The Added Benefit of Being True: Part 1
July 17, 2008
This post originally appeared in Creation Care Magazine.
The Rev. Jim Ball, Ph.D., is an ordained Baptist minister, the President and CEO of the Evangelical Environmental Network, and the national spokesperson for the Evangelical Climate Initiative.
I heard someone joke the other day about an argument he was making—that it had “the added benefit of being true.” That’s one of the great things about Christianity. I believe that the biblical world-view is true—and it has the added benefit of actually being true.
Take the Gospel portrayals of the disciples. There is certainly no attempt to air-brush out their failures and lack of spiritual understanding. For instance, they try to chase the kids away from Jesus, which prompts Jesus to say, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these” (Mk. 10:14). And on the very night he is to be betrayed they have a debate about who will be the greatest. Jesus says to them, “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who exercise authority over them call themselves Benefactors. But you are not to be like that. Instead, the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves. For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one who is at the table? But I am among you as one who serves” (Lk. 22:25-27). Finally, the disciples all fail Jesus in the end, with the supreme example being the one Jesus nicknamed “rock,” Simon Peter. He was no spiritual rock when it mattered most to Jesus. He denied Jesus three times when challenged by a servant girl, and ran away to weep bitterly during Jesus’ night of betrayal.
The disciples, as well as other biblical figures such as Paul (persecutor of the early church), Moses (a murderer), David (an adulterer and murderer), and Abraham (who offered his wife to another man to save his own skin), are pictured in the Bible as weak, foible humans, warts and all.
But this gritty realism about humanity is tempered by the truth about God, that “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them” (2 Cor. 5:19). Just as it was by God’s power that Jesus was raised from the dead, so too does our hope for our own resurrection rest in the power of a loving, forgiving God.
Of course, the Bible is also very clear that God’s love is not a loophole for our continued sinfulness. “What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?” (Rom. 6:1-2).
All of this is to say that when I look at the problem of global warming, when I begin to try to come to grips with the suffering it has brought and will bring to the innocent, I can face the reality of the problem, knowing that the Bible faces squarely the reality of the human spiritual condition, that God has ultimately resolved our spiritual problem, but that I am still called to live a grace-filled life of righteousness. My biblical world-view says not to hide problems, but face them with no illusions, and that the courage to do so comes from knowing that “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son …” (Jn. 3:16); and from understanding that “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Rom. 8:31).
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