Is there time left for righteousness to win in our recent presidential election? Admit with me that it looks dim. But admit with me that “with God nothing is impossible,” as well.

No honest American believes fraud was not perpetrated on us in the 2020 election. 

It’s late, very late, but maybe not too late. What is “too late” with God! Really!

“He sounds pollyannish!” “Pie in the sky!“ “Let it go!”

I say “why?” What do we lose by giving God a chance through fervent prayer and belief in His good and loving and powerful character?

Untold millions of Americans are still praying—at this late date—not for a political win, but for righteousness to prevail, for God to be honored, for America—maybe western civilization—to be saved from socialism and worse. 

God gave me the following some time ago; consider believing Him for another miracle, another shattering of the odds. 

Ask for God to enable you to believe for one more victory over “simply impossible” odds.

For the glory of God and for the salvation of America. 

Yesterday I was talking with a friend, a black woman named Connie. She is a health-care worker, and a serious follower of Christ. She said to me, “What we really need to do is to pray. I mean, why not encourage all Christians to stop at 12-noon every day and pray for God to heal the world?”

I thought: (a) she’s right, of course, (b) she’s got a big God, (c) why not?

I told her I was in! And since we spoke, I can’t get away from the simplicity, but the gravity(!) of what she said. Not to mention sanity!

So at noon yesterday, I said my first “Connie Prayer,” and now I’m inviting you—and everybody you know—to get in on it.

Yes, of course you and I have been praying! Of course! But I promise you this: we’re not praying more than we need to! And not enough of us are! And praying in unison creates power! And will honor God!

I thought of several prayer passages in the Bible, but, strangely, this little known one jumped out above the rest: the little prophet Habakkuk (a “minor” prophet just preached shorter messages than a “major” prophet) prayed a huge prayer in 3:2:

We live in a wrath-filled world! Maybe God’s wrath, satan’s wrath, man’s wrath, political wrath, fear’s wrath, a plague’s wrath, whatever. Maybe an equal portion of many “wraths,” but nobody will deny anger permeates the world—AND MAKES HABAKKUK’S PRAYER, “IN WRATH REMEMBER MERCY” so fitting, so apt, to pertinent! So necessary!

I am inviting you to join Connie’s Prayer, and to ask every person you know to do the same. At your twelve-noon. Today. Until the wrath’s gone!

Yes, that can become a ritual if you let it. But it can also become ultimate reality if you want it to.

Bill Anderson

Grapevine, Texas

So, according to pastor Andy Stanley, well-known pastor/evangelist in Alpharetta, Georgia, modern Christians should “unhitch” their minds from the Old Testament. Yes, he avers, it is inspired, but it is not necessary; in fact, it is a drag on many moderns, including, specifically, modern Christians.

Say this about Stanley: he’s not timid. Only a handful of far-left, literally “outside the pale” theological types have ever suggested such a breach throughout two thousand years of Christian history. 

Personally, since I was saved at seventeen, I have always felt “helped by” not “hitched to” the OT.

But the facts: 

1. Not a single NT author did not quote the OT; that alone should give us pause from throwing it away. Shall we unhitch from their OT quotes? 

2. The websites indicate that the NT has over 250 direct quotations from the OT, with over 1000 references or partial quotations. No unhitching there! 

3. The NT opens, in two of the gospels, with lengthy genealogies, spanning from creation to Jesus, as if to say, “You cannot possibly appreciate what you’re about to read if you don’t take about 1500 hundreds of years of history seriously.” Or “How is it possible to understand the crowning act of the divine drama if you don’t have some acquaintance with His previous fifty acts? You want the denouement of the story without a set-up?” Literature students regularly get flunked for that sort of a thing.

4. Jesus quotes from twenty-four OT books. Too bad He didn’t get the memo from Alpharetta.

5. Many early Jews and Christians memorized the entirety of what we call the OT; what a prodigious waste!

6. The NT explicitly, and often, states that what happened to the people of the OT period are to be “examples’ for NT believers. (I Cor. 10:6, Jude 7, James 5:10, and many others.) How about the entire eleventh chapter of Hebrews with its scores of heroes of the faith—all from the OT?

Interestingly, Pastor Stanley focuses on the church council reported in Acts 15, at which the question as to whether or not converted gentiles should be forced to keep the Jewish law was dealt with. This is where, he says, the “unhitching” occurred. Past tense. The decision was critical, and the issue was a burning one. Is a person saved by faith alone, or by faith plus the keeping of the law? The issue arose often in the early church and was addressed clearly: one is saved by God’s sheer grace by which he comes to believe, savingly, in the atoning death and resurrection of Jesus.

The instructive thing about the Jerusalem council, however, is just this: in the formal declaration which the council sent out, they said no to circumcision, but added to gentile (!) converts: “…that you abstain from things offered to idols, from blood, from things strangled, and from sexual immorality.” Two of those proscriptions—“blood” and “things strangled”— relate to OT Jewish rituals, not to NT salvation. They were not legislating, obviously, for all modern gentiles, but they did feel free to mandate that, in that historical context, it would be wise to observe Jewish law. (Acts 15:22f) That while we are free from the OT ritual law, as the NT incessantly states, we accept, in our context, the wisdom of certain OT practices. So much for unhitching the church from OT ritual. 

There is an upside to the suggestion. It would be an ecological plus. No more bulky Bibles, just slim New Testaments. And without the Psalms, because, obviously, they, like much else in the OT, may be “inspired” but are problematic and unnecessary for modern Christians to worry with.  

I have no personal animus toward Pastor Stanley, but it is impossible not to use the words “oceanic stupidity” at his tossing the back-story of our salvation—the incredible richness of the entire story of redemption. 

One wonders how two millennia of saints—Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Luther, come immediately to mind—would see the unhitcher. Would they have understood the phrase “theological pipsqueak?”  Seriously. 

Like Amos (yes, I know, an OT irrelevance), I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but I offer a prediction: this act by the pastor is not the first time he has walked away from NT truth (his “inclusive” position of homosexuals is well known), and it won’t be the last. 

I am for staying forever hitched and forever helped by God’s entire written revelation. 

I recently came across a sentence written by British philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626) which states: “The greatest vicissitude of things amongst men is the vicissitude of sects and religions,” which, translated, means—among other things—men are forever creating new “sects and religions” to deal with the essential focus of all religions—human morality. What is right and wrong, sin and righteousness, morality and immorality. Humans will never cease creating such entities because we cannot cease doing what is perfectly natural to us: debating morality. It is probably a human universal. We moralize in every language spoken by humans, and thus, we create “sects and religions”.

The big question forced upon us, then, is—given changing times, changing personal and cultural values, changing situations—can we ever be sure what is moral and what is not? What we should do and what we should refrain from doing?

I suggest two such solidities which never change, indeed, which cannot change, and which, amid the maelstrom of moral decisions—the various “vicissitudes” thrust upon us—give us moral light.

First, there is the nature of God. He is the one “true and living God” (to quote the apostle), distinct from the myriads of untrue and dead gods created by men, and He is unchanging in His divine character. If God is changeable, obviously, morality can never be defined with any certainty. We are left to the vagaries of men of human ingenuity, kaleidoscopically redefining morality on the run. The result is a moral morass, precisely what one observes all over the planet.

Second, there is the nature of man. Even if we grant that God is consistent, coherent, constant, what about man? Again, all the records we have of man, from the beginning of human history, tell the same story: at all times and in all places, he manifests that he is morally flawed. He is selfish, rebellious, capable of horrific brutality. That is what his own creation story tells us in the first pages of the Bible. Thomas Hobbes said that man’s natural state is war. Sigmund Freud said that man’s animalistic aggression is a given; it is “baked in the cake,” and cannot, he says, be controlled. (See his famous “Civilization and Its Discontents”) Lord Acton said: “No historian thinks well of human nature.” Stuart Barton Babbage has a thought-provoking line: “Man is the only animal which blushes, or needs to.”
There was a time, especially during “The Enlightenment—eighteenth-century Europe, when “the perfectibility of man” was commonly preached, especially among socialists and liberal theologians. H. G. Wells is an interesting study. After many years of passionately espousing the theory of humanity’s unbounded potential through science and education, he wrote late in his life in his “Mind at the End of its Tether “…a final repudiation of everything he had ever said or thought…” about such illimitable potential, given man’s essential nature. Most moderns agree with the late Wells position.

An acceptance of those two “solidities” give all men a basis for discovering what is right and what is wrong. If God can change, we will all live in a moral fog. If man can change his character, the same is true. The Bible says God’s character is predictable, and so is man’s. “The leopard cannot change his spots, and the Ethiopian cannot change his skin.” (Nor can the non-Ethiopian!)

It must, then, be clear that the search for right and wrong is such a man pursuing such a God. And such a man believing such a God. And such a man obeying such a God. That does not change man’s essential nature, but it does change his behavior.

But what about new sins? The short answer is—there are none. Such “modern” sins as price-gouging, incest, homosexuality, bestiality, etc., are explicitly proscribed in the Bible because they were practiced by biblical peoples, from the dawn of human history.

Modern vicissitude dwellers seeking moral clarity could do worse than to make a perusal of the Ten Commandments. They are first found in Exodus 20:1-17. Elton Trueblood called them “Foundations for Reconstruction.” Are they still relevant? Name one which would not be seriously relevant, say, in Beijing? Or in your town. Or for any life. Yours. Or mine. Or anybody else’s.

Bill Anderson
Grapevine, Texas

We westerners, with our Greek heritage, tend to view every event as related to three time-frames—past, present, and future. We view our own personal existence that way.

As to our past, a geneticist recently announced that she has found that we all carry the genes of a single female (whom most of us know as “Eve”). For starters, then, you and I have much more personal history than we often recognize, stretching back thousands of years. 

The second section of our lives, our “now” (whatever the meaning) is long or short, depending solely on our perspective. It is longer than that of a housefly, which lives three days, and a bit shorter than a certain Australian sponge that lives over 1500 years.  

The Sequel

And then here is our future. One of the “human universals” is that most of us, up to 99.99%, we are told, are betting on a sequel of some sort, another episode following the life we now enjoy. 

Let us assume that the vast majority of humans is right. All religions believe (though some individuals do not) that man’s spirit it eternal. The Bible, for instance, often states, explicitly, that there is life beyond this one, for everybody, and that it lasts forever. 

The idea of eternality is so profound that the Greeks did not even have a word for the concept and used various periphrastic (or “round-about”) expressions to get at the meaning. We simply have no frame of reference for infinity. At the least, however, it means you and I are going to spend much more time in the future than we have anywhere else. That, and much else, is what makes the subject so intriguing. And so important. 

It is impossible for humans to communicate without using similes, metaphors, allegories, and the like. We do that because subjects exist which, both conceptually and linguistically, are simply beyond us. That would especially be true of a subject as elusive as eternity.

I suggest an analogy, a metaphor, which might let in a bit of light as to the meaning of “eternal life.” 

The Metaphor

Let us say that just previous to your physical birth, an angel (the Hebrews believed each of us has one, and called them “the angel of the Presence”—see Matthew 18:10) announces to you that you need to prepare for “a little commotion.” Being perfectly content, you really don’t want any commotion. You have not a single worry. Maybe you have never worried at all. Comfortable, happy, well-nourished, safe, warm, with something thumping just above your head telling you with every thump that you are loved.  All is well in your entire universe.

Slowly, however, you begin to feel uncomfortable. Cramped. Hedged-in. And then you feel the very same muscles which have held you so delicately and lovingly and securely pushing on you. With increasing pressure, they shove you downwards, squeezing you so tightly that you become more than uncomfortable; you are in serious pain. And then terror, as you find yourself being crushed into a narrow tube or canal of sorts.

After perhaps hours of this comes a truly stunning shock. You find yourself in a frightfully alien place. Your lungs expand—for the very first time—and you feel as if you are drawing glass shards into of your body. You open your eyes, and searing light pierces your eyes. Your head is bursting with the sound of your own voice, which you are hearing for the first time, as it shrieks at your “little commotion.”  What you want desperately to communicate but cannot is “Take me back where I came from! Immediately!” You wouldn’t have used the verbiage, of course, but you would have had to sense that this must surely be the end of your existence.

It isn’t long, however, until the sights and sounds and other physical sensations which so stunned you begin to turn pleasant. You are surrounded by affection, and your least whim is obeyed immediately. You don’t know the word “king,” but you are experiencing the privileges of an oriental despot. As if highly magnetized, you draw admiring stares from everyone who enters your room. You own the place. 

At an early point, you learn that your room, much more capacious than your former quarters, is, however, not the entire picture. In fact, in the next sixty or eighty years, you continue to learn—to get a better perspective—on the size of your new environment, and you are rather astonished at it all.

At some point, you discover that you are walking about on a vast ball of matter and water called earth, and that it is so expansive, if you lived a thousand years, you could never see all of it. That, in fact, no one ever has in all human history. You learn that much of it has never felt a single human foot or been seen by a single human eye. 

Then comes the real shock: you learn that the huge ball called earth is but one of countless such balls, “planets” they are called. Billions of them, many of which are monstrously larger than earth. It hurts your head to be told, for instance, that the sun that you see is four hundred times as large as your earth. That one planet called Jupiter, which you can hardly see with the naked eye, has over one thousand times (actually something like 1,320 times) as much volume as does your earth-home. And then you hear that, from one side of the cosmos—the starry realm—to the other is in the range of 13 billion (BILLION!) light years! (For context, remember that you learned in the fifth grade that light travels about 186,000 miles per second.) Further, you are told by the cosmologists, that the universe is continually expanding, has been doing so since its beginning (likely with a “Big Bang”), and will continue doing so into the unimaginably expansive future. And, as a footnote, you feel as if you’re standing or sitting still, but actually, you are traveling something like 350,000 miles per hour with the rotation of your ball of matter. 

Further, you learn that your earth (indeed, the entire cosmos) is not only huge, but incredibly complex, beginning with what the scientists call an “atom,”  a word that literally means “uncuttable” and which refers to the smallest piece of matter. But then you learn that it betrays its name and turns out to be an entire microscopic galaxy comprised of at least eighteen known “sub-atomic” particles, with others expected to be found. So, whether you use the most advanced microscope to see the smallest things known, or the telescope to see the largest things known, you realize that you know very, very little about your world. One man, a world-famous scientist named Einstein, openly admitted that “We don’t know a millionth part of anything.” 

It is commonly confessed by the most learned among us, that we still don’t really know how much we don’t know. New worlds of truth are forever on the horizon, beckoning us to learn, but, alas, due to the reality of our own mortality, we can never know it all. The last “polymath,” a person who was believed to have mastered the then-known facts about the various disciplines of study, is said to be Gottfried Leibnitz, who died in 1716!

Here, then, is the question: why did God give you and me so much material to study in the context of such obvious limitations? Why these microscopic worlds beneath our microscope and these telescopic worlds beyond our telescopes? And why so little time, with so much to learn in both worlds which the smartest among us are still guessing about, our best efforts to learn having accumulated relatively so few facts?

I suggest it is all a splendidly enlightening parable. God’s magnificent metaphor. 

The Parable

That “little commotion” which we experienced at birth sending us into the vastness of the physical universe will serve us well in preparation for entrance into the third section of our life’s timeline—eternity.

How better to get a fix on that experience?  Perhaps our angel, at some point, gently suggests we prepare for another “little commotion,” that is, the event of our physical death. In approaching it, we find ourselves thinking much as we did before.

We are hesitant about leaving the comfort of our love-cradle called “life.” We hear ourselves saying, “I am really going to miss the children, and their children, and their children. Birthdays and graduations and Easters and Thanksgivings and Christmases and New Year Eves and spring-time Bluebonnets and fall football games. And our favorite vacation spots and our home and neighbors and friends. And food and music and poetry and art.  And et cetera! I just can’t imagine the loss of all that. I am really not ready to leave just yet.”

“You will remember,” the angel says, “how we had this conversation once before. And you will remember how, once becoming aware of the richness of your life outside your mother’s body, you would have resolutely refused to have retreated into that tiny, cramped space again. In fact, it is impossible to imagine it, isn’t it?  So now, on to our next ‘little commotion’ in a bit.”

Of course, the angel knows, but we don’t! Hear this: what he knows, we don’t know.  But he knows, we do know. And if we are sufficiently prescient, if we get the message: our first “little commotion” has prepared us for the second one. What better way for our Creator to prepare us to face eternity—whatever it is!—but by the metaphor of our physical birth ushering us into another new and unimaginably delightful experience? 

We may, therefore, in our current state, expect to be able to understand heaven as we might expect to have understood Euclidean geometry before our physical birth. Or to have fathomed Platonic epistemology six months after our conception. Or to put the Pacific in a tea-cup, the Sahara in a sand-box, or the Alps in a shoe-box. There are some magnitudes that defy miniaturization.

Nobody in heaven, before arriving, had anything but the slightest adumbration of its glory, but nobody there is asking to return to earth. Nobody! 

Our chief business, then, is to walk with the keenest anticipation of our future in that final-but-never-ending “segment” of our lives. Add to that our obvious benefit over our first “little commotion;” we didn’t know it was coming, but we do know the second one will.  

A serious caveat must be stated here: eternity will not be pleasant for everybody. No world religion believes that. And no rational person, religious or not, believes that. 

J. S. Whale put it this way:

       It is illogical to tell men that they must do the will of God and accept his gospel of grace, and that nothing ultimately depends on it. The curious modern heresy that everything is bound to come right in the end is so frivolous that I will not insult you by refuting it.

C. S. Lewis put it this way: 

       If the game is played, it must be possible to lose it. If the happiness of a creature lies in self-surrender, no one can make that surrender, but himself and he may refuse.…Everybody who goes to hell does so by his or her personal choice. 

George MacDonald says:

       There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy  will be done’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell choose it. Without that self-choice, there could be no Hell.

Jesus Christ, who spoke much more about hell than heaven, put it this way:

Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation. 
John 5:28 KJV

What if there is no painful eternity? Blaise Pascal, a serious Christian and world-class scientist famously answered the question this way. If there is but one chance in ten thousand that such an eternity exists, he said, it is still a bad gamble—given the danger— to bet against it. If I am wrong, he said, I suffer no great loss; if I am right, the loss is incalculable.

Thus, to be unprepared for our first “little commotion” is perfectly understandable; to be unprepared for our second one is the only truly unforgivable act of which any human is capable.