Prophetic Trajectories in Matthew

Matthew 10 recounts the commission of the twelve disciples to take the good news of the kingdom to all the cities of Israel.

There is a specifically ethnic character to this set of instructions: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” instructs the Lord.

At this time and for this specific purpose, the Lord equips his servants with a tool kit you and I do not possess in taking the message of gospel to the world today: he “gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal every disease and every affliction”.

Anonymous Asks (426)

“Are black people mentioned in the Bible?”

Today, we often hear words like “Canadian” or “American” applied to people who manifestly were not born in those nations and have no ancestral history there. The media deliberately conflates legal citizenship or mere residence with ethnic identity, so that it’s not uncommon to see headlines like “Canadian man arrested in France” written about people whose “Canadian identity” is summed up entirely in their possession of a passport and access to our health care system, and who actually spend most of their time abroad. It is a matter of convenience rather than allegiance or shared history.

One hopes a few of these folks also pay taxes, but even that is not always the case.

The Last Recorded Prophecy

“This shall be the sign to you, declares the Lord …”

Bible students are familiar with the difficulties raised by comparing one or two of Jeremiah’s later prophecies to secular historical narratives covering the same periods, particularly those concerning Nebuchadnezzar and his conquest of Egypt.

Having spent a fair bit of time studying other accounts written by secular historians, these tempests in a teapot trouble me not a bit.

Somebody Else’s Mail (25)

God is spirit. I think we can confidently affirm that spirits do not have physical features like we do.

So what’s this David is saying about God’s eyelids in Psalm 11 then? Seems a strange expression:

“The Lord is in his holy temple; the Lord’s throne is in heaven; his eyes see, his eyelids test the children of man. The Lord tests the righteous, but his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence.”

Hmm. Let’s give this idea some thought before we get into the psalm verse by verse.

Too Hot to Handle: A Time to Kell

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Tim Keller has been under fire around here lately. In mid-February we fisked a Daily Wire column by Megan Basham that listed Keller among thought leaders credibly accused of enabling Francis Collins to flog COVID propaganda to evangelicals by introducing him as a “friend” during a joint interview for BioLogos.

Collins is a man of the Left, a self-described ally and advocate of the gay and trans lobbies, has facilitated and funded experimental transgender research on minors, and has publicly defended experimentation on fetuses obtained from abortion. It’s one thing to engage personally and privately with such an individual in the name of Christ. It’s quite another to represent him to believers as fellow member of the flock and a trustworthy expert on science.

A Disturbance in the Force

“Stop forcing your beliefs on me!”

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that cry when debating with unbelievers. In fact, I’ve heard it so much that I’ve begun to think there might be something behind it. After all, when many kinds of people from many kinds of backgrounds and situations seem to be arriving at the same kind of sentiment, there must be some cause for it, right?

But for a long time I haven’t been able to figure out exactly what it is. The problem is the wording: “You’re forcing …”

Am I? Really? How is that?

Recommend-a-blog (35)

I haven’t done one of these recommendation posts in a couple of years for a variety of reasons, the most significant of which is the incredible site churn that has occurred on the Web since late 2013 when Bernie, IC and I began blogging here. Linking to other people’s worthwhile work is a moving target, quite impossible to maintain. If you still believe the bromide “The internet is forever”, well … stop. It just ain’t so, unless what you have posted is terminally embarrassing. In that case, you can guarantee it will not be going anywhere soon. Somebody’s got a backup to the backup to the backup on a server somewhere, and your great, great grandchildren will probably read it and weep. Or laugh uproariously.

The good stuff? That disappears faster than a Hollywood marriage. Grrr.

All the Truth

“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.”

One of the things the Lord has impressed on my heart repeatedly over the last decade or so is the importance of paying attention to pronouns in the word of God. The spirit of our present age is relentlessly individualistic and more than a little narcissistic. It turns other people’s responsibilities into my rights, passing observations into my personal promises, and conversations about other people into conversations about me.

That same spirit takes every pronoun in the Bible and makes it mine. No wonder Christians get confused when they read the scriptures. Much in the word of God concerns other people entirely.

Anonymous Asks (425)

“What do Jews believe about the afterlife?”

That’s a complicated question. At no point in Israel’s history has belief in the afterlife been ubiquitous, unanimous or easy to pin down. A survey of Old Testament history shows even genuine Israelite believers had different concepts of death. The Law of Moses, to the best of my knowledge, did not address the subject at all, and there are no OT “Thus says the Lord” passages in the prophets to explain what happens after men die. A single passage in Daniel comes closest to that.

A Difficult Passage

A speaker at my local church this week chose to exposit a passage whose meaning I consider less than perfectly obvious. He started right in the middle of Romans 8. As he worked his way through it explaining what he believes Paul was telling his readers, I struggled to agree with him at several points. I’ve been thinking it through since, and I’d like to gently suggest a few other angles that might be more consistent with both human experience and, more importantly, the rest of the word of God.

As always, our worthy readers are free to disagree.

Somebody Else’s Mail (24)

Today, evangelical Christendom divides broadly into people who relate to the formulation “Christ is King” and people who prefer “Jesus is Lord”, a subject discussed at length in this post. The first statement is the hope of the Israelite remnant. Ironically, we hear it most frequently today from Christians who conflate our present era with the millennial reign of Christ, many of whom don’t think much of Jews. The second statement was characteristic of the apostles and writers of the New Testament and best describes the Church’s relationship to Israel’s rejected Messiah.

God has made him both Lord and Christ. We completely concur.

Too Hot to Handle: Atheists in Foxholes

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

David Rönnegard is 37. He has a PhD in philosophy from the London School of Economics, and is a researcher and teacher in corporate social responsibility in Stockholm. Sadly, and far too soon, David’s friends and family will be using “had” and “was” rather than “has” and “is” to describe him.

Dr. Rönnegard has stage four lung cancer. He is also the author of an article in Philosophy Now entitled “Atheist in a Foxhole”.

Why Are We So Easily Shaken?

I won’t soon forget his face.

He was perhaps thirty or forty years of age, well-dressed and smart looking, a typical man of his era. He was just one among the thousands who had come to this week-long Christian conference.

Every morning, the speakers had been dealing with the reasons for faith, their goal being to show people how firm and rational the foundation for our beliefs really is. Naturally, in this day and age, they had found it necessary to refer often to the recent screeds of people like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett or Sam Harris, the self-appointed “brights” of the atheist world, the so-called “Four Horsemen” of the secular apocalypse; though, really, all four are theological lightweights, since contempt for one’s subject matter tends to make one rather imprecise. Anyway, they make their way by preaching to the atheistic converted, reciting to them the same old canards that have been circulating since Darwin, Freud, Marx and Nietzsche. (Truly there is no new thing under the sun.)

Dating Jeremiah

The prophecies of Jeremiah appear in nothing remotely resembling chronological order. The text supplies no explanation for this, but it’s definitely the case. I am confident there is an intentionality in the Holy Spirit’s arrangement of his word, but whatever it may be, his logic defies easy analysis.

Speculations inevitably ensue. Reader suggestions include scribal error, editorial accident, literary device, arrangement by topic or theme, ordering by length of message and even multiple authors.