Bienvenue…

Last Saturday, we went to Glencoe to ski. As our destination was a few hours drive from Edinburgh, we stayed in Glasgow the night before and very early on Saturday, took Caitriana and Heidi with us.

When we arrived at Glencoe, there was a lot of snow and the mountains looked fantastic:

We excitedly donned our skis on and headed up the mountain on the chairlift. The slopes looked really good; much excellent skiing ahead! However, this is where the chain of disaster begins. We arrived off the chairlift to find all the other skiers standing around at the bottom of the slopes and were told by an employee, “The slope is closed for a bit, until we see if the wind gets any better.” The wind did not get better. Within a couple of minutes, it was a lot worse and I felt like one of those male penguins from Planet Earth. We were sent straight back down the chairlift as it was now too windy to remain on the mountain.

Having just put on our skis and gone up the mountain, we were once again taking them off:

Down at the base camp we were freezing so we went into the restaurant to find somewhere warm to sit. However, everyone else had the same idea just before we did, meaning we couldn’t get a seat. Instead, we thought we’d enjoy the more private warmth of the car. (This is where the story goes from bad to worse to even worse).

In the car, my hands were freezing so I thought I’d turn the engine on to warm them up. Cue disaster number two: smoke started rising from the bonnet (hood for you Americans) and the car fast reeked of something burning. So, the engine went off pretty quickly. After letting it rest for a couple of minutes, we turned it on again and once more, it was smoking. This was not good.

Right at that time, it was announced that Glencoe was now closed for the rest of the day and we should all go home. That’s not too deflating if you live nearby, but when you live in Edinburgh and your only means of getting home is literally going up in smoke before you, it’s rubbish.

As I didn’t want to see my precious Clio on fire, I had to phone for a mechanic who came and took the car away. This is a picture of us in the breakdown truck:

My car, sitting silently on the back of a breakdown truck, was heading for a garage in Ballachulish. Again, this is not the best of news when you live a good 120 miles of winding roads away in Edinburgh. The garage very kindly loaned me an old Fiat to drive back to Edinburgh and thankfully, after driving all the way to Ballachulish and back, I now have my own car again!

I’m not particularly into the trite theologising of events. As Flavel said, providence is like a Hebrew word, you can only read it backwards, and even then we usually do a poor job of interpreting the past. That said, our day of disaster made me think a lot.

I found the whole experience of the day deeply frustrating, discontenting even. I did not respond well to having driven all that way, just for the slopes to close when so tantalisingly close, and then for the car to have a serious breakdown in the middle of nowhere. However, looking back, I think some legitimate non-trite theologising can be done.

There’s an obvious sense in which it is understandable to be frustrated when circumstances seem beyond your own control. There is, though, a deeply wrong pattern of thought that lies beneath this - the notion that you were ever actually in control, and the association that you make between (a) thinking that you are in control, and (b) your basic level of contentment. This ungodly way of thinking is totally inconsistent with the gospel, and yet it is something that troubles me from time to time.

The gospel way of thinking is displayed by Paul in Philippians 4:

I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.

According to Paul, there is a secret of being content in any and every situation. What is the secret, then? I certainly could have used it at Glencoe! Having thought about this over the last few days, I think that Paul’s contentment is produced by believing the gospel. Why?

• The gospel blows away our old, sinful pretence of autonomy. Before we believed the gospel, we pretended that we were in charge of our lives. But not now. We now know Jesus and we recognise His Lordship. He commands our destiny and governs our experience.
• The gospel, therefore, must break the relationship between (a) your perceived level of control, and (b) your basic level of contentment. This must happen because you now know you are always subject to the higher power of Jesus’ dominion. Thus when (a) disappears, it is totally illogical to found (b) on it.
• Paul’s contentment comes from knowing that whatever his circumstances, they are governed by the God who has saved him through the gospel. This might not make Paul happy in all circumstances, but it does make him content.

I think that is the lesson I need to take away from our day on the slopes at Glencoe. I believe the gospel, and yet I’m still full of such unbelief. There are still many, many aspects of my thinking that need to be brought in line with the gospel.

Thanks be to God that through His patient power, He is able to change a stubborn sinner like me.

[PS. Thanks to Caitriana for her typically excellent photos.]

Ok…

Who signed me up for Joel Osteen’s ‘Journey of Faith’ e-mails? Grrrrrr! Oh well, I suppose it was time I discovered the champion in me! Yippee!

Hell isn’t something I’ve ever written on the blog about. However, when Derek was preaching (at the start of a series of sermons on Jesus’ ‘woes’) at St C’s yesterday, he mentioned it in a way that made me think. He said something like, ‘The Devil laughs and rubs his hands together when you’re fooled into thinking that Hell is a place where he is stoking a fire and poking you with a big fork.’

I’ve heard a few preachers say, and I think I agree with their approach to this topic, that Hell isn’t literally a huge fire wherein people are tortured by eternal burning. Derek continued by saying, ‘Scripture presents how awful Hell is by giving all the worst pictures of the most horrendous places as a warning to us that whatever it’s like, we don’t want to end up there.’

This made me ask the question, what is it that makes Hell hellish? I don’t want to write on this a lot, but I would like to make some theological observations on the topic.

There is no grace in Hell

This works on two levels:

(1) There is no saving grace in Hell. That is, Hell is a place from which there is no hope of redemption or salvation. Thus, part of the awfulness of Hell is that once there, you are there forever. You cannot escape, nor will an external agent (God, who saves us graciously in this life) provide deliverance.

(2) There is no common grace in Hell. Common grace is a theological term used to describe the way God graciously gives good gifts to all people, regardless of whether they love or hate Him, follow or reject Him. This is why God gives gifts of art, music, beauty, language, literature, creativity, joy, love, social order and many other things, to the whole human race. All the best things in human experience and culture - the things that make life seem worth living - come about through common grace. However, this common grace will be absent in Hell. Thus it will be a place utterly without love, art, music, beauty, creativity, friendship or contentment. One of the most chilling aspects of this thought is that evil will be completely unrestrained in Hell. In this world, God (again through common grace) restrains the spread of evil. However, in Hell, this restraint will be removed. In Hell, there will be no end to the holocaust.

You can see why this awful, bleak picture is so: if God is ‘the giver of every good and perfect gift’ (James 1), one cannot eternally reject the giver and continue to receive His gifts; hence the lack of grace (both saving and common) in Hell.

Norwegian acoustic duo The Kings of Convenience. I really like these guys, they write beautifully relaxing ballads.

Nuair a tha thu a lorg ’son rudeigin Gaidhlig air an eadar-lion, is urrainn dhuibh seo a chleachdadh - Google Gàidhlig

Chan eil fhios ‘am de an verb as fhearr airson seo… a googladh no a googleach no a googlaigeadh no rudeigin.

Co-dhiu, a nis, is urrainn dhuibh lorg ’son guga tro Google anns a Ghaidhlig!

Mr T has formally warned NT Wright that he must drop the T in his name. The Bishop, who from now on will be known simply as N Wright, instantly complied with Mr T’s warning. “That fool was about to get a New Perspective on my fist!” says T.

John Bunyan’s famous work The Pilgrim’s Progress originally included a chapter where Pilgrim meets Mr T and learns the huge importance of pitying fools and wearing a lot of gold. However, Bunyan was forced to remove this chapter amidst fears it would be too awesome for the minds of children to handle.

On Mr T’s computer, the homepage is always set to www.shipoffools.com which he attacks with his ‘torpedoes of pity’.

If Mr T and Tim Keller were ever to high five, it would bring about a new, worldwide Reformation movement.

I saw this clip on Bryce’s blog. When I watched it, I honestly didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Before I explain why, let me say that I am an ex-Arminian. Until the age of about fifteen, I firmly believed what these guys are singing: God’s sovereignty extends everywhere apart from the human will. When it comes to us humans, God is only sovereign if we ‘choose to let Him in.’ He loves all people equally with enough love to let them choose whether or not to accept Him, but loves none strongly enough to ensure their salvation from a lost eternity.

[Note - if you aren't a Christian and you watch the video below, please bear in mind that this is to theology what Etch-a-Sketch is to art. There are some intellectual Arminians who would try and present this kind of theology in a scholarly way, but these guys aren't doing that.]

The issue raised by these Arminian (not to be confused with Armenian) singers is a huge one: how do we relate God’s sovereignty to human free will? As I said, I was a teenage Arminian. Now, though, I hold a pretty different view: some would call it Calvinism but really, I just call it Biblical Christianity. As I’ve spent time in the Arminian camp but no longer reside there, I’d like to make some observations on why I no longer sing from the same hymn-sheet as the YouTube quartet.

When I was questioning Arminianism,

I became deeply dissatisfied with the theological, philosophical, logical impossibility of God not being sovereign in any sphere of reality

‘How can God be God if He is not more powerful than anything He has created?‘ was my question. Even as a child, I was utterly perplexed at the classic line, ‘God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life, but only if you decide that He can come into your life.’ ‘Why does God have to rely on a plan B?’ I thought. The normal response to this, as sung by the Quartet, is that ‘God sovereignly chooses not to be sovereign.’ However, I couldn’t find any proof for this in the Bible. If God exists as separate from His creation, and in Him we live, move and have our being, the thing that defines reality (and allows it to continue to exist) is the will of God. Thus, that anything anywhere can exist independently of God’s sovereign will is an impossibility. If God is not sovereign over something, it does not exist.

Furthermore, the role played by God in such a worldview (whereby He is relegated to some kind of cosmic butler and divine therapist who would never impose His will over yours), I began to think, seemed very unlike the God of the Bible. Scripture’s Deity says ‘I am the Potter, you are the clay’, not ‘I would never ever overrule your supreme authority, o mighty human! Who am I to offend your autonomy!’

I started to take Biblical anthropology seriously

While I was an Arminian, I knew that sin in some way affected me. I did wrong things and felt bad about them. However, and I am ashamed to say this, I really didn’t think I was that bad a person. Qualitatively, I was somewhere in the middle - neither perfect nor a wretch. I just needed a little help from Jesus and I’d be ok. This is the view I needed to have, though. If my free will was just that, free, and was totally unimpaired by sin (thus meaning that by my own power I could choose to accept God), it had to be the case that sin hadn’t thoroughly ruined James Eglinton. James’ will, at least, wasn’t tainted by sin and was capable of making spiritually healthy decisions by itself. However, I read some stuff that changed this perception:

• Romans 8. This chapter makes clear that the mind is also ruined by sin. Indeed, it is so infected by sin that its natural inclination is enmity with God. What Paul was telling me about my mind was totally incompatible with the Arminian view of free will. (On top of this, reading Martin Luther’s The Bondage of the Will and Francis Schaeffer’s Escape from Reason clarified the effect of sin on my mind greatly: unless God takes the initiative and makes my will new, it will always exercise its freedom by making bad spiritual choices).
• Ephesians 2. Paul’s statements on us being ‘dead’ in sin. Previously, I’d read this as ‘man is sick in sin’. However, what the Holy Spirit has said through Paul is that, unless God first works to change us, we are as spiritually unresponsive to God as a corpse. Dead means dead.

So, I was starting to use the Bible in forming my perception of man. Man is naturally dead in sin and in the absence of God’s grace his mind and will are at enmity with God. If this was the case - and it is the case presented by Scripture - the Arminian gospel stopped working. ‘How could God keep His distance and not make the first move? How could He leave the first step up to me when I’m a sinner who naturally cannot make the first step?’

It became clear that the Arminian ‘love of God’ wasn’t loving enough

My former view (as sung by the Quartet) was, I thought, based on the love of God. God loves us so much that He would never initiate saving someone who didn’t want to be saved. However, once I realised (through reading the Bible) that naturally, no-one wants to be saved, my old understanding of divine love became completely inadequate. If we are the blind, dead sinful wretches that Scripture portrays, the God who opens up the kingdom to the blind and the dead must also be the God who also makes provision for the blind and dead to receive sight and life in order that they might enter said kingdom.

The huge problem with the Arminian take on God’s love is its weakness. God loves you enough to fling open the gates of salvation to you. And yet there you lie outside the gates, a lifeless corpse without any ability or desire to enter His gates. What a cruel game to play, taunting the dead and the blind, telling them they can only receive the blessing if they first do the impossible: live and see.

In my old Arminian days, I thought no further than that God loved all people enough to offer them salvation. This alone was good enough for me, as I didn’t take the Bible seriously enough and consequently I grossly underestimated the seriousness of sin. However, if the Bible’s teaching on humanity is true, God, in merely offering us salvation then standing back to see if we take it (at the expense of His Son’s precious life), is wasting His time. Left to our own initiation, we will never accept it because it is unnatural to us. Christ’s death, then, would be the most vain blasphemy of all time: the Son of God dying and none being saved.

I felt so sad when, in their Arminian context, I heard the Quartet sing ‘Only willing love will do’. If that’s the case, God will receive no love, as no sinner will ever (of his own will) love God. If God requires us (and we are not that bad, after all) to take the first step and love Him before He pours out the benefits of the gospel on us, grace isn’t all that amazing.

If, however, what Paul says in Romans 5 is true - that grace is where you trespass and yet receive a gift rather than a punishment - grace becomes truly amazing! Biblical divine love is one in which God goes the extra mile on His enemies: us. We naturally hate and reject Him, and yet He gives us His Son as Saviour and goes to the gracious liberty of transforming our sinful will thus enabling us to love Him.

The human will is only properly free when the gospel has made it free. Thank God that through the gospel, the will can be taken from such a wretched slavery to sin and made new and able to delight in the glory of God. Amazing grace indeed!