The Sword

Christmases were idyllic when my brothers and I were very young, or at least they seemed that way to me. Like every family, we had our own traditions, including a pillowcase full of surprises at the foot of each bed on Christmas morn and three or four highly prized confections that turned up in the kitchen only in December. But the big draw for me was the Christmas day drive an hour or so west of the city to my uncle’s big, impressive house. Empty roads, snow, and the atmosphere of sweet anticipation.

Mom’s eldest brother was — not to put too fine a point on it — set in his ways. He wasn’t going anywhere for Christmas. I don’t believe he ever did. The family was coming to him. Also, his wife was a lovely, generous, hospitable woman who didn’t in the least mind opening her home to her husband’s four siblings, their spouses and multitudinous offspring. The arrangement worked for many years until it didn’t.

Anonymous Asks (428)

“What’s the difference between fornication and adultery?”

Translators make choices. English translators of different versions of the Bible over the centuries have rendered the same Greek and Hebrew words various ways in English. That diversity of language complicates our understanding of certain terms. It compels us to make a bit of an effort to put ourselves back in the shoes of those to whom the word of God first came.

Doing that is always rewarding, so let’s make an effort with these two words.

Serendipity or Something Else

Reader participation time. Has anything like this ever happened to you?

It’s Sunday morning. The house is quiet, you’ve had coffee and a shower, and you’re sitting down for a few minutes with your Bible before heading off to the Lord’s Supper.

Your church is a little unusual these days in that it hosts a weekly worship meeting with no designated speaker and no fixed order of proceedings. Nobody but the couple doing the greeting has any preordained role. The husband on the door will generally opt to start the meeting with a welcome, a hymn and/or a prayer. After that, the elders encourage an hour of vocal participation in the meeting by what high churches sometimes call the “laity”, Christian men who are not religious professionals. All men, great and small, young and old, are free to give out a hymn, lead the congregation in prayer, or even open the Bible to do a little reading and commentary.

Do you remember when Jesus read from the scroll in a synagogue in Nazareth, then briefly commented to the effect that he was fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy right in front of them? It’s a bit like that, except you’re not the fulfillment of OT prophecy. Not that you know about anyway.

Somebody Else’s Mail (27)

“The faithful have vanished”, David wrote.

Not that the faithful have been exterminated and evil has finally won the day.

Not that the faithful have apostatized or lost their salt.

They’ve vanished. Elvis has left the building, folks.

This is not simply David’s personal experience here. No way, not without at least some exaggeration or hyperbole.

Too Hot to Handle: Feeding the Gators

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

Tom: Let’s do something a little different today, Immanuel Can. I was thinking about the social implications of that clip you sent me this morning from the action-adventure video game Red Dead Redemption 2. It seems like that might be worth talking about from a Christian perspective.

Do you want to take a crack at describing it?

Immanuel Can: It’s hard to imagine if a person has not seen modern video games. (Of course, for those who have children, avoiding video games is all-but-impossible nowadays.) A lot are now story-based, but a lot are also what’s called “first-person-shooters”, designed to let players kill a lot of characters as they move through a maze or follow some kind of prepared story line.

Ship of Fools, or The Titanic Arrogance of Postmodernity

“We’re setting sail
To the place on the map
From which no one has ever returned
Drawn by the promise of
the joker and the fool
By the light of the crosses that burn

Drawn by the promise of
the women and the lace
And the gold and the cotton and pearls
It's the place where they keep all the darkness you need
You sail away from the light of the world on this trip, baby

You will pay tomorrow
You’re gonna pay tomorrow
You will pay tomorrow”

— Ship of Fools, World Party (1986)

Those are pretty “Christian” lyrics, really.

Oh, they’re not genteel, kindly or polite, to be sure; but they’re real, they’re true and they’re accurate — at least when we apply them to our present society.

On the Obsessive Impulse to Correct Others

Call it rhetoric, hyperbole, sloppiness or slang. Call it figurative language or a poorly-chosen idiom. Call it whatever you like, but imprecise language is a normal feature of human interaction. Christians who do not learn to accept and accommodate looseness of expression from others — intentional or otherwise — are going to struggle in their relationships with the world and with their fellow believers.

Even the most popular communicators affect imprecision when it serves their purposes. Ain’t Too Proud to Beg is a decent song title, I Am Not Too Proud to Beg considerably less so.

Killing the Soul

The Lord Jesus taught that nothing men are capable of doing to one another in this life compares to eternal punishment. Not on their worst day with all the weapons at their disposal. “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul,” he told his disciples. “Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

Interestingly, scientists confirm that our nervous systems have a built-in upper limit to the agonies they may allow us to experience. They refer to the phenomenon as Conditional Pain Modulation or CPM. Pain inhibits pain. In this life, you can only hurt so much.

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“What is the Sermon on the Plain?”

Everyone who has spent any time at all in the Bible knows the Sermon on the Mount. The fifth through seventh chapters of Matthew describe the Lord Jesus taking to an impromptu “pulpit” on a mountain in Galilee, leading to three full chapters of teaching that began with his disciples and expanded to the crowds that followed him. Most Christians are well acquainted with it, and most Bibles with chapter headings commence Matthew 5 with the title “The Sermon on the Mount”.

What else would you call it? If there’s a better idea, nobody seems to have come up with it.

Dilettantes and Dominos

The consequences of sinful acts are rarely limited to the life of the sinner. A series of sinful acts can issue in ongoing repercussions. Like dominos.

Many of the circumstances we face in our lives are the product of choices made by our ancestors, by government, neighbors and even our fellow Christians. Much less obviously, in a democracy they are increasingly the result of decisions made by unelected administrative functionaries, more or less by fiat. To dominos it is not apparent what starts the chain reaction that causes their fall.

Somebody Else’s Mail (26)

Much has been written concerning the circumstances that inspired Psalm 11. Some readers assign it to the period of roughly eight years when David was on the run from Saul, others to the time when David’s son Absalom seized the kingdom and briefly threatened his father’s life. Either way, the theme they derive from the psalm is that when faced with the threat of evil, godly people ought to stand firm. It is critical, they say, that God-honoring authority not be lost.

Once again, to nobody’s surprise, I have to disagree. I will be asking the same question that has informed our interpretation of several psalms to date, which is “About whom does the prophet say this?” In Psalm 11 at least, I don’t believe the answer is “About himself.”

Too Hot to Handle: What Doesn’t Kell You...

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

Modern attention spans are what they are. We try to keep these posts to roughly 2,000 words; conventional internet wisdom has it the average person begins to tune out around then. But there were at least three points we didn’t get around to last week in our discussion of the accusation raised by Tim Keller that the traditional evangelical fundraising model is systemically racist.

Tom: IC, I wanted to start out with this thought: Tim Keller is using woke language and making typical social justice assumptions about his fellow believers, but I don’t want to leave the subject without pointing out that there is nothing wrong with self-examination on the part of Christians, churches, and parachurch organizations.

The Force Farce

Last week we were talking about the charge made by so many non-Christians today that we are guilty of forcing our views on them.

At first blush, the charge seemed ridiculous. After all, Christians represent absolutely no threat of physical or political violence: even to imagine that is just paranoid, and completely misunderstands the fundamental necessity of faith. Moreover, Christians may sometimes choose to absent themselves from participating in or approving of worldly values, activities or lifestyles because of conscience, but that represents no threat of force: it’s simply a matter of personal conscience — the very thing that world is at pains to affirm.

So where does the charge of “force” come from?

Not You Who Speak

Yesterday we revisited a 2020 post in which the Lord commissions his twelve closest disciples as his representatives to the nation of Israel. Matthew 10 is one of many examples in the gospels where alert Bible students feel compelled to ask the question “To whom is the Lord speaking here?”

Obviously, he was speaking to the Twelve, but that doesn’t answer the real question. Those disciples played multiple roles in the plans and purposes of God. We might better state the question as “In what capacity is the Lord addressing his disciples?”