From 'An Essay on Man'

 "All Nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear: Whatever IS, is RIGHT."
--Alexander Pope.

Dear Mr. Pope,
You've got some flawed theology.

Now, don't get me wrong, I am an artist.
I love painting. It's one of my absolute favorite pastimes. Right behind breathing and sleeping.

Much of today's modern art is full of discord and chance. Splatter painting is common, along with the seemingly random line drawings like Kandinsky. What does it mean??
As a culture, we paint what we think matters, what it is that we think is beautiful, what is important.
So we value.... lines.

This is not really where I have beef with Pope however.
The last line of his first Epistle in 'Essay on Man' is the last line quoted: "Whatever IS, is RIGHT."

The New York Times headlines are as follows:
Qaddafi's Army and Jets Strike at Rebels
U.S. Readies Military Options on Libya
Poll Shows Support for Embattled Public Sector Workers
Jane Russel, Star of Westerns, Dies at 89
Government Presses Fight Over Lesbian Employee's Benefits

Now that's what I call truth and beauty!

According to Pope, all of these things must be right, because this is how our world IS right now.
It follows Nature's rules that people should be at war with their neighbors; it is right that war should break out in a once calm area. The earth should always have death creeping across the land.
And we should accept this as good; this is Right.

Yet this contradicts how we react to our surroundings.
We seek to correct the "wrongs" around us, to fix the problems and set people at peace with their fellow man. It is a bad thing that there is a need for a military and government to keep people free and having equality.

The Bible has something very different to say about the matter:
Jeremiah 8:11
"They have treated superficially the brokenness of my dear people, claiming: 'Peace, peace' when there is no peace."

The Bible has a lot to say about how man is born sinful, and that the world is full of evil. Not only is today's vision of reality incredibly skewed from reality, but is incredibly distant from a Biblical perspective that says that man needs to be righted, rather than be "right" like Pope says.

It confounds me when I try to understand how people can think that the world is right.

Maybe you think TRUTH is objective?
Perhaps you disagree, you believe that man is not born sinful.

I've never seen a parent sit their child down to teach them how to lie, yet I have experienced a young kid look me right in the eye and tell me a blatant, obvious lie.

What you believe doesn't make sense.

Eternal Beauty

I'm loving Elisabeth Elliot's book Shadow of the Almighty: The Life and Testament of Jim Elliot.

Here is a quote from one of Jim's letters to his brother Bert,
"Eve's daughters are as flowers and none can ever say they are through unfolding. And what man can predict the consummate end of such a life when its ultimate center is Sharon's Rose?"

How beautiful an idea is this!
Thank God that He is never through with us; He is constantly waiting for us to surrender all to Him, so that He can use us in miraculous ways that we would never have been able to imagine.

He has such more for me than I can comprehend.

I remember a song I heard once, by a local band near where I lived, Desert Reign. The chorus had a line that said, "Forgiveness is the fragrance that the trampled flower casts upon the foot that crushed it into the ground."
While yes, it is quite a mouthful, the idea behind it is so precious.

It is never-ending, the love of God.
This has been true in my own life, as I have experienced the infinite forgiveness and love of God. He doesn't care what I have done in life, He wants to use me for His ends, for His purposes.
Regardless of what we encounter in life, God is always there to pick us up off the ground. He scrapes us up from the dirt that we have been ground into, breathes His life into our noses, and brings us back to life, over and over again.

He sees us as beautiful, and has freed us from our pasts with His love. The daughters of Eve will forever be blessed and used and loved of God, His mercy endures forever.
Thank God for His view of us, the mirror that never sees us as anything but what we really are: made in His image. He is Beauty, and we were created to look just like Him, from our beautiful conception to the surrendering of our last breath.
-Amen.

Slavery

John MacArthur is an amazing, intelligent man of God.
Today in Convocation, he spoke to the students of Liberty, and he had a message for us that will impact my life perspective forever if I can only put it into full out motion.

He is a Koine Greek language scholar, and has discovered a severe discrepancy in the translation of the Bible from Greek and Hebrew into English.
I myself am a second semester Greek student myself, and was thus able to keep up with him in general, and will try to explain to you the fallacy that is being sold to Americans and the English speaking population.
The word 'δοῦλος' (doulos) is used in the Greek New Testament 141 times. This word has a very specific meaning, that fortunately for our contemporaries has a very specific, particular meaning.
The word doulos literally and plainly means 'slave.'

Now, I'm not sure how many of you have read your entire Bible, or even just the New Testament- I myself have only read through the New Testament- but I digress from the point.
In the King James Version of the Bible, the word doulos is almost always translated as 'servant' rather than 'slave.' Actually, in every translation (with the exception of MacArthur's Holeman Christian Standard Bible) the word is translated as servant, especially when concerning the Christians.

I'm rather upset that this concept has been hidden from contemporary Christians.
I've been taught my whole life that I am to be a servant of Christ, but that is not at all what the entire idea of the New Testament holds for us.

God does not call me to serve Him. He requires me to be His slave.
He chose me.
He has bought me with the blood of Christ.
My life's purpose is to be His completely, do whatever He asks me to do.

This in reality makes the idea of salvation hundreds of times better.
God has bought me, and made me a slave, yes, but I have become His friend.
He has made me a Citizen of His country, but all of this was not enough.

I, through Christ, have become a Joint-Heir, a Daughter of the the Creator of the Universe.

Even though I was once a speck of dirt, nothing but dust.
Unworthy, yet allowed to one day stand in the presence of God.

Now THAT is True Love.