Thursday, August 14, 2008

To Love... and Hate More Deeply.

We often pray for a greater desire to seek after God, to love him and his Truth. Hans spoke on Sunday morning to end our church youth summer retreat (more thoughts on camp later), and described his hatred for distortions of God's truth, for gospels that land dead people in hell:
"What we find is that when we love something passionately deeply with all our heart, it also means that we become capable of a great deal of hate -- Captain Ahab at the end of Moby Dick hatred; the kind of hate where you might give up your face to get back at someone. And the reason I'm talking about this kind of hatred... is because there's something I hate. If I could get rid of some things, you could rip my nose off my face and I'd be happy, I hate them so much. And if I hate you that much, you just... better start running for your life."

-- Hans Sun
Do I love the gospel, as proclaimed in God's Word, enough to abhor other gospels? ... Hardly. I often enjoy entertaining ideas of God's Son as a keycard, credit card, insurance card ...

And so I've been thinking in these terms lately, to gauge my love for X by my hatred for not-X, and by what I would give to see X and not not-X.

Do I loathe sin with hatred severe and graphic enough to mortify those members that allow me to act out sinful thoughts? Amputating and gouging sound rather extreme. And I rather like my eyeballs. I must have either a grossly inflated sense of the value of my limbs or a deflated view of sin. And eternity.
"It is better for you to enter life with one eye..." Matthew 18:8-9.
I suppose this is related. Westminster's Bookstore has a deal on The Mortification of Sin study pack (the book and a study guide for $7.48). I'm not about to read any Owen but you can be my guest.

Hi, God. Let me love You more. That's all.

6 comments:

  1. Owen is tough. I remember spending a three hour bus ride reading one chapter from Mortification. It was good though and well worth the time.

    Do you have a copy of Hans' sermon audio?

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  2. "And so I've been thinking in these terms lately, to gauge my love for X by my hatred for not-X, and by what I would give to see X and not not-X."

    The world isn't that binary. There are objects without opposites, objects were it's converse is equally beneficial, and objects where it's opposite is just as bad.

    Also, there's a reason why moral ambiguity is a theme in most novels since the beginning of the 20th century: because it turns out that the line between good and evil is blurred and situation-dependent. It becomes impossible to determine if an action is sinful.

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  3. @ Alejandro

    Let's disregard for now that I hold every man to be totally depraved and his every action to be steeped in and tainted by sin. With these schools of thought, any "good" deed done outside of Christ could at most be considered merely "relatively" good; the truly good is done in Christ for the glory of God.

    Even with such binary classification of good and not-good, there's the morally grey (at least, humans cannot know for certain)... But I think you cannot generalize this ambiguity to the total absence of the extreme moral standards.

    Anyways, you are right that in many situations definition is... uncertain. But I write about my own propensity to consciously favor what I know to be not right -- by choice, not compulsion.

    And from an idealist (not realist) stance... I wouldn't at this point even give my nose or face for the idea of the good and right and true, even if that could secure my moral righteousness. Which it can't.

    Anyways I don't know if that made any sense. But I wish I at least could love the idea of righteousness and sanctification more.

    @ Tim

    Jerry Lin has a recording. Staticky and unmastered, though. You're welcome to my notes... Let me know.

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  4. hey..what do u know, i have the link right here: http://www.sendspace.com/file/08oegn

    tim...u seem like someone who knows how to use audition...teach me sometime? =D

    i think dif presuppositions about truth will logically lead to different conclusions. altho, i'd like to note...that the blurring of the line between good and evil tells us more about society than the nature of sin. Since i consider good and evil to be objective, the only thing that's blurring is society's ideas. but ideas/opinions do not possess the power to change objective realities.

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  5. @ Esther:

    "Anyways, you are right that in many situations definition is... uncertain. But I write about my own propensity to consciously favor what I know to be not right -- by choice, not compulsion."
    Remember the scene in Huckleberry Finn where Huck pledges to "go to hell" and help Jim escape instead of turning him in? Even though Huck "knows" that it's morally wrong to help a slave, he does so anyway. Granted, I don't know what actions you're talking about that you consider wrong, but it's possible that it falls into a similar category as Huck's (or, more likely, a morally ambiguous category by today's standards).

    "Let's disregard for now that I hold every man to be totally depraved and his every action to be steeped in and tainted by sin. With these schools of thought, any "good" deed done outside of Christ could at most be considered merely "relatively" good; the truly good is done in Christ for the glory of God."
    No need to disregard that. Why is it that every deed or action that man does is steeped in sin? If it is because of selfishness (that every action man takes is to benefit himself), then couldn't actions taken to benefit God be seen as merely pretenses, knowingly or unknowingly, to get into Heaven or to avoid Hell? Why is there a distinction between these two types of "goods"?

    @ Jerry

    If good and evil are objective, though, then why do we have such great difficulty in measuring it? What do we use as a standard for morality?
    Claiming that morality is completely subjective leads to a slippery slope, but an objective view of morality has its own problems as well.

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  6. @jerry

    ideas/opinions do not possess the power to change objective realities.
    Your idea that I "seem like someone who knows how to use audition" does not possess the power to change the objective reality that I have no experience with Audition or any audio editing software for that matter. =P

    Hmm..and that link isn't working for me. Maybe it works in your "sense of reality" but to me it's just a dead link. =(

    @alejandro

    No need to disregard that. Why is it that every deed or action that man does is steeped in sin?

    It is "his action" of those deeds that are sinful, not necessarily the deeds themselves. Some deeds, when abstracted enough from the doer, can be good or bad (like eating a lollipop or breathing). In the doing of those deeds, we do not have a humble reverence for God's grace in enabling us to do them. Also, it's not just that we do not give God credit where he is due (passive neglect) but we regard God as not worthy of our complete reverence in all things (active disrespect). Of course there are some deeds that blatantly show our disrespect, even hatred, for God, but this applies to our motives in doing any deed.
    Here's a brief article that argues from scripture for the total depravity of man:
    http://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/articles/piper/depravity.html
    I guess it might be written to a Christian audience so it might make certain assumptions about the authority of scripture that you might not agree with, but nonetheless I think it's a good summary of the biblical understanding of the sinfulness of mankind. Uh.. I must honestly admit it being hard for me to read something with the mind of someone else, so the article might not be as helpful to you as it is to me. =P

    If it is because of selfishness (that every action man takes is to benefit himself), then couldn't actions taken to benefit God be seen as merely pretenses, knowingly or unknowingly, to get into Heaven or to avoid Hell? Why is there a distinction between these two types of "goods"?

    Yes. In fact, the bible declares that no one will be justified by their "good" works. (take a look at Galatians) Doing something to "benefit" God would in a sense be placing ourselves in the position to say to God that we have something of our own that God lacks. It would be to deny his essence as the Creator of all things. The one who trusts in his own religious piety is not more assured of his salvation as the one who denies God and does blatantly evil things, though the religious one might be more deceived.

    I don't see why doing something to benefit the self is necessarily evil. I do see violating God as an evil, but it's not clear to me why benefiting the self would be wrong.

    aww man i don't like writing things longer than a few sentences... i forget why/what i was writing in the first place and now im a confused hungry man who needs to go to sleep. grumble grumble...

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