The Works of God

Pastor John started his sermon on March 20 noting that “it is possible to live in an evangelical, Bible-believing, Bible-loving world and never hear the criticism of the Bible that is commonplace in university religion departments around the country and in the classrooms of many mainline churches.”

The opposite is also true.

Dr. Hans Reinders writes frequently on the topic of theology and disability, and I have found him to be an interesting voice.

But he surprised me in his most recent article in the March 2011 Journal of Religion, Disability and Health, “Is There Meaning in Disability? Or Is It the Wrong Question” where he writes:

(T)he notion of providence does not seem to do much work in the life of contemporary Christianity.

Even though Christian liturgy is replete with songs and prayers full of the promises of what God will do, there is not much attention paid to the notion of providence in contemporary theology.

Apparently, it is not a topic that weighs strongly on people’s minds. (Emphasis mine)

Really?  I think about it a lot!

I’ve been to conferences with several thousand other people who also think about it a lot, and they go on to preach in churches to hundreds of thousands of others, who learn to pay attention to the notion of providence.  We had more than 3.5 million ‘unique’ visitors to the Desiring God website last year – I think most of those probably also pay attention.  Even Time Magazine noted the rising influence of ‘The New Calvinism’ a couple of years ago.

I’m not making fun of Dr. Reinders; his world is different than our evangelical world.  It takes effort to look outside our bubbles.

I know I’ve seen his email address somewhere in my studies. I’d like to let him know there are significant scholars like D.A. Carson and Al Mohler who take providence very seriously.

It would be good to have a scholar of his standing (he was just named Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Religion, Disability and Health) paying attention to those who take the sovereignty of God over all things, including disability, seriously.

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In a Friday New York Times editorial, The Shame of New York’s Group Homes, the closing sentence makes a clear and urgent moral pronouncement:

The answer lies in the state’s urgent obligation to protect those who cannot defend themselves.

They are absolutely correct, though it is not just the state who has an obligation to protect the defenseless.  In this case they are speaking of those living in group homes because of their developmental disabilities.

Please pray The New York Times would extend this logic to those even more defenseless: children in the womb.  Imagine the impact that could have if God were to wake up The New York Times editorial board to see this issue clearly!

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In his very helpful address at the Children Desiring God conference, Russell Moore drew clear attention to our enemy:

We rage against the reptile, not against his prey.

The reptile, of course, is Satan.

It can feel like he’s winning this war.  In this article from Saturday’s New York Times (login may be required; not appropriate for young children), the depths of our culture’s disregard for adults with severe disabilities living in group homes was apparent:

And, despite a state law requiring that incidents in which a crime may have been committed be reported to law enforcement, such referrals are rare: State records show that of some 13,000 allegations of abuse in 2009 within state-operated and licensed homes, fewer than 5 percent were referred to law enforcement. The hundreds of files examined by The Times contained shocking examples of abuse of residents with conditions like Down syndrome, autism and cerebral palsy.

Stories like these make me fully appreciate when parents say things like, “my prayer is to live one day longer than my child.”  The evil of this present age is horrifying, especially in light of how vulnerable my son is because of his multiple disabilities.

Pastor John helpfully reminds us that God is not just full of mercy:

God is more than merciful. He is also just. Verse 19 (of Romans 12) makes this crystal clear: “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” No wrong will go without punishment. The wrath of God will repay every wrong either in the suffering and death of Christ for those who repent and believe on him, or in hell for those who don’t. So when we return good for evil, it’s not only because God is merciful, but also because God is just. We display his mercy and we defer to his justice.  John Piper, When Is It Right to Repay Evil with Pain?, March 13, 2005

That doesn’t mean we are passive about evil.  We can pursue justice, but we do so through proper institutions and with a proper heart:

And God calls us to uphold justice as part of the God-ordained institutions we belong to—and all this to show people what God is like in his justice, and how he frees us to do justice without a malicious spirit.  Piper, same sermon

To my family members and friends in law enforcement: John, Andrew, Chris and Greg, I am very grateful God has called you to face the evil of this age as representatives of the civil authorities God has appointed.  And I am grateful that your experiences with your cousin, sister, and children with disabilities have shaped your understanding about people with disabilities as part of God’s creation worth protecting, nurturing and esteeming.

And I’m grateful that, someday, your services will no longer be needed.  Come quickly, Lord Jesus!

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Most Americans, even those who generally support a ‘right’ to abortion, don’t like the idea of later-term abortions.

Ann Furedi points out why this is intellectually dishonest:

To the ‘ethical straddlers’ concerned about gestation we must ask: is there anything qualitatively different about a fetus at, say, 28 weeks that gives it a morally different status to a fetus at 18 weeks or even eight weeks? It certainly looks different because its physical development has advanced. At 28 weeks we can see it is human – at eight weeks a human embryo looks much like that of a hamster. But are we really so shallow, so fickle, as to let our view on moral worth be determined by appearance? Even if at five weeks we can only see an embryonic pole, we know that it is human. The heart that can be seen beating on an ultrasound scan at six weeks is as much a human heart as the one that beats five months later.

That sounds like a great case against all abortions!

However, she’s actually arguing the opposite.

The moral principle at stake in the debate on later abortions, the one that genuinely matters, has been ignored completely in the recent discussions. This is the principle of moral autonomy in respect of reproductive decisions. To argue that a woman should no longer be able to make a moral decision about the future of her pregnancy, because 20 or 18 or 16 weeks have passed, assaults this and, in doing so, assaults the tradition of freedom of conscience that exists in modern pluralistic society.

Let’s remember what moral autonomy gets us on ANY issue:

None is righteous, no, not one (Romans 3:10).

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23).

For the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23).

And let us also not forget what moral autonomy means in this case – the destruction of a small human being by larger human beings.

Even a pluralistic society dictates limits on that sort of behavior for the sake of the weaker members.  Where that weaker member lives shouldn’t make a difference.

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