who told you?

“Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”

Genesis 3:11

[7 minutes]

There is a crisis of information today. No, not the lack of it, because, as we all well know, there are no limits to where we can find whatever we’re looking for whenever we need it. Alexa, how long does it take to boil an egg in the microwave? Hey Siri, what was the primary reason for the downfall of the Roman Empire?

Our appetite for knowledge is appeased through Google, ChatGPT, X, Apple News, Wikipedia, YouTube, Waze, Food Network, Zillow, and a thousand other sources as close to us as our devices. We are glutted with real-time data from every direction.

Suffering from the tyranny of FOMO, we bathe ourselves in digital light, robotically taking in whatever it feeds us — good or bad — for hours on end. Like junkies, our habit is fixed by mainlining content that is killing our souls. The Matrix is changing us from being made in God’s image to beings who slither around on our bellies like snakes.

In the beginning, God was the only source of information. So when the Lord asked Adam, “Who told you?” the latter had to sheepishly admit to going off-script and getting hoodwinked by misinformation.

It all falls apart in Genesis 3. The First Man on planet earth had barely gotten his feet under him before he believed the lie and, tragically, became the lie itself.

who told you God can’t be trusted?

The sin underneath all our sins is to trust the lie of the serpent that we cannot trust the love and grace of Christ.
—Martin Luther

Thanks to the Original Couple, we have embedded inside us the default mechanism to accuse God of being spartanly unfair or cruel. It’s a constant battle for many to quell the urge to instinctively blame God for their misfortunes.

I find it telling that the first book in our Bibles — chronologically, that is — is not Genesis, but Job. Of course Adam and Eve walked the earth long before he did, but Job preceded the writer of Genesis by a long shot. If we can trust the dating of Job, and I believe we can, then it asks the oldest question of all: If God is so good then why do I hurt so badly?

Now you can see why Moses opened the canon with Genesis and the rest of the Pentateuch. Each of those first five books provides a master class for people who have a background of suffering and struggling to “not go there” when they are tempted to believe the lie that God cannot be trusted:

This is God. This is who he is. This is how he is to be worshiped. This is how he is to be trusted. Yes, bad things happen. We know this all too well! But God is not the villain in our story; he is fighting for us and faithfully planning our blessed future.”

Job fought that same urge and won. Moses had to do battle against the devil’s lie in Midian no doubt, but he overcame and led the people of Israel to leave Egypt and overcome in the wilderness. Those who didn’t make it were those who never got the taste of Egypt’s fruit out of their mouths.

One of my daily follows on X (Twitter) posted this recently and I thought it captured quite well the common struggle of mankind:

What good is the apple when one bite makes your life a living hell?

who told you God made you inferior?

In the first page of Holy writ we are told that humans are made in God’s image, in His likeness. By page two, Adam and Eve are no longer satisfied with that and looking for an upgrade.

The present culture has bullied impressionable minds to think they are not enough. Social media influencers, cultural icons, and even medical professionals have convinced an entire generation they are born wrong, look wrong, or believe wrong.

None of it is new. The satan has been using the same tactics to mar the imago dei in us since the beginning. He laughs at our gullibility. He loves to see us stripped of glory and dressed in fig leaves.

Babies are blobs of cells.

Children are an inconvenience.

Old people are a nuisance.

All men are misogynists.

Women are sex objects.

Gender is fluid.

Fathers aren’t necessary.

Families are a capitalistic construct.

We love our labels. Many of our labels serve no other purpose but to depersonalize others and erase the imago dei from their beingness. And the devil laughs.

who told you God was finished with you?

Did you think your shame defined you?

Did you think it was over for you?

Did you think you were beyond saving?

Adam and Eve were painfully aware they were now defective. The shine wore off. The original pair were like those brand new cars you drive off the lot that depreciate immediately.

This is why humans “cover” themselves with things that hide their weaknesses.

We become defensive.

We have learned how to hide our wounds to avoid the proper remedy.

We become deceptive.

We have learned to lie and, by so doing, have become the lie itself.

We become destructive.

We will burn down the whole house before admitting we are wrong and coming home.

From that point, once the die is cast, Adam and Eve no longer see the supernatural. They can’t see God, they can only hear him coming. Their souls weren’t the only thing that went dark; their eyes went dark too.

But, as it is written,
“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
nor the heart of man imagined,
what God has prepared for those who love him”—
these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.
1 Corinthians 2:9-10

But God, in grace, made sure they knew his approach. We are told the very first words after the Fall were spoken by God:

“Where are you?”

He came seeking us. There’s grace in those words! Where are you? They imply they were somewhere they should not be but they still mattered enough for God to come looking for them. It’s the same for every human since.

You’ve messed up but you’re not irredeemable.

Your situation is not the end of the story.

We can’t hide too long without having to come out and face the music. It will catch up with us. We will eventually be outed. Better to come forward than die in the dark.

In Christ, we are not pursued like wanted criminals, but like wanted children, or like wanted lovers, because wrath is replaced by desire.
— Rachel Gilson

Don’t allow the voices and narratives of culture shape who you are. It’s fake news. Some of it has just enough truth to make it sound authentic, but it’s still a lie.

Beloved, God is not done with you. Wherever you’re hiding, whatever you’re trying to cover yourself up with to impersonate the imago dei, just stop. You may not see him, but he sees you.

I’m willing to bet you’re hearing his approach in these words. Why are you here? Who told you these lies? Come out, come back, come home. He’s calling you back to truer things than you’ll ever hear out there.

Selah, beloved.

the book that understands me

[7.5 minute read]

For the word of God is alive and powerful. It is sharper than the sharpest two-edged sword, cutting between soul and spirit, between joint and marrow. It exposes our innermost thoughts and desires.
Hebrews 4:12

Two men. One, a former president, fashioned a Bible to his own liking; the other, a French professor, tried to do that but was ultimately pierced through by its unconquerable swordplay and aliveness.

Thomas Jefferson thought the supernatural and miraculous works of Jesus were greatly exaggerated, so he took a razor to them in his New Testament. Once he had trimmed away all but the most core and basic teachings of Jesus, he sat back and sighed, satisfied with his compact version he named The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.

The Jefferson Bible, is an 86-page dumbed-down testament of Enlightened Man. It disregards Jesus’s virgin birth, resurrection, and ascension, along with anything else that defied common sense and reason. Or so thought the 77-year old American statesman.

Across the sea, Émile Cailliet was born in Dampierre, France on December 17, 1894. He served in the French armed forces in World War I, and distinguished himself with many degrees from two universities. After coming to America, he served as a professor French literature at the University of Pennsylvania; Scripps College and Claremont Graduate School in California; and Wesleyan University in Connecticut. In 1960, he began to teach Christian philosophy at Princeton Theological Seminary, in which capacity he continued until his death in 1983.

The following is his remarkable story (in his own words) of coming to faith through the supernatural appeal of the Word of God:

I was born in a small village of France and received an education that was naturalistic to the core. This could possibly have had a great deal to do with the fact that I did not even see a Bible before I reached the age of twenty-three.
To say that this naturalistically inspired education proved of little help through front-line experiences as a lad of twenty in World War I would amount to quite an understatement. When your own buddy – at the time speaking to you of his mother – dies standing in front of you, a bullet in his chest, what use is the sophistry of naturalism? Was there a meaning to it all?
One night a bullet got me, too. An American field ambulance crew saved my life and later the use of a badly shattered arm was restored. After a nine-month stay at the hospital, I was discharged and resumed graduate work.
During my stay at the American hospital, I had married a Scotch-Irish girl whom I had met in Germany on Christmas Eve the year before the war had broken out. She was, and has always remained, a deeply evangelical person. I am ashamed to confess that she must have been hurt to the very core of her being as I made it clear that religion would be taboo in our home. Little did I realize at the time that a militant attitude often betrays an inner turmoil.
I had returned to my books, but they were no longer the same books. Neither was my motivation the same motivation. Reading in literature and philosophy, I found myself probing in depth for meaning. During long night watches in the foxholes, I had in a strange way been longing – I must say it, however queer it may sound – for a book that would understand me.
But I knew of no such book. Now I would in secret prepare one for my own private use. And so, as I went on reading for my courses I would file passages that would speak to my condition, then carefully copy them in a leatherbound pocket book I would always carry with me. The quotations, which I numbered in red ink for easier reference, would mead me as it were from fear and anguish, through a variety of intervening stages, to supreme utterances of release and jubilation.
The day came when I put the finishing touch to “the book that would understand me,” speak to my condition, and help me through life’s happenings. A beautiful, sunny day it was. I went out, sat under a tree, and opened my precious anthology. As I went on reading, however, a growing disappointment came over me. Instead of speaking to my condition, the various passages reminded me of their context, of the circumstances of my labor over their selection.
Then I knew that the whole undertaking would not work, simply because it was of my own making. It carried no strength of persuasion. In a dejected mood, I put the little book back in my pocket.
At that very moment, my wife – who, incidentally, knew nothing of the project on which I had been working – appeared at the gate of the garden, pushing the baby carriage.
It had been a hot afternoon. She had followed the main boulevard only to find it too crowded. So she had turned to a side street which she could not name because we had only recently arrived in town. The cobblestones had shaken the carriage so badly that she had pondered what to do. Whereupon, having spotted a patch of grass beyond a small archway, she had gone in with the baby for a period of rest.
It turned out that the patch of grass led to an outside stone staircase which she had climbed without quite realizing what she was doing. At the top, she had seen a long room, door wide open. So she entered.
At the further end, a white-haired gentleman worked at a desk. He had not become aware of her presence. Looking around, she noticed the carving of a cross. Thus she suddenly realized that this office was a part of a church building – of a Huguenot church edifice hidden away as they all are, even long after the danger of persecution has passed. The venerable-looking gentleman was the pastor.
She walked to his desk and heard herself say, “Have you a Bible in French?”
He smiled and handed over to her a copy, which she eagerly took from his hand; then she walked out with a mixed feeling of both joy and guilt.
As she now stood in front of me, she meant to apologize, but I was no longer listening to her.
“A Bible, you say? Where is it? Show me. I have never seen one before!”
She complied. I literally grabbed the book and rush to my study with it. I opened and “chanced” upon the Beatitudes! I read, and read, and read – now aloud with an indescribable warmth surging within. I could not find words to express my awe and wonder. And suddenly the realization dawned upon me: this was the book that would understand me!
I continued to read deeply into the night, mostly from the Gospels. And lo and behold, as I looked through them, the One of whom they spoke, the One who spoke and acted in them became alive to me.
The providential circumstances amid which the book had found me now made it clear that while it seemed absurd to speak of a book understanding a man, this could be said of the Bible because its pages were animated by the presence of the living God and the power of his mighty acts. To this God I prayed that night, and the God who answered was the same God of whom it was spoken in the book.
(Eternity magazine, July 1974).

The Book of books is alive and powerful. It doesn’t just “understand us,” it enlightens and enlivens us to know God intimately and equips us to thrive in this hard, unyielding world. As H.B. Charles, Jr. put it so well, “It is the will of God to have the Spirit of God use the Word of God to make the children of God look like the Son of God.”

May his Word accomplish its perfect work in you and me today.

Selah, beloved.

losing one’s religion

If you googled Charles Templeton you would read about a gentleman who traveled with Billy Graham in his early years of ministry. People called them the ‘Gold Dust Twins,’ a term meaning they were inseparable and untiring in the work of evangelism.

While the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in 1946 dubbed Templeton among the “best used of God” and “most gifted,” he paid greater honor to his friend. Of Graham he wrote, “There is no feigning in him: he believes what he believes with an invincible innocence. He is the only mass evangelist I would trust.”

doubt and defection

It all started to unravel two years later. ‘Chuck’ Templeton enrolled in Princeton seminary, a progressively liberal institution, in 1948. His studies watered the seeds of doubt already growing in his heart re: the goodness of God and the trustworthiness of scripture.

For many years, Charles Templeton battled with his demons. His internal struggles caused him great physical distress. A physician advised him to settle his spiritual issues before they killed him.

In 1957, the once prominent evangelical evangelist, the budding preacher of hope, declared himself agnostic. In 1996 his memoir, FAREWELL TO GOD: MY REASONS FOR REJECTING THE CHRISTIAN FAITH, was published.

Most sadly, Charles (“Chuck”) Templeton died from complications to Alzheimer’s in 2001.

a grim reality

For it is impossible, in the case of those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, to restore them again to repentance…
Hebrew 6:4-6, ESV

It is a frightening thought that we, given over to ourselves, could fall away like Charles Templeton. Our New Testament book of Hebrews has much to say on these matters.

While it is possible to be a truly good person, give witness to one’s personal confession of belief, have exemplary conduct and blameless character…you can still be utterly lost.

There are doctrines of demons and Potiphar’s wives and poisonous grifters and bright city lights that beset us on every side. Whispers of doubt, menacing flirtations and suggestive come-hithers abound. If not for God’s grace, we could easily become shipwrecked, stuck deep in the muck and mire of sin.

As Gandalf warned Frodo Baggins:

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

The grim reality is the Christian world is littered with spiritual shipwrecks; people who once professed Christ, now walking in darkness. To even these the gospel call goes out: “Turn! Turn! There’s mercy with Christ!”

There’s no indication Chuck Templeton ever repented and turned back to Christ. By all indication he died in his sin. Did he lose his salvation? No, he merely proved by dying in sin that, though a great and admirable man and exemplary evangelist once upon a time, these never bore the fruit of true salvation.

jesus I am resting, resting

Lee Strobel interviewed Chuck Templeton a couple of years before he died. In the interview Strobel asked him if he would like to believe. Templeton replied, “Of course! If I could, I would. I’m eighty-three years old. I’ve got Alzheimer’s. I’m dying, for goodness sake.”

There’s an eternal gulf between, “If I could…” and “I can’t, but you can, Jesus. I trust you.”

The writer of Hebrews speaks of resting. Jesus said, “Come to me and I will give you rest.” That’s it. That’s the tweet, as they say. Come to Jesus. Keep coming to Jesus. Don’t hide. Don’t run away. Don’t ignore him. Come to him. Find rest for your burdened soul.

This, then, is the crux of the sermon of Hebrews. Take great care and be very sure that you end up on the side of Jesus. Do not neglect so great salvation (Hebrews 2:3). Live each day, moment by moment in his love (Jude 21). There is a rest that comes from that (Hebrews 4:3).

I am resting because Jesus invited me to and I’m taking him at his word. Obviously I’m not trusting in my ability to be faithful to him but rather in his faithfulness to hold me and keep me from falling (Jude 24-25). His love draws me in so I am less inclined to wander away. The key is to keep looking to Jesus.

Keep taking your messes to Jesus your High Priest (Hebrews 4:15-16). He has more than enough grace to forgive and restore you. He understands. He sympathizes with your weakness. He knows you’re “prone to wander.” He can handle your doubts. Keep taking it to Jesus. He is a Savior who “deals gently” with us (Hebrews 5:2).

I am on Christ’s side. Better, he is on my side (Romans 8:31-34). I don’t live in fear that I will blow it and God will strike me down. I am sobered by stories like that of Templeton. I do not want to be that man. With God’s help and his constant grace, I rest in the truth that I am his and he is mine.

Jesus, I am resting, resting
in the joy of what thou art;
I am finding out the greatness
of thy loving heart.
Thou hast bid me gaze upon thee,
as thy beauty fills my soul,
for by thy transforming power,
thou hast made me whole.

Jesus, I am resting, resting,
in the joy of what thou art;
I am finding out the greatness
of thy loving heart.

O how great thy lovingkindness,
vaster, broader than the sea!
O how marvelous thy goodness
lavished all on me!
Yes, I rest in thee, Beloved,
know what wealth of grace is thine,
know thy certainty of promise
and have made it mine. [Refrain]

Simply trusting thee, Lord Jesus,
I behold thee as thou art,
and thy love, so pure, so changeless,
satisfies my heart;
satisfies its deepest longings,
meets, supplies its ev’ry need,
compasseth me round with blessings:
thine is love indeed.

Ever lift thy face upon me
as I work and wait for thee;
resting ‘neath thy smile, Lord Jesus,
earth’s dark shadows flee.
Brightness of my Father’s glory,
sunshine of my Father’s face,
keep me ever trusting, resting,
fill me with thy grace.

Jesus I Am Resting, Resting, Jean Sophia Pigott (whose brother, a missionary to China, lost his life with 76 other missionaries during the Boxer Rebellion of 1901)

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