The Everyday Club

2/28/12    Evan,     about 30
On the sidewalk today I asked a businessman named Evan, who was on his way home from work, about his religious beliefs. He takes a "Starbucks" approach to spirituality. By this I mean that just like one has a thousand choices in a coffee shop, Evan picks and chooses any belief that seems attractive to him, regardless of whether it is theologically compatible within a larger set of beliefs or even compared to what he sees in reality for that matter. His answers began with phrases like "I like to think of God as..." or "I prefer to believe...such and such". Many people in our choice-obsessed culture would see no problem with this, but it goes completely against God's burning anger toward the making and worship of false idols. In our day we might not build statues but we build an image and set of beliefs about "God" in our own imaginations - one we are most comfortable with. We don't like the idea that God has already revealed everything we need to know about Himself in the pages of the Bible. The only "choice" we may have is to surrender to Him just as He is, or to continue to rebel against him. Some argue that Christianity itself is random and arbitrary, but I ask when, during the hundreds of years of the writing of scripture, were any arbitrary choices made by any individuals? The Bible must be taken as a whole, just as the 66 books within it each had to be accepted into the Canon of scripture as a whole, leaving no room for individuals to pick and choose arbitrary beliefs. I explained to Evan that one reason I am more and more convinced as a Christian is that the more I read and reread the Bible the more I see a miraculous harmony between the 40 or so authors of its 66 books, each from differing economic, cultural, geographic and language background but all agreeing and contributing to the unfolding story of God's sovreignty and redemption throughout history...