The vast majority of chapter breaks in scripture are well considered. Still, once in a long while, you may find one that is less than perfectly helpful. Because tens of thousands of Christians daily read the Bible by chapter, the worst chapter divisions are the ones that break up content that really belongs together, interrupting the writer’s thought flow and making it difficult to follow.
What does that have to do with financial printing? So glad you asked.
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In his book The God-Shaped Heart, Timothy Jennings makes what I believe is a helpful distinction between two manifestations of divine rule in the world: design law and imposed law.
Design law includes things as disparate as gravity, love, motion, health, mathematics, friction, thermodynamics, authority structures, liberty, exertion, and so on — principles intrinsic to the proper functioning of our world and human society as designed by God. Do X, and Y will be the natural result, either for good or ill. Design law is just the way the world works.
Imposed law refers to both God’s commands and all other codes, rules, regulations and ordinances enforced with penalties, whether imposed by God or by men under his authority.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Christianity Today notes a new trend in “worship”: electronic dance music. As writer Jeff Neely puts it, “layers of computer-programmed electronic backing tracks, quarter-note bass thumps, and cycles of musical ‘builds’ and ‘drops’, much of it set to a tempo around 130 beats per minute.”
*headdesk*
Tom: That’s my sister’s response, Immanuel Can, and I think it’s entirely apropos. Some things are beyond the pale. But perhaps we can use it as a jumping-on point to discuss the role of enthusiasm in worship, what sort of place the arts might have or not have in the context of local church gatherings, and so on.
That work for you?
Immanuel Can: Certainly.
A man and a woman are going to bed. It’s been a long day — work has been vexing, the children have been demanding, calls and emails have piled up, and best efforts at getting it all done have failed. Irritations have built up; and at times, the couple has actually been a bit snappish.
The husband is middle-aged, and somewhat dumpy and slightly graying. His earlier grumpy mood has subsided only into a plodding weariness as he gets ready to turn in. He’s left his slippers askew in the corner again, and hung his trousers over the chair instead of putting them in the closet.
The wife turns to her husband and says, “I love you.”
How important is transparency in church finances?
The question often arises in connection with shocking allegations of recently-discovered financial shenanigans in this denomination or that. These tend to proliferate wherever funds ripe for misappropriation are significant. For example, police in Kingston, Ontario recently investigated a local Catholic church for “financial irregularities” in the neighborhood of $600,000.
If you’re currently stumped trying to recall the last time your own local church had more than half a million dollars lying around for embezzlers to target, join the club.
The most effective lies are 90% truth. Satan proved that in the Garden of Eden, and he’s been exploiting the technique ever since.
Likewise, the most persuasive rhetoric ignores all inconvenient exceptions to its proclamations. Discussing the outliers takes time a rhetorician does not have. After all, rhetoric is about making a pithy point with emotionally compelling force, so shorter is better. In deliberately generalizing rather than carefully debating all possible pros and cons, a sophist makes an argument that hits his target audience right where they live, even if he leaves some significant percentage of the population stone cold.
Not his market. Too bad for them.
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“What’s the difference between faith and belief?”
As far as the Bible is concerned, there is absolutely no difference between these two concepts. The same Greek word (pistis and members of its family) is translated both “faith” and “believe”. You may be surprised to find that the word “faith” does not appear in most English translations of John’s gospel. Yet he writes, “To all who did receive [the Word], who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.”
That is unquestionably saving faith John is talking about, and he’s using the word “believed”. As far as salvation is concerned in scripture, the two words mean the same thing.
“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to bring back the preserved of Israel; I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”
The Father is speaking to his Son. When that happens, we all need to prick up our ears. It’s bound to be important.
There are some stunning examples of this in scripture, all regularly quoted in worship services around the world.
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Sometimes God gets angry. When his servants sin egregiously, even they may become the objects of his righteous and thoroughly justifiable anger:
“The Lord was angry with me because of you.”
“The Lord was so angry with Aaron that he was ready to destroy him.”
“The Lord was angry with Solomon, because his heart had turned away from the Lord.”
“He has cut down in fierce anger all the might of Israel; he has burned like a flaming fire in Jacob, consuming all around.”
But the consequences of God’s anger (not to mention its duration) are not always precisely the same.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
English philosophy professor James Tartaglia has
Somehow we are supposed to find this encouraging.
Tom: Canada’s CBC Radio recently gave Tartaglia and his Australian co-author Tracy Llanera the opportunity to air their views on its Ideas program. You can find a summary of that here.
IC, how on earth does one come to the conclusion that widespread belief in a meaningless existence “poses no significant problems or threats”?
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I’m seeing more and more of those “self-checkout” units at the local stores. They always creep me out a bit. There just seems to be something really weird about the idea of walking up to a mechanical box, shuffling around my own transaction, and then leaving, going out of a store without passing by a person.
I feel as if I owe somebody some kind of explanation, like “Here’s my purchase, and here’s my money, and they match up; so don’t call the cops.” And then this person is supposed to give me the nod, like, “Okay, you’re alright this time; but when you come back, we’ll need to see each other again.”
“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.
“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?”
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“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.