The Works of God

There is too much in our culture that is left to subjective feelings of the moment.  Yet, as we all know and have experienced, feelings change.

Some of the decisions made in the moment have lifelong, even eternal, consequences.

More news on abortion over the weekend left me shaken and angry.

Yet, in the end, no matter what our culture or our churches do or don’t ultimately do to protect the lives of our unborn babies with disabilities, God reigns over all things.

And there is the hope – Jesus is the king, perfect and just and good in everything he does.  All things will be made right by our king; every injustice will be accounted for.

We are not Christians because it makes us feel better; we are Christians because the very source of all joy has called us to himself and personally accounted for every evil we have committed against our Holy God and declared us righteous.

We can experience joy in the midst of great sorrow because he is God and he is glorious.  And that objective reality will help us do what we need to do today as we deal with disability in a culture that would prefer that we or our loved ones would just cease to exist.

Christianity begins with the conviction that God is an objective reality outside ourselves. We do not make him what he is by thinking a certain way about him. As Francis Schaefer said, he is the God who is there.

We don’t make him. He makes us. We don’t decide what he is going to be like. He decides what we are going to be like. He created the universe, and it has the meaning he gives it, not the meaning we give it.

If we give it a meaning different from his, we are fools. And our lives will be tragic in the end. Christianity is not a game; it’s not a therapy. All of its doctrines flow from what God is and what he has done in history.

They correspond to hard facts. Christianity is more than facts. There is faith and hope and love. But these don’t float in the air. They grow like great cedar trees in the rock of God’s truth. . .

Rootless emotionalism that treats Christianity like a therapeutic option will be swept away in the Last Days. Those who will be left standing will be those who have built their house on the rock of great, objective truth with Jesus Christ as the origin, center, and goal of it all.

John Piper, The Fatal Disobedience of Adam and the Triumphant Obedience of Christ, August 26, 2007.