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David de Bruyn’s morning email is a short prayer checklist entitled “When God Says ‘No’ ”. I’ve made them myself from time to time, and I’m sure I’ve done a post on the subject at some point over the years. You know what that looks like: “My prayer is not being answered in the affirmative, Lord. So what does your word say about that?”
What possible reasons might there be?
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As we hinted in the introduction last week, this series of incidents in chapter 8 effectively illustrates the moral degradation characteristic of Israel during the period of the Judges. The end of the chapter gives us four more strong indications that all was not well in Israel, even in the home of the one man who had personal dealings with God.
Despite God’s undeserved blessing and a marvelous victory, the end of Gideon’s tale leaves a sour taste in the mouth.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Christianity Today’s Caleb Lindgren interviews author Brian J. Wright about his new book, Communal Reading in the Time of Jesus.
Tom: We bounced this article around by email last week, IC, and it was fodder for a few interesting observations. I thought we might revisit it here. One major weakness of Lindgren’s interview is that he never quite gets Brian Wright to define “communal reading” for us, and the term then ends up being used to describe a whole bunch of different things in the course of the interview.
Care to take a shot at defining it?
“You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear”, as the famous adage goes. Your raw materials define what is possible with them.
The same is true of your mental life: you cannot make a good life out of bad imaginings.
Your mind is a scrapbook. Like any scrapbook, it collects fragmentary images of whatever you decide to put in there. Over time you fill it up. And eventually, what you have put into it defines the kind of life you’re going to have. That happens because the ‘resources’ you put into your mental scrapbook become the raw materials for your present attitudes, your frame of reference for present experiences, and the repository of images for your present imagination.
Garbage in, garbage out. Good stuff in, good stuff out. It’s that simple.
Some spiritual experiences are useful to share. Others, I find, I am better off keeping to myself, not because they are trivial but because they are personal, just between me and the Lord. Also, more than a few of these experiences are easily misunderstood.
An example. This morning I wake at 2:15 a.m., as is often the case. I know I’m either up for the day or at least for the next few hours. Long experience has proven trying to go back to sleep when I’m wide awake is wasted time. Upstairs, I can hear my son struggling with what turns out to be an uncooperative file conversion (he works overnight from home), and I overhear an uncharacteristic expression of frustration pass his lips.
Naturally, I go up and intrude. Come on, you would too.
Don’t laugh at me, long time Bible readers. I only just noticed for the first time that in the days when Solomon had his first vision of God, the ark of the covenant and the tabernacle of the Lord, also called the tent of meeting, were in different places. David had brought the ark into Jerusalem and had pitched another tent for it there, but the original tabernacle and the bronze altar made by Bezalel in the days of Moses remained at Gibeon.
I think we can safely say separating the ark of the covenant from the Holy of Holies, where it belonged, was a fairly egregious breach of the revealed will of God. Somehow, nobody seemed to notice.
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“Does God punish us when we sin?”
Bad stuff happens when people sin. That’s no surprise to any of us. It started in the Garden of Eden and it continues today. So today’s question is not about whether sin has consequences. Of course it does. What we’re really trying to answer is whether God is always personally responsible for meting out those consequences to sinners, and if so, what he is seeking to accomplish.
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I have written a couple of times before about the “labels” the writers of the Old Testament used for the cities, towns, nations and people groups in their histories. These men wrote centuries after the events they described, for audiences unfamiliar with any helpful historical context and detail. In many cases, the ethnicity of the people who lived in any particular geographic location about which they were writing had changed drastically in the intervening years, giving rise to potential confusion.
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The one-sided battle between Israel and Midian and its allies was winding down, moving into what we might call the cleanup stage. The writer of this portion of Judges now presents us with a series of incidents that effectively illustrate the level of spiritual and moral degradation in the nation during the period. While not quite as awful as some of the later chapters of Judges, these vignettes still require some consideration and explanation.
The Holy Spirit also ties up the story of Gideon for us, and sets up the grisly and somewhat predictable events to come in chapter 9.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Kevin Miller is an Executive VP at Christianity Today International. In this article he lays out a number of ways that one can go about developing a vision.
Tom: Immanuel Can, Miller is ignoring the elephant in the room: he starts with the unstudied assertion that good leaders must always be men of vision and charges right into how we can all acquire it without addressing why this quality is allegedly a critical component of leadership.
And he’s not alone.
Immanuel Can: You’re right, Tom, there are a lot of people talking about our lack of vision as Christians today. What do you think accounts for this widespread concern, and how legit do you think it is?
Everybody likes gifts, they say. Still, some are better than others.
A funny story: My in-laws were on their way to a wedding. Along the roadside, a hack artist was selling a number of truly horrible original oil paintings. (Doubtless this poor soul labored under the delusion he was some sort of Michelangelo.) Anyway, my relatives pulled over for a look. These ‘masterpieces’ were supposed to be landscapes, but they all looked like they’d been painted with a really fat brush using earth tones, pale blues and dark blacks. (If you imagine an explosion in a factory that produces toothpaste, peanut butter and licorice, you’ve roughly got the aesthetic here.)
“By faith Moses, when he was born, was hidden for three months by his parents, because they saw that the child was beautiful, and they were not afraid of the king’s edict.”
There is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist have been instituted by him. Whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. So says the apostle Paul, in one of the most quoted Bible passages of the last five years.
Well, the writer to the Hebrews says that the parents of Moses resisted the authority of their day as an act of faith.
Those of us who read the word of God day by day over a period of years have all probably experienced more or less the same thing: each trip through a particular passage of the Bible years apart tends to produce different observations and associations.
I’m always amazed how much more there is in any given passage than I have previously been able to dredge out. That’s both a commentary on the limitations of even the most avid, committed human mind to take in and retain the teaching of scripture, as well as a reflection on the incredible depths of wisdom in the Word.
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“Did Jesus go to hell?”
If the relative likelihood of any interpretation of scripture being true has any correlation with its popularity within Christendom, the answer to this one might be yes. However, as you may have discovered for yourself over the years, many quite popular teachings are mistaken, or at very least questionable. Personally, I think the teaching that Jesus went to hell is one of them.
The writers of the Apostles’ Creed thought otherwise.
Over at Stand to Reason, Jonathan Noyes handles the question “How did Satan sin in heaven if you can’t sin in heaven?” along with its worrisome corollary, “Will it be possible for me to sin in heaven?” His daughter texted him the queries from school one day, giving rise to a blog post on a subject I’ve never given a single moment’s thought. But it’s a perfectly reasonable question, so now I’m giving it a moment myself.
Okay, there are definitely a couple of red herrings to avoid along the way, but let’s try to get to the core of it.
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When the Lord calls a man to lead his people, these leaders do not generally ask those they lead to do things they are unwilling to do themselves. They do not sit in their comfy tents far behind the battle lines like the kings of the nations, shouting out orders while taking no risks themselves. Rather, they are right in there with their people, doing the same things they are asking them to do and taking the same risks they are.
I don’t want to read too much into a small turn of phrase from Gideon, but it’s hard to miss the takeaway here.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Scott Mannion believes in the value of fellowship: the communal spirit; taking ownership of problem-solving at the local level, rather than looking to government for answers; “distributing the burden of cognition”, as he puts it. He’s promoting fellowship vigorously, because he believes top-down solutions to our problems are simply not working.
Tom: Mannion’s YouTube video is the first time in a very long while that I’ve heard the word “fellowship” used outside a purely religious context. He certainly gets the concept right. IC, this one was your baby: what was it about the video that grabbed you?
“For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. Therefore what benefit were you then deriving from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the outcome of those things is death. But now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life.”
What is freedom? Does it mean what people today think it does? Does it mean doing whatever, whenever? Does it mean liberty to surrender to our own impulses? Does it mean opportunity to do whatever-the-heck we feel like at a given moment? Does it mean being exempt from moral censure or practical criticism regardless of what action we may choose to do?
Does it mean total independence? Does it mean not needing anyone, or not feeling the lack of anything?
Better known by his stage name, Gordon Sumner played and sang for a decade in a hugely successful eighties band, and followed that with an eclectic, critically-praised solo career. His net worth has been estimated at over half a billion dollars. His father Ernest was a milkman and factory worker. Neither are dishonorable professions, but middle class at best.
On Ernest’s deathbed, he said to Gordon, “Son, you used your hands better than I did.” Gordon’s reaction: “That was the first compliment he’d ever paid me, and the timing was pretty devastating ... and unforgettable.”
Wow. Talk about leaving your best pitch for the bottom of the ninth ...
“To dwell only in the world of objective analysis is to chill your own soul.” So says David de Bruyn in a post entitled “On Adoring Or Analysing”, which concerns a conflict even mature Christians regularly experience. Put succinctly, you cannot do a thing and think about doing it at the same time.
Peter provides a fine illustration of what happens when your thoughts stray from “Let’s just get closer to the Lord” to “Hey, I’m walking on water in the middle of a storm!” All of a sudden, Peter wasn’t walking on water anymore. He was just wet.
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“I have committed _____. Will God ever forgive me?”
I think I can safely say yes. As individual acts go, there is absolutely nothing you have ever done that our Lord will not forgive, assuming your repentance and desire for his forgiveness is genuine. We could fill in that blank space above with any sin, crime or misdemeanor, however heinous or grossly offensive to the Almighty. That is my personal belief on the authority of the word of God.
Let me argue that point for any among our readers who may disagree.
I am back in 1 Chronicles these days, working my way through passages that once inspired a post entitled “Does God Need An Editor?” (Spoiler: my answer was a hard no.)
For those unfamiliar, the first nine chapters of 1 Chronicles are almost entirely composed of Hebrew genealogies: descendants of Adam, Abraham, David, twelve of the thirteen tribes of Israel (mysteriously, not including Dan, none of whose progeny appear in Chronicles prior to chapter 27), Israel’s first king Saul, and a number of the returned exiles from the Babylonian captivity.
That’s a whole lot of Hebrew names one after another with very little intervening detail or editorial commentary. The modern Christian reader quite reasonably asks, “Er … what’s in this for me, if anything at all?”
Good question.
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The Hebrew word šāḥâ [literally, “bow down”; figuratively, “worship”] appears a grand total of four times in the book of Judges. That’s not a lot. But it gets worse. All but one of these four have to do with worshiping idols. The solitary exception, where the word refers to the worship of the God of Israel, is in today’s reading.
That’s a sad commentary on the state of Israel during the period of the judges. Accordingly, we may not expect to find out much about true, biblical worship in these pages.
Then again …
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Immanuel Can: I’m going to temporarily suspend our self-imposed five-sentence limit, Tom, in order to tell you a story about something that happened last year when our provincial standardized test was performed.
You need to know that teachers are all given a specific script for what they are and are not allowed to tell students on the day of the test. They are expressly forbidden to go beyond this script, and doing so is grounds for firing. Teachers cannot add any directions, explanations, definitions or any other kind of information to this. They are not allowed to give any guidance once the test begins, no matter what a student wants or needs. It’s standardized, period.
One of the questions on the test asked kids to imagine a picnic, and then write based on their imagining.
My church recently had a “membership” drive. The goal was to get people to sign up to the church roll, then stand up in front of the congregation and proclaim their membership through what they called a “church covenant”.
I’ve been in my local church for 12 years. I didn’t sign. I won’t.
It’s not because my fellow Christians do not know I’m one of them; they do. And I trust it’s not because I’m passive, uncommitted or uninvolved with church life. I’m in there serving, and I doubt there’s anyone in my congregation who couldn’t tell you that. (If there is, that will be corrected the next time they give me the pulpit, which they do fairly frequently.) And it’s not because they have found I am caught up in some particular sin or wickedness. No one has accused me of that — though I’d admit to being your garden variety hypocrite, in the sense that I continually fall short of the level of holiness God deserves from me. But no one so far has called me “hard hearted” or accused me of some crime.
“God is not a God of confusion but of peace.”
“The Lord your God will give them over to you and throw them into great confusion.”
If you pull up the word confusion [mᵊhûmâ, also translated “panic”] in an online concordance, you will quickly discover all but one of the twelve Old Testament references attribute confusion to God. The example I’ve cited above, in which Moses promises the children of Israel victory over their enemies provided they remain faithful to YHWH, is only one of many.
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| Even 99-44/100% is not enough |
Jonathan Noyes and Greg Koukl at Stand to Reason got together recently to produce an excellent post on the subject of the inerrancy of scripture. It’s lengthy, but well worth the time it takes to work through. Full credit to the apologists for doing their job. It’s severely needed these days, especially among the younger generation in our churches.
But in setting out why inerrancy matters and what the scripture claims about itself, Noyes and Koukl include a word of warning about the inerrancy argument that I think is worth taking to heart: they believe the Lord never intended us to debate inerrancy with the skeptics of our generation.
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“Does the Bible teach that you should ‘be yourself’?”
I can think of at least one example in scripture of a person who was better off being himself than trying to be something he was not. Saul clothed David with his own armor to fight Goliath, but David was unwilling to rely on protection he had never personally tested in battle. He left the best armor in the kingdom behind and used a sling and stones instead of a sword.
We all know the results of that encounter. David being David got the job done.
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A Bible student on Reddit inquires, “Why does the Apostle Paul write in such long sentences?”
This reader is obviously paying attention when he gets into the word of God, and good for him. My brother and I were discussing this issue only a few weeks back, as it’s something we too have noticed over the years. Some of Paul’s sentences are absolutely legendary. They go on for days.
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The practice of “putting out a fleece” is not widespread among evangelicals these days, at least as far as I know. You’re probably familiar with the phrase though. We might call it the superstitious interpretation of events as divine guidance in an area where God has already revealed his will.
So you ask for a specific bit of circumstantial evidence, and if the thing you have prayed for happens, you interpret it as God’s direction to move forward with your plans. “Lord, if it rains tomorrow, then I will know you want me to go to Bible College even though my parents want me to go to university.” “Lord, if the phone rings in the next five minutes, I’ll know I should leave my husband.” That sort of thing.
This chapter is where some Christians get the mistaken notion that the fleece trick might actually work. It worked for Gideon.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
We’ve written here on many occasions about current trends within Christendom and what they say about North American Christians. Last week, for instance, we did a piece on giving by millennials. But I wouldn’t say we do an inordinate amount of speculating about the future, because while we can see from scripture where both the world and the people of God are ultimately headed, it’s difficult (if not impossible) to plot exactly where we are on that timeline.
Tom: Still, Carey Nieuwhof is willing to go out on a limb and tell us where he thinks the Church is headed in the next few years in his article “10 Predictions About The Future Church”.
What did you think of Carey’s musings, Immanuel Can?
This is the third in my series on relativism.
I began by pointing out the two types of relativism, epistemic and moral, and showed that epistemic relativism is irrational. After that, I did a post showing that whether we are thinking of science or religious belief, we really know things only probabilistically … and that this is okay — that high-certainty belief is much better than low-certainty belief, and that in any case, being a Christian means knowing God both as an evidentiary probability and as a relational Person, which means with pretty great certainty; better, even, than a scientist can offer. So it is true that truth exists, and it is true that we can know that truth exists.
So far, so good.
“It is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring. For this is what the promise said: ‘About this time next year I will return, and Sarah shall have a son.’ ”
There is a good reason fruit is often used as a metaphor for children, both in the Bible and elsewhere. You don’t need to be a geneticist to observe that the fruit of a tree carries in it the nature of the tree on which it grows, and expresses that nature to the world in the next generation. Or at least it should. Real-world results with human beings vary, as we have all observed.
Turnabout being fair play, perhaps you will excuse me using children as a metaphor for fruit. Well, metaphorical fruit at least.
“… always struggling on your behalf in his prayers, that you may stand mature and fully assured in all the will of God.”
Our New Testament preserves four letters Paul wrote during his first Roman imprisonment. From these epistles and from the last chapter of the book of Acts, we learn that in Rome the authorities allowed him to stay “by himself” under guard for two years in what was probably a rented dwelling, awaiting trial. There, he was able to receive visitors and preach and teach unhindered.
During this period he had both “fellow prisoners” and “fellow workers”. Epaphras was one of the former.
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“Does marriage hinder your relationship with God?”
Hmm, I suspect somebody has been reading 1 Corinthians 7. “Those who marry will have worldly troubles.” “The married man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided.” “The married woman is anxious about worldly things, how to please her husband.” “I want you to be free from anxieties.”
If the apostle Paul is correct — and several decades of observation strongly suggest to me that he is — then, yes, it’s certainly possible that any given marriage can become an impediment to one’s service for the Lord, peppering life with distractions and putting you in the position of trying to serve two masters, which we know is impossible. I don’t believe it has to, but it can.
I wrapped up Jonathan Edwards’ Religious Affections the day before yesterday, and I should probably comment on its final few chapters while they are still fresh in my mind.
This book has been a stimulating read from many different angles. The posts it has generated vary as wildly in subject matter — eschatology, authenticity, assurance, the witness of the Holy Spirit and the distinction between natural and moral perfections — as they vary in my level of agreement with Edwards’ observations and assertions.
I’m fine with that. A good, solid, biblical disagreement concentrates the mind better than indifferent assent.
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The angel of the Lord called Gideon a mighty man of valor. Considering that he said it to a man hiding from the Midianites in a winepress, perhaps he meant it tongue in cheek. Then again, many centuries later he would make Simon the coward into a rock and Saul the persecutor of Christians into the foremost teacher and prophet in Christian history. The Lord’s choices invariably appear counterintuitive by human standards.
But even mighty men of valor are not invulnerable. Many have fallen before their time. The key to Gideon’s success was this: the Lord sent him, and the Lord promised to be with him. That’s all God’s servants ever need.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
The Independent reports that Belgium’s Walloon region is the latest territory to ban kosher and halal meats. Denmark, Switzerland and New Zealand all got there first, in each case turning a deaf ear to the protests of Jewish and Islamic minorities.
Tom: That’s fine with me. We’ve already established in the U.S. and Canada that there are reasonable limits on religious freedoms, though these have been applied more frequently (and certainly more visibly) against Christians than against religious minorities recently.
“Philip found Nathanael and said to him, ‘We have found him of whom Moses in the Law and also the Prophets wrote — Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.’ Nathanael said to him, ‘Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?’ Philip said to him, ‘Come and see.’ ”
In my last post, I talked about relativism. I pointed out that there are two kinds — epistemic relativism and moral relativism — and that they need separate treatment, because they deal with very different issues. Then I started with epistemic relativism, the doubting of the existence of any facts, and showed how it is completely irrational.
Thanks to the minor miracle of digitization, I have been listening to a series of 40-plus year old sermons my father preached to a congregation that had just moved into its own building, and in which there were at least a dozen recent converts to the faith. Also present were no small number of believers whose church experiences had been defined by the traditions of several different denominational backgrounds.
A disparate bunch indeed.
Sometimes the difference between making yourself clearly understood and leaving yourself open to wild misinterpretation can be measured in minutes.
Picture this. You’re on social media last week checking out the feeds of a couple of evangelicals you follow, and you come across this exchange:
Do you assume Doug Wilson is urging Americans to go to war with Iran in solidarity with Israel? Maybe.
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“Should Bible translations use gender-inclusive language?”
It’s axiomatic that God has poured out his love to both sexes. He sent his Son into the world to die for men and women alike. Women were prominent in serving and caring for the Lord Jesus. They were prominent at the cross, when many of the Lord’s male disciples ran away. They were certainly visible and active at the tomb of the Lord Jesus, and were first to declare he had risen from the dead.
Still, the Bible is written in the language of its time, and the pronouns and nouns in our English translations do not always reflect the theological realities behind them.
I usually blow through books like the west wind. Not so with Jonathan Edwards’ Religious Affections, which I began back in February of this year, and which I continue to labor with. Four months later, I’m not even halfway through it. For me, that’s an appalling performance.
That confessed, I simply can’t go any faster. I keep running into ideas I have to stop, meditate on, and (often) write about. Here’s another I think is worthwhile.
Edwards draws a sharp distinction between what he calls God’s “natural perfections” and his “moral perfections”. In the former category, he includes power, knowledge, eternity and immutability, among others; in the latter, justice, righteousness, truth, goodness, grace, and the like, which he sums up in the word “holiness”. He then observes that unregenerate men and women may be able to appreciate the former divine perfections but not the latter. He concludes that a love for the divine due to its moral beauty and sweetness is the starting point and source of all holy emotions.
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How would you feel if you had just seen God and escaped alive?
The modern believer has difficulty putting himself in the sandals of an oppressed Israelite whose family worshiped Baal, and whose only impressions of the God of Israel came from oral history: of his nation’s deliverance from Egyptian slavery, its sojourn in the wilderness and its miraculous conquest of Canaan. Gideon had stories of wonderful deeds recounted by the elders of his people. Meanwhile, Christians thousands of years later are habituated to platform messages in which the word “Abba” is alleged to give us license to crawl into Daddy’s lap for a good cuddle.
Ugh. It’s a frivolous and childish view of God, and it’s not the least bit like what Gideon experienced when the angel of the Lord appeared to him.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Yes, Leftism is just plain goofy.
Philosophers Adam Swift and Harry Brighouse are deeply concerned about the nuclear family.
What happens, worries Swift, when loving your child makes for an uneven playing field for those without equally devoted parents?
The difference between the solution you or I might propose and the one the political Left proposes is that Adam and Harry would prefer to bring us all down to the lowest common denominator rather than aspire to anything inherently more desirable.
“What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.”
So wrote Sir Francis Bacon, the father of the scientific method. The man was not just a scientist, but a devout Christian as well. For him, the two were of a piece — truth in scientific inquiry was a road to knowledge of the Creator. So he wrote as much theology as science, and he stands as but one evidence of the long interaction between Christianity and scientific advancement.
In his 1601 essay “Of Truth”, he pointed out the embarrassing relativism of Pilate’s attitude. Pontius Pilate was standing next to the very One who could tell him definitively any truth he wished to know. He could have asked how planetary motion worked. He could have asked about the origins of life. He could have asked the meaning of our existence. And obviously, he could have asked what God required of him personally. He could have had forgiveness. He could have had salvation. He could have had life. And yet he walked away. And so he is remembered as one of history’s great fools.
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A post from August 2023 generated a record number of responses, many of them intense. I thought it was time to share the entire comment string, which would otherwise go largely unnoticed by our readers, since many were written long after the post’s original publication date. This is the second of two posts.
Many of the commenters are writing in a second language, so some comments are more comprehensible than others. I have cleared up a few typographic errors and inconsistencies in the interest of clarity, which I trust their authors will forgive.
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Back in August of 2023, in the context of a study on the doctrine of sinless perfectionism, I wrote a post about the Brunstad Christian Church (BCC), a century-old Norwegian denomination that has grown to over 200 churches in 54 countries, with perhaps 1,700 members in North America. The gist of what I had to say was that finding the truth online is a tremendously difficult task these days. Certainly, opinions vary wildly about the BCC and its leadership. I opted to reserve judgment.
The post is called “He Said She Said”, and the response to it has been unusual, intense and exceedingly polarized. If anything, the reaction proves my point: it’s awfully hard to find the truth online these days.
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“How can I stop being nervous about praying publicly?”
I have been praying in church meetings going on fifty years now, and I cannot remember a single time I ever stood up to try to express the corporate desires, praise or worship of the people of God when I was not at least just a little bit nervous.
That’s probably discouraging. Sorry.
“But [Elijah] went a day’s journey into the wilderness and came and sat down under a broom tree. And he asked that he might die.”
Elijah was done. Many of us have had “mountaintop” spiritual experiences that bit the dust only days later. Elijah’s was unusual in that it was literal. The mount was Carmel, and the glorious moment he experienced atop it was the complete and utter vindication of Israel’s God and his solitary public voice (Elijah) before the entire nation, abruptly followed by the summary execution of 450 false prophets claiming to speak for YHWH’s rival.
It was a good day. A really good day. Everything Elijah asked God did, and he did it in spades.