Sam Storms joins me this afternoon on The Paul Edwards Program to discuss his new book, Signs of the Spirit: An Interpretation of Jonathan Edwards’s “Religious Affections”.  Jonathan Edwards was an 18th century American theologian and pastor in New England. His preaching is credited with igniting the Great Awakenings of that century. His treatise Religious Affections is widely considered the most important and accurate analysis of religious experience ever written. Edwards’ primary concern in that work was to determine, as much as possible, “what are the distinguishing qualifications of those that are in favor with God, and entitled to his eternal rewards.” Simply put, he endeavored to identify what constitutes true and authentic spirituality. What makes a person truly ‘Christian’? Are there certain features or characteristics in human thought and behavior that serve as “signs” of the saving activity and presence of the Spirit of God? Is it possible for us to know with any degree of certainty whether or not a person who claims to have experienced the saving grace of God is truly born-again?

If you have not yet read John Piper’s moving response to the bridge collapse in Minneapolis, please do so. The link is below. Bethlehem Baptist Church and DesiringGod Ministries are within a mile of the I-35 bridge spanning the Mississippi.

Piper has the uncanny ability to use words to bring God to bear in tragedy. His words stopped me in my tracks:

The word “bridge” does not occur in the Bible. There may be two reasons. One is that God doesn’t build bridges, he divides seas. The other is that usually his people must pass through the deadly currents of suffering and death, not simply ride over them. “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you” (Isaiah 43:2). They may drown you. But I will be with you in life and death.

Read the full post here: Putting My Daughter to Bed Two Hours After the Bridge Collapsed

(Reuters) – A Roman Catholic priest who unleashed a torrent of expletives and racist abuse against skateboarders outside his Australian cathedral, only to have the outburst filmed and placed on YouTube, has been put on leave.The Reverend Monsignor Geoff Baron, the dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Australia’s second biggest city, Melbourne, was videotaped swearing at and abusing a group of teenagers using the cathedral grounds as a skate park.

Read the full story: Priest on leave after YouTube outburst

WARNING: The YouTube video below contains graphic images and profane langauge. Viewer discretion is advised.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMWjV2zRD3w]

Last week in a post at the DesiringGod blog, John Piper responded to a question about portraits or pictures of Jesus. Part of what he said:

I’m a little hesitant about portraits of Jesus at all. There’s that argument about whether that’s breaking the first Commandment — don’t make any graven images, don’t have pictures of Jesus in your house. The reason I’m not a stickler on that is because Jesus became incarnate, therefore we know he had a face. God the father didn’t have a face, except insofar as He and the Son are one.

Jesus had a face and even though we don’t know what it looked like I think renderings of it to show various things are okay. And if we’re going to do that, they should be real diverse. I think they should be real diverse because you lock in on that famous one–I don’t know what it’s called, the one with the long hair, kind of the idyllic face and the blue eyes—that’s absolutely absurd.

But I think there should probably be black portrayals of Jesus, and white portrayals of Jesus, and Chinese portrayals of Jesus. And everybody knows that they’re not accurate. There isn’t one that’s accurate. That’s why it’s legitimate to do lots of inaccurate works. Because you just say we all know that we don’t know what he looked like so what we want to say with our inaccurate Jesus is something true about Jesus. Namely, he’s there for everybody.

On what basis should there be “black portrayals of Jesus,” and “white portrayals of Jesus,” and “Chinese portrayals of Jesus”? Piper bases his reasoning on the fact that any portrayal of Jesus is inaccurate, so why not say something that is true about Jesus in the midst of the inaccuracy: “Namely, he’s there for everybody.”

But do racially diverse images of Jesus really convey the message that Jesus is “there for everybody”? Does the fact that Jesus indeed was God incarnate in the flesh of a Jewish male, and not in the flesh of a African male, or a European male, or a Chinese male, make it any less true that “he’s there for everybody”? The image is the shadow, the type. The incarnation is the real thing. Is the real incarnation of Jesus in a non-diverse image therefore not effective in conveying the truth that Jesus is “there for everybody“? I know Dr. Piper does not believe that!

Jesus was not incarnated in reality in the form of every race. He “took upon him the form of a servant and was made in the likeness of men.” He was found “in fashion as a man” (Philippians 2:7,8). Biblically speaking, Jesus shows that he is indeed there for all of humanity in the incarnation: “Forasmuch then as children are partakers of flesh and blood, he himself likewise took part of the same” (Hebrews 2:14) It is Jesus’ HUMANITY – not his race – that demonstrates he is “there for us.” And in his humanity as a Jewish male “he redeemed us to God by his blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation” making us a new nation – a kingdom of priests – a people for his own possession without regard to race (1 Peter 2:9).

To suggest that we need racially diverse images of Jesus cheapens the reality. The reality is that Jesus, through his humanity and as God in human flesh, died to banish racial, social and class distinctives. In Christ we “…have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him: here there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all” (Colossians 3:10,11). All the nations of men are made “of one blood” (Acts 17:26) and are redeemed by “his own blood” (Hebrews 9:11-15).

We don’t need white images of Jesus, black images of Jesus, Chinese images of Jesus, or even Jewish images of Jesus. We need Jesus! “That I may know HIM, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death” (Philippians 3:10). The image is a mere distraction from the reality that is the person of Christ.

What most America’s do not realize is that we actually won the war in Iraq. Sadaam was removed and brought to justice. A democratically elected government now rules in his stead. The threat of nuclear or biological weapons development in Iraq was neutralized.

When President Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003 he declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq. He never once uttered the words ‘mission accomplished,’ yet the MSM has made certain two words on a banner overshadowed the very important 1,829 words the president did speak that day. The president indicated that the United States and the coalition forces had prevailed “in the Battle of Iraq,” known as Operation Iraqi Freedom. What is forgotten is that the speech that day indicated the beginning of a new SECOND war: the work of securing and reconstructing the country, specifically

We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We’re bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous. We’re pursuing and finding leaders of the old regime, who will be held to account for their crimes. We’ve begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated. We’re helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools. And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government of, by, and for the Iraqi people.

The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done. Then we will leave, and we will leave behind a free Iraq.

The president went on to say, “The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11, 2001 — and still goes on.” Later he said, “Our mission continues.”

I recently spoke with Victor Davis Hanson who told me that America’s anti-Iraq War mood finds its impetus in a lack of clairity on this second phase of the war:

The president did not articulate, I don’t think very well, what the stakes were: that he won a war, a brilliant war, and that all of the gloom and doomers who said we’d lose 5,000 to 10,000 dead we’re completely wrong, and now we’re not in the same war but in a very different second war which we can’t vacate because we’ve done that in the past. You need to tell the American people, “This isn’t new!” We tried the Republican/Conservative Realpolitik, cozying up with the House of Saud, not going to Bahgdad, No-Fly zones, dealing with Musharraf. And then we did the Democratic appeasement, overlooking the first World Trade Center, the East African bombing, the USS Cole, and both of those were wrong. This is a corrective to almost everything we’ve tried in the past.

The president has to realize you can’t just assert you’re for freedom, you have to explain why freedom – it’s a very difficult thing to impart by force, we’ve done it in the past, it’s been difficult, but it will work. And rather than just assert, “We’re going to win; we’re going to give them freedom,” he needs to explain just how difficult it is. I think all along we should have had far less “Mission Accomplished” and much more “We had a bad choice and we had a worse choice.” There are never any good alternatives in the Middle East, so don’t get your hopes up too high, but we can still win this thing and we can win it at historically low cost, if you look back in the long story of war this country’s put up with.

If indeed things are turning favorably in Iraq, why has that message not reached the American people? Especially with the proliferation of the blogosphere and alternatives to old media? Victor Davis Hanson:

I don’t think any of us have been able to disrupt the narrative of the IED and the suicide vest, so every time we try to enunciate how hard it is to bring a constitutional government to the ancient Caliphe, and if you were to be successful, the wonderful dividends that would start to disrupt this old nexus between dictatorships and theocracies, and how important it is. If you look at the long view of history, that we are doing it amazingly well, even though it has taken four years. This is a country, after all, that lost 12,000 dead in six weeks at Okinawa. And we haven’t made as many military mistakes (in Iraq) as this country has made in places like Hedgerows or Iwo Jima. But that has to be asserted every day, because we have some of the most brilliant minds in this country, National Public Radio, PBS, Washington Post, New York Times, you know these people: architects of the Democratic Party who really don’t believe that a) we can win, and b) even more disturbingly, that we should be able to win. They have a view of America that people will like us, they travel to Europe a lot, they will like us, they will praise us if we sort of retreat within our shores, invest our security and future with the United Nations, the World Court of the Hague, and that people in the world, such as radical Islamacists or China, these are really not that dangerous a group, but they’ve been sort of exaggerated by warmongers, industrial-military complex types in the United States. That narrative has sort of taken over Iraq as the news became only the violence and never that they’ve had a successful election, how big the Iraqi army is becoming, and how many good things we’re doing in that country compared to what, let’s say China is doing in the Sudan or what Russia did in Czechnya or what the Europeans are doing by selling almost anything the Iranian theocracy wants. The administration has not been able to get that message to the American people, that the United States of all the major contenders in the world, has the most humane and principled foreign policy.