Joe Rigney is Assistant Professor of Theology and Christian Worldview at Bethlehem College and Seminary. We spoke with Joe about his latest book The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts and what it means to enjoy the blessings God has given.
1. It seems much of Christian teaching is about a choice between loving God and loving the world he has made. But you're saying that it doesn't have to be this way?
Well, the Bible certainly does present the dichotomy that way sometimes. John says “Don’t love the world or the things in the world,” by which he means that we shouldn’t delight in that which God has forbidden. Elsewhere Paul tells us that he counts everything as rubbish compared to knowing Christ. So it’s certainly legitimate to put creation on one side of the scale and God on the other, provided that we find God to be infinitely more precious and delightful than the world he’s made. That’s why the psalmist says, “On earth there is nothing I desire besides you.”
I want to suggest that the Bible speaks in other ways about the relationship between loving God and loving his gifts. For example, “Eat honey, because it’s good” is a biblical exhortation. “The heavens declare the glory of God.” Not just the heavens, but everything else. The visible world was made to reveal the invisible God, and so there must be a way of enjoying it that also enhances and increases our enjoyment of him. I wrote the book to flesh out what exactly that type of God-centered delight in created things looks like.
2. I think for most American Christians there is a kind of guilt about the good things we enjoy compared to the suffering endured by those in the rest of the world. Is this healthy?
We should certainly be attuned to the suffering of those around us, both across the street and across the world. However, guilt is a terrible motivator for any real and lasting good. No one gets access to clean water or vaccinations or the gospel because we feel guilty for having them. In the book, I argue that our first response to the tremendous blessings we have in the West is gratitude to God. Paul tells us to give thanks always and for everything. Then, having acknowledged God’s goodness and our dependence, we dream and act so as to do good to others. One of my favorite quotes from Doug Wilson captures this perfectly: “Put your kids to bed, secure, well-fed, and warm, thank God for it from the low bottom of your heart, and plot how to extend that wonderful grace to others.”
The visible world was made to reveal the invisible God, there must be a way of enjoying it that increase our enjoyment of him.
3.Is there a way to "hold the things of this earth loosely" and yet also enjoy the richness of the material things God gives us?
If you mean that we should hold them like a hot potato, that we should always look at them with a skeptical eye lest they become too precious to us, then no. Authentic gratitude to God means allowing him to be a true giver, and we become genuine receivers ourselves. He richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. We ought to press into the goodness of nature, our children, our friends, our food, or whatever as a way of creating mental and emotional categories for knowing what he’s like.
We ought to hold some things more loosely (such as our financial resources) so that we are eager to share and be rich in good works. We should be genuinely open-handed with what God has given to us, ready to freely give what we’ve freely received. This open-handedness or holding things loosely carries with it the idea that we drink deeply from his fountain, that we seek to view every pleasure from his right hand as a tiny theophany, a revelation from God. We should not shrink back from deeply enjoying our children out of fear of idolatry (or fear of God taking them away). Instead, we press into them, knowing that the Giver is always present in his gifts when we receive them by faith.
4.How would this kind of theology play in a third world context, where people have so little?
I think the first thing to be said is that we must never treat God’s gifts as though they were bad in themselves, or as though we’re wrong in having them (which I think sometimes lurks behind this question). Our assumption is that we can't enjoy something that God gives to us if someone else lacks it. But that’s not the way the Bible talks.
Second, no matter where someone lives, God is present and active as the giver of every good and perfect gift. I don’t pretend to fathom his inscrutable wisdom in distributing his goodness in the ways he does. Paul says that there is a secret to facing plenty and abundance, and a secret to facing abundance and need, and it’s the same secret: I can do all things through him who gives me strength. God supplies all of our needs according to his riches in Christ, even if the form of his provision varies from person to person and nation to nation.
God reveals himself in everything that he has made. Everywhere you go, people misuse God’s good gifts, either through sinful indulgence (using them in ways that God has forbidden) or sinful renunciation (denying the goodness of creation). Anywhere we take the gospel, we must be prepared to teach people what it means to know God in and through the things he has made. In that sense, the book is as wide as the world, no matter how much or how little people have.
Our assumption is that we can't enjoy something that God gives to us if someone else lacks it.
5.If you are counseling pastors and church leaders, what kind of advice would you give them about preaching with the kind of balance you're aiming at in this book?
First, keep God central. The world was created to reveal him. Everything in reality exists to show us more of God. As a result, the call upon us as creatures is to love God supremely and fully and increasingly forever.
Second, having preached and established the supremacy of God, then we must preach and teach our people to live integrated lives. Teach them to recognize the goodness of God in the warmth of wool socks, in the coolness of a drink of water, in the laughter of a child, in the power of a thunderstorm. We don’t want to separate what God has joined together.
And third, we want to put to death all false guilt about our finitude and limitations. God does not condemn us because we are finite, temporal, and bodily. The physical world was his idea. There are better, biblical ways to motivate people for generosity than guilt trips. A deep recognition of God’s manifold kindness to us, and a glad-hearted resting in the cross will land on a people and spur them on to greater acts of love and good deeds.
Daniel Darling is vice-president of communications for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. He is the author of several books, including his latest, Activist Faith.
