The Foundation of Freedom

Vice President of the United States Mike Pence, addressing the recent graduates of Hillsdale College:

"Fatih has always been the wellspring of hope for millions of Americans. It has been the foundation of our freedom as well. Our Founders recognized religious faith as essential to maintaining our republic. In the words of our nations' first Vice President, John Adams: 'Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.'"

Free to Be in God's Will

(This is a re-posting of a piece I wrote on July 1, 2010). 

Nick Flatoff, photo

Free to Be in God's Will

I was reading Jeremiah 34 the other day; how the people of Israel made a promise before God to free their slaves. They freed them, but later decided to take them back as their slaves again. God, seeing this, tells the people through the Prophet Jeremiah that, since they have not provided freedom to their slaves as they proclaimed, He is giving them freedom to “fall by the sword…” I guess if we’re looking for a terrific accountability verse, this is it!

In Jeremiah 34, I see proof that there is free will: we are free to chose to either be in God’s will or our own or someone else’s will. God promises to guide and lead us if we let Him, but ultimately, we act on that guidance and leading or we don’t. And when the folks in Jeremiah 34 decide to initially obey God, but then change their minds, He holds them accountable. Just as God gives them liberty to live in His blessing, He also gives them liberty to break promises and live outside of His blessing.

Many people today focus on a forgiving God only and miss this point completely. God is a forgiving God, as the Old Testament proves over and over again. But He also lets people skin their knees a few times. To allow us to “fall by the sword” doesn’t mean God isn’t forgiving. It means there are consequences to our disobedience. Those consequences can be in the form of broken relationships, poor health, lost jobs, inner guilt, or just a lackluster and unfruitful faith life.

God puts such a high priority on covenant in His Word, we are foolish if we think He is going to take any promise we make lightly, or not hold us to it. That is why Jesus tells us to count the cost before we follow Him: because He will hold us accountable to the Christian life we profess (Luke 14:28). He will forgive us every time we repent, but forgiveness is not the same as accountability.

Our nation celebrates many freedoms on July 4^th. But every day is a day of liberty with God: the liberty to follow Him seriously, or the liberty to seriously deny Him and pay the consequences. And as much as it can sting to be held accountable by God, it always leads to more freedom from the bondage to sin.

copyright Barb Harwood

“Therefore, this is what the Lord says: You have not obeyed me; you have not proclaimed freedom for your fellow countrymen. So I now proclaim ‘freedom’ for you, declares the Lord—‘freedom’ to fall by the sword, plague and famine.” Jeremiah 34:17

“And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. “Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Will he not first sit down and estimate the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it? For if he lays the foundation and is not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule him, saying ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’“ Luke 14:27-30

Jordan B. Peterson

I have viewed several interviews with, and discourses by, Jordan B. Peterson, a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada, who is currently traveling the country on his 12 Rules for Life Tour: An Antidote to Chaos. 

I will say up front that I do not agree with everything Jordan Peterson says. But I agree with much of it, as apparently do the many people who sat in the theater with me listening to his insights and perspective, and who are tuning in online on a daily basis.

The most notable aspect, as I entered the venue in which Peterson recently spoke, was the abundance of young men, between the ages of 20 and 40, that I saw there. In fact, they were the majority. 

Also interesting is the fact that they came to the event with other young men. Sure, some were there with girlfriends or wives. But clearly this demographic dominated.

My husband and I sat down next to a young professional man in his 30's who traveled, alone, from his home in Des Moines to hear Peterson, after attending a previous tour stop in Detroit with a friend. 

My husband asked the young man, 

"What is it about Jordan Peterson that is resonating among young men?"

The man was quiet and thoughtful for a moment, and then said,

"I think it's because he provides parameters and foundational thinking. It's like he provides a platform of how to live."

I responded that I raised my children, as his parents most likely raised him, in a more open-ended parenting style where we encouraged and allowed our children to indulge every whim and interest so as not to "crush their spirit." We led our kids to believe that they really can accomplish whatever they "set their minds to," regardless of their abilities, personalities, societal expectations and employment trends, and that whatever they determine to be right for them must be. 

I said to this young man that there's a very fine balance between permissive parenting and knowing when to say "no," or how to teach a child to earn something through days, months and years of sweat and tears. I wasn't sure, I said, that I had rightly navigated that line.

And then I said, 

"Maybe your parents were the same way," quickly adding, "And I don't mean to say you had bad parents!"

He looked at me and said, 

"I had great parents." 

Then he went on to say how his child rearing sounded very much like how I raised my kids. 

After more thought, he looked at me and said, 

"Yeah, even though I had a great Dad, I guess I am looking for a father."

That blew me away.

I believe this young man from Des Moines hit the nail on the head of why Jordan Peterson is steaming-hot right now: men are looking for a father, regardless of what their biological father was like.

The way my husband and I were made aware of Jordan Peterson is through our 23-year-old son and his 20-something friends. Our son showed us a few of Peterson's talks on Youtube, and I've since seen Peterson on news programs and other online interviews.

I recently ran into a man who said his Dad, who was struggling with depression, was greatly helped by reading Peterson's book, 12 Rules for Life. Peterson seems to be expanding to other age groups, perhaps filling the fatherhood void for them too.

I enjoyed Peterson's one-man-show. But to be honest, at my age, I didn't hear anything I hadn't already heard before from the self-help movements of the 70's and 80's, or my own parents. 

Here is a condensed list of some of the nuggets of wisdom Peterson expanded upon in his talk:

Don't sleep your day away (my parents taught me this and didn't let it happen as long as I was under their roof).
Journal or write to figure things out (This practice is a staple of the self-help movement).
Start out with small, or individual, goals so as not to become overwhelmed (I think we've all heard that before).
Write about, seek out, do only what you are passionate about (Ditto).

Perhaps this talk of Peterson's wasn't for me: a woman in her 50's who has chewed on the plethora of "rules for life" type books that came before, so often and so much as a pre-Christian that I couldn't help saying to myself, during Peterson's presentation, 

"Really? These again?" 

And that's when it dawned on me that Peterson's rules have been around forever. The secular world has promoted and reconfigured them a million times. And still....and still people, in the words of U2, haven't found what they're looking for.

And what people are looking for in Peterson is no different than what they've looked for in Plato, Aristotle, Darwin, Thoreau, Dr. Laura Schlessinger or William J. Bennett and his Book of Virtues.

I remember tuning in to Dr. Laura in my late twenties the way young men are tuning into Peterson today. She was the first voice to say something different than the liberalism I had grown up with. I couldn't get enough of her. I would put my kids down for their nap and clean my house to Dr. Laura, only to find myself sitting at the kitchen table, marveling in agreement to her perspective and wisdom, all entirely new to me and resonating!

For me, Dr. Laura was the first seed planted into hearing another viewpoint. The unquestioned secular, atheistic, deistic, agnostic, feminist bubble I had been encapsulated in was finally popped, opening the door to discovering how things really are. 

I call it truth. It was the father, if you will, I was seeking without even realizing it. 

And I kept going. 

I didn't stop at Dr. Laura. 

I began reading the Bible cover to cover, admittedly in fits and starts, around the same time I was listening to her. 

It took close to ten years for the ultimate truth of Christ to once and for all set me free, and it is that truth that I now feed on every day, growing in the knowledge and love of my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. My Father indeed.

I believe Peterson is doing the same thing for young men today. I believe the young men who crave his words are seekers, hungry for the same thing I was, even though I would have never been able to articulate it, just as many of the Peterson followers today cannot articulate it. 

But one man did articulate it. The man from Des Moines who sat next to me. 

"I had a great Dad," he said, "I'm looking for a father."

I hope that, after finding Peterson, these young men don't stop there. I pray they go on, like I did, to the ultimate truth--the person they are really looking for--the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. 

copyright Barb Harwood

"At that time Jesus said, 'I praise You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that You have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and have revealed them to infants. Yes, Father, for this was well-pleasing in Your sight. 
All things have been handed over to Me by My Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal Him. 
Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am humble and gentle in heart, and YOU WILL FIND REST FOR YOUR SOULS. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light." Matthew 11:25-30.

Searching to Actually Find

Many people are taking the time, sometimes inordinately so--even entire lifetimes--to search. 

But isn't the point of searching to find? 

Oh, that unromantic, "rain-on-my-parade," socially out-of-favor notion of actually coming to conviction about things and actually knowing something. 

Not to be confused with "Know-it-allism," which is merely the outworking of not having taken the time to search and learn anything at all. 

Searching, I agree, never fully concludes, as knowledge is infinite. 

The point is, that finding actually begins. 

copyright Barb Harwood


"Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind and said,
'Who is this that darkens counsel 
By words without knowledge?'" Job 38:1-2


"Then Job answered the LORD and said,
'I know that You can do all things,
And that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
'Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?'
Therefore I have declared that which I did not understand,
Things too wonderful for me, which I did not know...
I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear;
But now my eye sees You;
Therefore I retract,
And I repent in dust and ashes.'" Job 42:1-3; 5-6


"So I say to you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives; and he who seeks, finds; and to him who knocks, it will be opened." Jesus, speaking in Luke 11:9-10

The Evolving of Evolution into an Unconsidered Presupposition

Phillip E. Johnson, writing in Reason in the Balance:

The "platform of mechanism and materialism is now so firmly established in the world of higher education that it is very difficult for most professors even to imagine that the platform might be shaky. When a few years ago I began pressing in university circles the question whether evolutionary naturalism is true, I was met mainly with blank incomprehension. Ask a group of intellectuals whether new-Darwinism is really true, I learned, and you can hear the sound of minds snapping shut all around the room.
When I did get a reply, it usually was that 'evolution' is the best naturalistic theory and that naturalism is the philosophical basis of science and thus equivalent to rationality. Hence naturalism is 'the way we think today.' To ask modernists whether science is true is like asking them whether rationality is rational or truth is truthful. Science is, by modernist definition, our only truly objective way of knowing anything. 
Alfred North Whitehead was among the greatest of twentieth-century philosophers of science. In his classic work Science and the Modern World Whitehead wrote that to understand the philosophy of an age, the important thing to concentrate on is not the ideas that people are explicitly debating. More important by far are the presuppositions that practically everybody with any influence takes for granted, presuppositions that are rarely defended or even articulated because they seem so obviously true. These constitute the cultural definition of rationality, the beginning of reason. 
In the late twentieth century, the most important presuppositions in intellectual circles are that science has preeminent authority to describe reality and that science is based on naturalism--or methodological atheism, as it is sometimes called. This starting point necessarily implies, whether everyone understands the implication or not, that room for God exists only in the world of the imagination, or perhaps somewhere back in a 'Big Bang singularity' at the ultimate beginning of time. 
Belief in God may persist, particularly in people who have only a shallow understanding of science, but the believers can never have more than a tenuous standing in the world of the mind. Science can step forward at any time and employ its prestige to take control of any subject, even subjects inaccessible to empirical investigation like the ultimate beginning itself. Metaphysical statements by prominent scientists are accepted in the press and throughout public education as advances in scientific knowledge; contrary statements by theologians or religious leaders are dismissed as 'fundamentalism.' The naturalists hold the cultural power; theists in academic life have to accommodate as best they can."
Phillip E. Johnson in the chapter, The Beginning of Reason

"...evolution really is mistaken for explanation. It has the fatal quality of leaving on many minds the impression that they do understand it and everything else; just as many of them live under a sort of illusion that they have read the Origin of Species." G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

God is in Our Pain and Waiting for Us

C.S. Lewis, in The Problem of Pain:

"Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him. Yet we will not seek it in Him as long as He leaves us any other resort where it can even plausibly be looked for. While what we call 'our own life' remains agreeable we will not surrender it to Him. What then can God do in our interests but make 'our own life' less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness? It is just here, where God's providence seems at first to be most cruel, that the Divine humility, the stooping down of the Highest, most deserves praise." 
C.S. Lewis, from the chapter Human Pain, from his book, The Problem of Pain

God is Not a Human Construct

David Powlison, of the Christian Counseling and Education Foundation, writes:

"What is the typical human experience of "God"? Depending on who you listen to, God is a philosophical abstraction, your higher power, an idol, an experiential high during meditation, a remote tyrant, a good buddy, creative energy, a benign grandfather, or even yourself. All these images grossly misshape God. Does that mean it is impossible to know the living and true God if I have spent my life believing such false images? The Bible everywhere rejects such an idea and offers instead to "open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light" (Acts 26:18). God is in the business of changing people's minds; (shining) in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ" (2 Corinthians 4:6). Life experience is not supreme; neither are the lies that people believe. God is, and he alone trumps what we bring to the table." 
David Powlison, in his booklet, Life Beyond Your Parents' Mistakes




"Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: 'People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship--and this is what I am going to proclaim to you. 
'The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. 'For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring.'
Therefore since we are God's offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone--an image made by human design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.'
When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, 'We want to hear you again on this subject.' At that, Paul left the Council. Some of the people became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others." Acts 17:22-34