Monthly Archives: August 2008

A New Heart and a New Spirit

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Our Daily Bible reading this week has ventured into the book of Ezekiel, where God’s anger against Israel continues to be revealed. In direct contrast to what we often assume about God, his anger is not incidental or without great justification. Quite the contrary, God has been overwhelmingly patient in sending a message of repentance to his people, and, instead of listening to His prophets’ message – a call to repentance – the Israelites choose to listen to other false prophets who suggest that “all is well; those other prophets are just negative naysayers.”

There is a warning for us in this teaching from the Old Testament (see Romans 15:4). When we are comfortable, enjoying the luxuries of life, and seemingly all is well, it may be good to ask if we are pleasing ourselves or pleasing the Lord. Are we hearing what we want to hear? Do we disdain the Lord’s message: to repent, to come out of the world, to be God’s people?

At the end of Ezekiel 18, God says, “Rid yourselves of all the offenses you have committed, and get a new heart and an new spirit.” This Old Testament admonition is a powerful message for me today – to seek out a new “heart” and a new “spirit.” It reminds me of the words of Paul in Romans 12:2:

Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will.

A recurring theme in the Old Testament is Israel falling into idolatry – even though God, through his covenant, has promised them blessing beyond comprehension. Thankfully, we don’t have that challenge today…..do we?

What Was Wrong With Lamar?

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Something was wrong with Lamar.

There just had to have been. To commit suicide is bad enough. But to do it that way — to walk out to a dark highway, to pick out the next pair of emerging headlights, to turn toward them, waiting, and then at last to step in front of them. I’d like to think that their eyes — Lamar’s and the driver’s — locked in that moment before impact. And the horror in hers helped drive the haze from his, granting him a nanosecond of clarity, time for one urgent “Forgive me, Father” before he had his life crushed out of him.

But that’s just wishful speculation. All I really know is that something was seriously wrong with Lamar.

What was wrong with him, of course, is what is wrong with me and you. I did a post last week about a writer who became fascinated with the preserved remains of a two-headed calf and how she came to associate that freakish image with our own divided natures as sinful human beings. She described how the calf’s own deformity had apparently worked to destroy it, how its one perfectly formed head had embraced life, and how its other head, misshapen and hideous, had sought death, to the point even of spitting out all the nourishment its counterpart took in.

The idea was put forward that we are all two-headed calves — creatures burdened with split natures, each of our halves working against the other, always at cross purposes. There’s an answer to our internal division and it involves a Cross and a purpose. But if we do not avail ourselves of it, the death head will win out like it did with Lamar. It is only by the Cross that we will find life and wholeness.

Culture And How To Change It

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I notice in today’s paper that one of our Oklahoma state lawmakers has proclaimed herself “a cultural warrior for Judeo-Christian values.”

While I have no doubt that she means well, I think her statement springs from a sentiment that has taken deep root among American Christians in recent years — the idea that the best way to get our morally adrift culture back on the right course is through political action.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be concerned about laws and government and who our elected leaders are; we certainly should be. But if that becomes our central concern, we are focusing on a symptom and missing the real problem, which goes much deeper. Real change for good occurs on an intimate personal level, as individual hearts come to realize their alienation from God through sin and find reconciliation in Jesus Christ. That and only that is how individual souls, and by extension groups of people, will find their bearings.

As long as the individual hearts of our country are turned away from God, it is going to be reflected in their collective whole — the culture at large, of which our laws and governing institutions are but an emanation. Laws are top-down solutions to problems that originate at the bottom of a society: the individual hearts of its members. Laws are necessary but they are ultimately ineffective at getting at the real source of corruption. Even if you could somehow magically transform all our laws overnight to reflect Judeo-Christian values, it wouldn’t change one single solitary heart and our society’s slow backwards drift into spiritual narcolepsy would continue unabated.

As for this particular lawmaker, whose intentions I’m sure are noble, if she is committed to the cause of Christ, she would serve it much better by spurring her fellow Christians to get out of their church buildings and take their message to the streets, getting involved in their communities through acts of service — not acts as ends in themselves, but as avenues for reaching individual hearts with the Good News about Jesus.

That, brothers and sisters, is how you change a culture. Anything else is confusing effects for the real cause.

The Two-Headed Calf

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Wrapping our finite earthbound minds around infinite spiritual concepts is tough and that’s why metaphorical language is almost always necessary. To that point, I ran across a striking image recently that I believe offers an excellent depiction of our central dilemma as fallen creatures and I wanted to share it: It comes from a chapter in Alan Jacob’s excellent new book “Original Sin,” in which Jacobs recounts the true story of author Rebecca West’s journey to Yugoslavia in the 1930s to work on a history of the country. At one point, West and her husband visit a museum where they discover several oddities, including:

“…a stuffed two-headed calf in a glass case, an animal ‘strangely lovely in form,’ so that ‘it was a shock to find that of the two heads which branched like candelabra, one was lovely, but one was hideous…’ The museum’s custodian affirms that the calf lived for two days ‘and should be alive today had it not been for its nature.’ West’s husband expresses puzzlement at this statement, and the custodian explains that when they fed milk to the calf through its beautiful head, its ugly head spit the milk out, so no food got into its stomach, and it died. This account prompts West to meditate: ‘To have two heads, one that looks to the right and another that looks to the left, one that is carved by grace and another that is not, the one that wishes to live and the other that does not; this was an experience not wholly unknown to human beings…’”

Observes Jacobs of this story: “The whole history of Yugoslavia, West comes to think, is the story of a two-headed calf, and maybe the whole of human history … ‘[Quoting Alexasandr Solzhenitsyn] The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.’ In other words, each and every one of us is a divided self, a two-headed calf … (West) sees with an absolute clarity our innate dividedness, the immovable and constant presence of an ever vigilant ugly head, always determined to expel nourishment and thereby to reject life and to choose death instead …”

A two-headed calf! It’s an image right out of a carnival sideshow. But like effective metaphors can do, it should stick with you, giving your imagination something concrete to work with in helping you make sense of a difficult spiritual subject. I know it has done so for me.

“And pray for us, too, that God may open a door for our message, so that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ.”

Colossians 4:3