Now there's a title to discourage further reading. But since my wife says nobody reads this blog anyway (she's such a sweetheart), the risk is minimal.
Induction is a kind of reasoning in which a set of established facts provide enough information to make a general observation beyond those facts. For example, if a dozen people bombed an airplane and all 12 of them were from one country, it is reasonable to be worried about someone else from that country boarding airplanes. This is not bias or prejudice. It is inductive reasoning.
The flip side of induction is deduction. Deduction makes an observation internal to the established facts. For example, it is deductive to say "Mr. Brown is a man." The established fact is the "Mr." That is all you need to further deduce that he is a man.
Which leads to the question of writing and texts.
You might say that a grocery list encourages deductive thinking while a poem stirs inductive thinking. "Bread and wine" on a grocery list simply means "buy bread and wine." Did you deduce that?
But: "bread and wine" in a poem, well, that could mean a whole lot of things.
And you don't even need a poem. "Bread and wine" in prose will do. Already in prose, "Bread and wine" can mean a whole lot of things. And our world is much better for it.
I mean to say that there is an aesthetic dimension to inductive reasoning. When we induce, we encompass the possibility of the beautiful.
Now, the Word of God is not all poetry. But it is no grocery list either.
The Word of God is prophetic. That's what it is. How do we know this? Well, it says that "the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy." And Jesus is the Word -- the Logos -- of God.
And so when the prophetic Logos says "God is love," you don't deduce that it applied only to John, who wrote it.
You induce to the point that it includes you, who receives it. God is Love, to you.
You induce to the point that it includes the world. God is Love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.
And that is a beautiful thing.
Logos2Go
Revelation 19.10 Then I fell down at his feet to worship him, but he said to me, "You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you and your brothers who hold to the testimony of Jesus. Worship God." For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.
1 John 4.16 So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.
The aesthetics of prophetic induction
Deadlines and 'The day of the Lord'
We think of time as a line, and on that line we tie many knots we call deadlines.
Dead-lines. Interesting word.
Just how dead is a deadline?
Many of them are pretty dead even before you get to them. That’s because many of them are artificial. In an achievement-oriented culture such as ours, many of our deadlines are culturally imposed:
In keeping up with the Joneses, you’ve got to look like the Joneses. And that entails meeting deadlines:
Let’s get that HDTV, say, by Christmas. That way we’ll look like the Joneses, who already have one (the nerve …!). So now I’ve got to come up with, oh, about a thousand bucks in a coupla weeks.
Once that deadline is fixed, it’s hard to shake. In fact we don’t want to shake it. Our happiness somehow depends on meeting the deadline.
Deadlines are subtle in that way.
Earlier in my academic “trajectory” (think of it as an ascending line), I set the goal of publishing more papers than my peers. That involved deadlines. Dead-lines. I didn’t kill myself meeting them, but I sure know about blood-pressure meds.
In the Scriptures, there is the phrase “the day of the Lord” -- and it is one frustrating phrase. This is because “the day of the Lord” is a moving target. You can’t exactly point to a knot on your time-line and say, “See, that knot is ‘the day of the Lord.’ So watch out, you’ve got about a week and a half left before it hits…”.
You just can’t say that because this “day of the Lord” is here, all around us, as much as it is to come. You can't set up your priorities on a line: this first, this second, this third, to prepare for the day of the Lord … .
It's a hard thing to tie knots when there are no lines.
It's a hard thing to build a stepladder out of water ... when you are in the ocean.
Logos2Go
Joel 2.28-31 And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female servants in those days I will pour out my Spirit. And I will show wonders in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and columns of smoke. The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. For in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be those who escape, as the Lord has said, and among the survivors shall be those whom the Lord calls.
Acts 2.16-17, 20 But this is what was uttered through the prophet Joel: And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh … (20) the sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the day of the Lord comes, the great and magnificent day …
Hebrews 1.1-2 Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things …
The picture of building a step ladder out of water when you are in the ocean is not mine. I believe it is in one of Cornelius van Til's books.
The yellow light problem
There's no way to prove this, but I suspect I run into more yellow lights than the average bear.
There's that green light far away. You see it through your windshield as clearly as a moth sees a candle, as clearly as a ship in a storm sees the beacon from the lighthouse, as clearly as all of those overdone Christmas lights everybody in Spokane will hang, oh, just a coupla weeks from now ...
There's that green light far away ... and I just KNOW it'll turn yellow right before I get to it.
After everybody else comfortably drives through the green, when Mr. Dave draws nigh, boom: YELLOW.
Yellow for Mr. Dave.
Yellow for Mr. Dave.
Yellow for Mr. Dave. For crying out loud.
This has been one of the BANES of my life since I was a young man in Philadelphia. With two kids, then three kids, in tow. With a wife sitting quietly -- then not-so-quietly -- next to me, knowing that I'm stewing about the next stupid traffic light, which I'm absolutely sure will turn yellow just as I get there.
What nobody else in the world has to worry about -- because they all get the green -- is always a MOMENT OF DECISION for me because...
Boom: guess what? It just turned yelloooooooow. You must be right there at the intersection, aren't you, Dave? You jerk.
Do I stop? Do I rush through it? Do I risk a ticket? Do I look like a fool by stopping halfway into the intersection and then sheepishly putting my car in reverse, going back to "go" with my tail between the rear tires?
I must admit I've muttered things that should not be muttered at many traffic intersections.
Things that should NOT be muttered.
And a philosophical slob like me tends to generalize this misfortune to larger domains of life. Is my entire life a story of coming up to yellow lights??? Everybody else slipping comfortably through. But I have to wait in suspense because ... I just might not get through. I just might have to wait. It might all turn yellow on me. How many years of my life have been spent waiting because of this YELLOW LIGHT PROBLEM???
But a sure sign of getting older is that I've actually come to appreciate those yellow lights -- one of which I just got prior to writing this (which gave me the idea of writing this).
These days I almost always stop at yellow lights. They are times to pause and be thankful, to be reminded that I don't have to rush to the next forgettable obligation.
If God counts the hairs of our heads, He surely must also have designed all of those yellow lights. And because I get more yellows than most, I'm one blessed guy.
Logos2Go
Matthew 10-29-31 Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.
Nobel prizes and virtual accomplishments
"They make money the old fashioned way, the earrrrrn it."
That was John Houseman's famous pitch line for the investment firm Smith Barney. You can still see it on YouTube.
Houseman hammers home the fact that earning money the old fashioned way involves work, hard work. The point is that working hard is not only the surest way towards achieving one's goal, it also gives that achievement a seal of authenticity. The one who finally succeeds deserves any rewards he has coming to him.
Nowadays it seems that Houseman's maxim is itself old fashioned.
That's because we live more and more in a virtual world where the distance between wishful thinking and actual achievement -- at least in an illusory way -- is not as far as it used to be.
Rather than working years to achieve your goal -- and in the process expending your life for it -- today we have the convenience of the click of a mouse. Click that mouse and benefits come immediately: banking, schooling, shopping, entertainment; you can belong to an entire community of friends without physically being with any of them.
But the recent financial collapse should suggest to us that making (or spending) what turned out to be artificial quick-money has its problems.
All of that wealth was illusory.
Houseman's point should still give us pause. To make real money, you might still have to do it the old fashioned way. You might still have to work hard to earrrrrrrrn it.
But market-savvy advertisers today probably wouldn't run the ad because they know that a generation used to getting instant results at the click of a mouse may not be attracted to the notion of hard work.
They may not even recognize the idea. Hard work? You mean I actually have to sweat for my highfalutin ideas? Wow.
Having been in the education business for several decades now, I have noticed that student achievement is less and less measured by hard work. More and more it is measured by how students can express their feelings. Or by how "sincere" they are.
Education used to be about preparing folks for the work and sweat of the real world. And that real world rewarded those who worked and sweated and succeeded -- fully accepting the real world fact that not all will.
Education today is more about creating a virtual world, a world of feeling rather than labor, a world of instant product rather than the gestation of process, a world offering an illusory equality for all because it is a world offering an illusory lack of need for any.
A world of make-believe depths and virtual accomplishments.
And if you can talk about it all really eloquently, you might even win a Nobel Prize.
Logos2Go
Genesis 3.19 By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
2 Thessalonians 3.10 ... If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat.
Luke 9.23 And he said to all, If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me...
James 2.18 But someone will say, "You have faith and I have works." Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works.
On my father-in-law's passing
D. Robert Bastian came into my life 35 years ago, and I was scared to death of him. That was because I wanted to marry his daughter. For Mr. Bastian -- and up to the day he passed away this week, it was always "Mr. Bastian" to me -- for Mr. Bastian, me marrying his daughter was not an acceptable idea.
I remember the night we talked to him about our plans. Basically, he said I could be part of the family if that was his daughter's wish, but his love will only be reserved for his daughters. He also made clear his disapproval over his daughter marrying someone non-white. That particularly hurt, especially during the earlier stages of our marriage.
But let me quickly say this. Years later, when I turned 50-something, I wrote Mr. Bastian a letter. I said, you know, now that I have my own grown children, if one of them were to waltz into my house with someone like the young David Wang: idealistic, unmannered, hair too long, artsy-fartsy -- and yes, of a different race -- and if that person wanted to marry into my family, I would also have serious issues. I would probably flat out say NO. I felt a real need to let him know that.
Characteristically, he never responded. But I know he took note of it.
The fear and hurt have eroded away over the decades; certainly it hasn't been there for me for years. And I don't think it was there for him at the end. In recent years I've always looked forward to seeing him.
And I absolutely enjoyed it when he traveled with us to China in 2005. The man actually gave "scholarships" to his children and their families to enable all of them to go. And so the American and Chinese sides of my family hung out for over two weeks going all over China. I climbed the Great Wall with Mr. Bastian. It was one of the most memorable times of my life.
Now, about that love thing. I'm not sure where he stood on that at the end. Love comes in different forms, and one benefit of growing old is you can spot love in more diverse ways, most of them unspoken ways.
One thing is for sure: love only comes when you're stuck with someone for years. You either learn love over time. Or you split. Mr. Bastian never split (years later we were to find out that he resolved not to disown his daughter over our marriage (!!) -- as when his mother's parents disowned her when she married his father).
And sir, I never split either. And now that it's all over, I wouldn't have wanted it any other way.
There are three things Mr. Bastian added to my life:
1. He was the most consistent man I ever knew. Never depressed, but never exuberant. Always skeptical of people, but it was a consistent skepticism, one that protected his family. A self-made man who wouldn't pay 15 bucks for long distance phone service, but for over 35 years never ceased to lavish generous gifts to his daughters' families. Mr. Bastian and his wife Phyllis, who passed 7 years ago, raised three solid daughters. It was the grace of God that did it, yes, but God's grace included Bob and Phyllis Bastian.
2. I've never said this to anyone, only because his loss this week clarified it for me for the first time. For me, an immigrant, Mr. Bastian represented Middle America during the mid-20th century. The generation that went through the Depression, the War; the generation that had nothing of what their kids, and certainly their grandkids, have now in the way of material comforts, electronic gadgetry ... negotiable morals. The generation that kept America great during those decades. The America of my childhood. The America I love.
3. Yes, unfortunately for all of his daughters' families who follow Jesus, we were never quite able to get Mr. Bastian to acknowledge his need for Him. But over the years I've become more and more challenged -- which is to say, less and less certain -- as to who, exactly, I will see in heaven. I'm more convinced than ever that I'll be surprised by all who will be there. And that makes me more and more eager to go there myself.
As one of our dear friends wrote upon hearing of his passing, "...shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?"
Logos2Go
Genesis 18.25 That be far from thee to do after this manner, to slay the righteous with wicked: and that thethe righteous should be as the wicked, that be far from thee: shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?
Broken bread
This is what came to me today:
The only purpose for a loaf of bread is to be broken, and the pieces fed to others.
Jesus said he is the bread of life. And the Scripture says " ... as he is, so are we to be in the world."
And what did Jesus the Bread of Life do -- or, as the popular cliche asks: What Would Jesus Do?
Here is what Jesus did: the Bread of Life was broken for many. That is what Jesus did.
And we are to be like him in the world.
It shed new light on my concerns, so much of them having to do with how to hold my life together. Is my job still meaningful or should I look for another? Do I still have time to build my shed before winter? Even this: what series of messages should I next preach?
If I am bread in the world, it seems I not only want my loaf to be unbroken, all my concerns are about how to keep my loaf together -- even to be better looking.
But Jesus the Bread of Life was broken apart for the world. And as he is, so should we be in the world.
Logos2Go
John 6.35 Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.
1 Corinthians 11.23b-24 ... the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body which is for* you. Do this in remembrance of me.”
1 John 4.17 ... because as he is, so are we in this world.
The church at the end
When I was younger, I thought Jesus was referring to church starts (nowadays we call them church plants -- quite an organic term) when he said: Where two or three are gathered, there I am in the midst.
Just two or three. A nice little way to start. As you build up steam -- as you get your mission statement right, calculate the demographics of your neighborhood, come up with the right programs, and perhaps just a little blessing from heaven -- you'll grow, and become a mega-church.
It's like the kid who gets his first job: "Well, I'll be making five bucks an hour to start...", not doubting that the pay will be a lot more later on.
Just two or three in my name -- to start.
But what if "two or three" describes the condition of a church at the end of its trajectory, not the start of it? What if that is what Jesus meant?
What if, after all you've gone through, you're just left with two or three?
Two or three who know you, really know you, and you them?
Two or three who pray for you, and you them?
Two or three to be accountable to.
Two or three who are the human expressions of shelter in a storm. (That is what the early church was -- and still is in many places in the world: a secret shelter for God's people in the midst of storms most of us could not imagine. Those churches did not have latte stands in the foyer, or bowling alleys).
Over the years I've often looked at my "two or three" and have been discouraged. I'd look beyond them to more, because I thought the proof of blessing comes with more. I expected the two or three to become twenty or thirty, two hundred or three hundred.
But the three hundred have never come.
And I am ever more thankful for the two or three.
Logos2Go
Matthew 18.19-20 Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.