“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.
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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.
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“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.
“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.
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“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.
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.
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.
I’ve been reading a few comments online from Christian parents wondering how much contact they should allow their children with unsaved relatives expressing convictions or modeling lifestyles antithetical to their values. I mean homosexuals, alcoholics, atheists, practitioners of false religions or woke ideology, career criminals, and so on. The concern is that a friendly, affectionate uncle, aunt or older cousin who takes an interest in one’s child may become, for a time at least, a more appealing role model than the parent who cares for them every day.
Children may be insufficiently discerning, some fear, to appreciate an unsaved relative’s value to God and family while categorically rejecting his bad example.
“I know, O Lord, that the way of man is not in himself, that it is not in man who walks to direct his steps.”
Perhaps the prophet Jeremiah had been reading the book of Proverbs when he made this statement. There, Solomon wrote these words: “A man’s steps are from the Lord; how then can man understand his way?” Solomon wondered about it. Jeremiah simply asserted it.
Either way, left to our own devices, we are blind men groping in the dark. In this life, the word of God is our only unerring guide.
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“Do nominally-Christian family members have a right to privacy when their behavior changes in suspicious ways?”
Here is an interesting and very modern dilemma. Do you remember the days before ubiquitous social media, online histories in our browser caches and the discovery of the occasional unlocked cell phone? Even if we felt we just couldn’t go on together with suspicious minds, there wasn’t a whole lot we could do about our discomfort beyond appealing to the suspect to open up and talk with us about what was really going on.
Today, Big Brother is watching not just you but everybody in your family, and he’s happy to share what he knows any time you’re willing to take a peek. Should you?
“They bend their tongue like a bow.”
I have a dear friend who professed faith in Christ back in his youth, but in his twenties married an unsaved woman and wandered far away from the Lord … or maybe the process worked the other way round. Either way, raising a family in lockstep with the worldview of a woman who does not know Christ or the scriptures, he has grown comfortable subjecting himself to the propaganda of the leftist media on a daily basis.
Eager to please his wife, he now pays arguably more attention to her ideology than she does.
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The prophetic spirit moved David as he wrote Psalm 9. Of course, the Holy Spirit was upon him as he wrote all his psalms of scripture but, like many good authors, on plenty of occasions he simply wrote what he knew. Not all David’s psalms required that he peer into the future and write down what the Spirit showed him as he carried him along.
This one does, as we will see shortly. The “will of man” did not move David’s pen, and I wonder exactly how much he understood about the times and circumstances the Spirit of Christ in him was indicating.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Tom: Where commonly misunderstood Bible verses are concerned, IC, this one is a favorite, particularly south of the border:
“If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”
To be fair, I’ve heard it prayed by Christians here too, beseeching the Lord that Canadians would suddenly and inexplicably vote to abolish abortion on demand, or oust Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal Ontario government, or whatever.
A few years ago I went on vacation in England. We had some special places to go, but of course there were a few of the obligatory touristy things as well.
We went to the Tower of London. It’s not a single tower, but a concentric castle formed of 21 towers. One of the main ones is called the White Tower. It was especially interesting to me since it housed a great collection of historical armaments spanning several centuries of warfare. Much of it is conventional stuff: swords, cannons, muskets, shields, chain mail and so forth. Some of the displays feature experimental weaponry, such as multi-barreled, repeating guns and so forth.
Cool.