Category: Mind

How to find peace on the roads, part one

You’re a well-put-together person. You’re kind to strangers, hold the door for the person behind you at the shopping mall entrance, always tip well, and love your spouse and children. People just really like you.

All that changes when you get behind the wheel of an automobile. Have you ever stopped to wonder why?

How is it that you can be such an amazing human being off the roads, and then turn into either a) a selfish monster from hell — willing to mow down grandma in order to get a thirty foot advantage over the next car, willing to endanger the lives of a sweet, little family in a minivan just so you can get to your destination four minutes earlier — or b) a quivering ball of cowardly jelly?

Let’s say that early one Saturday morning, you decide you want to surprise your still-sleeping family with breakfast. Happy and hopeful for the day, you jump in the car to take a quick jaunt down to your favorite local donut shop. You don’t get a quarter mile from the house when some bozo in a jacked-up Ford F-350 decides that, of all the open spaces on the quiet streets of your little neighborhood at 6:30am, he likes the space about 48 inches from your rear bumper. Instantly, your mood goes from happy and hopeful to furious or scared. Or both.

Why do you respond this way? Why do we respond that way? The simple answer is that the threat represented by the jerk in the Ford causes an autonomic, physiological, biochemical response called “fight or flight.” Those are the two possible responses to such stress: anger and aggression, or fear and the need to quickly get away.

Fight or flight comprises the great messy stew that are the roads. Somebody cuts you off, you get angry, so you cut the next guy off. Somebody scares you by pulling up on your tail, so you speed up and tailgate the next guy. Next thing you know, you’re either fearfully pulled over to the far lane driving 30 when everyone else is doing 70mph, or you’re the one in the F-350, terrorizing good people.

It seems an inescapable cycle. But it is possible to decide to check out of the game and find peace on the roads. In the next post, I’ll tell you how.

How does one find contentment?

The great Hebrew prophet Isaiah tells us that contentment is to be had by staying your mind on God.

What does it mean to “stay” your mind?

It means to keep something at the forefront of your consciousness, put your attention there and keep it there.

Ok, I’m staying my mind on God. What’s next?

It is from this position of focus that we must yearn for God, earnestly seek him.

As Jesus tells us, if we seek, we will find.

And when we find, we’ll also find that — to our great happiness — contentment has been thrown in as well.

Who is this man?

Albrecht Dürer: “Selbstbildnis im Pelzrock”, 1500, Öl auf Holz, 67 × 49 cm, Alte Pinakothek München

To understand Christ, we have to start with the Trinity, which consists of one divine being, God, who is comprised of three distinct persons, each with a unique role: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Christology is essentially the study of the person of Jesus Christ, the Son: who he is in relation to the other two persons of the Trinity, his divine and human natures, and his mission to save humanity from its otherwise inescapable fallenness.

In the historic Apostles Creed, we are told of:

Jesus Christ, [God’s] only Son, Our Lord,
Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.
He descended into Hell; the third day He rose again from the dead;
He ascended into Heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God, the Father almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead.

The Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary and nine months later was born the savior of the world. He lived the life we should have lived, taught us the true nature of God. He was condemned by the rulers of his own people and handed over to a Roman leader named Pilate, who did what was reasonable to try let the man go free. But in the end, Jesus was treated as an exceptional criminal, as a traitor to the Roman republic, and received the horrific punishment of being beaten, scourged, stripped naked, and nailed to a cross to die.

Jesus was given a fairly normal Jewish burial, though in a tomb beyond his family’s ability to pay, but was not given with the standard burial treatment due to it being the Sabbath.1 Three days later, he arose from the dead, the firstfruits of the new kingdom he has initiated and will eventually complete when he returns in glory to judge all people.

Christology, then, consists of making sense of this man, this God, for Jesus was both God and man. He was both one with the Father, equal in power and glory, as well as a man, born of woman and with all the limitations of humanity.

1 The women who discovered the empty tomb had come to complete the task of preparing Jesus’ body 

Doubt

I was reading chapter 17 of Exodus this morning. The people of Israel had already grumbled in the previous chapter about not having food — God gave them food; they grumbled in this chapter about being thirsty — God gave them water. 

All fine and well.

But then I read the final verses of chapter 17 about the Amalekite people attacking the Israelites in the wilderness, and a doubt overcame me that this part was a true story. It seemed so, well, unbelievable — even bothersome — that God would magically use Moses’ staff to overcome the enemy on the battlefield.   This account must have been a later insertion.

So I immediately prayed that God would forgive me. Before I could even fully form the thought, God told me not to worry — it’s ok, even natural, to doubt like that. I smiled to myself and then finished reading the story. It ended with this verse:

“The LORD will have war with Amalek from generation to generation.”

Curious, I googled Amalek. Who the heck is that?  Well, it turns out that he was the grandson of our hairy friend Esau. His people, the Amalekites, lived in the area near Horeb where Moses struck the rock to water his people. But here’s a quote from the googled commentary that struck me:

“Amalek is the constant doubter, brazenly rushing to any sign of passion for holiness and cooling things down.”

That, sayeth the LORD, is the bad kind of doubt.

Source: chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/3942715/jewish/Who-Were-Amalek-and-the-Amalekites

Dostoyevsky’s Response to the Problem of Evil

Portrait by Vasili Perov, 1872

From the literary classic Brothers Karamazov:

I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, of the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they’ve shed; and it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify what has happened.

Beautiful words, aren’t they?

Watch this.

No, this is not a “hold my beer” moment.

Anyone who knows me well is more than aware that I love Tim Keller, the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. The guy is just so humble, learned, and wise. No one currently living — and I mean no one — has more significantly impacted my faith and my understanding of what life is all about.

If I could force everyone I know to watch the following, I would. Alas, I can’t. Will you please watch? You’ll be very glad you did.

The Problem of Evil (Part One)

In the last post, I asked whether you, dear reader, might even want God to exist. And I tried to provide some reasons for maybe why that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. I’d like to shift gears a little bit and get philosophical.

According Boston College professor Peter Kreeft, the only truly formidable argument against God’s existence is the so-called “Problem of Evil.”[1]  I’m going to spend at least the next post addressing it.  But before we get into that, can we agree agree to put aside two common but unnecessary obstacles to thinking on this question?

1. Relativism.  This is the idea that what is true for you isn’t necessarily what’s true for me.  While helpful when arguing over vanilla versus chocolate, the idea is utter nonsense when you’re talking about whether a thing exists.  It doesn’t make a lot of sense to say: “It may be true for you that the Sun is up there in sky, but it’s not true for me.”  The Sun is either there or it isn’t.  Same with God: He either exists or He doesn’t, whether we want Him to or not.

2. Science has disproved God’s existence.  If God exists, He’s by definition outside the created order — and therefore not detectable via the Scientific Method.  One would only find the idea palatable by bringing to the question an a priori assumption that He doesn’t exist. Which kinda makes intelligent conversation on the subject difficult.

[1] Peter Kreeft, A Shorter Summa (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 53.

An Invitation to The Inklings

We are a free online apologetics discussion group for Christians interested in deepening the imaginative and philosophical grounds for our faith. Our focus is primarily, though not exclusively, on the literary and philosophical works of C.S. Lewis, arguably the 20th century’s greatest defender of the Christian faith.

There are no prerequisites other than a love of reading and thinking.

We are set to begin our first session of 2020.

Here’s how it works:

  1. Sign up in the comments section below, making sure to enter your name and email address. (You may also contact me via Facebook)
  2. On Sunday, April 12th, 2020 (and going forward every Sunday), I will send out info on the week’s subject material — as well as a link to a video lecture
  3. Starting on Wednesday, April 15th (and going forward on every Wednesday evening), we will gather from 7-8pm for group discussion via web conference
  4. The plan right now is to continue meeting through early June, 2020

Week One will consist of a general overview. And Week Two will be on how we as humans create meaning from information. Both are setup material for C.S. Lewis’s treatment of love in his The Four Loves and Till We Have Faces.

If you want to get ahead of the reading, we will be starting in Week Three on The Four Loves. You might want to go ahead and purchase both books now, if you don’t already own them.

-Jim Swayze