The subject of giving to the Lord has come up a few times in the last year from different angles. One idea that I touched on briefly in a previous post is that some Christians believe we ought to do all our giving through the filter of local church leadership, who would distribute funds received as they see fit.
You’d have to know a little bit about my background to understand how foreign such an idea seems to me.
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The superscription to Psalm 5 reads “To the choirmaster: for the flutes. A Psalm of David.” I had to take a quick peek at the Hebrew for “flutes” in my Strong’s, as I don’t imagine what the Levite musicians played 3,000 years ago bore much resemblance to a modern wind instrument, especially one usually made out of nickel-silver alloys.
As it turns out, the word only appears in certain English Bibles. Some consistently omit the superscriptions for reasons discussed in this article. Even in the cases where it does appear, we have nothing else in the Old Testament with which to compare it. The usage is unique. Strong’s says it may refer to a musical instrument or simply be the name of a particular melody, which is a discreet way of saying the translators are guessing. Most modern translations go with “flutes”, though a few say “wind instruments” and the NIV goes with “pipes”.
It would be nice if we perfectly understood the etymology and popular usage of every ancient Hebrew word. This one we don’t. We can only imagine how this psalm sounded in full vocal chorus with accompaniment.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Tom: Quick quiz, IC: How many different local churches have you been part of? I’m not counting churches you’ve visited, but just those you would have considered “my church” for a period of time; churches in which it would have been notable to others if you weren’t there.
Immanuel Can: Um … rather more than most people, I suspect. I’ve been regarded, for some time, as a regular attendee of … I make it 14. I might be missing one or two. My youth and early adult years were marked by a lot of moving around, so it wasn’t a product of unhappiness in most cases. How about you?
So … what if atheists took themselves seriously?
So seriously, as a matter of fact, that they actually tried to live out the rational implications of their own rejection of all possibility of God or gods? What then?
As I said in yesterday’s post, getting answers to this question turned out to be more difficult than it might initially appear.
Persuading atheists to speak about what follows from the rejection of God was very hard. Not only did they generally refuse to press forward logically, but they often reacted with bitter, visceral hatred at any prompting to do so, making further conversation difficult.
“Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.”
— Jane Austen
“Things without all remedy should be without regard: what’s done is done.”
— William Shakespeare
“The past can’t hurt you anymore, not unless you let it.”
— Alan Moore
Guess what I’ve been thinking about this week?
I’ve been thinking about the value of word studies in the Bible’s original languages. There are definitely pros and cons.
There is a potential problem inherent in the style of platform ministry that commences every attempt at exposition by telling the audience which Greek or Hebrew words underlie the most significant words in your text, and to what extent their meaning differs from the closest possible English equivalents.
You probably identified that danger zone right away. Invariably, one of two things happens.
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“What is the great deception of the end times?”
The Bible portrays the final years of our present age as a period characterized by lies and deception, one in which truth will be very hard to find. Sometimes I wonder if we are getting close.
In Matthew 24, the disciples asked Jesus what signs will indicate the end of the age has come, and that the Lord Jesus is returning to earth as king. Among other things, he replied, “Many false prophets will arise and lead many astray”, including deceivers who claim to be the Christ. Paul would later write to Timothy, reminding him that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and the teaching of demons. Numerous other passages say similar things.
If we had only the accounts in the four gospels from which to form an opinion about Pontius Pilate, we might find ourselves with a measure of sympathy for his plight. After all, he didn’t invite a crazed mob of angry Jews to show up on his doorstep in the middle of the night, threatening the peace, his person and his reputation. He didn’t ask to be accused of public disloyalty to Caesar. He didn’t ask for the job of judging Jesus.
He certainly doesn’t come across as hostile to the Lord personally. I’m quite sure he would much rather have been snugly tucked into his bed than making a life-or-death decision in a situation he didn’t understand.
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The superscription to Psalm 4 reads, “To the choirmaster: with stringed instruments. A Psalm of David.” It reminds us that no matter how personal any given psalm may appear, each was written with the entire body of believers in mind. Three thousand years ago, your new psalm did not get played on the radio in your car, revolve on the turntable of your stereo, or get discovered on Spotify. The average Israelite did not even have a copy of the words at home in a scroll to read and meditate on.
Psalms were for the congregation when it gathered, whether sung and accompanied or performed for worshipers by trained musicians.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Everybody’s favorite political football Bristol Palin has written a column on the subject of the Guinness Beer Company and its Christian origins.
Tom: This is not the first time I’ve come across this story, Immanuel Can. In another generation, a Christian brewer turns out to have been the voice of moderation and societal self control. But in some evangelical circles today, Arthur Guinness would be taken to task for corrupting the faithful. I mean, he sold alcohol for a living!
Is there a less cartoonish and more biblical position to be taken on the subject of alcohol consumption, IC?
I’ve spent quite a bit of time talking with atheists.
You might wonder why. You might say, “People have to be open to the voice of God, or they hear nothing at all. ‘He who has ears to hear, let him hear,’ said the Lord. A man whose ears are already shut gets nothing — and, if we follow the Lord’s example — should get nothing, for he does not unite his hearing with any measure of faith. And without faith, it is impossible to please God.”
Even secular common sense accepts this. “A man convinced against his will remains an unbeliever still,” goes the axiom.
So why bother to talk to people whose minds are already made up? A fair question.
When the Ottoman Empire collapsed in the WWI era, the Balkan Peninsula, previously unified, fragmented into numerous smaller, less-stable states and the term “balkanize” entered our vocabulary as a way of describing any process by which a bigger unit breaks down into smaller units or factions.
It’s not a verb I use a whole lot, but it showed up last week in a text from my good friend and occasional commenter WiC. He asked, “Should Christians balkanize to strengthen in dark days? The West has been conquered without a shot.”
Ah yes. The Benedict Option, or something like it. Hmm, let’s consider that a bit.
Schools of systematic theology develop out of a felt need to explain difficult or unclear passages of scripture. As much as we might try to avoid systems — and I certainly do — the necessity of finding a coherent set of overarching principles within which we may evaluate the meaning of any individual text eventually asserts itself. Even refusing to interpret becomes its own sort of interpretation, or at very least a comment on the significance of what God has said. So we try to explain the text without explaining it away.
What then should we do when our systematic theology collides with both observable reality and, more importantly, the scriptures?
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“Why are missionaries obsessed with getting everybody else to go to the ends of the earth with the gospel?”
If you’ve never had a missionary to another country visit your local church while on furlough, let me tell you what to expect. You will not get a nice little forty-minute message from scripture. You will definitely not get deep exposition that will help you to grow in Christ. You’ll get a rousing, urgent call to join the missionary out in the world somewhere preaching the gospel to the lost.
If you’re like me, you’ll end the meeting feeling slightly guilty and a little annoyed. I guess I’m saying I can relate to this question, and maybe you can too.
In 1931, an excavator named Claude Schaeffer on a dig in Ras Shamra, Syria came across three clay tablets in the ruins of a house belonging to a high priest of the god Baal that have come to be referred to as the Krt Epic or the The Epic of Kret. (Without any vowels in the original languages, it’s hard to be consistent in the transliteration of some ancient Eastern names.)
If you were to cherry-pick a few couplets from the Krt tablets you might observe that they bear a passing similarity to the language of the Psalms.
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Psalm 3 is a little piece of history.
The superscript over it reads, “A Psalm of David, when he fled from Absalom his son.” It takes us back to chapters 15 through 19 of 2 Samuel, which describe Absalom’s conspiracy against his father. The scripture says he “stole the hearts of the men of Israel”. An attractive, charismatic young man, Absalom pretended to care about the people of God and to offer them something his father could not, and large numbers of Israelites followed him in rebelling against David and driving the king from his palace in Jerusalem to exile across the Jordan River.
Absalom’s conspiracy ultimately failed. God delivered David, and if we read Psalm 3 with those events in the back of our minds, we see its words harmonizing with the history in Samuel.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
The Gospel Coalition is an evangelical colossus, with close to 8,000 affiliated congregations across the U.S., 65 million annual website pageviews, regular live events, a full slate of in-house blogs and other media promoting its theological checklist.
Tom: But one very slightly unsettling feature of TGC’s ministry, Immanuel Can, is that they seem to have little interest in engaging in the exchange of ideas, as this Jonathan Merritt article very effectively documents.
You’re quite familiar with TGC. What do they stand for?
Today I want to do a short follow-up from last week’s post, which was about bad songs that conservative evangelical congregations are singing these days.
My particular concern in that one was the really atrocious doctrine of the Holy Spirit that they seem to be teaching in song. I pointed out some of the raw falsehoods that are being sung passionately by those of us who really ought to know better: and I said that the victims of our error include all untaught believers and our own children, as well as the Spirit of God himself, concerning whom these songs promote raw falsehoods.
I ended with a passionate plea for us to stop.
And I really hope somebody is listening.
One of the minor themes that has caught my attention throughout my latest pass through scripture in my morning readings is the orthodoxy of our Lord’s teaching during his time in the public eye. Most of the subjects he referenced came directly out of the Law, Psalms, Prophets and wisdom literature with which the Jews were extremely familiar, and his take on these subjects was entirely in harmony with all the writers of the Old Testament from one end to another.
Now, it is certainly true that he reframed these ancient concepts in new ways appropriate to his own generation, but he never left himself open to the charge of preaching heresy. His doctrine was in every respect firmly moored to the scripture that he himself insisted cannot be broken.
“Six days you shall labor, and do all your work …”
There’s much discussion in Western economies among secularists, and more recently among believers, about eliminating employment altogether for the vast majority of the population. You have almost surely read something to that effect in the last little while. Futurists tell us it’s all but inevitable.
The prospect of a labor-less future for humanity has Elon Musk speculating about governments providing “universal high income” payments to compensate their voters for the unemployment they expect AI to cause.
For unbelievers, any “universal” income, feeble or otherwise, is a sort of holy grail.