Hey there, mere cognition blog thing. It's mostly been a minute. A long while back, I was going to write as I went through the epistles.
God decided life needed to get weird again.
So the writing went by the wayside.
A lot has happened as I neglected you. There have been ups and downs and lefts and rights.
Somewhere along the way, I thought about the nature of being and God's design of us - how we propagate traits down family lines.
I thought about a lot of other things too.
Most of all, though, I thought about a jewel that is most precious to me. Not more precious than Christ, but close behind.
I think I shall make time to begin writing again. That jewel will need to know things at future times.
The best time to plant a shade tree is twenty years ago. The second best time to plant a shade tree is now.
Defending Ravi - Open Letter: https://defendingravi.com/2024/01/01/open-letter/
This is a rather sobering and not-unexpected response from Ravi's family. It is always best to examine single-sided accounts with a healthy grain of salt and critical analysis of the holistic picture.
I will admit when things first came out, I callously and jadedly thought, "sin never surprises me anymore". With more discernment and conversation, though, the more I see the work of the enemy to try and destroy the legacy of a faithful servant.
It takes a nontrivial amount of work to examine the motivations of involved parties because you have to do a deeper examination of what intrinsically drives a person to determine what their default trajectory is likely to be. Being Reformed, this is only marginally easier because we can start from the natural tendency towards total depravity.
Bringing the evidence into contextual relation of a holistic overview gives us a better overall picture of what we're up against when trying to discern truth.
And the truth here is, despite the sinful motivations of those who were part of the RZIM organization, despite the rose-colored glasses Ravi's family look from, despite the actual sins of Ravi (and the general fallenness of humanity as a whole), his work for the kingdom should stand on its own as its own testimony from decades of evidence. Whatever Ravi did or did not actually do is irrelevant to the ideas that he preached that can be corroborated by scripture.
God's truth is universal and the actions of a man will not tarnish it, neither objectively or in the eyes of people that actually value truth for what it is above all. Those that would dismiss ideas simply due to the characteristics of the person that spoke them, and not on the merits of the ideas themselves, commit no less hypocrisy.
We are a condemning people, willing to exact judgment in the righteousness of our own eyes at transgressions we perceive. How much, do you think, is this an image-bearing aspect? How sinful, do you think, must this be to have the hubris to think we are capable of righteous judgment with our limited perception? Only the omniscient can make righteous judgment, for the only the omniscient is capable of knowing and seeing all.
Why then, do you think, Jesus was sent to exalt and hold high love as the synopsis of the whole of the Law (Mark 12:30-31), giving us license to judge the ideas while leaving judgment of people and acts of vengeance to God alone?
Because, as with Cain and Abel, we are more than happy to murder our neighbor (in heart or physically) for nearly any reason whatsoever.
To our own shame.