To Spare the Life of a Snake

  Several weeks ago, I attempted to rescue the life of a wild baby rabbit whose legs I had accidentally mangled with our riding lawn mower. Ultimately, the rabbit died from infections and maggots. But one of the things the Lord instructed us during this time was that it is He who decides who lives and who dies, especially on this farm which belongs to Him. And His instructions to Heidi and I were explicit after that, we were to ask before we took the life of any animal on this property.

Today, I went to let our dogs in from the front yard for their dinner. I saw that they were barking at something. Well, that something turned out to be a relatively large red snake. I quickly brought the dogs in and informed those in the house that there was a snake in the front yard. We had seen this snake before, but had let it go believing that it was a relatively harmless rat snake (though we believe that it later ate one of our chicks). But someone had told Heidi that it was in fact a copperhead.

Heidi hurries out to see what it is, and she sees that it is the same snake we encountered before, and as far as she knows, this is a copperhead, which is an extremely venomous and deadly snake. My first thought was we need to take a shovel to its head and not take the chance. But Heidi remembered the Lord’s instructions on this matter, and she asks and gets that we are not to kill it, but relocate it. I ask as well, and get the same thing.

To be perfectly honest, I was incredulous. If this was truly such a threat, then it needed to be dealt with. To have two people with little idea how to relocate a snake in the first place attempt it with a venomous animal was insane. I said something to this effect, but Heidi held firm that this is what we both got from the Lord, and this is what we needed to do. So, she sends me looking for a plastic tub and a stick. After a failed attempt with a cooler and a pitchfork, I locate an unused tub and a long thin length of PVC which would serve.

Both of us trying to keep our distance, we try herding the snake into the tub. It goes about as well as expected on the first try. The snake makes a run for it. I try herding it back, it gets testy and slips past me. It then goes and hides in a bush and Heidi begins using the stick to try and scare it out. All of the while, we’re working under the assumption that this snake is lethal.

I begin to get frustrated, and start talking about grabbing the shovel again and just ending it because I don’t want Heidi injured, or Holly our cat who is hiding under the car watching the whole thing. This whole thing is taking too long, and it’s too dangerous. But Heidi reminds me again that she’s just trying to obey what we’re told. And so we press on.

Finally, the snake makes a break for it running along the edge of the (closed) garage door and I stab at it with the end of the PVC, pinning it into place so it can’t move. Snot like stuff starts appearing out of it, and feces appears nearby. It starts trying to strike at us, but then Heidi notices something. “I don’t see any fangs!” She tells me. I look again as it opens its mouth. I don’t see any fangs either. We throw the plastic bin over it, and eventually, carefully, work the lid underneath it, enclosing it. Neither of us understand why it doesn’t have fangs. But we apparently scared both the urine and the feces out of it. And all I can think about is that, for a lethal snake, this animal has only been trying to get away from us. It didn’t attempt to strike until it was pinned and scared to death.

We take the animal across the road and down a little bit and release it into a field that is almost never used anymore on the neighbor’s property who lives in Owensboro now. The snake slithers away from us and into the brush almost as soon as the lid is opened.

Both Heidi and I immediately look up images of snakes when we get back to the house. It was never a copperhead at all. It was just an innocent red rat snake that got caught in the wrong yard by two dogs, and terrorized by two humans. I was going to kill an animal that didn’t need to be killed, and was probably more beneficial than not just because it was mistakenly identified as harmful.

God was right. We didn’t need to kill it. But my fear nearly caused me to disobey and harm an innocent creature. My actions and words were my own, and it was only the trust and faith of my wife which saved both the snake, and saved me from taking a life that didn’t need to be taken.

Responses on the Character and Omnipotence of God as Regards Uvalde

  My friend, I'm not sure how to answer this question without it sounding "off" in some way. Either I run the risk of sounding potentially arrogant, or I run the risk of sounding totally out there. I've seen God do a number of things in terms of protecting and providing, most of which are things which are so astronomically improbable if not impossible that He is the only explanation. I've known Him deeply in a way that is hard to put into words. I've seen what He does, and only later understood why He does it or doesn't do it, because I could not have truly understood in the moment. 

I didn't understand why, at one point in time, He allowed our family to have only beans to eat for weeks, and then only peas we had gleaned from a field until they ran out, and only then did He provide the money for us to go and get food from the store. I wouldn't understand the reason for almost ten years. As it turned out, that bout of forced fasting probably saved Heidi's life and forced her first M.S. flare into remission. But we didn't know that at the time. 

It is true, God won't violate the free will of anyone, because to do that would take away the person and replace him or her with an automaton, effectively destroying the person. Murdering their soul, if you will. 

There are times God will and does protect a person from being harmed in all the ways you mentioned. He kept us from going off the side of a cliff when three of our four tires were over open air on an iced road during the winter. We should have died. He shielded us from the tornado that went through here. And when I say it went through here, I mean it passed over our house and then broke apart. None of us or our animals were lost, and neither were our buildings damaged. Does that mean He's protected us from every misfortune,? No. Clearly not. But that wouldn't be realistic either, nor would it be beneficial to us or to anyone else. 

God allows human beings to suffer the consequences of their individual actions, and their collective actions. He will do damage control to keep it from getting as bad as it could, but He won't stop it completely, otherwise, we would keep doing those things which are harmful to ourselves and others. He could fix climate change instantly, for example, but we would keep doing what we're doing to cause it. Ultimately, at least according to Scripture, there will come a time when human beings have made such a mess of things and brought ourselves and this planet close enough to total destruction that He will step in and impose direct military and political occupation on Earth. This is the last resort, and a step He has been putting off for a very long time. 

You brought up the mass shooting at Uvalde. Let's look at that for a minute. It was not God who decided to walk into a school and murder children. It was a human being. It was not God who bought the gun. It was a human being. It was not God who chose to pull the trigger again, and again, and again. It was a human being. It was also not God who encouraged a culture where such weapons are easily obtainable. It was not God who harassed and bullied the kid who became the shooter, but human beings. It was not God who waited in the school hallway for an hour before moving into the classroom to confront the shooter, but human beings. 

The argument is frequently made, "But why didn't God stop the shooting if He is omnipotent?" More to the point, why doesn't God stop every shooting, theft, rape, and offense which occurs? Can He? Yes. If He chose to, He could render every particle of matter in existence back into its raw energy state with less than a thought. Or He could render the energy of His own Being into any particle or combination of particles He so chose. Matter, energy, time, space, dimensionality, it all moves through Him, and He is the infinite foundation of it all. 

He could stop every negative action, word, or thought, but then this goes back to the violation of free will, and murdering the person in the process. He would have that same person turn away from the harm they are causing on their own accord. He would have them come to their senses, and allow them to suffer the consequences of their actions in order to accomplish this. 

The Uvalde shooter and every shooter, one way or the other, is a product of our human society as a whole. He is a symptom of a much more systemic disease which we can only hide for so long before it becomes manifest to everyone. The same is true of the rise of fascism, racism, famine, super diseases, and so on. These are symptoms of a core disease much like coughing, sneezing, fever, and a runny nose are symptoms of a cold. It is not God's fault that we have reached this point. He's done damage control throughout the millennia, but He won't fully remove the consequences of our actions as a species. 

There is nothing which God "can't" do. But there is a lot that He "won't" do, because doing it would be worse for everyone in the long run and wouldn't result in the best possible outcome for everyone. It is an old truism that the child who gets too close to the fire should be allowed to burn himself just once in order to learn to never do it again. God's discipline is always about the natural consequences of actions. And what affects one person always affects every person around them, and every person around those people individually, and so on. What we are seeing now are the natural consequences of the actions of our species being played out.

The only shootings like this we see are the ones He doesn't stop. For every shooting which makes the news, there are a hundred potential shootings which He brings to nothing. You never pay attention to the person keeping things clean, taking out the trash, and so on until they don't. He could stop every shooting, every murder, every rape, every violation. But no, He doesn't because to stop every violation of human beings would require that He turn every human being into an automaton, including you and me. We are the ones with the malfunction. 

Making the argument you're making is like the World of Warcraft Horde players I once saw on Youtube who kited Jaina Proudmore all the way from Theramore to Orgrimmar where she randomly started killing everyone in the city and the bodies started piling up. The players then messaged Blizzard's help center telling them what was going on and asked, "How could you let us do this? She's killing everybody!" 

We are the cause of these problems, not Him. He has already given us the Way, the solution to keep from causing them and we refuse to take it. 

As I said before, God does damage control, but He does not stop everything. He will not contribute to our collective and increasing delusion that we can keep doing what we're doing and somehow we're going to be just fine and get better. That's not how this works. Our malfunction will eventually destroy both our species and the surface of this planet, but we have to understand and admit that, and we are so in our own little worlds that we can't see it and blame Him for our behaviors. 

This whole planet is functionally an asylum for a species that has become inherently deranged and delusional. How would you respond to a patient who refuses to do what you prescribe or listen to you any longer? How would you respond to a patient who refuses to believe you are who you are, and instead makes up another therapist and begins quoting this figment of their imagination instead? 

The god you describe isn't omnipotent, he's impotent. He's a god you can live with because he satisfies your ideas of right and wrong, good and evil, what pleases you and what displeases you. He's a god you can stuff in a box and call a "good boy." 

But the Foundation of all existence can't be stuffed in a box, and isn't subject to our ideas of who He is and isn't. He's not subject to individual human ideas about morality, nor does He bow to what makes us happy and what doesn't. His concerns are rescuing as many of us as possible, and all things are possible for Him, from our own insanity and my point in the original post and in my other arguments on this thread was that He does not need us physically alive to do just that, and is perfectly capable of resurrecting all those who have died into physical bodies once more, as the Scriptures say.

Those children who died in Uvalde went immediately into His presence, as Jesus said, "their angels always see the face of My father." They will be among the resurrected. They suffered for minutes, but they are fully surrounded by and are engulfed in His eternal presence and love for them right now. Those who die in this world are not destroyed, not to Him, but He preserves every single human soul because they are all precious to Him. More precious to Him than they are to us. God is Good and fully and infinitely omnipotent, but He plays the longest game for all of us, and He is playing to win.

A police officer would stop every shooting within their power to stop because that is their charge and responsibility. A police officer is a being bound by four dimensions and only truly capable of dealing with what is happening right in front of them in that moment. That police officer has no idea of the repercussions of his actions, or how they might affect those a thousand miles away or a hundred years in the future. 

God considers the best good for every single creature that has ever existed or will ever exist because all of those existences are right in front of Him. Were He to engage in what you suggest, stopping every single harm that every single human being commits, He would have to end the human race as we know it, one way or the other. It would be functional and total genocide. 

You and others are upset about Uvalde, about the Holocaust, about every atrocity a human being has committed since before history began. Like the previously mentioned WoW players, this is still, "Why does God let us do these horrible, atrocious things to each other?" Really, the question is or should be, "Why do we do these horrible atrocious things to one another?" 

The answer is that we do these horrible atrocious things to one another because all human beings have an inherited neurological problem without limbic system, sending it into overdrive, and which sees everything we individually like as necessary to survival ("good") and everything we individually dislike as a threat to survival ("evil"), and we respond accordingly by trying to hoard what we like and destroy what we dislike. And more to the point, without this problem being shown to us in stark and sometimes painful detail, we can't think or reason apart from this flaw. Only what we agree with is considered "Good" and everything else is considered "Bad." 

God did do something about this, and human beings on the whole rejected His solution, perverted it, watered it down, and twisted it into something which resonates with their malfunctioning mind instead. Had humanity as a whole followed and kept the treatment plan He prescribed, we wouldn't be having this conversation. But they didn't. 

Your argument is only logical if you don't consider all factors at play. But when you begin to consider all the factors, including the inherited problem all human beings have (which I know you reject), then the picture looks a lot different, and God is both Good and totally Omnipotent, omnipresent (in all points of time, space, and every dimension, as well as beyond the boundaries of all of these), omniscient, and working for the best possible outcome for all of us without destroying who each one of us is individually.

Recent Thoughts on Universalism and Salvation

  I've been reading a book written in 1899 on Universalism lately. More specifically, in defense of Universalism from the Early Christian writings. It's got some good points, and some things which I feel are a stretch of logic. More to the point, it hinges most of its argument on the subtle differences of meaning between AIΩNIAN and AIΔIOC in Greek. Those differences are valid, but it's kind of a shaky branch to hang something like this on.

My evolving thought on the subject is that maybe we aren't supposed to speculate and build dogmas in either direction. Maybe there's always the possibility of redemption even out of torment, but maybe not everyone will make use of it. Human beings don't like to deal with possibilities. We like certainties. We want to know that 1+1=2. We want to know "If this, then that." And frequently, we want vengeance, payback against those whom we feel have done wrong in some way. We want the offender to be punished so that "we" feel better.

One point that the book made is that the word in Greek for God's punishment in the afterlife is "KOΛACIN," which means "discipline, chastisement." It's punishment which takes place to train and restore someone, not retribution or payback. But this word assumes that there's an end goal where the chastisement is no longer necessary. No good parent punishes a child just to exact vengeance on them, but to train them to produce the desired behavior.

Scripture doesn't use the word "forever" when it comes to punishment, at least not in Greek. In Greek, the word that strictly means "forever" with regards to time is AIΔIOC. The word that Scripture uses is AIΩNIAN. This word is more nuanced. Strictly speaking, it means "to the end of the age," or also "pertaining to the age to come." It can also mean "indefinite, timeless," and to this end "eternal" in the sense that the thing being described is outside of time rather than being described as continuing forever within time. Greek writers would sometimes use this word to describe some holding an office for the rest of his life, or something just happening since anyone can remember. In this respect, it's the same kind of thing as English slang when we talk about the high school teacher who's "been at that school for an eternity." That is, they've been there for a very long time.

So, is the outer darkness, torment, truly eternal in the sense of forever? Maybe that depends on the individual soul, like the prodigal son, coming to their senses and asking to come home. Maybe some will, maybe some won't. But maybe the important things to know are that the outer darkness is real, and also there may still be hope for those who come to their senses within it.

If God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance, then doesn't it follow that He would take all and every necessary action to ensure that this happens with the only restriction being that He will not violate the individual soul's free will to choose? If this was His heart, and it was that important to Him, then why would He just leave it up to us? He would and does certainly invite us with the privilege of being a part of reconciling the world, but He would not rest everything on the willingness or ability of human beings whom He knows are malfunctioning in the first place. The work then is God's work, and He will accomplish it with or without us. That He invites us to take part is a privilege which He allows to some and not others depending on time and place.

Furthermore, if this is His heart, and it is that important to Him, why would He make it so that physical death would be the point of no return in regards to repentance and turning to Him? He is not some tribal deity some humans made up in their own cultural image. He is not Zeus, Ba'al, Hades, Odin, or any other myth. He is the ground and foundation of all existence and being who does not just give up when one of His creations develops a flaw, no matter how bad the flaw might be. And that He does not just give up, His resources in addressing the problem are as infinite as He is.

*  *  *

Who is saved and who is not?

I woke up, just this morning, to find a request from a friend to write about my views on this subject after espousing my current thoughts from reading an old work on Universalism. In some ways, I feel like I have already addressed this question many, many times over. And no matter how I answer now, no one is going to be satisfied with my answer.

This question is based on a fundamental misconception of what the salvation found in Jesus Christ is to begin with. It is based on the concept that salvation primarily, if not only, concerned with the afterlife. What happens after we die?

But this is not the salvation which is taught or described by Jesus Christ and His Apostles. That salvation which was taught is very much rooted in this life. It is very much about the here and now, with consequences that extend into the afterlife yes, but it is primarily focused on who we are and what we do in this life.

The salvation which is taught in the New Testament is deliverance or rescue from our own fatal flaw as human beings which makes it so that we can literally do nothing without screwing it up in some way. This fatal flaw makes it so that no matter how hard we try to do the right thing, we end up doing the wrong thing in some way. No matter how hard we might seek the good, the bad ends up resulting in some way.

The salvation which is taught in the New Testament is union with Jesus Christ allowing for His Spirit to bypass that fatal flaw within our brains so that we are no longer enslaved to it. Thus we are actually able to do the good and the right thing because it is He who is doing it through us, and not we ourselves.

This union has consequences not only here, but in the afterlife, as whoever is joined with Jesus Christ is wherever He is, and vice versa. Whoever is joined to Jesus Christ is a part of Him just as His eye, or hand, or foot is a part of Him, and He is joined to that person as the head which coordinates and controls movement and action insofar as the person remains connected to that head.

The early Christians were explicit in who they considered to be one of their number, and this was the person who lived as Jesus Christ lived and taught. If a person didn't live as He taught, then he wasn't considered a Christian regardless of what he or she said or preached.

Fundamentally, I don't think we should be asking this question of anyone else other than ourselves, and this in the vein of "Am I actually living as Jesus taught? Am I actually one of His disciples, or am I just paying Him lip service?"

If what I have previously written is true regarding God not giving up on people even after death, then we have absolutely no measure to hold up to another person in this life and say, "This person is 'saved,' and that person is not" where the afterlife is concerned. The only measuring rod we have to gauge someone's salvation in Jesus Christ in the here and now is whether or not their behaviors and words reflect and resemble that of Jesus Christ Himself.

Salvation is in the here and now. It is in what we think, what we say, and what we do. That "salvation" which does nothing to alter behavior is not salvation at all, but acting and pretending. Salvation is the life of Jesus Christ being lived through the individual who follows Him. Everything else is a consequence of this. You cannot be a disciple of Jesus Christ without actually holding to the discipline of Jesus Christ.

"How can I best love this other person next to me?" This really is the first and most important question for a disciple of Jesus Christ. Not "what great things can I do for God?" Not "Do I have enough faith?" Not really anything else. 

It doesn't matter who this person next to me is, and if I am alone, it is both "How can I best love God?" and "How can I best love this person that I am?" This latter point is in the sense of stepping outside oneself as though a third party observer.

How best can I love my wife? How best can I love Cindy? How best can I love John? How best can I love the cashier at Walmart? How best can I love the woman with four young kids taking forever at the self-checkout? How best can I love any person and every person who enters my orbit? How best can I love our dogs? Our livestock? How best can I love each one individually and as a group?

This is the first and most important question we must ask, because this question immediately addresses Jesus' commands to love, and so this question is really, "How can I best obey Jesus' commands right now in this moment with this person or creature right next to me?"

It is best to put the thoughts of those not right next to you away for the moment, because then it becomes overwhelming and too hypothetical. Just focus on this person next to you, whoever it might be. It's not about whether they deserve it, whether they're worthy of it, whether they're pleasant or unpleasant. Do I best love them by inserting myself into their space, or by leaving them be? Do I best love them by spending time with them? Speaking to them? Giving them something? Simple respect and compassion go a long way, as does a smile and some friendly words. These are easy enough to part with. But the key idea is, "How do I best love this person right here and right now?"