Real Guilt and Phantom Guilt

Revisiting the past can be a draining and unpleasant experience.

Let’s start with this: some parents are better than others, but no parent is perfect. That includes parents who were relatively established, mature Christians when they began raising their children. There is just too much we don’t know at 25 or 34. There are things about parenting I am just learning now, three decades later.

So then, at some point, the chickens come home to roost. Your children will either start telling you in which ways you failed, or else their progress in life (or lack thereof) may tell the story more eloquently than any words. You will have one of those very unpleasant “I did THAT?” moments.

Semi-Random Musings (53)

This 2021 post documented how, in not much more than a single generation, Jewish religious leaders went from burning the prophecies of Jeremiah — and physically abusing him for making them — to preserving and circulating those same predictions for posterity, such that Daniel in exile had his own copy of what eventually became Jeremiah 25.

In fewer than 66 years, Jeremiah went from pariah and public menace to one of Israel’s most respected prognosticators, though he probably didn’t live long enough to see his career re-evaluated.

Anonymous Asks (423)

“Why didn’t Jesus write any books of the Bible?”

If we’re going to be pedantic, there’s an argument to be made that he did. The Bible refers to the Holy Spirit as “the Spirit of Jesus”. It also tells us that same Spirit superintended the writing of the Bible. “Men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” and “All scripture is breathed out by God”, literally in-Spirit-ed.

If we accept what the Bible says about the process by which it came into existence, then technically speaking Jesus didn’t just write one book of the Bible, he wrote them all.

A Good Question

“Dad, why does everybody shut their eyes when they pray?” my daughter once asked. It’s a good question, and one that never occurred to me in my own childhood. I know now why I still do it instinctively: it’s because it was drummed into me both by precept and example.

To be fair, I can’t remember my parents instructing their children to do it, though both practiced it. Mind you, they also religiously practiced an afternoon nap, and that didn’t come out of either Old or New Testament. With four children relatively close together in age, I’m pretty sure it came out of sheer exhaustion. I have never felt obliged to mimic that habit.

Somebody Else’s Mail (22)

To date our studies have treated Psalm 9 as another of many that only a future believing Israelite remnant may sing in the text’s absolute and final sense.

Two Saturdays ago, we compared the language of this psalm to the language of the historical books concerning David’s personal dealings with the nations, and found they were an uncomfortable fit. Whereas David subdued individual nations temporarily only to have them rise up again against future Israelite kings, Psalm 9 speaks of God’s final, annihilative judgment of national Israel’s enemies as a collective, something David never saw during his lifetime.

So then, either Psalm 9 is a study in pure hyperbole, or else it is literal and prophetic, in which case David is speaking in a voice other than his own.

Too Hot to Handle: Surveying Evangelicalism

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

The current state of our evangelical Christian churches is not the easiest thing to encapsulate in a few sentences. While each of today’s Protestant denominations originally sprang from a set of shared doctrinal convictions and associated practices, few could ever have been called monolithic, and evangelicals are even less so. Some groups bear the same name but believe and do things very differently indeed.

Tom: My experience with folks from the denominations is primarily online, but our own Immanuel Can has been out church-shopping of late, and may have a better view from the trenches ... er, pews. Does the average modern evangelical church building still have pews, IC?

Mismeetings of the Christian Church

“Blest be the tie that binds
 Our hearts in Christian love:
 The fellowship of kindred minds
 Is like to that above.”

So sang the congregation.

And they sang it every Sunday.

They sang it whenever it was announced that they had a visitor or new congregant come among them.

A nice gesture, wasn’t it?

On Calling Jesus Lord

“No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except in the Holy Spirit.”

“On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord’.”

Critics of the Bible like to pit unrelated verses against one another in hope of identifying a contradiction and thereby discrediting scripture. Yet my personal experience over sixty years has been that examining any pair of apparent Bible contradictions in context generally has the effect of making perceived difficulties vanish in the proverbial puff of smoke.

Semi-Random Musings (52)

Given the eschatological assumptions of postmillennialism, I should probably have expected this, but it really didn’t hit me between the eyes until I saw it in plain language in their own words. That school of prophecy declares, “the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ” not just in the near future but right here and now, in the present moment.

How they explain the current state of the world around us through that interpretive lens is a mystery to me, but there it is. If Christ is indeed acting monarch of the universe in the present moment, it seems to me he is ruling with uncanny self-restraint.

Anonymous Asks (422)

“Where would you call ‘home’?”

Many of the Bible’s great men were strangers, living in places they didn’t truly belong.

Abraham is a fine example, among the earliest. God promised him the land in which he sojourned, but Abraham never possessed that territory during his own lifetime. He lived in tents among people he did not know and with whom he had little in common.

When his wife died, he described himself to the Hittites as a “sojourner and foreigner among you”. He had to solicit a place to bury his dear Sarah because he possessed no real estate of his own.

Not Like the Others

“One of these things is not like the others
 One of these things just doesn’t belong.”

— Sesame Street, before its writers went woke

One of the great privileges of celebrating the Lord’s Supper is that any male believer is welcome to participate vocally. That principle draws its authority from 1 Corinthians 14:31, which says concerning church meetings, “You can all prophesy one by one, so that all may learn and all be encouraged.” The “all” in that verse means “all you men who are gifted prophets”.

We know that because the word Paul uses for “prophets” in the passage is masculine. The Greek language has a separate word for female prophets that we translate into English as “prophetesses”. That’s not the word Paul used in this chapter.

Somebody Else’s Mail (21)

“Sing praises to the Lord, who sits enthroned in Zion! Tell among the peoples his deeds! For he who avenges blood is mindful of them; he does not forget the cry of the afflicted.”

If you read this verse in the NASB, you may be forgiven for thinking David was name-checking a cheesy vampire flick. There, it reads, “He who requires blood”, a statement which sounds odd to modern ears but is nonetheless the most ruthlessly literal of all translations.

The author of Psalm 9 made no such silly Hollywood associations and neither did his original readers. The subject was deadly serious. The ESV rendering above is less literal but a little easier to process. So let’s talk about this title of YHWH, or maybe of Christ, if the distinction is worth considering.

Too Hot to Handle: How Do You Read It? (5)

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

Tom: We’re in the middle of batting around commonly misunderstood Bible verses. Here’s another frequently-quoted line for you, IC, this one from Proverbs:

“As he thinks within himself, so he is.”

I mentioned in another post a few weeks ago that I’ve often found other people understand individual proverbs very differently from the way I understand them. This one is no exception.

Sailing the High Seas

An old friend sent me an email a while ago. He was concerned:

“My daughter is going off to university next year, and she wants to take English Literature as her major! I’m worried about her: could you talk to her?”

I had to smile. Sure, I could talk to her. After all, I had been through all that, and I had survived just fine, thank you.

But why the panic?

I recalled that he is university educated himself, but in mathematical subjects. I suppose that somewhere along the line he’d picked up the idea that while maths might be a safe study for a Christian, the humanities might be unusually hostile to faith. I wondered what he thought of anthropology or the life sciences.