Thomas Watson, one of my favorite Puritans, writes this simple yet inspiring thought:

Read the scripture, not only as a history, but as a love-letter sent to you from God.

Some read the word solely as a means to understand and develop theology. Others, as a means to know what they should and shouldn’t do. Others, only to know what has happened in the past, according to Christian and Jewish tradition.

The intention of the Word isn’t less than these, but it is also a great deal more.

We should approach it, as Watson says, like a ‘love letter’. Not necessarily in the literal sense, but in spirit. What we read, was not only an intellectual work to be studied—a textbook. But it was intended for us so that we would be deeply affected and moved in the most sensitive regions of our soul. If we accept it as anything less than it really is, we miss more than we are gaining.

Shuffle on my iPod landed on a Ben Folds song this morning called Free Coffee. It’s on his most recent album Way to Normal. As I was driving to Carabou Coffee to get a change of scene this morning, it was somehow clearer.

Ben Folds is highlighting what is socially logical, but otherwise ass-backwards about our society. That is, that our social royalty need nothing, but everything is given to them. Meanwhile, everyone else has many needs, but have to labor for it.

called in sick one day
stepped out my front door
squinted up at the sky
and stomped on my backpack
got into a van
and when i returned i had
ex-wives and children
boxes of photographs
and they gave me some food
and they didn’t charge me
and they gave me some coffee
but they didn’t charge me
and when i was broke i needed more
but now that i’m rich they give me coffee
eating an ice cream cone
texting with my phones
flipping off the asshole who pulled into my lane
life could be longer than something cracked up to be
we all get new selves every seven years
i feel the seventh day, its a good day to die again
now they saved me my place
over there in the cornor
and i never get tickets, yeah i only get warnings
but when i was broke i needed more
and now that i’m rich, i get free coffee

It’s fascinating to me how resilient people are, yet at the same time extraordinarily fragile. People can survive some pretty intense physical trauma. Car accidents, falls, gunshots. It’s pretty amazing.

But in some circumstances, even tiny little imperfections in a persons chemistry and genetic makeup can reduce a lifespan by decades.

It reminds me of the opening verse of the Andrew Bird song The Giant of Illinois.

The giant of Illinois
died from a blister on his toe
after walking all day through the first winter snow

throwing bits of stale bread
to the last speckled doves
he never even felt his shoes filled with blood

A giant dies from a small wound on his foot that he didn’t notice.

It also got me thinking how, in a spiritual way, even small sins when gone unnoticed and unchecked can have a resounding effect in a persons life; no sin stands alone.

Deuteronomy 6:4-9:

The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

It is parliamentary that we saturate our lives with God’s word. Moses here commands the people of Israel to keep God’s word on their heart, teaching them to our children, talking about them constantly, written on our hands and mounted in our homes.

Now, whether that means we ought to literally saturate our environment with spiritual reminders or not is a different question.

But the point, perhaps at its most basic, is that we must be immersed in the Truth of the Gospel. All of our facets of thought must run through the conduit of God’s grace in Jesus Christ.

Easier said than done.

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.

Community on NBC is my favorite new comedy to come along since The Office. Smart, Witty and delightfully dumb. Plus, it’s generally pretty tame in its sense of humor. In other words, most jokes are about pop-culture, not sex—which I appreciate.

The most recent episode, the Christmas episode, made a point to poke fun at religion in general, which each member of the ‘community’ having a different, stereotypical religious belief. There’s the Jewish girl, the middle eastern Muslim boy, the African American Jehovah’s Witness, the feminist atheist, the born again Christian woman, the older liberal man who’s in a cult but doesn’t know it, and the main character who’s an agnostic.

When they introduce everyone’s belief, the main Character reveals that he is agnostic. The others scoff at him insisting that he’s too ‘lazy’ to decide what he believes. It was a comical discussion, but it got me thinking about the Church’s various theological makeup.

An extremely large portion of the church finds itself as a sort of “agnostic Christian”. Of course, not in the literal sense of the word.

Religiously speaking, an agnostic is “a person who claims that they cannot have true knowledge about the existence of God (but does not deny that God might exist)”. In Christianity, many people take the complexity of theology and conclude that we simply cannot know the right answer and sit non-committedly in ambiguous belief. They’re mostly unwilling to place definitions on God, or on the way God works.

But, this is simply wrong. We are able to look at scripture and draw confident conclusions about God and how he works. While we shouldn’t scoff at anyone’s belief, we should encourage our brothers and sisters not to rest in ‘agnostic Christianity’, but to seek the scriptures and draw conclusions.

I strongly believe that it is important to know what we believe and why. Even if that belief isn’t necessarily ‘right’, knowing our beliefs about God is important and much healthier than giving up because we think it’s too complicated.

Luke 21:12-15:

“…they will lay their hands on you and persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors for my name’s sake. This will be your opportunity to bear witness. Settle it therefore in your minds not to meditate beforehand how to answer, for I will give you a mouth and wisdom, which none of your adversaries will be able to withstand or contradict.”

Settle it in our minds not to meditate on how to answer. I find it compelling that Jesus felt that it was important to include this. After all, he could have easily left it out without necessarily altering the meaning. But he didn’t. Which to me, means that it could really use some reflection.

I think that there’s a number of possibilities in there. Probably something about pride. Something about reliance on God. But the idea that keeps sticking in my mind right now is not convoluting the Spirit of God in us.

You get the impression from the full passage that the Spirit, in some sense, is going to kind of take over. It’s going to replace some natural capacity of ours with a supernatural one. The term knee-jerk reaction comes to mind. Perhaps it is that Jesus doesn’t want us convoluting the Spirit’s knee-jerk reaction in us with something contrived of our own minds.

Really any way you look at it, it seems bizarre to me. And in terms of language, there aren’t many times when we’re told not to think about something. But it sure says it here and that is worth thinking about.