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The New Testament writers quote, allude to, or possibly allude to Zechariah more often than any other Minor Prophet. Given the sheer number of passages that reference his writing, I will only attempt to deal in any depth with direct quotations or obvious repurposings of the prophetic word.
It seems as the time grew shorter for Messiah to enter the world, the Holy Spirit was all the more eager to testify to his coming at every possible opportunity.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Last week we were discussing how we can best live out the truth that, denominations notwithstanding, the church of God remains one Body, not many.
Tom: I do think the number of available evangelical church options out there can be beneficial in some ways, especially for elders. For instance, when you find that great new couple who want to join your church but can’t restrain themselves from talking about the glories of speaking in tongues, or the blessed benefits of Reformed Theology, or why women ought to worship audibly, the multiplicity of options allows you to easily point them to the gathering in your neighborhood that might suit them better in that respect without a lot of hard feelings.
After all, it's not like you’re saying, “If you don’t like the way we do it, there’s no place for you in the Church.”
One of our most popular features is our weekly Too Hot to Handle post.
Tom and I started it because we wanted to get beyond safe topics. If the word of God is really our guide, we decided, how can we confine ourselves to applying it to the sorts of tame issues that keep us all feeling comfortable? Isn’t it a sharp and quick sword, a sword of division? And doesn’t it have to be our guide in all things, not just in those that are polite, conventional and suitably religious?
We wanted to push those limits, to see how far the word of God can take us. Pretty far, we’re guessing.
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For years, conservatives have conserved next to nothing, hamstringing their own cause by refusing to use the very effective cancel culture tactics of the militant left. These are certainly unpleasant, but a philosophy that maintains it is better to lose nobly than win ugly and which disapproves of what you say but defends to the death your right to say it (even when it’s rank wickedness) simply does not work in war, however dignified and mature it may appear.
That includes culture war.
As the world gets nuttier and nuttier, so do the popular theories about what’s really going on. As I write, it’s been about twelve hours since a twenty-year old man was killed by Secret Service snipers at a rally in Pennsylvania after shooting at President Trump, injuring the former president and killing at least one member of his audience. Or so we are told. It might even be true.
What is certain is that the narrative will evolve. Initial reports that Thomas Matthew Crooks was Antifa were quickly amended to claim he was a registered Republican.
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“What does it mean to take communion unworthily?”
Today’s question comes from 1 Corinthians 11:27, which reads, “Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord.”
At the beginning of his public ministry, Jesus established a base of operations near the Sea of Galilee at Capernaum, about 40 miles from Nazareth where he had grown up. Matthew tells us he made this move right after the arrest of John the Baptist, in fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy.
It was near Capernaum that he called his first disciples, preached the Sermon on the Mount and calmed the storm. It was from the same region that he sent out the Twelve into the rest of Israel to proclaim the kingdom of heaven.
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As we have discussed several times in the process of trying to interpret the prophecies of Zechariah, commentators have tried a variety of approaches to the text. One of the least successful (but most respectful) of these remains Martin Luther, who wrote, “I give up. I am not sure what the prophet is talking about.”
Hey, better than blabbering on without any idea where you are going.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
For the last fifty years, the media has quietly endorsed it. Politicians in every country in the world have worked tirelessly to build public support for it. Mega-corporations love it: who wouldn’t like to have the entire planet to choose from when optimizing for low taxes, inexpensive manufacturing and cheap labor?
Tom: Globalism is officially out of the closet, Immanuel Can. The Economist declares: “The danger is that a rising sense of insecurity will lead to more electoral victories for closed-world types. This is the gravest risk to the free world since communism. Nothing matters more than countering it.”
“Nothing matters more.” That’s pretty clear. So tell me, IC, is it possible to be a Christian globalist? Can we hold such an ideological position coherently and biblically?
“There are three types of lies,” Mark Twain famously quipped, “lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
I know he was overstating the case somewhat, but my time in higher education has given me plenty of opportunity to see that he was not far off. Statistics have a way of impressing people with the apparent solidity of the numbers they generate. Many of us, especially the numerically inclined, tend to think they’re telling us something profound, truthful and scientific. But I have discovered that often they are not, and until you know how the numbers were obtained and how they are being interpreted, you can never be quite sure how solid they really are.
Anyone who has attempted to maintain an email subscription to ComingUntrue over the years knows Blogger’s email tool is notoriously unreliable. Often, we do not even receive our own posts. Substack is basically a newsletter subscription service that is proving increasingly popular and much more reliable.
Effectively immediately, I’m going to try publishing each post to Substack as we create them in hope this may make life easier for our friends who prefer email delivery to browsing the web. You won’t get all the features available at the regular website (sidebars, archive pages, topical studies, search box, etc.), but you’ll get the content of each post seven days a week (we hope) in a clear, readable form.
When truth is revealed, men have an obligation to hear it. The Lord will judge those who claim to speak it, and he will also judge the hearers for the way they receive it, which is to say that we need to accept and respond to the things we hear that are true, and reject the things we hear that are not.
What scripture doesn’t talk about all the time is how difficult that process can be for the onlooker.
Today I am going to generalize, because there’s no way to discuss the topic at hand usefully without doing so. Since it is my occasional, bitter experience that some people detest generalizations, I will dutifully warn you up front that you are in for endless amounts of them if you read on. Best come back another time if you find yourself emotionally triggered by statements about averages offered in the absence of hard evidence.
You heard me right. I’m not even going to offer statistics to support the assertions that follow. Why not? Because people of a non-generalizing disposition who dislike what I have to say will simply dispute the data. Again, bitter experience. That, and those capable of pattern recognition don’t need statistics to back up what they already know.
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“Why are Christians homophobic?”
Homophobia is a ridiculous pejorative that applies literally to almost no Christians in the real world. It fails miserably as language, in that if it means anything at all, it means “fear of that which is the same”. The term is a convenient way to deflect arguments that address the dangers and evils of a lifestyle that exalts sodomy. I do not use it.
That said, if you don’t celebrate perversion, anyone who inquires why that might be will probably use the word, so we may as well formulate an answer for them.
From the department of straining at gnats and swallowing camels, The Standard Bearer ran a series of posts by David Englesma in 2017 and 2018 criticizing the standard premillennial interpretation of Romans 11, culminating in this one and this one. Based on this chapter (though not exclusively), premillennialists anticipate (in Englesma’s own words), “a mass conversion and salvation of Jews, and their restoration as an earthly kingdom of God in Palestine”.
That’s a fair representation of my beliefs, an exegetical hill I’ll happily die on.
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We are coming down the home stretch in Zechariah, moving topic by topic, though not necessarily in the order these future events will take place. Today’s four verses are set in millennial Israel, describing the geographic upheaval that will take place at the second coming of the Lord Jesus and continue into the millennium, as well as a couple of statements concerning the rule of Christ during this period.
That rule is a well-established Old Testament fact. Zechariah can sum it up in two sentences.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Joel Kotkin of The Daily Beast coins the term “Great Rebellion” to describe the phenomenon of eroding trust in elite opinion-shapers: scientists, politicians, economists, corporatists and the media. He’s not alone: Village Voice and even the Huffington Post have just run similar articles.
Tom: The peasants are revolting, Immanuel Can.
I’m going to start this post with an apology. I’m sorry.
I usually don’t go all egg-headed and philosophical in this space. I think that usually truth can be spoken plainly and simply, and it’s my aim to do that. Every now and then, though, I run into something that is bugging a whole bunch of people — Christians among them — and that just can’t be treated without going off the grid. This is one of those issues. If I lose you, don’t worry; this probably isn’t an issue that’s come up for you, and it needn’t worry you. Tomorrow there may well be a post that suits you more directly.
On the other hand, if you’ve run into the arguments below, you might be very glad for some help with them even if it takes us into deeper waters. So I’m going to risk it.
My Christianity is not my father’s Christianity. His was not his father’s, nor his grandfather’s, which was different again.
You will understand that I am not talking about differences in the substance of what was and is believed or practiced. We have a common salvation. The faith was once for all delivered. Paul taught the same things in all the churches and in all his letters. If one departs from these things, he is preaching “another Jesus” and “a different gospel”.
That’s definitely not what I have in mind.
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Cultures do not suddenly plummet into the abyss for no reason. Yes, corrupt and self-serving leadership plays its part, and we have seen plenty of that in the last few decades. Still, assuming democracy is indeed the least-worst governmental option, and assuming it works as claimed to any degree at all, we have to look beyond leadership to explain how we have gotten into our current mess.
The man on the street has to be called to account.
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“What does it mean to ‘call upon’ the Lord?”
The expression “to call upon” the Lord sounds admittedly archaic today. We don’t talk about calling upon the doctor, the lawyer or the bankruptcy trustee.
With reference specifically to God, the words “call upon” are a translation of the Hebrew qārā' or qārā' šēm, which means to address by name, to single out or identify. The first time the phrase appears in scripture is in Genesis 4, where the statement is made, “At that time people began to call upon the name of the Lord.”
What time was that? So glad you asked.
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“We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.”
Have you ever played Telephone Tag? (Maybe where you grew up people called it Broken Telephone or Chinese Whispers.) It’s a game played sitting in a circle. It begins when someone outside the circle whispers a sentence to a person selected at random, who then whispers it to the person on his right. The message continues around the circle until it reaches the person sitting to the left of the original starting point, who then declares aloud what he thinks he heard.
If the circle is large enough, you’ll frequently find the product of the exercise bears little resemblance to the original message.
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Martin Luther said of Zechariah 14, “Here, in this chapter, I give up. For I am not sure what the prophet is talking about.” Apparently he wrote two commentaries on Zechariah, both of which ended abruptly with chapter 13. John Calvin likewise demurred to offer an interpretation, for which many of us are eternally grateful.
There is no problem interpreting Zechariah 14 if you take it literally, believe God is God and that he keeps his covenants with no cute allegorical cheats. None. So I am definitely not boldly going where no man has gone before. Lots of men have gone there. They just didn’t spiritualize everything they ever encountered in the Old Testament and apply it to the Church. Steer clear of that interpretational dead-end, and you’ll be fine. So let’s have at it!
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Sometimes you come across something so odd you don’t know what to think about it. For example, when Immanuel Can sent me this link last week, I responded with, “Seriously? Is this real????”
Tom: Turns out it’s as real as obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), and probably worth making Christians aware of, assuming they have not encountered it already.
The post IC linked me to is not about OCD per se, but about a particular variety of OCD referred to in the article as “religious scrupulosity”. Like other forms of OCD, religious scrupulosity is a biochemical aberration. As we discussed last week, Christians who try to give spiritual help to a person suffering from a biochemical condition which affects their spiritual lives, and who dive into counseling them without acknowledging and accounting for these underlying physical causes, are likely to frustrate both themselves and the person they are counseling.
Maybe I should let you explain it a little bit, IC.
He was a walking nightmare — tall, balding, all angles-and-bones, a vulture of a man. His beady eyes peered out predaciously over his hawk-like nose, and his battered tweed jacket emanated chalk dust clouds as he strode up and down the aisles. We students cowered in fear, praying he would not ask us the next question. Chances are we couldn’t answer it.
Hey, chances are we couldn’t even understand it, so high over our heads was his vocabulary.
But cowering would not save us. He would pick someone at random. “You,” he would say. “What does ‘ephemeral’ mean?” His respondent would not know. He would repeat the question, stepping closer to the cringing child. No answer.
He would persist: “Don’t you have a dictionary? … Can’t you ask anyone?”
Silence.
If you’ve been paying attention to politics in Europe and south of the border, you’ll know that the so-called rules-based international order — the neo-liberal status quo in the West — is staggering around like a drunk looking for somewhere quiet to vomit. Tens of millions of voters across Europe, Canada and the US simply aren’t buying anything their leaders are telling them anymore.
Projecting power around the globe ain’t what it used to be, folks.
Inclusion is exclusion by another name. Somebody always pays the price.
This morning I went shopping at a retail chain that normally collects for cancer research, hospitals, the homeless and other causes with moral legitimacy. They could have been doing that today. Instead, they were virtue-signaling like so many of their competitors, rainbow flags everywhere, and the senior behind the cash register politely inquired whether I would like to donate a couple dollars to “the Pride”.
I just about lost my teeth … and the ones I have are not dentures.
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“Why did God punish David and Bathsheba’s innocent child with death?”
I came across this question at the GotQuestions website and was curious how they would answer, as it’s something I’ve reflected on at length. It’s a reference to the events of 2 Samuel 12, in which God afflicts the bastard child Uriah’s wife bore to David, who subsequently dies of the illness much to David’s sorrow.
The sad death of comparative innocents is one of the more perplexing mysteries we ever encounter, and the GQ writers usually offer solid, biblical answers to difficult inquiries. Moreover, scripture doesn’t tell us God’s motivation in this instance, it simply tells us what happened, which means the writer of the post was obliged to conjecture.
Growing up, from time to time my father would assign me a job of one sort or another around the house. I doubt my unskilled service was overly helpful; he probably had to redo most of my work after I finished. But the tasks were a training exercise. Dad knew his children needed to learn that life was not all road hockey games, good books and model kits.
I was less-than-entirely keen on learning the discipline of service. I used to drag my feet, complaining that I didn’t understand what was required, didn’t have the proper tools I needed to do the job, or couldn’t possibly be expected to operate that dangerous-looking lawnmower thingy with no prior experience. The object, naturally, was to get out of having to do it at all.
At such times my father would simply say, “Stop quaddling and get to it.”
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How many ethnic Jews are there in the world today?
The Brave AI tool I just asked that question warns that counting Jews is not an exact science. (Some people incorrectly refer to Gentile proselytes of Judaism as “Jews”. Real Jews do not, and the Bible definitely does not.) Anyway, AI estimates the low number of actual Jews at 15.7 million and the high at 25.5 million, around 0.2-0.3% of the world’s population. The lower number is probably closer to reality.
Now, that number is strictly related to Judah and the tribes associated with it, and does not take into account the ten tribes of Israel, mostly scattered abroad since 722 BC. There is no easy way to calculate their number (hint: it is probably equal to or higher than the number of Jews). The vast majority of Ephraim will not come home to Israel until Christ sets up his kingdom.
Whatever those numbers may be, they will definitely factor into our discussion of today’s reading in Zechariah.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Immanuel Can: Let me tell you a story, a true story. It’s about a Christian man. Unfortunately for this poor fellow, he was also a diagnosed schizophrenic. He was taking medication supplied by the government, and so long as he was on his meds he was functioning normally. But then his program was discontinued and his medication cut off. Without it he became delusional, and in that delusion he came to believe that his son could only be saved by being killed.
Operating in that mindset, he attacked and nearly killed his own child.
“The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ ”
Sometimes the Bible just hits the nail on the head.
You run into a lot of people who pride themselves in being atheists. They rattle on about how they are the only intellectual option … that every scientist is an atheist … that no one who has any sense would be anything else … and so on. Their smugness, their self-satisfaction, their certainty seem so great that the unprepared believer is often blown back on his heels.
We were thinking yesterday about the disappointment that can result when we discover a Bible teacher we admired was wrong about something, big or small. The scriptural remedy is not to expect perfection from men, to “pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it” and, for our own part, to “Do [our] best to present [ourselves] to God as one approved … rightly handling the word of truth.”
Problems of Bible interpretation come up regularly, and they should not discourage us if we understand that the scripture anticipates them. The bigger problem is not interpreting the Bible. It’s living it out.
Hans Schantz has a Ph.D. in physics and dozens of conference papers and patents to his credit. He works in the field of electromagnetism — quantum mechanics, dipoles, fields, energy and other aspects of science about which I know literally nothing. Despite having a vastly superior grasp of these concepts than I do, Hans said exactly the same thing about himself in a recent blog post as I feel about my own comprehension of them: “I Know That I Know Nothing”.
How can that be?
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“In a theocracy such as the Christian Nationalist movement would like to see established, what would be the most biblical way to treat people with non-Christian religious beliefs?”
I’m never a huge fan of hypotheticals, and this is a big one. Notwithstanding the efforts of our postmillennialist friends, I believe the next (pseudo-) theocracy we’re going to see on this planet will be global beast-worship, to be followed shortly by the glorious millennial kingdom of the Lord Jesus, who will not require my advice about how to administer justice.
Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in 1976’s The Selfish Gene to describe an idea that spreads by means of imitation from person to person, often carrying symbolic meaning representing a phenomenon or theme. He nicked the word from the Greek mīmēma, meaning “imitated thing”.
Most of us know what’s happened to the “meme” concept since.
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In April of this year, the US House of Representatives passed a bill called The Antisemitism Awareness Act. If signed into law, the act would make it illegal to say the Jews killed Christ, as the Bible plainly and repeatedly states. The bill gives examples of online statements that would now be classified as hate speech and violations of the law, including “using the symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism (e.g. claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis”.
If it’s anti-Semitic to say the Jews killed Christ, then the apostle Peter, a Jew himself, was a flaming anti-Semite.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Immanuel Can: I’ve got something on my mind this morning, Tom.
I was reading this article. Now, this is an old and still-debated topic, and I don’t deny that the author probably has some good points. But what struck me about this article were several things.
The author asks why it is that people leave a church, and then he goes on to suggest three reasons. In order, they are: (a) our subculture (by which he actually seems to mean the larger, secular culture of consumerism); (b) expectations (and he emphasizes in particular the tendency to forget that the church is a “family”); and (c) the “fatal assumption” … that newer is better (which, by some sort of path, “leads the average church goer to hold the opinion that it is better to be served than to serve”).
“He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him.”
Jesus Christ was a sign from God.
What is a sign? It is something that is not what it seems to be, but looked at correctly, points beyond the surface appearance to something else.
Wars are complicated things. They rarely have a single cause and often have many.
The Russo-Ukrainian conflict currently winding down (we hope) has layers of
potential causes, and peeling them back one by one will take you places citizens of NATO-aligned countries probably don’t want to go. Let’s just say that the
superficial explanation offered by the Western media — “Putin is evil!” as the
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From the department of “It’s All Been Done Before”, my ongoing trek through the last several thousand years of humanity’s follies continues with the first volume of the Cambridge Medieval History, which takes us from Constantine through the twelfth century.
Constantine is most notable for “converting” and subsequently making Christianity the official religion of the then-declining Roman Empire. This act led to a few moral reforms for those who lived at that time. (The newly empowered state religion frowned, for instance, on the cruelties of the Roman amphitheatre, crucifixion and the widespread practice of exposing unwanted infants, especially girls.)
It also compromised the church in ways we are still dealing with today.
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“Why are there so many atheists in the world?”
The impression that the world is full of atheists is actually quite false. It has several causes, not least the vocal efforts of a small minority of “true unbelievers” to keep their hobbyhorse in the public eye and to blame religion for every feature of the world they dislike. The high profile of men like Stephen Fry, Bertrand Russell and Richard Dawkins leaves many with the impression their beliefs are scientific and their numbers statistically significant. That is simply wrong.
“And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end.”
Years of repeatedly reading scripture have convinced me there is no misspeaking in it, no poorly chosen words or phrases. None. Everything God says through his servants is exactly right all the time. When something revealed by the Holy Spirit seems incomprehensible to us, the answer is always to wait, pray and investigate further as intellect and opportunity permit. The problem is not what God wrote; it is that we are misunderstanding him in some way.
In the end, it will all make sense.
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Four times in the book of Revelation the Lord Jesus or God identifies himself as “the Alpha and the Omega”: the beginning and the end or the first and the last, depending on your translation. This is not a title men have given him but a name by which he chooses to make himself known. It’s a reminder of the truth boldly stated numerous times throughout the New Testament (and probably not well understood prior to that time) that the Word was in the beginning with God and nothing at all was made without his participation.
The Son was personally active in the beginning, and he will be personally active again in the end. The title means more, of course, but that is certainly one implication.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
I’ve observed a consistent phenomenon: churches are usually required by law to have some sort of general annual business meeting (AGM). At that meeting there are always some members of the congregation who are unhappy with something that has been decided on their behalf. It may be something small, or something quite big.
I’ve been to a few churches lately. And I’ve got some questions. Maybe you do too.
Two weeks ago I visited a tiny congregation. Everything about them — the building, the furniture and the people — was redolent of a past generation.
Not near past. Long past.
This was no “blast from the ’60s”, unless you meant the 1860s. True, there had been some updates. The carpet was relatively recent, the chairs (formerly wooden butt-punishers) had been replaced with modern, padded units, and the walls had been given a coat of fresh, white paint to brighten up the former cream-to-caramel tones of the main room. The formerly-towering platform had been supplanted by a more understated, low one, with a decorous little stand replacing the older-style, bulging pulpit. Even the ancient light fixtures had some of those new soft-white bulbs.
One of the more gratifying aspects of writing and editing a blog over a decade or more is the occasional recent comment on an ancient post. That a post from March 2014 is still drawing the odd pair of eyes ten years on is testimony to both the goodness of the Lord and the short-term durability of the expression of internet opinions — at least so long as somebody continues to ante up the annual fees for ownership of your domain.
In this case, a reader weighs in on the existence of angels, a controversy that goes all the way back to the disagreements between Pharisees and Sadducees in the time of Christ.
From the department of “maybe I’m the crazy one”, I keep seeing Christians making statements like this all over the internet:
“As your children get older and develop a robust faith and worldview, they will become more resistant to being influenced by LGBT ideology. It might be more strategic to wait until the children are older before agreeing to invite same-sex couples over to the home.”
Might? Might?
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“Is it really possible to be overly righteous or too wise?”
New Christians may be inclined to exclaim, “Of course not!” How could one have too much of a good thing? But those who have read the complete works of King Solomon may find the wording of this question familiar. He speaks of both.
The subject of the first few chapters of 1 Corinthians is Paul’s concern about divisions in the church. It takes him only nine verses of introduction to jump right into it, and because it is the first of many different church-related exhortations in his letter, we may reasonably infer that the apostle viewed the matter as very significant.
The fact that the churches down through the centuries have pretty much entirely failed to process the lesson he was teaching and put it into practice in no way diminishes the importance of what Paul said or the clarity and intensity with which he wrote about it. Expressing the unity of the body of Christ in every possible way on every possible occasion is a mark of mature Christian faith. More, please!