Prophetic Trajectories in Matthew

Matthew 10 recounts the commission of the twelve disciples to take the good news of the kingdom to all the cities of Israel.

There is a specifically ethnic character to this set of instructions: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” instructs the Lord.

At this time and for this specific purpose, the Lord equips his servants with a tool kit you and I do not possess in taking the message of gospel to the world today: he “gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal every disease and every affliction”.

Anonymous Asks (426)

“Are black people mentioned in the Bible?”

Today, we often hear words like “Canadian” or “American” applied to people who manifestly were not born in those nations and have no ancestral history there. The media deliberately conflates legal citizenship or mere residence with ethnic identity, so that it’s not uncommon to see headlines like “Canadian man arrested in France” written about people whose “Canadian identity” is summed up entirely in their possession of a passport and access to our health care system, and who actually spend most of their time abroad. It is a matter of convenience rather than allegiance or shared history.

One hopes a few of these folks also pay taxes, but even that is not always the case.

The Last Recorded Prophecy

“This shall be the sign to you, declares the Lord …”

Bible students are familiar with the difficulties raised by comparing one or two of Jeremiah’s later prophecies to secular historical narratives covering the same periods, particularly those concerning Nebuchadnezzar and his conquest of Egypt.

Having spent a fair bit of time studying other accounts written by secular historians, these tempests in a teapot trouble me not a bit.

Somebody Else’s Mail (25)

God is spirit. I think we can confidently affirm that spirits do not have physical features like we do.

So what’s this David is saying about God’s eyelids in Psalm 11 then? Seems a strange expression:

“The Lord is in his holy temple; the Lord’s throne is in heaven; his eyes see, his eyelids test the children of man. The Lord tests the righteous, but his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence.”

Hmm. Let’s give this idea some thought before we get into the psalm verse by verse.

Too Hot to Handle: A Time to Kell

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Tim Keller has been under fire around here lately. In mid-February we fisked a Daily Wire column by Megan Basham that listed Keller among thought leaders credibly accused of enabling Francis Collins to flog COVID propaganda to evangelicals by introducing him as a “friend” during a joint interview for BioLogos.

Collins is a man of the Left, a self-described ally and advocate of the gay and trans lobbies, has facilitated and funded experimental transgender research on minors, and has publicly defended experimentation on fetuses obtained from abortion. It’s one thing to engage personally and privately with such an individual in the name of Christ. It’s quite another to represent him to believers as fellow member of the flock and a trustworthy expert on science.

A Disturbance in the Force

“Stop forcing your beliefs on me!”

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that cry when debating with unbelievers. In fact, I’ve heard it so much that I’ve begun to think there might be something behind it. After all, when many kinds of people from many kinds of backgrounds and situations seem to be arriving at the same kind of sentiment, there must be some cause for it, right?

But for a long time I haven’t been able to figure out exactly what it is. The problem is the wording: “You’re forcing …”

Am I? Really? How is that?

Recommend-a-blog (35)

I haven’t done one of these recommendation posts in a couple of years for a variety of reasons, the most significant of which is the incredible site churn that has occurred on the Web since late 2013 when Bernie, IC and I began blogging here. Linking to other people’s worthwhile work is a moving target, quite impossible to maintain. If you still believe the bromide “The internet is forever”, well … stop. It just ain’t so, unless what you have posted is terminally embarrassing. In that case, you can guarantee it will not be going anywhere soon. Somebody’s got a backup to the backup to the backup on a server somewhere, and your great, great grandchildren will probably read it and weep. Or laugh uproariously.

The good stuff? That disappears faster than a Hollywood marriage. Grrr.

All the Truth

“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.”

One of the things the Lord has impressed on my heart repeatedly over the last decade or so is the importance of paying attention to pronouns in the word of God. The spirit of our present age is relentlessly individualistic and more than a little narcissistic. It turns other people’s responsibilities into my rights, passing observations into my personal promises, and conversations about other people into conversations about me.

That same spirit takes every pronoun in the Bible and makes it mine. No wonder Christians get confused when they read the scriptures. Much in the word of God concerns other people entirely.

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“What do Jews believe about the afterlife?”

That’s a complicated question. At no point in Israel’s history has belief in the afterlife been ubiquitous, unanimous or easy to pin down. A survey of Old Testament history shows even genuine Israelite believers had different concepts of death. The Law of Moses, to the best of my knowledge, did not address the subject at all, and there are no OT “Thus says the Lord” passages in the prophets to explain what happens after men die. A single passage in Daniel comes closest to that.

A Difficult Passage

A speaker at my local church this week chose to exposit a passage whose meaning I consider less than perfectly obvious. He started right in the middle of Romans 8. As he worked his way through it explaining what he believes Paul was telling his readers, I struggled to agree with him at several points. I’ve been thinking it through since, and I’d like to gently suggest a few other angles that might be more consistent with both human experience and, more importantly, the rest of the word of God.

As always, our worthy readers are free to disagree.

Somebody Else’s Mail (24)

Today, evangelical Christendom divides broadly into people who relate to the formulation “Christ is King” and people who prefer “Jesus is Lord”, a subject discussed at length in this post. The first statement is the hope of the Israelite remnant. Ironically, we hear it most frequently today from Christians who conflate our present era with the millennial reign of Christ, many of whom don’t think much of Jews. The second statement was characteristic of the apostles and writers of the New Testament and best describes the Church’s relationship to Israel’s rejected Messiah.

God has made him both Lord and Christ. We completely concur.

Too Hot to Handle: Atheists in Foxholes

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

David Rönnegard is 37. He has a PhD in philosophy from the London School of Economics, and is a researcher and teacher in corporate social responsibility in Stockholm. Sadly, and far too soon, David’s friends and family will be using “had” and “was” rather than “has” and “is” to describe him.

Dr. Rönnegard has stage four lung cancer. He is also the author of an article in Philosophy Now entitled “Atheist in a Foxhole”.

Why Are We So Easily Shaken?

I won’t soon forget his face.

He was perhaps thirty or forty years of age, well-dressed and smart looking, a typical man of his era. He was just one among the thousands who had come to this week-long Christian conference.

Every morning, the speakers had been dealing with the reasons for faith, their goal being to show people how firm and rational the foundation for our beliefs really is. Naturally, in this day and age, they had found it necessary to refer often to the recent screeds of people like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett or Sam Harris, the self-appointed “brights” of the atheist world, the so-called “Four Horsemen” of the secular apocalypse; though, really, all four are theological lightweights, since contempt for one’s subject matter tends to make one rather imprecise. Anyway, they make their way by preaching to the atheistic converted, reciting to them the same old canards that have been circulating since Darwin, Freud, Marx and Nietzsche. (Truly there is no new thing under the sun.)

Dating Jeremiah

The prophecies of Jeremiah appear in nothing remotely resembling chronological order. The text supplies no explanation for this, but it’s definitely the case. I am confident there is an intentionality in the Holy Spirit’s arrangement of his word, but whatever it may be, his logic defies easy analysis.

Speculations inevitably ensue. Reader suggestions include scribal error, editorial accident, literary device, arrangement by topic or theme, ordering by length of message and even multiple authors.

Refusing a Direct Order

If I have the story right, a few years ago my nephew drove an ax into his own foot while chopping firewood at camp. I imagine it hurt a fair bit. He made his way to one of our northern doctors, who performed a rough and ready repair without anesthesia, which made for an interesting series of sensations he had little desire to repeat.

Life is full of such learning experiences. I’m pretty sure my nephew has had occasion to pick up an ax since, but no such mishaps have resulted. Perhaps he stands differently to cut wood, or hews from a different angle, away from his own body. Maybe he takes care to work undistracted. I don’t know what the change might be, but whatever it is, it seems to have worked.

Anonymous Asks (424)

“Does a wife have to submit to her husband?”

The way we frame a question tells people quite a bit about the assumptions that provoked us to ask it. Moreover, in seeking to answer an anonymous question, the reader finds himself making assumptions about the person asking it that are hard to avoid and may well be entirely wrong. For example, the way today’s question is framed immediately sends my brain down a particular track. I am already making assumptions about the writer — female, issues with authority, chip on the shoulder, etc. — all of which may be complete rubbish.

The Prophetic Curveball

Like Fred MacMurray, Rachel had three sons. Boy, I’m dating myself with that one.

Work with me here. I know the patriarch Jacob’s favorite wife only gave birth to two boys physically: Joseph and Benjamin. No need to argue about that. Her unfortunate death in the immediate aftermath of bringing the latter into the world ensured she would produce no more heirs for Jacob.

But she still ended up with three boys. Some of our readers are getting it now.

Somebody Else’s Mail (23)

Several pieces of internal evidence prompt Bible scholars to link Psalms 9 and 10. The most obvious is an irregular acrostic pattern that begins in Psalm 9 (alef through kaf) and which Psalm 10 completes (lamed through tav), though EW Bullinger asserts seven letters are missing. A second clue is the lack of superscription on Psalm 10, and a third is the fact that in the Septuagint they form a single psalm.

Despite these indications, reading the two psalms back to back also raises more than a few questions.

Too Hot to Handle: Brimstone and Deceit

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Tom: Here’s a hot topic we’ve yet to discuss, IC — at least, it’s generated some serious heat for [former] Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, sufficient to rate an article in The New York Times.

At issue is the government’s determination to tie federal funding for youth job programs to the expression of politically correct opinion. It’s about $113 million annually, give or take, and approximately 70,000 jobs are at stake.

The Prime Minister dismisses the very predictable negative reaction from Canadian conservatives as a “kerfuffle”.

Tracking True

So it was my birthday, and a friend says to me, “Why don’t we go sailing on the big water?”

I’d sailed in a small way before, but that sounded good. So off we set.

My friend let me take the tiller while he went up to the prow deck and relaxed in the sun. “Just keep your eye on the compass in front of you and trust that,” he said. “So long as it says what it says now, we’re going to be on course.”

Real Guilt and Phantom Guilt

Revisiting the past can be a draining and unpleasant experience.

Let’s start with this: some parents are better than others, but no parent is perfect. That includes parents who were relatively established, mature Christians when they began raising their children. There is just too much we don’t know at 25 or 34. There are things about parenting I am just learning now, three decades later.

So then, at some point, the chickens come home to roost. Your children will either start telling you in which ways you failed, or else their progress in life (or lack thereof) may tell the story more eloquently than any words. You will have one of those very unpleasant “I did THAT?” moments.

Semi-Random Musings (53)

This 2021 post documented how, in not much more than a single generation, Jewish religious leaders went from burning the prophecies of Jeremiah — and physically abusing him for making them — to preserving and circulating those same predictions for posterity, such that Daniel in exile had his own copy of what eventually became Jeremiah 25.

In fewer than 66 years, Jeremiah went from pariah and public menace to one of Israel’s most respected prognosticators, though he probably didn’t live long enough to see his career re-evaluated.

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“Why didn’t Jesus write any books of the Bible?”

If we’re going to be pedantic, there’s an argument to be made that he did. The Bible refers to the Holy Spirit as “the Spirit of Jesus”. It also tells us that same Spirit superintended the writing of the Bible. “Men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” and “All scripture is breathed out by God”, literally in-Spirit-ed.

If we accept what the Bible says about the process by which it came into existence, then technically speaking Jesus didn’t just write one book of the Bible, he wrote them all.

A Good Question

“Dad, why does everybody shut their eyes when they pray?” my daughter once asked. It’s a good question, and one that never occurred to me in my own childhood. I know now why I still do it instinctively: it’s because it was drummed into me both by precept and example.

To be fair, I can’t remember my parents instructing their children to do it, though both practiced it. Mind you, they also religiously practiced an afternoon nap, and that didn’t come out of either Old or New Testament. With four children relatively close together in age, I’m pretty sure it came out of sheer exhaustion. I have never felt obliged to mimic that habit.

Somebody Else’s Mail (22)

To date our studies have treated Psalm 9 as another of many that only a future believing Israelite remnant may sing in the text’s absolute and final sense.

Two Saturdays ago, we compared the language of this psalm to the language of the historical books concerning David’s personal dealings with the nations, and found they were an uncomfortable fit. Whereas David subdued individual nations temporarily only to have them rise up again against future Israelite kings, Psalm 9 speaks of God’s final, annihilative judgment of national Israel’s enemies as a collective, something David never saw during his lifetime.

So then, either Psalm 9 is a study in pure hyperbole, or else it is literal and prophetic, in which case David is speaking in a voice other than his own.

Too Hot to Handle: Surveying Evangelicalism

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

The current state of our evangelical Christian churches is not the easiest thing to encapsulate in a few sentences. While each of today’s Protestant denominations originally sprang from a set of shared doctrinal convictions and associated practices, few could ever have been called monolithic, and evangelicals are even less so. Some groups bear the same name but believe and do things very differently indeed.

Tom: My experience with folks from the denominations is primarily online, but our own Immanuel Can has been out church-shopping of late, and may have a better view from the trenches ... er, pews. Does the average modern evangelical church building still have pews, IC?

Mismeetings of the Christian Church

“Blest be the tie that binds
 Our hearts in Christian love:
 The fellowship of kindred minds
 Is like to that above.”

So sang the congregation.

And they sang it every Sunday.

They sang it whenever it was announced that they had a visitor or new congregant come among them.

A nice gesture, wasn’t it?

On Calling Jesus Lord

“No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except in the Holy Spirit.”

“On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord’.”

Critics of the Bible like to pit unrelated verses against one another in hope of identifying a contradiction and thereby discrediting scripture. Yet my personal experience over sixty years has been that examining any pair of apparent Bible contradictions in context generally has the effect of making perceived difficulties vanish in the proverbial puff of smoke.

Semi-Random Musings (52)

Given the eschatological assumptions of postmillennialism, I should probably have expected this, but it really didn’t hit me between the eyes until I saw it in plain language in their own words. That school of prophecy declares, “the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ” not just in the near future but right here and now, in the present moment.

How they explain the current state of the world around us through that interpretive lens is a mystery to me, but there it is. If Christ is indeed acting monarch of the universe in the present moment, it seems to me he is ruling with uncanny self-restraint.

Anonymous Asks (422)

“Where would you call ‘home’?”

Many of the Bible’s great men were strangers, living in places they didn’t truly belong.

Abraham is a fine example, among the earliest. God promised him the land in which he sojourned, but Abraham never possessed that territory during his own lifetime. He lived in tents among people he did not know and with whom he had little in common.

When his wife died, he described himself to the Hittites as a “sojourner and foreigner among you”. He had to solicit a place to bury his dear Sarah because he possessed no real estate of his own.

Not Like the Others

“One of these things is not like the others
 One of these things just doesn’t belong.”

— Sesame Street, before its writers went woke

One of the great privileges of celebrating the Lord’s Supper is that any male believer is welcome to participate vocally. That principle draws its authority from 1 Corinthians 14:31, which says concerning church meetings, “You can all prophesy one by one, so that all may learn and all be encouraged.” The “all” in that verse means “all you men who are gifted prophets”.

We know that because the word Paul uses for “prophets” in the passage is masculine. The Greek language has a separate word for female prophets that we translate into English as “prophetesses”. That’s not the word Paul used in this chapter.

Somebody Else’s Mail (21)

“Sing praises to the Lord, who sits enthroned in Zion! Tell among the peoples his deeds! For he who avenges blood is mindful of them; he does not forget the cry of the afflicted.”

If you read this verse in the NASB, you may be forgiven for thinking David was name-checking a cheesy vampire flick. There, it reads, “He who requires blood”, a statement which sounds odd to modern ears but is nonetheless the most ruthlessly literal of all translations.

The author of Psalm 9 made no such silly Hollywood associations and neither did his original readers. The subject was deadly serious. The ESV rendering above is less literal but a little easier to process. So let’s talk about this title of YHWH, or maybe of Christ, if the distinction is worth considering.

Too Hot to Handle: How Do You Read It? (5)

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Tom: We’re in the middle of batting around commonly misunderstood Bible verses. Here’s another frequently-quoted line for you, IC, this one from Proverbs:

“As he thinks within himself, so he is.”

I mentioned in another post a few weeks ago that I’ve often found other people understand individual proverbs very differently from the way I understand them. This one is no exception.

Sailing the High Seas

An old friend sent me an email a while ago. He was concerned:

“My daughter is going off to university next year, and she wants to take English Literature as her major! I’m worried about her: could you talk to her?”

I had to smile. Sure, I could talk to her. After all, I had been through all that, and I had survived just fine, thank you.

But why the panic?

I recalled that he is university educated himself, but in mathematical subjects. I suppose that somewhere along the line he’d picked up the idea that while maths might be a safe study for a Christian, the humanities might be unusually hostile to faith. I wondered what he thought of anthropology or the life sciences.

Those Negative Influences

I’ve been reading a few comments online from Christian parents wondering how much contact they should allow their children with unsaved relatives expressing convictions or modeling lifestyles antithetical to their values. I mean homosexuals, alcoholics, atheists, practitioners of false religions or woke ideology, career criminals, and so on. The concern is that a friendly, affectionate uncle, aunt or older cousin who takes an interest in one’s child may become, for a time at least, a more appealing role model than the parent who cares for them every day.

Children may be insufficiently discerning, some fear, to appreciate an unsaved relative’s value to God and family while categorically rejecting his bad example.

The Way of Man

“I know, O Lord, that the way of man is not in himself, that it is not in man who walks to direct his steps.”

Perhaps the prophet Jeremiah had been reading the book of Proverbs when he made this statement. There, Solomon wrote these words: “A man’s steps are from the Lord; how then can man understand his way?” Solomon wondered about it. Jeremiah simply asserted it.

Either way, left to our own devices, we are blind men groping in the dark. In this life, the word of God is our only unerring guide.

Anonymous Asks (421)

“Do nominally-Christian family members have a right to privacy when their behavior changes in suspicious ways?”

Here is an interesting and very modern dilemma. Do you remember the days before ubiquitous social media, online histories in our browser caches and the discovery of the occasional unlocked cell phone? Even if we felt we just couldn’t go on together with suspicious minds, there wasn’t a whole lot we could do about our discomfort beyond appealing to the suspect to open up and talk with us about what was really going on.

Today, Big Brother is watching not just you but everybody in your family, and he’s happy to share what he knows any time you’re willing to take a peek. Should you?

Tongue Like a Bow

“They bend their tongue like a bow.”

I have a dear friend who professed faith in Christ back in his youth, but in his twenties married an unsaved woman and wandered far away from the Lord … or maybe the process worked the other way round. Either way, raising a family in lockstep with the worldview of a woman who does not know Christ or the scriptures, he has grown comfortable subjecting himself to the propaganda of the leftist media on a daily basis.

Eager to please his wife, he now pays arguably more attention to her ideology than she does.

Somebody Else’s Mail (20)

The prophetic spirit moved David as he wrote Psalm 9. Of course, the Holy Spirit was upon him as he wrote all his psalms of scripture but, like many good authors, on plenty of occasions he simply wrote what he knew. Not all David’s psalms required that he peer into the future and write down what the Spirit showed him as he carried him along.

This one does, as we will see shortly. The “will of man” did not move David’s pen, and I wonder exactly how much he understood about the times and circumstances the Spirit of Christ in him was indicating.

Too Hot to Handle: How Do You Read It? (4)

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Tom: Where commonly misunderstood Bible verses are concerned, IC, this one is a favorite, particularly south of the border:

“If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”

To be fair, I’ve heard it prayed by Christians here too, beseeching the Lord that Canadians would suddenly and inexplicably vote to abolish abortion on demand, or oust Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal Ontario government, or whatever.

New, Improved, Advanced … You Need One

A few years ago I went on vacation in England. We had some special places to go, but of course there were a few of the obligatory touristy things as well.

We went to the Tower of London. It’s not a single tower, but a concentric castle formed of 21 towers. One of the main ones is called the White Tower. It was especially interesting to me since it housed a great collection of historical armaments spanning several centuries of warfare. Much of it is conventional stuff: swords, cannons, muskets, shields, chain mail and so forth. Some of the displays feature experimental weaponry, such as multi-barreled, repeating guns and so forth.

Cool.

Building Card Houses

I had an illuminative experience earlier today. My sons sent me a link to a sermon unlike any I’ve previously encountered and, believe me, I’ve had some interesting Sunday mornings over the years. This particular well-meaning culprit will remain nameless in order to protect the guilty. Hopefully, his more senior colleagues in his local church will encourage him to go a different direction with his next effort at expositing the word of God.

Hey, I’m proud of my boys. Far from being mean-spirited or hypercritical, they simply showed a little appropriate caution, discernment and a Berean attitude to the word of God. That will serve them well.

The Language of the Debate (14)

Christians who uncritically accept redefinitions foisted on us in bad faith by people with agendas are bound to end up confused and stymied in conversations about anything important. Our standard practice in this blog post series has been to identify and point out changes cleverly made to English words with the object of reframing divisive issues, shaping public discussion or circumventing debate entirely.

Today’s term is a little different. It’s not that it’s been conveniently redefined so much as it never had much meaning in the first place.

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“Will we eat food in our glorified bodies?”

The glorified human body is very much on my mind these days. My mother is in her mid-nineties after decades of serving the Lord Jesus, and her mind and body are in the process of demonstrating the truth of the Second Law of Thermodynamics: things fall apart. Her inexorable deterioration may plateau, but it will not cease until the Lord returns for his Church.

When I’m praying for Mom, I sometimes wonder what that glorified body will look like.

Never Ceases to Amaze Me

“Run to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, look and take note! Search her squares to see if you can find a man, one who does justice and seeks truth, that I may pardon her.”

As I study the scriptures, the magnitude of God’s grace never ceases to amaze me. This passage is just one in an almost-endless list of examples.

Somebody Else’s Mail (19)

Psalm 9 is the first acrostic psalm, a structural poetry convention in which each line begins with a consecutive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. (Psalm 119 is the most famous example of this technique.) As others have noted, this one is an imperfect acrostic: some letters are missing. The pattern of starting each line with the next letter continues into Psalm 10, leading analysts to conclude they were originally two movements of the same psalm.

Jewish tradition suggests David wrote this psalm after his victory over Goliath.

Too Hot to Handle: How Do You Read It? (3)

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

God, cash & prizes: a winning combo! Or not.

Tom: How Do You Read It? is kind of a series within a series, in which Immanuel Can and I discuss common misinterpretations of some very familiar verses. IC, have you got one for me?

Immanuel Can: What about “Whatever you ask in my name …”?

The Can of Worms Opens

Tom: Whoa! That’s opening a can of worms. That one question might do for an entire topic.

A Church Without Wings

In one of the towns in which I lived as a child there was a church that called itself “Berean”. I’ve noticed quite a few such establishments, and I wonder if many people know what that word actually means.

It’s a reference to a group of ancient Jews who lived in a town called Berea, and who were among those who experienced the early ministry of the apostle Paul. They listened to the gospel Paul preached; and yet they didn’t just trust it. They checked it out for themselves, comparing his New Testament teaching with the word of God in the Old Testament. Acts says that they “received the message with great eagerness and examined the scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true”.

Unacceptable by Today’s Standards

George Orwell was not a Christian.

His biographers describe him as agnostic or even an atheist. His dystopian classic 1984 contains the occasional anti-Catholic comment and a plethora of in-storyline lies and betrayals, not to mention a few (admittedly tame) sex scenes. Back in the day, it was required reading in high school, where I first came across it. I re-read it this week for the first time in years, and found it thought provoking and useful, not to mention scarily prescient. Orwell is also a deeply depressing read for those who believe his vision of the future was prophetic, and who don’t have the hope of Christ’s return to look forward to.

Bizarrely, 1984 is also (in some mysterious way I was unable to ascertain) “unacceptable by today’s standards”.

Losing Down Here

“Should we not consider that an eschatology that teaches ‘we lose down here’ is an eschatology that may have had something to do with why we are, you know, losing down here?”

The quote comes from Doug Wilson’s introductory comments to a recent round table discussion about Christian nationalism. In case it’s insufficiently clear outside of its original context, the point he’s making is that our expectations often determine how much we are able to accomplish.