GOD HAS SOME QUESTIONS FOR YOU

When God asks us questions—as He frequently does in Scripture—they are of the utmost importance. Of course, being omniscient, He already knows the answers. He’s not gathering information. He asks them rhetorically to tell us what we need to learn or need to remember. Look for God’s questions, as you read the Bible, but be sure you meditate on the very first three (Genesis 3:9-11), because they form a foundation for most others in Scripture. This brief article points to a few of things I’ve gleaned from studying them.

“Where are you?”

God already knew Adam had gone astray, but Adam needed to know it. God asked him (and us) “Where are you?” because He wants lost humans to know He’s searching for them. As a shepherd looks for sheep that go astray, God wants to find and bring us home. The old saying is accurate: “If we feel far from God, guess who moved?” We did—we fled. But God is on our trail. His first question tells us that if we run, He runs after us. We may try avoiding Him, but ultimately He shows up. The poet Francis Thompson describes this God as “The Hound of Heaven”:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, . . . .
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat—and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet—
‘All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.’

God’s first question also helps us to see where unfounded fears take us: into hiding—hiding from each other behind fig leaves, hiding from God behind bushes, hiding from our human calling and its responsibilities behind excuses. A proper response to His question is to agree that we’re lost and let Him lead us to safety. But Adam didn’t respond properly.

A new condition guided the thinking of the first fallen humans. They had eaten from a tree that gave them a “knowledge of good and evil” independent from a direct relationship with God. It brought them, and all their descendants, into a condition of spiritual death. Adam’s reply to God revealed that he had adopted a new form of morality that was essentially legalistic in nature: “I was afraid at your approach because of my nudity, so, of course, I hid.” To God, such behavior was a novelty, not a matter of course, and it led to His next rhetorical question.

“Who told you that you were naked?”

Most Bible teachers avoid the clear implications in this second question by skipping over it without comment. For them, lingering here is embarrassingly dangerous. It might unmask the real root of their teachings about the shamefulness of the naked human body. In fact, I enjoy exposing this cowardly theological neglect with a bit of my own humor:

Serious consideration of God’s 1st question to fallen humanity, “Where are you?” might lead a person to repent and become a Christian. Serious consideration of His 2nd question, “Who said you were naked?” might lead a person to repent and become a nudist.

In a totally naked world—like the original creation—nakedness had no moral meaning. Shame about it had to come from outside, introduced by someone who detested the openness nakedness fosters. Who, from outside the naked material cosmos, would want to camouflage reality, hide truth beneath lies? God leaves no room for denying the obvious. His question, “Who told you that you were naked?” clearly identifies the foreign source of humanity’s body shame.

The point of God’s second question is this: “Where did you get these new ideas about your body? Who have you been listening to? Have you been listening to a deceiver, that lying fallen angel who hates the naked glory of My embodied image? Is he now your teacher? Have you traded My instructions for the word of a liar?”

It’s crucial for us to acknowledge the sin of entertaining falsehoods. Unless we realize our error, we will continue listening to the deceiver of souls, who wants to destroy us. To be set free from false thinking, we must look to our Maker alone for moral guidance. The opened eyes Satan promised our first parents laid them wide open to deceitful suggestions. We must vomit up and spit out the forbidden fruit of moral independence and learn to live by feeding upon every word that comes from the mouth of our Creator (Matthew 4:4).

“Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”

Of course, the purpose of Satan’s deception was to get us not only to believe lies, but to disobey our Maker. Again, God is completely aware of our sins. Our answer to this question is for our benefit, not His. We cannot experience God’s healing forgiveness unless we fully acknowledge our disobedience.

This question also reminds us how much God cares about our welfare. His commandments, His directives, His rules-to-live-by, weren’t intended to stifle our happiness, but to secure it. God wants keep us from doing what harms us. We pave our own road to destruction by failing to realize the grave consequences of doing our own thing. Safety for the human soul lies only in living according to God’s will and ways.

This last question calls us to confess our sins, which is a direct path to divine mercy (Proverbs 28:13). What would have happened, if Adam and Eve had responded in confession and repentance? Perhaps human history would have been quite different. God was kind to them in the midst of their newly fallen world, but He never got to show them the “mercy” bestowed on those who confess and renounce their sins, because they didn’t do it. Instead, as they had tried to hide their bodies with fig leaves, they tried to cover their sin with excuses.

How Will We Answer God’s Questions?

God still asks fallen humans, “Where are you? Who have you been listening to? Did you fail to do what I told you?” Try to answer them while reviewing the circumstances and situations you experience, the mass of information you receive, the various failures and shortcomings you bring into your earthly journey. These three questions reveal the heart of the God Who asks them. He is our loving Creator Who seeks to find us, guide us and heal us.

BETWEEN THE WOMB AND THE TOMB….

What are we supposed to learn during our lifetime, during our journey between “the womb and the tomb”? What has been built into creation that can teach it to us? I’d like to share this poem—from my fourth book of poetry, Poems Between Birth and Resurrection—which tries to answer those questions, and more:

CREATION QUEST

There’s beauty in a panoramic view of land and sea.
There’s dancing in the heart that hears a birdsong’s melody.
There’s sweetness in a flower, majesty within a storm,
Amazing grace and glory in our naked human form.
There’s mesmerizing loveliness in every clear night sky,
Enchantment in a sunset, as it captures every eye,
And mysteries in ocean depths beyond the sunlight’s rays:
God’s miracles abounding all around us, all our days.

But while we stare bedazzled at creation’s lovely charms,
Our God who stands behind them waits for us with open arms.
Enthrallment and enjoyment were intended by His hand.
In everything He crafted are delights divinely planned,
Not just to please our senses, but to set our souls aflame
With thirst for greater pleasure than this world can give or name,
A joy that all creation was proclaiming from the start
That’s found alone in union with our Maker’s loving heart.

— David L. Hatton, 6/21/2006

Creation is waiting to be set free by the Divine Human, the God-Man Jesus Christ. Even in its longing and “groaning” in awaiting that liberation, it teaches us where the human race can “alone” find happiness: “in union with our Maker’s loving heart.”

(see also on this blog "Poems Between Birth and Resurrection")

A HOLY HELL, NO LESS. . .

Although some evangelicals treat Rob Bell as a heretic, I tried keeping an open mind as I read his book Love Wins. Most of Bell’s critics habitually quote C. S. Lewis, whose literary mentor was George MacDonald. Do they realize MacDonald was a Christian universalist who believed with all his heart that God’s love would eventually win every soul?

Lewis disagreed with MacDonald about the eternality of hell, because he believed that the perpetuity of human freedom made hell an everlasting probability. But even Lewis—while portraying his mentor’s change of mind about hell in The Great Divorce—suggested the possibility of an escape. (Shame on you, if you’ve not yet read that masterpiece! . . and I won’t let my description of his “escape” episode tempt you to avoid this insightful novelette by Lewis.)

No matter what their theological degree or expertise, only the heartless can trample over the pathos and moral outrage exuding from Rob Bell’s question: “Does God punish people for thousands of years with infinite, eternal torment for things they did in their few finite years of life?” The question is as old as the early church, and there have been others who stood within the orthodoxy of the ancient Creeds yet struggled until answering it in much the same way Bell does.

A quick search online will provide all the arguments you need against Bell’s optimism, if that’s what you’re looking for. However, while disagreeing with him, I share his logical pain over the thought of a place where the lost forever receive cruel and unusual punishment. But if that’s the straw man Bell sets up to knock down as a foundation for his theories, then he must be talking about a destiny that exists only in the theological imagination of Calvinists. I say this not because of the disagreeable nature of hell’s intense suffering, but because of the unloving nature of a Calvinistic deity who doesn’t care about keeping a certain large number of lost souls from going there.

Calvinist intellectuals may ridicule the "simple-minded" enthusiasm of Arminians, but it’s the sovereign will of the all-loving God, celebrated first in Catholicism and later in Arminianism, that freely grants prevenient grace for awakening sin-bound souls. This grace allows every sinner the awesome freedom to responsibly choose or adamantly refuse the light of Christ. Divine grace to obey must logically accompany each and every divine command to repent, otherwise the whole concept of human responsibility is as much an illusion as the maya of Hinduism. At the same time, it’s the endless mercy of that all-loving God—forever desiring none to perish—that maintains a place called hell for all the impenitent. Yes, a real hell, and for very holy reasons.

How could it be otherwise? God sovereignly sets the will of sinners free to respond to Him. When they resist, God refuses to abandon lost souls to their miserable, relentless flight from truth. Ongoing divine Love and Light are never silent or complacent in the midst of ongoing human rebellion. C. S. Lewis believed “that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.” (The Problem of Pain). And so, right along with Lewis, I believe that “God in His mercy made \ The fixed pain of Hell.” (from Lewis’ poem “Divine Justice”). Hell’s ceaseless pain is divine Love’s incessant knocking on doors kept shut by the perpetual defiance of self-will against the healing of divine Light.

No, I can't agree with Rob, who tries to defend God’s reputation by making hell into a short prison sentence, nor even with Master MacDonald, whose fearfully fiery purgatory would set Brother Bell's teeth on edge. Their big mistake, so similar to that in Calvinism, is to make God's loving grace irresistible, while underestimating His sovereign enabling of human wills to freely choose their ultimate destiny.

Neither the bliss of heaven nor the blast of hell need a further defense to free-willed minds than this: Light’s passionate marriage to Love forever celebrates in heaven every human’s pursuit of truth, and Love’s absolute allegiance to Light persistently refutes in hell all stubborn commitments to lies (Romans 2:6-11). Both conditions—that of paradise and that of perdition—mercifully demonstrate God’s eternal promotion of authenticity. Both destinies validate the everlasting duty of humans to choose goodness. Therefore, both forever glorify the grace of a holy and loving Creator.

[for further thoughts along these lines, see my poems, “Inviting Visitations,” “Hellfire and Damnation” and “The Knock.” See, as well, my previous blog article, “The Problem of Hell.” Also, you might benefit from a very Biblical sermon on YouTube called "Hell Explained," well worth listening to.]

LET’S FINISH THE SONG

In my devotional time a few weeks ago, I felt the urge to put some thoughts into a short rhyme:

"Adore the Designer of all things real.
Enjoy these beauties, but hurry along. . . .
Resist temptations to linger or kneel.
Our journey is brief; let's finish the Song."

Feeling the body’s approaching need for retirement stimulates thoughts about mortality. Health issues and aging both tend to fix our gaze on the sand that keeps trickling through the hourglass of life. To contemplate departing from this world isn’t necessarily unhealthy. Ancient Christian monks made it a spiritual discipline to meditate on the day of their death, to help them focus on living each day well. Our concern should not be about how much sand is left to fall, but on the way we live while it’s falling.

Saying this reminds me of writing similar thoughts some years ago in a short essay called “It’s a Short Trip.” Although what I shared then is related, my little poem points toward another facet of concern: the finish.

I love the Lord, and I love the beauties of His creation.  As long as that former love includes loving my neighbor, it is entirely safe. But that latter love of the beauty God has created can be distractive.

I’ve spent hours collecting photo references off the Internet for art compositions that I want to paint someday. Some of that time could have been better invested in painting a few of them. It would have produced more tangible forms of appreciation to our Creator than my own personal delight in collecting them. If painting is part of the “song” God is calling me to sing, then lingering long among creation’s attractions is procrastination.

No one knows what tomorrow may bring. The good that we wish to do, whether by creating things to share with others or by showing love in word and deed, must be performed while we have the opportunity and the strength. Procrastination not only affects our own happiness. Others wait for our kind communications or helpful actions. If the Lord is prompting us to be a blessing to those around us, let’s not put it off till an unknown tomorrow. Today, let’s send that gift, write that email, give that phone call, make that visit. As the cartoon above says, "Do it now!"

PRUDERY AND PORN ADDICTION

Prudery portrays nudity as a stimulus for sexual lust. That’s exactly how pornography sees it. This pair—born from the same sex-obsessed conception of our fleshly embodiment—are twins. Both obscure a holy vision of the physical human form with “vain imaginations.” As two sides of the same coin, together they buy an ungodly distortion of our “fearfully and wonderfully made” anatomy.

Prudery hides the body, calling God’s “temple” a lustful indecency. Profiting from that definition, pornography flaunts the Creator’s handiwork to stimulate the lust prudery predicts. Both ways of treating the body are unnatural, unrealistic and abusive. Purported to be opposites, they are conceptually identical. Both of them dishonor God by turning the incarnation of His image into a lustful temptation.

Christians have notoriously maintained the worst of these two viewpoints, which I stigmatize as porno-prudery, because it lays the essential groundwork for our “pornified” culture. Whenever a wholesome, godly view of the naked body is rejected and a shameful, obscene view embraced, the zeal of prudery inevitably plunges society into the hellish depravity of pornography.

Why do modern mission agencies train interns not to mix Western dress with their Gospel to naked people groups? History’s painful lesson is that such “modesty” devastated undressed cultures with the same lascivious chaos raging in the dressed-up West. Why no official apology for this infamous error committed by Victorian predecessors? Is it because the same erroneous attitude of body shame still survives and thrives in their supporting churches?

Sadly, its allegiance to porno-prudery condemns the modern church to struggle with porn addiction to the same degree as the surrounding culture. Its legalistic methods to curb this epidemic fail miserably, because none of them address the real problem: a pornographic view of the body. As long as Christians treat the sight of certain body parts as the source of lust, they miss the real target. The human heart is where Jesus focuses His attention and healing power. When His followers seek help against porn addiction by applying external measures derived from a porno-prudish view of the body, it’s like using gasoline to put out a fire.

The way to combat the dehumanizing porn problem is to eliminate its symbiotic twin. Without porno-prudery, the power and momentum of porn is lost. Nakedness alone cannot hold the addict. Pornography's hook is the fantasy, the perversion, the lie. Jesus said the truth would set us free (John 8:32). The “Naked Truth” of the ancient fable can quickly undo the chains of bondage forged by porn and prudery. Unadorned Truth shows us the body the way its Creator sees it. Truth soberly instructs us to replace body shame with body acceptance.

It took porno-prudery years to indoctrinate us. Naked Truth wins her converts in a few moments. Among them are painters and sculptors of the human form, who copy the Ultimate Artist's original design from nude models. Millions of them work in healthcare, where the sight of naked bodies is a daily routine. Some live and serve as cross-cultural workers among tribal people who have treated nudity as a social norm for thousands of years. Whatever porn and prudery long and laboriously taught these groups of fellow citizens, Naked Truth quickly and easily untaught them.

Such normal, nonsexual responses to nudity clearly undermine the credibility of those who support porno-prudery. As a desperate maneuver, its defenders may trivialize these examples as “merely contextual.” But, as for as the naked body itself, context is nothing; as for how it's presented, context is everything. Of this crucial difference between the body's moral and immoral presentations, porno-prudery seems stubbornly ignorant. For that fault alone, it deserves removal from all minds claiming to uphold morality. It certainly has no place at all in the hearts of those who believe the human body is the one structure in all of physical creation that our Maker calls a Self-portrait (Genesis 1:27).

(For a more thorough understanding of prudery's direct relationship to porn addiction, visit “My Chains Are Gone.”)

WHY DO THE INNOCENT SUFFER?

In graduate studies at New College Berkeley, I took a course on Job from the Bible scholar Francis I. Andersen. He let two assignments determine our grade. At the outset was a short essay about the suffering of the innocent. The final was to be a fully developed argument defending our personal response to this question, “Did the Lord answer Job?” With his permission I wrote an interpretive summary in drama called The Lord Answered Job, which so impressed him that he mentioned it in that year’s commencement address. Recently I put the drama on my website to be read or performed by anyone interested.

I had been reading Job on the day of the Connecticut massacre. That tragedy gave the question “Why do the innocent suffer?” a fresh context. My initial answer for Dr. Andersen’s class has not changed: God makes the best possible choice, to intervene or not to intervene, by thoroughly evaluating the direct and indirect effects resulting from the infinitesimally complex interplay of the following elements:

• Every single person involved or in any way touched by the incident in question.
• The impact of every past prayer, present choice, or future action of these individuals on all others with whom they are connected now or will be later.
• His omniscient decision to keep the world existing as it is until an ultimately unfavorable balance of evil over good makes prolonging its potential history unjustifiable.
• Each direct or indirect effect that the aftermath of the earthly incident in question will have on the environment and inhabitants of the afterlife.
• Any other interactive elements that God would need take into consideration for His decision. (If others come to mind, please mention them to me in a comment.)

“No man is an island, entire of itself,” wrote John Donne, “every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. . . . any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”

The film classic It’s a Wonderful Life was based on this idea—how one person’s life and actions crucially affect everyone and everything around them. More recently the book Five People You Meet in Heaven—also made into a movie—expounded this same theme. Somehow, “God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.” (Romans 8:28).

When Abraham asked God, “Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Genesis 18:25), he already knew the answer. We may not see how the intertwined relationships of people, or the ongoing effects of their choices, relate to specific tragedies. But when the innocent suffer, we can be sure that God chose the best of all possible bad choices. Yes, BAD CHOICES!

In an environment where people can behave selfishly, an array of bad possibilities are all God has to choose from, unless He decides to cancel free will. Since He won’t do that, all His decisions must deal with the reality of a fallen race living in a world groaning with earthquake and storm under the curse of human sin. Instead of abandoning this sinful mess, God employs His love and wisdom to make, from among all the bad alternatives, exactly the right long-term selection in every situation.

But God did not hang aloof from this knot of interwoven human suffering. The Incarnation is His ultimate answer to our questions about His allowance of suffering. God knows exactly how it feels to be an innocent human being suffering cruelty at the hands of insane powers and fanatical injustice. His divinity diminished none of the pain that cried out, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Mark 15:34). His pain did not dim the divine love behind His prayer for the persecutors who mocked Him, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34).

As far as the suffering of the innocent or the injustice of some of our own pains, God is patient with our doubts about the rightness of His choosing to let them happen. After we reach the afterlife, He has an eternity to explain His reasons. But it might absorb a few eons of our heavenly bliss for God to unravel for our finite understanding what was obvious to Him in the fragment of a nanosecond. He could start with the closest and end with most distant contingencies related to the event in question, showing us one-by-one the weight of each in the cosmic balance of good over evil. When the last interconnected item is measured, we will invariably sigh that long interjection of acknowledgment that C. S. Lewis said would be one of the most familiar utterances heard in Heaven: “Oh-h-h. . . .”

Over the years, I’ve had many why questions I wanted to ask God someday. But as I grow older, they become fewer—not because they’ve decreased in number, but because I’ve increased in trust that the God of all the earth will do right. And if there remains any pains, any open wounds, any vestiges of grief, any tearful sorrows, He has already promised to wipe them out so thoroughly that they will hurt us no more (Revelation 21:4). Beyond the astronomically long explanation we might receive for our questions and doubts, such an ultimate and absolute comfort for affliction is as much as can be provided by God’s perfect love and wisdom, given the reality of unalterably interrelated human choices and actions in a fallen world.

BEYOND SAME-SEX ATTRACTION

The condition of same-sex attraction (SSA) is not synonymous with the campaign of gay activism. In fact, gay politics has been notoriously unkind to those whose perplexity with SSA causes them to pray for a transformation that would bring opposite-sex attraction. I'm writing this both to validate those hoping God will answer such prayers and to invalidate the arrogant dogmatism of those trying to discourage them.

Gay activists, following a plan documented as far back as the 1970s, have infused their agenda into almost every agency of social influence. Yet true science still thwarts their attempt to make SSA a new “norm.” Atypical examples extracted from nature to authenticate homosexuality are not norms of the natural order, but rarities. Political leverage alone turns them into mandates for redefining human sexuality.

Profiting from its momentum in destabilizing the ancient, trans-cultural concept of marriage, gay activists are now working to eliminate the social vocabulary that differentiates gender into “male” and “female.” This makes science the next logical target for political deconstruction, since this terminology is categorically scientific. As far as gay logistics, science has always created obstacles. It categorizes homosexual behavior itself as psycho-social in origin, not biologically natural. Science defines sexuality in mammals only in terms of complementary sexes. As far as sexual union, it doesn't occur except from joining the reproductive components of opposite, not identical, genders.

No, nature won’t march to the beat of a fictional drum, even to placate power politics. Lesbian couples still get pregnant the physiologically correct way: by uterine implantation of a female egg fertilized by a male sperm. Indeed, SSA may initiate an interpersonal bond between those of the same gender. Using the genitals to express that relationship can even bring mutual orgasmic pleasure. But the absence of real sexual union forbids true science from calling such intercourse sexual, just as all traditional cultures refuse to acknowledge such a union as a sexual marriage. The body’s biology and history's collective cultural wisdom are not tricked by modern emotional or political semantics.

Despite the above arguments, it may soon become a political hate crime to call persons “male” or “female.” But isn’t hate also a motive in the obliteration of scientific terms for gender distinction? Perhaps hate is too harsh a word. Anger might be more accurate. Where’s the anger about SSA really coming from? Obviously many are disgruntled by the gay agenda. But what about those who are experiencing SSA?

How upsetting it must be for someone with SSA to live in a body whose every cell ceaselessly exclaims, “I am physically a male!” or “I am physically a female!” The irritation has led some to try smothering the loud voice of their visible anatomy with hormones and reconstructive surgery. But from cradle to grave, nothing can stifle the cry of gender-identity embedded in DNA. Without exception, the same genes that determine the development of a person’s sexually distinct body parts reside in every single cell of the body.

The truth is that there definitely is hope for change, hope for healing. Why? Because God’s grace is still amazing! But the steps to hope and grace are also logical and understandable. One of those healed through the Pastoral Care Ministries seminars (now Ministries of Pastoral Care) started by Leanne Payne was Mario Bergner, who wrote Setting Love in Order: Hope and Healing for the Homosexual. He and several other PCM speakers, whose talks are available on CD, formerly had SSA and are cogently articulate in leading others out of it.

The emotional pain of this conflict between brain and body is understandable, for the unity of body and soul is a measure of psychological well-being. But the body’s incessant contention that the brain’s SSA is biologically incongruent with one’s physical sex cannot be silenced by politics. Even if the meaning of gender becomes as thoroughly altered as the original concept of the word gay, political redefinition can bring no true bio-psychical peace. Distorting gender distinction to soothe intrapersonal pain is as cruel as calling the body’s discord with SSA gaiety to make the brain laugh. For those wishing their SSA could be banished, neither is helpful nor humorous.

The cruelest aspect of gay activism’s power, however, is in how effectively it blocks those who wrestle with this internal anguish from seeking a reversal of SSA. At all costs, testimonies of real change through therapy, either human or divine, must be suppressed. A new normal will not survive, if there’s legitimate hope for healing. Those who claim it must be portrayed as impostors. Those who proclaim it must be labelled as perpetrators of homophobic hate. All is lost if dreams of therapeutic reintegration with his or her gendered body can really come true for the person with SSA.To maintain its credibility, the gay political platform must mentally barricade any exit the gay lifestyle. “Once gay, always gay, to your dying day!” Fortunately, such dogmatic slogans are just noisy smoke billowing from a feverish fear of the truth.

God wants us all to be whole spiritually, psychologically, and physically. For now, bodily healing is temporary and limited—becoming ultimate only in future resurrection. But God provides for wholeness of spirit and soul during this life. When SSA leads to sins of sexual immorality, He offers forgiveness. But in itself, SSA is not a sin. It’s merely one of the many human conditions that need the divine healing which God's grace brings into our fallen world. The problem has never been God’s inability to save and heal, but always our reluctance or resistance to come to Him.

People with SSA need to know they have a choice. Yes, they can choose to trust in gay politics to make them “feel better” with new meanings for words like marriage or gender. Or they can put their faith in the hope offered by Jesus Christ, the Savior and Healer, Who asks everyone of us the same question: “Do you want to get well?” (John 5:6).