The Fury and the Joy

“We desire each one of you to show the same earnestness to have the full assurance of hope until the end, so that you may not be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.”

I was reminded this week that languages evolve. A fellow believer embarrassed himself online with a rant that included a line to the effect that a Jew is a person from the tribe of Judah. To be fair, I hear this all the time. He just picked up a talking point from somebody and ran with it. But it’s not so, and it hasn’t been so for at least a couple of millennia. If you doubt that, compare the first four words of Acts 22:3 with Philippians 3:5.

True and Useful

“God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Ba-dum-bum!

I don’t recall hearing that line of argument against same-sex marriage from evangelicals much prior to the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling in 2015. However, Google’s Ngram viewer shows the phrase “Adam and Steve” appeared in popular culture for the first time around 1978 and peaked in 2011, with a strong tail into 2020.

So then, the line has been around nearly fifty years. It’s an old argument. It’s definitely a true argument. But whenever I hear it I ask myself, “Is it a useful argument?”

Anonymous Asks (415)

“What does it mean that Christ died for our sins ‘in accordance with the scriptures’?”

The phrase “in accordance with the scriptures” comes from two verses in 1 Corinthians, a letter Paul wrote to a church he established during his second missionary journey. The year was probably AD55, making it likely the fifth book of our New Testament chronologically. When he wrote it, the word “scriptures” meant what we now call the Old Testament, no more. None of the gospels existed, so Paul certainly didn’t mean them.

Later, “the scriptures” would come to include the four gospels, many of Paul’s letters and a number from other pillars of the early church, as it does today.

The Balancing Act

“Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife.”

“Honor your father and your mother.”

God never contradicts himself, and any two of his commands, rightly understood, are never opposed to one another. If it looks to us like they are, it’s because we are not interpreting one or both correctly.

Still, many young couples have difficulty reconciling the command to “leave and cleave” to one another in marriage with their ongoing biblical obligations to parents that continue until they die. For no small number of Christian newlyweds, especially those with demanding parents, it’s a tough balancing act.

Let’s try to balance it by looking at the whole counsel of God on the subject.

Somebody Else’s Mail (14)

The apostle Paul once wrote about his desire to know Christ and share in his sufferings, becoming like him. In doing so, he was responding to God’s own desire that those closest to him understand his heart. In both Old and New Testaments, we find the Lord putting his most faithful servants through hard experiences to teach them how God thought and felt.

Accordingly, we find the Lord testing Abraham in order than he might understand what it is like to give up a beloved son, testing Ezekiel in order that he might know what it’s like to lose one’s beloved, or testing Jeremiah so he would know the cost of telling the truth. I believe such trials were never arbitrary, and never inflicted on anyone who couldn’t handle them. They were expressions of trust and intimacy from friend to friend. Perhaps you have been through similar trials and come out with a better understanding of our heavenly Father and his beloved Son.

Too Hot to Handle: Rethinking Sunday School

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

Tom: I have a confession for you, IC. I was a terrible kid in Sunday School. I made everybody’s lives miserable, from the guy tasked with leading the singing to my individual Sunday School teachers. I really didn’t like it much.

The odd thing is that I had nothing against church particularly, or the Bible. I even believed it was true. But I was a total cut-up.

How about you?

Immanuel Can: Yep. Dead with boredom, and ready to make trouble.

Getting to the Truth

“I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.”

— English Common Law
Oath of Testimony

The fight outside a club was broken up by police; but a man was stabbed. Inspector Thomas has been assigned to find the assailant.

When the perp fled, the crowd scattered, but four witnesses remain: a bouncer, the girlfriend, the bar manager and a local cabbie. Inspector Thomas knows procedure; that each must be interviewed separately in order to get a complete picture.

On the Losing End

Hagar. Leah. Peninnah. Michal. What do these four Bible women have in common?

If your answer is something like “They came out on the losing end of a bigamous or polygamous relationship”, congratulations. I don’t have any great reward for you, but if you’ve learned the practical lesson these women’s stories teach us, you will be disinclined to pit family members against one another with your attention and love as the prize. Being flattered and chased is fun, but it’s neither kind nor fair to those forced to compete.

Even the “winners” in these oddball relationships lost something in the bargain.

Things Ovine and Caprine

Schindler’s List was a very successful 1990s movie about a German businessman and member of the Nazi party who saved the lives of hundreds of Jewish refugees during WWII. While the screenplay certainly received the Hollywood treatment and has been criticized for a taking a variety of storytelling liberties, one of which was being overly sentimental, the story upon which it is based is said to be substantially true.

So there is a real-world precedent for the scenario I am about to lay out for you.

Anonymous Asks (414)

“Should Christians be tolerant of other people’s beliefs?”

Some questions have no easy answers, not because the Bible is unclear, but because we cannot be sure what is really at issue. Provided we are paying attention, answering today’s question requires asking several more:

• How do you define tolerance?
• Which beliefs?
• Under what circumstances?

If we cannot first answer these secondary questions, we will not be in any position to answer the primary question.

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.