Thought for the day: on arbitrary laws

Just a little thought I came up with while studying to teach this week's Sabbath school lesson on sin.

Often, people look at the test of the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden as an example of the arbitrary laws of God. Laws, they say, ought to be for our protection, and make sense with the laws of nature, and so on, whereas, just simply eating a fruit (not even one that was particularly poisonous) is completely random. Why should they have been forbidden to eat the fruit of one particular random tree? Therefore, God is arbitrary and harsh, and only wants to display tyrannical qualities, etc. 

This leads to the question: Is it fair for a parent to test their child's obedience? We can safely assume that most parents would agree that complete obedience to their word is best for their child, so that they will know that if they yell, "Get out of the street!" their child will immediately respond and obey, not a second too late. Therefore, parents spend most of their children's young lives training them to be obedient to them. But a random test, as random as the seemingly useless tree-test, just to see if they will obey?

Perhaps one answer lies in the context of Adam and Eve's test, compared to the surroundings of every child since. Quite simply, Adam and Eve did not have traffic, and there were no cars to get out of the way of. They had no hot stoves, no swimming pools to drown in, no poison on their shelves, or sharp glass objects to break. In fact, they had no other dangers that God had to train them to stay away from, because it was a perfect sinless paradise. However, parents today have all of those dangers and many more at every corner to use as practical training in obedience. There's no need to think up any arbitrary test of faith or obedience when our children are constantly exposed to dangers all around, whereas God had to think up something to see if His new people would take Him at His word.

Now, after 6,000 years of evil in the world, we know something very clearly that Adam and Eve did not know at the time: if we run too fast in the yard, we could trip on a rock and scrape our knees up real good. But there might just be other dangers beyond our comprehension, dangers only God really knows about, dangers beyond our street and our medicine cabinets and our hot stoves. Those are the dangers we just have to trust God to know about--and again, just take Him at His word.

Musings on faith and prepositions

I realized that one of the reasons why I haven't been blogging lately is because it's so much easier to come up with a one-sentence status update on Facebook than an entire essay for a blog. Right now I'm going through a brief "fast" from Facebook because I have other things I need to get done, namely practicing violin (what a thought! A professional violinist needing to practice violin?). Also, I heard a great sermon this past weekend based on Hebrews 12:1, and realized that I needed to go on a diet. So, now I have more time to...blog. (So much for practicing. Well, I got 2 hours in this morning!)

However...what will the philosopher write about today? I've had a lot of things on my mind recently, some from personal experiences, and some ideas from sermons I've heard. (In case you're wondering about all the links, yes, I'm promoting Audioverse. No, they don't pay-per-click.) We've been studying the first half of Romans at prayer meeting lately (there I go again), and I've been blessed by the light that Dr. McNulty has shed on justification by faith. The study on Romans 4 especially struck me. The summary is that Abraham was justified before God through his belief (Rom. 4:3)--which was evidenced in his works (James 2:21-24). What was that faith? He believed that what God had promised, He could fulfill. In Abraham's case, God had promised him that a child would be born to him, even in his very old age, and that child would become a great nation. Twice Abraham was tested in that, first, just being able to have the child at all at his and Sarah's age, and secondly, after this miraculous child was actually born and raised, God told him to sacrifice him. But Abraham trusted God at His word--that whatever He said would happen, would happen. 

So that's the first important lesson of justification by faith: our actions testify to whether we believe God's word is good or not. The second involves where that faith comes from. Dr. McNulty brought out an interesting point regarding Galations 2:20 and Revelation 14:12. The King James Version is the only version that has this in common with those texts: the little phrase "faith of Jesus." Most of the other versions say "faith in Jesus" or something to that effect--remaining faithful to Jesus, etc. In the original language, there is no preposition at all, so I'm not sure what the translations are based on. But it's an interesting thought that a world of difference exists in those prepositions. Having "faith in Jesus" is certainly important, and I believe our faith in Jesus is what I've described above. But having "faith of Jesus"--what does that mean? It means that we take hold of the faith that Jesus had when He was on earth--and certainly, there was never a person who has ever lived who had as much faith as He! His connection with His Father was unbreakable, unimaginably deep. If we have the faith "of" Jesus, we can share in that connection through Christ Himself, whose life on earth made it possible that we can be saved through His merits and His faith, instead of relying solely on whatever faith that our own feeble minds can come up with.

"I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me."

How I Went To Sleep Last Night

Memory verse #1:

2 Cor. 10:4-5 "The weapons we fight with are not weapons of this world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ."

Weapons. Demolishing strongholds. Captivity. 

Fighting words.

Who can fight that?

Memory verse #2:

Exodus 14:14 "The Lord shall fight for you, you need only to be still."

Good night.

2008 Year in Review

Nothing happened this year, either.

Chicken Soup for the Soul

I haven't written a blog post for a while; writer's block, I suppose. I've been focusing my energy on organizing the music for the Generation of Youth for Christ conference, coming up just next week. I still feel somewhat overwhelmed with what needs to be done to get everything ready, but at the same time I'm not exactly sure what that is at this point; put out fires wherever they occur, I suppose, and see what happens when I get there. 

I really ought to get out of bed and get to work, but I felt compelled to finally write another blog post, lest my readers (whoever they are!) get discouraged that this blog hasn't been updated for so long that they quit checking it. Today's topic: emotions. 

The title of this blog evokes feelings of comfort food and nice puppy stories, but that's not what I have in mind. I was thinking today about the soul's emotions and how we care for them, compared to our physical weaknesses and how we care for them. I think that emotions are like a cold or a flu. It's inevitable that at times we may feel under the weather. If you're a fairly healthy person and do all the right things, it may be less often than otherwise. We are taught to eat healthy foods and avoid sugar and take our vitamins, dress warmly, get lots of exercise and rest, wash our hands regularly, and avoid getting close to people who are sick to avoid catching something. If we do these things, our chances for getting a cold may decrease, and we may be able to heal quicker and not lose as much productivity. However, I don't believe there's ever been a person on earth who has been so healthy and done all the right things so that they didn't ever have a day where they just felt icky and feverish and had a cough or sore throat and wanted to stay in bed. It's just the way things go. 

Likewise, our emotions can be controlled--and not controlled--in the same way. If we eat healthy foods and avoid sugar and take our vitamins, dress warmly, and get lots of exercise and rest, it helps to strengthen our minds as well as our bodies so that we can have clear minds to make good decisions and deal with things. Very importantly, we also ought to keep our hearts clean as well as our hands, and avoid contact with influences that will contaminate us. However, as colds, emotions and temptations do come into our minds without our consent; it's just part of life. 

I was listening to a sermon from Audioverse yesterday, and it mentioned that it's not our emotions that define us, it's what we choose to do with them. Too many times, people think that just because they feel something, that means they have to act on it, which is often times not the right decision. (I'm talking about the kind of emotions that could lead us to make the wrong decision, such as anger, unsanctified attraction, jealousy, despair, etc.) In this case, it helps to think of these emotions as a cold--do the best you can to get over it, but understand that you just have to let it go. And just like the times when you are lying in bed with at fever of 100 degrees and feel like you can't remember what it was like to be well and will never be healthy again, you just have to realize that with time, you'll be all back to normal again.

Studying

Sometimes I'm struck with how similar the method of studying the Bible is to studying music.

Take, for example, the Bach unaccompanied sonatas and partitas: if you're unfamiliar with them, they're nothing but a collection of enormous, overwhelming works for plain old solo violin, and they tend to sound similar. Even simple sounding. If you're a violinist and you're trying to play them, some movements are not technically terribly difficult to play (well, excluding all the fugues and the Chaccone, of course), but it doesn't take long to realize that if you actually want to play them in tune, they aren't as easy as they look. What I've found about the Bach unaccompanied works is that the more you dig into them, the more you realize is actually in there and how very challenging they are. Soon you find that it's a lifetime work.

The Bible is the same way. You can look at it on a shallow level and think you've pretty much got the hang of it. But the deeper you study it, the deeper you realize it is.

This led me to think about the technique of studying the Bible, something I've been wondering about and working on for a long time. It occurred to me that, since I teach the violin all day every day, perhaps there's something I can learn from learning an instrument like the violin.

The first thing I teach beginning violinists is technique. I don't hand them a violin and say, "Here's a concerto, figure it out and go play it." The first two or three months are spent practicing holding the violin and bow over and over and playing games to develop coordination, ear training, and general comfort with the instrument before the bow is even placed on the string to make a sound. The next step is "patterning," where the child's teacher and parent actually move the bow on the string for him, so the student can gradually develop the feeling of what it's like to move the bow, and what it should sound like. Eventually, after weeks of daily practice (often with tears), the student gets a turn once in a while to copy Mom's pattern. Then, after more time of developing the technique, the student is able to play one simple rhythm pattern--but play it much more beautifully than a student who has never been through this process could play the Mendelssohn concerto.

With the Suzuki method, while all of this technique is being developed physically, the student is constantly listening to the CD of the music he or she will be playing to internalize it in the same way language is listened to and internalized for every child. By the time the student is ready to play, he or she will know the music so well that it's a natural progression to just play the tune that's already in his or her head.

When the student gets advanced enough to play a longer piece, great care needs to be taken to encourage him to avoid playing through the entire piece once at top speed, then saying, "There, I did it, now I can stop practicing." We can all guess how much the student would improve from that type of practice! Yet it's so unnatural for a student to go slower, take a 4-6 note "nugget" to practice, and play it over and over and over to really understand it and make it so easy that it's impossible to play incorrectly. Parents and teachers are absolutely necessary for directing a young student to do this. When each difficulty is mastered, then the student can successfully play through the entire piece as beautifully as the recording she has been listening to. 

Sometimes in my Bible study I find myself doing the same thing as my Book 1 students studying the Bach minuets (yes, the same composer who wrote the enormous unaccompanied works). I read through, halfway thinking about what I'll eat for breakfast and what today's jogging route will be, and say "I've read it, I'm done." It would be so much better if I used the following method while studying:

1. Listen, or read, over and over. Really know how it goes.

2. Find a smaller passage to dig into--not the whole book at once.

3. Ask: What is the challenge in this passage? What questions can be answered?

4. What small "nugget" of information can I find to answer the question?

5. Am I willing to study that nugget and do whatever it takes to internalize it--to make it so easy that it's impossible to think incorrectly? How can I apply it to my life?

6. Now, going back over the larger passage and connecting it with other passages, how can I fit it into the bigger picture to make the whole thing hang together in a coherent way?

For when for the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need that one teach you again which be the first principles of the oracles of God; and are become such as have need of milk, and not of strong meat. For every one that useth milk is unskilful in the word of righteousness: for he is a babe. But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.  (Heb. 5:12-14). Well, we're getting there. 

Philosopher off duty

Why bother, when you can just hear this?