Lighting a torch in the darkness
We are allotted so few New Year’s Eves, in the grand scheme of things. Make each day count. Put service to God first on your resolution list. If you have not “joined the team”, and become a Christian, then do consider making that commitment before it is too late to do so.
The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.
(Isaiah 9:2, Holy Bible, King James Version).
Spiritual Disciplines
(Photo Credit: Training Exercises, U.S. Marine Corps, by Cpl. Will Perkins, Sept 10, 2015; Public Domain)
This is where the rubber meets the road in Christianity. Through these activities which we refer to as “spiritual disciplines”, we can grow in faith and knowledge, and are permitted to assist in the work of the Holy Spirit, our divine companion, who is dwelling and working mysteriously within us.
St. Paul in one of his letters advised his readers: “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” (Philippians 2:12-13: English Standard Version). The “work out” part is where these activities come in to play.
At our baptisms, God could probably have chosen just to “zap us” with instant knowledge and all the “fruits of the Spirit” in full development. He could have made us fully impervious to temptations and further sins. However, God has graciously chosen to allow us to cooperate with Him on a lifelong journey. This idea flows from the Christian idea that “God is Love”, that He wants relationship with beings who can choose love, and not merely a bunch of robotic servants.
Baptism is the beginning for us, not the end. We refer to the earliest part of our spiritual journey as a “new birth”–it is a beginning, a moment of decision, an emerging. We have answered the call to become “God’s woman” or “God’s man”. It may be for some a “mountain top experience”, but in fact answering the call and being baptized are but getting to the trailhead in the foothills, at the beginning of our trek. At this point we are picking up our trail maps and donning the clothes and tools we need for the climb, but hard work remains ahead. The mountain top lies before us, in the remote distance. We will get there, with God’s help.
It should be made clear that these activities we call the “spiritual disciplines” are tools to help us to draw closer to God’s presence, but ultimately the work of transforming our inner being belongs to God alone. In advocating these disciplines, we are not endorsing a “works” based doctrine of salvation. Christianity teaches that “works” flow from “faith”, and not vice versa. Furthermore, even faith itself is mysteriously a gift to us, and not something we conjured up alone. A vital (living) faith produces good works, while dead faith produces none.
We should also make clear that our efforts are designed to bend ourselves toward God. We don’t pray or meditate in order to bend God or the Cosmos to our wills. We are not wizards or necromancers. There are disciplines that if used wrong can become empty incantations, and lead to a false sense of power. You might hear in some quarters about plugging into or wielding the power of the Spirit, or reaping the benefits of prayer. And there is something to that, but the major effort of God’s power is to scrub us and polish us, not merely that we may shine with our own glory, but that we may be better mirrors to reflect God’s glory.
What are the disciplines? Well, you will find a variety of categories and lists. The biggies would be prayer, Bible study, and the various activities that are done in community, what some refer to as “corporate” disciplines. Prayer is a discipline that connects us to God. Bible study connects us to the history of God’s work in the world, His teachings through prophets, and the words of His Son, our Lord, Jesus. “Church” or corporate disciplines involve what we find in Acts 2:42: “And they continued stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers.”
One of the recent classics of the subject spiritual disciplines is the book A Celebration of Discipline, by Richard Foster, founder of the “Renovare” movement. He is not universally embraced, of course, but that aside, I have borrowed his classification of the disciplines.
He perceives three categories or types of disciplines: Inward, Outward, and Corporate. The four inward disciplines are meditation, prayer, fasting, and study. He lists four outward disciplines as simplicity, solitude, submission, and service. The remaining corporate disciplines focus on the development of Christian community as a whole; these are confession, worship, guidance, and celebration.
Roots of these laws reach deep into the spiritual fervor of colonists who arrived on the East Coast in the 17th century. Always prominent in such reflections are the Puritans of New England, but consider also the 1611 foundation laws of the Anglican colony of Virginia, which are the earliest set of English laws produced in the Western Hemisphere:
As also every man and woman shall repair in the morning to the divine service and sermons preached upon the Sabbath day in the afternoon to divine service and catechizing, upon pain for the first fault to lose their provision and allowance for the whole week following, for the second to lose the said allowance and also to be whipped, and for the third to suffer death.
(You can read this document online here).
Even after the adoption of a secular constitution, blue laws enjoyed widespread support in the U.S. Blue laws were not only supported by religious people, but were also celebrated by organized labor. An online history of the 1909 blue law in Washington state noted the following.
Some labor organizations supported the broad ban the Blue Law placed on commercial activities on Sunday, in order to preserve it as a day off for their members. For example, meat was a product that supposedly could not be sold on Sunday. This gave the butchers’ union a successful argument against merchants requiring butchers to work on that day. (from HistoryLink).
In the mid to late 20th century, there was a rush to abolish these laws. Now they linger on only in a few isolated locales. I don’t recall hearing any great rationale for this change, just something about them being old fashioned, like the spate of stately Victorian and beaux arts buildings that occasionally got slated for demolition in order to build parking lots or condos. Just one more thing for decent ordinary people to suck up–another thing that couldn’t be stopped–in the name of “progress.”
To be fair, although I may not recall them, valid arguments have actually been cited. One was that such laws amounted to discrimination against non-Christian minorities. Church-state concerns have also been raised, and have led to court battles, in which the constitutionality of blue laws has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court (for example, McGowan vs Maryland in 1961). Another reason often advanced is cash flow, an example of which we saw as recently as 2010, when New Jersey governor Chris Christie urged repeal of blue laws in order to increase revenue to the state. He cited Bergen County, one of the last last places to keep its malls closed on Sunday, as “costing” the state $65 million in potential tax revenue.
The loss of the “blue laws” has not necessarily been to everyone’s advantage. On a clearly economic basis, it is debatable whether the blue laws have actually helped or hurt localities. It may increase some economic activities and diminish others (Goos, 2005).
It has clearly harmed attendance at churches, which must now compete with shopping malls and an ever growing variety of Sunday morning activities such as youth sports. (To be clear I don’t believe that blue laws are solely to blame for emptying our churches–many other factors can be cited). In concert with declining church attendance, other social ills can be correlated with this change. One study finds that blue law repeal is associated with a decrease in measures of happiness, particularly among women, even as Sunday shopping has increased. (Cohen-Zada and Sander, 2010)
Consider also the findings of a study by economists Jonathan Gruber of MIT and Daniel Hungerman of the University of Notre Dame, published in 2008.
Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) on consumption of alcohol and illegal drugs, the economists found that repealing the blue laws did lead to an increase in drinking and drug use.
What’s more, they found that individuals who had attended church and stopped after the blue laws were repealed showed the greatest increase in substance abuse, Gruber notes.(a summary with link to the journal can be found at MIT News).
A 2014 study from Dara Lee at University of Missouri Columbia indicates that opening the malls on Sunday has caused decreased graduation rates and decrease in number of years in school, along with an increase in risky behaviors (Available online here).
What does it matter? Well, I certainly don’t expect blue laws to make a comeback. Like a lot of changes that happened in the 20th century, you really can’t close the proverbial “Pandora’s Box”. As individual Christians, though, we should do our best to “remember the Sabbath to keep it holy.” We should continue to try to put God first in our lives. That means going to church and perhaps missing out on some sales. It may mean explaining to our sons why they can’t play travel ball on Sundays. Although it won’t be as easy, we should be committed to carving out a time and space for Sabbath rest within our own busy worlds, to focus on God and his purposes for us.
With respect to the larger society, we should also be more vocal and strident in insisting that society “count the costs” before making changes that affect us. We should ask that purely financial goals be weighed against the non-financial harms that might ensue.
A slight play on the wording here would give us an even more profound statement, “Logos is life”. As Christians, in the midst of the season of Advent, we have the privilege of heralding the arrival of the divine Logos, God’s “Word made flesh”.
“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14, Holy Bible)
Logos is Life!
Logically, most “Christian” violence can be dealt with fairly easily by noting that the perpetrators were failing to live up to the tenets of their own faith. The prescription for this is better faith, not less faith.
A harder issue, and one which has come up for me recently in discussions with fellow Christians, is the violence that appears to be sanctioned in the Old Testament.
We have addressed this in our Q and A section: “Christians believe that God is good, and yet why did God order the slaughter of all Canaanites? Isn’t that a contradiction? Isn’t killing the Canaanites a violation of God’s own Law in the Ten Commandments?”
Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
(Source: “Godlessness: the First Step to the Gulag”, an address by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn given when he received the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion on May of 1983).
(Image credit: This is an image from the Nationaal Archief, the Dutch National Archives, and Spaarnestad Photo, accessed on Wikimedia Commons, and used in accordance with Creative Commons 3.0 license).
At one time I was fond of saying that demons may be little more than dark psychological forces that lurk inside of us. As to the reality of the demonic, I became converted–or “re-converted”, to be more accurate–because of knowing a couple of people who have had encounters with apparitions of evil. That’s a story for another time. (Disclaimer here, I still struggle with disbelief at times).
My wife recently came across an account of demon possession, that stirred some discussion while we were vacationing. The victim in question was a young lady named “Lacey” or “Roxane” (neither is likely her real name), who called a radio station that was operating out of a church. She claimed to be possessed and indeed her young terrified female voice would be interrupted by guttural snarls and demonic sounds. The DJ, Bill Scott, who didn’t much believe in demons at the time, nonetheless tried to help her, even inviting her to his home. He has written a book about his encounters, called The Day Satan Called. You can find summaries of the story in the following links:
The Christian Post and The Examiner.
The quoted passages below are from the second article.
Doors opened and closed, lights turned on and off, on and off. Their feet were pulled and poked while they were in bed at night, and on one occasion, Scott saw a black figure in the hallway.
He said to the figure, “In Jesus’ name, why do you feel you can be in my home?”
The entity’s eerie reply was, “I’m an invited guest into this home…”
They learned that the girl had been in a witch coven, and been involved in rituals that involved sex, consuming human flesh and blood, and invoking the names of demons. Her particular demon was Abbaddon, mentioned in Revelation 9:11 as guardian of the Abyss.
After two weeks of this demonic ordeal, Scott and his wife were finally able to find a safe house for women that could take Lacey in, providing her with a safe place to live and professional medical assistance. Now life would return to normal. Or, so they thought.
But the manifestations continued. On several occasions Scott and his wife had to leave the house in the middle of the night due to the overpowering sense of evil.
One night, during another demonic confrontation, Scott says he heard a voice say, “Have you looked under her bed?”
He didn’t know if it was the voice of Satan or of God but he did as suggested and looked under the bed Lacey had been using while in their home. There he found several occult items, including a black ceremonial robe. He immediately burned everything he found.
…But that’s not the end of the story. By this time, the shelter where Lacey was staying was also experiencing demonic activity. “Things” were looking in the windows and they weren’t human beings. “Things” were jumping on the women while they were in bed at night.
The girl drifted out of the life of Mr. Scott. The story goes on to describe a series of coincidences, or else a trail of destruction, left in her wake: Church splits, divorces, and ruined lives.
Now, I don’t know Mr. Scott, and therefore I have no more insight into this story than would any other reader. As to corroboration from others, here is a blogger who provides some support: http://themommaven.com/2011/12/the-day-satan-called-by-bill-scott/.
She says, “I know the author. Bill and I worked together in Christian Radio in the early 90s. I had heard bits of this story back then and I am glad that he has finally put down his experiences for the world to read and learn from.”
A person named Dave Stewart also offered the following in an Amazon review of the book: “As someone who was working with Bill at the time this incident occurred, I wanted to take a moment and let folks know that what was written was accurately portrayed. (An earlier reviewer asked why no other person had come forward to verify the story, and I wanted to answer that inquiry). It brought back a lot of memories that scared me witless when they were happening, because this was the stuff of movies and the product of Steven King’s mind to be honest with you. I also experienced what Bill did; with my own 2 ears hearing that voice on all phone lines ringing at once. It was a great reminder about who we really are dealing with in this world. “We wrestle not against flesh and blood….” are not cute lines in a book. Satan is alive and well, and if you stop and take a good look around, is quite active in many aspects of everyday life now. I got my copy and read it through in a single sitting; a few friends I have recommended it to have not been able to get past a few chapters. As you are reading the book I encourage your takeaway to be praying against the power of evil, and doing so in Jesus’ name. “Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit” is the real deal. The great thing about this story is that the final chapter hasn’t been written yet. The girl Bill writes about is still alive and living her life, and Bill is still trusting God. Get your copy today, and also check out Bill’s blog at BillScottgroup.com. All eyes on Jesus. Everything else, you get your butt kicked.”
The veracity of this story aside, it does sound like other possession accounts:
-The person feels, and seems to others, to be under the control of a malignant entity
-The entity seems to have a personality and mind, and is not merely a mood or bad feeling.
-The “demon” seems to know things about people in its vicinity that shouldn’t possibly be known.
-there are eerie manifestations, such as disembodied voices or sounds, or telekinetic activity, that are difficult to explain in naturalistic terms. (This is, in fact, a requirement for some groups, such the Roman Catholic Church, to validate a case of possession, prior to authorizing an exorcism).
-The entity typically gains a foothold based on some sort of susceptibility or invitation, such as dabbling in the occult.
-The possessed shows a strong aversion to the name of Jesus, and the entity can be (at least temporarily) overpowered and commanded by invoking Jesus’ name.
-The process of freeing the person from the entity can be long and arduous, and destructive to the person performing the prayers of deliverance.
-The attempt at deliverance / exorcism may not succeed.
As to this lack of success, one might raise questions. Why should not the evil entity vanish immediately upon command? Is Jesus less powerful than we believe? The Bible speaks to this, when it describes our role against this kind evil in terms of “struggling” or “wrestling.” New Testament indicates that Jesus’ own disciples had troubles at times:
And after crying out and convulsing him terribly, it came out, and the boy was like a corpse, so that most of them said, “He is dead.” But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up, and he arose. And when he had entered the house, his disciples asked him privately, “Why could we not cast it out?” And he said to them, “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.” (Mark 9:26-29, English Standard Version)
Another author (none other than the famous M. Scott Peck, who pursued a “road less travelled” in his book, Glimpses of the Devil) has suggested that the longer a person has been possessed, the harder it is to bring about release from the demon. He speculates that social isolation plays a role also. The possessed must repudiate the demon, and the longer the demon has been his or her “only friend”, the less likely this is to happen.
Fortunately, possession of this severe and dramatic kind seems quite rare, and that is probably a gift to the world of our Heavenly Father, a part of that “common grace” that is extended to all. It could also mean that there aren’t all that many evil spiritual entities available to go around.
I’ll conclude with a disclaimer. I am not an exorcist, nor do I play one on TV. I also do not seek to become any part of a story like this one. If it is forced on you somehow, I would recommend extreme caution approaching such a situation. Don’t face such a darkness alone. Best to get help, and don’t get in over your head. Otherwise, as I stated in the title, when Satan calls, it’s best to hang up.
“The Martian” is the kind of movie I used to love as a kid, full of heroic scientists, and the wonders of space travel, and the best aspects of human achievement. I guess my Christianity has always been sprinkled with a bit of humanism–in the best sense of the term.
This movie will of course be compared to the other “space realism” movies that have come out in the last two years. It is a warmer and less theological movie than “Gravity”, though it does touch on that loneliness of being alone in space (or in this case, on Mars), and it approaches some of the big existential issues. Really, though, this hearkens back more to “Apollo 13.” This is a fairly straightforward saga of one man’s survival in an unforgiving environment, in this case Mars. As with Ron Howard’s movie, teams of NASA engineers and scientists must figure out how to solve seemingly insurmountable problems to get him home safely, while the whole world watches.
At one moment in the film, the main character played by Matt Damon asks a colleague on a nearby space vessel to relay a message to his parents. What he says here is very touching. He wants to reassure them that he loves his work and that his death has meaning. I don’t remember the exact wording, but he says something to the effect of “I died for something that is bigger than me.”
That phrase resonates with my own longing for a meaningful life. Ultimately, for all of God’s children, life does have that kind of meaning. We live for the kingdom of God. We do the tasks God has given to us to do, and can go on to our eternal rest satisfied that we died for something that is bigger than us. As the great apostle Paul stated when contemplating his own death, “for me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”
This is not to belittle human achievement on its own terms. When humanity listens to “the better angels of our nature”, when it ascends the highest peaks, when it produces masterworks of art or sublime music, when it rises above self-destructive appetites in order to do good, and when it reaches into space, we as Christians should appreciate these things. We do not worship humanity, of course, but we worship the God that made us, and who deeply loves us. These achievements are gifts, reflecting the common grace of God. We are seeing in them the spark of divinity, the echo of that image of God that has been given to each of us.
A picture has emerged of a church that was secretive, whose pastor had become paranoid and controlling, driving away many members. Today’s New York Times describes it as a “lethal sect”. Apparently it was not always so. Somewhere along the way an ordinary church took a dark turn.
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Former members of the upstate New York church where two teens were viciously beaten paint a picture of a once vibrant and joyous house of worship that declined into a place of fear and intimidation under new leadership.
“When I first arrived, it was warm and welcoming. It was encouraging. It was helpful,” said Chadwick Handville, a massage therapist in Phoenix, Arizona, who left the Word of Life Christian Church in June 2000 after 10 years that included a stint as a worship leader and trustee. Things went downhill after founder Jerry Irwin returned from some time away and reclaimed his position as pastor, Handville said. (from Yahoo News).