One man can have a tremendous effect on many. One act can transform history.
The apostle Paul considers the effect of two men who lived several thousand years apart on you and me in two great New Testament passages about the two heads of the human race: 1 Corinthians 15 and Romans 5.
In Adam all die. In Christ all shall be made alive.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate some surprising things. In my twenties, I finally “got” Shakespeare. How many people, like me, loathed him at first meeting, usually in high school? I guess there are some things you just have to be old enough to understand. And some people never do.
By my thirties, I suddenly found I had a feel for non-fiction reading. In my forties, I developed a taste for comparative religions and philosophy, then for apologetics. Now, in my fifties, I suddenly discover that some of the music styles of songsters more celebrated by my parents’ generation have started to speak to me with very strange poignancy. Again, I guess sometimes you just have to reach an age.
Lately, I’ve found myself strangely compelled by the work of Burt Bacharach.
I went to an old-time hymn sing last week.
It’s not that I prefer the old hymns. I’m just as much a fan of new choruses as the next guy … provided they’re theologically sound, of course. And singable: there’s no point in trying to sing something that’s lame musically. But if it’s all coming together, I don’t much care how new or old the tune is. If the words are good, and the tune is great for congregational singing, I say let’s go.
“Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”
I’d like to give some thought this morning to the phrase “rulers of this age” that appears twice in the passage above. It might be a little more interesting than it looks.
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A Minneapolis pastor named Jonathan Parnell is offering tips on being a friend of sinners. He believes it’s a good thing to be. John MacArthur riffed on the “friend of sinners” idea in a 1980 sermon. He liked it too. A church in Milwaukee identifies with the concept so much that it has taken the name. “Friend of Sinners Church” offers a free breakfast followed by a worship service each Sunday.
So was Jesus a friend of sinners? Should we be? Well, yes and no.
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“Why did Jesus weep at the grave of Lazarus?”
This week has been hard. An unsaved friend of over 30 years is on his way out of this world. He can’t communicate directly anymore, and his younger sister, the “baby” of the family, has been passing messages back and forth to me. I have every confidence the Judge of all the earth will do justice with respect to my friend, but his poor sister has no clue. Her desolation when she talks about losing her brother would break your heart.
Am I grieving for my friend? Absolutely. But I’m grieving even more for his family, who do not have the resources I do.
John 9 begins with the healing of a man born blind. The story, like so many others in John, is unique to that gospel. The chapter is not even primarily about the healing itself, which takes up a mere seven verses. Strange as it may seem to a first-time reader to find Jesus making mud with his own saliva and anointing a man’s eyes, it’s no stranger than some of his other healings. John’s account is concerned primarily with the repercussions of the event, which take him almost five times as long to tell as the actual healing.
John gives us 41 verses devoted to a man’s story, but no record of his name. That’s actually fairly common in all the gospels, since their subject is Christ, not us. In a way, the man himself is incidental. In another way, he’s anything but.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
[Editor’s note: When we were young we used to play road hockey. Now we do this. I missed out on this particular email discussion, but I thought the rest of you might enjoy it as much as I did when I woke up to find it in my inbox. And yes, I got called out for not participating, but these days I will take sleep whenever I can get it.]
Bernie: Okay, bear with me ...
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.)
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Our friend Michael Gungor is at it again, doubling down on his statement to the effect that “Genesis is a poem if I’ve ever seen one.”
Which would be fine, as mere opinions go, but now he’s brought Jesus Christ into it:
“Even if he was wrong, even if he did believe that Noah was a historical person, or Adam was a historical person, and ended up being wrong, I don’t understand how that even would deny the divinity of Christ. The point is it wouldn’t freak me out if he was wrong about it, in his human side.”
Tom: Let’s just catch us up here.
There’s an odd and rather bleak passage in Job in which he compares human beings to trees. “A man dies and is laid low,” says the beleaguered believer, but “there is hope for a tree.”
Why? “Though its root grow old in the earth, and its stump die in the soil, yet at the scent of water it will bud and put out branches like a young plant.”
Pouring water on a headstone does not generally produce similar results.
“It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”
Trudy Smith of the Huffington Post asks, “Was Jesus racist?” Her answer, of course, is yes.
That’s hardly surprising. The HuffPost is the online poster-rag for the New American Left. In their exceedingly well-defined and ideologically-pristine PC world, even the Son of God takes the knee before the official progressive racial narrative.
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“Was Jesus rich?”
There’s a well-known theological answer to this question, but I’m guessing our anonymous questioner can Google “rich” and “Jesus”, and come up with 2 Corinthians 8 as fast than I can, so that’s probably not what he has in mind. He’s curious whether Jesus the man actually had shekels a-plenty during the time of his ministry.
Two years ago, I would have called this a silly question. Today, not so much.
(An aside: teaching an AI anything about authority is next to impossible, let alone biblical authority. All it will give you by way of illustration is a group of random people holding hands in a circle, presumably singing Kumbaya.)
Regardless of their home denomination or personal theological quirks, most remotely orthodox Christian readers will not take issue with the contention that the Son is the intrinsic equal of the Father. It’s the plain statement of the New Testament.
Philippians says prior to the incarnation the Son was “in the form of God”. Hebrews says the Son is “the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature”. John calls him the one who makes God known in the world, and this statement has the approval of the Lord Jesus himself.
The Old Testament is full of hints, winks and nudges. Or so it seems to me.
For example, I cannot read Abraham’s words to Isaac, “God will provide for himself the lamb,” without marveling at the subtlety of the wording. It works as a double entendre in either Hebrew or English. Was Abraham a straight man or a prophet? I can’t tell you, but I love that line. From thousands of years down the road we look back and say, “He certainly did.”
That’s not a comment on our cleverness, of course.
Right in the middle of Deuteronomy, God promised Israel another mediator “like Moses”. Well, technically, he did it roughly forty years earlier, but Deuteronomy is where we find the details.
Exodus 20 tells the original story of this awesome encounter and its consequences, and Moses repeated it to a new generation of Israelites in Deuteronomy 5. God graciously accommodated a terrified people at Sinai (Horeb), unwilling to continue experiencing the Almighty’s presence directly, when he spoke to them from heaven out of the midst of the fire and gave them the first ‘ten words’ out of many commands.
The people then begged Moses to receive God’s message to them on behalf of the entire nation.
Wesley Huff is a Toronto-based apologist and popular YouTube presence with considerable experience in public debates on behalf of the Christian faith. Ammon Hillman is an American classicist who was raised Baptist, but apostatized from the faith in his early twenties and has been passing himself off as a public intellectual and serious Greek scholar ever since.
Bernie sent me one of Huff’s YouTube shorts last week in which he comments on Hillman’s bizarre assertion that the word “Christ” actually means “to be stung by a gadfly”.
Really? Really? Okay, let’s play …
“The people who were sitting in darkness saw a great Light, and those who were sitting in the land and shadow of death, upon them a Light dawned.”
If there is any such thing as a universal symbol, it just might be light.
In every place and culture all around the world, everybody instinctively associates light with things like truth and insight and joy. Whether it’s our Christmas, or the Hanukkah of Judaism, or Chinese New Year, or some other “festival of light”, it always seems to point to the same sorts of experience: that of being able to see, whereas before, one could not. Is not the celebrated historical period of the secular skeptics called “The Enlightenment”? Even the irreligious are drawn to this symbolism.
“… the power of the Most High will overshadow you.”
“So this is Christmas, and what have you done?”
So sing the children in John Lennon’s wretched ditty. I really don’t know why he bothered himself about Christmas when he also wanted to “imagine there’s no heaven”. But each to his own. I’m sure he’s thought better of that since.
At Christmas time, I can’t imagine a more dismal question. Another year over, Lennon accuses, and you haven’t done anything. The poor are still starving, the world is still at war. When are you going to get off your haunches and be worth something?
Ah, there’s nothing like Christmas pudding and the sounds of self-flagellation to improve the seasonal mood.
“He came to his own, and his own did not receive him.”
“Having loved his own … he loved them to the end.”
If you really wanted to irritate a well-read Christian audience, you could probably preach a sermon that started by quoting both these verses from the gospel of John. Then you could delve into the Greek, noting that the same word [idios] is used for “his own” by the same author in the same book. Finally, you could finish with a flurry by pontificating about how the Lord Jesus loved “to the uttermost” the people who rejected him.
You could. I’m not saying it’s a good idea. You’d have a lineup of sixty people waiting to tell you that using the same Greek word doesn’t mean they are precisely the same people. The latter group is a subset of the first.