Friday, April 25, 2014
Lord v Savior
Wesley J Smith @ First Things:
In some ways that is not a problem, learning to lean more on Christ in dealing with things like obesity is a good thing. The problem is this particular approach to the issue robs us of God's sovereignty. Instead of petitioning our King for mercy and grace, we are going to doctor - a doctor that we can tell what treatment we do and do not want, and a doctor we can walk away from once we are cured. This is classic "cheap grace," your God is indeed too small. (With apologies to JB Phillips.)
WE have more than a savior - we have a Lord and a King. We must never forget that.
Lord illness sin
We no longer perceive ourselves to be free people making good or bad personal choices from which we will either benefit or suffer. Instead, our personal problems are being medicalized—almost to the point that whenever we hurt ourselves, we are told it is actually a symptom of illness.I could not agree more. What is sad to me is that we see this increasingly in presentations of the gospel. No longer does Christ offer salvation - He offers a cure for what ails us. No longer do we learn to overcome sin, Christ simply cures us.
Obesity is the latest example. The American Medical Association has now declared obesity—not just the maladies it can cause, such as type 2 diabetes—a “disease.”
[...]
Medicalizing our social problems isn’t healthy. It undermines personal responsibility and renders important character-building virtues such as self-restraint and discipline hopelessly passé. Lowering expectations for individual behavior is the real “disease” afflicting the modern age, and well-intentioned “experts” are the vectors.
In some ways that is not a problem, learning to lean more on Christ in dealing with things like obesity is a good thing. The problem is this particular approach to the issue robs us of God's sovereignty. Instead of petitioning our King for mercy and grace, we are going to doctor - a doctor that we can tell what treatment we do and do not want, and a doctor we can walk away from once we are cured. This is classic "cheap grace," your God is indeed too small. (With apologies to JB Phillips.)
WE have more than a savior - we have a Lord and a King. We must never forget that.
Lord illness sin
