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“Is it biblical to choose the lesser of two evils?”
In the ancient Hebrew of the Old Testament, the word translated “evil” [raʿ] has two distinct meanings. One is wickedness, an ungodly moral choice made by a living being. The other is misfortune, a sad practical consequence of living in a fallen world, about which we often have little or no choice at all.
“So Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her.”
Love gives us a different perspective on the difficulties of life. Seven years of hard work, day in, day out, is a high price to pay for a wife. Elsewhere, Jacob talks about serving Laban, and he says, “By day the heat consumed me, and the cold by night, and my sleep fled from my eyes.” So he was not unaware what Rachel cost him, but love gave Jacob a different perspective. He had a goal in front of him. Compared to that, seven years became but a few days.
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Three interesting verses early in Exodus: Moses had reluctantly accepted the Lord’s commission to lead Israel out of Egyptian slavery into the land God had promised them. He, his Midianite wife Zipporah and their young son Gershom then began the trek to Egypt to present God’s agenda to Pharaoh. On the way, “the Lord met him and sought to put him to death”. Zipporah wisely intervened, emergency-circumcised her son and touched her husband’s feet with the bloody foreskin, averting the crisis.
Readers get totally confused, and rightly so. We do not have all the necessary information in the immediate context.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
They started in 1988 with a 27-year old “senior pastor” named James MacDonald and a couple hundred interested Christians and seekers gathered in a Chicago high school auditorium. Today, they are known as Harvest Bible Chapel, a megachurch with campuses all over the Chicago area and over 100 affiliated fellowships in North America and internationally.
Tom: Today, the mother church is being investigated for alleged financial shenanigans.
No, I’m not going to break into the Talking Heads’ 1983 pop hit.
I’m tempted, but I’m not going to. You really don’t want to hear me do that.
But nothing raises the temperature in a local congregation faster than any suggestion we change the music. Countless battles have been fought, and whole congregations have divided over that sort of thing.
That’s really a pity.
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A passage in 1 Timothy sets a Reddit commenter’s teeth on edge:
“This verse has frankly been getting under my skin for the last two weeks. Why would Timothy put such an emphasis on the subordination of women at that point in early Christianity, especially if the spread of the gospel was paramount? Wouldn’t forcing women into submissiveness during church turn women (and possibly men) away from the new religion?”
These instructions in Timothy concern Christian sex roles, both in church meetings and at home. The commenter is not the first Bible reader to whom a question along these lines has occurred, and will definitely not be the last. Let’s see if we can help.
“Jesus answered them, ‘Is it not written in your Law, “I said, you are gods”?’ ”
Bible commentators often say the New Testament (NT) interprets the Old (OT), not the other way around. This principle is generally solid, though it can be taken to extremes; for example, by erroneously concluding that we cannot interpret any OT scripture properly without reference to the NT. Manifestly, we both can and should.
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“What are the windows of heaven?”
We find the metaphor “windows of heaven” several times throughout the Old Testament. It describes how God responds to the actions of men in two very different ways.
What they have in common is abundance.
In the first book of the OT, the “windows of heaven” describes the outpouring of rain during Noah’s flood. In Genesis 7, the windows of heaven were opened. In Genesis 8, the windows of heaven were closed, and the rain ceased to fall. Forty days and forty nights of rain is what we might reasonably call an abundance, but it was an abundance of judgment. God used it to destroy a wicked world. Nobody wants that sort of abundance. You wouldn’t pray for it, and God has promised never to do it again.
Lately I’ve been reading a lot about how important it is not to put barriers to Christian faith in the way of the unsaved. I certainly don’t want to do that, and I’m very sure you don’t either.
Archaic language and holy jargon can be hurdles. Arguing about the age of the earth can be off-putting, as can paternalism, denominational conflicts, smugness, and a host of other far-too-common attitudes and practices that needn’t and shouldn’t get in the way of the knowledge of Christ.
These things are unnecessary, and it’s shameful to see someone shake his head and retreat into the darkness of ignorance and eternal loss over the bad manners and misplaced priorities of the messenger, over mere tradition, or over form.
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There’s no getting around it, I hate this part of the story. When I’m preparing a chapter-by-chapter book study like this one, my morning Bible reading consists of a chapter of the Old Testament twice through, a chapter of the New twice through, plus the chapter of the book I’m working on for the study twice through, usually in that order.
This story is so distasteful that I had to switch my reading order around for the past few weeks or go into my prayer time feeling slightly defiled. I needed a Psalm and a chapter of Matthew to wash the taste of Judges 19 out of my mouth.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Tom: I’m prowling the Internet, as is my wont, and encountering discussion on the subject of whether a church building can impede one’s efforts to grow a local church. Take for example this meditation, from Abby Stocker at Christianity Today:
“Our worship spaces matter. The music, preaching, and community obviously influence our church experience, but building styles also communicate something to the congregation about what is proper in worship. A central stage outfitted with a drumset probably means the music will be emotional and modern. Feel free to wave your hands, dance, however the Spirit leads you. Kneelers will probably be dedicated to congregational, possibly liturgical, prayer. Space for a mosh pit signifies ... you’re probably not at, say, a small intimate gathering based primarily on discussion of a text.”
So here we are, left to consider how the apostle Paul might have felt about a mosh pit. Immanuel Can, please help me out here.
I’ve heard it said that the quickest way to split a congregation is to change the hymnbook or repaint the walls.
Well, I have no feel for interior decorating, so that second one’s not going to be a problem for me. But like most people, I have more definite tastes when it comes to music. Some of the songs that my local church sings, I love; others, I confess, make me cringe.
Book III of Psalms begins with Psalm 73. The superscriptions over the next 11 psalms tell us a man named Asaph wrote them. Asaph was a Levite singer and musician commissioned during David’s reign. Among other things, he was a harpist and a cymbal player. He and his fellow Levites sang and played David’s psalms as well as their own.
Most psalmists were prophets. Orthodoxy accepts that without question. Asaph too was a prophet, as his psalms establish beyond any reasonable argument to any reader using consistent interpretive principles.
I’ve been following a fair bit of online discussion about ‘spiritual abuse’ and leaving churches, a trek through the interwebs that took me to The Wartburg Watch 2024. The website looked eerily familiar and the writing tone and subject matter rang a distant bell, so I did a little research. Sure enough, a decade ago I wrote a post about the biblical roles of the sexes prompted by something John Piper said that TWW reported.
Since early 2009, Wartburg has documented and debated cases of spiritual abuse, theological fads, controlling pastors and other church issues, as their mission page declares.
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“Is the ‘Name It Claim It’ philosophy biblical?”
I had to look up this phrase since I’m entirely unfamiliar with the concept. A Google Ngram search shows it began appearing in English literature just prior to 1980 and took off in popularity post-2000, peaking after 2020. Having established that, I looked for a book by that name in hope of finding a popular proponent of the teaching. The one that crops up most frequently is a 2008 publication by Dag Heward-Mills entitled Name It! Claim It!! Take It!!! (with all those crazy exclamation marks), available since 2024 as a free PDF online in what I think is its entirety.
The book certainly falls within the Ngram timeframe, but late enough to suggest the phrase probably did not originate with Heward-Mills. TV evangelists like Kenneth Copeland have popularized the concept to the point that it may not be possible to figure out exactly where it came from. For our purposes, it hardly matters one way or another; the basic teaching has been around for centuries.
An infinite God can concern himself with matters great and comparatively insignificant. There are no time constraints when you dwell in eternity and no detail, no matter how microscopic, is ever overlooked. The Lord Jesus taught that the Father sees the falling of a sparrow and numbers the hairs on the human head. That’s the kind of God we have. He misses nothing, big or small.
Infinite bandwidth will do that, with no degradation of appropriate priorities.
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English translations of the Bible call the tribe made up of the children of Benjamin either Benjamites or Benjaminites. Literally, the Hebrew is “of Benjamin”. The numerous English versions extant split about 60/40 in usage, with the older versions like the KJV mostly leaning toward the truncated form of the name. At this point, neither is really right or wrong.
I’ll go with the shorter version here because it’s … shorter. Having read Judges 19 as many as thirty times in the process of preparing this series, I’m inclined to dwell on the evil men of Gibeah as fleetingly as possible.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
A few days ago, I watched a popular YouTube video one of our readers passed on. It was intended as a spoof of lazy, millennial, hipster Christians who have figured out how to avoid the inevitable complications and commitments of church life by going to “virtual church”. By themselves. From bed. Provided they can work up the energy.
Tom: It’s actually quite entertaining, and if you can watch it without cracking up, you have more self-control than I do. In fact, to really get the picture, you should probably watch it first, if you’re that sort of reader.
“Now I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus, who saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe. And the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day — just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.”
Ummm …
What do you mean, “remind”?
Romans 5 is a fine example of the importance of following a writer’s thought flow when interpreting the Bible.
Say you do your morning reading like most people, a chapter at a time. So you drag yourself out of bed, sleep in your eyes, coffee cooling on the table beside your comfy reading chair, and open the scripture where you finished yesterday, at the end of chapter 4. You read on.
Do you even remember chapter 4? Not too likely. Maybe only in the vaguest way. That was a whole 24 hours ago. Chapters 1-3? You’ve got to be kidding. They were last week.
“… my little children, for whom I am again in the anguish of childbirth until Christ is formed in you!”
Context is key to discovering the intended meaning of almost every word and phrase in the Bible. Following a writer’s thought flow and keeping in mind where we are in his overall argument invariably gives us a better sense of what he is trying to say then simply looking up the definitions of the Greek or Hebrew words he used.
Sometimes, however, the immediate context of a statement doesn’t help you much at all.
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“Are religious icons idols?”
For readers with limited exposure to “high church” traditions, an icon is an artistic depiction of Bible persons or events in paint, mosaic or wood. Icons are common among the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics and some Lutherans. The Lord Jesus, Mary, ‘saints’ and angels are the most frequent subjects.
Depending whom you ask, what makes an icon ‘iconic’ is that, rather than simply being decorative, it serves as an object of devotion.
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We’ve done a few posts over the last couple of years about how the systematic theology we adopt (or uncritically absorb) affects not only the way we read a verse here or there, but also the way we read whole books of the Bible and what we take away from them. One little difference of interpretation here and there may have huge ripple effects downstream. For that reason alone, I always advise new Christians not to sign on to any existing system without a measure of reserve and constant reassessment of whether that way of viewing the Bible aligns with what you are discovering as you read and study it daily.
We can trust the Word absolutely. What people extrapolate from it is a different story.
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Years ago, my aunt appeared at her mother’s door only a few days into her honeymoon, wailing about her “impossible” new husband. My grandmother was a worthy old gal with a very traditional, even biblical view of the importance of keeping one’s word once given. She briskly turned her daughter around in the yard and pointed her right back where she had come from with the trenchant observation, “You married him.”
Hrm. I loved my aunt. She was quite a woman. But I’ve always enjoyed that story.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Over the last 20 years we’ve seen all kinds of pontificating about the threat of global warming, or climate change, or whatever it’s being repackaged as this week. One thing we can be sure of is that climate change is not the first thing on the minds of most Americans. The percentage of U.S. citizens who consider the environment a source of great worry dropped to a new low of 29% in 2025, dwarfed by issues like government corruption, cost of living, and cultural and social divisions.
Given that the dire warnings of the Warmists are going largely unheeded at present, there has been an increasingly intense effort to reframe the climate change issue as a moral one rather than merely a political or practical one.
Welcome back to our two-part treatment of the (post-)modern attitude to truth.
Last week, we were observing that the concept of an actual objective truth has gone out of fashion these days. More and more, the average person of today tends to disbelieve that anything can be, in any final and universally binding sense, “true”. Truth has been banished because there are so many voices shouting so many messages that most of us don’t know where to find it if it did exist. We’re overwhelmed by multiculturalism, media overload, the speed of modern life and the decline of the formerly-solid touchpoints of religion and tradition, even if we know nothing about the theory behind it, or about the new skeptical “hermeneutics” being taught in the contemporary academy. We’re all just pretty confused about truth.
Well over two-thirds of the Bible’s 150 psalms have titles or introductory notes that scholars refer to as superscriptions. These provide information about authorship, usage, musical directions and sometimes even the circumstances in which the psalm was written. From the late 1800s until relatively recently, a majority of Bible scholars questioned the value of these superscriptions, believing Hebrew scribes likely added them centuries later than the original text. It may be for this reason that not all modern translations include them.
At least one expert on Old Testament studies has reconsidered that view.
In the course of studying and writing my way through more than fourteen different books of the Bible chapter by chapter and verse by verse for our ongoing Saturday series of expository posts, it’s been quite impossible to avoid the subject of authorship. I’ve had to consider that question at the beginning of every series, twelve times alone in our study on the Minor Prophets.
What quickly becomes evident is that unless the author specifically identifies himself in the text, we simply do not know who wrote any given book.
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“When did the Church begin?”
Two answers to this question are common among evangelicals. The Dispensational answer is “At Pentecost in the early first century AD.” The answer of Replacement Theology (“RT”) is “The people of God are one throughout the entire Bible.” Since “church” [ekklēsia] means a congregation (i.e., more than one person), the Church can then be said to have begun with the second human being ever saved, perhaps Eve or Abel. Others argue Abraham is “the father of us all”. Either position adds thousands of years to the age of the Church.
If you think the difference is a mere numeric technicality, think again.
For over a decade, I have lived with a sleep disorder that usually limits me to between two-and-a-half and four hours of uninterrupted rest per night. I have probably mentioned that once or twice in this space. I don’t have any trouble at all getting to sleep; I nod right off in a heartbeat as soon as I lie down and turn out the light. I just can’t make sleep last, and once I’m awake again after a nap, nodding back off is impossible.
That’s been great in some ways. I have no end of opportunity for Bible study and prayer when most people are sawing logs. On the other hand, I’m not usually up to much socially later on in the evening. By ten I’m right out of gas. The third period of most hockey games ain’t happening no matter how much I’d like to see the final score.
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One of the more interesting features of this final, very unsavory episode in Judges is that while it gives us both the spiritual nadir and narrative climax for the book, it is chronologically out of sequence. Rather than coming at the end of the period when the judges governed Israel, I believe the culling of the Benjamites actually occurred some 300 years prior; before Samson, Jephthah, Gideon and many others lived, fought and ruled.
How do we know this? By the major logistical difficulties placing it anywhere else creates.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
In America is not a Christian nation: The dark capitalist roots of our country’s most destructive myth, Andrew Aghapour quizzes Princeton professor Kevin Kruse about the “Christian nation myth”.
As with most things in the media these days, the title is a bit sensationalist and the substance of the article a little less dramatic. Basically, it’s what it purports to be: the assertion that America is not and never has been a Christian nation, with a bit of window dressing that suggests a mini-conspiracy by businessmen and evangelicals to spread that myth.
Tom: Immanuel Can, I think we can agree that America is demonstrably not a Christian nation today. Has it ever been?
Some years ago I picked up a volume compiled by Walter Truett Anderson entitled The Truth About the Truth. It was a collection of essays, actually, each one detailing some way in which the modern conception of “truth” has been warped. It had chapters on reification (the modern tendency to mistake mere traditions for inevitabilities), the love of the ironic tone, the tendency to accept things at face value, the obsession with commercialism, gender fluidity, cultural pluralism and the loss of the integrated self, and so on … all very interesting, and some of it insightful. But so far as the concept of a stable, universal, actually-existing kind of truth, very cynical.
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The Google Books Ngram Viewer is a great little online tool for discovering when any word or phrase began to appear in the 22 million English books and manuscripts Google has digitized, and the years in which its popular usage peaked. Google’s library is a reasonable proxy for the frequency with which a term was and is used in Western cultures. The Ngram Viewer charts sets of search strings by year, in most cases from 1800 to 2022, and only charts words and phrases that appear in forty or more books.
The phrase I’m searching today is “sense [alternatively, ‘feeling’] of entitlement”.
The vast majority of people Jesus healed went home to family and friends to tell the tale, though the Lord would often instruct them not to reveal who had healed them, especially early in his ministry. In some cases, he commanded even the demons he drove out of men and women not to speak “because they knew him”.
Unclean spirits tended to use phrases like “Son of God” to describe him. That might be a bit of a giveaway.
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“What is the Synoptic Problem?”
The word ‘synoptic’ refers to the gospels written by Matthew, Mark and Luke, coming from the Latin synopticus, literally “seeing all together”. Wikipedia describes the Synoptic Problem this way:
“The ‘synoptic problem’ is … the question as to the source or sources upon which each synoptic gospel depended when it was written.”
You too may have noticed passages from the three gospels that are similar to one another. I’m not quite sure why commentators describe it as a problem. I think of it more as a curiosity.
It occurred to me while reading through the Gospel of Mark that the significance of many little things perfectly obvious to Bible students or people with a Christian upbringing is probably quite lost on first time readers, especially those whose background is not Jewish.
Little things like the words of the blind beggar Bartimaeus, who cried out to Jesus, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” That “Son of David” thing must have been important: after all, the blind guy kept repeating it despite everybody around him trying to hush him up.
He wasn’t the only one. That title was something Jesus heard regularly.
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The tribe of Ephraim was contrary, rebellious and idolatrous. The half-tribe of Manasseh in Gilead refused to obey the judges God raised up to defend Israel, provoking a brief civil war. The histories in Judges reveal the persistent moral failings of Joseph’s children during this period.
However, Ephraim and Manasseh were hardly the only Israelite tribes whose cultures bottomed out during the rule of the judges.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Juan Cole at Alternet.org has bucketloads of fun in an article entitled “If the Christian Right Wants to Get Worked Up About Sexual Controversy, They Should Read These 5 Bible Passages”. He goes to town on Solomon’s 300 concubines, Abraham and Hagar, etc.
In a forlorn attempt at evenhandedness, Mr. Cole tosses in this disclaimer: “Ancient scripture can be a source of higher values and spiritual strength, but any time you in a literal-minded way impose specific legal behavior because of it, you’re committing anachronism.”
Tom: Immanuel Can, one of things I love most about Mr. Cole is the unquestioned assumption that each scripture he cites is a “gotcha” moment to the religious right. Like none of us have seen these passages until his article came along …
Pearls of wisdom from Mary Kassian:
“A husband does not have the right to demand or extract submission from his wife. Submission is HER choice — her responsibility … it is NOT his right!! Not ever. She is to ‘submit herself’ — deciding when and how to submit is her call. In a Christian marriage, the focus is never on rights, but on personal responsibility. It’s his responsibility to be affectionate. It’s her responsibility to be agreeable. The husband’s responsibility is to sacrificially love as Christ loved the Church — not to make his wife submit.”
So it is “HER choice — her responsibility … deciding when and how to submit is her call”. So declares Mary Kassian.
The introduction to Psalm 45 calls it a love song and tells us the Sons of Korah wrote it. The psalm portrays a glorious, conquering king. By verse 5, his enemies, in so many words, have become his footstool. Hmm, now where have I heard that before?
I jest. There’s no difficulty identifying the king as our Lord Jesus Christ. The writer to the Hebrews quotes verses 6 and 7 of this very psalm and plainly tells us they speak of “the Son”, distinguishing him above all created beings, no matter how powerful and glorious.
“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
In yesterday’s Anonymous Asks post, we considered Adam and Eve. One was deceived into sinning, the other was not, but neither had much more to work with than a simple, unambiguous command: do not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The penalty: “you shall surely die”.
They were given the “what” but not really the “why”.
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“Why does God allow deception?”
Google the phrase “Why does God allow”. Stop there. The number one answer by a long, long shot is “suffering”. Even my browser’s AI response assumes that’s what my open-ended question is really asking. Second highest is “evil”. Third is “tragedy”, which may or may not have a malevolent component. I often associate tragedy with natural events that hurt people, or things like dying young.
Way down the list is “Why does God allow me to struggle and fail?” Hey, I sympathize.
“It’s a bad testimony,” she insisted.
The speaker was an older friend, the “bad testimony” a younger friend, and the evidence a report from a third party about a political opinion the younger friend had posted to social media where the whole world (or at least people who follow him, depending on his settings) could read it and react, pro or con.
Almost immediately, I was on the fence. A “bad testimony” is often very much in the eye of the beholder. Or at least it depends on the lens one is looking through.
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Others have noted Judges does not recount certain events in chronological order. The story in chapters 17 and 18 appears to have taken place after the death of Samson during a period in which Israel had no named judge, maintaining a more-or-less linear march through time to this point in the book. However, it’s evident the final three chapters (19-21) actually took place quite a bit earlier and probably find their place at the end of the book for theological, dramatic and/or thematic reasons.
Historically speaking, chapter 18 concludes Judges.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Tom: A few weeks back, I was sent a list of questions asked anonymously by a group of teenagers attending a Christian summer camp. This one sounds like it’s worth thinking about:
“Do you think that we should wait to date until we are more prepared to be married, i.e., financially responsible, able to cook and clean … OR date younger?”
There’s a hot potato, IC. I’m actually impressed that a younger person is open to considering the options, given that our society operates in a very predictable fashion today where young people are concerned. What do you think of the question?
I was reading a book on apologetics, a collection of essays. It had one by Sean McDowell. Yes, that Sean McDowell, son of the more famous Josh McDowell. (How tired he must be of hearing that!)
Anyway, I’ve read a few McDowell books, and from the first moment I opened one, I remember feeling a vague sense of … what was it? ... a sort of vague ‘missing’.