Dolly Parton’s husband dies at 82

If I told you that Carl Dean had died, what would be your response?

If I told you that he was married to Dolly Parton for fifty-nine years before his death on March 3 at the age of eighty-two, would your response be different?

The reason for the difference is that Mr. Dean avoided the spotlight so effectively that most of us had no idea who he was. If anything, we might have heard how he inspired Dolly’s hit song “Jolene.” As Dolly told the story, a bank teller “got this terrible crush on my husband.” However, “she had everything I didn’t, like legs—you know, she was about six feet tall.”

So Dolly wrote a song pleading with her, “Please don’t take my man.” She named the bank teller “Jolene” after a young fan who impressed her during a concert.

That’s it for Carl Dean’s public story. He focused on his asphalt-paving business in Nashville, while Dolly became an international superstar. His story reminds us that what we don’t know about people often exceeds what we do know about them.

Yet our ignorance does not change their reality.

“They understood none of these things”

I make this point in light of the fact that Lent begins today.

Millions of Christians around the world will use this day to begin their spiritual preparations for Good Friday and Easter Sunday. But when Jesus was seven weeks away from his cross and resurrection, few understood his messianic mission or the transformational significance of what was to come.

On one occasion, as he and his disciples neared the Holy City, he told them:

See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished. For he will be delivered over to the Gentiles and will be mocked and shamefully treated and spit upon. And after flogging him, they will kill him, and on the third day he will rise (Luke 18:31–33).

He could not have predicted the events to come more clearly, but “they understood none of these things” (v. 34). Their ignorance did not change his identity.

Tragically, our postmodern relativism blinds us to this fact. We are convinced that all truth is personal and subjective and that the world is what we believe it to be. So many people over the years have told me that they don’t believe in God, or in hell, or in Jesus, as if their lack of faith defines reality. Just the other day a man told my wife, “I’m not religious,” as if that was all that needed to be said on the subject.

But as CS Lewis observed in The Problem of Pain, “A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.”

In most dimensions of life, we know that reality is not required to conform to what we think. We don’t believe that sincerity is a better test for directions home than a map or a better way to take medicine than a doctor’s instructions. We understand that the King of England exists whether we have met him or not.

However, when we face a reality we’d rather not face, we resort to personal “belief” as the “truth” we claim.

Why we must choose God’s will or our own

Such a detour from reality into opinion is one of Satan’s most effective ways to lure us from God’s perfect will into our sinfulness. Any time he can get us to be our own god (Genesis 3:5), he knows we are likely to fall and fail. This is because choosing between God and ourselves is a binary choice, one driven by logic as ancient as Aristotle.

When I taught the history of philosophy in various seminaries, we always focused on the famed philosopher’s laws of logic: identity, contradiction, and the “excluded middle.”

• Identity means a thing is what it is (an elephant is an elephant, for example).
• Contradiction means it cannot be what it is and, at the same time, be what it is not (an elephant is not a car).
• The “excluded middle” means there is no middle option, so we must choose (there is no such thing as an elephant-car).

The same is true with the will of God and personal opinion:

• God is omniscient and omnibenevolent, always knowing what is best for us and wanting only what is best for us. Humans, by contrast, are fallen, finite, and driven by the selfish “will to power.”
• God cannot be a fallen human, and a fallen human cannot be God.
• We must, therefore, choose whether to trust God’s will or our own.

As we do, let’s remember the old adage: God always gives the best to those who leave the choice with him.

“The central message of the Bible”

Substituting opinion for reality is dangerous on every level, but none more so than the fact that choosing opinion costs us the transforming personal relationship with Jesus for which we were created. If we use this Lenten season to focus every day on him in prayer, Bible study, and worship, we will know him in ways that will mark us forever. The closer we draw to him, the more we become the people we are meant to be.

This is because, at its simplest, Christianity is about Christ. Billy Graham wrote:

The central message of the Bible is Jesus Christ. In Genesis, Jesus is the Seed of the Woman. In Exodus, He is the Passover Lamb. In Leviticus, He is the atoning Sacrifice. In Numbers, the Smitten Rock. In Deuteronomy, the Prophet. In Joshua, the Captain of the Lord’s hosts. In Judges, the Deliverer. In Ruth, the Heavenly Kinsman. In the six books of Kings, the Promised King. In Nehemiah, the Restorer of the nation. In Esther, the Advocate. In Job, my Redeemer. In Psalms, my Strength. In Proverbs, my Pattern. In Ecclesiastes, my Goal. In the Song of Solomon, my Satisfier. In the prophets, the Coming Prince of Peace. In the Gospels, He is the Christ who came to seek and to save. In Acts, He is Christ risen. In the epistles, He is Christ exalted. In Revelation, He is Christ returning and reigning.

Where would you say you are on your faith journey with him?