On the Spirit of Fear

Apart from Romans 13:1, for my money the most frequently cited Bible verse during the COVID years was 2 Timothy 1:7: “For God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.” Christians who quoted it were usually trying to encourage one another not to overreact to the media propaganda campaign that had so many around us in an absolutely irrational state.

As with so many verses evangelicals quote out of context, they were applying this one to a subject we can safely say never occurred to its author. Paul was not writing about fear of the early 2020s pandemic or any other.

The Commentariat Speaks (39)

Mental Health America says 80% of Americans experience emotional abuse and that 84% of women and 75% of men report having a “toxic friend” at some point. Toxic people, they tell us, are manipulative, self-centered, relentlessly negative, judgmental and passive aggressive. Worst of all, toxic people make us feel bad about ourselves.

Their solution? Eliminate the toxic influence. Cut them off, say sayonara, so long, adios.

Anonymous Asks (430)

“Are all false teachers equally culpable?”

The apostle Paul makes an interesting comment in his second letter to Timothy. He writes, “All who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evil people and impostors will go on from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.” This is in harmony with his teaching in Romans about the debased mind. If you want to know what going from bad to worse looks like, Romans 1 is the place to find it.

For those who haven’t read it, a debased mind is what you get when God has basically given up on you.

Snowmobiling on Thin Ice

“Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God.”

One of my friends grew up in a small, northern town with a stepfather whose job description included transporting the dead to the local funeral home. Supper-time conversations during the cold winter months frequently concerned which neighbor, acquaintance or school chum he had just delivered to the mortician. An alarming number of the deceased were fished out of the local lake.

Morbid, yes. But the point is that, like faith, the utility of confidence depends entirely on its object. If the ice is too thin, it won’t hold a snowmobile no matter how skilled and experienced its rider may be. Likewise with confidence misplaced.

Somebody Else’s Mail (29)

David Brainerd is a little worked up, asking, “Can anyone defend Paul’s misuse of scripture in Romans 3?”

He’s referring to verses 10 through 18, in which Paul strings together a lengthy series of Old Testament quotes in order to demonstrate that both Jews and Greeks alike are under sin.

Mr. Brainerd’s beef is that in their original contexts, none of these verses prove what Paul says they prove. Is he right?

Too Hot to Handle: Immasculate Conception

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

Last week we discussed the problems faced by children who grow up without fathers. If it were just an issue within society, that’s one thing, but evangelicals are increasingly being called upon to aid, abet and even validate single motherhood in the church.

Tom: I’ve just referenced three cases (and there are many more like them) where so-called Christians are looking to justify these sorts of choices and normalize them in Christian circles.

Faith’s Got Legs

It’s been a good winter for walking.

There’s hardly been any ice on the sidewalks, for one thing. For another, you could go out in February and march about in a thin jacket.

My little terrier has been ecstatic, actually. He loves a good walk. Dogs need a couple every day; and unlike in other winters, there have been plenty of smells around for him to get into. He stops everywhere, and he finds everything delightful. My dog trainer would never approve, but I can’t resist indulging him a little bit, and so our peregrinations contain frequent pauses to let him sniff about. Sometimes I actually think we walk his nose more than we walk my legs. But who could begrudge him a winter like this?

That You May Know

The occasions on which God may be said to hide himself are rare indeed. Decades and even centuries of great provocation usually precede such events. Ordinarily speaking, we have a God who wants men to know and understand him. He makes gracious and even extravagant efforts to reveal himself to us.

Human beings sometimes want to be known because we are proud, self-absorbed, eager to make a name for ourselves or to experience the worldly benefits of fame. God, on the other hand, reveals himself because knowing and understanding him is both the source of the greatest possible blessings a created being can ever experience and the best possible brake on all the evils men tend to inflict on one another. He does it for us, not for himself.

We might say God wants us to know him in order to save us from ourselves.

Like the Most High: A Cautionary Tale

“I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.”

Isaiah 14 starts with a taunt for the king of Babylon. That’s what the prophet plainly tells us at the beginning of the chapter. Israel was shortly to go into exile and Judah destined to join them, but Isaiah promises that in good time God will once again restore the nation to their land. By the time Israel finds rest, Isaiah says, both Assyria’s and Babylon’s days in the sun will be over, their empires long past. He assures his countrymen, “You will take up this taunt against the king of Babylon.”

Anonymous Asks (429)

“What is a ‘remnant’ in the Bible?”

A clear and authoritative answer to this question is a very good thing to have in mind when reading the Psalms and Prophets. Scripture uses the word and its cognates over 100 times in different contexts.

As the writers of the Bible use it, any remnant is simply an amount left over after some event, a remainder or residue.

A Vast Gulf Fixed Between

Well-meaning evangelical friends often advise me to cool down my rhetoric or dial back the perceived intensity of my objections to certain aspects of Reformed Theology. “After all,” they remind me, “We are brothers in Christ.”

That is true, and I want to acknowledge it right out of the starting gate. The basis for Christian unity is common faith in the person and work of the resurrected Christ, not any particular theological position about divine sovereignty, the composition and future of the nation of Israel or the timing of our Lord’s return for his people, not to mention several dozen less serious matters.

At the same time, the differences in faith and practice between dispensational Christians and Reformed believers go well beyond the theoretical. They are hugely practical.

Somebody Else’s Mail (28)

The sheer variety of ideas any given psalm generates in the minds of its readers constantly amazes me, both with respect to the circumstances in which the psalmists wrote them and with respect to their intentions in writing. I don’t look frequently at what other commentators have written about the scriptures before putting together one of these posts, but I happened to this morning. Almost everybody had something to say about the inspiration for Psalm 13.

Concerning the circumstances that led David to write it, we have a complete information vacuum. Vacuums apparently exist to be filled.

Too Hot to Handle: Faith and the Fatherless

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

Single motherhood is the new “normal”.

Government programs of various kinds have made possible a generation (or more) of children many of whom know no father but the state. The Washington Post reports that by age eighteen fully half of children today will have lived some period with a single mother.

And increasingly, evangelicals are being called upon to aid, abet and even validate single motherhood.

Tom: IC, are there predictable consequences to growing up fatherless?

Collective Madness

“They said, ‘Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name.’ ”

What is collectivism? It’s not just the belief that it helps to have others around, or that a group can do more than a lone person can. Rather, it’s the belief and practice of making a group more important than any or all individuals in it.

It requires us to define the value of each human being by the crowds to which we suppose them to belong — their cultural, racial, economic, educational, sexual and historical peer-groups. It’s a form of Marxism, really, but Marxism in new clothes, because the evils of Marxism are too well known.