Hate Religion, Love Jesus

You may have seen this video in the last few days:

Perhaps you also saw The Amazing Atheist’s response (contains bad language):

I sent the guy the following message; perhaps others might find it interesting too.

Hi,

I think you’re right that Bethke isn’t very clear about the difference between Jesus and religion.
I think you’d probably already made your mind up that it was a load of rubbish before you watched it, but in case you’re actually an honest enquirer, I’d like to have a go at explaining a bit more clearly what I think Bethke was trying to get across.

You summed up Christianity as follows: “the only way to redeem yourself is… you gotta go to church, and there’s this book called the Bible, it’s full of a lot of neat stuff, you gotta believe all that, and then you can go to heaven”.

Bethke was trying to say that actually, going to heaven does not depend on how often you go to church, or how much time you spend reading the Bible. The key line is “religion says do; Jesus says done.”

God doesn’t want you to do anything. He wants to demonstrate His immense love by the things He does for you.

You rightly point out that Jesus isn’t just a pal to play Xbox with. He does want us to love Him more than our mother and father. If He was just a random guy who lived in the desert 2000 years ago, it would be an outrageous demand. C.S. Lewis would be pleased that you haven’t fallen into the common mistake of calling Jesus a good teacher, but nothing more. If Jesus wasn’t the Son of God, he was either evil or crazy (or both).

However, if you could, try to imagine for a moment that God does actually exist, and that He gave you everything you enjoy in this world. Perhaps you could imagine Him like a father who gives his children loads of great gifts. Let’s say a man gave his son an iPad for Christmas (not as valuable as the loving family God’s given you, but still a fairly decent present). If the kid loved the iPad more than the dad who gave it to him, to the point where the dad asks the kid to put the iPad down and spend some time with his old man and the kid’s response is to tell his dad to go f*** himself, I think you’d agree the dad would be justified in being a bit annoyed.

So, if that’s your response to God, do you think it’s unfair that He might eventually say enough is enough and cut you off? (Note: I think the traditional picture of hell is a bit distorted from what the Bible teaches; no one will be punished more than they deserve, but justice does dictate that there is a price to pay for our rebellion against our creator.)

The difference between religion and Jesus is that religion says we have to try to earn forgiveness from God, but Jesus says no, I want to show off the amount of love I have for you, I will take the cost of forgiving you. I just ask that you will accept it as a free gift.

Hope this helps.

Books 2011

I never used to be much of a reader (except on holiday), but about a year ago, God used John Piper to induce in me a hunger to learn more about Him, and as a result I’ve consumed probably more books this past year than the previous 5 years put together (plus a couple of secular books).

Books I’ve read this year (most were very good, but the ones that particularly stood out are highlighted in bold):

Living For God’s Glory – Joel Beeke
The Heart of Christianity – Marcus Borg (not recommended)
The Discipline of Grace – Jerry Bridges
The Pursuit of Holiness – Jerry Bridges
The Pilgirm’s Progress – John Bunyan
Uncovered: True Stories of Changed Lives – Jonathan Carswell
Things God Wants Us To Know – Roger Carswell
Reasonable Faith – William Lane Craig (very good, but hard work)
Judges – Dale Ralph Davis
The God Delusion – Richard Dawkins (weirdly this helped reassure me of God’s existence at a time when I was having doubts)
Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God – Jonathan Edwards
The Air I Breathe – Louie Giglio
The Grace Outpouring – Roy Godwin (interesting, I’d like to go and see it for myself)
Stop Dating The Church – Josh Harris
10 Second Sermons – Milton Jones (yes, the guy off of Mock The Week)
Counterfeit Gods – Tim Keller
Generous Justice – Tim Keller
King’s Cross – Tim Keller
The Prodigal God – Tim Keller
Freakonomics – Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
Servant Leadership For Slow Learners – David Lundy
Christ Our Mediator – C.J. Mahaney
The Cross Centred Life – C.J. Mahaney
Humility: True Greatness – C.J. Mahaney
The Hidden Life of Prayer – David McIntyre
The Mortification of Sin – John Owen
Battling Unbelief – John Piper
The Dangerous Duty of Delight – John Piper (if the thickness of Desiring God is too daunting, try this mini-version)
Desiring God – John Piper (see my review here)
Don’t Waste Your Life – John Piper
God Is The Gospel – John Piper (I started this one in 2010)
When I Don’t Desire God – John Piper
Real Success and How To Achieve It – David Short
The Holiness of God – R.C. Sproul
Discovering The Power of The Cross of Christ – C.H. Spurgeon
The Case For Christ – Lee Strobel
Republocrat – Carl Trueman
Walking Away From Faith – Ruth Tucker (helped me out of my summer of Cartesian doubt)
The Bourne Legacy – Eric Van Lustbader
The Bourne Deception – Eric Van Lustbader
The Dark Side of Christian Cousnselling – Dr E.S. Williams

Books I’m currently part way through:

The Cost of Discipleship – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The Gagging of God – Don Carson (very good, but hard work)
Bible Doctrine – Wayne Grudem

Books on my shelf, waiting to be read:

Journal Keeping: Writing For Spiritual Growth – Luann Budd
How Long, O Lord? – Don Carson
Joshua – Dale Ralph Davis
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Nature of True Virtue – Jonathan Edwards
Religious Affections – Jonathan Edwards
The Rage Against God – Peter Hitchens
Ministries of Mercy – Tim Keller
Smart Faith: Loving God With All Your Mind – J.P. Moreland
Think – John Piper

…

Have you read any particularly good books this year that I should add to my wishlist?

5 Songs of 2011

I’d been waiting for another album from the Red Hot Chili Peppers for 5 years. Did I Let You Know is my favourite song on I’m With You.

I probably lose man points for admitting this, but I really like Christina Perri’s album. Her song Arms reminds me a bit of Phil Wickham’s song Home. I’m so fickle in my relationship with God, but with Him is my home.

I don’t know anyone called Savannah, but for some reason I can’t get enough of this song by Relient K.

2011 has been the year when I really got into Reformed Rap/Holy Hip-Hop. Perhaps I’m having a quarter-life crisis, trying to appear “hip” by listening to rap music, but I think it’s more that I just appreciate the brilliance with which Trip Lee manages to cram so much Biblical truth into 5 minutes as he summarises Paul’s letter to the Philippians in To Live Is Christ.

And through Trip Lee I came across this song called Grace Amazing by Jimmy Needham.

Is It All In My Head?

Thanks to Derren Brown and Russell Crowe, I’ve recently been looking at Christianity differently than I ever have before.

At the time I watched Derren Brown’s Miracles For Sale (in which he trained someone to be a convincing faith healer), I only thought of it applying to the so-called Christians who manipulate people’s emotions to get money out of them in return for supposed miracles. Since my church background is not charismatic (i.e. you won’t see “healings” or people getting “slain in the spirit” or “speaking in tongues” at our services), I didn’t really see much connection between what he was talking about and my beliefs.

Then I watched the film A Beautiful Mind.

If you haven’t seen the film and don’t want any spoilers, you probably shouldn’t read beyond this paragraph, but please come back after you’ve seen it. Or maybe up to now you’ve had no interest in seeing it; in which case, perhaps the following will make you more interested.

A couple of things about the film led me to start really analysing whether the God of Christianity is just as imaginary as Parcher, Charles and Marcee.

For example, there’s the idea that Marcee doesn’t get any older, from which Nash worked out that she couldn’t be real. Obviously, unlike humans, God’s not supposed to age, so that specific line of reasoning doesn’t apply to Him, but this got me thinking about the attributes that God is supposed to have, that could work equally well, or perhaps better, for an imaginary friend.

Also, Nash found Parcher appealing because he gave his life a perceived purpose which it didn’t otherwise have. It seems that Nash’s brain created its own fictional purpose for existence to make up for the pointlessness of his real life. This got me analysing the way Christianity gives our lives an objective purpose that they wouldn’t otherwise have.

I don’t think any of the following is evidence that God doesn’t exist, but perhaps there really are plausible alternative explanations for a lot of Christian experiences.

So here are some of the questions that have been swirling around in my head recently:

God’s Guidance

One of the things I’ve learnt recently about Christian living is about getting guidance from God. Basically what I found from various sources was that, when making a decision, God doesn’t want you to just sit around and wait for Him to send a lightning bolt from heaven, you’re supposed to kind of knock on doors and see which ones He opens… Basically (once you’ve consulted the Bible) do what you want, and then find out whether God approves or not by your success or failure.

I’m starting to understand why unbelievers don’t want to spoil religion for those people who get “inner strength” from their belief in God. God gives them boldness to go out and do whatever they want – pursue their dreams! – armed with the knowledge that they’ve got an omnipotent friend to make things happen, instead of just their poor little selves trying to do it all on their own. At the same time, they can tell themselves it’s not their fault if things don’t go as they’d hoped; it was obviously not what God wanted for them. Is it possible that God could be totally imaginary and still perform the same function?

God In Control Of Everything

Then there’s the things that happen to us and other people around the world. God apparently works all things, both the good and the seemingly bad, for His purposes. We may not be able to see how, but everything will work out for the best; if not in this life, then in the next. We attribute the good stuff that happens to us as God’s goodness, and we attribute the bad stuff to God teaching us to depend on Him, or testing us or something. But what if we’re just kidding ourselves, and actually, things just happen… some good, and some bad?

Communicating With God

When we pray, are we just talking to ourselves? This is something that bugged me before I saw either of the films mentioned above.

Does God really answer prayer, or is that belief just a result of the confirmation biases of people who want it to be true?

An example of a belief based on a confirmation bias is Murphy’s Law, which states that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. Obviously it’s not really true that everything that could go wrong in our lives does actually go wrong; it’s all about our perception. We notice when things go wrong; we don’t notice when things work as normal. The things that go wrong stand out. They seem more significant than they really are, so much so that we almost start to believe that whatever can go wrong really does go wrong. With prayer, when we apparently get a clear, positive answer, it’s very noticeable. When we don’t get an immediate answer, or we get a negative answer, we can write it off as “not God’s will” and perhaps these negative occurrences become much less significant than the positive answers, encouraging our belief that God really does answer prayer.

Why Pray?

Since God doesn’t change His mind, the point of praying can’t be to try to convince Him to do things he wouldn’t have done otherwise. He already knows exactly how things are going to work out. In this way I consider myself to have something in common with Deists, or maybe it’s determinists… anyway, what I mean is: I believe God had all of history (including miracles and “answers to prayer”) planned out before creation started, so in a way you could say he doesn’t really intervene any more; everything’s going exactly according to plan, so why would He intervene? So I’m not sure in what way He could be said to answer prayer. The only prayers He appears to answer are the ones that match what He already had planned.

So what is the point of prayer? We’re told that God likes to hear us ask for things, but surely the point must be, not that we convince Him to give us stuff, but that we somehow learn from the process of prayer. We learn to depend on God for things, we learn patience when He doesn’t answer our prayers immediately, or we learn to submit to His will when He doesn’t answer our prayers in the way we hoped. But in reality, could all those things work in the basically the same way if God is not really there and we’re just talking to ourselves? Sometimes things go our way and sometimes they don’t. Believing that God is listening to their prayers could usefully teach people patience and help them move on in life when things don’t go as they hoped, even if God didn’t actually exist.

On Paper

A while ago one of the blogs I follow shared this post about how fantasies regarding men and women appearing in printed media compare with real relationships with people we actually know, and who know us. He talks specifically about how Christians relate to their favourite authors compared with how they get on with their local pastors, and notes the similarities with a man’s relationships with women in real life compared to pornography.

I’m pretty sure fantasy relationships don’t need to be based on paper forms, I reckon it works just as well – if not better – with TV, movies, song lyrics, and facebook… and images certainly don’t have to be pornographic; the people in them don’t even need to be physically attractive. In fact, I think the fictional personalities of TV and movie characters have the potential to cause even more problems than their looks… and I’m certain it’s not just men that have this sort of problem. How many women complain that “there’s no really nice guys out there”?* Could it be that unrealistic standards have been set by the men in Rom-coms? Is it surprising that real-life men don’t live up to those standards?

*Do women really complain that much about a lack of nice guys? Or have I just got that impression based on women I’ve seen on TV? :S

I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent there, but does a similar thing happen with God?

We’re told that God, like the paper men and women described above, is unchanging (EDIT: I haven’t explained it very well, it’ll make more sense if you go and read the article yourself). I wonder if we’re convinced that God is unchanging because our knowledge of Him is based on a book that hasn’t changed in the last 1900 years. Do we impose our own thoughts and ideas and desires on a text that is perhaps in a lot of ways more ambiguous than we think? I don’t have anything particular in mind here, but (even in a Sola Scriptura-minded church) I do wonder how much of my understanding of God’s character is actually directly from the Bible, and how much depends on interpretation. Derren Brown demonstrated how to use mood lighting, arm-waving, shouting and emotionally-charged music to manipulate people, but I think a church can influence people just as powerfully without putting on that sort of show; when I read the Bible, how much does my understanding of it depend on what was originally written, and how much does it depend on what I’ve been told it means? And in private too, how much does my understanding of the Bible depend on what’s going on in my head at the time as I read a particular passage?

When it comes to decision making based on our understanding of the Bible, on one level we might think we’re obeying God, but in reality, do our thoughts about what God wants actually always suit our mood, our needs, our wants (or what others have taught us we should want)?

I wonder if I’ve sometimes tricked myself into thinking I’m submitting to God, when really I’m just doing what I want to do (or what I’ve been brought up to think is the right thing to do). I suppose at least with Christian Hedonism, you don’t pretend you’re not doing things to make yourself happy, but still, is God just a kind of sophisticated psychological tool for motivating ourselves?

Like paper pastors, and unlike the humans we speak to literally face-to-face, God always has time for us, He’s available 24/7, anywhere we like, at our whim, and we always have His full attention. He’s willing to listen to all our moaning, He never has to rush off to another appointment, He’s never ill, and – as far as we know – He’s never in a bad mood when we’re speaking to Him; He understands exactly how we feel, and almost certainly agrees with our conclusions. He also keeps His distance when we don’t want to hear from Him. We can just shut the book and think about something else and stop listening to Him. Just like you can turn the TV off or skip a few pages in your paper pastor’s latest book when it makes you a little bit uncomfortable.

To be continued…

Since I have more of an open mind than ever before, I thought it would be a good time to read Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, so at some point I’ll get a review posted on here.

In the mean time, in case you’ve read this far thinking all this is evidence that God is not real:

Also, I reckon the film Horton Hears A Who! is worth a watch.

The Ice Inside Your Soul

I discovered this song back in January, thanks to Christina Grimmie:

And now it’s finally made it’s way to the UK.

I’m not sure what it is about her music, but I couldn’t wait for the UK release, so I imported her album Lovestrong. from the US where it came out a couple of weeks ago…

So I don’t need to buy it again, but I’d say it’s significantly better than anything currently in the iTunes Top 10 Singles (sorry Saturdays, but Notorious is rubbish). I notice that Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours is in the Top 10 Albums, which I assume is thanks to last week’s Glee, so perhaps Rachel’s performance of Jar of Hearts at the Prom on this week’s episode will help?

[[UPDATE: The (decent, but inferior) Glee Cast version of Jar of Hearts is currently at No. 38 on the iTunes chart, while the original is all the way down at No. 57. Please fix this British public. Thanks.]]

Here’s Christina’s 2nd single, which lyrics-wise reminds me of Phil Wickham’s song Home:

And rather than bore you with more and more posts about Christina Perri, I’ll squeeze a couple more of her best videos into this one:

How To Find Ultimate Joy

Last Sunday morning (17th April), I reviewed a book for my church’s Bible Study session. Here’s what I said about it:

I’m going to be reviewing Desiring God, by John Piper. This book, along with others that I’ve read recently, has made a big difference to my understanding of my relationship to God. It’s possible that all of you will think what I’ve learned is really obvious, but to me it’s new and exciting. I hope, even if it’s not new to you, it is still exciting. And in some ways I hope it’s not new, because I hope it’s biblical.

If I were to say I hope you’ll read this book and be inspired to take a more God-centred view of life, I reckon you’d probably all approve. If I said instead that I hope you’ll read it and be inspired to more eagerly seek your own pleasure, I expect there’d be a few raised eyebrows. Well, I’m actually going for both at the same time. Hopefully that will make more sense by the time I’ve finished.

John Piper is pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis. He’s written loads of books, but I first came across him in a YouTube video, addressing Barack Obama’s views on abortion. Then I started watching his Desiring God videos where he answers questions from viewers on a wide range of subjects, such as ‘Can I enjoy art produced by unbelievers and glorify God?’, ‘How should you boast only in Christ when job hunting?’, ‘Is it sin to dislike the doctrine of election…?’

Then, before Blair went back to America, he gave me Piper’s book God Is The Gospel. Just the introduction to that book blew me away. I’ve sometimes described its effect on me as a kind of re-conversion. Before, I saw the whole point of Christianity as being salvation from hell, but God Is The Gospel showed me that salvation is just the means to an end, the end being for us to spend eternity glorifying God and enjoying getting to know Him. Forgiveness of sins is of course an essential prerequisite for us to have a relationship with God, but it’s just the beginning, and that book gave me a new hunger to know God more and more… which led me onto Desiring God and a heap of other books. I wasn’t a big reader before, so if you’re thinking “these book reviews are all well and good for people who like reading, but that’s just not for me”, think again; thanks to God Is The Gospel, I’ve probably read more books so far in 2011 than the previous couple of years put together.

But I’m reviewing Desiring God. Piper says about this book that:

“This is a serious book about being happy in God. It’s about happiness because that is what our creator commands: “Delight yourself in the Lord” (Psalm 34:7). And it is a serious book because, as Jeremy Taylor said, “God threatens terrible things if we will not be happy.””

The subtitle of the book is ‘Meditations of a Christian Hedonist’. (Apologies if I pronounce it wrong at any point. It looks like it should be pronounced ‘heddonism’ to me, but apparently ‘heedonism’ is the correct pronunciation.)

I think I should probably explain what he means by Christian Hedonism, because the whole book is based on that foundation, so I can’t really say anything else about the book unless you understand that bit. I don’t want to say too much, because I’m trying to persuade you to read the book for yourselves, but if I don’t say enough, you probably won’t have a clue what I’m on about.

Firstly, do people know what hedonism is?
A dictionary definition of it is “devotion to pleasure as a way of life.”
Now you might say Christianity is devotion to God as a way of life, so how can you be a Christian and a Hedonist? Aren’t the two contradictory?

I’ve tried to avoid just reading long chunks from the book, but I will use a few quotes to explain this Christian Hedonism idea.

Firstly though, a little bit of audience participation for you:

“What is the chief end of man?”

Answer:

“Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”

Good. Now I would open up my follow-up question for anyone to answer, but I’m worried someone might throw me a real curveball that I don’t know how to deal with, so I think it’s safer to just tell you what I used to think, and then go on explain to what I think now.

My question is: If my chief end is to glorify God, how do I glorify God?

6 months ago – before I read God Is The Gospel or Desiring God – I would’ve said something like “by living as He intends”, or “by serving Him and keeping His commandments”… Of course, we are told in Romans 1 to “present [our] bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is [our] reasonable service.” And Jesus said in John 14 verse 15: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments”, but is our obedience and service really what glorifies God?

I will come back to this in a minute, but for now, notice that man’s chief end (singular) is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. It doesn’t say “man’s chief ends are…”; it says “man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.”

Does that mean “sometimes you glorify God and sometimes you enjoy Him? Sometimes He gets the glory, sometimes you get joy?” Piper explains that each part works best when the other is happening at the same time!

So in Piper’s words

“The chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying Him forever.”

So that’s kind of the basic principle (I hope you’re following so far), but I think it’s worth taking a little bit more from the introductory section called ‘How I became a Christian Hedonist’ to explain a bit further how it works.

Piper says:

“When I was in college, I had a vague pervasive notion that if I did something good because it would make me happy, I would ruin its goodness. I figured that the goodness of my moral action was lessened to the degree that I was motivated by a desire for my own pleasure… to be motivated by a desire for happiness or pleasure when I volunteered for Christian service or went to church – that seemed selfish, utilitarian, mercenary. This was a problem for me because I found in myself… a tremendously powerful impulse to seek pleasure, yet at every point of moral decision I said to myself that this impulse should have no influence.
One of the most frustrating areas was that of worship and praise. My vague notion that the higher the activity, the less there must be of self-interest in it caused me to think of worship almost solely in terms of duty. And that cuts the heart out of it…
Then I came to see that it is unbiblical and arrogant to try to worship God for any other reason than the pleasure to be had in Him. (Don’t miss those last two words: in Him. Not His gifts… Not ourselves, but Him)”

So how did Piper come to this realisation? Among others, he quotes C.S. Lewis from a sermon called The Weight of Glory:

“If you asked twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? … The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not think this is the Christian virtue of Love. The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

So basically, he’s saying that the problem is not that we seek pleasure; it’s that we seek our pleasure in the wrong places. The things we find pleasure in might not be inherently bad, but if there’s no reference to God as the source of the pleasure, then we’re not glorifying God as we should; we’re honouring the gifts rather than the giver.

But also, if we claim God is all that satisfies us, why would we want to seek pleasure anywhere else? I’m thinking mainly of myself here, if I watch something on TV, or a film, or sport, or listen to music, and it doesn’t in any way lead me to worship God, why am I doing it?

If I really believed God to be the ultimate source of all real joy, I wouldn’t just want to go to church on a Sunday, prayer meeting during the week, maybe spend a few minutes reading the Bible and praying each day, and then use the rest of my time for secular work and pleasure. I’d want to spend all my time enjoying Him, and like everything else I enjoy I wouldn’t be able to stop myself constantly praising Him. I mean, when we say things like “I love this song!” or “What a great goal!” or “Look at that view!” it’s an involuntary reaction to something glorious, so why should praising God feel like a duty?

We must worship God because we are commanded to, but to quote Edward John Carnell:

“Suppose a husband asks his wife if he must kiss her good night. Her answer is, “You must, but not that kind of a must.” What she means is this: “Unless a spontaneous affection for my person motivates you, your overtures are stripped of all moral value.””

This new, real heartfelt understanding of God as the ultimate source of joy, rather than just focusing on what He’s done for me in His work of salvation, is what I mean by having a more God-centred, rather than self-centred, view of life. But I’m also more eagerly seeking my own pleasure, in God.

So once Piper has explained what Christian Hedonism is, he goes on to apply it to a range of different areas of life. There’s Worship: The Feast of Christian Hedonism, Love: The Labour of Christian Hedonism, Scripture: Kindling for Christian Hedonism, Prayer: The Power of Christian Hedonism, then chapters on money, marriage, missions, and suffering.

I’ve already briefly mentioned the hedonistic principle of worship, how it should be a joy rather than just a duty. The other chapter that particularly stood out for me was the one on prayer. I think it’s key to understanding how we glorify God by enjoying Him forever.

Piper refers to John 14 verse 13:

“Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the father may be glorified in the Son.”

He then uses an illustration to show how we should glorify God:

Suppose you’re totally paralysed and can do nothing for yourself but talk. And suppose a strong and reliable friend promised to live with you and do whatever you needed done. If someone came to visit you, how would you show them how great your friend is? Would you try to get out of bed and start doing things for them? Surely the best way for your visitor to see your friend’s generosity and strength would instead be for him to see for himself what your friend does for you?

He quotes Spurgeon’s explanation of Psalm 50 verse 15, which says:

“call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.”

Spurgeon says:

“God and the praying man take shares… first here is your share: “Call upon me in the day of trouble.” Secondly, here is God’s share: “I will deliver thee.” Again, you take a share – for you shall be delivered. And then again it is the Lord’s turn – “Thou shalt glorify me.” Here is… a covenant that God enters into with you who pray to him, and whom he helps. He says, “You shall have the deliverance, but I must have the glory…” Here is a delightful partnership: we obtain that which we so greatly need, and all that God getteth is the glory which is due unto his name.”

So we need to be careful about trying to serve God. Of course, we are called to be God’s servants, but when we serve God, who gets the glory?

Mark 10:45 says: “the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve.”

And the image of Christ’s return in Luke 12:37 is actually quite shocking:

“Blessed are those servants whom the master finds awake when he comes. Truly, I say to you, he will dress himself for service and have them recline at table, and he will come and serve them.”

Clearly we need to be careful not to start thinking we’re above God, but He glorifies Himself by giving of His infinite riches, not by taking anything from us. So the way for us to glorify Him is not to try to do things for Him, as though he needs anything from us, but to enjoy what He gives us, and make sure to give Him all the credit.

So to sum up, God Is The Gospel gave me a new hunger to know God, and to use John MacArthur’s words off the back cover of Desiring God it’s “a soul-stirring celebration of the pleasures of knowing God… a must-read for every Christian, and a feast for the spiritually hungry.”

Perhaps you already have an intense hunger to know God more, in which case, this is a feast for you. But if you don’t feel you have such a hunger, I think Piper’s desire for God is infectious, so read this book and I’ll be very surprised if you don’t have more of a hunger by the time you finish it.

In case I haven’t conveyed my enthusiasm for this book as well as I hoped, to show how keen I am for you to read this, I’ve bought an extra copy of both Desiring God and God Is The Gospel just to lend out to people, and I’ll be very disappointed if no one asks to borrow them.

And for those of you reading this on my blog, you can download a free pdf of Desiring God for your Kindle or whatever from here, and God Is The Gospel here.

Economics For Dummies

It’s nearly a year ago now that the leaders of the three main parties in the UK held those TV debates, but you will probably remember the talk of cutting the budget deficit, which was at that time approximately £150 billion. David Cameron was arguing that the deficit needed to be cut, while Gordon Brown was convinced that it should wait until the economy was growing healthily again.

I get the impression many people don’t really understand what is meant by a budget deficit.

A budget deficit is like running into the overdraft of your bank account, and instead of paying off its overdraft, the government was going £150 billion further into debt each year.

Like going into your overdraft, a budget deficit should be avoided as much as possible. It’s understandable that it might happen during difficult times like we’re in at the moment, but you want to minimise how long you spend in your overdraft because your bank charges interest on the money you borrow.

Here’s a graph that shows the state of the government’s bank account from 2002-2009:

The red bars show, very simply, how much the government borrowed each year between 2002 and 2009. The green line shows what those bars adds up to. That’s not the total debt, because it doesn’t include any debt accumulated before 2002, and neither does it count the interest the government owes to its lenders. But it’s clear that the Labour government was into its overdraft even before the recession, when times were good.

The government can’t go on borrowing indefinitely. At the moment we still have a pretty good reputation for repaying debts, so lenders are happy to trust us with their money, and they’re charging relatively little interest, but if we don’t start repaying that money at some point, that won’t last.

Students are worried about the prospect of being in debt for most of their lives having taken on a student loan, and yet many people seem oblivious to the government’s debt, and the interest building up on it.

Just to give you an idea how much debt we’re in, how much interest we’re paying (despite the relatively low rate), and how much better we could be using our money, here’s a quote from Nick Clegg:

“This year we’ll be spending over £43bn just on the interest on our debts.

That’s £830m per week. Just under £119m a day. For that money, we could build a new primary school every hour. We could buy a new Chinook helicopter every day. We could take 11 million people out of paying income tax. We could triple the number of doctors in our hospitals.”

If the government is going to start paying back its debt so we can start buying useful things rather than spending so much on interest, it will first have to make sure its income is greater than the amount it spends each year. This is what they mean by reducing the budget deficit; they need to turn it into a surplus.

There are two ways to work towards this. The government needs to either cut its spending, or increase its income, or both.

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First, let’s talk about cuts.

Ed Balls would argue that no cuts need to be made. He would claim that it is necessary to maintain spending to encourage the economy to grow, and that income will eventually catch up with spending so the debt can be repaid.

I will try to explain simply the folly of that idea.

There are two types of jobs in the UK:

A private sector employee works for a business that pays the employee’s wages out of its profits.

A public sector employee works for the government, which pays the employee’s wages out of the taxes it collects from the private sector.

Basically, Labour’s idea is that by giving people public sector jobs (i.e. they work for the government), those people will have money to spend, and if people are spending, the economy will grow.

The problem with this is, for the government to make a profit from one of its public sector employees, it needs more than 100% of the salary it’s paid to come back in taxes.

Let’s have a look at how plausible that is:

Think about what a typical employee spends their wages on: mortgage/rent, fuel bills, food, etc…

Take food for example: some of the price of the food is VAT, so the government gets a bit back there… the shop that sold them the food pays some tax, so the government gets a bit back there too… and the shop will have more money to spend on other things than it might have otherwise, so the government might get some more tax that way too… but these amounts are just ever decreasing fractions of the original salary paid out by the government, and the actual cost of the food or house or fuel never gets back to the government. The government is not going to get back more than it put in.

Government spending accounts for about half of our GDP, i.e. the government wants to spend about as much as the entire private sector.

But remember that the private sector ultimately has to pay the government’s bills as well as its own, so for the government to be able to afford to spend that much, it’s taking a huge amount of tax off the people and businesses that are actually creating wealth.

Obviously no one likes paying a lot of tax, but for many of these private sector companies – and hence for the government which is relying on them – a high tax rate actually causes serious problems.

It means that companies can’t afford to employ so many people, so they have to lay them off (or at least can’t take on as many as they would otherwise). Labour’s solution is to create more jobs in the public sector for those redundant people to do instead (who cares about efficiency anyway?). In order to pay these people a salary, the government needs to collect more taxes from the private sector, and a bigger tax bill makes it even more difficult for private sector firms to pay employees so they have to make more people redundant. It’s a vicious circle: raising taxes means people in the private sector lose their jobs; giving those people jobs in the public sector instead means the government has to raise taxes even higher to pay for them.

If you ever watch the BBC’s Question Time, you will have heard people questioning the Con-Lib representatives on whether the private sector will create enough jobs to make up for the losses from the public sector.

The simple answer is: it has to. Encouragingly “the number of private sector jobs rose by 428,000 in the year to December. Over that time, the public sector shed 132,000 jobs”, but whether that was already happening or not, the cuts need to happen.

The government needs money, and keeping so many people employed in the public sector will only make the situation worse. This seems very uncaring towards the people who will lose their jobs in the short term, but I’m afraid there is no other option, and in the short term, yes, it will be painful for many, I wish it didn’t have to be, but I will later go on to explain how the vicious circle will work in reverse.

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So how can the government increase its income?

I implied before that the answer is to raise taxes. Actually, I intend to show that the opposite is true.

This chart shows top tax rates in the US, compared with the income the government received from those taxes:

You can see that, whether the top tax rate was 90% or 40%, the amount the government received was basically the same. The idea that taxing the rich more gives the government more money is clearly not true.

In fact, with lower tax rates, private sector companies would be more able to afford to employ people, and more people in private sector employment would mean the tax bill is shared out between more people; so each person can pay less, while the total the government receives actually increases.

This is the vicious circle in reverse: lower tax rates means more private sector jobs, more private sector jobs means the government can afford to charge each individual a lower rate and still get more money than it did before. Everybody wins!

I know that the government is cutting some worthy causes in order to achieve this, but going on with a budget deficit is just not clever. When the debt has been repaid, then that money we’re currently paying as interest on our debts can be used for useful projects like those described by Nick Clegg in the quote above.

The alternative is to build up a bigger and bigger debt to pass on to future generations and let them worry about paying it back. That’s basically stealing from your children.

For Christians, of course we want to look after the poor, but the Biblical principle, from Ephesians 4:28, is to work to have to give, you don’t take from others in order to give more than you can afford.

Valentine’s Day, Schmalentine’s Day

The Carpenters once sang, “the best love songs are written with a broken heart”; I think this song (still unknown in the UK, I believe) is pretty strong evidence in support of that theory:

Anyway, changing the subject… despite what Paul wrote to Christians in Corinth (1 Cor 7),  in my experience, Christians are worse than non-Christians for assuming everyone should get married.

Admittedly that could be because many non-Christians aren’t worried about getting married before having sex, but if, as we Christians claim, God satisfies all our desires, why does it seem like The Pussycat Dolls have something we don’t when they’re able to sing “I don’t need a ring around my finger to make me feel complete”?

Or how about Natasha Bedingfield:

Richard Dawkins admits the possibility that life on Earth was Intelligently Designed?

I recently watched Ben Stein’s film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

The basic point of the movie is to show how scientists who believe we may have been intelligently designed are expelled from the community of “real scientists”.

There were a few things I didn’t like about the film. For example, Stein portrayed himself as an unbiased investigator, and even being on the side of ID myself, I have to say this film was blatantly biased against Dawkins & Co. from the start. I wasn’t surprised to read afterwards that certain people interviewed for the film felt they’d been misled, and that quotes had been carefully edited to fit what the producers wanted them to say. Scientific American has Six Things That Ben Stein Doesn’t Want You To Know.

I also think Hitler should have been left out of a film about the scientific validity of Intelligent Design. Whether the Nazis based their principles on natural selection or not has no bearing on the accuracy of Darwin’s theory. It is also pointed out that the notion that life was intelligently designed and the acceptance of the theory of evolution are not mutually exclusive.

I can also understand that using the idea of Intelligent Design to just say “this is complicated, God must’ve done it”, is not really very useful science, so some concerns are about allowing ID-ers into the realm of serious science are understandable. However, many people seem to be under the impression that anyone who believes in God is completely incapable of doing anything useful in science. If that’s true, then I guess we should abandon everything Newton and Einstein did.

Anyway, onto the part my title is referring to. Dawkins said that, while he cannot believe in the God or gods of the world’s various religions, there is a possibility, albeit very unlikely, that life on our planet is a result of ‘directed panspermia’, i.e. that life was designed by beings of higher intelligence elsewhere in the universe, although those beings would of course have had to evolve by chance themselves. He said it’s possible there could be some design signature observable in the world around us that would point to this conclusion. (Sorry I can’t be bothered to watch the film again to get exact quotes, but I don’t think I’m bearing false witness to what he said.)

Now, if there’s even the slightest chance that we could find evidence that life was designed (even if it was by aliens), why is science currently outlawing any suggestion that it was anything but the result of chance? What if that evidence is there, but you’re ruling out the possibility of ever finding it because of your obstinate faith in the creative powers of chance?

Nobel Prize-winner Fred Hoyle likened the possibility of life starting by chance to the chance of a tornado blowing through a junkyard and producing a 747 jet ready for take-off… “even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe” (Source: ICR). I know the argument that, given infinite time and possibly and infinite number of universes, it was bound to happen eventually, but there’s certainly no more evidence for universes other than our own than there is for a designer.

In conclusion, I don’t think it’s unreasonable that you evolutionists should allow those with alternative theories to put forward their ideas for serious consideration. You talk about how oppressed people like Darwin and Galileo were when they came out with radical theories that challenged the understanding of established scientists, and yet the current science establishment seems no better at allowing free-thinkers to get their theories considered. If the evidence for evolution purely by chance is really that overwhelming, you’ve got nothing to be afraid of in debating with these nutters, because all sane people will be able to see who’s got the evidence to back up their theories.

Are The New Tuition Fees Fair?

Some people seem to be a little bit annoyed by the government’s decision that students should pay up to £9000 a year for their degrees.

From what I’ve seen on the news, and Question Time, it seems a lot of people have a rather misconceived idea of what the changes actually mean. I think the way the media have presented the story hasn’t helped; I guess you’re going to sell more papers if you make government decisions look massively controversial. Plus you’ve got the Labour party, who are opposing every cut the government makes, but while they seem to acknowledge that the way universities are funded needs fixing (it was them that commissioned the Browne report in the first place), they can’t really agree among themselves on a viable alternative.

So I can understand why people are under the impression that the new system is unfair, but I hope that people will try to read the following with an open mind as I try to show you why the new system is, as crazy as this may sound, fairer than the old one.

I was going to try and explain it all in my own words, but then realised the Prime Minister already covered most of what I was going to say in this speech. I’m thinking the people who are most passionately against the new fees are probably inclined to automatically dislike everything in that speech just because it was David Cameron that delivered it, but please give him a chance. I think it’s worth a read, and if you’re willing to listen, I think you’ll see that they are being fair. Otherwise, I think the following still makes sense even if you don’t bother with the link:

I’d like to emphasise that people from poor backgrounds who go to university will be better off under the new system, while the people who don’t go, and end up doing low-paid jobs their whole lives instead, won’t have to pay for those that do.

The people who will take a hit under the new system are those who aren’t poor enough to receive grants, but aren’t rich enough to pay the fees up front to avoid the interest on their loan. People like me would have to pay our own way, rather than take money off non-graduates, and (although it’s easy for me to say this now that I’ve already got my degree) I think that’s fair.

I’ve heard two common arguments against this.

Firstly, it is claimed that everyone, including minimum wage-earners, benefits from university graduates working in our country, so everyone should contribute to the cost of educating them.

Secondly, it is pointed out that people received free university tuition in the past.

I think these would both have been valid arguments/points back when very few people went to university. When not many people went to university, it didn’t cost the government very much to pay for them. Plus, the degrees the students received were more valuable because they were rare, and those that possessed those degrees would have contributed significantly to a workforce that consisted mostly of relatively uneducated people.

Now, there are lots more people going to university, so if the government were still to pay for them, it would cost a lot more. Also, since so many people have degrees, graduates are much less in demand in the workplace, so having a degree doesn’t necessarily mean you’re contributing much to the country (right now my Master’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering is being put to good use as I serve coffee and do the washing up in a restaurant).

So firstly, I’d say that sending all these people to university no longer seems all that useful to non-graduates. There are some cases where there is still a clear benefit to everyone, e.g. training doctors, and if their salaries are not enough reward, then perhaps their tuition should still be paid for by the taxpayer. In most cases though, I think the benefit that non-graduates get from someone else doing a degree is negligible.

Secondly, it’s important to remember that no-one’s education was ever free. £9000 a year is the price UK universities will be charging for degrees. The only question is who pays that cost? Do the people who receive the degree pay? Or should everyone share the cost, including those who’ve never dreamed of going to university and are working in a factory on minimum wage? Take into account that the average increase in earnings over a lifetime as a result of having a degree is over £100,000. If you still think you can justify taking money off of the lowest-earning taxpayers to pay for your degree for you, then I guess you’re entitled to your opinion, but I think that’s actually pretty disgusting. You’re basically doing a Robin Hood in reverse, taking from the poor to reduce the debts of the future high-earners.

I also dislike the way society is saying you need a degree to get a decent job. To me, that seems to send a message to the people working in factories etc., that their jobs are pretty worthless. People shouldn’t be made to feel inferior because they don’t earn as much. Suggesting that these people benefit from having university graduates in the country, and should therefore help pay to create them, encourages the idea that they themselves are less valuable to the country. Graduates need people to do these low-paid jobs, and they should show their appreciation to the people willing to do them, not charge them for the privilege of having these people who’ve been to university and got important, highly-paid jobs, look down on them.

That said, I’m not against education. The government should do all it can to make sure the same opportunities are available to anyone who wants to go to university, and I think the Lib-Con system, when properly understood, does a better job of providing those opportunities to anyone than the previous system did.

So finally, if you’re put off going to university by the increase in fees, I’d like to firstly point out that someone has to pay for your tuition (lecturers don’t normally work for free!), and it might as well be you (it’s all very well insisting the government pays for you, but the government has no money of its own, it’s only using the money you give them through taxes). Secondly, you’re not being asked to pay a penny until you’ve finished and are earning over £21k a year, and even then, say  you were earning £23k a year, you would only pay back £15 a month. In practice, it’s very similar to paying for tuition using taxes, but only the people who go to uni will pay. Is that really worth smashing windows over?