God Did It

The following list is the merest starting point. The moment you begin reading it, you will notice all the verses I’ve missed, which is inevitable. Lord willing, I will keep adding to it as I come across more. I’ve barely touched the Old Testament and the Gospels.

The idea started with two friends of mine who grew up among Christians with a bent for legalism. Their upbringing fixed in their minds an image of God their Father as wrathful, implacable, enthroned and distant, while Jesus in his role as advocate and intercessor constantly appealed to him to restrain his abiding anger from breaking out against his children. That image has been difficult to shake off, even with repeated readings through the scriptures.

That’s not the picture I grew up with. Not one bit. How do we get that from a God who so loved the world and a Son he gave, in what may be the single most well-known verse in all the Bible?

Somebody Else’s Mail (13)

Not all long-term friendships get off on the right foot.

The relationship between the tribes of Judah and Benjamin is a fascinating historical study. Israel’s second king, our beloved psalmist, was from the more dominant, numerous and historically significant tribe of Judah, while its first king, Saul, hailed from the comparatively tiny tribe of Benjamin.

What Benjamin lacked in size it made up in pugnacity. “Benjamin is a ravenous wolf”, prophesied the original Benjamin’s dad, and so it came to be.

Too Hot to Handle: Unhinged Racism

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

Jonathan Merritt contributes to The Atlantic and has been named one of “30 young influencers reshaping Christian leadership” by Outreach Magazine. All good so far, provided you don’t mind your “Christian leadership” flavored with a big honkin’ tablespoon of social justice.

Tom: He also just called Doug Wilson an “unhinged racist”, and Doug has sensibly called foul right here in one of the funniest posts I’ve read in a long time.

IC, these accusations of “racism” are getting so common today as to be almost meaningless.

Immanuel Can: Yes, along with the words, “sexist”, “homophobic” and “Islamophobic”, they comprise today’s “Four Horsemen of the Horse Manure”.

Retro Christianity

“In a post-Christian society, all faithful people begin to look a little Amish.”

— Ken Myers, host of Mars Hill Audio

Nice quote, Ken. Love the way you put that.

He’s got a point, though. In the ongoing moral and cultural decline of modern society, there must surely come a point at which the difference between how Christians live and how their neighbors live becomes too great to escape notice any longer.

And then, in a sense, we will all be “Amish”. I mean those who actually care to be Christians will be.

The Upper Limits

“A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher.”

A couple of months ago I discovered a new word. Don’t laugh. It was “autodidact”.

It’s not a difficult concept. An autodidact is simply a person who is self-taught rather than formally schooled. Despite being a voracious reader for six decades, to the best of my recollection I had never come across “autodidact” before a friend used it in conversation, prompting me to inquire, “Er, what is that?” I was embarrassed, but only slightly. English has an awful lot of words. I have a decent vocabulary, but some of the words I know are only useful in limited, very specific contexts. Autodidact is certainly one of those.

Semi-Random Musings (50)

Partial Preterists argue that Futurists misinterpret the symbolic language of scripture. Where a Futurist understands imagery like that of Matthew 24:29 (the darkening of sun and moon, stars falling from heaven, etc.) to refer to the apocalyptic finale of our present age, Preterists exhaust the meaning of the Lord’s words in the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in AD70. For Preterists, most or all of the events prophesied in that chapter have already taken place.

The issue, Preterists say, is that Futurists fail to understand “Old Testament prophetic de-creation language”.

Anonymous Asks (413)

“How should Christians react to doomsday predictions?”

You know what’s worse than nuclear Armageddon, for me at least? The prospect of ending life in an old folks’ home while succumbing to Alzheimer’s just slowly enough that I occasionally notice my mind’s merciless and inexorable deterioration. Of the various fates that might turn me into a quivering bag of Jell-O if I allowed myself to indulge in hysterics, that’s the mother of them all. Loss of independence and autonomy are right up at the very top of my personal anti-bucket list. Any form of speedy, absolute obliteration I don’t see coming is vastly, vastly preferable.

Yeah, as I have said about a few of the questions we’ve handled here over the years, I might be the wrong guy to ask. I’m not exactly the median respondent in any survey you might conduct.

In the Path of Your Judgments

Once upon a time, I had a conversation with a former co-worker about a friend who had just passed away. The Lord gave me the opportunity to share with her how he came to faith.

For years, his family prayed for his salvation, but he was a decent fellow with morals and principles and couldn’t see what all their concern for his soul was about. Looking at the way other people lived, he estimated that if God existed and he found himself standing before him one day, he would probably make out okay. Despite attending church regularly with his family and despite seeing the changes in their lives, he felt no particular personal need of Christ or his salvation.

Then one day on his way to work, he was involved in a catastrophic car accident.

Somebody Else’s Mail (12)

Because so many psalms are prophetic, we are wise when we come to them to ask the question posed to Philip by the Ethiopian eunuch concerning the prophecy of Isaiah that he was reading at the time. He inquired, “About whom does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?”

It was an excellent question. We must ask it of ourselves (and of the scriptures) today.

Too Hot to Handle: Rainbow Unicorns and Cosmic Heat Death

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

Canada’s former Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland once noted that Russia had a chance to get on the “right side of history” and help negotiate a political end to the reign of Syrian strongman Bashar Assad. Former president Obama loved the expression, and Bill Clinton used it more than 20 times in his speeches. Writer Ben Yagoda says the phrase — whether it’s “right side” or “wrong side” — has been in use for over a century.

Tom: I can vaguely understand what a Christian might intend by the use of the expression, Immanuel Can. But what on earth does “the right side of history” mean in a post-religious, thoroughly secular context?

Valley and Peak

On September 9, 1939, The Telegraph reported that a woman from London, England named Frances Fripps was accidentally struck by a local bus. Taken to Middlesex hospital, Miss Fripps awoke to find someone bending over her bed. To her utter astonishment, she recognized her visitor as none other than the Queen of England, there for a surprise tour of the hospital.

“They told me I had been trying to knock down a bus,” gasped Miss Fripps, “and now I find you here, your Majesty. What a day!”

What a day indeed.

Mystery Babylon in the New Testament (2)

I don’t love boring post titles like this one. However, in this case the alternative was my working title, Babylon 5. You can thank me later.

Yes, this series has run longer than expected. We are done today. In yesterday’s post, we briefly examined the current frontrunners for the real-world, present-day religious and political entity toward which scripture’s “mystery Babylon” symbolism is pointing us. Eschatologists in the Reformed tradition put forward apostate Judaism as its prime candidate, while the more popular names in the Dispensationalist school have historically envisioned Roman Catholicism in the role of the great prostitute seated on many waters or, as John refers to her, “Babylon the great”.

Hey, we’re Protestants. We have to protest something. Or someone. And yes, I know more than a few saved Catholics. Let’s not go there.

Mystery Babylon in the New Testament (1)

The New Testament writers reference Babylon 11 times. The first four mentions are purely historical, denoting the ancient city and its empire. My interest today is in the final seven, which talk about a Babylon that has endured throughout history. Six of these are in Revelation.

Few attentive readers of scripture doubt that John’s usage of “Babylon” in Revelation is primarily or exclusively symbolic. It has to be. The city was a ruin then and remains one today, buried under millennia of dirt. The empire is long gone. To the extent that Babylon continues to be a factor in our world, it is primarily a spiritual and philosophical influence rather than a visible political entity. I’ve been calling her “mystery Babylon”, not least because interpreters of scripture struggle to determine exactly where and how the Babylonian spirit currently manifests and how it will manifest in the end times. That is certainly mysterious.

Of course, there are always opinions about it. One favorite speculation over the centuries has been that Roman Catholicism is mystery Babylon.

Anonymous Asks (412)

“I believe our pastor is trying to introduce teaching and practices inconsistent with our church’s statement of faith. Should I respond, and if so, how?”

It’s not at all uncommon for Christians to attend a church whose statement of faith they disagree with in small ways. I’ve yet to fellowship with any congregation that was monolithic in its faith and practice. Doctrinal differences are to be expected, and our Lord anticipated them in his letters to the seven churches in Revelation. To the church in Pergamum he twice says some among them held teachings contrary to the faith.

Quietly holding a doctrinal error is a problem, but not as big a problem as being in a position to teach it. Being in a position to teach it weekly is worst of all.