The Brokenhearted

Luke 4:18-19 (NKJV)"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord."

After Jesus had finished reading this passage from the book of Isaiah he sat down and declared, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” In this meditation, my focus is on the little phrase “to heal the brokenhearted.” And my question is, “Who were these brokenhearted ones Jesus came to heal, and what was the cause of the heartbreak?” Were they brokenhearted because they had just broken up with their sweetheart? Were they children who had lost a parent, or parents who had lost a child? I think we are getting closer to the truth because Jesus does heal those who are brokenhearted in these ways, but a passage from the Old Testament gives a more in-depth answer to our question. It’s a passage from one of David’s Psalms, written as he was suffering from another kind of broken heart. He writes:

“…A broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” (Psalm 51:17). David had become devastatingly aware of the vast gulf that sin had created between him and the God he loved, Who had said “Be holy, for I am holy.” David’s heart was broken because of his separation from God. And this is the kind of broken heart that Jesus came to heal. The brokenhearted ones are those whose hearts are broken by the things that break God’s heart. The prisoners he came to set free are those who are held captive by sin, including false beliefs that keep them from being brokenhearted by the things that break God’s heart. And the blind ones, whose sight he came to restore, are those whose sin keeps them from seeing clearly God’s presence in the world. Jesus came to heal, to free, and to restore those who suffer from this kind of broken heart, this kind of captivity, and this kind of blindness. He came that they might have life and have it more abundantly, being filled with the love, joy, peace and hope only God can give.

Scripture

2 Tim 3:16-17 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

God shows himself through scripture to those who love him, because only those who have come to love God will accept His rebuke, correction, and training in righteousness. “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way” (Isaiah 53:6). That is why only those who have been “quickened” by the Spirit of God will turn from our wayward path and start to follow Him, rather than going our own way. Only then will the worldview of scripture (the Bible) begin to replace the worldviews that have held the believer captive up until the time of “quickening.” This is as true of scientists who become believers as it is of any other believer.

But what is the experience of being “quickened”? Ephesians 2: 4-5 gives us the necessary insight: “But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions--it is by grace you have been saved.” (NIV). It is God’s love and irresistible grace that “quickens us together with Christ” (KJV), or “makes us alive with Christ” (NIV). God’s great love and grace draws us to him – irresistibly – in God’s own timing.

God Had a Purpose

“God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” (Gene 1:31)

Anyone who evaluates his handiwork and says “it is good” has a purpose in mind and is satisfied that what he has made fulfills that purpose. So what was God’s purpose in creation? When the psalmist writes, “The heavens declare the glory of God,” (Ps. 19:1) he is recognizing that God’s purpose in creating the heavens was to declare His glory. That is what the heavens are doing as the psalmist beholds them. Yet the communication would not be complete unless there was someone there – the psalmist – who was ready, willing and able to comprehend what the heavens are saying and declare it – in writing, in speech, in song. When Einstein said, “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible,” he was declaring his own wonder that man is able to comprehend the universe. There is a kind of ‘meshing’ of man’s mind with the beautiful natural order built into the universe. Perhaps it would be best described as a “meeting of the minds” – the finite mind of the creature created in the image of God with the infinite Mind of the Creator.

Science is the greatly refined ability of man to “see clearly” the natural order built into the universe and to pass his discoveries down to future generations. Man, using this God-given tool made some awesome discoveries throughout the 20th century. One of these was the “code of life” that exists in every living cell. Another was the discovery of the “fine-tuning” of the universe’s fundamental forces that make both life and science possible. So why aren’t scientists joining in unison to declare the glory of God? Why do so many of them declare the opposite, making claims such as “God is dead” and “God is a Delusion”? I think my nephew Jim is onto something. See the comment on my last post, October 25th.

To Whom Does God Show Himself?


John 14:1 (NKJV) “Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me.”

When Jesus spoke those words He was talking to His disciples, men who had believed in God all their lives. Unlike the “new atheists” of today, they had not been brainwashed for generations to suppress their natural inclination to sing of themes such as “the heavens declare the glory of God” and “what is man that you are mindful of him” and “the law of God is perfect, reviving the soul.” They knew that God cares for man and that the law of God, the moral order, is part of the natural order built into God’s creation for man’s good. They also knew they were the people through whom God had given His Word, the scriptures that reinforce and build upon the natural revelation that is available to all people everywhere in the created order. Those scriptures also told of a Redeemer who would come to free them from their oppressors. So when Jesus said “you believe in God, believe also in me,” he was saying belief in God, the Creator, is the starting point, but your faith must take you farther because God has shown himself more fully in the scriptures and in His Son who was foretold by the scriptures.

The condition Jesus puts on manifesting himself more fully to any man, woman, or child is simply “love God, love His Word, and love his Way.” The reason the “new atheists” like Richard Dawkins don’t “see” God, even in His creation, is because they choose not to see Him. They are atheists by choice because they don’t want God tinkering in the world, and especially they don’t want Him tinkering in their lives.

How Does God Show Himself?

John 14:21 Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him.”

God has shown himself to mankind in two ways: 1) by His creation, and 2) by sending His Son, the perfect revelation of himself, and giving us the scriptures that tell of Him – prophesized in the Old Testament, fulfilled in the New.

Creation, the first revelation, was as much a supernatural event as was the second, because God is not part of the physical realm He created. He is beyond nature. He preceded it and is sovereign over it. He controls it. It does not control or limit Him. Yet man, whose physical body is part of nature, can know much about the created universe in which he lives because God, by a supernatural act, created mankind in His own image so that man can comprehend, at least to some extent, what God has made. Albert Einstein recognized this when he said, “the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” Man, by his own efforts, using the sense organs and power of reason God has given him, can “see" clearly God’s divine nature in His creation. He can see the awesome power and beautiful order God has built into it – both the physical order and the moral order. That order would not be comprehensible to man if his finite mind did not, in some way, correspond to the infinite mind of the Creator. Science, properly understood, is simply the greatly refined natural ability God has given to man to comprehend what God has made. God’s ultimate purpose for giving this tool to man is so that man can, if he chooses, give God the glory He alone deserves.

But like any tool, science is only as good as the artisan using it. If the artisan chooses not to use a tool for the purpose for which it was designed, the results will be limited. In fact the artisan might begin to look like a fool. Early scientists such as Sir Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler gave God the glory when they made their great scientific discoveries. They were using science for the purpose God intended. But postmodern man does not do that. Instead he increasingly seeks to bring glory to himself, even going to great lengths to avoid the conclusion that there might possibly be a Designer, a Creator, a God. Many postmodern scientists simply choose to believe that God does not exist, absolute truth does not exist, and an absolute moral order does not exist. When Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, saw the incredibly intelligent design inherent in every living cell, he chose to believe that life was brought to earth by intelligent aliens from outer space, rather than admit to the possibility of an all-knowing, all-powerful supernatural Creator with absolute authority over all of His creation. Crick chose not to give the glory for the marvelous design he had discovered in nature to the only One who is worthy.

Sinful man does not want God, absolute truth, or an absolute moral order. That is why God showed himself in a second way. My next meditation will be about love and the condition God has placed upon showing himself, in that second way, to any person, scientist or otherwise. The condition is summarized in John 14:21 above.

I Will Show Myself to Him

Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him." John 14:21

In the 14th chapter of the gospel of John, Jesus makes two very interesting claims about himself. He says he is the Truth (John 14:6). And he says he will show himself to those who love him (John 14:21). Jesus, the Word who was in the beginning with God, who was God, who became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1), is the source of absolute Truth. The Creator of the universe, the only one who knows absolute Truth, promises to reveal Truth to those who really want it – to those who love the Creator of the universe. Who are those that love Him? They are those who love God’s Word and want to live the way God intended the creature created in His image to live.

In the early years of the development of modern science, those who made the greatest contributions did love the Creator. Men like Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler used their God-given intellect to study God’s creation, and as they discovered bits and pieces of truth they gave God the glory, just as King David had done 2700 years earlier when he wrote “the heavens declare the glory of God…” But as science continued its apparently unstoppable race through time, scientists began to loose their love for the Creator and his Word. The scientific method sought to strip the mind of all cultural biases and presuppositions, religious or otherwise, and focus on the “pure” data of sense experience. The method proved to be so successful that scientists began to believe that all of nature would eventually be explained by natural laws. When that happened they would have come to know absolute truth. They also believed they could get there by their own effort – no need for a purposeful Creator to show himself to them.
But our postmodern era has shown how preposterous this Enlightenment ideal of perfect human objectivity is. Stephen J. Gould’s critical analysis of the scientific community’s acceptance of the work of certain biological determinists in the 19th and early 20th century provides an example of just how difficult it is, even for scientists, to keep biases out of science. The biological determinists, living in a period of colonialism, attempted to prove the intellectual superiority of one race over another by measuring brain size and IQ’s. At first the scientific community accepted their work. The entire scientific community, after all, was part of that same racist culture. It was only when the larger culture began to change that the biases built into the data accumulated by these racist scientists began to come to light, and one more scientific theory bit the dust. However, Gould continued to have faith that astute scientists can strive to recognize the inevitable influences of political and cultural biases on their work, and can somehow overcome such biases. His theory of NOMA, meaning that science and religion are Non-Overlapping Magisteria, depends on scientists being able to keep religion and values out of their work. My next post, which will deal with the limitations of scientific truth, will show that scientists cannot keep religion and values out of their work. Scientists believe what they want to believe, and scientific theories come and go. But the Word of our Lord stands forever.

There is Truth

Modern man is a product of that historical period known as “The Enlightenment.” He says, “Yes, there is truth,” but goes on to proclaim that science, with its refined tools for observation and experiment, is the one and only pathway to truth, so God is out of a job. But as modern man continued to pursue this vision into the 20th century, his most revolutionary scientific discoveries began to cast a shadow of doubt over his inflated aspirations. The aftermath of the truth-shattering scientific revelations of the last century is our contemporary postmodern culture in which the truth pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme. Postmodern man says that there is no such thing as absolute truth; everything is relative. The phrase, “True for you but not for me,” is bandied about with reckless abandon, the speaker seeming to say, “I am now privy to the one and only absolute truth, which is that there is no absolute truth.” He fails to see the contradiction in his own statement of faith.

The faith of both modernism and postmodernism has failed because both have rejected the One and only source of absolute truth. God himself is that source, and He has made himself known – first through creation, then through the Old Testament scriptures, and finally through His Son who is the “spitting image” of the Father. But the fact that God has put His Truth out there for all to see does not mean that all will “see.” To those who continually refuse to “see,” God is either completely shrouded in mystery or He doesn’t even exist. But He makes Himself known to those who love Him and are called to His purpose. Jesus Christ said, “Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him” (John 14:21). Jesus goes on to tell his disciples that he will continue to reveal himself to them after he has left this world. He says, "All this I have spoken while still with you. But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you (John 14:25-26).

However, our postmodern secular culture does not want to be reminded of the absolute truth God has revealed and continues to reveal. So it has set up a dichotomy between science and religion, fact and value, and has relegated religion and value to the “private sphere.” But these two “magisteria,” as Stephen J. Gould has called them in his theory of NOMA, cannot be kept separate. They often overlap. In my next meditation I will explore the fact that this dichotomy of fact and value is false. Values cannot be kept out of science and facts cannot be kept out of religion.

The Little We Know

When I was a child my mother used to encourage my brothers and me with the wonderful saying, “Good, better, best, never let it rest, until your good is better, and your better best.” I believe my last meditation on our Christian faith started out well, but ended with a whimper. I must do better!

My dissatisfaction with last month’s meditation was with the way I ended it. In the end it left me with the rather hopeless feeling that we cannot know anything about God. But that is the philosophy of “agnosticism,” which is just as bad as my former “atheism"! And I know that is not what the apostle Paul meant when he wrote 1 Cor 8:2 “The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know.” Pastor Tom’s blog title, “The Little We Know,” gives the proper perspective. He writes, “We all know at least a little bit of truth don’t we? And we are responsible and accountable for the little bit of truth we know, aren’t we?” It’s all about humility and submission. Jesus said it this way, “Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him" (John 14:21). We can know much about God because Jesus Christ has made Him known. I like to think of it in a rather folksy way: The Son is the "spitting image" of the Father, so if we know the Son we know the Father. The Holy Spirit is involved too, since Jesus goes on to say, "All this I have spoken while still with you. But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you (John 14:25-26). Yes, we do know a little bit of truth and we can continually learn more as we yield to the Holy Spirit and He continues His work of conforming us to the likeness of Jesus Christ.

With this introduction, my next meditation will get back to the issue of the reasonableness of our faith and the question of the limitations of scientific truth.

Christianity - the Reasonable Faith

When I was an atheist I thought that, when scientists had finally discovered all the laws of nature, including all laws of human behavior, mankind would usher in “heaven on earth.” Man would finally have achieved absolute truth. I, like all atheists, had faith but it was not a reasonable faith. It was a faith without God, the Creator of nature. It was a faith that relegated “supernaturalism” to the category of myth and fairy tale. It was the faith of secular humanism, which says that all belief in the supernatural is nothing but the product of primitive man’s fearful and irrational imaginings. Such belief, according to the humanist, can now be discarded because science has now given man control over nature. “Fear not,” says the secular humanist. “Big Brother government, with the help of science giving us absolute truth, will solve all your problems.” Secular humanism discards belief in God and the Bible “like a worn out garment,” to use Alex deSherbinin’s very descriptive phrase (see my Dec.17, 2008 post).

Thank God, He miraculously entered my life and gave me reasonable faith. I no longer believe that science is the only method for seeking truth. Science – observation and experiment – is the best, most reasonable method for discovering the laws of nature that God himself laid down in the beginning. Science does discover some truths. A part of what it means for man to be created in God’s image is that we are able to gain some understanding of God’s Creation. The most spectacular scientific discoveries of the 20th century, such as the discovery of DNA the code of life, show there is design in nature. But science alone is limited to saying, “Yes, there is design.” It cannot go beyond that to tell us anything about who or what did the designing. Scientific truth has its limitations. When scientists try to go beyond the limits of science, while still clinging to naturalist philosophy, they begin to look like “fools.” As Francis Crick, discoverer of DNA, desperately looked around to find some way of avoiding the reasonable conclusion that a supernatural mind might be the designer, he concluded instead that life must have arisen on another planet and was brought here by aliens from outer space. Such irrational leaps of faith are not necessary for the thinking Christian because God gave us another source of truth – the Bible. Christians, through God’s revelation, have received absolute truth. The Bible says God is the Designer. Just as science has discovered many truths about nature, the Bible tells us many truths about God. Yet can we claim that we fully understand the Bible? God has said that if you “seek the LORD your God, you will find him if you look for him with all your heart and with all your soul.” (Deut. 4:29). Christians want to know God fully, but we also know that getting to know him better is a life-long process. Do we dare to claim we have arrived? I’m grateful for Pastor Tom’s reminder from God’s Word, "The man who thinks that he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know." (1 Corinthians 8:2)

The Basic Moral Sense

In his book Culture Shift, Al Mohler writes, “Ominous signs of moral collapse and cultural decay now appear on our contemporary horizon. A society ready to put the institution of marriage up for demolition and transformation is a society losing its most basic moral sense.” (p.5). Dr. Mohler’s statement quite rightly presupposes that there is such a thing as a “basic moral sense,” otherwise it could not be in jeopardy of being lost. President Obama also expressed such a moral sense when, in his international prayer breakfast speech, he said that the diverse faiths represented there all agree that it is wrong to kill innocent human beings. So here are two things our society’s “most basic moral sense” knows are wrong – the demolition and transformation of marriage and the killing of innocent human beings. Yet since our new president has taken office, laws defending both marriage and the lives of innocent human beings are in jeopardy of being over-turned. Yes indeed, there are ominous signs of moral collapse on our contemporary horizon, as our society ignores and suppresses the “most basic moral sense.”

So where did this “most basic moral sense” come from? John Dewey, the late 19th early 20th century philosopher and author of the book, “ A Common Faith,” said it has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind. But since Dewey was an evolutionist he didn’t recognize morality as coming from the Creator. It just evolved as the human animal struggled to survive. It’s a product of evolution. Dewey didn’t see the moral sense as being suppressed. It’s just there hovering on the edge of consciousness. It remains for our Democratic society to make it explicit and militant, and that is what our culture, which has accepted the legacy of American pragmatists such as Dewey is doing. God-given faith and morality is being demolished and replaced by a man-made substitute.

Let’s contrast that with what the Bible says about that “basic moral sense.” Roma 1:20 says that “…since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” The basic moral sense was given by God – built into His creation of mankind. But it has been suppressed by sin. God made his moral order explicit and militant when He gave the moral law to Moses as a refresher course in what man already knew but had chosen to ignore. Our culture today continues to suppress and ignore that basic moral sense. Even more ominous is the fact that our leaders no longer have a God-given refresher course to bring to consciousness the distortions that have crept into that basic moral sense because of sin. As in Nazi Germany, our culture “has discarded its beliefs in God and the Bible like a worn out garment.” (Thank you Alex for that wonderfully descriptive phrase). A morality without God is being made explicit and militant.

God is not Silent

In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe. (Heb1:1-2).

God made Himself known to the entire world in His Creation (general revelation). He also revealed Himself in Scripture (special revelation) – through the prophets in the Old Testament and through His Son and apostles in the New. But mankind chooses to ignore both forms of revelation. He suppresses the truth and creates his own gods.

This running from God can be seen in our own culture in the dramatic rise of secular humanism, which makes man himself a god. In his book "Culture Shift" Albert Mohler gives a remarkably clear-headed analysis of the current cultural issues and the anti-Christian philosophies that brought us to the current crisis. Figuring prominently among these historical influences is that of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century philosopher and educator John Dewey, who summed up his secular humanism in his book "A Common Faith," published in 1934. After dismissing both of the ways in which God has revealed Himself to man, in a manner similar to that of current atheists such as Richard Dawkins who say that science has buried God, Dewey proceeds to create his own religion without God. He concludes his book with the statement, “Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind. It remains to make it explicit and militant.” (p.87). Dewey’s “common faith” did not take root immediately, but with the growth of organizations such as the ACLU and NEA (National Education Association), this “new” religion is now being made “explicit and militant” in our own time. I commend Al Mohler’s book to every Christian who wants to engage in the culture war, confronting the secular humanism of our culture with the timeless truth of the Bible.