We all live with certain presuppositions. These help us to make sense of our world. For instance, a compass points north. If you’re off trail in Yosemite and want to find your way back to the road that your map says is to the west of the area you’re in, it’s helpful to know which way west is and it is therefore helpful to know that your compass will point north reliably. You presuppose the accuracy of your compass.

What if I told you that this presupposition is wrong on the 64^th parallel? My compass points east. Well, mostly east and a little north, to somewhere in Greenland. True north is about 23 degrees to the west of where my compass says north is. North is really north, but my compass is pointing at the magnetic north pole. While presupposing the accuracy of a compass in Yosemite helps me greatly, in Alaska, that presupposition will get you eaten by bears.

People presuppose certain things about the world we live in. Those presuppositions depend on culture and upbringing. As an American, I presuppose I have the right to speak my mind. So far, that may have caused me some discomfort, but it hasn’t risked my life. My presupposition is currently holding up well. If I were to move to Saudi Arabia tomorrow, my presupposition might no longer be accurate.

My compass always points east-by-northeast when I’m hiking around home. Once, when we were hiking in New Hampshire, for about a half-hour, I was heading about 23 degrees to the west of where I thought I was going because I had forgotten to recalibrate my Alaskan compass to the reality of New Hampshire. I thank my directionally-challenged mother for forcing me to develop an internal compass; otherwise, we would have been eaten by whatever wildlife New Hampshire still has (we saw a moose!)

My compass isn’t always accurate and by the same token, my presuppositions aren’t always accurate.

When I was 14 years old, a bright young teenager who (of course) knew all, I presupposed that the world was exactly as it seemed. I saw a lot of evidence of evil (or of human beings acting disreputably) and not a lot of evidence of God, so I presupposed that, if God existed at all (which I doubted), He wasn’t much interested in this world or in my behavior since He was clearly not fixing all the world’s problems as I thought He should. On a weekend flying trip that fog turned into a weeklong vacation, I picked up a book in a miner’s cabin on the Colleen River. I didn’t know who Francis Shaeffer was, but I was bored enough not to care. The boredom evaporated quickly in the bright heat of Francis Shaeffer’s writing. “Escape from Reason” opened my eyes to my own lack of reason. It showed me that basing my reality on false presuppositions is no safer than trusting an Alaskan compass to point true north. The book did not “bring me to God” but it opened my intellect to the possibility of God.

When your compass doesn’t point in the right direction, but you believe it does, you’re going to get lost! In Alaska, trusting an otherwise trustworthy compass will get you eaten by bears. In the spiritual world, trusting your “moral compass” will have a similar effect.

 The quick version:

Younger son feels restricted in Dad’s home and wants his inheritance. His father sells land and livestock to make it happen and the kid takes off down the road to party. In a while, he’s out of money and doing things to survive he never thought he’d do. Dad’s home looks pretty good now. Even Dad’s servants have something to eat. Repenting of his past behavior and attitudes, the kid heads home. Dad doesn’t have to take him in. The kid is willing to sell himself as a slave to Dad if Dad will feed him. Yet, when he gets there, Dad treats him like his son, dresses him in nice clothes and throws a feast for him. In the meantime, older brother has been slaving away on Dad’s farm and not getting the recognition he thinks he deserves. He complains jealously of Dad greeting the prodigal with open arms.  Dad points out that the older son will still get everything, but that this younger son was "dead" and now has returned to life and he, Dad, wants to celebrate. In this, the older son is invited to participate.

It helps if you know a bit about the societal laws of 1^st Century Israel. The father’s estate belonged to the father until he died. The estate did not belong to the children until after their father's death. Upon his death, the estate was divided evenly among the male heirs plus one. If he had six boys, the estate was divided into seven equal portions. The oldest boy received two portions and the younger boys each received one portion.

The prodigal’s father did not have to give either of his sons their inheritance prior to his death. Jesus’ listeners understood this. They would have understood the effort it had taken for the father to liquidate one-third of his assets to give to his younger son. They would have known that the older brother did not yet receive his inheritance, but that he was working on his double-portion of the inheritance expecting to receive it upon his father’s death. Thus, when younger brother showed up and Dad gave him fine clothes, a nice ring and a fatted calf, it was coming out of the older brother’s portion of the estate. To many of Jesus’ listeners, it would have seemed just plain unfair that the father was giving the younger brother anything upon his return. He’d already spent his entitlement. Jesus apparently knew what they were thinking, because He had the older brother complain about it, so He could explain the father’s actions.

For a Deity, Jesus understood human beings quite well. I’ll credit that to his mother. This parable is just one of many examples of how Jesus used the every day occurrences in the lives of His listeners to get them to think about spiritual issues and how they apply to our every day lives.

The older brother saw only the brother who had forced the selling of part of the estate (which likely meant the remaining portion earned less) and not a younger brother returned from the “dead.” The father had to remind him of this and through reminding him, God reminds us.

God has given us everything! The air we breathe! The cells that process our food and waste! The planet we walk on! The awareness of our own existence! Absolutely nothing that we have did not ultimately come from God. This is true whether you accepted the Lord when you were four, waiting until you were 84 or have no intention of ever doing so. It doesn’t really matter to God if you believe in Him, because He created you anyway. Because He has already given us everything we have, we are foolish to think that He owes us one morsel more. He didn’t have to give us what we already possess. It was His. It is only ours because He gave it to us.

Yet, like the older brother, all human beings think that God owes them something and we stand outside of God’s party demanding what we think should be ours when the feast we desire is already in progress. This is not the response He requires from us.

If we want something from God, we should approach him as the prodigal son approached his father – hat in hand, saying, “I’m sorry, I was wrong!” God has much He would give us, but it’s His to give and His choice to whom and in what way it is given. The prodigal son left home in stupidity and youthful folly, but when he returned – he had it right, and that’s the lesson all humans need to learn in relation to God and what He offers us.

 

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound! That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see

Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear, the hour I first believed!

Through many dangers, toils and snares, we have already come;
Tis grace has brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.

The Lord has promised good to me, His word my hope secures;
He will my shield and portion be, as long as life endures.

Yes, when this flesh and heart shall fail, and mortal life shall cease;
I shall possess, within the veil, a life of joy and peace.

The earth shall soon dissolve like snow, the sun forbear to shine;
But God, who called me here below, will be forever mine.

When we’ve been then ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise then when we’d first begun.

I usually avoid “hymnal theology” because a lot of it isn’t clearly based on Biblical text, but John Newton, repentant slave trader turned born-again Christian, abolitionist and minister, understood about grace in a way that never ceases to amaze me!

Grace is God’s unearned love bestowed on His often unrepentant creation Mankind. Because it’s a “God-thing” and largely outside of our understanding, it’s a hard thing to explain, which is why most Christians just use the “church word”. Yet, here in this familiar hymn lies a serviceable definition.

Because of God’s love toward me and not because of anything I had done to deserve it, He saved me. I was lost in the woods of life without a map or a compass, but now I’m not. Because God loved me, He lead me into contact with people who made me feel uncomfortable and who told me scary things about myself, but when I turned to Him and accepted that love, He set my fear aside. God “travels” with me every day in every way, sometimes through some scary places, and He will still be with me to the end. The world I inhabit now is often hard and scary and unfulfilling, but when I united with God upon my death I will be reborn to a life of joy and peace. This world we live in is uncertain and science tells us it will end someday, but God, reaching into our physical realm, will always be a certainty in this life and beyond. In that life beyond the veil (heaven?) there will be no time and no end to the praises for God’s love that He bestowed on those who did not deserve it.

According to one hymnal, this song is based on I Chronicles 17:16 where David stands in amazement over the favor God has shown him. Frankly, I see David’s entire life to be evidence of grace. The youngest son of a sheep herder from an unimportant town, David rose to be king of Israel through a series of unimaginable events. Clearly, David did not become king because of his family status or his early abilities as a sheep herder. It was only after the anointing as king that he displayed the heroic qualities that made people think of him as a potential rival to a king who already had heirs. If God had been looking for a king that nobody would question or fight, He would have anointed Jonathan, but God saw something in David worth encouraging and He sent His prophet to mark this young man as His. Jonathan apparently had nothing wrong with him. His behavior toward David was incredibly honorable. The Bible never says he would have been a bad king. He simply wasn’t the king God wanted.

David had many admirable qualities, but he would later show a few that would grieve God. Not being bound by time and space like human beings, God already knew at the anointment these blots were hiding in David’s character. David did not deserve to be king. God showed unmerited favor toward David in making him king.

Consider the Apostle Paul. We first hear of Saul from Tarsus when he is holding the coats of the people who stoned Stephen, the first Christian to be martyred for the faith. Not a good way to start in God’s service – consenting to the murder of one of His followers. We next hear about Saul when he asks for letters of arrest for Christians and heads to Damascus to carry out his orders. If God were human, He’d have fried Saul with a lightning bolt on the Damascus road, not blinded him to give him a little quality time thinking about God. God is not human. His capacity to love far outshines ours and He chose Saul of Tarsus to evolve into THE greatest Christian theologian. Even the apostles couldn’t believe it for a number of years, but God showed love to His greatest enemy and thereby won His greatest advocate.

In the same way, John Newton, still a slave trader in 1748 when he became a Christian, did not deserve the grace that God had given him.  He was making money off the misery of human beings, a practice he continued for a number of years after his conversion. Yet, he showed an immediate evolution of personality in that he began insisting the slaves on the ships he captained be treated humanely. Later, he quit being a trader and used the small fortune he'd amassed to combat slavery as a Christian minister and abolitionist. God saw a man who didn't deserve His love, but He loved him anyway.

The Bible is filled with examples of men and women who did not deserve God’s favor, yet it was shown to them. And, that is grace. It’s not something human beings can do. It’s a God-thing. We cannot reach God, but God in His great love for us has reached us.

What should our response be?

 

Romans 3:23, 5:12-21

As always, I recommend you read the text, because I do not wish to present personal opinion here, but to draw people to my Savior.

In many ways, the relationship between God and Man (as in mankind, meaning both genders) is very similar to the parent-minor child relationship. God created Mankind just as parents "create" their children. God loves us as we love our children. We are disobedient to our spiritual Father just as our children are disobedient to us. It is a relationship of unequals, not a partnership, and the lesser party keeps thinking that it is somehow unfair. As parents, we keep our end of the bargain (to feed, clothe and shelter them) while they constantly try to push the envelop of our rules and standards just to see how disobedient they can be in order to prove they can be our equals.

I'm going to use my 13-year-old to demonstrate my point. A usually sensible child who makes us smile regularly, she recently decided to act in a manner that reminds us that she is only 13. It involved a fair amount of disobedience to family rules and a huge dollop of thoughtlessness. By this, I don't mean unkindness, but that she wasn't thinking. About halfway into the situation, she realized she'd made a huge mistake and that there was no way she could extricate herself from it without our help and that she was going to face discipline no matter what.

How very much like human beings in this regard! Adam and Eve knew the rules (all one of them) that God had set up and they chose to disobey it. Although not in the dark about consequences, they apparently thought they could wriggle loose on a technicality and were surprised to find out that God keeps His word.

Now, my daughter is serving a one-week suspension of her life as she knows it -- sometimes called "grounding". School, home, church, no electronics, can't call her friends on the telephone, has to write an article about what she did and why her mean parents have disciplined her. She started out declaring that it was unfair and then changed her argument to "well, I was scared and I learned from it," to accepting that she's in adolescent purgatory until Wednesday and there's no use arguing about it.

Again, how like human beings! Forced from the garden and trying to place blame on each other, the serpent and even God, but eventually getting on with life outside of the glory of God because they didn't have a choice.

Several of the parents I know think we were too soft on our daughter, just grounding her for one week, but we felt that her usual good behavior justifies a more reasoned approach. We can always repent of our leniency and become draconian next time. In short, we love her and we don't want to make her miserable for any longer than we have to.

This is what God's grace does for us. We earned discipline through our disobedience, but God loves us too much to leave us in the misery we chose. He allows us grace -- unmerited favor -- so that we don't have to go on facing the consequences of our disobedience of Him.

Of course, there's a big difference between our daughter's grounding and the conseqences of our sin. She's just stuck in her room reading books for her act of disobedience. We're born spiritually dead for ours. Obviously, human beings as a race of beings need a lot more grace than my13-year-old does. She's probably lucky that her parents' standard of perfection is considerably less than God's. We're all lucky that God's grace far outshines anything we as parents can give to the children of our bodies.

Romans 3:23 says "for all have sinned (disobeyed God) and fallen short of the glory of God (what He created us to be). They (we) are justified freely by His grace (unearned favor) through the redemption (to be discussed later) of Jesus Christ. God gave Jesus as a (ransom - too many big church words, so I boiled it down), because, in His restraint, God passed over the previously committed sins."

In other words, God could punish us as we deserve, but He doesn't want to do that and He gave Jesus as the means so that we don't have to serve our fully earned sentence for disobeying Him. Grace is the loving eye God turns on us who can be so unlovely and, just because He loves us, He gives us opportunity to be loveable.

My daughter will be free of her sentence for disobedience on Wednesday NOT because she has earned a parole, but because we her parents love her and desire for her not to be miserable. She's still guilty of disobedience, but we've chosen not to hold it against her beyond that certain date.

Human beings are still guilty of disobedience and worthy of the death sentence Adam and Eve were fully apprised of, but God has chosen not to hold us accountable, provided we will accept the terms of His redemption.

Susan Butcher, five time winner of the Iditarod, died last week of a rare form of leukemia after a valiant fight against it.  As Susan was known worldwide as an ambassador of the great state I live in, I thought I would say something about her.  We lived in the same town and my cousin-in-law, a Yukon Quest winner, was both her Iditarod rival and a source of many of her dogs, so we met a few times.  We weren't friends as we moved in different circles.  I was not in awe of her press. She sort of remembered my name when we would meet. We were cordial acquaintenances and knew a lot of the same people.

Susan inspired the T-shirt that reads "Alaska -- Where men are men and women win the Iditarod."  A lot of people probably thought of her as some hee-woman who could arm-wrestle construction workers, but that was not Susan Butcher. First, she never even attempted the much-more demanding Yukon Quest race. Second, she wasn't the only woman to win the Iditarod.  Libby Riddles won it back in 1984 by daring a winter storm out on the pack ice of the Bering Straight while the guys stayed back in the village on the coast. That gave her a lead they couldn't close.  Winning the Iditarod is as much about luck with the elements, wildlife and dogs as it is about athletic ability.  Susan was small and athletic and usually wore her hair in two braids. Those of us who know a little about sled dogs know that the dogs are every bit as much athletes as the musher and it takes all of them working as a unit to win a race.  In a 9-day race, the musher rides the runners a lot (often sleeping standing up) and her being small was a plus for Susan's dogs. Still, taking advantage of a gift from God did not keep Susan from being a great Alaskan lady. She would have been that had she never run the Iditarod.

I first met Susan back in college when I took a weekend roadtrip to Manley with some friends.  Manley is a town built around some hot springs 120 miles north and west of Fairbanks. The road is treacherous and goes across some forbidding territory. Most people don't take it in the winter unless they live out there.  If I remember correctly, Susan had run middle-distance races up to that point, but had said she might like to try her hand at the Iditarod, then a relatively new phenomenon in Alaska. Those of us who followed mushing back then lived and died for the North American and the Fur Rendevous. The Iditarod was, and to a large extent still is, a vanity race in our minds. The Quest didn't exist yet, but was being hatched in the minds of a few mushers who thought the Iditarod wasn't a true test of distance racing.

So, Susan was out on the Minto flats training her Interior Alaskan dogs to handle the wind of the Bering coast while I and my friends were driving a truck along the Manley road. It was January, about -35 degrees Fahrenheit, and windy like Interior Alaska almost never is.  We found some cheechako (newcomer) buried up to his wheel wells in a snow drift that had blocked the road. Apparently, he'd thought he could just muscle through it with a heavy load in his pickup and it would be just fine. As his truck was stalled because he'd let snow clog the muffler, he was lucky we came along because he could have been just dead.  We stopped, of course, chained up and tried to pull him out, but he was too far into the drift with a fully-laden truck and, at the limit of the tow chain, we couldn't budge him with our lone pickup. Knowing we couldn't unload a skid-generator to lighten the load, we were discussing whether to wait there until someone came along -- a slim prospect on that road in January as the sun was going down -- when a dog team came out of nowhere.  Even those of us who didn't follow racing knew those signature braids and the big trapper's hat.

Now, racing dogs tend to be small and wiry, built for speed and endurance, not strength, but long-distance dogs usually have two wheeldogs who are all brawn and not bright enough not to use it. That's what Susan had with her that afternoon, along with 12 more of the prettiest Aurora huskies I've ever seen. Although I'd heard of Susan, I'd never met her, so I was surprised to realize she wasn't any larger than me, but man, could she handle those dogs!  She knew the driver of our truck because he'd grown up in Manley, and together we cooked up a plan for her team to dead-freight the truck until our truck could get traction and haul him the rest of the way out of the drift. She never said anything like "Well, I'm training for the Greatest Race on Earth and I don't want my dogs to hurt themselves."  She dropped her sled, hooked her dogs into the tow chain and bellowed "Hike".  Her dogs hit the end of the chain and her leader, Tekla, jumped about three feet in the air, then they all stopped, turned around and glared at the truck. You could just read their expressions. That "sled" was heavier than they'd been expecting and they were embarrassed.  They all looked at Susan.  She bellowed "hike" again and they hit that chain with a collective yelp.  The leaders kept yelping and jerking while the wheel dogs bunched their backs and strained against the harnesses.  The line dogs dug their claws into the pack and snow flew up behind the team as they willed the truck to move.  The truck dragged forward.  As our men were pushing, we'd thrown our least-Alaskan driver behind the wheel and she was too busy staring at the dogs to know when to hit the gas.  After pounding on the side of the truck, I realized she wasn't paying any attention, so I shoved in to gun our truck, but by that time the dogs had pulled the other truck to the edge of the drift. We all congratulated one another on saving the life of another goofy cheechako, Susan hooked up her dogs to the sled and disappeared into the dark, and we followed the other truck into Manley to make sure he didn't kill himself.

Susan ran the Iditarod that year, and though she didn't win, she put in a good showing and I think she won it the next year.  But whether or not she'd ever won another race was immaterial to the Alaskans she met that day out on the Manley road. In the true spirit of Alaska, she gave what she had for someone in need and that made her a true Alaskan.  Alaska will miss Susan and our hearts go out to her husband and children during this time.  In the Alaskan code, it is not the races you win, so much as how you run the races you finish, and Susan ran a mighty fine race.