Becoming a Christian Takes Work. ( Criticism of "Intellectual" Atheists and Others)

Staying atheist is certainly the more convenient option, if you are lazy. And let's face the facts, most people who live in the West and don't have faith in Christ are definitively lazy.

You have access to more knowledge in a day, without leaving the chair you're sitting at right now, than most people prior to the printing press had access to in their entire lives. A daily newspaper nowadays would be a month's worth of word-of-mouth overheard from travelers as they passed through your town.

The amount of time it took to copy a book just once was the amount of time it took for a person to gather together enough blank pages, ink, not to mention also a copy of the book, and then for him to rewrite every word on the blank pages, before binding the book and starting anew. Knowledge spread very slowly in a horizontal fashion (from one person to contemporaries, people alive at the same time), and knowledge spread through tradition, from parents to children (vertically) was much more effective. Consequently, a person's ideas could take a century or more to catch on, and they'd never live to see the effect of their work. But now history has come to a remarkable place.

We can access anything that anyone anywhere has found out about the past or found written in the past, so long as it has been transcribed or photocopied onto the Internet -- which is to say, any computer or database connected to the Internet information highway, so that anyone else can access the information as long as they are also connected.

And despite all this, the vast majority of people REFUSE to use the Internet to learn anything important!

You there, o atheist. You who have the knowledge of all the world's history at your fingertips, day in and day out, do you go looking for information that confirms and points to the Bible being true and its admonitions having the force of an ultimate Lawgiver behind them? Do you try to prove the Bible and do you go looking for evidence to utterly convince you that Jesus Christ is God, you are a man of sin, you need to repent, and you deserve His judgment but are utterly at the mercy of His unmerited favor in order to escape?

You can't make this claim. And I know from experience (the other benefit of the Internet is that it allows you to sample large amounts of people at a time to see how they think and consider their personal testimonies) that most people who are atheists are not so from being scholarly, studious and disciplined. They took the first lame reason to reject faith they could find, and clung to it, and now they're monstrously irrational and as a consequence of choosing not to think, CAN NOT think.

Statistical Vindication of the Superiority of Pre-Marital Sexual Abstinence

That sounds like a scientific paper title. If you ever write for a technical journal, basically your header will encapsulate the conclusion of your research. Goes to show I really was paying attention in my writing-intensive elective seminar.

As I scrolled through the latest argument about sex on my university forum, I saw that the resident third-wave feminist had levied a research study's conclusions against a guy commenting on the same "slut survey" I wrote about in this post. He had said that he couldn't see why anyone would take pride in 'owning' the word slut and expressed that there must be something wrong with them. Feminista Number One's response made use of data from a blogspot article by The Social Pathologist to claim that women who had several sexual partners were less likely to divorce than women who had had a few, or women who had had numerous partners. This was supposedly evidence of the superiority of having more than one sexual partner. 

Nevertheless, FN1 couldn't deny the results also showing that virginity prior to marriage was far superior to any number of sexual partners, in serving as a predictor for the success (non-divorce over an extended period) of their first/only marriage. Intrigued, I went on to click on the link and peruse the article.

Here are some quotes of interest from the article at the blog link:

"...divorce rates are the lowest for those with zero pre‐marital partners. That part is unambiguous. Virgin brides are the least likely to divorce, all else equal. But why do  divorce rates rise with one or two premarital partners only to reverse and drop after two or more sexual partners? And next, why do divorce rates reverse and climb back up after the pre‐marital partner count goes into the double digits?"

"My own hypothesis is that a higher partner count (up to 5‐9 or so partners) is correlated with age and maturity in dating experience....Specifically, I suspect it’s not the 5‐9 pre‐marital sex partner count per se that drives the relative drop in the divorce rates, but rather it’s the maturity and experience that women have acquired while they’ve dated more men."

From a table constructed by the analyst,

"One can see that the divorce rate is nearly 50% for women who had only one pre‐marital partner and if that partner did not develop into her husband. The divorce rate falls to half the above rate (25.6%) if a woman later marries her first and only pre‐marital sex partner. However, both these divorce rates are higher than the divorce rate for virgin brides. Pre‐marital sexual experience with one’s future spouse does not beat out having no pre‐marital sex at all."

Thanks, Feminista Number One!

I initially thought I was going to be led  to a pro-3WF site where I would have to read between the lines. As it turns out, that's what FN1 was doing, herself. Intriguingly, the study cited was called the National Survey of Family Growth and was published by the Heritage Foundation. So FN1 is reading research spearheaded by conservatives. One can only hope she doesn't fail to be persuasively influenced by her dabbling in the enemy's camp, over time.

It should be noted that it isn't the mere fact of virginity or sexual activity that has an effect on marital success, but what it implies, either in terms of the type of character or decision making that went into the choice to have or abstain from intercourse, or in terms of the type of effect that such a decision consequently has on that person. But if you're a foolish person, doing the right thing without knowing why is not morally wrong, it's just less beneficial to you; nevertheless, since it gives you time to figure out a coherent ethic justifying your choice, you will reap the reward for it over time, even if you do "the right thing for the wrong reasons." 

~ Rak Chazak

Topical Bible Study I -- Righteousness and Goodness

Part of the reason for utilizing a blog is to hopefully bless others through the sharing of my personal experiences. Some of the random insights I've come across are too short to rise to the amount of material necessary for a full sermon -- so there aren't many you can find online about that. And they're obscure enough that the big-name commentary and theology-glossary sites like Biblehub (used to be Bible.cc but they've apparently purchased an easier domain name) and GotQuestions haven't devoted resources to it--or if they have, it's too hard to find among the thousands of pages on their websites. Therefore, be it thus resolved that I'll share some of these insights periodically and call them "Bible Study" or "Word Study" or other names like that, and make a series out of them over time. Here's my first attempt.

Righteousness and Goodness: A Biblical Word Study

The way I think of these words now is probably very different from the way a typical person uses them, because I think of them in Biblical terms. Without getting too technical, let me spell out the distinction between them, and then give some verses to back up my point.

Righteousness is one of two things: godly behavior (what we would usually think of) OR the positional righteousness that saints have because of the Cross--namely, that God considers us to be perfect like Jesus even though we're not, because we've traded places with Him so that our sins could be dealt with separately from us.

Goodness in the Bible can be something we do as humans, indicated by Galatians 5, but it is appropriate to translate the word 'good' as perfection, which is consistent because goodness as a fruit of the Spirit is something that we don't manufacture on our own, but it comes from God. 

Here's my super-simplified idea: No one is good, but some are righteous. Lemme show you my proof-text:

Romans 5:6-8
6 For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. 7 For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. 8 But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. 

This verse used to make no sense to me. What is the distinction between righteous and good? And why is righteous seemingly placed below good on an apparent grading-scale of holiness? The verses arrange it like so: ungodly-->righteous-->good. If righteous and good aren't the same thing, then what do they mean? And here's the answer:

Good Means Perfect

Mark 10:17-18

17 Now as He was going out on the road, one came running, knelt before Him, and asked Him, “Good Teacher, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?”

18 So Jesus said to him, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good but One, that is, God. 19

Jesus isn't saying that He's undeserving of being called good. On the contrary, He's subtly implying that since the 'rich young man' of this passage recognized Him as good, that He IS God. This is yet another example of Jesus' sense of humor, as I see it. But notice what He says--no one is good except God. And God is perfect. So this passage identifies the Biblical word "good" as equivalent to our modern English definition of the word "perfect." Consider this, and we'll look at another example of the same.

Genesis 1:31
31 Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good. So the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

Logically, since there was yet no sin in the creation, everything was still sinless, and thus perfect. So the use of 'very good' at the conclusion of the creation account is to be understood as 'totally perfect.' If I understand the scholarship, the word translated 'very' in the Hebrew signifies completeness, lacking nothing. 

Of interest, since I now have the conclusion that good = perfect in Biblical terminology, I wondered if this would hold up concerning Galatians 5 where one of the fruits of the Spirit in believers listed is 'goodness.' I looked up the word in GotQuestions and cross-checked the word in the Mark 10:18 passage with the Greek interlineary provided by BibleHub and verified that the exact same Greek word was used. Agathosune is the Koine Greek for 'goodness' as read in the New King James Version (the one I prefer to use on BibleGateway because it's less cluttered with hyperlinks), in both locations, and is understood to mean selfless acts for the benefit of others.

What really nailed it down for me was the James 1:17 passage that GQ included which said that "every good and perfect thing comes from God above" (paraphrased the ending), which affirms that goodness doesn't come from us but God, since God being the only perfect being, is the only One who can cause goodness to be done in the earth. 
Out of curiosity, I searched the BibleHub database for the Greek word translated as 'perfect' in that passage, and it is teleion, which appears to be the Greek counterpart in this passage to the Genesis 1 Hebrew word "very." Look at the 7 uses in the New Testament listed and see if you agree. I think a safe definition for teleion would be "completeness." Don't you?

Righteousness Means You're Not Righteous

I'm just being cheeky, here. But when you consider that righteousness is a word that comes with certain qualifications, you realize it's not a word that confers any opportunity for pride to a person. Not in itself, at least. The word "self-righteous" means that you think you are righteous in and of yourself, and this is wrong. The correct way is to be "God-righteous," to be considered righteous by God's standards. So how can we do this?

Isaiah 64:6
"all our righteousnesses [not even our sins!] are like filthy rags."

Titus 3:5
we were not saved because of any righteous acts we did.

Romans 3:21-26

“²¹ But now the righteousness of God apart from the law is revealed, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, ²² even the righteousness of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, to all and on all who believe. For there is no difference; ²³ for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, ²⁴ being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, ²⁵ whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed, ²⁶ to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.”

I highlighted the key part. Do you see that God, when He justifies the repentant sinner, GIVES His righteousness to them, through Christ? This means that God considers us righteous, but it's not our righteousness that we have, it's HIS righteousness. So that's why it's called 'positional righteousness.' We are righteous by virtue of our relationship to God, and not by any special ability to be good that we inherently have which other people do not. In fact, the whole point is that we don't have the ability to be righteous by ourselves, that's why God has to give us His righteousness. Otherwise we couldn't be saved. That's why the doctrine of substitution is so important. 

This is a repost of the video from "The Gospel in 60 Seconds." It explains substitution from 2 Corinthians 5:21 -- "He made Him, who knew no sin, sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him."

Summary

None of us are good. The good we do is by the power of God.

None of us are truly righteous. Those of us whom God considers righteous have the righteousness of Jesus Christ credited to us, we have no inherent righteousness of our own.

Good to know, huh? :) I hope this was an interesting and informative read. And now you'll know what I mean in future posts if I refuse to use the words good or righteous to refer to someone...or on the other hand, what I would mean if I do use those words.
Also see these previous posts for similar articles:

Jesus, King of Insults
Be Careful What You Pray For
Feeling Bad in a Good Way

~ Rak Chazak