My Christmas present this year from an old friend and mentor was not quite a lump of coal in my stocking, more like a hot potato bouncing from palm to palm to avoid getting singed. He responded to last week’s Anonymous Asks post (subtitled “If Jesus was/is omniscient, why did he ask questions?”) with this query: “What about the questions He asked as a boy (Lk 2:46). Did He know the answers or did He learn?”
I believe the correct theological rejoinder is “Aaargh!”
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“What does leaven symbolize in the Bible?”
Lots of things, none of them good. Let me try to make that case.
Symbols can be tricky things. Where our Bible interprets a symbol, we generally have no difficulty at all, but there are also times when the meaning of a symbol is open to question because the Holy Spirit has not told us plainly, “This signifies that.” Leaven was unacceptable to God in some contexts and acceptable in others. We will need to find an explanation for that.
The Old Testament uses leaven as an illustration. The New Testament unpacks its meaning.
An illustration, and I’ll try to keep it as brief and clear as possible.
In the process of editing IC’s Christmas Day post this year, I came across one of those inconvenient translation variants that scripture affirms as legitimate despite what seems to be a significant change in meaning. Matthew 4:16 has the apostle quoting the prophet Isaiah concerning the “great light” that dawned on Galilee when our Lord settled in Capernaum for a time.
If you are going to find Christ in Psalm 119, today’s eleventh “stanza” of the psalm is by far the best place for it. For a consistent prophetic portrayal of the sinless, suffering servant, these eight lines have no parallel in the psalm, which makes our reading a perfect fit for the tail end of the Christmas season, as we move from the contemplation of our Lord’s birth to considering his purpose in coming into the world. By non-coincidence, the letter Kaph [כ], which begins every line, has a dual meaning to Hebrew scholars: “form” and “crown”.
No, I’m really not making this stuff up.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
France is getting ‘woke’, or at least so says the New York Times. Young people on the other side of the Atlantic from an entirely different cultural background and with an entirely different history than their counterparts in the U.S. are mobilizing, protesting and even rioting over the treatment of blacks, over gender issues, over colonialism — you name it, they’re up in arms about it. What’s interesting is that, as French president Emmanuel Macron puts it, all this fuss and bother is “entirely imported”. It is the product of American universities and American media.
When we left off last week, we were talking about the roots of the Social Justice movement. We traced things back to a philosopher named Hegel, who passed on some basic ideas to another guy, Karl Marx. Marx might well be the most evil character in all of history, judging by the number of people dispossessed, starved, tortured and killed as result of his ideology. (Let nobody tell you that ideas do not have consequences.)
But Marx died way back in 1883, and went to his own consequences. So we might well wonder why we would be thinking about him now. How did some old atheist guy with a bad idea end up causing problems for the Church a century and a half or so after he was dead? Good question. It deserves an answer. So here we go.
“The people who were sitting in darkness saw a great Light, and those who were sitting in the land and shadow of death, upon them a Light dawned.”
If there is any such thing as a universal symbol, it just might be light.
In every place and culture all around the world, everybody instinctively associates light with things like truth and insight and joy. Whether it’s our Christmas, or the Hanukkah of Judaism, or Chinese New Year, or some other “festival of light”, it always seems to point to the same sorts of experience: that of being able to see, whereas before, one could not. Is not the celebrated historical period of the secular skeptics called “The Enlightenment”? Even the irreligious are drawn to this symbolism.
“… the power of the Most High will overshadow you.”
“So this is Christmas, and what have you done?”
So sing the children in John Lennon’s wretched ditty. I really don’t know why he bothered himself about Christmas when he also wanted to “imagine there’s no heaven”. But each to his own. I’m sure he’s thought better of that since.
At Christmas time, I can’t imagine a more dismal question. Another year over, Lennon accuses, and you haven’t done anything. The poor are still starving, the world is still at war. When are you going to get off your haunches and be worth something?
Ah, there’s nothing like Christmas pudding and the sounds of self-flagellation to improve the seasonal mood.
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“If Jesus was/is omniscient, why did he ask questions?”
Good question. You can find several lists online of the questions Jesus asked in the gospels. Curious Bible students have dug up at least 300, minus a few repetitions from overlapping accounts. No single explanation accounts for them all, but one thing we can say with absolute certainty is that Jesus never asked a question to which he didn’t already know the answer.
“He came to his own, and his own did not receive him.”
“Having loved his own … he loved them to the end.”
If you really wanted to irritate a well-read Christian audience, you could probably preach a sermon that started by quoting both these verses from the gospel of John. Then you could delve into the Greek, noting that the same word [idios] is used for “his own” by the same author in the same book. Finally, you could finish with a flurry by pontificating about how the Lord Jesus loved “to the uttermost” the people who rejected him.
You could. I’m not saying it’s a good idea. You’d have a lineup of sixty people waiting to tell you that using the same Greek word doesn’t mean they are precisely the same people. The latter group is a subset of the first.
Yodh [י] is the tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet as well as the smallest, the famous “jot” of “jot and tittle” in the KJV of Matthew 5:18, corresponding with the English “i”. In Greek, it is iota, the smallest particle. “Not an iota will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.” A yodh is a single point, but it also has the numeric value of ten in Hebrew.
The Old Testament personal name of God begins with yodh (in orange) and looks like this:
יהוה
Every verse of this section of Psalm 119 also begins with yodh.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Recently asked on an Internet philosophy site:
“If God is everywhere, why do Christians have congregations?”
We Christians may think the question a bit clueless, but to someone who doesn’t know the first thing about the Church or about God’s purposes in establishing it, it’s not unreasonable to consider.
Tom: Immanuel Can, the man has a point. God IS everywhere. You and I can call on him anytime from anywhere, and we’re awfully grateful for it. So why exactly do we get together?
Immanuel Can: In a word, relationship.
In our last instalment of this book, we left off talking about ideologies ... secular ideologies, and particularly the kind of beliefs that have given rise to the Social Justice ideology that’s nowadays making heavy inroads in many local churches. Though the love of a humanistic ideology goes all the way back to the Tower of Babel, there are a few new twists in present case. Some of these twists were introduced by a guy named G.W.F. Hegel, who believed that all history is like a great “god” with its own will, direction and trajectory, and that by releasing the power of this great “History” by busting the shackles of the status quo, we would have inevitable moral and social progress.
We left off last time with Hegel’s much more famous disciple, Karl Marx, who was going to take things to a whole new level, and eventually was to become the true father of the modern Social Justice movement ... even for those who’ve never yet heard of Karl Marx. (So toxic are bad ideas that they often continue to infect us long after their founders are pushing up daisies.)
I was having coffee with an older friend, a well-known Bible teacher for many years, when he surprised me by disclosing that he does not invest a great deal of time in the study of prophecy. Like me, he’s disinclined to do a lot of speculating, and uses his opportunities for platform ministry to exposit areas of scripture about which he can be most confident before the Lord concerning the interpretations he is sharing.
That’s a prudent stewardship of his study time for which he is to be commended. There are times when taking the wrong eschatological position can put you in a very awkward place.
The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic of the 118th Congress
of the US House of Representatives just issued its Final
Report, entitled After Action Review of the
It’s probably not the definitive word on the scamdemic, and at times it seems a bit self-contradictory, but it’s all we’re going to get with the US government’s stamp of approval on it, and it’s as close to the truth as anyone in power cares to admit. It’s also wildly different from what both government and media told us at the time.
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“Is the name you give your child important?”
In the beginning, names signified destiny. Adam is simply the word for “mankind”, while Eve sounds like the Hebrew for “life-giver” and resembles the word for “living”. Genesis explicitly tells us Adam named his wife Eve “because she was the mother of all living”.
Nowhere does it say God named either member of the first couple. He certainly named the species, but not the individuals. He left that up to our questionable judgment.
Back in the seventies and eighties, when Marvel Comics had yet to become a cesspool of woke craziness and child propaganda (though parents at the time would probably argue it had other sinister aspects), the imprint published a semi-regular comic entitled What If?
Like the Apocrypha, What If? was non-canonical. Its readers understood its stories were even more imaginary than usual, in the sense that they were not intended to be part of any character’s regular ongoing narrative arc. A What If? story was the Butterfly Effect dramatized. Take a famous comic storyline and make one small change in the circumstances or choices of the characters, then see how it plays out differently with all its unexpected consequences.
Like the multiverse before anyone came up with that nonsensical idea.
The ninth Hebrew letter, Teth [ט], is the symbol of all the goodness of creation. It is also the first letter of the word tov, meaning “good”. Technically, first in our Western, left-to-right way of reading is actually last in Hebrew, but you get what I mean. This is what the word tov looks like in Hebrew letterforms:
טוב
(You can see the teth in orange at the end, which is actually the beginning.) When God saw that “it was good” seven times in Genesis 1, that’s tov each time, and the initial letter of the word has come to be associated with all that creative goodness in its many manifestations.
Variants on the word tov, each with the initial teth, also show up six times in this ninth section of Psalm 119.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Immanuel Can: Tom, a week ago we did a post called “Virginity as Social Construct”. But I’m wondering if there aren’t perhaps a lot of Christians who have heard somebody in school or in the media say that this or that thing is “a construct”, and maybe wondered what that actually means. Does everybody know?
Tom: Good question.
IC: It’s become a very important word lately, so maybe we should talk a bit about where it comes from, what it means, and perhaps why Christians should be especially alert when somebody claims that something is “a construct”. Should we spend some time on that?
Last week, we started to work on the question of how it has come to be that the church is being invaded from inside by the “nice lady” types, Christians who claim to be helping us move toward a better, godlier more Christian way of doing church, but who are actually directing us to something very different. We ended up talking about the Tower of Babel incident from Genesis.
Even back in that very first book of the Bible, the natural human inclination toward this kind of strange ideology is spelled out. Nothing unexpected, nothing new, nothing out of keeping with human nature from the dawn of time is really involved here. So in a sense, we should have seen it coming: but we don’t, because every time it recurs it seems to be clothed in different language and circumstances.
An old friend and I were batting around topics for blog posts a few weeks back. I often impose on people that way, and most are happy to help. They also tend to come up with ideas I would never think of on my own. In this case, the suggestion that jumped out at me was worded as follows: “Not being weary in well doing when you are weary in well doing.”
Well, yeah.
Apologies for my title. Regular readers won’t get it and shouldn’t be expected to.
However, here’s something you’re more likely to come across than a pun on an obscure, late-career Elvis Costello album title: the online debate over Christian Nationalism is getting hotter and more acrimonious by the week, and with good reason. Young men are drawn to CN like moths to a flame, starved for something useful to do, a cause to stand for, and any sense that clear lines about political realities are finally being drawn within evangelicalism.
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“Is not reading the Bible a sin?”
As with so many answers to questions asked here, let’s say it depends on the situation. There have been times throughout history, both during and after the period when scripture was in the process of being written, when large numbers of its intended audience were illiterate, and not by their own choice. Literacy is a privilege and an opportunity not offered to all men and women, and surely the Lord would no more charge people who can’t read with the sin of not doing what they are unable to do than he would charge the innocent poor man for being poor.
Likewise, I don’t see him adding the charge of not reading the Bible to every one of the dead scheduled to appear before the great white throne, though it will certainly leave those who had opportunity to do so without excuse. But they have plenty on their plates without that.
I know two elders, one current and one former, who cared for the people of God for a number of years. Concerning the former elder, I can confirm he was perpetually pleasant and present, often greeting at the door with a warm smile on his face. I was not around when he was asked to serve as an overseer and I cannot comment on his qualifications, but I never heard that he disgraced himself in any way, and he was certainly well liked by many. I was only an occasional visitor in those days, but he never forgot my name.
After a few years, he resigned his responsibilities and his family later left the church under circumstances that were less than fully transparent, but I do not hold that against him either. Sometimes discretion is preferable to full disclosure, especially when it involves the confidences of others.
The other elder is still serving, and he has his share of detractors.
Pronounced chet, Heth [ח] is the eighth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, called by Jewish scholars the “letter of life”. They teach that a soul at one with God is enlivened by the “essential life” God himself possesses, which does not seem an unreasonable proposition. Where Christianity differs with Judaism, of course, is over the matter of how being “at one” with God comes about.
As the New Testament teaches, it is only in the person of Jesus Christ that the essential life of God may be communicated to his creatures.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Christians who frequent the major social media sites are finding it difficult to miss the sudden and precipitous increase in closed accounts, shadowbannings and deplatformings of Christian, conservative and even centrist voices. When so many are being abruptly silenced, it is not unreasonable to wonder which opinions are still acceptable in the public square.
Wonder no more. A mother of five girls is using her TikTok account to try to put an end to the “social construct” of virginity, which she claims is “designed by men to control women’s bodies and ultimately make women feel bad about themselves”. [Caution: coarse language in link.] She says she is raising her daughters to believe there is no such thing as virginity.
Well, not in her home at any rate.
“I know that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves men will arise, speaking perverse things to draw away the disciples after them. Therefore, be on the alert …”
The verse above is from Paul’s “swan song” to the Ephesian elders. He knows his ministry with them is done, and he’s concerned that they might not be ready. He knows trouble is coming, and it’s coming from two directions. One they’ll probably expect, the other not so much.
There will be merciless, God-hating persecutors — “wolves” — who will come in among the flock and do them harm. Paul says they need to be aware of them, and not to be surprised if such persecution comes. But there’s another danger for which they really need to be on the alert: the danger of people rising up “from among your own selves”. These are people who only appear to be Christians — but equally, may be people who genuinely are, but who have been poisoned, corrupted or misled in some way. Either way, they will be “speaking distorted things”, things that are nearly Christian but are twisted in some way so that they really are not.
If you are looking for something to stimulate the tear ducts, this will definitely get you going.
A UK widow writing for The Conservative Woman makes a profound observation about the nature of choice-making in a post entitled “I am so grateful my husband ignored those who would have assisted his dying”. What Gabriella Dunn has to say about her personal experience applies far beyond the issue of assisted dying.
We might say it presents us with a particular type of choice that goes back all the way to Eden.
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Back in March of this year, a Special Reporter advised the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva that “There are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of the crime of genocide … has been met.” She was referring, of course, to Israel’s ongoing incursion into Gaza against Hamas.
Nobody blinked. The glib Francesca Albanese redefinition of a well-understood term slid by the council without a murmur of objection. Israel called the report “an obscene inversion of reality”, but news programs around the world now routinely describe the invasion as a genocide without significant pushback.
Was the description accurate?
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“Are mono-ethnic churches biblical?”
I have never been to a truly mono-ethnic church. I have no evidence they exist. To remain truly mono-ethnic for more than a few weeks, a church would have to find a way to enforce ethnicity-based membership. Which leads to the obvious question: What makes a person, for example, Chinese? Is 100% racial “purity” required? Or would it be permissible for him to have one Tibetan grandparent, or if not a grandparent, perhaps a great-grandparent?
How would you prove such a thing, and why should you have to?
Under the Law of Moses, the sacrificial system reminded devout Israelites of their sins, failures and shortcomings year after year. In this respect, it was much like a nagging mother: you know she’s right, but you wish she’d please stop talking. As the writer to the Hebrews puts it, “It is impossible for the blood for bulls and goats to take away sins.”
If that’s what Israel was looking for, it went home disappointed. The fix was only temporary.