“But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled, my steps had nearly slipped.” –Psalm 73:2
The news about Joshua Harris abandoning the Christian faith hit me hard. From my view of things, Josh wasn’t one of those arrogant guys that seemed more infatuated with himself than with Jesus. He seemed genuine. Humble. One of the guys who had the type of humble orthodoxy that I wanted to follow.
I was saddened to hear the news but I wasn’t really shocked, given a few recent posts of his. Nor am I completely convinced that this is the final page written in Josh’s story. I’m not yet ready to give up hope that we might see this prodigal run home. God, I hope so.
His fall from a place of faith startled me, though. It startled me because it could have just as easily been my story. My fall wouldn’t have made any news outlets. I’ve been in Asaph’s position before, my feet on really shaky grounds.
A Different Type of Prosperity Gospel
I grew up in the faith imbibing Harris’ works on purity. And Katelyn Beaty is correct that it was really a form of the prosperity gospel. I think her term “sexual prosperity gospel” is spot on. Being dashed by this form of legalism I soon thereafter found myself in the safe and comforting world of the gospel-centered branch of the Young, Restless, and Reformed crowd. I was given fresh eyes to see Jesus everywhere and the Spirit enlivened my heart to embrace all that God had done for me in Christ.
But all wasn’t bright and beautiful…
I soon found there was a new type of legalism threatening to grab hold of my heart. It was a theological prosperity gospel. The same lie that had captivated me for a season in Harris’ sexual prosperity gospel captured me here. If I had all the right theology, if I was passionate about the truth, and kept all my theological ducks in a row then I could be certain of God’s favor.
Of course this created in me a spirit of fighting and biting and laboring to climb the ladder of truth speakers–all whilst working to set straight any who opposed the truth. After all, if a church wants to be fully blessed by God then she had better have all her theological t’s crossed, and we couldn’t be bogged down by those slow-minded people struggling with our precious doctrines of grace.
Legalism always leaves you empty. God’s grace eventually causes you to wake up to the clay feet of every idol you’ve carved. But that creates a problem when our schtick was the neat and tidy theology of being Young, Restless, and Reformed.
When the Wheels Fall Off
We pride ourselves on the golden chain of God’s grace. (And I still believe in that). But what happens when we start adding other links to this chain? And then what happens when they start to break? What happens when the formula of putting gospel-centered Jesus-focused theology into the oven produces something we can’t recognize? What happens when our theology breeds arrogance, division, lust, greed, and things unbecoming the body of Christ?
This is where my feet nearly stumbled. I couldn’t fathom how a sovereign God who controls the hearts and growth of his people would allow some of these professing followers of Jesus to wound myself and my family so deeply. And it doesn’t seem fair to just say, “they mustn’t be believers”. Because I know I’ve wounded people and I wasn’t comfortable saying that I wasn’t a follower of Jesus.
So I understood completely when Josh said that it was easier just to throw out the whole thing than to try to untangle all the webs. I get it. And I almost did the same thing.
Until I went into the sanctuary of God…
I had to hit pause for a season and just feast on the goodness of God. I didn’t try to untangle all the webs and find answers. I suspended judgment for a bit and just dug into the things which I did know. I set the fact that God is there and God is good as immovable truths. Once these truths coursed deeply enough into my veins I was able to venture out again.
Believing right things about God isn’t the same thing as being enamored with God. Saying that God is good isn’t the same thing as tasting and seeing that the Lord is good. Nobody else could do that for me. My “good” theology wasn’t a big enough fig leaf to cover my naked soul. Only Jesus would do. I didn’t need answers to my pain. My theological prosperity gospel made me think that I had to have all these knots untangled and I had to have understanding and to do everything rightly before I would be able to heal and find God’s favor.
God isn’t the author of confusion. But that doesn’t mean that Jesus is always perfectly sensible to our finite and sinful hearts and minds. When our faith is in a black and white God who only paints in tightly-woven systems of theology we’re going to be baffled when our creative God grabs a paintbrush of a different color and starts painting on our canvas.
That doesn’t mean that God changes His mind or that truth isn’t actually revealed in Scripture. Yes, Jesus doesn’t change and God is always true. But this really means He will always be inexhaustible. And his blessings aren’t necessarily tied to how much of that unfathomable God we are able to fathom in a given moment. He’s good and He’s good to us because that’s who He is, not because our theology of His goodness is up to a certain level.
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