Anfechtung 2 - ... caught up in the complex spiritual dynamics of sin at war with the love of God.

While the author speaks of sin at work in the unbeliever, the same soul struggle takes place with the believer as his old man and Satan attempt to him take control of his sin and guilt. 

“Whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire; he breaks out against all sound judgment.” Proverbs 18:1 (ESV)  According to this text, a person first becomes estranged or “isolated” – that is, a close relationship is broken, so that love is replaced by hatred or indifference.  

The person who is estranged then looks for “pretexts” – excuses, rationalizations, arguments, and other masks that cover up the real problem.  The person uses the “pretexts” to “break out” against the truth. 

When friends hurt our feelings, their objective faults, which never bothered us before, stand out in glaring clarity.  

It is true in our relationship with God.  When we become “estranged” from God (that is, when we sin), we often start to manufacture a whole range of excuses by which we can “break out” against the truth of His Word.  In fact, there seems to be a pattern of unbelief, a cycle that can be seen in the lives of many unbelievers. It goes something like this:

A young man is raised in a Christian home and has some measure of belief in Christ.  He then becomes involved in some overt sin.  This can be any sin-pride, covetousness, addiction, dishonoring of parents, worldliness.  It is often a sexual sin.  He has the honesty and presence of mind to realize that his favorite sin is incompatible with the Christian faith.  He has the moral sensitivity to experience guilt.

There are two ways he can respond.  He may repent of the sin and turn to Christ to receive full and free forgiveness.  Or he may hold on to the sin, treasure it, and refuse to give it up either overtly or emotionally.  He starts to center his life around the sin, to seek from it consolation, help, and escape, to find in it, in effect, the meaning of his life.

But what about the guilt?  If he is not interested in repenting and being forgiven, then there is only one way to end the torment: To reject whatever it is that brands his life as evil.  If what I am doing is not really wrong, then I can “feel good about myself.”  If there is no objective standard of right and wrong, I can do as I please.  If there is no God, then I am not a sinner.

At this point, the “pretexts are discovered.  There are many reasons not to believe in God.  They become extremely persuasive to someone who does not want God to exist.  The arguments with the most force become those that turn one’s own moral failures against the Judge, so that the person’s own sinfulness is projected onto God Himself: “I can never believe in God because He allows so much evil in the world.”  

God becomes imagined not as the source of good, but as the source of evil.

The moral crusade becomes directed against Christians in general – a narrow mined, intolerant, hypocritical lost – and against the Church in particular.  The moral zeal creates a feeling of self-righteousness, a precious feeling to someone who has been tormented by guilt.

But his confidence is not totally secure.  The very smell of Christianity or the very mention of Jesus Christ triggers his defenses.  He lashes out at anything or anyone that represents the old belief that is still so accusing him.  He “breaks out” with startling emotion and aggressiveness against something that, supposedly, he does not even believe exists.  He may lose himself in humanitarian causes.  He may develop new theologies.  He may become one of those professors in a university who delights in tearing down his students’ faith.  But there is a presence that will not go away, something looming in the background that he must always either fight against or give in to.

This psychological pattern can be broken at any point by the Word of God, by the devastating truth of God’s Law and the penetrating grace that is offered in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, who died to save sinners.  

The unbeliever is not playing an intellectual game but is caught up in the complex spiritual dynamics of sin at war with the love of God.  For a Christian, this pattern illustrates the slippery slope of unrepentant and rationalized sin.

pp. 78-80 

LOVING GOD WITH ALL YOUR MIND

Thinking as a Christian in a Postmodern World.

Gene Edward Veith, Jr. 

The Anfechtung - The Soul Turmoil of The Christian Life - 1

Anfechtung - the painful turmoil and struggle of a believer’s soul that takes place when worldly events and experience seem to wholly contradict the Gospel message of our sure victory in Jesus Christ.

“I will give an example to confirm this faith and console that evil eye which suspects God of injustice. As you can see, God so orders this corporal world in its external affairs that if you respect and follow the judgment of human reason, you are bound to say either that there is no God or that God is unjust. For look at the prosperity the wicked enjoy and the adversity the good endure, and note how both proverbs and that parent of proverbs, experience, testify that the bigger the scoundrel the greater his luck. “The tents of the ungodly are at peace,” says Job [Job 12:6], and Psalm 72[73:12] complains that the sinners of the world increase in riches. Tell me, is it not in everyone’s judgment most unjust that the wicked should prosper and the good suffer? But that is the way of the world. Here even the greatest minds have stumbled and fallen, denying the existence of God and imagining that all things are moved at random by blind Chance or Fortune. The prophets, however, who did believe in God, had more temptation to regard him as unjust—Jeremiah, for instance, and Job, David, Asaph, and others.
Yet all this, which looks so very like injustice in God, and which has been represented as such with arguments that no human reason or light of nature can resist, is very easily dealt with in the light of the gospel and the knowledge of grace, by which we are taught that although the ungodly flourish in their bodies, they lose their souls.
In fact, this whole insoluble problem finds a quick solution in one short sentence, namely, that there is a life after this life, and whatever has not been punished and rewarded here will be punished and rewarded there, since this life is nothing but an anticipation, or rather, the beginning of the life to come.”

- Martin Luther   (Luther's Works 33), S. 33:291

Blessed Lent & An Invitation To Prayer

Lent is a time for step back from the world and take time to get on our knees and repent and pray to the Lord. Pres. Harrison, who wishes us a Blessed Lent and invites us to pray the Litany daily with him in the video below:


Blessed Lent from VimeoLCMS on Vimeo.

It is my goal to daily take Pres. Harrison up on his invitation and begin each day throughout Lent by praying the Litany (LSB 288-89). I will further close each day with Suffrages (Responsive Prayer 1 or 2 LSB 282-84 / 285-87).

I invite you to take this journey in prayer.

- pmwl

Living according to a reality greater than your plans

 
LUTHERAN WITNESS  June 21, 1887 pg. 14  - Google Books
http://books.google.com/books?id=GMEpAAAAYAAJ&dq=lutheran&pg=PA6#v=onepage&q&f=false

We do best when all is against us

In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, IF NECESSARY, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.
First Peter 1:6-7

In the history of the Church. - When has she made her greatest number of adherents? When her pulpits have been filled with eloquent preachers, and her aisles crowded with fashion and wealth? No; but when she has been driven to the dens and caves of the earth, and her sons have been proscribed outcasts. The real triumphs of the early Church were in the first centuries of opprobrium and persecution; her decline began when Constantine made Christianity the religion of the State.
In the history of each earnest soul. - It is rarely the case that we make much spiritual headway when winds and currents favor us. We do best when all is against us. We grow quickest in the dark. In times of persecution we realize the security, and comfort, and joy, which are in Christ Jesus our Lord; and as God goes the round of the world, it is in chambers of pain, sickness, and bereavement, that He beholds the multiplication of the choice graces of holy character and temper. The affliction, which is for the moment, is working out an exceeding weight of glory.

F.B. Meyer

Pastor Walther's Meditations: There Are Times...

An excellent reminder to each of us as the ruler of this fallen world, Satan presses us to despair and let loose of Christ. We have been given God's Word - Jesus Christ crucified and resurrected over Satan and anything with which he might press or crush us. Thanks be to God that this Word holds us and resurrects us daily through faith.

Pastor Walther's Meditations: There Are Times...

that ‘economy of salvation,’ ‘in which the rich, noble, righteous bridegroom Christ takes as spouse the poor, shamed, evil little whore.

An excellent excerpt from ‘Through the Son, Our Lord’: God as Mercy and Love in Martin Luther’s Theology   by Oswald Bayer  - 

“God action of salvation cannot be described in any other way; it use intense wording and takes place on the edge and the point of the rupture, as

‘[that] happy exchange, in which the rich, noble, righteous bridegroom Christ takes as spouse the poor, shamed, evil little whore[cf. Hosea 1-3] and acquits her of all evil, decorating her with all good things.  Thus it is not possible that the sins will damn her; now they lie upon Christ and have been swallowed up by him.  She thus has such a rich righteousness from her bridegroom that she can survive once again against all sins – even if they would lie upon her.  Paul speaks about this in 1 Corinthians 15:[57; 55; cf. Hosea 13:14]: “Praise and thanks to God, who has given us such a conquest in Christ Jesus, in which death is swallowed up, together with sin.”’ (WA 7:26.4-12;LW 31:352)

This passage cited from On the Freedom of a Christian is placed within a context in which Luther states three times what is meant by the unio (union) of the ‘Word of God’ and ‘soul,’ about God and the human being in faith.  …. that ‘happy transaction,’ and ‘economy of salvation,’ ‘in which the rich, noble, righteous bridegroom Christ takes as spouse the poor, shamed, evil little whore.’”

pp. 329-230

Only the Lord's Word has the power to call a thing what it is ...

CAUGHT AND NOT CAUGHT  Monday - Epiphany 7  -  1 February 2011 from Esther 7:1-10

It seemed like a good idea when a policeman pulling second shift decided that he'd stretch out in the back seat of his police cruiser and take a little nap during his break. He fell right asleep, and slept well. When he woke up he remembered a funny thing about the back seat of police cars. The doors don't open from the inside. Sometimes people are too clever by half. They are caught by their own good plans, which don't work out so well. I had planned to use PowerPoint to make a presentation on the church's lectionary in Bible class on Sunday. However, I was thwarted by the technology that suffered a delaying glitch. So I had to ad lib the first part of the presentation without the visuals. It would have been better if I had not depended on the technology, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. We can be thwarted by our own craftiness. Our heavenly Father thwarts the worldly wise by catching them in their own craftiness (1Co 3:19). The story of Haman in the Old Testament book of Esther certainly falls into this category.  Haman plotted an ancient Kristallnacht for the Jews of Persia to destroy them. However, his wicked plan was turned upon him when Esther, having found favor in his eyes, begged King Ahasuerus for her life and the life of her people. The very slaughter Haman had planned for the Jews was visited upon his own head. "For Haman the Agagite, the son of Hammedatha, the enemy of all the Jews, had plotted against the Jews to destroy them, and had cast Pur (that is, cast lots), to crush and to destroy them. But when it came before the king, he gave orders in writing that his evil plan that he had devised against the Jews should return on his own head, and that he and his sons should be hanged on the gallows" (Est 9:24-25). His wicked plan not only failed but was the source of his own miserable demise. If God's wise foolishness will not suffice, then your own foolish wisdom will have to do; and with predictable results. If God's strong weakness is not good enough for you, then your own weak strength will be just enough. Yet, we find ourselves easily enamored of the world's wisdom. Look how powerful it is! Worldly wisdom has now produced a super computer that can defeat the Jeopardy champions. Soon they will say that Alex Trebek could be replaced by a computer! Worldly wisdom has created such beautiful people with plastic surgery and airbrushing that we doubt their reality, but still we are enamored of such persons, listening to their empty-headed advice and buying the worthless products for which they are shills. This kind of brilliance is not wisdom. This kind of beauty is quite shallow. Yet, in our spiritual laxity we are attracted by it and trapped by it. We can't recognize its poverty and weakness by ourselves. God, in His true wisdom must warn us of its empty power and discourage our following it. Only the divine Word can disclose the true meaning of the world's wisdom because it is the divine speech. Only the Lord's Word has the power to call a thing what it is; to call worldly wisdom foolishness. Only He rightly knows the foolishness of the seeming wise; and calls it futile. This Word must catch us if we are to avoid being caught by our own craftiness. Only the Lord Jesus Himself can catch us so that we are not caught.   John Chrysostom     "Paul urged men to withdraw themselves from worldly wisdom. He adds the reason, saying, 'For the wisdom of this world is folly with God' (1Co 3:19). For it not only contributes nothing, but it even hinders. We must then withdraw ourselves from it, because it is doing harm. Paul carries off the spoils of victory with a high hand, having proven that, so far from benefiting us at all, worldly wisdom is diametrically opposed to the faith. "He is not content with his own arguments, but he has also added testimony: 'For it is written, "He catches the wise in their craftiness"' (Job 5:13). By 'craftiness,' he means their own arms get the better of them. For seeing they made use of their wisdom so that they would do away with all need for God, through this need, and no other thing, He refuted them by showing that they were especially in need of God. How and by what method? Because by human wisdom having become fools, by this worldly wisdom, as was appropriate, they were caught. For those who supposed that they did not need God were reduced to so great a difficulty that they appeared inferior to fishermen and uneducated persons; and from that time forth were unable to do without such people. Therefore he said, 'In their own craftiness' God caught them. For the saying 'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,' (1Co 1:19) was spoken to show it introduced nothing useful; but this, 'He catches the wise in their craftiness' was spoken with a view of showing the power of God. "Next, he declares also the mode by which God caught them, adding another testimony: 'The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile' (1Co 3:20; cf. Ps 94:11). Now when the Wisdom which is boundless pronounces this edict concerning them, and declares them to be such, what other proof of their extreme foolishness do you need? For human judgment, it is true, in many cases fails; but the decision of God is absolutely beyond our comprehension and is incorruptible." John Chrysostom, Homilies on 1 Corinthians, 10.3

from Memorial Moments by Rev. Dr. Scott Murray
http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?llr=gxf7b9bab&v=001VJlu5GGZPDShskItU8JnKKVVeAoByxdfxBV_9pGctvek1K77SmouHetkSfLRJPy-u4SnEfLfouTJ77gTrdDbrO3T4VkRBqK3YhHPK7Dhx8o%3D 

... to justify and demand that all the arrows in this world ... must point toward and be about me.

Theology during the time of the Reformation, and throughout most of the period known as “modernism," suffered from the “magisterial” use of reason. Where human reason/thinking and comprehension are given authority over the Biblical texts, there will be the limitations on what God actually is, what He actually says and what He actually does. How much has the full truth, and thus the full salvation and thus the full comfort of God been denied to those who deal with God’s Word, and thus God Himself, according to the tyranny of their human limitations.

What of the theology in our day? The human attribute of reason has been tossed to the curb in favor of another human attribute. This “magisterial” use of this human attribute has been elevated far above and beyond that of human reason. So great is the authority given to this human attribute that it can completely displace the Word of God and thus God Himself, in favor of that which satisfies the demands of this attribute.
What is this attribute? Emotion. Anything in the Scriptures, anything commanded of God, promised of God, and decreed by God, all must bow before the majestic use of emotion. Where emotion reigns, the validity of who and what God is, is determined not by what He is or says, but by how one feels about Him. Where emotion reigns, the validity of others in our lives and our responsibility to them is subject to how one feels.
Theology then becomes full blown “Meology” under the guise of “spirituality”. This meology by any other name would be called narcissism.
The “magisterial” use of emotion is just another manifestation of what St. Augustine identified as the root problem of humanity - Incurvatus in se – “curved in on itself”. What I refer to as the “magisterial” use of emotion is nothing more than an attempt to justify and demand that all the arrows in this world, all the people in one’s life, the church and even God Himself - must point toward and be about me.
Feelings are so much like Satan it is terrifying. Feelings offer us much and entice us to much, and if given completely up to them, leave us destitute.
Many would contend that our post-modern world is more open to the Gospel than ever before. I disagree. While our post-modern world has lost its love affair with reason, this same world has fallen head over heels in love what provides the feelings it wants. The opening of the Gospel will come only when one has been so ravaged and tormented by the unfaithfulness of feelings, that one loses faith in the ability of feelings to determine what is true and to rule over what really is true.
"... preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry."  2 Timothy 4:2-5

- pmwl

Where the resurrected flesh of Christ is present, there is no room for human flesh or it's works.

An excellent post from Luther on why the fleshly resurrection of Christ is such a blessing as that same flesh is also omnipresent.  Thanks to Dr. Kilcrease for posting this.

Great Steven Paulson Quote on the Absolute Omnipresence of Christ

From his excellent book Luther for Armchair Theologians, my out teacher Dr. Steven Paulson writes on the absolute omnipresence of Christ:
"Luther is even willing to pause for a minute and talk about Christ's body being wherever Christ is- and that means everywhere present! Of course, this makes human reason and its buff, free will feel crowded out of the world."
In other words, human reason that lusts for self-justification through imaginary free will, is "crowded out" of the world when it recognizes that Christ is all-present "for you." If the gracious God found in the flesh of Jesus reigns and is present everywhere, the human person loses all their power to establish themselves before God by their good works. There is no distance from this incarnate God within which they can use their free will in order to move towards him. They can only accept in faith that Christ is all-present and gracious pro nobis.

Posted by Dr. Jack Kilcrease at 6:07 AM
http://jackkilcrease.blogspot.com/2011/02/great-steven-paulson-quote-on-absolute.html?showComment=1297953550737#c3766523589211954060