Some people believe this to be a verse from the Bible. It is not a verse from the Bible. Read much of the New Testament and it becomes clear that effort is involved on our part – but it also becomes abundantly clear that God helped us – to massively understate his contribution – before we ever knew we needed helping. This article from compellingtruth.org explains this very well with a bundle of New Testament references, so I won’t retread it all here. Suffice to say this one might not get you off the hook for your midnight freezer raids.

There is no-one like God. This same incomparable God is the creator, the sustainer, and the focus of all life. Paul says that ‘in him we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28), and in Hebrews we read that he upholds the universe by the word of his power. He is the one who put the first breath in our lungs, and without whom we would cease to be. But rather than this deity creating the universe to stave off boredom, God is fully involved with his creation. His desire is that we would find in him our source of strength, of purest joy, our purpose and value and meaning. His design is that we would worship him with our whole hearts, not because his ego needs a boost but simply because it is right to do so.

Put no other thing in his place. No other idol, no source of pleasure or comfort or happiness. All of it is from him, and none of it can match him. There is no-one like our God.

---

This is available as a print

 

Continuing the Isaiah 40 quotation from last week – verses 18-25 contrast God with kings and princes, and the gods we set up in his place.

Idolatry is a topic that runs right through the Bible. It is explicitly mentioned from the first books right the way into the New Testament, and while the word ‘idol’ can summon up something of an outdated idea, it actually speaks into every culture. A while back I read Tim Keller’s excellent book, Counterfeit Gods, the introduction to which sets this out very well:

“To contemporary people the word idolatry conjures up pictures of primitive people bowing down before statues. The biblical book of Acts in the New Testament contains vivid descriptions of the cultures of the ancient Greco-Roman world. Each city worshipped its favourite deities and built shrines around their images for worship…

… Our contemporary society is not fundamentally different from these ancient ones. Each culture is dominated by its own set of idols. Each has its ‘priesthoods,’ its totems and rituals. Each one has its shrines – whether office towers, spas and gyms, studios or stadiums – where sacrifices must be made in order to procure the blessings of the good life and ward off disaster…

… the human heart takes good things like a successful career, love, material possessions, even family, and turns them into ultimate things. Our hearts deify them as the center of our lives, because, we think, they can give us significance and security, safety and fulfilment, if we attain to them…

… What is an idol? It is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give.”

I would highly recommend a read of the whole book – it discusses the problem of idolatry and some of its most common forms, and also offers some encouraging and useful instruction on dealing with our idols – rooting them out where we have made a good thing into an ultimate thing – and looking instead to our incomparable God to give us what only he can provide.

---

This is available as a print

 

This is part one of three running through chapter 40 of Isaiah.

Isaiah is a book which records a little bit of history, along with a number of prophecies given to the people of Israel around 7-800 BC. In particular it deals with a period of Jewish history known as the exile. Over a long period God had repeatedly warned his people that if they did not follow the laws he had given them, he would remove them from the promised land he had brought them to over 500 years earlier. Isaiah was tasked with delivering a final warning, one which God knew would be ignored.

But far more than just warning, Isaiah also looks beyond the exile, and in chapter 40 the tone shifts. Having set out Israel’s coming judgement, God begins to speak hope to his people, and in doing so gives a sweeping view of just who it is that has set his heart on them. I was inspired to try and illustrate some of it, but a picture can never truly do God justice. I hope this helps point in at least a small way to how great and wise and incomparable a God we have.

---

This is available as a print

 

The quote above is from CS Lewis’ Miracles – and meant as a cry against the widespread view of God as some impersonal force. Not the active and involved king of the universe, but simply a higher power to be called on when it suits us. Earlier in the same segment he writes that such a god,

‘does nothing, demands nothing. He is there if you wish for Him, like a book on a shelf. He will not pursue you. There is no danger that at any time heaven and earth should flee away at His glance‘

The message of the Bible is quite the opposite. He is the one who walks into the first disciples’ lives and calls them away from their nets. He is the one who appears to John in Revelation, a vision that would so overawe him as to knock him out cold. He is the one who was dying for our sins, long before we knew there was a problem. He is the one who stands at the door and knocks. It is up to us to answer, but know that opening that door is not a matter of welcoming him in to take advantage of the periodic benefits of his company. Opening that door means

 

As a side note – it’s ended up a little too small to read, but I wasn’t sure exactly what sort of information you would find on a submarine’s monitors. I went with the most likely option in the end, so most of the text on the monitors is the lyrics to ‘Under the Sea’ from Disney’s The Little Mermaid.

The assumption for many people is that they in some way need to earn their place when it comes to God’s kingdom. He’s not going to want me until I’ve sorted out my addictions! I can’t be worthy to come and worship at church before I’ve dealt with all my demons! And to be honest it’s not a surprising point of view – that’s the way things often tend to work here on Earth. For an employer it’s not enough that you say you’ll go to rehab – they want so see some evidence of concrete change.

But to our amazement, this is not how it goes in God’s kingdom. As we read his word, we find that even before we ever thought to ask him for help – before we even knew there was a problem – he died for us. Such was his love for the people he had made that, while we were still his enemies, he was willing to pay the very highest price to atone for our sins. He isn’t waiting for you to reach a certain level of righteousness before he will take you on, because in truth whatever we set our sights on, even if we can achieve it, would not be enough. This is what was required to make you acceptable to God: the blood of his own son, God himself in human form, Jesus Christ. To claim that you still need to work for God’s acceptance is like claiming that the death of Jesus wasn’t enough.

God’s heart for Christians is that they should become more and more like Jesus (2 Corinthians 3:18), letting go of old habits, sinful ways, ungodly desires. It takes time – sometimes feeling like 2 steps forward and 1, or even 2 steps back – but more importantly it requires the help of the Holy Spirit. You can keep striving for acceptance in your own strength, perhaps giving up in exhaustion, or you can give your life to God now, and find both help and hope in his kingdom.

Already the second strip I have illustrated about not being anxious. Faith in Jesus is a powerful thing. Perhaps from the outside it can look outdated or absurd to be pinning your hopes on God being real, but it is the experience of countless Christians – myself firmly included – that faith in him is a rock in the midst of a turbulent and unpredictable life. We are holding onto hope of a future resurrection from the dead, and on top of that a God who cares about us and is involved in the stuff of everyday life.

It’s not a blind faith, but a faith which is strengthened and extended by the work of the Holy Spirit, by the historical evidence for what the Bible claims about Jesus, and by the experience of living a life dependant on him, seeing him answer prayers and come through for us in myriad ways, both mundane and miraculous.

If you’re a Christian and struggle with fears and anxieties, these verses are for you. I appreciate that these things are not straightforward – sometimes that peace comes straight away, sometimes it’s a barrage of worries and it’s all you can do to pray, grit your teeth and try to carry on. In some cases there may be a medical basis to your anxiety and medication would be helpful. Whatever your situation, our hope is ultimately in Jesus – an expectation that he is for us, that he is capable of bringing peace to troubled minds, and that a day is coming when all fear and anxiety will be removed forever.

If you’re not a Christian, but would like to experience the peace of God which surpasses understanding in your own life – believing in Jesus would be a good place to start.

 

It’s Halloween week – and having seen a handful of posts of people looking forward to some spooky supernatural escapades, I wanted to share a word of advice for anyone thinking about having a dabble:

Don’t do it.

As much as our society likes to laugh at the concept of the supernatural, writing it off as a fairy tale, it certainly has a place in pop culture. Ghost hunting tv shows wouldn’t be so commonplace if there wasn’t a part of us wondering ‘is there something more to this….?’ Shows like Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, or the White Queen explore magic and the demonic, and a ouija board even made its way into Downton Abbey as a subplot a couple of seasons ago. Often it’s just as a joke, sometimes it’s more serious, but there is an interest in the supernatural, and we are willing to try all sorts of ways to engage with it.

The trouble is, we can get in over our heads all too quickly. When people muck about with attempting to contact spirits – whether through seances, ouija boards or whatever else, we are messing with something that is in a very real sense beyond us. The best intruction manual you could turn to is the Bible – and it says over and again, don’t touch this stuff with a barge pole.

The occult is a counterfeit of the real thing. The Bible forbids it because, in a search for answers and hidden knowledge, it involves turning to forces that explicitly wish you no good, when it is God’s desire that we turn to him for all our needs, both material and spiritual.

What I want to get across is that these things can sound exciting – but they are empty counterfeits in comparison to seeing God at work. The one who, though being in every respect infinite and boundless, came to Earth in the form of a man in the person of Jesus Christ. The one who was put to death, and three days later took up his life again. Physics and biology are but tools in his hands. In his presence, the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, demons are cast out, the deaf hear, and the dead are raised to life. And he is still doing these things today, through his people the church. Little wonder that occultists in Acts gave up their former ways for something altogether better. He is the one who reveals mysteries, who works miracles, and who guarantees our resurrection from the dead. Don’t mess about with the counterfeit. The real thing is here.

Two verses from “From Whence this Fear and Unbelief” – a hymn by the excellently named Augustus Toplady, who also wrote the slightly more well known Rock of Ages (not the musical rock opera). I’m not altogether sure the illustration has worked on this one, but I was taken with the lyrics. The full hymn is an entire two verses longer.

I found it in a chapter of JI Packer’s Knowing God, which I would highly recommend, and have previously illustrated a quote from.

I can give a couple of arguments in favour of the universe having a start point. The first is the one presented in the comic – if there was no beginning, and this universe has always been around, then we would never have reached this present moment in time. If you were to draw a timeline from today stretching back into the past, that line would never, ever end. It just doesn’t make sense to have a universe that never had a beginning.

Even if you imagine some kind of scenario where there were universes before this one – for example, if the universe is born, then dies, then starts over again – you still have the time problem. At some point the whole thing has to have had a beginning, or else we couldn’t be where we are now.

A second argument would be that, in our universe, entropy increases over time (some explanation here) – if entropy is increasing, and over time the useful energy in the universe is running out, then the universe must have had a starting point. If it had existed forever, then all the useful energy would have run out by now.

So – if there was a point before which there was no universe – no time, no materials, and by definition, no scientific processes to cause a universe to pop into being – then how could the universe have gotten started?

Any theory you propose at this point requires a huge leap of faith. The Christian view is that God existed, prior to the existence of everything we see around us, including time itself. He is outside of time, able to set our little universe spinning, with all of it’s laws of physics, and none of which he is bound by. And while that might sound like a cop out, a fairy tale, or a ridiculous leap of faith, for my part it’s honestly the most likely explanation for all this. If it’s between the universe popping into existence out of nowhere without cause, or an act of creation by a sovereign supernatural power, then the supernatural simply seems to be the more reasonable option.