The Laying On of Hands

In Sunday’s post, we noted the first century baptism of the Holy Spirit in Samaria took place when Peter and John first prayed, then laid hands on believing Samaritans. That’s in Acts 8. We also noted the Holy Spirit did not deem this step necessary when he baptized Jews in Jerusalem in Acts 2 or Gentiles in Caesarea in Acts 10. These simply believed and were filled with the Spirit, glorifying God in other languages.

The experience of Acts 8 prompts a few questions about this “laying on of hands”. Where did it come from? What does it signify? How did the early church practice it? Did miracles always accompany it? We’re going to try to answer these questions today.

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“Is it possible for fallen angels to repent?”

In C.S. Lewis’s Narnia stories, Aslan never tells anyone any story but their own. When he walks with Edmund after his restoration, Lewis comments, “There is no need to tell you (and no one ever heard) what Aslan was saying.”

I’ve always thought those lines insightful. Scripture is silent about many things that inspire our curiosity, the status of spirit beings who “left their proper dwelling” among them.

What Happened in Samaria?

We speak of the baptism of the Holy Spirit as an event that took place in the first century, at the very beginning of church history. That’s correct. Notwithstanding the practices of some charismatic groups, most Christians today do not expect groups of new believers to receive the Holy Spirit accompanied by tongues of fire and the expression of the prophetic word in foreign languages as in Acts 2. If we are honest, nothing that we see happening in those churches today corresponds authentically to the events we read about in Acts.

So then, we consign the baptism of the Holy Spirit to the past, where we believe it belongs. It was a historic manifestation of the power of God by which “in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body”.

No King in Israel (22)

You may have heard the expression “sow it with salt” before. It’s most commonly associated with the incident we are reading about today, in which Abimelech destroyed the city of Shechem and sowed it with salt thereafter. Salting the earth apparently became common in the ancient Near East. Hittite and Assyrian sources both mention the practice, but none predates the Judges account.

Maybe Abimelech was a trendsetter.

Too Hot to Handle: Facts and Opinions

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

The Pew Research Center — a moderately reputable outfit as these things go — just released study data that indicates three quarters of Americans are incapable of distinguishing fact from opinion. When given a series of statements like “Spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid make up the largest portion of the U.S. federal budget” (fact, supposedly), and “Democracy is the greatest form of government” (opinion, surely), most participants were unable to determine which were which.

Tom: Somebody’s responsible for that, IC. Want to hazard a guess who it might be?

Assumptions and Loaded Conversations

Back in 2012, NBA Commissioner David Stern caught flack for cracking an old joke in an interview with Jim Rome. Rome asked him if the NBA lottery was rigged. Stern came back with, “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?”

Of course, this immediately got him into trouble with the PC set, who took him to be making fun of the very serious issue of wife abuse. I can sympathize with their ire; but in fairness, I think it’s not what Stern was trying to say. He was actually referring to an old (admittedly somewhat tasteless) joke. I think I first read it on a bubble gum wrapper when I was a kid, and I remember seeing it in other places as well. It was one of those things that was “just around”. The joke went like this:

Question: What’s a question you cannot answer either “Yes” or “No”?

Answer: Have you stopped beating your wife yet?

Perhaps Stern and I chewed the same gum, I don’t know.

Peace and War

“Too long have I had my dwelling among those who hate peace. I am for peace, but when I speak, they are for war!”

The perennial burden of the believer in a faithless, self-interested, predatory and relentlessly aggressive world is that he simply does not fit in, no matter how hard he or she may try. If our hearts are truly in the process of being remade in the likeness of the Lord Jesus, we are bound to find ourselves emotionally at odds with our co-workers, neighbors and especially the power structures of the societies in which we live.

How can we not? We are of a completely different disposition, and it goes right down to our spiritual genetics.

Dreams and Meanings

I don’t think I’ve had a spiritually meaningful dream in my life.

Well, let me qualify that just a little. I’m sure I’ve had dreams psychiatrists would call meaningful in that they revealed truths about my subconscious preoccupations, some of which are surely spiritual. I wouldn’t argue with the experts about the contents of my cranium either; it seems logical to me that when you have the same dream dozens of times, surely something is consistently on your mind that you haven’t resolved to your own satisfaction.

But personal messages from God in my sleep? Not a one.

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“What is a bruised reed?”

Today’s question comes out of something I heard in a meeting recently. A well-meaning, sincere brother in Christ expressed the opinion that the “bruised reed” mentioned in Isaiah 42:3 was a musical instrument of some sort.

Yeah, it was a first for me too. But it’s always interesting to find that even very smart people make associations that would never occur to you in a month of Sundays.

A Prophecy Primer

Over the last couple weeks, we’ve looked at self-proclaimed practitioners of the spiritual gift of prophecy, how they say God “speaks” to them, the sorts of things they claim he speaks about, and what they do with their gift. The most common threads in all this mystical mumbo jumbo are (1) money, (2) women, and (3) eagerness to get children involved.

If these are not aircraft carrier-sized red flags, I’m not sure what else we should call them.

What If I Miss the Rapture?

Before I moved earlier this year, I was part of a weekly home church gathering. The rapture loomed large in a few of those studies and became the subject of a couple posts here, as often happens with Bible passages I am wrestling my way through with friends.

In one of those posts I made reference to an ex-evangelical named Joshua Rivera who now writes for Slate.

Too Hot to Handle: Snatched Up

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

Tom: So we did the millennium, IC. Care to walk me through the rapture?

Immanuel Can: I thought that was the same as the Second Coming. Next you’re going to tell me that Israel still exists and that I wasn’t predestined to election before the foundation of the world.

Tom: Do I need to put a </sarc> at the end there? Never mind. Sometimes you open a can and the worms just go everywhere ...

IC: Well, one way to manage the worms is to focus on making the distinction between the Second Coming and the rapture.

Tom: Okay, then.

A Second Chance

Will we have a second chance to go to heaven? There are at least three different reasons a question like this gets asked. One is very Catholic, a second very Protestant, and the third ... well ... universal.

The Catholic might best have his question paraphrased as something like “Is there a purgatory, and do we get to go to heaven at the end of it?” The Protestant is really asking “Is this ‘rapture’ thing I’ve heard about really in the Bible, and if I get left behind, do I get another shot?” The universalist is asking some version of “Surely hell cannot last forever, can it?”

The Rapture and the Imprecatory Psalms

All true Christians are believers, but not all believers are Christians.

That is in the Bible. Abraham wasn’t a Christian. Christianity belongs to the time following the ministry of the Lord Jesus, the descent of the Holy Spirit, and the inauguration of the church. That’s when the disciples became Christians. You don’t read the word “Christian” in the Old Testament, nor is a Christian described. What you have is godly or ungodly Israelites; those who believed God and those who didn’t; the wicked and the righteous in Israel — and of course some Gentiles saved as well.

The position from which a godly Jewish believer would look at things and the stance of an equally godly Christian looking at things are quite different.