The Vision Thing (24): False Claims

El Greco, Christ Healing the Blind (c. 1570)

God is delighted to give true vision to those who lack it. But he is equally determined to withhold it from those who insist that they have it but do not. Making an empty claim to vision is the worst thing we can do.

John 9 contains a fascinating story about spiritual vision that involves literal, physical vision. Jesus heals a man born blind so that he sees. The Pharisees are trying to figure out how this happened, especially as it happened on the Sabbath when no work was to be done, and what this event indicates about Jesus. As the story develops, the once-blind man increasingly "sees" Jesus to be the One Sent from God while the Pharisees become hostile to the seeing man and strenuously reject his conclusion. "You were born completely in sinfulness," they say, seething. "And yet you presume to teach us?" (v. 34).

Upon meeting up with the once-blind man again, Jesus asserts, "For judgment I have come into this world, so that those who do not see may gain their sight, and the ones who see may become blind" (v. 39). In other words, Jesus came into the world so that those who lack vision could gain it. However, those who claim to have vision Jesus would judge on the basis of their claim. If these people actually lack vision because the vision they claim to have is merely self-invented, then Jesus would punish them by cementing them in their unwitting blindness. Jesus confirms this verdict when Pharisees around him bait him with the question, "We are not blind too, are we?" Jesus' reply: "If you were blind you would not be guilty of sin, but now because you claim that you can see, your guilt remains" (vv. 40-41).

I don't believe that God is pleased if a person has a vision of God and from God and modestly claims not to have one. Imagine what God would have done if one of the prophets had pulled that stunt! But on the other hand, vision is an awesome, precious thing, because it is a faculty of God himself that only he can bestow. If you don't have vision, and you humbly admit it, you're in a good place, because the Son may give it to you. But the false purveyors of vision that have concocted it themselves, copied it from others, or (still worse) mimicked it from the world get blinder all the time the more they claim to see.

The Vision Thing (23): God Withholds It

If true vision comes from God, then not to have true vision is also from God in at least some sense. Undoubtedly our failure to see what God sees is because our perception has been obscured and perverted by our depraved nature. But if God bestows vision on some people despite their depravity, then God's disinclination to give it to others constitutes his decision to withhold it from them.

This idea might make people uncomfortable, but there is some subtle corroboration of it in the Gospel of Luke.

In Luke 9:43-45 Jesus tells his disciples that he is going to be betrayed. "But they did not understand this statement; its meaning had been concealed from them, so that they could not grasp it."

In Luke 19:41-44 Jesus weeps over Jerusalem: "If you had only known on this day, even you, the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes."

In Luke 24:13-35 two of Jesus' disciples (not among the Twelve) are walking to Emmaus two days after Jesus had died. The risen Jesus encounters them and explains to them why it was "necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and enter into his glory" (v. 26), but "their eyes were kept from recognizing him" (v. 16).

Who concealed Jesus' prediction of his betrayal from his disciples? Who hid the things that make for peace from Jerusalem? Who kept the disciples' eyes from recognizing the risen Lord? God did.

The underlined phrases above are best understood as what are called "divine passives." Divine passives are verbs in the passive voice that respectfully avoid identifying God directly—e.g., "they are hidden" rather than "God hid them." Divine passives are not unusual in the New Testament, and these three examples seem to fit the mold, because God could tear the veil off whenever he wanted to (as he did with Saul/Paul, for example). And in fact, he did.

Notice that though God concealed the meaning of Jesus' prediction of his betrayal in Luke 9, in chapter 24 Jesus "opened their minds so they could understand the scriptures" that were fulfilled by that betrayal.

In Matthew's rendition of Luke 19:41-44 Jesus says, "You will not see me from now until you say, 'Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!' " The one who hid the things that made for peace will eventually make Jerusalem yearn for the one coming from him, and he will open their eyes to see him.

And with the two disciples headed toward Emmaus, God kept them from recognizing Jesus only until the moment that Jesus broke the bread, when "their eyes were opened" (v. 31, another divine passive).

So why does God do this? Why does he choose to keep people from gaining vision? Timing. God is a God who reveals, but he gives the vision at the right time for each person according to his perfect plan. So what does this teach us about vision? Two things.

First, we simply cannot take credit for vision, ever. The God who gives it is just as powerful to keep us in the dark. He deserves all the credit, we none.

Second, if we have the vision but others don't yet, we must remember that they never will until God is ready to open their eyes. Jesus did not successfully communicate true vision about his impending suffering to his disciples, and it wasn't because Jesus was a poor communicator. It was because God had concealed the plain truth that Jesus was speaking.

Though we can't blame people for our poor communication, our excellent communication of the vision must be accompanied by patience, because we know that only God will open their minds to grasp it. And the patience must be accompanied by confident trust that God's timing is always best, and he won't let them see until it is just the right time.

The Vision Thing (22): Musicians

You know who needs true vision? Musicians.

A composition professor at my college used to groan when a kid in chapel would introduce his musical offering by saying, "God gave me this song." "If God gave you that song," the prof would intone to those around him, "it wouldn’t have parallel fifths and octaves. And it would have more than four chords!"

No doubt, the "God gave me a song" thing is way overplayed (pun intended). But it does happen—in fact, for the sake of God's people, it must happen. (And incidentally, though it isn't fair to attribute to God lousy-to-mediocre music, if God inspired the awful grammar [parallel fifths and octaves] of the Book of Revelation and the small vocabulary [four chords] of the writings of John, then he may be inspiring more dull or ugly music than refined tastes care to admit.) The point is that those who make musical worship possible in the church need God's vision if worshiping God is really going to happen.

Of the many notable things King David did in his life and reign, one of the less familiar is his thorough reform of the organization and duties of the tribe of Levi. During Israel’s journey from Egypt to Canaan the Levites were responsible to transport the tabernacle, the mobile temple, but once Israel settled in their new land the Levites had kind of lost their way. One of the jobs David gave to a particular subgroup of Levites was to make music in the temple that David’s son Solomon would build. David selected three families, one from each of the three Levite clans, to constitute these worship choirs and bands forever after. The leaders of the three families were named Asaph, Heman, and Jeduthun (a.k.a. Ethan), and all of them were prophets.

We know they were prophets because they wrote Psalms (including some or all of these), and writing God-breathed, holy Scripture makes one a prophet by definition. But we also know this because they are called such in the Bible. Heman was David's seer. So was Asaph. During David's reign, other seers, Gad and Nathan, gave musical directions that came from God himself about the playing of cymbals and stringed instruments. Seers see. These worship leaders had supernatural vision.

If worship musicians don't have vision, they do something like this:

If they do have vision, they do something like this:

( . . . which, incidentally, was written to be entertainment, not worship music; it takes some vision to make entertainment something like that.)

Or (in my opinion, submitted just so that you know that I am pro-contemporary music) they do something like this:

I met a young woman from a non-religious background who had been exposed to Christianity by her aunt. Once she got to college she connected with the Christian group on campus. As a musician, what was most appealing to her about Christianity was the abandon with which she could sing and sway to songs like The David Crowder Band's "How He Loves." Please understand that I really dig "How He Loves" as an element of a well-balanced worship diet. But this poor girl had never heard the gospel (or at least never knew that she heard it or had never been invited to do anything about it) and never knew that sleeping with her presumed Christian boyfriend was contrary to the very love of God that she loved to sing about.

Where there is no vision in worship, it is easier for this kind of thing to happen. This is why the church needs its musicians to have true vision of God, the origin of true vision from God.

The Vision Thing (21): Unusual Connections

Jean Restout II, Ananias Restoring the Sight of St. Paul (1719)

Quite often, true vision creates connections between people that wouldn't happen otherwise.

In the Book of Acts, a man named Saul was on his way with a band of Sanhedrin-authorized thugs to kidnap Christians in Damascus and haul them back to imprisonment or death in Jerusalem. Then he saw a vision of Jesus, and he discovered that he was bound not only to serve this Jesus as Lord and Messiah, not only to be connected as a brother to the very people he was doggedly hunting down, but even to have a special mission to bring the good news about Jesus to unclean Gentiles that he had never met and would never dream of associating with.

Three days later, a Christian in Damascus named Ananias was praying and saw a vision of Jesus, and he discovered that Saul had been completely turned around and that he, Ananias, was to pray for him in person to regain his sight. When he entered the place where Saul was staying, he addressed him as "Brother Saul."

In the following chapter, a Roman officer in Caesarea named Cornelius saw a vision of an angel that told him to send messengers to Joppa to bring back a man named Peter. Peter saw a vision of a weird sheet full of all sorts of animals being lowered from heaven and heard a voice call them clean to eat, because God can call the unclean clean. When the messengers showed up at his door, Peter heard the voice tell him to go with them. When he got to Cornelius's house and heard the Roman's story, he saw that God doesn't play favorites but accepts the person from any and every nation who fears him and does what is right. Then he saw Cornelius and his household filled with the Holy Spirit, and he saw that if Jesus saw fit to baptize them in the Holy Spirit, then surely he shouldn't withhold baptism in water. Suddenly the Christian movement extended beyond the borders of Judaism.

A few chapters later, Saul (known as Paul now) was wandering through modern-day Turkey, prohibited by the Spirit to announce the good news in all these places that had never heard it. Then once he got to the Aegean Sea, he saw a vision of a man of Macedonia, across the water, urging him to come and help them. A few days later, the good news had a new foothold in Europe.

There are so many barriers between people in the world—barriers of prejudice, of conviction, of custom, of affinity, and of mere routine. Whether obvious or covert, what surmounts the barriers is a willingness to go and do the unnatural thing, and what spawns that willingness is a vision from God of the strangers who turn out not to be so very different from us after all: people with the same desperate need of the salvation in the name of Jesus Christ and the same surprising craving to receive it.

The Vision Thing (20): One for Others

Louis Cheron, Le prophète Agabus prédisant à saint Paul ses souffrances à Jérusalem (1687)

In my last post I asserted that since the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, true vision is available to everybody. But that doesn't mean that it's available to everybody at the same time. Sometimes one person gets the vision for everyone, and everyone else has to trust the visionary.

That one-person-speaking-to-all-people model isn't just an Old Testament thing. The activity of Agabus in the early church bears this out. Even in that assembly that was full of people who saw visions and had dreams from God, at least twice Agabus received messages for the whole church that no one else received directly.

The most amazing example of this in the Bible in my opinion is the crisis Judah faced under King Jehoshaphat when they were threatened with invasion by the combined forces of Moab, Ammon, and Edom. Jehoshaphat calls the people together to pray for deliverance and guidance. God answers their prayer right away by filling a Levite named Jachaziel with his Spirit. In front of thousands of praying Israelites, Jachaziel informs the nation exactly where their enemies will be positioned and also that they won't have to fight because Yahweh will do all the fighting for them.

Can you imagine the guts it would have taken for Jachaziel to break the silence and effectively take responsibility for Judah proceeding on this unusual course of action? And can you imagine the guts of Jehoshaphat, who so believed Jachaziel's message that instead of placing elite warriors as his vanguard on the way to meet the enemy, he had his worship team go first! (Think about your church's worship team. Would you do that?)

Even today, sometimes God only gives the vision to one—not necessarily the expected leader either—but he expects the rest to trust and follow.

As I read the Old Testament, I am struck by how prophets emerge and people just know that they're legit prophets. (See Samuel for one of many examples.) Sure, after a while a prophet could develop a track record. But in Jachaziel's case for instance, the assembly (or at least Jehoshaphat) knew that he was the real deal just by hearing it the first time.

On the other hand, there are many examples in the Old Testament of false prophets, prophets who say whatever people want to hear, whom people believed even though they hadn't really seen a vision from the Lord. (See a good example of the contrast between false prophets and a true one here.)

So when someone says to your church, "I have a vision; here's what God wants us to do," how do you know that it's true? Paul gave practical instructions about this kind of situation, which he expected to be routine in the church. He wrote, "Do not extinguish the Spirit—do not despise prophecies—but test everything: hold on to what is good; stay away from everything that looks wrong" (1 Thess. 5:19-22, my translation). In 1 Cor. 14:29 he says that as a general rule, prophets should be allowed to speak when the church gathers, but once they do "the others should evaluate what is said."

Without going into much detail here, suffice it to say that the primary criteria for evaluating the vision that someone recounts are (1) does it cohere with what we already know to be true, especially from Scripture? and (2) does it enjoin an action we're supposed to take or adjustment we're supposed to make that glorifies Christ? Beyond these criteria there is also a certain gut-level sense that believers full of the Spirit have. Like in Jachaziel's day, when a true vision is recounted, the Spirit-filled believer often just knows—and they often just know when it isn't true.

So what does this all mean for vision in our churches? First it means, when you get a vision, don't expect someone else to go first. Don't hold back until someone else has seen the same thing. Sometimes God gives the vision to one person for the sake of all the others, and that one person might not be in charge either. It might just be ordinary you. If you don't speak it, it won't be spoken, and the church will stumble into danger. Speak up!

Second, be open to hearing the vision coming from only one person, including someone you don't expect. Leaders, be open to the vision coming from a person outside of the leadership circle. Be as wise as Jehoshaphat was—listen to your Jachaziel wherever they're located on (or off) the organizational chart and submit to the message even though you're the king.

Imagine how nimble and faithful the church would be if everyone was prepared to adjust and obey as soon as a mere one of us received a vision from God.

The Vision Thing (19): For Everybody!

True vision is for everybody!

It was a motley crew meeting daily for prayer after Jesus ascended to heaven. There were men and women (together in first-century Palestine? shocking!), Galileans and Judeans, former zealots, tax-collectors, prostitutes, widows, businessmen, Pharisees, probably old and young. The only things they had in common were their experiential conviction that Jesus was Lord and their heritage as the children of Abraham (though that would be redefined sooner than they would have imagined). Part of that heritage was the tradition of the prophets—men (and sometimes women) who were filled with the Holy Spirit to bring a message from the Lord. They were special people, few and far between, an elite and awesome spiritual fraternity.

Could these praying disciples have guessed that they were all about to join it?

After the fiery wind of the Spirit burst upon them and they spontaneously went into the streets proclaiming the good news of Jesus in languages they did not know, Peter rose to make sense of it all, hearkening back to the words of the prophet Joel:

"And in the last days it will be," God says,
"that I will pour out my Spirit on all people,
and your sons and your daughters will prophesy,
and your young men will see visions,
and your old men will dream dreams.
Even on my servants, both men and women,
I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy [Acts 2:17-18].

From that moment on, vision was no longer the privilege of the spiritually elite few. Vision belonged, in theory, to anyone on whom rested the Spirit of God. No human distinctions had any bearing on whom the Spirit came upon. Every believer who asks for the Holy Spirit will receive him and the vision that he brings.

The early church was not a group of loyal followers of a few visionary leaders. It was a group of visionaries. That's why they took over the world. What would happen if your church and mine were groups of visionaries too?

Is a "Personal Relationship with Jesus" Part of the Feminization of Christianity?

I'm taking another short break from my "Vision Thing" series to strike while the iron's hot on a post by David Murrow called Why we call it "a personal relationship with Jesus."

Murrow's shtick is called Church for Men, and the passion that drives his writing and speaking is to see the church become a place that isn't a foreign cultural landscape to men, a place where men don't have to act like women in subtle ways in order to belong and thrive. Noting the pervasive tendency of churches to be numerically dominated by females, Murrow incisively critiques the habits, practices, verbiage, and ideas that we have come to take for granted in the Christian church that form obstacles against most men becoming strong Christians. He is probably the expert on this topic.

I love what Murrow is about and avidly follow his online stuff. (In fact, stay tuned for a coming post in which I link to a triad of recent posts by him that blew my mind.) A couple days ago Murrow posted his investigation into the origin of the ubiquitous evangelical phrase "personal relationship with Jesus," which he claims is "the number one term evangelicals use to describe the Christian walk." In his book Why Men Hate Going to Church, Murrow claims that this phrase "frames the gospel in terms of a woman's deepest desire—a personal relationship with a man who loves her unconditionally. It's imagery that delights women—and baffles men."

According to a search for this phrase in Google's large scanned literary corpus, the phrase first appears in the late Victorian era (ca. 1880). Interestingly, as a percentage of all phrases in all of English-language publishing, "personal relationship with Jesus" enjoyed small and temporary but noticeable upsurges during both World Wars, while men were fighting, not writing. But it was still fairly obscure language until the mid-1960s. Since then its prominence has rocketed up steadily and may not have peaked yet. Murrow points out that "This was the growth era of the evangelical subculture and its focus on female consumers. Christian books, music, and media outlets proliferated, all heavily dependent on female buyers and viewers. [So true.] Savvy authors and preachers realized this and began using female-friendly metaphors in their books and sermons. [Max Lucado, we're looking at you.] Chief among these: a personal relationship with Jesus."

Murrow claims that unlike women, "Men are obsessed with mission. . . . Men are happiest when they're on a mission, and that mission is going well. . . . [M]en also enjoy good relationships, but they are often a secondary concern." He suggests that if evangelicals want to present the gospel of Jesus to men, they need to replace the invitation to a passive or contemplative "personal relationship with Jesus" with something active. He also suggests that "personal relationship" implies equality with Jesus which minimizes his transcedence as a commander above us. If so, that is important theologically as well as evangelistically.

Murrow isn't wrong that a "personal relationship with Jesus" appeals to women today in a deep, primal way that it does not to most men. But he is wrong that the term, or at least the concept behind the term, is inherently feminine.

In order to understand "personal relationship with Jesus" verbiage, you have to go back further than the Victorians. You have to go back to the Pietist movement in German Lutheranism and the Evangelical Revival/Great Awakening in Britain and her colonies in the 18th century. Notwithstanding evangelicals' rightful claim to descent from the Reformation and the Apostles themselves, that awakening almost 300 years ago is where evangelicalism as such was born.

The early evangelicals/Pietists emerged as a renewal movement that fought battles on two fronts. The front we're familiar with consisted of the Enlightenment types whose ideas would eventually make theological liberalism possible by undercutting confidence in the reliability of Scripture. But at the time, the battle on the other front was even more intense. Those opponents were orthodox dogmatists. They defended ornate creeds that synthesized the biblical witness with rigorously logical philosophical speculation.

The evangelicals didn't have a problem with the creeds. In fact, the disparate creeds that they subscribed to (Lutheran, Anglican, Reformed, and Baptist) frequently limited how closely they worked together. The evangelicals' problem was that these creeds were all that the orthodox that dominated the church believed. They did not know the God that the creeds spoke about. As a result, though the orthodox analysis of justification was spot-on, their preaching simply urged people to religious practices that kept institutional worship rolling. It did not save, nor did it transform lives.

Challenging this dead dogmatism in the early 1700s, Pietistic theologian August Hermann Francke wrote in "The Idea of a Student of Theology" that Christianity does not consist in "knowing, averring, and chattering, nor in high speculations" or "in all kinds of strange opinions." Rather, "true Christianity consists in this, that one acknowledge the Lord Jesus as personal Savior and Lord." Personal Savior and Lord—could have been written yesterday, right? But what Francke meant three centuries ago was that the core of Christianity was not intellectual cognition or institutional allegiance but a direct connection to ultimate spiritual reality, which is not merely an idea, but a person.

As a result of that connection, the true believer wouldn't have mere "head-knowledge" but also "heart-knowledge." There would be a direct spiritual perception of divine things, including a supernatural experience like John Wesley's experience of his "heart strangely warmed." The subjective experience emerged from an objective reality—not only "Christ for us" but "Christ for me" and "Christ in me." That objective reality necessarily involves a complete reorientation of the stuff of the human psyche, the understanding, emotion, and will, a reorientation called conversion.

As Jonathan Edwards put it, "True religion, in great part, consists in holy affections" (in his aptly titled Treatise Concerning the Religious Affections). Edwards didn't just mean "emotions" by the term "affections." He meant the wellsprings of our choices, those deep-seated, subrational loves and hates, preferences and revulsions, that move us to want what we want and act as we act. True Christianity is about God's reformation of the believer's affections to be holy, as he is holy. It is about more than emotion, but it is not about less, because our affections reveal themselves in part in our emotional responses to God and to our world.

As it happens, "holy affections" caused the early evangelicals—conspicuously led by young men—to do amazing things. They were anything but passive; they were men on a mission. Gripped by a personal connection to Jesus Christ, they preached to thousands, defied ecclesiastical authorities, and did absolutely, wildly courageous stuff like the two guys described in this video:



So taking Christ as one's personal Savior—an extrabiblical phrase that the early evangelicals freely employed—meant Christ living his life in and through the believer in a direct, unmediated, supernatural fashion a la Galatians 2:20. This is the heart of the personal relationship with Jesus.

But as time changes, so does culture, and as culture changes, so does the meaning of language. The irrationalism simmering under the surface of the rationalistic 18th century finally blew up into Romanticism, which affected both liberal and evangelical Protestantism. By the time of its full bloom in the latter part of the 19th century, it reduced affections to emotions, and it drew intense attention to God's love, expressed by liberals as a friendly benevolence for the whole human race (see the lyrics for "Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee") and by evangelicals as a quasi-romance with the individual (see "I Am His and He Is Mine"). This is the late Victorian influence on the concept of the personal relationship with Jesus that Murrow talks about in his post.

But the other impact is the Sexual Revolution, which coincided with the surge of "personal relationship with Jesus" that Murrow notes in the mid-1960s. Since then, in ordinary parlance the connotation of the word "relationship" has become sexualized because our concept of intimacy has been so heavily sexualized. But that's not the heart of the word "relationship" (or the concept of intimacy), at least not traditionally. "Relationship" used to refer merely to the nature of the connection between two persons, extrapersonal entities (like states), or ideas. On its own, there is nothing about the word "relationship" that implies equality between the related parties. It simply means that they are, in fact, related. The idea that a personal relationship with Jesus means that that relationship isn't the relationship of Master to servant, Commander to soldier, Sender to sent reveals just how vastly the Sexual Revolution has impacted our language and way of thinking.

But this is the world in which we live, and it does require us to be careful with our language. Murrow's post reveals that when we use the term "personal relationship with Jesus," men and women may be inferring things we don't mean to imply, and we have to be rigorous with our speech to prevent that. But does that mean that men don't need a personal relationship with Jesus? Absolutely not. A personal relationship with Jesus, rightly defined, is central to salvation. Any way around that, even if pragmatically successful in winning guys, will just win them to works-righteousness that is every bit as deadly as the naked sin they were living in before we met them. A personal relationship with Jesus isn't feminine fantasy. Rather, without a personal relationship with Jesus, rightly understood, there is no gospel.

The Vision Thing (18): Seeing the Details That Matter

We are deluged with information as never before in history. That any one of us can (or soon will be able to) access virtually the sum of human knowledge through a device that fits in one's pocket is astounding. In addition to the information that we may actively pursue, there is the information that is shot at us uninvited in the course of our pursuit of information or pleasure (through advertising and through the static and rabbit-trails of web searches gone awry). There is also the information we ask for (knowingly and unknowingly) through our e-mail subscriptions and RSS, Facebook, and Twitter feeds.

Amid the swirl of all the information we have at our disposal, true vision includes picking out the details that matter, which turns haphazard "knowledge" into insight and wisdom.

Jesus teaches an example of this which is extremely important in its own right but also serves as a model of what true vision does across a range of situations. In Matthew 24 (and parallels in Mark and Luke), Jesus answers his disciples' two questions, "When will [the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem] happen? And what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?" (v. 3). As the disciples' questions were lumped together, so Jesus blends his answer to the two, alternating subtly between short-distance prophecy of Jerusalem's destruction and long-distance prophecy of his return and the end of this world.

Jesus begins by giving examples of information that does not matter. "Watch out that no one misleads you," he warns. "For many will come in my name saying, 'I am the Christ,' and they will mislead many. You will hear of wars and rumors of wars. Make sure that you are not alarmed, for this must happen, but the end is still to come. For nation will rise up in arms against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these things are the beginning of birth pains" (vv. 4-8).

So let's review. According to Jesus, the following information is next to meaningless as an indicator of when we are close to Jesus' return and the end of this age:

• People who claim to be Jesus returned
• Wars (yes—even in the Middle East!)
• Famines
• Earthquakes

These things are just the beginning of labor pains, which may begin long before the baby is born and are no indicator of how long labor will take.

It is amazing, therefore, how many Christians through the centuries have read these words and entirely missed Jesus' point. He clearly says, This is the information that doesn't matter. Do not draw any conclusions about these factoids. Ignore them. And yet believers without vision hear "rumors of wars" and conclude that the world is about to end.

But Jesus then continues by identifying three indicators that do matter, the bits that are worth picking out of the deluge of information the world floods us with.

Then they will hand you over to be persecuted and will kill you. You will be hated by all nations on account of my name. Then many will be led to sin, and they will betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will appear and deceive many, and because lawlessness will increase so much, the love of many will grow cold. But the person who endures to the end will be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole inhabited earth as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come [vv. 9-14].

 Again, let's review. Here are indicators of the nearness of the end of the age that matter:

• True Christians will be hated by all nations and put to death.
• Many professing Christians will, in word or action, give up the faith and its moral requirements, being led astray by people who claim to be promoting the truth who actually aren't, and these surrendering Christians will inform the authorities of the whereabouts of faithful Christians.
• The good news about the royal government of God in heaven about to overthrow the governments of this earth will be proclaimed and heard among every ethnos ("people-group") on the planet.

The first two indicators Jesus gives have happened ever since the first century, often in waves of persecution and apostasy, and in fact are happening now, in some places more than others. But we have not yet seen either of them as a truly global phenomenon—Christians hated and killed everywhere at once, and defections from the faith by compromise with the dominant society and state everywhere at once. The third indicator has gotten closer to completion every decade, especially with the rapidly accelerating pace over the last two centuries, though there are still ethnē composed of millions with no indigenous, attention-getting Christian witness.

This is all extremely important for followers of Jesus to know. But my point in this post comes from Jesus' conclusion: "Learn this parable from the fig tree: Whenever its branch becomes tender and puts out its leaves, you know that summer is near. So also you, when you see all these things, know that he is near, right at the door" (vv. 32-33). True vision involves a discriminating, analytical perception shaped by the Word of God that picks out the few details that matter from the many details that don't.

Let's face it—media, whether "established," "social," or "underground," will always be talking about wars, famines (especially famines of money), and earthquakes (and hurricanes and climate change and so on). They may even talk about the occasional false Christ, though they will always give loads of airplay to false prophets. As a rule, the media will rarely talk about Christians being persecuted and killed for their faith, even though it happens every day. They will not report on defections from the faith in those terms. And they will hardly ever report on the swell of proclamation of the Christian gospel that even now is sweeping the globe and transforming the world. But this is the information that is really telling the story of history. At the end of the age, everyone will finally discover that that is what it was all about. While we live in this age, wars, famines of all sorts, and natural disasters surely are important, and of course Christians would not and should not be indifferent to them and the suffering they cause and how they might be prevented righteously. But without vision one would never guess that they are ultimately subsidiary to the point of it all.

As it is in the world, so it is in your church. As it is in history, so it is in your life. The details are endless, the stream of facts overwhelming. But only a few details really matter. Vision from God shows you which they are.

Finding God in the Dark

You might think that my interminable series on "The Vision Thing" has finally terminated, but you would be wrong. I have a bit further to go on that topic yet, but I'm taking a short and timely time-out.

A few years ago I attended a seminar called "Dealing with Difficult People." The trainer spent the introduction getting us to want to listen to him for the rest of the day, and he did a good job. But I'll never forget the unsettling (though intriguing) way he ended his intro: " . . . and then, before we're done, we're going to look at whether you are the difficult person in your office." True to his word, we surveyed the menagerie of difficult people found in offices all over the earth, and we took a further step to discover why the difficult person we are dealing with is so peculiarly difficult to oneself individually. Then the kicker—we saw how that person sees ourselves. We turned and faced the elephant: "I am as difficult a person to him as he is to me." A difficult step, but a necessary one, and far more comfortable a few moments after taking it than the moment before taking it.

This step is what Ted Kluck and Ronnie Martin write about in Finding God in the Dark: Faith, Disappointment, and the Struggle to Believe (Bethany House), released today.

In alternating chapters, Kluck and Martin each describe their parallel journeys. As their stories begin, they are dealing with the equivalent of "difficult people"—usually involving literal difficult people but always involving difficult circumstances. In Kluck's case it was a crushing year that included an international adoption stolen away and financial freefall as a result of plug-pulled book deals. Martin's story included the end of a musical career when people stopped showing up to concerts and the sudden death of his father.

Some of these might sound like fairly weak difficulties. "Wow, you lost a chance to get your name on a book. How hard for you. Looks like you bounced back." "What a shame you didn't get a fourteenth year getting paid to make music in front of people who want to hear it. A starving child in Africa is all broken up about it—as am I in my second straight shift changing bed pans." But trust me, the authors' trials don't sound weak when you read them. What makes our difficulties difficult is that they are ours. Kluck and Martin get the reader inside their heads and hearts, revealing just what made their difficulties so difficult for them and within the story making them convincingly and sympathetically difficult for us.

Then their journeys take a surprising turn for personal-disaster literature: the authors candidly reveal how the disasters expose their sin. (The most gripping chapter in the book is where Kluck describes his anger, bitterness, and jealousy over being strung along and dropped by the camp of a certain lantern-jawed, stubble-chinned, SEC football icon dubbed in the book as "American Hero.") The authors' sufferings that come from the outside are compounded by the perversion that reacts from the inside.

Eventually both men discover that they are the "difficult people." They start the hard process of repentance, confession of sin, and changing their attitudes and behaviors toward their circumstances and the people around them. They make amends. They make life-changing decisions, and they move on. They find God in the deepest, darkest place. Their pain ultimately came from the Lord's hand, a severe gift to drive them from their self-imposed death into abundant life. They describe it as "grace"—those truths of God's mercy on sinners that they had always professed, becoming existentially real in a way that they didn't know was possible.

It isn't hard to find a story in a book or a TV show about a person who experiences tragedy, digs down deep within, and overcomes to land in a storybook ending. It is rarer to find someone who admits that their victimhood reveals themselves as a perpetrator, and who has found inner peace though the denouement falls short of the fairy tale or has not yet come. If you're in the dark, alone, and wary of pat answers, Kluck and Martin's stories might help you find God there too.

The Vision Thing (17): Seeing Strength

Everyone who devotes themselves fully to obeying the vision that God has given them will have a power encounter. It is the day that the Evil One, through those who deliberately sin, who accidentally sin, or who are simply confused and ignorant for now, tries to stop you in your tracks. He may use intimidation or temptation or discouragement when he comes, but he will come, and the stronger of the two of you will win.

When he comes, the vision may seem to unravel before your eyes. It may look hopeless. You may start thinking that you failed God, that you were not good enough to see it through. You may question whether you heard God at all. You may wonder if your calling was predestined to fail, given just to build your character somehow.

When the devil attacks and you think about quitting, may God give you vision.

Elisha the Prophet was gifted by God to see the battle plan of the king of Aram against Israel before he executed it. Elisha shared his intelligence with the king of Israel, and Israel was always waiting in ambush whenever Aram invaded. When the oft-defeated king of Aram finally discovered what the secret of Israel's success was, he adopted a new strategy: get Elisha.

Elisha and his assistant went to bed one night and woke up in a city besieged by an Aramean strike force. His assistant started freaking out: "Oh no, my master! What will we do?"

Elisha was unimpressed. "Don't be afraid, for our side outnumbers them," he said casually. And then he prayed,

"O LORD, open his eyes so he can see."

Elisha's valet raised his head and dropped his jaw. There, between the city wall and the Aramean force, was a host of blazing, angelic chariots and horses ready for battle.

Think about it: Elisha didn't act like this was a big deal. He saw his security detail all the time.

When the Arameans began their assault on the foes they could not see, Elisha asked God to strike them blind, and God promptly obliged. Then, in one of the most bizarre moments in the often bizarre collection we call the Bible, Elisha walks out and offers to lead the Arameans to the guy they're looking for. Then he leads this column of helpless, blind Aramean charioteers ten miles into the Israelite capital of Samaria—probably suffering an injury on the way from trying to keep from laughing—where at Elisha's request, God opens their eyes, and they find themselves surrounded. Then Elisha convinces the king of Israel to throw these marauders a huge party and send them home, with best wishes to the king of Aram. The Arameans never raided Israel again (2 Kings 6:8-23).

God opens eyes, and he blinds them, and he opens them again if he pleases. And while the world and its invisible ruler, hell-bent on crushing the church, froth and rage, God steals their vision whenever it suits him while he gives his servants the vision of his power and protection. Those who have true vision have a vision that they cannot be stopped.

I have frequently freaked out like Elisha's servant in the face of attack. But before I give up, God always opens my eyes so I can see his flaming chariots ensuring victory.