Dr. John Currid wrote on his blog (his is one of the blogs that I follow regularly) a while back,
I have taught in seminary now for fifteen years. This was the first year that I was asked to help teach preaching at the seminary; most of my work has been in OT. In any event, one of the lessons that I try to get across to my students is to be careful in drawing attention to yourself in the pulpit. Indeed, many illustrations that one hears today are about the pastor and his experiences. One needs to be careful: Spurgeon told his students to help their congregants to look up to Jesus . . . with both eyes! Let us draw our people's eyes to the Word and to Christ, and not to ourselves.
After reading that I had to rethink what the purpose of my blog was. I figured that if it was going to be a diary, then it should be private. But if it was to be public, its chief purpose would have to be to point people to the Saviour.
The reason I address this issue now, two months after the fact, was that I was reading Ecclesiastes in my QT today and was completely taken aback. Solomon wrote, "There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God, for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment?" (Ec. 2:24, 25). Solomon's saying that all joy is from God. To paraphrase what he's written, I'd say, "The enjoyment of eating and drinking is from God. What joy is there that hasn't been given by God." That means that the joy from a glass of wine, the joy of sex, the joy of eating salty-greasy food, the joy of experiencing the loyalty of a friend, the joy of soaking in a hot shower, are all from God (not to say that I enjoy all these things). And there are ways of abusing these gifts of joy. E.g., getting drunk, premarital sex, gluttony, testing your friends, idleness.
What really got my mind thinking was when it came to the joys that don't seem to have any redeemable purpose in creation. One example that comes to mind are mind-altering drugs (e.g., marijuana, cocaine, etc.). Having never tried one of these narcotics, I don't know whether it's enjoyable, in fact. Assuming it is, and that's why people do them, what was God's purpose for creating them? Was Solomon wrong saying that all enjoyment is from God? Did God create marijuana to be enjoyed?
Deeper yet, what about sin that appears to have no avenue where it can be righteous? For example, a sin that does have an avenue where it would be righteous is premarital sex. Sex before marriage is enjoyable, I've been told. So one might ask, "Isn't all enjoyment from God." And the Bible would say back, "Yes, but this joy was meant exclusively for when you're married." So, when I say, the "sin that appears to have no avenue where it can be righteous" I'm specifically thinking about pride, though there may be others. I find reveling in myself, worshiping myself, and lifting myself up as an idol very enjoyable. As Piper said (approximately), "I would gladly give up sex for the rest of my life if people would make much of me everyday." Does the root of the enjoyment of pride have a redeemable source that traces back to a righteous God? I wonder what it is?
Joe Carter (not the baseball player) once said that it's good for bloggers to let their audiences get to know them better. I'm not going to do that (at least not in a more serious version of what Mr. Carter did) because I need to fight my pride, and that could very easily turn into me talking about how great I am.
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Dr. Currid is also surprisingly accessible for a seminary professor. I emailed him once about a question related to church history and he got back to me just a short while later. He even went to some length to get the answer for me. He didn't know the answer so he email the scholars around him. I thought that it was really neat.
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4 comments:
God created us as relational beings and we each have legitimate human needs for love, acceptance, attention, etc. I wonder if pride results when we are driven by the desire to fill these needs, to the point where we put ourselves above God or others.
Just a thought.
Glad you found my blog, Jer. It was good input.
"I wonder if pride results when we are driven by the desire to fill these needs" ...or, rather, to overcompensate to fill those needs.
This also gets me thinking to one of my presuppositions in writing this post. I presupposed that valuing yourself was bad. Jesus would have said that it was impossible to love others if you didn't love yourself. He said, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Mt. 19:19).
C.S. Lewis said (as I remember from what Pipes wrote in Desiring God) that when the secular person was asked what the highest value in humanity was, he would say selflessness. The Christian, though, would say love.
Maybe the line has been crossed so far, so many times, that we've forgotten what it would mean to have a healthy love of self without worshiping self.
Dear Peter Eddie.
It appears your blog has died. Is this true?
Not to say that you'll refer to this comments thread again, but, as you can see, it has not died. I was away for three weeks so I was unavailable to post.
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