Of 2013 Celebrity Deaths

We have all heard about the death of Nelson Mandela; the mass media made sure of that.  However, one death that has gone underreported is that of Paul Crouch, who died on 30 November at the age of 79.  When I got the news of Paul Crouch’s death the report did not sit well with me or did not seem quite right.  I remember some of the early days of TBN--back when everyone was convinced the Rapture was nearly at hand and Paul Crouch really seemed to believe that he was a part of “the generation that will cheat the undertaker,” to use his words.  Indeed, it seems like he was supposed to keep right on living, but he hasn’t.

Several months prior to this I had inquired about the condition of Richard Eby of Spring Valley Lake.  I first saw the man on a CBN broadcast in the 1990s where he was being interviewed on TV in front of an outdoor location that immediately looked familiar and like the Spring Valley Lake area (which it turned out to be).  As I recall, and to hear Richard Eby tell it, he had an accident, he was killed, the Lord spoke to him, his name was temporarily “expunged” from the Book of Life, he went to hell, he was tormented by spider-like demons, and at the end of the matter he was informed that he would still be alive on this earth at the Parousia.  Now, my inquiry seemed to indicate that the man was still alive at the age of 101 or so.  However, I checked again and it now turns out that he died ten years ago without my hearing about it.  According to one website, as Mr. Eby lay on his deathbed someone asked him about his claim that Eby would be alive at the end of the age; this claim was subsequently retracted as a matter of reading too much into someone else’s words.

Add it all up and there apparently is no special reason to believe that only twenty more years of the trials, travails, pitfalls and miseries of life remain; the average lifespan of human beings cannot be used as an approximate gauge of how much time this current world has left (unless you believe the “prophecy” about Hal Lindsey’s having gray hair at the Parousia).  By the same token, the end of the world could be either three hundred years away, three years away, or something else entirely.  We still do not know the day or hour.

Beyond the crude facts of homosexuality

This more or less dovetails a post that DB recently pasted; I’ve only now managed to organize my thoughts enough to post them, plus I have a new perspective on them.

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I don’t often divulge details of my personal life, but I’ll be painfully candid in this case for illustrative purposes.  For a host of reasons that I cannot get into, I do not like most people.  (Notice that I did not say that I dislike most people, but rather that I do not like most people, at least not as much as most people like other people.)  Now, there is a girl at work whom I do like, perhaps both platonically and otherwise; this person is also physically well-endowed, flaunts it, flirts...and already has a BF.  So, faced with the choice of either leading a tortured existence every day at work or making the problem go away, what’s a guy to do?  Whether figuratively or literally, the easiest thing to do is to just hurry up, get a hotel room and be done with it; or the easiest thing is to attempt to just push the other guy completely out of the picture in a way that brings about unnecessary strife or rifts between the boyfriend and this girl who still likes him anyhow.  However, what I know of Christ’s teachings on sexuality (cf. John 14.25-26, John 16.12-15, 2 Peter 3.15-16, 1 Corinthians 7.8-9, Mark 7.20-23) and what I know of the Golden Rule both have an impact on my decision-making processes: thus I choose the tortured existence.

Where there is fuel there is fire, which is why a day at work can be miserable in ways to which I already alluded.  But where there is not fuel there is also trouble.  In the absence of this person, or of a significant other in general, I am left to realize my solitary existence and what a solitary existence means.  I’m not a part of one of these happy couples that you see at the restaurant, theater, park, club, or whatever.  Instead, whenever I see these couples I am sadly made aware of that which I do not have but others do have.  (Sadness of this kind is only intensified in those cases where one realizes that his odds at finding someone with whom they have chemistry and a shot at becoming part of a lasting couple are one in a billion; because those who are not easy on the eyes or are unlikable are by definition unattrative.  With that said, there is also a word that denotes what is experienced when he or she deals with such a thing, and that word is “grief.”)

As if it were not enough to have sadness and grief piled upon pain of other sorts, let’s also throw loneliness into the mix.  If someone is used to a solitary existence then they can, in God’s grace, adapt or otherwise erstwhile have the fortitude to flourish to some degree in their solitary existence.  However, if one is forced to taste of what life is like for most people on this earth, but later has that respite from solitude taken away, one must now deal with a new problem and a new sorrow: loneliness.

So there it is: a continual, daily, or weekly grind of loneliness piled upon grief piled upon sadness piled upon the experience of being teased.  Sounds great, right?  But this is exactly the sort of thing that Christians who hold fast to biblical teachings expect of gays and lesbians who either profess or do not profess to be disciples of Christ, is it not?  Of course, I do not criticize Christians on this matter, because they rightly acknowledge the fact that the Creator himself expects all people to be on the winning side of the war between the will of God vs. the desires of fallen, post-Edenic human nature (cf. 1 Peter 2.11); nonetheless, I think that people would do well to consider some of the pastoral and existential implications of contemporary culture wars as they pertain to homosexuality.  Why do I think that people should consider such things?  This is because if we as Christians counsel sinners with the words “Go and sin no more” or “Take up your cross daily and follow,” then both parties should know what they are getting themselves into in the entire process.

Unregenerate man, in large part, hasn’t the will or the interest to follow the exhortation “Take up your cross daily and follow.”  In fact, unless the meaning of the phrase and the means by which the phrase can be obeyed are explained, the person who attempts to counsel others with these words runs the serious risk of appearing to have no grip on reality or on what kinds of issues people actually deal with in life.  So I claim that such a would-be counselor should carefully consider and analyze his actions in advance, because Christianity ought not be more offensive than it already is, as one can glean from Titus 2.9-10, 1 Timothy 6.1-2, and 1 Peter 2.12.

Likewise, the phrase “Go and sin no more” does not strike me, for one, as a comforting set of words or the sort of things that good pep talks are made of: simple words and advice probably won’t be very useful to those people who are called upon to leave their same-sex significant others along with their incorrect sexual desires.  Keep in mind that in daily struggles against the flesh sometimes even the best of us apparently just give up and decide to stop fighting, which not too long ago seemed to be the case with Amy Grant and Gary Chapman (http://assets.baptiststandard.com/archived/1999/12_8/pages/grant.html) vis-à-vis the Difficult Teachings of Matthew 5, 19 and 1 Corinthians 7.  So I claim that any would-be biblical counselor should carefully consider and analyze his actions in advance and act accordingly, because sheer head knowledge of moral rights and wrongs is no guarantee that any of us will do the right thing and continue to do the right thing.

So any believer who is ready to stand up and begin to push back against the contemporary social forces that are encouraging everyone and every institution to sanction homosexuality should consider the pastoral and existential implications of their own deeds in advance; they should consider them and act accordingly for moral reasons and reasons of practicality.  Meanwhile, of course, I state the above not merely as a matter of brute facts and logic but also as a matter of someone who to some degree can begin to relate to what others might be going through.  With that said, I would urge any would-be counselor on this issue to choose his words wisely according to the time, place, person and circumstance.  For example, I think that Christ proves himself worldly-wise with regard to his words about eunuchs and the Difficult Teaching in Matthew 19 and I also find concepts and biblical teaching about theodical character-building to be somewhat comforting: these are the sorts of things that I would like to hear, somewhat, if someone were exhorting me not to choose the easy/evil solution to my own problems.  Of course, other people may respond differently to such words on an emotional or rational level, so other appeals of ethos, logos, and pathos may be helpful with other people.

But just as one’s own heterosexual affects and emotions are not activated and deactivated as easily as the flick of switch, so it is with gays and lesbians who need to leave behind whatever sin they need to leave behind but, yes, may still have to lead their lives in the meantime amid the same temptations and same strong urges, desires and drives of the flesh which they had before, because struggles in life do not necessarily go away when someone repents.  Let everyone remember this.

For some, the Twilight Zone is real.

For anyone with time on their hands and nothing to think about I present the following problem for you to consider: What does it mean when uncanny, too-bizarre-to-be-fictional strings of events continue to occur in a person’s life?  What if one series of events provides for a recurrent cheating of death and physical injury, while another series slaps you in the face time and again thus reducing you to a mere shell of a person, while still another series manages to put you in the most curious ephemeral circumstances at the right time?

What if there were no discernible patterns of human behavior involved which would allow one to theorize “Oh, this person did wrong, and that’s why these things happen” or, to the contrary, “Oh, this person is being rewarded, and that’s why these things happen”?  And to what degree should people plan their future activities with the expectation that such events will only continue to occur as they have been occurring?  For example, if the evil events that Job experienced in the first few chapters of the Book of Job continued for a longer period of time--say ten years--before ending, then in year five should Job have given up on the idea of having a family and riches ever again?

When Secular and Christian Philosophy Cross Paths (Existentialism)

Those who endure depression or who otherwise lead either a jaded or inaffective existence can probably agree that just about everything in this world is meaningless. If you are clinically depressed, most times you probably just don’t care about things: they simply don’t matter. And if you are the type who is bored by everything, impressed by nothing, unentertained by anything such that you experience neither joy nor satisfaction, then the real, subjective and visceral truth of the matter is that nothing matters: in relative terms, nothing has any signficance perhaps beyond the cold or mechanical requirements of moral duty.

In fact, signficance itself apparently is a subjective or relative property. While one could always view things such as holiness or obedience to God as having intrinsic worth or at least as always having worth inasmuch as the Creator and Sustainer of all things places value in such things, it is always possible for such things not to matter to some particular person, such as a reprobate and atheist. This is because the words “meaning” and “significant” in some instances refer to objects which are more or less psychological or affective in nature.

Yet this post is not meant to focus on psychology or to be a statement on the glib, foolish beliefs and judgments that people tend to have concerning those “less fortunate” than they are. The point is that the concerns expressed by the wise Teacher in the book of Ecclesiastes are existential concerns. The Teacher has examined and analyzed the life and existence that human beings have before they die, and he accordingly makes a series of comments and recommendations about the human condition or the kind of mortal existence that we all have. So in this particular instance the writings of the Teacher and of modern-day existentialists are comparable.

Moreover, the Teacher also repeatedly uses the word “vanity” or “meaningless” to describe everything. (And if a Christian will be honest with the text, then he will avoid the temptation to eisegete the text and say, “Oh, that’s just Solomon speaking as a fool or unbeliever” or “Oh, that’s just how the world is if you are without God.” People who say such things either are liars or are simply missing the boat, a lack of experience with particular parts of the dark side of life perhaps being that which won’t allow their eyes to see what is clearly before them in the Ecclesiastes text.) So if one were to stretch the use of the term, one could say that the Teacher indeeds holds to a particular form of nihlism.

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Meanwhile, the Teacher is nobody’s fool. His concerns in the book of Ecclesiastes are those of the heart and not so much of the mind. Therefore, he does not attempt to allay anyone’s fears or concerns with circumlocutionary feel-good, pop theology. Likewise, he does not attempt to allay anyone’s fears or concerns with merely the mechanical hard facts of the matter (i.e., that everything works out for good in the end) and thus target the mind while leaving the heart completely untouched.

No, if anyone tells the Teacher that he or she understands why this or that particular event in life occurs, the Teacher may well proceed to point out the error and naïveté of this claim, as suggested by Proverbs 20.24 and possibly Ecclesiastes 8.16-17. And though the Teacher ends his treatise with the categorical exhortation that one fear God and keep His commandments as the whole (duty) of man, throughout the book in question he never stops calling everything “vanity” or “meaningless.” It should therefore come as no surprise that the Teacher also repeatedly calls for one to eat, drink and be merry. For one knows that such things do well to lift people’s spirits, if only for a time.

Again, the Teacher is nobody’s fool. If someone’s disgust, weariness, sorrow, or grief from the human condition is first and foremost existential and psychological, what good is it to tell such a person, “Hey, this is happening because God loves you” or “This is happening because God has a plan”? In other words, is it always appropriate to say to someone “Hey, this is happening because God loves you”? Is it always sufficient to say, “This is happening because God has a plan”? Is this the right thing to say immediately after a loved one has just been shot dead in cold blood? Is this the right thing to say to someone who cannot get over the death of a son, daughter or wife and now has no further desire to live?

No, it is dubious that such things are either appropriate or useful in all circumstances. On the other hand, the effects of good food, drink, and even sleep are such that they just do tend to make things better, if only temporarily. But temporary things can make for more permanent things, and one should never underestimate the importance of morale in any situation. Morale is life. Morale is the antithesis of apathy. Morale is what produces will, and will is what produces action. Action is how we live our lives and do the things we need to do, whether it is work, play, or worship.

So what is the meaning of life, according to the Scriptures? None of us knows the answer entirely, and none of us knows why God has orchestrated the universe exactly as He has done so. (These are things which Romans 8.28 does not answer.) However, we do know that one must fear God and keep His commandments. And while one keeps God’s commandments, with all the duties entailed by these commandments, the best way to cope with life on this miserable planet is to do what is pleasing; eat, drink, marry, enjoy the benefits of your labor, and have fun, for this is a gift of God (Ecc. 3.12-13; 5.18-20; 9.7-10).