Tag: Science

Only God is good

To say that God is good is fairly commonplace: if there is a God, most people would agree, he ought to be good. But Jesus had a different angle on this. This is his riposte to someone who called him “good Master”: “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone” (Luke 18.18-19). No one is good! Only God is!

This is a profound insight, and a vital clue to answering many of our ethical questions. The first important thing Jesus teaches here is that no-one is good. On two occasions in his teaching, speaking to a perfectly ordinary group of listeners, he refers to them as “evil”. In his famous “Sermon on the Mount”, for example, he says, “If you, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7.11 and again in Luke 11.13).

These words communicate two truths: first, that people are essentially classified by God as “evil”; yet, they are also capable of doing good, like giving good things to their kids. What may seem shocking to us, however, is Jesus’ insistence that “no one is good” in the absolute sense – or as the Bible teaches elsewhere, “There is no-one righteous, not even one… for all have sinned” (Romans 3.10, 23).

The second thing taught by Jesus is that God is good – indeed, he alone is good. Now these two fundamental truths revealed about both God and humans form the foundation enabling us to get clarity on issues relating to morality.

We all face moral questions every day: what should I do? What is right or wrong here? How am I to decide? According to my family tradition? According to the majority opinion? By the light of my conscience? One’s conscience needs a reference for its judgment, and that reference can vary – it is not stable.

“Only God is good”: here, then, Jesus would say, is the only proper source for understanding what is good and what is evil. This is a service that “only God” can render to humanity – for we are all tainted with evil to some degree, and therefore disqualified to pontificate on moral truth. God alone – who is our Maker, after all – is wise and good enough to inform us correctly about how his creatures are to be good.

And God has rendered us this service – beginning by laying down the famous Ten Commandments which he gave to Moses for his people to obey. Jesus reinforced those commandments and Christians hold to them as defining right human behaviour. To disobey them is wrong. So adultery, theft and murder, for example, are wrong, as are coveting (lust), perjury (lying), and putting other things as “gods” in the place of God himself. These are the minimum basics for truly good human living. And Jesus fills out the very demanding “spirit” of these commandments in his Sermon on the Mount. Have you ever read it? It is revolutionary! You will find it in Matthew’s Gospel, chapters 5 to 7.

There’s more to say on our need for moral guidance, but the key is – God is good, and it is he who can (and does) tell us. And it is to him, after all, that we are answerable. If this highlights the very real problem of our misdeeds, we need to hear – and can know – that God forgives. That’ll be for another blog post.

Clive Every-Clayton

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God’s love and human freedom

Another difficult question needs to be answered as we grapple with the sad fact that God’s supreme creature has become so perverted as to displease his Creator: why didn’t God prevent the Fall from happening? Was it wise to allow the first man the freedom to sin?

Well, what was the alternative? To create a robot? God is perfectly capable of creating parts of the world that act mechanically; but he is personal, he is a lover. He created little persons in his image to be able to enjoy personal relationships. Human beings are not automatons: Professor of psychiatry Glynn Harrison informs us: “Human beings are fundamentally lovers”. We are so gloriously constituted that not only can we delight in relationships with other people – we can also have a personal relationship with God himself! 

But here’s the basic issue: love relationships must allow freedom. It’s part of the deep pleasure that love is mutual and consented freely. So God made Adam and Eve in his image, as persons with intelligence, emotions like love and a free will – the capacity to choose. And this included the very real possibility that they could choose – as indeed they did – to disobey God’s will. Yes, our freedom is that real!

But our freedom is not autonomy; we are never independent of God. Autonomy would mean that we are a law unto ourselves – we would make our “law” which would replace God’s law. This was the essence of Adam and Eve’s sin. The law we would choose for ourselves is not the best – we are not as wise as God in our ethical choices. God as Creator has supreme authority in the universe: he remains in ultimate control and we remain answerable to him. He has the right to impose his wise and best will on us, demanding our obedience for our highest good. And he has the ultimate right to exercise just judgment and also to inflict final punishment where it is deserved.

So our human free will is grounded on the fact that we are true persons, made with a view to enjoying a loving, warm relationship with God.

But did not God foresee that mankind would rebel? Yes, he surely did. So why did he still go ahead with it? Here we are in the profound depths of God’s unfathomable infinite wisdom: God’s design was to reveal to humankind the most mind-boggling aspect of his glorious love for us. The technical word for this amazing love is “grace”, which has the meaning “God’s undeserved loving-kindness and favour” – shown not merely to the undeserving, but to the hell-deserving! 

When Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount that we should “love our enemies”, he said that if we did we would be like his heavenly Father who is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. What an amazing concept! In other words, God loves even his enemies. So the Bible encourages believers by telling us that “while we were God’s enemies we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son”. And again, “God proves his love towards us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5.8, 10). The immensity of God’s love is revealed in that he cares deeply even for those who live in rebellion against him; it is also revealed in the greatness of the sacrifice he made to show the fullness of his love. Before Jesus died, he said, “Greater love has no-one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends” (John 15.13).

It is as we take in the full wonder of His love revealed in the Cross, that we are overwhelmed by his amazing grace and can gladly accept his offer of pardon and reconciliation and begin to love him in return.

And thus we enter into the purpose for which we were created!

Clive Every-Clayton

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A fall you can recover from

The Bible’s first three chapters recount what Christian theology refers to as “the Fall of man – how a pure creation became contaminated by evil. The original ancestors of the human race, created positively good, yet free to choose, were given one simple prohibition: not to eat of one particular tree in the Garden of Eden. God warned of serious consequences in the event of disobedience to this one commandment: “The day you eat of it, you will die”. Adam and Eve chose to disobey. The New Testament comments: “sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin” (Romans 5.12). Sin “came into” human existence; it was not there before. But now humans have become sinners, subject to all kinds of evil and death.

Because of this, Jesus describes human depravity in our inner being, when he says: “From within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness” (Mark 7.21-22). Quite the opposite of the first couple’s holiness before the Fall! A great tragedy – but one from which we humans can be saved and healed.

The New Testament adds, in Romans 5.19, “By one man’s disobedience many were made sinners”. In other words, sin entered as it were into the bloodstream of humanity, and we are all infected with it. Thus we are vestiges of the original glory, tarnished by inherent corruption. That is how we are to understand our human reality. That is the Maker’s diagnosis – the true facts about our condition. And the Maker subsequently set in motion the means of redemption, restoration, healing, and forgiveness – we will come to that in due course.

But I want to refer again to Pascal’s brilliant explanation of this – what theologians call “original sin”, and he calls “the mystery furthest from our ken” (§131/434). It is so dense, I will have to summarise and simplify it. He says:

As a result of the Fall, all humans are born with an inner disposition to evil. He acknowledges that this doctrine – that we should suffer from the effects of our ancestor’s disobedience – offends our proud sensibilities. “Nothing jolts us more rudely than this doctrine,” he says. Yet – get this: without this revealed explanation (that none of us likes nor could have invented, but which was there in the Bible from the first) we are unable to explain the essential duality of good and evil in our nature. “But for this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all”, he wrote, “we remain incomprehensible to ourselves”! Only by grasping this revealed truth which appears so contrary to proud human reason, he concludes, only then “can we really know ourselves.”

Profound!

He sums up therefore “two equally constant truths. One is that man in the state of his creation… is made like unto God; the other is that in the state of corruption and sin, he has fallen from that first estate and has become like the beasts”. But he alludes also to a third state, “the state of grace”. This refers to the restoration of sinful man by the redeeming work of the Lord Jesus Christ. Sinful men and women can be forgiven by God’s grace, through the Cross of their Saviour; and they can be made new by the converting power of the Holy Spirit, becoming beloved children of God, saved from the consequences of their sins, welcomed by God into a warm ,loving relationship with him, for which they were designed.

Clive Every-Clayton

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The deep human malady

Are people essentially good, basically corrupt, or somewhere in between? How to assess our human reality? By our own opinion? Our evaluation would tend either to hubris or low self-esteem, because, bizarrely, there is in our nature both good and evil. Our pride would emphasise the good; our realism may recognise the bad also. 

The difficulty is, you cannot truly understand yourself by yourself. This is the eternal conundrum already long before Blaise Pascal, he who excelled in “showing how vile and how great man is” (§119/423). He also had deep insight into the real cause of both our nobility and our baseness. The dual nature of man, he saw, has its explanation par excellence in the Bible, and he expresses it as if God was telling us: “It is I who have made you, and I alone can teach you what you are. But you are no longer in the state in which I made you. I created man holy, innocent, perfect… He was not then in the darkness that now blinds his sight, nor subject to death and the miseries that afflict him. But… he wanted to make himself his own centre and do without my help. He withdrew from my rule, setting himself up as my equal in his desire to find happiness in himself, and I abandoned him to himself” (§149/430).

In other words, our positive glory comes from being part of the unique species that was created in the image of God; our deep depravity comes from the fact that humankind has fallen away from that original holiness. This is the light from God that we need to make sense of our dual reality. God’s glorious creation is in ruins; and the fault is not God’s! Man has become a rebel: “men are the devils of the earth” (Schopenhauer). “Humans have a great capacity for wrong-doing,” wrote Jordan Peterson, a “proclivity for malevolent actions. Every person is deeply flawed. Everyone falls short of the glory of God” (12 Rules for Life, p.55 and p.62). And Malcolm Muggeridge stated, “The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality, but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact”. Yes, we resist it, don’t we? Yet in our sober moments, we must acknowledge it is true. “All have sinned”, says the Bible: “None is righteous” – in the sense of being perfectly good in God’s eyes (Romans 3.10, 23). And if we think we are the exception, the Bible brings us back to reality: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1.8).

We have said that God is our Creator, but he did not make us inherently evil; he made humankind in his image, in the likeness of a holy, good and loving God. That is the source of our inherent greatness. The source of our inherent sinfulness is due to a primeval rebellion, the disobedience of the first human couple, Adam and Eve.

That deserves separate treatment.

Clive Every-Clayton

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Diagnosis of human nature

“What is man?” is an age-old question. Another question we should also ask is, What’s wrong with man? Because we are fraught with trouble that we cannot easily grasp. Things are not right with human nature, but how to make sense of our psychological ills – that is the question.

Blaise Pascal had an astute understanding of this human dilemma; indeed, few had the penetrating insights that he expressed with such incisive prose: “Man is neither angel nor beast, and it is unfortunately the case that anyone trying to act the angel acts the beast” (§678/358).

Speaking of the unity in man of mind and matter, Pascal writes: “This is the thing we understand least; man is to himself the greatest prodigy in nature, for he cannot conceive what body is, and still less what mind is, and least of all how a body can be joined to a mind. This is his supreme difficulty, and yet it is his very being. The way in which minds are attached to bodies is beyond man’s understanding, and yet this is what man is” (§199/92).

But there is another duality in our nature that Pascal points up: some, he says, are “exalted at… the sense of their greatness” while others are “dejected at the sight of their present weakness… If they realised man’s excellence [but] they did not know [man’s] corruption… the result [is] … pride, and if they recognised the infirmity of nature, [without knowing] its dignity… the result [is] that they… fall headlong into despair.” So he sums up: “We feel within ourselves the indelible marks of excellence, and is it not equally true that we constantly experience the effects of our deplorable condition?” (§208/435).

“Who cannot see that unless we realise the duality of human nature we remain invincibly ignorant of the truth about ourselves?” (§131/434).

So, is man good and glorious? Or is he weak and wicked?

“What shall become of man? Will he be the equal of God or the beasts? What a terrifying distance! What then shall he be? Who cannot see from all this that man is lost, that he has fallen from his place, that he anxiously seeks it, and cannot find it again? And who then is to direct him there? The greatest men have failed” (§430/431).

“You are a paradox to yourself” says Pascal – echoed by Professor of Psychology Jordan Peterson, “You are too complex to understand yourself”. We need help!

“Men, it is in vain that you seek within yourselves the cure for your miseries. All your intelligence can only bring you to realise that it is not within yourselves that you will find either truth or good” (§149/430).

“Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Be humble, impotent reason! Be silent, feeble nature! Learn that man infinitely transcends man, hear from your master your true condition, which is unknown to you. Listen to God.” (§131/434).

When we are seriously ill without realising it, a doctor’s diagnosis is hard to take. So also it is humbling to face up to our existential pain, when our pride is the main problem, and our pride is hurt. 

On the other hand, a doctor’s mistaken diagnosis can be very harmful for a patient, because the remedy proposed may actually be detrimental to the patient’s health. So it is with our human predicament: many a wrong diagnosis of our ills has only led people into further distress. So, what is wrong with us? Where is the doctor who can bring the right diagnosis?

“Listen to God”. Only our Maker can mend us. 

Clive Every-Clayton

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Our human predicament

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was one of France’s greatest minds: inventor of the first calculating machine, and the first public transport (in Paris), he was a mathematician but most famous for his literary accomplishments; he was regarded by many as the greatest of French prose artists. He was an unconventional Catholic because he struggled against the Jesuits, calling their Society and the Inquisition “twin scourges of the truth” (Pensées §916/920). Also unusual for a Catholic layman in those days, he profoundly studied the Bible which was for him the source of absolute truth; so he was quite like an evangelical not only for his high regard for Scripture, but also because he underwent a profound experience of the risen Christ, which was a radical conversion, the essence of which he wrote immediately in his “Memorial” which has been described as the most sublime writing ever put on paper. 

Pascal thought long about the human condition: he compares mankind to a feeble plant, like a reed, then adds “but he is a thinking reed… All our dignity consists in thought” (§620/347). Well, he had lots of thoughts; he would be a blogger if he lived today, though some of his thoughts (pensées in French) are short like a tweet. They were considered so powerful and brilliant that they were published just as he jotted them down in his moments of inspiration and they are still in print today – 350 years later.

Here is an example of Pascal’s penetrating understanding of our human dilemma – which you will agree, as you read, sounds like it was written in our time.

“When I see the blind and wretched state of man, when I survey the whole universe in its dumbness and man left to himself with no light, as if lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who put him there, what he has come to do, what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost and with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair. I see other people around me, made like myself. I ask them if they are any better informed than I, and they say they are not. Then these lost and wretched creatures look around and find some attractive objects to which they become addicted and attached. For my part, I have never been able to form such attachments, and considering how very likely it is that there exists something besides what I can see, I have tried to find out whether God has left any traces of himself.” (§198/693)

If his emphasis on man’s “wretchedness” sounds too negative, know that Pascal also emphasises man’s wonderfulness: “What sort of freak then is man! … glory and refuse of the universe”! (§131/434)

Clive Every-Clayton

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God loves you very much

We may not be keen on loving God, but we should know that he loves us very much. His love is of immense, eternal proportions! There was love in the heart of God before he began creation: Jesus prays to his Father, “You loved me before the foundation of the world” (John 17.24). That is mind-blowing!

Before creation began, God had foreseen his plan of action, to create persons able to love each other and to love him, and one day he would reveal to them the greatness of his love for them. His love is all the more powerful in that he allowed us humans to live in potential rebellion against him, and indeed, we humans are not, in general, passionate about loving God. But despite our indifference, going our own way instead of His, he has persisted in drawing people out of their inner reticence into his arms of love.

So he demonstrated his immense love in a mind-boggling manifestation. He came into the world like an ‘undercover boss’ by sending his Son, Jesus. Jesus came to seek and to save the lost. “All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned every one to his own way,” says the Bible, but Jesus came as the Good Shepherd, seeking the sheep that was lost.

Let’s face it, we’ve all wandered far from God in thoughtless disinterest in doing his will, and so by our disobedience we have incurred his displeasure. He would be quite entitled to cast us away, to pay no attention to us, even to visit righteous judgment upon us. But when he came in Jesus, he did not come to demand we pay for our sins – no! the marvel is that he came to pay for our sins! That’s what Jesus’ death on the cross was all about. The Good Shepherd gave his life for us, the wayward sheep!

“God demonstrates his own love for us in this” – says the Bible – “in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us”. We didn’t have to clean up our act before God loved us – we were, in his verdict, “sinners”. We were guilty, we deserved righteous judgment; but Jesus – who never ever sinned – interposed and bore our sin in his body on the cross, suffering the horror of punishment that should have fallen on the guilty. “He died, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3.18). “This is how God showed his love to us”, says the Bible (1 John 4.9-10) “He sent his only Son into the world… not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be an atoning sacrifice for our sins”. 

It’s maybe hard to grasp, but an atonement was needed because of the demands of justice. Since God is absolutely just, he cannot grant pardon to all the guilty people in the world – that would be a supreme injustice. Yet he desires to forgive and receive us into a warm loving relationship. How could he do it while yet upholding the demands of his justice? By himself providing the atoning sacrifice, whereby his Son, truly man but also truly divine, accepted out of love to come and bear – on the Cross – the full penalty of our many sins. His death for us is the most loving event ever, in the entire history of the world. 

And he did it for you, because he loves you that much.

Clive Every-Clayton

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God loves

Love puts a spring in your step, a smile on your face and joy in your heart. What happiness to love and to be loved! That’s because we were made for love. But therefore how sad is the experience of those who are not loved, or whose love relationship has ended in acrimony… There is deep pain in feeling unloved – because we were made for love, not for disputes and hatred.

The good news is that God loves you. This is no mere religious fantasy, not just a heart-warming ideal that we are pleased to entertain: if that is all it is, we would be indulging in a religious illusion. Humans cannot invent a God of love. The real issue is not what we desire, but what God is objectively like. The Judeo-Christian God alone, in all the religions of the world, presents himself to us as a God who loves us dearly. Jesus, God incarnate, told us not only that God is there and that he is our Creator: he brought the astonishing revelation that God loves us. 

But what is love? Impossible fully to define, we may consider it as delight in the other, as emotional attachment, deep friendship, harmony and mutual understanding, caring and helping… On the human level, love is seen in seeking the good of the other, and acting on that love, even at extreme personal cost. All this – and more – applies to God’s love for his creatures: he seeks our highest good; he wants to be our friend and he desires that we come to know his love and enter into a warm loving relationship with him.

The one who loves longs for the other to respond in love; and so it is with God. That’s why Jesus insisted that the first commandment – which is God’s foremost desire for us his beloved creatures – is to “love the Lord you God with all you heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12.30). Such total love cannot just be demanded, however; it must be won. And God has taken steps to demonstrate his immense love for you in such a way as to win your total love in return. In other words, God loves you with a love so strong, faithful, immense and kind, that he considers your response to loving him with all you have as the only fitting response.

One of Jesus’ apostles wrote, “We love him, because he first loved us” (1 John 4.19). God takes the initiative in love. He “proved his love toward us” says the apostle Paul (Romans 5.8). Why does no other religion teach that God is love? Because they cannot show any proof of God having shown great love. In Christianity this is unique: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3.16). “This is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4.10). Christians therefore see in Jesus’ self-giving sacrifice the supreme demonstration of God’s love for them. 

This needs to be developed in order to be understood; the one who has not grasped this yet has a glorious enlightenment in store!

Clive Every-Clayton

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Divine prerogatives

For some people the idea of God as Creator represents a specific problem: they do not like the idea because they realise that God would logically have the right to command their obedience. There are three things to say to such people, and the first is, that we are not dealing with simple philosophical ideas here. The witness of Jesus and all the biblical prophets, the findings of science as it has revealed how fine-tuned our universe is, and the deep intuition in the human heart combine to tell us there is a Creator behind this amazing world we inhabit. Chance does not do things so extraordinarily well! I have sought to show this in previous posts.

The second thing follows from the first: whether we like it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not, we have been created by an almighty, wise and loving God. Once we are persuaded that Jesus came from God, his teaching is clear: God is our Creator. The subtle reason many people strive against Christianity is because there is that in our nature which does not like being obliged to obey a higher power. To those who share this viewpoint I would say, I understand, for I have been there. It was realising how greatly God loves me that enabled me to bow the knee to his lordship over my life, and that would be my advice – study how much God loves you. I plan to deal with this in an upcoming post.

Thirdly, we should get it into our heads that we, God’s creatures, are obligatorily in some kind of relationship with God: it is either a warm friendly relationship or a fraught distant relationship. He is there, and he knows us through and through, even though we deny him and don’t want him to be there! Wisdom dictates that we make peace with God, that our relationship is positive. That is what God wants, and that is what is best for us.

We do need to clarify, however, what God’s prerogatives are as the Creator of all things. If he is over us, we are necessarily under him – under his all-seeing eye and subject to his ultimate judgment on the way we conduct ourselves. For though God did create us with the freedom to reject him and disobey his will, he did not put us in a context where we could rebel with impunity. We are responsible beings, and our Creator does hold us answerable for our conduct.

Furthermore, it is God’s prerogative to tell us what is true. If we reject God, we reject the source of the very truth we need to answer our existential questions. There is no other source of absolute truth to which we can turn for such answers! We need both humility and wisdom to listen carefully to what God has said to us, through Jesus and in his word, the Bible. 

In particular, God’s word not only indicates general truth about our relationship to God, but also, as our Creator, he gives us moral truth – clear indications of his will for us. He is wise, loving and holy: his commands are wise, indicating what is really best for us. As he is loving, he seeks our true happiness, and his commandments are good and right. Indeed, our Creator defines what is good – as no-one else in the universe can. Believe it – he really does want the very best for you!

Clive Every-Clayton

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Cancer and death: why?

Last week, August 4th, 2023, I went for a check-up in the hospital where, seven months ago my much loved wife died. For the second time in my life, a surgeon who examined me told me I had cancer. I had come through the first with radiotherapy, chemotherapy and an operation, some 14 years ago. Now the verdict has fallen again.

What does a Christian do in times like these? Having thanked God through my tears for giving me such a wonderful wife and the mother of our children, though the grief was uniquely overpowering at times, as I now face another ordeal, I remain thankful that whatever this cancer may involve for me, the God who loves me will be beside me day by day as my ever-present helper.

What a blessing to be a believer in Jesus in times like these, when suffering pain, experiencing loss and facing the shadow of death! What wondrous peace to know, on the basis of Jesus’ words which I fully believe to be trustworthy, that there is an eternal life of glory awaiting me where I shall see both my beloved Saviour and my dear wife!

I do not know what treatment, what pain, what distresses may lie before me, but I know that the God who loves me has promised never to leave me nor forsake me. I wish for all my readers the same confidence whatever you may be going through. God’s truth, his love and his wisdom may be fully trusted. This is the way to know peace in the midst of whatever trial you may have to undergo.

In God’s heaven, he promises, “there will be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain” (Revelation 21.4). The most important of our existential questions is – how can we be prepared for death and the life beyond? For many years I have known the answer and sought to share it with others: as I face the probable reality, the answer holds true. 

Why, then, does God allow such suffering? The full answer is long, but here are some elements. God uses our trials as a way of getting through to us, reminding us of our weakness and our need of him, encouraging us to turn to him with a better attitude, to find comfort and help in him. Sadly, many don’t have the right attitude. Each of us should reflect on how we should react. To rebel is unhelpful; to trust is better.

As for me, God is granting me an opportunity to show him that I will faithfully love him and follow Jesus whatever suffering may be involved. A trial tests the reality of one’s faith. It is a way through which I can prove my commitment to him whatever the cost. The biblical principle can be found in Deuteronomy 8.2: “You shall remember the whole way the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you, to know what is in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not”. 

As I look back, I see how God has helped me; as I look forward, I trust he will help me still.

Clive Every-Clayton

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