Doesn’t Always Mean What We Think It Means (5)

The majority of times the word “brother” is used in scripture, it denotes a male sibling, a family relation, someone swimming very close to another in the gene pool, a son of the same mother, father or both. In Hebrew, the word “brother” is 'ach, in Greek it is adelphos.

In this literal sense, Cain and Abel were brothers, Isaac and Ishmael were brothers, James and John were brothers. Little more need be said about that.

Anonymous Asks (86)

“How can I become more spiritually discerning?”

Great question. Discernment is something to which every Christian should aspire. Maybe the wisdom of Solomon is not a realistic goal, but each one of us can get better at making clear distinctions between things that please the Lord and things that don’t.

Let me suggest five ways we can start moving in that direction.

Inbox: To the Youth Group

Last week, a youth leader we know sent the following email to the young people in his local church. I thought it made a great point, and he was kind enough to allow us to share it here.

Good morning everyone,

Students, your March Break 2020 is drawing to a close. I wonder: if someone had asked you on Saturday, March 7th how you would describe your March Break today on Saturday, March 21st, would your description have been anywhere close to how it actually unfolded?

The dramatic shifts in just two weeks get me thinking that there is probably something in the Bible that can provide some wisdom for us to shape our lives to. Of course there is, so the tricky part is to limit ourselves to just two selections for now.

Time and Chance (29)

Much of Ecclesiastes is observational rather than directly instructive. The Preacher tells us the things he did, the things he has seen, and what he thinks about it all ... then leaves the reader to decide how he ought to behave in light of the information shared with him. The first six chapters of Ecclesiastes contain only three “do” or “do not”-type commands.

These next few verses of chapter 7 are a little more pointed.

Too Hot to Handle: The Pagans Weigh In

The most recent version of this post is available here. 

Christian, or just ‘christiany’?

The most recent version of this post is available here.

The New Creationism

I’ve gotten far too used to seeing creationists adopt a more or less defensive posture, taking issue with what purports to be intelligent criticism from a scientific perspective, but usually amounts to nothing more than derisive sniping. The non-scientific media relentlessly harangue creationists over views they haven’t read and don’t understand in favor of secular views they also haven’t read and couldn’t coherently articulate in any case.

These apologetics are of some limited use; however, because they are almost completely defensive, they cannot do much to rehabilitate — let alone popularize — the creationist position in the public sphere.

The Forgotten Virtue of Shame

“You’re body-shaming me,” lectures the tubby, well-propagandized primary school girl, heading off her mother’s forlorn attempts to get her to order a salad instead of yet another side of large fries.

“Fat shaming is dangerous,” opine the editors of Psychology Today. Well, we can certainly concede that certain forms of it are impolite.

Wikipedia says the term “slut-shaming” is a derogatory expression used by feminists to “reclaim the word slut and empower women and girls to have agency over their own sexuality.” I’m not sure that’s world’s most helpful agenda, but there you are.

Anonymous Asks (85)

“Does the Bible say to ask Jesus into your heart?”

If there is anything in the Bible that may have given rise to this very popular expression, it is probably the risen Lord’s generous offer to members of the Laodicean church in Revelation: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.” Obviously it is not literal. Eating symbolizes fellowship, fortifying and encouraging the believer and delighting the heart of Christ.

The Biblical Procedure for Church Discipline?

“If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”

From time to time we come across believers referring to this famous passage in Matthew as the “biblical procedure for church discipline”.

Time and Chance (28)

Many years ago I went for counseling. A man with a big white beard (I am so not making this up) asked me a number of questions, listened quietly to my responses, then assured me I was a good person and that I should not be down on myself.

Needless to say, I never went back. I can’t tell you whether he was right or wrong, but I can tell you he had taken all of twenty minutes to reach his conclusion. He was pronouncing on my life in utter ignorance. He could have made a more meaningful diagnosis of my situation by hurling darts at a dartboard.

Advice is only useful when it comes from people with actual knowledge. That is true whether we are talking about praise or criticism.

Too Hot to Handle: The Garment Stained by the Flesh

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Youth Problems Part 1: Double Jeopardy

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Stricken Sheep

“Then David spoke to the Lord when he saw the angel who was striking the people, and said, ‘Behold, I have sinned, and I have done wickedly. But these sheep, what have they done?’ ”

People who are characteristically righteous always have an outsized sense of their own relative culpability. That is probably a good thing. A tender conscience toward sin and a heart which always looks to get right with God are qualities to be valued and pursued. God is often more generous with his assessment of righteous men and women than they are with themselves.

But a preoccupation with our own personal responsibility can also be a bit like wearing blinders.

The Commentariat Speaks (18)

Once in a while the commentariat speaks directly to me:

“Are you one of those people who say that there are actually two different Gog and Magog events?”

Good question. I may have looked into it before, but my last serious attempt to unpack Bible prophecy in detail was way back in the nineties. I wouldn’t attempt to answer a question like that without going back to the scriptures and refreshing my memory. So I begged off answering until I had time to take a more careful look at the text.

This week I had plenty.

Anonymous Asks (84)

“Does Christianity need to develop a new gospel adapted to today’s world?”

If the Christian faith was merely the invention of man, and if Christians were permitted to market it to the world in whatever way seems like it might work best, this could be a good idea. After all, brands grow stale over time and need to be refreshed. And in a consumer world, it’s whatever makes the sale for you. The customer is always right.

In this case, however, the “customer” is going to hell.

Satan Unleashed

A reader of the book of Revelation writes:

“Doesn’t the Pre-Mill version of Satan’s release seem weird? In it Jesus has physically ruled over the nations for a thousand years. Don’t you think they’d have learned something? And then Satan just waltzes out of his prison, goes, ‘Hi, it’s me, your old pal Satan!’ and EVERY nation goes, ‘WE LOVE YOU SATAN, LEAD US PLZ!!’ I mean, how long does it take to get to that point? A few weeks? A month? How does that work?

In the Pre-Mill view, doesn’t it also seem weird that the nations don’t go, ‘Wait, things are happening JUST like in that book Jesus has been talking about for a millennium. But hey, following Satan still seems like the best idea!’ How could they possibly get confused over this?”

The way a reader reacts to Satan’s release and the events which follow it in Revelation 20:7 very much depends on what he believes about the Millennium: its intended purpose(s), its governing conditions, and the people over whom Jesus Christ will rule.

Personally, I find the reaction of the nations in Revelation 20 all too plausible.

Time and Chance (27)

If we took the first thirteen verses of Ecclesiastes 7 on their own, we might initially think they belong in the book of Proverbs. They are fairly standard Hebrew proverbial couplets (with the occasional interjection).

This is not the first time the form is used in Ecclesiastes. There are a few couplets sprinkled through chapters 1, 4 and 5, and we will encounter more in chapters 8, 10 and 11.

What is different about the proverbs we find in Ecclesiastes in that they do not skip around from subject to subject with anything like their usual apparent randomness, but instead serve the book’s larger treatise. They are thematically linked to one another, to what comes before them, and to what follows them.

Too Hot to Handle: Break Out the Marshmallows

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

This is an interesting take. The Independent brings us the story of Joseph Atwill, who has written a book entitled Caesar’s Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus.

Atwill says Christianity is actually a “system of mind control” developed by the Romans to “produce slaves that believe God actually decreed their slavery”.

Tom: Who knew, Immanuel Can? Our whole faith is nothing more than the product of a first century propaganda campaign. Fortunately someone finally figured that out for us. Or not.

Divorce: What We Don’t Know

The most recent version of this post is available here.

The Commentariat Speaks (17)

A Baptist pastor weighs in on the question of when the church began:

“The church didn’t begin at Pentecost, it began when God called Abram out of Ur of the Chaldees. All who believe are descendants of his promise. Nothing has stopped his church for over 4000 years and nothing can.”

Reply to this sort of thing in 180 characters? You have to be kidding. It’s one reason certain social media platforms are inferior places for Christian discussion. They foster snappy rhetorical flourishes, but discourage nuanced analysis. That doesn’t make them useless, but it certainly limits their usefulness.

I suppose one might reply, “It depends how you define ‘church’.” That may get the attentive reader thinking. Or not. So let’s try something a little longer-form.

Not An Idiot

The books of Chronicles cover much of the same historical material we find in the books of Samuel and Kings, sometimes in near-identical wording. This provokes legitimate questions: Do we need both? Our Bibles are bulky enough already without including a whole lot of duplicated material. What do the books of Chronicles offer us that Samuel and Kings do not?

There are several possible responses to those questions, but the short answers are “Yes” and “Quite a bit.” I am working on a comparative study of the two sets of narratives and hope to get into that subject more extensively later this year in this space if time permits. Though more or less the same time periods are covered, there are numerous variations in content and wording that make each account useful to readers in different ways.

Anonymous Asks (83)

“Why isn’t the Bible in chronological order?”

If the Bible were nothing more than a history text, organizing it chronologically would be perfectly sensible. But when you have a book that contains history, law, poetry, wisdom literature, prophecy and moral teaching that interprets history for us, the question becomes considerably more complicated.

Under the Tower of Siloam

Individual guilt differs from corporate guilt, and individual repentance from corporate repentance, not just quantitatively but qualitatively.

That’s going to require a fair bit of explanation, especially for Christian readers born into our hyper-individualistic Western culture. Most of us only think about the matter of corporate guilt when we find ourselves summarily dismissing Progressivist ravings about race- or gender-based privilege. We rightly reject being held responsible for the long-term social impact of patterns of historical behavior in which we have never engaged and from which we do not personally benefit. “Each of us will give an account of himself to God,” we say.

Full stop, move along now.

Time and Chance (26)

The much-maligned Donald Rumsfeld, former U.S. Secretary of Defense under President George W. Bush, once said this: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”

That may sound like bafflegab, but it’s actually a fairly lucid breakdown of the possibilities.

Too Hot to Handle: The Dwarves are for the Dwarves

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

The term “postmodern” is not actually all that modern. John Watkins Chapman used it in the 1880s in relation to art criticism. Umberto Eco has said that postmodernism is less a style or a period than an “attitude”.

The attitude comes out clearly in what is produced by postmodernists in their various fields: postmodern graphic design disdains traditional conventions such as legibility; postmodern music rejects beauty and sometimes structure; postmodern philosophers reject the concepts of subjectivity and objectivity. You get the general idea.

Tom: Immanuel Can, help me nail it down: what is postmodernism?

Two Glories

The most recent version of this post is available here.

John Piper’s God

John Piper’s God is not someone I find particularly appealing.

Piper’s Calvinist determinism makes his version of heaven a scary place where every microscopic detail of human existence is examined, and from which God himself administers rough justice to his subjects on the spot as he sees fit, to believers and unbelievers alike, sometimes in the form of really bad weather.

A rash of tornados across the U.S. in 2012 prompted Piper to express his opinion in this post.

Of Generals and Foot Soldiers

“Seek his kingdom, and these things will be added to you.”

Here is a tall order, no? How exactly do we seek God’s kingdom?

Oh, I know we all have some kind of mental picture in view when we pray “Thy kingdom come.” I certainly always do. During the eight years of Barack Obama’s stewardship of the U.S., I regularly imagined the man’s surprise at getting his just desserts one day. I look forward to all deceivers being shown to the world for exactly what they are: right, left and apolitical alike. I picture the enthroned Christ dispensing justice, the wolf lying down with the lamb, and ultimate truth, love and discernment dictating all aspects of world governance.

There are all kinds of ways we may picture the kingdom. But seeking it? That’s something else. It seems like the sort of aspiration in which one’s reach easily exceeds one’s grasp.

Anonymous Asks (82)

“Should I wait for God to bring me a boyfriend?”

Let’s apply this “wait for God” principle to a few of life’s other important questions and consider how much sense it makes, as well as the mostly likely outcome of waiting:

“Should I wait for God to deliver  dinner?” (Starvation)

“Should I wait for God to provide me with a job?” (Chronic unemployment)

“Should I wait for God to wash my car?” (An unspeakably filthy vehicle)

Crazed Swine on a Gerasene Hillside

We do not have a whole lot of clear teaching in the Bible about demons and precisely how they operate. It is evident from the various accounts we have in the gospels that demons are capable of indwelling, tormenting and periodically controlling humans who become susceptible to them, but we do not know much more than this for certain.

Under what conditions do demons come and indwell a person? Where do they go when they haven’t got a human being to play with? Why do they so terribly fear the abyss, and what makes them crave human hosts while methodically working away at their destruction? None of these things are spelled out for us.