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“Are lustful thoughts natural, and how do I deal with them when they keep coming back into my mind?”
God made the average young man to procreate. There are always exceptions to the average, of course, as the Lord Jesus noted to his disciples — that’s how it becomes an average in the first place. You need the outliers on both ends to put you smack bang in the middle of the pack.
You sound like you’re right there in the middle, Anonymous: a normal human, Christian male.
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For almost nine years, I have been reading the New Testament as closely as possible to the order in which I believe its writers composed its various component letters, gospels and prophecies. That’s well over a dozen times through. As I have commented here, it’s a very different experience from reading the NT in the order we find it in our Bibles. The intended significance of certain passages is much more obvious when you read your mail in the order the mailman actually delivered it.
The relative importance of Paul’s teaching about the return of Christ positively jumps out at the Bible student who stops to put his reading material in chronological order.
The letter Mem [מ] symbolizes water and is associated with the number forty. If that seems an odd pairing, we should consider that the first “forty” in scripture denotes the duration of the Genesis flood in days. Thereafter, the number is often associated with testing or judgment.
In the New Testament, water is most frequently associated with the Holy Spirit of God. It is not without reason that we call that great, singular event in which the Spirit came to indwell all who are in Christ and bind together Jew and Gentile into one body a “baptism”. But water serves other purposes than cleansing and testimony. It meets the perpetual need of humanity. Jesus cried out to the thirsty, “Come to me and drink.” John comments, “He said this about the Spirit.”
How does the Spirit operate in the human heart? Well, he uses the word of God, which is where our psalmist comes in once again.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
We’ve run a couple of posts recently about Christian Nationalism and its appeal to young men, especially those raised on the supersessionist aspect of Reformed Theology.
Tom: I see two different problems cropping up, but I believe they are both coming from a common source. On the dispensational side, I see young men disillusioned with their denominations because they feel like the staid routine their older brothers in Christ have established gives them no outlet for their youthful energies and the desire to effect change, and may inspire them to look for something more real and relevant. On the Reformed side, I see older men panicking over the particular ways the energies of their young men are manifesting themselves. They wanted activism and now they’ve got it. They just don’t like the shape it’s taking.
IC, without getting into a lot of detail about Christian Nationalism, with its accusations of antisemitism and so on — because we have done that elsewhere — I’d like to talk a bit about the package we are offering young men when they come to church, and whether it’s deficient in any way. In short, is the problem them, or is the problem us?
Immanuel Can: Or is the problem with our society? I think it is.
“… and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh, it is a very nice word, indeed! — it does for everything.”
(Henry Tilney, in Jane Austen’s novel,
Northanger Abbey, 1817)
The word “nice” is tricky. Like so many of our English words, it has had some different shades of meaning, which have switched as time passed. The quotation with which this chapter starts relates to this: through her character, Jane Austen is making fun of the different ways that single word can be taken.
In its present use, it most often means the sort of thing you probably thought of when I first talked about the nice lady — pleasant, friendly, kind, and so on. It will probably come as a real surprise to most people that when the word “nice” was originally coined, it meant “ignorant”.
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An international team of university researchers has concluded that people who curse more are less likely to lie and may possess greater integrity than their politer peers.
Sure. Of course. Christians will buy that one hook, line and sinker, right? Didn’t think so.
What fascinates me about the study is not its rather pedestrian conclusions, which are all too predictable given the initial assumptions of psychologist Gilad Feldman and his team. Garbage in, garbage out. No, it’s really their preconceived ideas about the meaning of honesty that ought to cause Christians to stop and think. Why? Because apparently the word no longer means what it once did.
Ugh. Not again.
The book of Acts ends with Paul’s first Roman imprisonment, from which he was eventually released and which was a comparative walk in the park.
Acts is the final historical book of the New Testament, so we must infer anything further about Paul’s life and ministry from his later letters. Without an independent witness to Paul’s travels, trials and tribulations, we only know what went on by reading between the lines of the apostle’s subsequent correspondence with local churches, friends and associates.
Everything we know about the circumstances of his second imprisonment comes from 2 Timothy.
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“Should Christians from different denominations date or marry?”
As with so many questions, the answer very much depends on your personal situation. Why do you attend the church you currently attend? Obviously, the most desirable answer is “Out of conviction about the interpretations of scripture taught there.”
But that’s not always why people are where they are, is it?
“What about the questions Jesus asked as a boy (Lk 2:46). Did He know the answers or did He learn?”
There is no application of the word “learn” in Luke 2:46. Luke simply says that Jesus Christ was listening to the teachers and asking them questions. There’s no reason to suppose he was asking those questions because of any lack in his own knowledge, rather than the sort of rhetorical and didactic questioning in which he would later so frequently engage with his disciples or with the Pharisees. He would call on their judgment in order to set the stage for deeper thinking on a subject they had so far understood only superficially.
There is but one passage in all of scripture that employs the word “learn” in reference to Christ’s life: Hebrews 5:8.
The Lamedh [ל] is the twelfth letter of the Hebrew alphabet and the symbol of learning. It begins the second half of the alphabet and the second half of Psalm 119, thus putting learning at the heart of the human experience, and spiritual learning most central of all.
One of the most important lessons we can ever learn is to worship appropriately.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Something strange has come up recently on YouTube and TikTok. There’s this spate of home-made videos — short ones — that present the following scenario: usually it begins with a girl who claims to have a boy who is her “best friend”. Some saccharine pop tune plays, and then words appear on screen to the effect that she’s secretly infatuated with him and, allegedly, he doesn’t know. So then, the girl invents some pretext for getting close to him, and suddenly kisses him … and whatever happens happens. Either he seems to respond, or he doesn’t. Then the video ends.
Immanuel Can: There’ve got to be thousands of these things. Sometimes it’s a boy who’s made them, but most of the time, a girl. But always the camera — and the viewers — are the third ‘person’ in the equation, of course. Let’s start with the obvious. Do you think it would be okay for young Christian women to try emulating this trend?
Tom: Oh please.
And so we arrive at the present moment.
We've been talking about history — about that old nonsense created by Karl Marx, and then picked up in the middle of the last century by a group of rabid ideologues now known as “The Frankfurt School”. But what’s all this got to do with us? Why should we care? Didn’t all that end with the Berlin Wall? Whom do we, in the West, ever meet who preens himself as a Marxist? So why bother ourselves with dead men and dead beliefs?
Well, because sometimes things don’t quite die. Bad ideas have a horrible way of persisting, and even of being resurrected in new forms. This happened with Marxism, which has now reappeared under the cloak of humanist, racial, environmental and sexual-equality concerns, in what we now know as the “Social Justice” movement. So our subject today is this final switcheroo, when the old dogmas of Marxism got converted into their current form, and managed to seize so much of the public agenda, and even to make serious inroads among professing Christians.
Our most popular posts of last year dealt with relationships (or the absence thereof), the visions of Zechariah, the importance of thought flow in expository preaching, and the practical implications of Reformed theology. If that seems a mixed bag to you, welcome to ComingUntrue, where we try to come up with a little something for everyone … or possibly you just get stuck with whatever random subject is rattling around in our heads on any given day.
Without further ado, let’s count ’em down!