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.

The evidence of our eyes and ears makes us question such dubious theology, as it ought. So too should the context of that statement about the kingdom of the world, which self-evidently had yet to be fulfilled at the time it was written, many decades after Christ’s resurrection. Anytime we are reading predictive prophecy, the natural question to ask is “At what point in history did/will this occur?” If you read that entire passage in Revelation 11 and not just a single verse, the most intuitive answer is certainly not “now”.

Moreover, the New Testament writers describe Satan’s present-day authority over the world in terms that flatly contradict the notion that Jesus is currently choosing to exercise his God-given authority over it. In this the Lord Jesus is much like David, years after his own anointing, who refused to oust the rejected Saul until God’s appointed time came, enduring insults and humiliations on account of it. The kingdoms of this world are indeed his rightful domain, but he waits patiently for the Father to make them his footstool.

If we found these statements about Satan’s authority only in the Gospels, we might dismiss them as obsolete, in that they would predate the victory of the cross. But that’s not how it is. The apostles continued to make these claims concerning Satan’s authority over the kingdoms of the world throughout the Epistles, all written decades after the events of the Gospels. Ephesians calls Satan the prince of the power of the air, “the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience”. 2 Corinthians calls him “the god of this world”, not prior to the cross but in the present era. Most persuasively, in one of the latest letters of the NT, John writes that “the whole world lies [present tense] in the power of the evil one”.

We need not set scripture against scripture, and we shouldn’t. All these incongruities disappear if we simply acknowledge that Satan continues to rule this planet today and will do so until the full implications of Christ’s victory on the cross are realized in our world at his glorious return. The verdict against Satan has been declared, but his sentence has yet to be carried out.

*   *   *   *   *

Sunday’s post explored one way worship can potentially go sideways in an open meeting like the Lord’s Supper: misleading teaching resulting from inadvertently conflating two distinct spiritual ideas. I deliberately omitted mentioning an arguably more interesting incident that took place the very same Sunday morning in the same Lord’s Supper. A young lady stood up and participated. She read a single verse of scripture, requested we sing a particular hymn, and sat down as if it were the most natural thing in the world. At our church it absolutely isn’t.

Still, nobody overreacted. I’m not surprised. Three of our elders were absent that week, and the one present is not the type to confront anyone without getting all his facts in order first. But it was definitely awkward, and it set an unfortunate precedent that will require discreet, gentle management from leadership. Whenever you leave an opening for spontaneity, you also leave an opening for chaos. I did not know this particular young woman, so I had no sense if she was engaging in performance art in defiance of a perceived status quo, or merely unfamiliar with the teaching of scripture and our local practices.

Recognizing that my church and others of its ilk are increasingly the exception rather than the rule, I gave some background in Sunday’s post to explain why we believe women ought not to participate audibly in church meetings, so I won’t recycle that here. But the thought occurred to me that incidents of this sort may have been the impetus behind the growing evangelical trend toward regulating, formalizing or minimizing participation in church meetings by the so-called laity. Where congregants are taught to view themselves as consumers of a spiritual product rather than active participants in the Body of Christ, you never have to worry about people presumptuously crossing lines they shouldn’t. They sit there docile as well-fed housecats and let the men they are paying to speak entertain them. The question of appropriate participation is only an issue where believers prize and promote the use of spiritual gifts and hold the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers practically as well as theoretically.

I can understand how it might appeal to insecure leaders to eliminate the possibility of any unexpected disturbance in worship by assigning responsibilities beforehand, so everybody else knows they are watching a performance in which nobody expects them to participate. I can understand why certain types of leader might consider reducing the length or frequency of such a meeting. Safer that way. Everybody knows exactly what they are going to get.

I can understand the thinking, but I would always opt for participation over a closed, regulated service. The former has established New Testament precedent; the latter does not.

*   *   *   *   *

I learned another new word today. My youngest son asked me what I thought of bibliomancy. I was familiar with the practice, though I didn’t realize there was a technical term for it. It involves asking God a question, then flipping to a random page of scripture to look for his “answer”. I’ve known Christians who treated the Bible that way, and the results they obtained were always less than ideal. God does not expect us to apply his word to our lives by rolling dice or flipping pages. He engages the human intellect by means of his Spirit. We understand the will and purposes of God by earnest study of the scriptures, not through free association.

We may excuse immature and untaught believers for their early mistakes in learning how to make use of the scriptures rightly, but bibliomancy is more sinister than garden-variety ignorance or mysticism lite. Secular sources like Wikipedia and Reddit are unsparing in their assessments, calling it a form of divination, a practice the Law of Moses condemned. Moreover, bibliomancy is neither Judaic nor Christian, but pagan in origin. The only difference from using the tarot for guidance is that you don’t have to pay to see a medium. The Bible is not the only book traditionally used for this kind of “fortune telling”, which dates back millennia. In ancient times, Homer and Virgil’s works served the same purpose. Today, some use the Koran.

When you mess with the spirit world, you are not playing games. You are entering into a relationship whether you recognize it or not. One can have a life-changing, life-giving relationship with the Holy Spirit by trusting Christ for salvation. Almost every other being you will encounter in the spiritual realm is in some degree hazardous to humanity, ranging from serious to mortal. You do not want to get your direction in life from such spirits.

Make no mistake. When you play divination games, you are dealing with powerful, personal beings deeply interested in you, and not in a good way.