Anonymous Asks (394)

“Hey, I’ve been trying to learn more about living in Christ. What books or resources do you personally read or follow?”

I almost posted photos of my bookshelves, but I’m not sure how useful a complete rundown of my collection or my regular online reading list would be as an example for a younger believer. I’m an older Christian and I write for online publication almost every day my life. I am at my sharpest when reacting to error, so I buy and read many books written by people I don’t agree with in whole or in part in order to get the view “from the other side”. I try to use the experience the Lord has given me to test good arguments and bad, and pick apart the ones that need it.

Then I often keep the books that contain them around for reference afterwards. I will leave most of these off my recommendation list. No pictures today!

Semi-Random Musings (47)

When a fractured relationship with another believer disturbs your fellowship with the Lord as you break bread, chances are the disagreement was over something practical and comparatively trivial rather than over one of the essential doctrines of scripture. Disputes about what the Bible teaches have always existed and will until the Lord returns, but these days they are more common online or in print than between believers who attend the same church. It’s so much easier to fling words like “heretic” around when both sides are anonymous, hundreds of miles apart, or both.

We save our passive aggressive behavior for friends, family and locals. “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me.”

Really? Mary didn’t have a pair of working ears?

No King in Israel (47)

Can you think of any current law so unjust that you would be willing to give your life to prevent its enforcement?

ICE agents killed two Minneapolis protesters attempting to prevent the deportation of foreign illegals in separate incidents recently, resulting in a level of public controversy almost impossible to miss. I suppose it’s conceivable one or both of the deceased was committed to his or her cause to the point of martyrdom, but my uneducated guess is that the protestors simply did not believe that, even when personally endangered, enforcement agents were prepared to open fire on American citizens in the charged atmosphere of post-George Floyd Minneapolis. Now they know.

Too Hot to Handle: Bypassing the Intellect

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

[Editor’s note: The following email back-and-forth reproduced here didn’t really bring us to any hard-and-fast conclusions about transcendent experiences and how the Christian ought to process them. Perhaps we talked past each other a bit too much. Certainly, we all used the words “I think” far too often for any of us to hold our respective positions too dogmatically. All the same, it seems to me the exchange serves as a good example of how brothers in Christ tend to work things out in our heads by bouncing ideas off one another, as well as a plausible explanation for why their wives flee the room at such times.]

Bernie: I remember being struck by something I read some years ago. I can’t find the original quote but my attempt at a paraphrase is this: “Music has a way of bypassing the intellect and speaking directly to the heart.”

Turning the Beat Around

Today’s title? Sorry about that ... it just worked. And yep, that’s right: now you’re going to have Vickie Sue Robinson’s 1976 disco anthem in your brain all day. My bad.

Disco’s not my taste either. In fact, as a leftover child of the New Wave era, I’ve always thought it was the fifth horseman of the Apocalypse. But that’s not going to help you with Vickie today. Like it or not, she’s going to be in your head.

You can thank me later.

Out of His Mind

“Your great learning is driving you out of your mind.”

So declared Porcius Festus, fifth procurator of Judea, to the apostle Paul at one of his trials in Caesarea.

To be fair, Paul was representing himself in court with a rather unlikely defense. Instead of dismantling the prosecution’s case or putting forward arguments for his own innocence, he enthusiastically proclaimed Christ risen from the dead, a light to Jews and Gentiles alike, truths that nearly got him killed in Jerusalem.

So Festus assumed he was nuts.

The Faintly Burning Wick

I had just turned sixteen. Understandably, I was eager to get my driver’s license; it’s no fun trying to arrange a date night by way of the local transit schedule. Greatly to my distress, my father put a damper on my mobility aspirations by pointing out that the cost of insuring a sixteen-year-old male as an occasional driver of the family vehicle was well beyond his means. I was welcome to get a part-time job after school and pay the cost myself if driving was all that important to me.

Well, driving wasn’t, but grousing was.

Anonymous Asks (393)

“Is it biblical to choose the lesser of two evils?”

In the ancient Hebrew of the Old Testament, the word translated “evil” [raʿ] has two distinct meanings. One is wickedness, an ungodly moral choice made by a living being. The other is misfortune, a sad practical consequence of living in a fallen world, about which we often have little or no choice at all.

The Redemption Paradox

“So Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her.”

Love gives us a different perspective on the difficulties of life. Seven years of hard work, day in, day out, is a high price to pay for a wife. Elsewhere, Jacob talks about serving Laban, and he says, “By day the heat consumed me, and the cold by night, and my sleep fled from my eyes.” So he was not unaware what Rachel cost him, but love gave Jacob a different perspective. He had a goal in front of him. Compared to that, seven years became but a few days.

No King in Israel (46)

Three interesting verses early in Exodus: Moses had reluctantly accepted the Lord’s commission to lead Israel out of Egyptian slavery into the land God had promised them. He, his Midianite wife Zipporah and their young son Gershom then began the trek to Egypt to present God’s agenda to Pharaoh. On the way, “the Lord met him and sought to put him to death”. Zipporah wisely intervened, emergency-circumcised her son and touched her husband’s feet with the bloody foreskin, averting the crisis.

Readers get totally confused, and rightly so. We do not have all the necessary information in the immediate context.

Too Hot to Handle: Branded

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

They started in 1988 with a 27-year old “senior pastor” named James MacDonald and a couple hundred interested Christians and seekers gathered in a Chicago high school auditorium. Today, they are known as Harvest Bible Chapel, a megachurch with campuses all over the Chicago area and over 100 affiliated fellowships in North America and internationally.

Tom: Today, the mother church is being investigated for alleged financial shenanigans.

Burning Down the House

No, I’m not going to break into the Talking Heads’ 1983 pop hit.

I’m tempted, but I’m not going to. You really don’t want to hear me do that.

But nothing raises the temperature in a local congregation faster than any suggestion we change the music. Countless battles have been fought, and whole congregations have divided over that sort of thing.

That’s really a pity.

The Commentariat Speaks (37)

A passage in 1 Timothy sets a Reddit commenter’s teeth on edge:

“This verse has frankly been getting under my skin for the last two weeks. Why would Timothy put such an emphasis on the subordination of women at that point in early Christianity, especially if the spread of the gospel was paramount? Wouldn’t forcing women into submissiveness during church turn women (and possibly men) away from the new religion?”

These instructions in Timothy concern Christian sex roles, both in church meetings and at home. The commenter is not the first Bible reader to whom a question along these lines has occurred, and will definitely not be the last. Let’s see if we can help.

I Said, You Are Gods

“Jesus answered them, ‘Is it not written in your Law, “I said, you are gods”?’ ”

Bible commentators often say the New Testament (NT) interprets the Old (OT), not the other way around. This principle is generally solid, though it can be taken to extremes; for example, by erroneously concluding that we cannot interpret any OT scripture properly without reference to the NT. Manifestly, we both can and should.