who—in God’s transferring my sin to Jesus by my union with him—became an accursed model of the serpent himself.  And by entering into the realm of death he broke its power over all who look to him.

Faith is that simple.  It’s not a “power within” us.  It’s not an energy that I can cause to grow and develop by my own efforts.  It’s all about the Person who invites my gaze, my confidence and my love.  I respond more and more and my faith becomes that much stronger.  The more I love, the more I trust.  So faith is working through love.  And it started when I was still dead in my sins.  That’s why faith is all about him, and not about us.  We’re just watching him while he changes us.  Yet we soon discover that we have never been busier, now caring for others as we enjoy all of what we see in Christ.

A good friend recently raised a question in light of my emphasis on the heart as the center of the soul.  It was about the role of choosing.  “I have heard,” he wrote, “teachers and preachers [who insist] that love is a choice.”  He added some quotes from an unidentified devotional piece that I’ll offer in excerpts here:

A Christian writer says, “For many years I lived according to my feelings. It was like riding a roller coaster; one day laughing and feeling good and the next crying and feeling sorry for myself. I was being tormented and controlled. I needed emotional maturity, but I required God’s help to attain it. It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing your fickle feelings more than what God says in His Word. It will take a constant act of your will, to choose to do things His way rather than your own. When you do make that choice, you’ll discover that life is more enjoyable when you’re living according to God’s plan.”

Just as you don’t let everybody who knocks on your door come in and make themselves at home, don’t let every emotion that surfaces dictate the direction of your day or decide your responses.  …. God is a God of faith and He works in ways that only faith, not feelings, can discern.

It’s certainly an important question, and one that stirs suspicion about anyone who insists (as I do) that the Bible treats the heart as the affective basis for every activity of life.  In effect, the claim I make about the Bible witness is that what we love most always defines us.  Yet, according to this critic, the affections of the heart—and, yes, the affections mean our “emotions” and “feelings”—are simply too unstable to bear such weight!  Choice, on the other hand, represents “a constant act of your will” that is, by comparison, much more reliable.

First, let me agree that the heart is, indeed, unreliable as it expresses our sinful “feelings” and “emotions”.  Jesus himself said as much, as reported in Mark 7:21-22, “For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness.”  Paul, too, understood that our emotions and uncontrolled desires are traps to be avoided as he spoke about our turning away from the life we “once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind.” [Ephesians 2:3]

So, according to the devotional we cited above, the solution to this problem is for us to use our capacity to choose.  We must avoid “the trap of believing your fickle feelings more than what God says in His Word”. 

This seems like a compelling argument, doesn’t it?  After all, our choices are what define us and carve out the shelter we need in order to avoid being taken over by other people’s choices that encroach on our freedoms.  What we do with our bodies, for instance, is “our choice” and where we go and do in life is “our choice’’—and God will judge us on the basis of what we choose, so we need to practice making right choices!  Right?

Maybe . . . or maybe not.  As I think of a world that is adamantly “pro-choice” and has, with that devotion to choosing, slaughtered millions of unborn babies at the bloody altar of a “freedom to choose” I get a queasy sense that the argument may not be very sound.  Especially as we stand before Christ in that “Day” that lies ahead for all of us.  I suspect that it actually represents the mantra of individualism—the claim that we are essentially autonomous beings, “like God,” in knowing and choosing for ourselves what is good and what is evil.

Here’s the issue: according to the Bible we are, indeed, “choosers”.  Joshua, for instance, challenged the nation of Israel to “choose this day whom you will serve [among various gods] . . . . But as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.” [Joshua 24:15]  So far we have a “choice-based” model at work.  But notice a much bigger question that always rests beneath any choice: “What motivates that choice?”  This is where the real battle is to be found: do we hide our motives and pretend that a Stoic self-determination defines us?  Or do we realize that we were once enslaved to the Lie that Satan offered Adam, and had once been lovers of self; but now we are set free by the Truth so that we are now “controlled” (to use Paul’s term from 2 Corinthians 5:14) by our new love for Christ?  Either way, our choosing is defined by prior motivational sources.

So, to press the issue, do we make choices “ex nihilo” [“out of nothing”], or is every choice based on prior causes—including earlier experiences, fears, desires, doubts, and so on?  For Joshua the basis for his choice was his relationship with the God who had called Israel out of Egypt and revealed himself to the nation at Mt Sinai.  With that experience Joshua called on the people to “cling to the LORD your God just as you have done to this day” and “to love the LORD your God.” [Joshua 23:8 & 11]  Why love God?  Because, as Moses had disclosed to Joshua and to Israel on God’s behalf, they all knew “that the LORD set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples . . . [and] the LORD loves you . . . and redeemed you from the house of slavery”. [Deuteronomy 7:7-8]

Here’s the bottom line that addresses the problem biblically: God made us as dependent beings.  And God “is love” so that we, too, were made to love him as responders.  We love him because he first loved us!  And he pours that love out in our hearts as the first act of conversion that causes me to find him attractive for the first time in my life.  Then the fruit of the Spirit’s presence in us is love as we love others with his love pouring through us. 

And love is an affection, an emotion, and a feeling in response to the one who loves us.  So, yes, I choose God!  I choose to obey God!  I choose to follow God!  Yet all these choices are motivated by love.  And, if not a love for God, then a love for the “glory” that other Christians give us for being “good” people.  One is a choice with a proper motive, the other with a false motive.

And all “choices” made towards God evaporate the moment I return to the love of self, the love of pleasure, the love of glory, the love of money, and every other deceitful love that beckons for me to respond in a world filled with false loves—all of which Paul labeled as “the flesh.” 

So the real battle, as Martin Luther’s disciple put it so clearly on Luther’s behalf, is always “affection versus affection.”  Satan rules human hearts by capturing us with the promise of autonomy—of “free wills”—but the reality is that he rules our wills by manipulating our hearts with deceitful desires.  God’s love, in sharp contrast, is holy, blameless, and utterly winsome.  It will include moments of joy, desire, delight—call these “feelings” or “emotions”—and it will also bring to us more settled affections such as peace, kindness, forbearance, and so on.  The question is not the strength or the vigor of these inward qualities, but the object that stirs them.  If Jesus wept when Lazarus was in the tomb, let us weep as well—even though we know the resurrection is coming.  If Paul called on the saints, again and again, to “rejoice” I think he was calling for us to unleash our emotions in response to God’s providential care for us.  Let’s learn to love boldly and dramatically—it may just call others to the love of Christ that surpasses understanding.

What then, will protect us from “fickle feelings”?  Certainly not the naïve venue of Stoic self-control!  All that offers is a self-centered “will power” that displaces our gaze on Christ.  Instead I can “choose to rule my emotions” by responding to the ever-spreading love of Christ who loves me with his stable, eternal, selfless—and “emotional”—love!  Please join me, and invite others as well!

In my college days I spent a summer piloting a fishing boat in and around Ketchikan, Alaska.  In learning the job I recall my first extended shift of piloting by myself as we traveled up from Seattle to Ketchikan.  We followed the scenic but often narrow “inside passage” among the islands just off the Canadian coast.

As pilot my main concern was to stay steady on the heading I was directed to steer—as posted in our guidebook—until we reached each new navigation marker.  There I would be directed by the book to steer to a new heading.  The book listed the miles traveled between navigation markers, so I could know when to expect a course change by the speed we were traveling. 

On that first extended stretch something went wrong.  After steering the proper course for well over an hour I was directed in the book to change our course.  Yet the book promised a new navigation buoy would be in view at that stage.  But all I could see were some treacherous rocks getting all too close!  After a bit of hesitation I called below to the skipper: “Hey, Hans, I need some help!”  He came up to the bridge, looked around, turned white, and yanked back the throttle: “Where are we?!”  I certainly didn’t know! 

He was angry with me at first for not steering the proper course.  But I knew I had.  He accepted that and after some further checking he came up with the actual problem: the boat’s compass had drifted—a function of traveling ever closer to the magnetic north pole—and it needed to be readjusted.  With the unrecognized compass error we had traveled off course by just 2 degrees, but in two hours that was enough to bring us very near some dangerous shoals.

In talking about the Christian faith we find a similar challenge if we ask, “Where do we begin?  And what direction do we take in our new faith?”  A shared clue is offered in both Genesis and John’s gospel.  Both start, “In the beginning . . . .”  Genesis goes on to say “God”.  And John starts with “the Word”.  Both make God to be the first point of reference, each with trinitarian features.  God himself is: a) the beginning, b) the “way”, and c) the outcome for all that follows in both the Old and New Testaments.  The Bible is not about us, but about God.  Once that’s settled both texts go on to discuss us and our relationship to God.

Yet our human instinct is to ask, “Fine, but let’s be practical: what is our place—our duty—in all this?”  The famous Westminster Catechisms (i.e. both the shorter and the longer versions) start, for instance, by asking: “What is the chief end of man?” 

An important and very practical question!  But is there, perhaps, a misdirection in our course when we shift from God’s beginning point to our own interest in the chief end of man?  I don’t mean to be petty in raising the question.  The English ministers assembled in London had written their questions-and-responses as a 17th century training manual for young believers.  So that is where they started: with the audience.  It made perfectly good sense.  But it may well have revealed a human preoccupation with humanity.

So here is the point: the catechism began with a slight shift away from the lead offered by Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1. It started with the human point of view.  God was nudged, ever so slightly, out of the center.  He became the frame of the picture.  God’s role as creator, ruler, judge, and savior would be unfolded later in the catechism, so why worry about the order of presentation?  How could that be a problem?

The problem appeared when the same basic shift was taken by the French Catholic philosopher, Renee Descartes, some years later.  In his famous aphorism, “I think, therefore I am,” he meant to defend the Christian faith.  How?  By using a self-referential premise that was “beyond doubt”.  It offered a practical starting point in bringing a Christian witness to skeptics.  Yet in doing so, Descartes shifted the beginning point for considering God.  Rather then God’s revelation, Descartes began with human rationality.  So it was no longer, “In the beginning God . . .”  Instead it was, “In the beginning ‘I think!’”  And, “from my capacities to think clearly and argue convincingly, I will demonstrate beyond any doubt that God, too, must exist!” 

Or so he hoped.  But he was wrong as a host of later rationalistic travelers would show by offering their own convincing proofs that God—at least the God of the Bible—did not exist.  Or so they hoped.

In fact a slightly new course had been set—only a couple of degrees away from the Bible’s own starting point.  The Cartesian rationalists—those who followed Descartes’ methods—had moved away from the biblical course steered by the first great Reformers, but only in a small way.  For Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, John Calvin, and others, God is the ultimate communicator.  God must be trusted to share himself reliably, freely, and in every expression of priority.  Revelation, and the faith birthed by that revelation, begins and continues with a focus on God and God alone.

With the shift to a human starting point—only a slight shift in its starting point and direction of travel—the complete confidence in revelation that Luther embraced began to be replaced over time by human critiques of Biblical content.  Man became, increasingly, the measure of all things.  And in this new version of “faith” virtually every biblical affirmation and disclosure of God and his heart now can be challenged, or even dismissed, by good arguments.  We humans have become “like God” with a deep self-confidence in clear thinking.  God is merely a frame for our portraits.

Let me add here that I have no doubt that proponents of the Westminster doctrinal themes—whether in the 17th or the 21st centuries, or anytime in between—were and are intent on honoring God.  In fact, the proper answer to the great question of the two catechisms is that the “chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.”  Yet even this seemingly noble claim differs from the Bible . . . by at least a couple of degrees. 

How so?  It is ultimately utilitarian and pragmatic.  The human encounter with God sets up a treaty-like obligation.  Any encounter with God focuses on a duty: to give God glory.  By making the human role central, humans are seen to be workers created to satisfy God’s needs—as servants rather than sons.  Servants with a task to fulfill, even though the duty promises enjoyment.  That can be made to sound wonderful!  But it moves ever so slightly away from the order and the substance of the Bible.  

Consider the function of glory.  Jesus, with the Father always first in his eyes, spoke with an incredible delight he found in bringing glory to the Father, a glory shared within the Godhead from before the creation began.  Jesus, however, refused to make glory an end in itself.  Instead it was an offshoot of love as he spoke to the Father on our behalf, seeking to share with us “the glory you have given me because you loved me!” [John 17:24] 

So in the slight misdirection of pragmatic faith, the love of God that creates a response of mutual love in us slips out of focus.  Instead faith is formed around lists of God’s qualities and powers; lists created for more efficient human applications.  Biblical narratives are displaced by more efficient summaries that are better able to guide our conduct and worship as servants.  Theology offered better proofs and more coherent truth systems in order to overcome doubts and to convince others to believe right truths.  But this seems not to have been God’s point of view as he led the writer of the fourth gospel to start off very simply and in a way that portrays God’s desire to communicate his own agenda: “In the beginning was the Word.”

What if we started with God instead of man?  If our catechisms were to begin by considering God’s being?  And not our own?  As in: “What is most true of God?”  What would we find to be our starting point?  The Bible answers firmly and clearly: “For God so loved the world that he sent his one and only Son . . .”  And, that, “God is love.” 

The Bible also tells us that God is holy, righteous, strong, wise, and so on.  But all of these adjectives simply describe God’s character and his activities, but not his motivational center.  His “heart” is revealed as love.  The first fruit of the Spirit—who shares God’s inmost being with us—is love.  The great call of the Bible, whenever God’s own agenda is front and center, is to love God and, in consort with that, to love our neighbor.  The great signal of a true community of faith is the presence of unflagging mutual love.  In the great triad of faith, hope, and love, the greatest is love.

From the fount of God’s love emerges the creation, and we then discover that he loves us as the epitome of the creation.  Our chief end, then, is to love God in return.  We are wired by God to love, just as God loves. 

What if we shift away from that course?  In the Bible, our guide book to eternity, we find just two courses are posted: after Adam’s Fall all of creation divides into one of two trajectories.  One is to love God.  The other is to hate him (while still trying to placate him!). 

In life every activity, every discussion, every thought, and every affection is meant to correspond to God’s heart—to follow in his ways.  As we long to explore the trajectory of God’s love, with a desire birthed by God’s own paternity, a tremendous opportunity lies before us: to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.  Any other ambition is outside the course set before us by the triune God who, in his eternal inherent communion, is love.  To know him is to love him.

So “In the beginning God” is just the launching point to an eternal pursuit that will never end, but which always has God before us, Christ in us, and the Spirit moving us—to follow his Word into the love we are invited to enjoy forever.  May we steer that course, using the Bible as our guidebook and God’s heart as our compass, without any variations whatsoever.  The joy of his love will be present both in our travel and in our destiny.

I was once at a weekend retreat, speaking about God’s overflowing love.  “This triune love,” I said, “explains the creation as God’s selfless giving of himself in a work of joy.  The creation was made to receive and reciprocate that love.” 

I pointed, for support, to Genesis 3 where God came “walking in the garden in the cool of the day” only to find Adam and Eve had hidden themselves.  Here was God, as lover, looking for those he loved.

I went on to explain how Adam had sinned and why he was now hiding.

“The ‘freedom’ of humanity is located only in the heart—or ‘spirit’—the sole center of all our motivations.  And our hearts are never ‘self-determined’.  Rather we were designed as responders: both receiving and returning the love offered to us by God and each other.  What’s the basis for saying this?  Because God’s own being exists in eternal communion—in an ongoing exchange of mutual love and glory.  We were made in this relational image.”

I continued:  “Yet sin was possible because the heart can never be forced to love.  Love is lost in the moment that coercion arises.  Coercion, as an act of force imposed on another, is never a function of love.  It violates the ‘offer-and-response’ delight of lovers.  God invites us to love him but he never forces us to love him.”

How did sin emerge in the garden?  How did the human partnership of love with God, shared in the cool of the day, end?  By a seduction. 

Here is the basis for seduction.  The heart, as the sole center of response in our souls, always remains free not to love.  And in that freedom it can become hardened towards one lover if it ever gives itself away to another lover who is competing with the first.  It was in Adam’s freedom not to love that he turned from his proper and spontaneous love for God to a love for himself.

Why and how?  Because he both received and responded to the serpent’s promise of relative independence—a prospect to be “like God” by expressing his free will by eating the fruit.  In this promise the serpent had given him the moral equivalent to a mirror by which Adam judged God’s word to be inferior to the serpent’s word.  In doing that he also judged God to be unloving and, with his new free-will, he then followed Satan.

So when God came into the garden after Adam and Eve had declared independence from God by eating the forbidden fruit, they had turned away from his love.  The prior communion they had in the garden with God had been shattered, so they hid themselves in fear and shame.

During a break that followed that part of my presentation one of the men attending the retreat sat down and asked for a few moments of private conversation.

“Certainly,” I responded.  The man was an advanced seminary student and seemed very bright.

“I appreciate what you’re trying to say about God’s relational being, but I think there’s a much better and more accurate way to view it.”

“Oh?”

“You see, the events in the garden actually represent God’s judgment of humanity.  Adam had been given a covenantal responsibility and he had failed.  So God was coming into the garden to confront Adam’s sin—his failure to fulfill the covenant of works—so that God’s appearance in the garden was judicial: he had come to hold a hearing.  After the hearing we find the narrative shifting to a trial in which Adam, Eve, and the Serpent are all judged.  Finally we have a summative and executive judgment by God against all of humanity—which concludes as Adam and Eve are driven from the garden.”

“Yes,” I responded, “I’m actually very familiar with your view.  And while it holds elements of truth I can’t embrace your basic portrayal of God for a host of reasons.”

Let me now depart from this particular story.  I’ll conclude by saying that he and I ended in an impasse over our different approaches—with his concern to represent God mainly as a judge, and my description of God as one who “is love” leaving us far apart from each other in the end.

What I want to share from my experience with the seminary student is this: our hearts define the way in which we view God! 

This man’s view of God as the “ultimate judge” represented his view of all God’s dealings with humanity.  That much was explicit in what he said.  And I’m sure that it also represented his own experience of God.  Why do I say that, given that in our conversation he never quite said as much?  Because my own presentation of God failed to draw a positive response from him.  Instead he felt that I was misrepresenting God.  And that I failed to represent the role of the human free will as that which had failed, and for which Adam was being judged.

My thoughts then and now turn to a similar controversy that Jesus had in John 8:30-59 with a group of “believers” who were also concerned about the primacy of free wills.  Yet Jesus confronted them for their lack of love as the basis for their failure to understand and receive what Jesus was teaching: “my word finds no place in you . . . . If God were your Father you would love me . . .”  Anyone who has experienced God as his loving father—while aware that God is also a judge—will see him first as the “Abba” who loves them.

So as my friend at the retreat, and others, insist that sin is essentially “covenant-breaking” or “law-breaking”, it tells me that the vision of God that stands behind that view is one of a self-concerned, boundary-sensitive deity—a God defined by the laws he imposes by his self-determined free-will.  And which our own self-determined free wills need to obey.  His love comes later, as a reward to those who are obedient to his will.

If, on the other hand, we view sin as an expression of “whoredom”—a turning away from a proper response to God’s love to an illicit self-love—we have a vision of God who must judge us, but whose judgment is rooted in his proper jealousy for our spirits that were made by him and for him.  The Father’s wrath is directed against all who despise the Son whom he loves—yet he is willing to send the Son to death in order to draw us out of our spiritual adultery.

My invitation to the seminary student and to all others is this: read through the Bible in a month or two and see which themes stand out—is God primarily a judicial figure, or a stubborn lover who calls for our hearts to turn to him?

But first pray and ask God, by the Spirit, to pour out his love in our hearts so that we would have him present in us to offer a heartfelt orientation to what he directed the original authors to write.

“Who” James asked, “is wise and understanding among you?” [James 3:13]

This is in the same letter that all but began with an invitation to wisdom: “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given to him.”

It’s interesting that these days I don’t hear many people talking about wisdom.  Much more is said about being “smart” or learning how to “make it in life.”  But, whether it’s popular or not, wisdom seems to be something important.  “So here it is: “God, please give me wisdom!”  I want it, I need it, and I’m asking for it.  In everything I do and say.  And, if I can be bold: soon, please!

As I ask for wisdom I know that it’s one of the “ribbon” topics that we find threaded through the entire Bible.  It seems to be very important to almost all the Bible writers.

But the first reference to wisdom in Genesis is an eye-opener.  In chapters 1-2 God is presented as both creating and offering “good”, more “good”, and “very good” surroundings and care for the first couple, Adam and Eve.  They were made by God, for God, and in a bond that displayed God’s relational image: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness . . . . So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

Yet the first mention of wisdom comes in chapter 3, amid this idyllic and dynamic relational launching of humanity:

But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die.  For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”  So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that is was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.  Then the eyes of both were opened and they knew that they were naked.  [Genesis 3:4-7]

The context for this exchange was a brief and surprising argument.  God had told Adam earlier that he would die right away if he ever ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  We’re not absolutely sure why such a deadly tree was planted in a garden full of goodness, but most scholars assume it represented freedom—the option to do something other than what God called for.  Which is certainly the way events unfolded when the serpent called God a liar.  God said “you shall surely die” and the Serpent said “You will not surely die.”  A very bold move.

God, a liar?  That’s a very strange idea, especially if we think of lying as a usually selfish attempt to reshape reality, as in “No, officer, I didn’t know I was speeding” . . . even if the throttle had been intentionally set at 12 mph over the posted limit.  So lying can be treated as a useful ploy for someone in a defensive position like a speeder caught in a speed trap, but God is the creator of everything.  He shapes reality, so the idea that he would ever lie in order to reshape the reality that he created is utter nonsense.

What is even odder is that Adam and Eve both accepted the serpent’s invitation to treat God as a liar, and to eat from the fruit of the tree that would make them wise.  But they had their reasons: it was, after all, their chance to “be like God, knowing good and evil.”  Yet even that option was odd because they knew the “good” already.  Everything around them was good, good, and very good.  The only new feature the serpent was pressing them to embrace  was the chance to know evil.

Later in the Bible we return to the moral issues of wisdom that are obvious in Genesis 3.  A set of books are, for instance, called “wisdom literature” and among that set the Proverbs are most explicit in pointing to the importance of wisdom.  A central theme is offered in 1:7—“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.”  Yet there is much more.  Let me cite two more segments as examples of the range of topics Proverbs offers: one treating wisdom as the basis for God’s work of creation and the other elevating the priority of wisdom.

The LORD by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he established the heavens; by his knowledge the deeps broke open, and the clouds drop down the dew.  [3:19-20]

And,

The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom, and whatever you get, get insight. [4:7]

So we find these texts inviting us to see God’s wisdom expressed in his creation.  Yet wisdom  is not treated as a built-in component of human nature, though humans are a part of that creation.  Wisdom needs to be pursued by the wise person.  And we would also see, in a broader reading of Proverbs, that there is a connection between knowledge and wisdom: wisdom is needed in order to accurately engage knowledge.

With that bit of background in view, let us return to the book of James.  Again in chapter 3 where he invites readers to embrace wisdom he also points to two types of wisdom in 3:15: one that “comes down from above” and another that is “earthly, unspiritual, demonic.”  In the latter version it becomes clear that the serpent’s offer of wisdom made in Genesis 3 is still alive and active!

So what is the ultimate difference between God’s wisdom and the serpent’s version?  It has everything to do with the ultimate axis of reality: either God, the Creator, is the center of reality; or we, the creatures, are the center of reality—functioning as if we are “like God.”  So that everything either pivots on God’s character, works, and words; or everything pivots on our individual concerns and our pursuit of happiness.

With that distinction in mind, listen to the way James summarized the outcomes of the two competing wisdoms:

But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth.  . . . For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice.  But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere.

True wisdom, then, begins with God.  It treats others as fellow creatures, made by and for God; and companions with us under God’s loving care and direction.  It makes life work!

But the alternative wisdom begins with self at the center allows a person to be a “winner” in office politics; and it allows a person to “beat the system”; and it has a self-centered source, in the wiles of the serpent who calls God a liar. 

One wisdom is rooted in the true reality in which God’s love is at work, and our wisdom is aligned with him and with his love.  The other starts with a love of self, and it leaves everyone else at risk.  It is a wisdom located in the knowledge of evil the serpent offered us in Eden.

I prefer the wisdom from above, and pray for that wisdom to grow each day.  And it starts with my delight in Jesus, the author of all creation . . . who also loves me, and you.