In the book of Deuteronomy, Moses warns the people not to make an image of any god. But he prefaces it by reminding them that they heard a voice, but they didn’t see anything.

“…watch yourselves very carefully. Since you saw no form on the day that the LORD spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire, beware lest you act corruptly by making a carved image for yourselves, in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any animal that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird that flies in the air, the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth.”

The fact that the people saw nothing was the ground Moses used, in this instance, to condemn the making of ‘carved’ images. After all, they did not actually see God, how could they possibly make a carved image of him, unless they filled in a lot of blanks with their own flimsy speculation.

Over the course of generations, that could be tragic. People might begin to neglect the the words they heard from God, and pay more attention to the form they’d created for him from their own minds.

As I read this this morning, it dawned on me that, in a way, we break this commandment quite regularly. Although, not quite in the way that Moses laid it out.

Today, while we have the complete Word of God, much of the church has a habit of going beyond what the scriptures actually say in an attempt to fill in gaps that God intends would remain open.

We have to be careful to remember that—like the Israelites who were permitted to make ‘carved images’ in one sense, they were not allowed to place them in the position of any kind of deity (especially God)—we also are allowed to speculate on spiritual things. We are even allowed to use our best judgments to make decisions and find the right path. But, we’re never allowed to elevate these speculations to the level of authority that the Word of God exclusively holds.

For the Washington, DC area, the national weather service is advising us to be prepared for a major snow storm this Saturday. About two feet of snow is what they’re predicting. That’s pretty significant. And as I was reading the scriptures today, it reminded me of the Noah and flood.

Only a few verses before the story of Noah and the Ark in Genesis 6, God is noting that the people are multiplying and becoming progressively more and more wicked. Then, he declares that the number of man’s years will be 120.

After reading it through several times, doing some word-research on my own and then hearing from the puritans (John Calvin, in particular), I feel pretty confident in saying that God was giving humanity 120 years before wiping almost everyone out with the flood. If that is a reasonable interpretation of the text, then that’s pretty amazing.

Though things were in sad shape and getting worse, God left them with over a century to turn. Of course, they didn’t, and that sucks. But, God’s grace and mercy in that are beautiful.

It keeps us in the tension between eagerly waiting and praying for Christ’s return, yet at the same time praying that God would have patience and mercy and bring in many, many more who don’t yet believe. And that’s just where we are. Waiting for the ‘flood’, knowing it will come, yet hoping that God will wait and more will be saved.

That’s pretty cool, I think.

Romans 6:19:

“…For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification.”

There’s an important truth embedded here that I sometimes overlook.

“Lawlessness leading to more lawlessness…” Sin leads to more sin. Have you ever been stuck in a series of habitual sins? Have you ever told yourself that quitting cold-turkey would be too hard and so you thought you might try and ease yourself out of your sin pattern? I definitely have. It’s never worked for me and I’m betting it didn’t work for you either.

That’s because sin begets sin. When we sin, we sin more. That’s the problem. If we want to break our sin-patterns, we’ll have to stop more than that sin in specific, but focus on Sin as the grand tyrant it is.

sVery recently, a somewhat successful blogger, mother and Christian, made public her shift in thinking. More specifically, that she has become an atheist. I have to commend her honesty and bravery. If she was as active in her church as her post made it seem, she almost definitely has lost most of, if not all of, her church friends (which statistically among Christians would mean all of her friends. Of course, her own experience is all conjecture on my part).

I am not going to link directly to her post. Specifics aren’t terribly important and digital gossip is still gossip I’d like to avoid.

In her post which puts some background under he conversion, she links to a number of YouTube videos which decry Christianity and the Bible. The YouTube videos, like usual, take many of the harder passages from the bible and isolates them from the whole of scripture. Or, assumes a lot of things about the state of naturalistic thinking and the reason behind that.

In a few words, the woman remade these points with her own lexicon. Citing misogyny, slavery and child abuse as some of her biggest contentions with Christianity. Though in the length of the whole post, these were pretty small points. Perhaps the “wrinkles” in the fabric of her faith which eventually lent themselves to a full fledged tear.

When she really got down to a heated monologue it wasn’t about Christianity, it was about the Church.

This is long, but if you’re a Christian you ought to read it!

The woman absolutely did not want to serve as an elder in her church for a second term.  The woman did not like being an elder.   Being an elder was mostly about money.  How to get it and how to spend it.  She came to understand just how much money it took to maintain the large brick church building that stood empty six days a week.  The amount of money it took made her sick.  It was thousands and thousands of dollars every month.  She thought about how all that money could be used to alleviate human suffering and misery and instead it went to to heat and cool and pay a mortgage on a huge brick church building that stood empty six days a week.  She thought about the hundreds of dollars that she gave every month to maintain the huge brick church building that stood empty six days a week.  She thought about how if she gave that money to a starving family or a hospital in Africa or a school in the slums of Brazil, she would be doing a much better thing than when she gave that money to heat and cool and staff a huge brick church building that stood empty six days a week.  But the bible commanded that the woman give ten percent of her money to the church and not to starving people in Africa.  The bible was more interested in the empty building and not the miserable people who were suffering and so was god.  The woman did not want to be an elder anymore because she wanted to forget about that money that went to heat and cool the huge brick empty church building, but the woman felt like she had to be an elder. Because that is what christians do.  They serve the church… or the the expensive brick building that stands empty six days a week.

What has she said here? She’s said, in extreme brevity, that there was a painful mismatch between the money they had and what they spent their money on.

In the case of this woman, it seems that her church failed to help her, or at least give her the tools, to iron out the theological wrinkles in her faith. If that isn’t one of the churches important functions, I’m not sure what is. But more than that, her church’s self-absorption led her to misunderstand the whole point. Unfortunately, it ended sadly. Though my own story must lead me to believe no one is out of God’s reach. There is still hope.

I’m heartbroken for this woman, and my own lack of faith leaves me fearful for the huge number of people in the current church system. The church cannot continue like this. It’s disgusting and stories like these are just the refuse of something that should be beautiful, but instead is disfigured and grotesque.

So, can it stop already?

I like to think that I am a logical thinker. For the most part, I don’t think that’s an unreasonable self-assessment. No one is perfect and we’re all prone to mistakes. In our choice of lifestyle, the things we do, say and believe.

When our theology is challenged, it doesn’t do us (or anyone else) any good to stick our head in the ground and cling to what we think we know.

I’m not an atheist because I have found the arguments presented by Christianity are more compelling, though not without it’s intellectual challenges. I’m not a Catholic because I’ve found the arguments presented by the Protestant part of the church more reasonable. I’m not a Methodist because I’ve found the doctrines of Reformed theology resonate more deeply with scripture. I could continue, but I think you get the point.

Without healthy debate, I would not have come to any conclusions at all and, in all likelihood, I would probably still be a bitter, cynical, proud agnostic (though I don’t mean to imply all agnostics are—but I was). I am much better off now than I was then.

Religious belief is a great taboo of our age. Individualism is so prized among us that a debate over such things seems to shake us to our very core. Simply vocalizing our disagreement with one another has the effect of a huge personal attack.

But I think this is a disservice to ourselves and to each other. We will not all agree on all things. Sometimes our disagreements will be small, other times huge. But, the fact that our potential for wrongness is ever-present means that if we to grow and improve ourselves, we have to be willing to be wrong. Or at least entertain the possibility.

All of that been said, I would like to invite healthy debate. Even over this, if you like. For the Church, I would like us to come to grips with what we believe. Whether we agree or not. But that will definitely mean engaging one another’s differing opinions and beliefs with respect and humility.

So, let’s do that. Emphasis on the respect and humility part.

I have had a few conversations in the past couple weeks in which the Christian on the other side seemed to argue that humans were not stuck with a ‘sinful nature’ per se. Rather, they were stricken with a kind of natural ‘mark’ or ‘sin’ at birth, passed down from Adam, which is washed away during infant baptism.

In the context of the argument (and that particular Christian denomination), the original ‘sin’ at birth would appear purely ceremonial, and nothing more. Once removed by baptism, a person returns to a pre-fall state. There is no ‘sinful nature’ which tends us all toward sin. And thus, human choice and absolute freedom is prized more highly than God’s grace.

This, however, I find both irrational and unbiblical.

1. Human beings are born bad. We don’t like to think that, but it’s hard to deny. And no, it’s not purely a kind of ceremonial mark of uncleanness. It’s real, and aggressive. Even a basic look at a small child reveals the tendency toward sin which exists. Among the first things we do once we learn to speak is to lie. We are not taught to do it. We just do. A mother sees that a child has broken a plate in the kitchen. She asks, “did you break this plate?” the child quickly replies, “No, it was…”. Fill in the blank.

In adult life, even among Christians, any rational, honest, self-assessment will reveal that we tend toward things that are bad for us. Even those who have been baptized. We are not always caring, loving, patient, kind or humble. In fact, we are not more often than we are. It requires a kind of delusion to miss this.

Even Paul experienced this and writes about it in an eerily relatable way in Romans 7:13-20.

2. Freedom to choose is not in question, it is the will to choose. There is only one human in all history who did not sin. If there were not some kind of block in a human’s heart or mind, this would be extremely unlikely. At some point, someone would’ve gotten it right.

It’s not that human beings don’t have the freedom not to sin, it’s that they do not have the will not to sin.

This, as I’ve already shown, is not removed by any kind of ceremonial practice at birth, or otherwise. Christians from every sect all over the world echo the inclination to sin. Rather, It is removed at God’s discretion by his Spirit, and it always accompanies a personal learning faith in Christ. Only at this point is a Christian freed from their own will which then allows them to choose not to sin.

In conclusion.

The topic of ancestral sin is very large and complicated. I’ve hardly scratched the surface of the discussion here. However, I am hard pressed to believe that there is any kind of spiritual ‘mark of Cain’, which believers must have removed. And, the scripture used in its defense is highly suspect (1 Corinthians 15:22, Romans 5:12-21).

Instead, I find that it sits well with scripture and my rational mind to say that humans are born wicked and in need of actual redemption from Christ.

When the Passion of the Christ was released back in 2004 I don’t think I knew a single Christian who wasn’t moved by it. Christians flocked to the movie theater in groups and watched the movie together.

But since then, the movie has become something of a punch-line in the church. Especially among younger Christians.

This is probably in part because the secular world found it funny how Christians bought so hard into the commercial product. And Christians not liking being the butt of a joke joined the laughter. I’ll admit, that the slew of Passion related merchandise that hit the Christian bookshops was a bit sickening to me, and still is.

But I think another reason Christians have, over time, responded to Passion in jest is because there’s a certain and real discomfort associated with it. Just look at almost every other depiction of Jesus’ crucifixion in our culture. It’s extremely tame. When we are accustomed to movies like Saw, Jesus’ crucifixion, the way the church has painted it, really doesn’t seem so bad.

Growing up I remember thinking to myself, “Yeah, that sucks, but I can think of worse”. And certainly, there is worse. The degree isn’t the point. But we’ve brought the temperature so far down it’s barely even noticeable.

So when Passion was released, though not without its flaws, we were given the most realistic depiction of Jesus’ last day we’ve ever had in modern culture. Compared to the way we’ve grown up looking at Jesus’ death, Passion cut our hearts like a hot knife in soft butter. The difference is vast. And while we don’t seem to have a problem watching the gore elsewhere, when we see it like it probably really happened to our savior, I think we get pretty uncomfortable with it. (Perhaps even an indication of our guilt in enjoying the gruesome entertainment we do; if this were true, one would have to go).

In response, the movie becomes a joke and thus, impossible to hurt us. And I think this is tragic.

1. The Passion of the Christ was an excellent movie on it’s own. Regardless of what my faith says, assessing the film itself, it was done with real excellence. (Though I don’t recommend watching it as form of entertainment.)

2. A cornerstone of our faith is in remembering what Christ did and why. For Christians in the first century, Matthew simply saying the word ‘crucifixion’ was enough to invoke understanding in the hearer. We have no such connection to that word. Passion helps bridge that gap.

3. If we harden our hearts to the most basic realities of Jesus’ suffering to defend ourselves from discomfort, how can we have any confidence in our own belief and faith in those sufferings?

It may not be anywhere near Easter, but I think Christians—especially those in my generation—should reconsider their attitude toward this film. Perhaps even set a time and watch it alone and consider some of the realities of Jesus’ sufferings on our behalf.