The Daily Devo with Steve

Chapter 1 Summary:

http://www.stevecanderson.com/journal-entries/gods-not-dead-by-rice-brooks

I am doing something a little different for a couple of weeks.  I love reading God’s word and studying God’s word in the morning, and while that it true, it is also true that I am in a season of life where I have 30-45 minutes for devotional time in the morning.  At the same time, I love reading as well, and I would like to read some books about our great faith.  So, for the next few weeks, I am going to be reading a chapter a morning in this book that was recommended to me, “God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty”, but Rice Brooks.  Apologetics is a favorite topic of mine, so this will be a fun journey.  I will journal and comment along the way as I normally do, and I will try to pull takeaways from the reading, as always.  I am sure there will be references to scriptures and all of that as well, so we’ll chase things down the rabbit hole and have a good time with it.

Here is the bed rock passage for this book:

15 but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect, 16 having a good conscience, so that, when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame.

We just studied this passage within the last few weeks.  We know that Peter was addressing suffering to a group of Christians spread out across what is now Turkey, and that he was urging them to be prepared to account for their faith.  Now, I want to be fair - there are people who are gifted apologists and who can stand toe-to-toe with amazingly skilled debaters and skeptics (Tim Keller and Andy Stanley come to mind), but we aren’t called to that.  We are called to be reasonably accountable, at least that’s my belief...Peter doesn’t qualify his statement here in 1 Peter 3:15.  But, based on everything I have ready, a reasonable level of accountability certainly seems fitting.  In fact, we talked a couple of weeks ago, when reading this passage, about a method of discussing what we believe that I think does exactly that.

In this opening section of the book, the introduction and chapter 1, we see a few topical issues discussed and I think that most important one, to me, is this idea that one of the primary tools that atheists have is this ability to set up a false dichotomy between science and faith.   Now, before I go into that more, let me be clear about what I am saying and what I am NOT saying about atheists here - MOST atheists are not actively assaulting the Christian faith and Christians, and they aren’t running around trying to oppress our beliefs.  When we talk about pushing back against them, we need to remember that most non-believers are just like most believers...they just walk around with a set of beliefs that they haven’t really ever tested.  So we shouldn’t villainize atheists in our minds...sometimes these apologetics books will feel a little like that, and that’s not the intent.  The intent is to attack ideas, not people.

This is a longer chapter, so I definitely had to break this into two parts.  Today one verse really jumped out at me:

12 Apply your heart to instruction and your ear to words of knowledge.

I don’t know that what I am thinking is necessarily what the author was intending, but as I was reading this I loved the progression.  The first part, where we are urged to let our hearts be applied to instruction, sounds to me like it is saying allow ourselves to be shaped and modeled, and be disciplined to take wisdom and put it to work in our lives.  It sounds like a subtle nudge to action instead of a nudge to hearing.  It is the second verse where we are urged to hear and to find wisdom.  In other words, the author is breaking it into two pieces - hearing and doing; listening and applying.  I love that.  It is easy to read the words of Proverbs and be swept away by their gravity and the wisdom that often seems so obvious, but it is entirely another thing to APPLY those words in our lives.  Application is the key though.  We have to hear AND do.  We can’t listen our way to wisdom.  Ironically, or not, I have found that faith is grown in much the same way...we read and we study, but then we have to go our and actually love people, take a step forward in faith that God will give us strength in the moment, and we have to BE Christians to FEEL God’s Grace.  In that way, growing our wisdom and growing our faith are very similar.  And a part of me wonders if that is part of the plan that God designed.  It’s funny how that works.

Just an interesting note, today we are starting the reading in Proverbs which we’re not written by Solomon. It’s interesting, but right out of the gate they pacing in the structure of these Proverbs are slightly different.

Here is the verse that jumped out at me today:

28 Do not move the ancient landmark that your fathers have set.

Interestingly, it is basically repeated in the next chapter and verse 10:

10 Do not move an ancient landmark or enter the fields of the fatherless,

11 for their Redeemer is strong; he will plead their cause against you.

These are very simple and straightforward versus, essentially just warning us against stealing land from others. In these times, these landmarks would be how property lines were drawn many times.  So, moving a landmark was stealing.

On a fairly unrelated note, it just got me thinking about “cutting corners“ in general; it has me asking the question, “Where in my faith am I not really holding myself accountable to the truth?”

Moving a boundary line/landmark a few feet it’s such a small crime that it’s almost not with mentioning.  However, if you do that little bit of stealing often enough, eventually you’ve stolen a lot. At some point, it is a big deal. The same is true of cutting corners in our faith.  If we don’t hold ourselves to the truth 100%, aren’t we effectively lying to ourselves 100%?

So, this morning, I’m gonna spend some time challenging myself with this idea and with this question.

It is always fun to open up Proverbs and start looking at all of these little zingers...that amazing one-liners.  it is difficult to pick just two or three for some extra focus and attention as well.  Nonetheless, here we go.

One of of them was easy because this is literally one of my top 2-3 verses in all of scripture.  We looked at this a couple of weeks ago:

3 The prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it.

What’s so great about this is that it is worded so succinctly...the wise person is a person who sees danger and flees from it, he isn’t the person who sees it and plays at the edge.  He flees it.  The simple, or the fool, is someone who doesn’t do that...he plays at the edges of it, or he runs right into it.  And I love this...it doesn’t tell us that he dies...just that he suffers.  The fool plows face first into danger and in some way will suffer for it.  And that’s the trap with temptation; it often isn’t sudden and pronounced, the punishment...sometimes it creeps up on you until you realize that all of your choices are now bad choices.  You wake up and you are surrounded with chaos...you are suffering for it.  Great, great verse!

The next one that caught my attention was verse 10:

10 Drive out a scoffer, and strife will go out, and quarreling and abuse will cease.

Another comment I have made is that the last few years have been the most stressful of my life.  During that time, I have lost some of ‘me’...I have generally been less joyful, less playful, less optimistic and less of upbeat than I normally would be.  I have just been less ‘me’.  In that, I have become more cynical as well, and I have become more of a scoffer than I was before.   This verse reminds me that I want to monitor myself as I am getting my stress resolved and while I am getting myself more ‘back to normal’...I am encouraged and motivated by this verse to NOT be the scoffer in others’ eyes...I don’t want anyone to think about me in this way, that driving me out of their company will resolve some of the tension in the group or the organization.  I don’t want to be the scoffer and the source of the struggle.  Just a great reminder about being self-aware.

Then, for my 3rd verse, I love this reminder about raising kids. There are two verses directed at this topic in today’s 16 verses, but this one was a great reminder to me:

15 Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline drives it far from him.

It is great to remind ourselves that our kids are one day going to face the world.  And the world is tricky - as verse 3 says, a fool can move forward without immediate consequence but one day will reap what he sows.  It is just the way of life.  And, the world often doesn’t punish immediately and harshly...the world often punishes by way of compounding.  It is often just the last straw that breaks the camels back in the real world, and when things fall apart you are left wondering how you got here.  We have a duty to help our kids realize they have veered with much more immediacy.  We have a duty to help them to develop a sense of where the edges are, where the struggles come into play, and how to deal with them.  We can’t blow past this and hope for the best...this requires intentionality and hard work.  Let us not run from this responsibility and from discipline that is fit for their age and stage of life.  Great reminder here.

Looking at this chapter and looking back at what I wrote in the read through, which is the following and which I am going to simply reiterate today:

2 Peter‬ ‭3:8-10‬ ‭ESV

“But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day (something I have noticed about myself is that patience over time is amazingly difficult...I mean, delayed gratification is a skill that takes time to develop, and one thing reading the Bible REALLY demonstrates, when we read the whole story, is that God has an amazing ability to wait and let things play out and then intervene at the right time...after we’ve thought that 2, 3, or even thousands of the right times have already passed. Perspective is one of the great gifts of reading God’s Word). The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you (I love that...not ‘slow’, but ‘patient’...allowing things to develop as He plans, over time, in His time), not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed.” (Being in the financial planning world, one thing I have noticed is how language can sometimes be completely off-base. Death is one of the common places I see this...people will say that “he died suddenly and unexpectedly”...you know, very seldom is death completely ‘expected’. Even people who’ve been waiting on death for some time end up ‘suddenly’ passing most of the time. Usually there is a goodbye that is missed, a final kiss or a farewell that is lost...death is a thief in that way, striking unexpectedly on all but very seldom occasions. I love the reminder here that God’s next demonstration, God’s coming again, will feel like that. We should live in expectation and in preparation. Frankly, I don’t know anyone who’s lived a faithful life who has regretted it...perhaps I don’t see enough people who’ve reached the end of life to have heard someone express that feeling...but I bet that’s a very uncommon position to take, to say that a faithful life was an unfulfilling life.)

The one thing that I would add goes back to yesterday’s reading, and it is this idea of being curious for truth as we open God’s Word.  Today, we read in 2 Peter 3:1-2 that Peter wants to stir our minds up with reminders of predictions past.  I was doing a little digging, it according to the website reasons.org, there are about 2500 prophecies or predictions in scripture about the future.  What is amazing is that based on their research, 2000 of them have already come true.  Now, we can argue about little predictions and I am guessing some of the coming true events are less convincing than others, but that is still 2000...I mean, 200 would be a lot...but 2000?  Wow.

We can rest easy that though we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, God does...and God has things under control.

Tomorrow we’ll dive back into Proverbs again for a few days and then we’ll pick our next study.

For me, today, tone is one of the active one of the 2 words that come to mind.  Peter’s tone is strong and firm and direct, and Peter is certainly coming in hard on false teachers and false teachings.  History has really proven out that these false teachings will eventually get fleshed out - God is cited as doing so in several direct examples today.  It is hard to miss Peter’s message on this today.

For me though, the second word that comes to mind is vulnerability.  This really isn’t directly tied to Peter’s letter, but rather, it is something I am inferring from his letter.   Peter doesn’t tell us that these false teachers are leading others astray because they have educated themselves relating to the gospel and are convinced that what Christians say happened, that Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, was a lie...they didn’t take on false teaching with that motivation.  They took on false teachings with a motivation to appease their passions and their wallets.  These folks seem to have found a system whereby they could do what they wanted, when they wanted, and with whom they wanted, and they could even get rich in the process.  However, they figured out that Jesus’ message wouldn’t support this way of living, so they went about trying to construct a system that would.  They were likely adding a little here, taking away a little there, etc...and they were shaping Jesus’ message to fit their agenda rather than coming to God with their hands and minds open.

And, the reason I say that the word ‘vulnerability’ comes to mind is because we all do this.  We all do it, at least just a little bit.  We may be as subtle as to avoid just one little topic of idea from the Bible, like tithing or no sex before marriage (as examples), and with just that little bit of avoidance we can do what we want because we are otherwise living mostly righteous lives; or so we feel, when we look around and compare ourselves against others - which is a whole different issue.  Or, we may read the Bible and go to church but avoid smaller group settings where we know our sins will be exposed, thereby shielding ourselves from judgement.  Or, we may even completely walk away from our faith because we can’t reconcile our lifestyle with our faith and we just find it easier to walk away.

Whatever it is, we are all vulnerable to this - we are all vulnerable to looking at the world with an agenda in mind, to find what we are looking for.  We are equally vulnerable to reading God’s Word with something in mind to get from it...looking to confirm a message rather than to find God’s Will.

Today is a great reminder to me to be curious, that curiosity is an essential part of our faith.  Further, today reminds me that we must be open to God’s correction of us, and humble enough to receive it from those whom God has placed into our lives.

I thought this was a great verse this morning, verse 4...it starts off my acknowledging that God has granted us His own promises.  Now, it doesn’t elaborate on this, so I just have to kind of think to myself, “What are God’s promises to us?”.  Well, for one, His presence...He promises His presence.  He also promises His saving Grace, as well has His return, which is a big part of Peter’s letters that we’ve been reading.  For the most part, those are the real promises of God.  So, turning to to rest of the verse, it goes on... “so that through them you may become gpartakers of the divine nature, hhaving escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire”.  This is great - we are promised presence and Grace from God, and His eventual return, and through those promises we can partake in the divine nature.  It appears what Peter is doing is contrasting what many Greeks had believed, which was that they could actually become gods, and what God ascribes to be true, that you can partake in some of God’s nature and blessing through your faith and trust in Him.  But my favorite part is the last part, where it says “having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire”.  The reason I love that is become it is a great reminder...the reason we have pain, the reason we struggle and we suffer, the reason for hunger and for death and for war and for famine and all of the other tragedies and indecencies of this world is the same thing...our sinful nature.  That’s why good things happen to bad people - because of sinful nature.  Peter isn’t getting into a deep apologetics discussion here, but this one subtle comment is really powerful.

At any rate, now we get to the part I keyed off of yesterday, verses 5-7.  In these verses, Peter uses what is known as sorites, which is a literary style that is like a staircase...this leads to this leads to this leads to this, and so on.  As we read these verses, we can see this clearly, and this would have been a familiar philosophical style of his audience as well.

2 Peter‬ ‭1:5-9‬ ‭ESV

“For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

So, for me, here is what I am thinking as I read these verses.  That I need to first supplement my faith (which is my understanding and my knowledge about God) with virtue - virtue in this context really means excellence in our terms.  But what is excellence?  Well, it is knowledge paired with self-control, which leads to steadfastness and then to godliness (so now I am living a life consistently moving forward in being more like God), and then I will show brotherly affection and then pure love.  So, ultimately, when I am living a life that is based on love, I am living as I have been called.  And then he goes on to say that if we are living out these qualities, this keeps us from being held back from knowing God more fully.  Or, said from the opposite vantage point...to the extent that we aren’t living out these qualities in our life, we will struggle to understand God.

Ultimately, I think what Peter is getting at here is that we can study God and we can understand God on paper, but to KNOW God, to truly EXPERIENCE God, we have to live more like Christ.  We can’t know God unless we try to walk in Jesus’ shoes.  That’s strong.

2 things really jumped out at me while glazing over this letter in its entirety this morning.

First would be:

‭‭2 Peter‬ ‭1:5-10‬ ‭ESV

“For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. For whoever lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he is blind, having forgotten that he was cleansed from his former sins. Therefore, brothers, be all the more diligent to confirm your calling and election, for if you practice these qualities you will never fall.”

‬‬

Now, I am not going to spend much time on this today, because this is up for our reading and discussion tomorrow.  But I love these progressions like this, these ‘do a and then b and then c’ type things...Paul does this a few times, and I love that Peter did it too.  But, again, we’ll talk about this one tomorrow for sure!

And the second on that I loved this morning was this:

2 Peter‬ ‭3:8-10‬ ‭ESV

“But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day (something I have noticed about myself is that patience over time is amazingly difficult...I mean, delayed gratification is a skill that takes time to develop, and one thing reading the Bible REALLY demonstrates, when we read the whole story, is that God has an amazing ability to wait and let things play out and then intervene at the right time...after we’ve thought that 2, 3, or even thousands of the right times have already passed.  Perspective is one of the great gifts of reading God’s Word). The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you (I love that...not ‘slow’, but ‘patient’...allowing things to develop as He plans, over time, in His time), not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed.” (Being in the financial planning world, one thing I have noticed is how language can sometimes be completely off-base.  Death is one of the common places I see this...people will say that “he died suddenly and unexpectedly”...you know, very seldom is death completely ‘expected’.  Even people who’ve been waiting on death for some time end up ‘suddenly’ passing most of the time.  Usually there is a goodbye that is missed, a final kiss or a farewell that is lost...death is a thief in that way, striking unexpectedly on all but very seldom occasions.  I love the reminder here that God’s next demonstration, God’s coming again, will feel like that.  We should live in expectation and in preparation.  Frankly, I don’t know anyone who’s lived a faithful life who has regretted it...perhaps I don’t see enough people who’ve reached the end of life to have heard someone express that feeling...but I bet that’s a very uncommon position to take, to say that a faithful life was an unfulfilling life.)

Great lessons today...great perspective.

Evidence suggests that Peter was executed under the reign of Emporer Nero, and this likely served as kind of a ‘farewell’ speech from Peter.  It was addressed to the same group of people as his first letter.

Peter directly addresses 3 different objections or challenges to the faith that were apparently being made there in these communities, which serves as a great point of discussion for us.  First was this idea that the apostles made everything up...that Jesus was just a figment of their imagination and creation.  Then Peter argues against the second objection, which is an argument that there actually won’t be this final reckoning where Jesus returns again, and that people won’t REALLY be accountable for their choices in the end.  Side note - the motivation for this argument from these corrupt teachers is the same as the argument that people generally make when they follow this line of argument...they are trying to justify their behavior.  We know from this and other sources that these teachers were making a bunch of money and were sleeping around in very inappropriate ways, so they were no doubt having a lot of world fun and hoping not to have it catch up with them; we do the same thing ourselves.  Peter really goes after this idea using historical Biblical lessons as sources and examples.  Peter doesn’t want us to use Grace as an excuse to live free of judgement...there is a difference between freedom from using Grace for the sake of living recklessly vs. using Grace to empower us to live for God...that’s really where Peter is driving with that.  And lastly, Peter addresses the argument that this final judgement isn’t coming because it has been supposed to come for generation after generation and has never actually happened...they argue, “Why would it happen now?”.  And Peter does something really interesting and really powerful as the counter to this argument...he offers perspective.  Instead of asking “Why now?”, he essentially asks a question for rhetorical pondering of “Why is God taking so long?”, which is a question we can carry around with us and think about.  And he reminds us that something dosn’t come from nothing, that creation is really pointing at a Cretor, and that we can’t just look blindly past that.  We have to remember that our human conception of time is really distorted in that it blinds us to God’s conception of time.

As a note, some see the differences in style between 1 Peter and 2 Peter as reason to doubt Peter’s authorship.  In reality, Peter has a secretary or someone who actually recorded his teaching for him, and it is much more likely that this was a different person rather than the author (Peter) being different.  This would be a much simpler and much more likely explanation.  Assuming this is true, this was likely written, as I said in the beginning, during the reign of Nero and likely in the mid-60s.

Tomorrow we will do the read-through...this will be a great one!