ben.atwood.com.au

Back in June or July, we became the owners of a fishtank and four goldfish, and have since enjoyed having these pets (or pieces of furniture? I can’t decide) swimming around in our lounge room. But something had always been missing. Goldfish are fine, but they’re so everyday, so bourgeois. So I went to the aquarium shop and returned with a new resident for our tank.

So named because she is an apple snail, Granny Smith has enlivened our tank by scooting around and scavenging on the leftover food and er, goldfish byproducts which litter the gravel. Her hobbies appear to include climbing to the top of the tank and base-jumping back to the ground, eating lettuce, hiding in logs, and getting stuck behind pipes and hoses. We also learnt that she is at least semi-amphibious, as she climbed out of the tank while we were at church and we found her on the carpet when we got home. Fortunately, she survived long enough for us to drop her back in the water.

We initially thought of Granny as elderly, but she surprised us by laying a clutch of eggs just above the waterline. We are waiting to see if they hatch – not sure what we’ll do with all those little snail-lets, especially as each clutch contains between one to three hundred eggs. If you are into escargot, please contact us.

One of the pluses of working on staff at a church? Receiving unsolicited emails people submit via the website (I’m not sure why they choose me – there are six other people on staff!). Here are some excerpts from two which I thought were worth sharing.

#1 – received 25/08/2008

I am writing to you on behalf of Anderson, Indiana-based pop/rock band no greater sky. We are scheduling dates for our upcoming Australia tour, which will run from November 21 to February 11. We would love to have Toongabbie Anglican Church as a part of our tour! Specifically, we will be in your area
23-26 November. Whether it be through a one-night, weekend, or week-long concert and/or worship event, we are open to what will meet the needs of your church best. We are also available for Christmas events. Below, I have included dates that are available for booking.

I did end up looking up the band’s myspace page and it turns out they are a real band. Is it a sign that you’ve made it as a church when US Christian pop/rock bands are saying that they would love to include you as part of a tour? I suggested to others in our staff team that we book in the week-long concert and/or worship event, but so far, I haven’t heard back.

#2 – received 11/09/2008

God said to worship on the Sabbath not Sunday. You can easily check and see the Catholic Church changed it about 400 AD. and every church has kept this day since. Wrong. Saturday is the day. God said to work 6 days and to rest on the Sabbath. You study some and you will see that Saturday is the day.
The 4th commandment says to keep it Holy. You sin every week by worshiping on Sunday. You will also see that the emperior [sic] worshiped on a Sunday and he with your good buddies the Catholic Church decided they could change anything in the Bible, but they can’t changed [sic] a thing.

Picked up this morning when I checked my emails. I apparently missed the memo which locked Saturday in as the only acceptable Sabbath…and the memo where I became good buddies with the entirety of the Roman Catholic Church. Better get me to a confessional and deal with all those sinful Sunday church gatherings I’ve been a part of for the past twenty-three years.

I recently tussled with the idea of predestination as part of an assessment I did for my MTS program. The task was really to design a way of teaching predestination in a way that doesn’t require your listeners to have a BTh, but true to nerdular form, I ended up writing a companion essay to think through the issues more fully and get my head straight on what the Bible teaches on predestination.

The main surprise for me was that the whole doctrine is really not as hard as I thought it would be. In fact, I suspect people get hung up at one of three points and remain stuck there because predestination is one of those things that doesn’t neatly slot into our Western, rationalistic, logic-oriented minds (privately, I do wonder if this will become less of an issue as pluralism sinks in as an acceptable way of assessing ideas). The three points where I reckon most people run aground are:

1. The idea that God predestines some and not others to eternal life. This is understandable; to accept this, it requires us to defer to God and acknowledge that He has not chosen to predestine everyone to eternal life, but rather some to eternal life and some to eternal punishment.
2. The tension between God’s sovereignty (or, as Packer would argue, His Kingship) and human responsibility for sin (or, God’s role as Judge), seeing as the two are made plain in Scripture but appear irreconcilable. If God is sovereign and all our thoughts and ways are known by Him and subject to His will, how can we be held accountable for our sin? For a related difficulty, see point one above.
3. The question of falling away – specifically, if God has predestined His elect, and someone who appears to be elect falls away, were they really elect in the first place?

I could write a lengthy article about these, but I won’t (perhaps I will make my essay available, for the interested). But, I will say this – could it be that our biggest problem with predestination, as a doctrine, is not that it is nonsense, or unfair, or inconsistent, but rather that we are sometimes unwilling to adopt a position of humility and accept that God’s ways are higher than ours? The conflicting, seemingly-incompatible truths presented by the Bible may cause our minds to bristle and may spawn questions which appear to have no answer. This, though, should not lead us instantly to disillusionment. Rather, perhaps we should acknowledge that our human wisdom is finite and accept that we will not always be able to wrangle Biblical truth into a logically-consistent framework. The tensions and difficulties we encounter are no doubt frustrating, but there is also comfort in the knowledge that God would not have created such tensions and difficulties if such things were meant to be skimmed over.

What are your thoughts on predestination? What difficulties do you have with this doctrine when it is taught?