I am reliably informed that in the days of my youth, when I was apparently even more attractive, a sweet young thing from church had a serious crush on me.
The day I got married, or so I hear, she mourned in tears — at the loss of ‘what might have been’, I suppose.
I am supposing because I don’t know. To the best of my recollection, over a period of almost two years, the girl had never said more than ten words to me, nor I to her.
Do you find that odd? I sure do.
There’s an odd and rather bleak passage in Job in which he compares human beings to trees. “A man dies and is laid low,” says the beleaguered believer, but “there is hope for a tree.”
Why? “Though its root grow old in the earth, and its stump die in the soil, yet at the scent of water it will bud and put out branches like a young plant.”
Pouring water on a headstone does not generally produce similar results.
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“How should Christians view retirement?”
There is a little bar on a major street near where I used to live. It’s owned by a Greek fellow who makes what I think is the best (and by far the cheapest) souvlaki dinner in the neighborhood. I have eaten there enough times to lose count. From about 3:30 p.m. onward, up to a dozen retired white men occupy most of its barstools, some of whom I became friendly with over the years. A trip to the bar gets them out of the house and gives their wives a break. They drain their pints with care, milking out of them as much socialization and conversation as possible for their dollar, then head home in time for dinner.
Most don’t wobble when they leave, but two of them passed away in the last twelve months.
“The fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.”
The book is Revelation, and before us is the marriage supper of the Lamb. The Bride is a certain subset of God’s people (we shall not revisit that discussion in detail here), and others among God’s redeemed are present to celebrate. The Bride has clothed herself with “fine linen, bright and pure”.
It’s the most uplifting picture in several chapters of what is, at times, a very dark book, and it is the great hope of the Church.
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The phrase “the children of Israel did evil” (in some modern translations, “people”) appears exactly seven times throughout the book of Judges, once in the introductory summary and once at the beginning of each of six of its twelve historical sections. In order, these are: Othniel (oppressing nation: Mesopotamia, period of national servitude: 8 years); Ehud (Moab, 18 years); Deborah (Canaan, 20 years); Gideon (Midian, 7 years); Jephthah (Ammon, 18 years); and Samson (Philistines, 40 years).
So then, six notable periods of extended oppression from six different nations, totaling 111 of the 300-plus years the judges judged Israel.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
If there’s a single more common inter-generational issue in churches today, I can’t think of it right now:
“My kids want to go to that church down the road …”
Hoo boy.
Tom: I bet that church down the road has a worship team, Immanuel Can.
Immanuel Can: It could be. They could also have a big youth group, a modern music program, and maybe a nice gym too. Or maybe not. I’m not sure those things are always the determining factor, but sometimes maybe they are. Should we care either way?
“Where two or three are gathered …”
I’ve heard this little phrase quoted for years in churches all over the place. I’ve almost never heard it quoted correctly, meaning in its context and referring to the situations to which it actually applies.
When I’ve heard it quoted, almost invariably it is used to suggest that any local gathering of the church, no matter how small, is important enough to the Lord that he will, in some spiritual way, be present and involved with that situation. And really, I can’t say that isn’t true. But I can say for sure that that isn’t what this particular verse was given us to teach us.
Sunday’s ad hoc Easter post (lifted last minute from a reader-supplied YouTube link) implicitly asked a humorous question that I’d like to discuss a little more seriously this morning. That’s really why I posted it in the first place, not to poke fun at evangelical Easter celebrations. In a way, Monday’s Anonymous Asks raised much the same question in so many words: Why is modern Christendom so widely divided on so many points of theology? Should we be worried about it?
More importantly, is there something the Lord would want us to be doing about it?
Paul’s letter to Titus is full of commands to a young man acting as the apostle’s agent among the congregations in the towns of Crete; commands he intended Titus to pass on to new believers he hoped and prayed would grow in the faith and in godliness as the Lord intended. What should maturing faith look like at various ages and in different contexts? Titus received instructions for young and old, men and women, elders and children alike.
So we read words like “remind”, “teach”, “declare”, “urge” and even “rebuke”. Yes, there had to be a little bit of that too.
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“If cessationism is true, then why does God seem to continue to work through Pentecostal churches?”
For anyone unfamiliar with the term, “cessationism” is the teaching that the Holy Spirit of God no longer gives some of the spiritual gifts he gave in the early days of the church, the most comprehensive lists of which may be found in Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12. Cessationists believe the Lord intended certain gifts only to operate in the churches for a short time until the fall of Jerusalem in AD70, and until the completion of the canon of scripture.
Anyway, you’re asking the right person. I happen to be a cessationist, though I don’t usually use the term. My reasons for believing certain gifts are no longer being given may be found here, here and here.
This YouTube short posted by ConversationswithaCalvinist and uploaded just in time for Easter weekend captures … well, it captures something about the state of evangelicalism in 2025:
BAPTIST: All right, guys, I wanted to check in and see what everybody has planned for Easter weekend.
TORAH BROS: Well, last night, we celebrated our seder. All praise to Yahashua.
BAPTIST: Yaha- what now?
PENTECOSTAL: You guys heard that, he just spoke in tongues.
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Verse 7 of Judges 3 will bring us to the next section of Judges, telling twelve stories of the judges God raised up to deliver Israel over the next fourteen chapters. But before we get to these tales, each with their own lessons, the writer or writers of Judges present us with a historical overview of the entire period, along with a preview of some of the enemies Israel will encounter in subsequent chapters as a result of its sins.
Running like a red thread through this era of spiritual decline is the mercy of God …
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Years ago I would regularly come across stories of how this theologian or that one came out of Catholicism and now calls himself an evangelical Christian. More recently I notice some going the other way. Among the reasons usually given for embracing Rome is an emphasis on church history and tradition that doesn’t exist in the same way in Protestant gatherings. Roman Catholicism is thought to have “roots” that go back to the early church.
To seekers of this sort, the value of a church experience is measured by whether their faith community is convincingly in touch with its own past.
We’re in the final half of our final chapter in our thinking about Social Justice and the church. Last week, we were working through what the promoter of that ideology is likely to have caused, and what alternatives we have for dealing with her going forward.
It’s natural to think the thing to do is to “forgive and forget”, as the old axiom goes: we simply note the fault, say, “We forgive you”, and reinvite the contentious “nice lady” into the congregation without further delay. But this would be exceedingly dangerous, even disastrous; for unless her repentance is full, honest and genuine, then the deep motivations that led her to campaign for Social Justice ideology and to trade on the church to do it will remain. So we need to take full and fair inventory of what her faults and motives have really been, assess how complete her awareness of her sin is, and make sure she’s really been freed from what led her into it in the first place.
“… and the Philistines struck down Jonathan and Abinadab and Malchi-shua, the sons of Saul.”
Jonathan’s death was not as ignominious as the death of his father Saul, whose enemies summarily beheaded him, but his is not the storybook ending the reader expects for David’s most loyal friend and fiercest defender.
Do you ever find yourself looking at a passage of scripture you’ve read a hundred times and realizing you never really processed it? I had one of those moments this morning in Mark 4 as I read and re-read what commentators refer to as “The Parable of the Seed Growing”. This short parable is unique to Mark’s gospel. Perhaps it is so easy to gloss over because it contains similar imagery to the parable of the sower in Matthew 13 (and earlier in this same chapter).
Or perhaps other people pay closer attention to detail that I do.
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“Does an unmarried couple who have sex become married in God’s eyes?”
Some years ago, I had a late night phone call from an old friend to whom I hadn’t spoken in years. He was reviewing his relationship history. Many of these, frankly, had been sinful and ended in disappointment. The most recent was no exception. Despite professing to follow Christ, he has been initiating and falling into uncommitted sexual entanglements most of his life.
“I’ve been ‘one flesh’ with over thirty women,” he confessed. “Which relationship does God regard as ‘the one’?”
Mark structured what later became the second chapter of his gospel around four questions, all of which begin with the word “Why?” (The other synoptics contain much of the same material, but not within a single chapter.) Two of these queries came from scribes, a third from the Pharisees, and another from the people. As we might expect, three of the four were challenges to the Lord’s authority; the other may have been simple curiosity.
In one memorable instance, they never even got to ask the question. Jesus correctly discerned what they were thinking and answered it before they could express it.
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A public appearance by the angel of the Lord in front of large numbers of people is quite exceptional. Indeed, for God to mete out justice personally to sinners during their lifetimes is also a comparatively rare event. A formal, exhaustive accounting for all the evil men have done awaits them at the end of their lives, as the book of Hebrews tells us. Under normal circumstances, that is where God judges sin.
All the same, throughout human history, God has necessarily overlooked much evil, or else all our lives would be very short ones. The divine standard is not to be applied to men until after death.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
It’s been years since I paid a great deal of
attention to the charismatic movement, but David de Bruyn’s
post on The
Pentecostalization of Christian Worship at ReligiousAffections.org is a
real
Tom: Mr. de Bruyn’s thesis is fairly simple: the current patterns of worship in the charismatic movement are not leading Christians within it anywhere good. Worse, these practices are catching on throughout the evangelical world. I’ve experienced them myself in my early twenties, but never really stopped to analyze the significant differences between the way charismatics engage in “worship”, and the historic patterns of worship across many other Christian traditions. Far more importantly, the charismatic approach differs radically from the patterns of worship we observe in the scriptures.
What did you think of the post, IC?
Immanuel Can: So many things … where shall we start?
“See to it that no one comes short of the grace of God; that no root of bitterness springing up causes trouble, and by it many become defiled.”
Bitterness.
The word literally means “acidity”, and refers in scripture to wicked covetousness or wicked resentment. It is associated with cursing and anger. A related adjective is used in James 3:14 of wicked jealousy. What’s clear is it speaks of bitter hatred against others felt to be justified by their advantages.
The result? The defilement of many. That means their being stained so as to be rendered unfit for sacred service. This angry, resentful spirit between Christians can defile them in their relationship with God. The writer to the Hebrews says we are vigilantly to watch over the congregation, and make sure this doesn’t happen.
Because it can. So easily. Especially today.
You’ve just made a major move, one you believe served the Lord’s interests while also having potential spiritual benefits for your family and other relationships. It wasn’t even a hard choice. Work opportunities had dried up locally and you’re too young to retire. All the churches where you lived are dead, dying, or riddled with theological peculiarities. Godly friends suggested a change of location might be the answer. Less-godly friends said you were crazy to leave. More local job opportunities fell through.
Then your landlady mentioned she wants to do a major reno on your apartment, an invasive process that might take weeks or months to complete. It was time. So you took a risk with a job opportunity several hundred miles away, packed up the car and found yourself a new place to unload your furniture, such as it is.
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At its leanest and meanest, the Reformed package requires some variant of Calvinism, plus Covenant Theology. Supersessionism and/or postmillennialism are often associated with these but are not, so far as I know, mandatory in order to call yourself Reformed. Some of these concepts fit together better than others; for example, supersessionism harmonizes quite naturally with CT. If there is only one covenant people through all the ages, it follows that someone has to be in and someone else has to be out.
Not all these theological components fit together quite so well as that pair.
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“What’s wrong with ‘always learning’?”
Today’s question is about a description of life in the “last days” from Paul’s second letter to Timothy. It reads as follows:
“But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people. For among them are those who creep into households and capture weak women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions, always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth.”
That’s a long list of unpleasant character qualities and behaviors that were already appearing in the churches of God in Timothy’s time (the instruction to Timothy to “avoid such people” implies some of them were already around), and are increasingly present today.
“It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”
Trudy Smith of the Huffington Post asks, “Was Jesus racist?” Her answer, of course, is yes.
That’s hardly surprising. The HuffPost is the online poster-rag for the New American Left. In their exceedingly well-defined and ideologically-pristine PC world, even the Son of God takes the knee before the official progressive racial narrative.
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The word šāpāṭ, frequently translated “judge”, appears 21 times in the Hebrew version of the book of Judges, beginning with the second chapter. It’s far from the first time the word occurs in scripture, also being present at least 30 times in the first six books of the Bible. The vast majority of this content almost surely dates earlier than Judges, establishing the meaning of the word for us as its initial readers understood it.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Once again, Christianity Today has the sort of article everybody who serves the Lord Jesus and loves the Body of Christ should be reading and thinking about. I don’t agree with everything they have to say by a long shot, but they regularly provide a starting point for serious discussion of major evangelical issues. Kudos to them for that.
Tom: In this particular piece they’re talking about missions and what makes that whole thing tick. Immanuel Can, did you find anything CT had to say interesting?
Immanuel Can: Oh, plenty. This is something I know a fair bit about.
We pick up this week in the middle of a list of choices the church has to make today. On the one hand, there are the values scripture lays out for church life; on the other, the things Social Justice today instructs us to value instead. The goal is simply to see the alternatives before us.
We began with the choice between a heavenly and a worldly “kingdom”. Then there was the choice between advocating salvation or system-blaming. Whether we should live by contentment or resentment came next, and then the choice between having confident faith in God and taking self-willed, self-confident action against the world. Finally, we considered the tension between individual responsibility to God and the attraction of surrender to a thoughtless collective — a theme continued in our first item below.
We're going to complete that list of contrasts today, and then draw some conclusions.
A while back I pointed out that the apostles use the word “gospel” in slightly different ways at different times, emphasizing certain aspects of what we might consider an acceptable presentation of the good news and omitting others entirely.
Never is this more evident that in the third of Peter’s four references to the gospel found in his first epistle. His use of the word, and the context around it, open up what may be described as a theological can of worms.
Or perhaps later commentators on 1 Peter opened that can all by themselves.
The facts are these: about 57 A.D., give or take, the apostle Paul traveled to Jerusalem, where he was arrested something less than seven days after his arrival. Initially at least, he was (falsely or mistakenly) accused by the Jewish religious authorities of profaning the temple. Later he was also accused of disturbing the peace, a charge more likely to be taken seriously by the Romans than any merely religious disagreement between members of a subject people group. His Roman custodians took him first to Caesarea and finally to Rome when he made an appeal to have his case heard by Caesar himself. He was imprisoned there for approximately two years.
Contrary to what I thought as a teen and young adult, Paul did not die in Rome. Not that time at least. I had my chronology muddled for years. In any case, even if martyrdom was not the result, we can reasonably conclude these four-plus years in Roman custody were not exactly fun and games.
And they were entirely voluntary.