As news broke about the Central Texas floods and the loss of 27 girls at Camp Mystic, this was the picture that got me. A first responder – clearly tough as nails – with his head in his hand sobbing at what – at who – he has just found.
When I first saw it, I started sobbing, too.
I am no mind-reader, but I can tell you with almost 100 percent certainty what he was thinking as the tears flowed: “If only I could have saved her.” In fact, even more than that: “I would have willingly given my life for hers.”
There is something in the human instinct and drive to save others, especially children, that profoundly reflects the God in whose image we are made. It’s why mothers leap to the ground to cushion their toddlers from a fall. It’s why firefighters rush into burning buildings. Tears for Fears told us, “Everybody wants to rule the world.” Maybe so. But there’s something even deeper in us that wants to save the world.
I can’t imagine a more exhilarating feeling than saving a life. The mixture of joy and relief that rushes through the soul can’t be described – only experienced.
But the inverse is also true. I can’t imagine anything more soul-crushing than losing a life you desperately wanted to save. Hence the haunting thoughts:
“If only I could have saved her.”
“I would have willingly given my life for hers.”
I know these thoughts because they are universal. We’ve all thought them in one form or another when loss visits us. And they’re ancient. This is why the Psalmist complains: “No man can ransom another, or give to God the price of his life” (Psalm 49:7). But oh, how we wish we could.
The gospel has something to say to that first responder – and to us – when we cry: “I would have willingly given my life for hers.” It says, “Thank you. And I know you would have. But Someone already has. She’s taken care of.”
This is why this is the other picture that brought me to tears.
This picture reminds me that the girls who lost their lives at Camp Mystic still have their lives – because long before floodwaters surged down the Guadalupe River on a Friday in the twenty-first century, one Man gave His life on a cross in exchange for theirs on a Friday in the first century.
That doesn’t stop our tears. But it promises us that our tears are not final.
Credit: The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo (1511) / Wikimedia
When God creates the plants, fish, and land animals in Genesis 1, He speaks to the land and water He has already created to bring these creatures forth:
Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds. (Genesis 1:11)
Let the water teem with living creatures. (Genesis 1:20)
Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind. (Genesis 1:24)
God calls to the land to produce plants and animals and to the water to produce fish. Why? Because the land is where plants and animals belong and the water is where fish belong.
And yet, when God creates human beings, things change. Rather than speaking to the land, where we will live, God speaks to Himself:
Let us make mankind in Our image, in Our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground. (Genesis 1:26)
If the land is where humans will live and belong, why doesn’t God call to the land to bring them – to bring us – forth? It’s because ultimately and in a very unique way, we don’t belong to the land, but to God. We are created in His image:
God created mankind in His own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27)
Yes, we will live on the land. And yes, the first man Adam is even created from the ground. But he belongs – and we belong – to God.
This is why Adam’s fall into sin in Genesis 3 is such a tragedy. He goes from belonging to God to wanting to be like God, which shatters his relationship with God. But God does not give up. Through the prophet Jeremiah, He envisions a time when:
“This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel…” declares the Lord. “I will put My law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be My people. No longer will they teach their neighbor, or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest,” declares the Lord. “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” (Jeremiah 31:33-34)
God will make sure we belong to Him. We will be His people. He will be our God.
God loves you so much that, when He created you, He had a conversation with Himself about you. You belong to Him. And nothing can change that.
One of the things I’m committed to saying freely in our home is, “I love you.” I want my wife and my kids to have no doubt about how much I love them. I even made up a little song – not a good song, but a song nonetheless – that I will often sing to my kids at bedtime telling them about my love for them.
But the other day, my daughter asked me a question that stopped me in my tracks. “Daddy,” she said looking up at me with her signature sweet smile, “why do you love me?”
Now, there are many things I love about my daughter.
I love the way she laughs at my corny dad jokes.
I love how academically adept and interested she is.
I love how she leans in to kiss me on the cheek.
There are many things I love about my daughter. But even though these are things I love about my daughter, these are not the reasons why I love my daughter. I wouldn’t love her any less if she stopped laughing at my jokes, although I might question her sense of humor. I wouldn’t love her any less if she began to struggle in school. And I wouldn’t love her any less if, perhaps one day, the kisses she gives me on the cheek become fewer and farther between, although, admittedly, that will make me sad.
I just love my daughter. Period. That’s all there is to it.
One of the deepest lies we tell ourselves about love is this: “I am loved because…”
I am loved because I am successful.
I am loved because I am smart.
I am loved because I am good-looking.
I am loved because I am spiritual.
The reason this is such a deep and damnable lie is because, if we lose any of these things – our success, our smarts, our looks, or even if our faith begins to falter – we’ll believe that we have lost love, too, because we’ll believe that we no longer have what it takes to get others to love us. Which leaves us feeling alone. And hurting. And broken. And hopeless. And worthless.
In the gospel, Christ says, “I love you. Period. There’s no ‘because’ behind My love. My love finds its delight in your sheer existence. There is nothing you can do that will destroy My love for you.” Or, as Paul puts it:
I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38-39)
That’s the kind of love we all secretly long for. That’s the kind of love we all fundamentally need. For what we do and who we are inevitably ebbs and flows over time. True and lasting love, then, cannot come with a “because.” And Christ’s love for you does not.
The polemical can sometimes become the enemy of the thoughtful. This seems to be what has happened in an opinion piece penned by Peter Atterton for The New York Times titled, “A God Problem.”
Mr. Atterton is a professor of philosophy at San Diego State University who spends his piece trotting out well-worn and, if I may be frank, tired arguments against the logical integrity of Theism. He begins with this classic:
Can God create a stone that cannot be lifted? If God can create such a stone, then He is not all powerful, since He Himself cannot lift it. On the other hand, if He cannot create a stone that cannot be lifted, then He is not all powerful, since He cannot create the unliftable stone. Either way, God is not all powerful.
This is popularly known as the “omnipotence paradox.” God either cannot create an unliftable stone or He can create an unliftable stone, but then He cannot lift it. Either way, there is something God cannot do, which, the argument goes, means His omnipotence is rendered impotent. C.S. Lewis’ classic rejoinder to this paradox remains the most cogent:
God’s omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say, ‘God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,’ you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words, ‘God can’ … Nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.
Lewis’ position is the position the Bible itself takes when speaking of God. Logically, there are some things Scripture says God cannot do – not because He lacks power, but simply because to pose even their possibility is to traffic in utter nonsense. The apostle Paul, for instance, writes, “If we are faithless, God remains faithful, for He cannot disown Himself” (2 Timothy 2:13). In other words, God cannot not be God. He also cannot create liftable unliftable stones – again, not because He lacks power, but because liftable unliftable stones aren’t about exercising power over some theoretical state of nature. They’re about the law of noncontradiction. And to try to break the law of noncontradiction doesn’t mean you have unlimited power. It just means you’re incoherent and incompetent. And God is neither. To insist that God use His power to perform senseless and silly acts so that we may be properly impressed seems to be worthy of the kind of rebuke Jesus once gave to the religious leaders who demanded from Him a powerful sign: “A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a sign” (Matthew 12:39)!
Ultimately, the omnipotence paradox strips God’s power of any purpose by demanding a brute cracking of an irrational and useless quandary. And to have power without purpose only results in disaster. For instance, uncontrolled explosions are powerful, but they are also, paradoxically, powerless, because they cannot exercise any ordered power over their chaotic power. Omnipotence requires that there is power over uncontrolled power that directs and contains it toward generative ends. This is how God’s power is classically conceived. Just look at the creation story. God’s power needs purpose to be omnipotence, which is precisely what God’s power has, and precisely what the omnipotence paradox does not care to address.
For his second objection against God, Mr. Atterton turns to the problem of evil:
Can God create a world in which evil does not exist? This does appear to be logically possible. Presumably God could have created such a world without contradiction. It evidently would be a world very different from the one we currently inhabit, but a possible world all the same. Indeed, if God is morally perfect, it is difficult to see why He wouldn’t have created such a world. So why didn’t He?
According to the Bible, God did create a world where evil did not exist. It was called Eden. And God will re-create a world where evil will not exist. It will be called the New Jerusalem. As for the evil that Adam and Eve brought into the world, this much is sure: God is more than up to the task of dealing with the evil that they, and we, have welcomed. He has conquered and is conquering it in Christ.
With this being said, a common objection remains: Why did and does God allow evil to remain in this time – in our time? Or, to take the objection back to evil’s initial entry into creation: Why would God allow for the possibility of evil by putting a tree in the center of Eden if He knew Adam and Eve were going to eat from it and bring sin into the world? This objection, however, misses the true locus of evil. The true locus of evil was not the tree. It was Adam and Eve, who wanted to usurp God’s authority. They were tempted not by a tree, but by a futile aspiration: “You can be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). If Adam and Eve wouldn’t have had a tree around to use to try to usurp God’s prerogative, they almost assuredly would have tried to use something else. The tree was only an incidental means for them to indulge the evil pride they harbored in their hearts. If God wanted to create a world where evil most assuredly would never exist, then, He would have had to create a world without us.
Thus, I’m not quite sure what there’s to object to here. The story of evil’s entrance into creation doesn’t sound like the story of a feckless God who can’t get things right. It sounds like the story of a loving God who willingly sacrifices to make right the things He already knows we will get wrong even before He puts us here. God decides from eternity that we are worth His Son’s suffering.
The final objection to God leveled by Mr. Atterton has to do with God’s omniscience:
If God knows all there is to know, then He knows at least as much as we know. But if He knows what we know, then this would appear to detract from His perfection. Why?
There are some things that we know that, if they were also known to God, would automatically make Him a sinner, which of course is in contradiction with the concept of God. As the late American philosopher Michael Martin has already pointed out, if God knows all that is knowable, then God must know things that we do, like lust and envy. But one cannot know lust and envy unless one has experienced them. But to have had feelings of lust and envy is to have sinned, in which case God cannot be morally perfect.
This is the weakest of Mr. Atterton’s three objections. One can have knowledge without experience. I know about murder even though I have never taken a knife or gun to someone. God can know about lust and envy even if He has not lusted and envied. The preacher of Hebrews explains well how God can know sin and yet not commit sin as he describes Jesus’ struggles under temptation: “We do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are – yet He did not sin” (Hebrews 4:15). Jesus was confronted with every sinful temptation, so He knows what sin is, but He also refused to swim to sin’s siren songs. The difference, then, is not in what He knows and we know. The difference is in how He responds to what He knows and how we respond to what we know.
One additional point is in order. Though I believe Mr. Atterton’s assertion that one cannot know certain things “unless one has experienced them” is questionable, it can nevertheless be addressed on its own terms by Christianity. On the cross, Christians believe that every sin was laid upon Christ, who thereby became sin for us. In other words, Christ, on the cross, became the chief of sinners, suffering the penalty that every sinner deserved, while, in exchange, giving us the righteous life that only He could live (see 2 Corinthians 5:21). In this way, then, Christ has experienced every sin on the cross because He has borne every sin on the cross. Thus, even according to Mr. Atterton’s own rules for knowing, in Christ, God can know everything through Christ, including every sin.
I should conclude with a confession about a hunch. I am a little suspicious whether or not this 1,140-word opinion piece in The New York Times decrying faith in God as illogical was written in, ahem, good faith. This piece and its arguments feel a little too meandering and scattershot and seem a little too clickbait-y to be serious. Nevertheless, this is a piece that has gained a lot of traction and talk. I’m not sure that the traction and talk, rather than the arguments, weren’t the point.
Whatever the case, Theism has certainly seen more compelling and interesting interlocutions than this piece. God, blessedly, is still safely on His throne.
They are the worst wildfires in the history of the state of California.
Nearly 250,000 acres have burned. 79 people have been killed. Sadly, that number will likely climb as first responders continue their search through the rubble these fires have left behind. The town of Paradise, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, has been especially hard hit, with nearly the whole town being destroyed.
California has had a rough go of it lately. Just two weeks ago, the state endured another tragedy as a gunman opened fire at a country bar filled with college students in Thousand Oaks, killing twelve. The shooter was a Marine Corps veteran who appears to have had all sorts of mental health issues and was, at one time, on the cusp of being committed.
The sheer number of tragedies that roll in through each news cycle can begin to feel overwhelming. For each town that is charred and person that is shot, we ask, “How can we stop this from happening?” Answers to this perennial and pressing question seem to elude us. When tragedies do strike, we are thankful for firefighters who risk their lives on the frontlines of massive and unpredictable blazes and officers who run into hails of bullets rather than away from them. Proactively, we are instructed to keep dry brush away from homes in fire zones and guns out of the hands of mentally disturbed people. But despite our best efforts, the tragedies keep coming. Tragedies, even if they can be somewhat mitigated and managed by us, cannot be successfully stayed by us.
On the surface, the California fires and the California shooting seem to be two different types of tragedies. One is a natural disaster. The other is man-caused carnage. Below the surface, however, these two tragedies share a common core: sin. The fires remind us that the sin that came into the world with Adam and Eve has disordered and distorted the world in profound and frightening ways. The mass shooting reminds us that sin is not just in the world. It is in us. It’s not just that we cannot eradicate the sin that distorts creation; it’s that we cannot even kill the sin in ourselves.
The message of Christianity reminds us that, even as societies scramble to address sin, we need a victory over sin that we cannot gain for ourselves. Sin needs not only our noble actions and timely reactions, but a perfect transaction that exchanges our sad sin for a better righteousness. This is the transaction Christ makes for us on the cross.
Tragedies are sure to continue. And we should be thankful for those fighting on the front lines of those tragedies. But we can also be hopeful that tragedy’s time is short, for sin’s defeat is certain.
