What an enjoyable discussion about gifts with my four-year-old! What a difference gratitude makes when it comes to gifts. From seeing our possessions as products of chance or luck, which are objects to be used for our pleasure; gratitude transforms our attitude into seeing our possessions as tokens of the love that someone has for us. What a transformation!
Gratitude is founded
on the principle of Grace. Please indulge me as I try to emphasize how the
biblical narrative subverts whole modern secular narratives and ought to
transform our attitude. I’m specifically focusing on the popular conceptions of
economics and eternal salvation.
Our modern secular narrative is founded on the principle of
evolution which sees the order of life as from impersonal static forces called
natural laws. Within which gratitude is relegated to human-to-human
interactions, but what we receive from “nature” is ours to exploit according to
our own pleasure. The right-wing version of this narrative emphasizes individual
work and the resulting privilege of disposing with our property as the individual
sees fit. The left-wing version emphasizes
the grace of inheriting nature but perverts it by making the State into God’s
earthly representative—making us accountable to the collective will in the way
we use our property. In contrast, the
biblical narrative casts all our private property as fundamentally gifts from Jehovah,
the Creator. He created our life and all the abundance of the earth to sustain
it. We must work our property in order to sustain and enhance our life, but the
Bible puts the pre-eminence on the gracious gift and the work follows as obedience
and calls for gratitude for the opportunity to do the work. As a result, we are
accountable to Him for the use of our wealth.
We also need to purge of ourselves of humanism in the doctrine
of salvation. The cross of Christ is the central focus of the Bible and the gift
of eternal salvation from death and suffering as the greatest gift and triumph
of Grace. The attitude that is so dominant in nominally Christian society is
that humans make the final decision over our destiny. I contend that the
biblical doctrine of predestination powerfully opposes this idea without
sacrificing an iota of human will and responsibility, through this same model
of Grace. In accordance with humanism, we are surrounded with the assumptions
that man has some kind of sovereignty to accept or reject that gift of the cross.
The missionary mandate (that man carries the gift of the cross to fellow man
through their preaching of the gospel or giving of copies of the Bible) is
still a version of this error. I call it an error because all these models
bring man into agency in eternal salvation. No matter how mild or small man’s
agency is, once man does his part, God’s gift of life is required on the terms
of that contract. This is the model of debt and is incompatible with the model of
Grace (Rom 4:4-5). The role of faith cannot be a condition of salvation without
destroying Grace. The biblical model of Grace teaches that our faith is a free
gift of God that comes with eternal glory. Our responsibility (obedience and
worship) always comes after our eternal salvation is secured by God on the
principle of adoption which was pre-determined by the sovereign will of God before
we existed (Eph 1:3-5). Just like the biblical model of economics doesn’t have
to choose between a left-right dichotomy of Humanism, neither does the biblical
model choose between the humanistic dichotomy of God’s sovereignty and man’s
responsibility. Man’s responsibility is not destroyed by subverting the model
of debt, it is amplified by Grace via the principle of gratitude.
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