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“Why do people struggle with lack of faith?”
On its own, the word “faith” is content-free. There is no such thing as generic faith. To talk about believing without asking what you are supposed to believe is like trying to order dinner at a restaurant when you’ve never been given a menu and the waiter refuses to tell you what the options are. A question so unspecific is quite impossible to answer meaningfully.
Faith always has to be in something or someone. It cannot exist in a vacuum.
“By faith Moses, when he was born, was hidden for three months by his parents, because they saw that the child was beautiful, and they were not afraid of the king’s edict.”
There is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist have been instituted by him. Whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. So says the apostle Paul, in one of the most quoted Bible passages of the last five years.
Well, the writer to the Hebrews says that the parents of Moses resisted the authority of their day as an act of faith.
“What about the questions Jesus asked as a boy (Lk 2:46). Did He know the answers or did He learn?”
There is no application of the word “learn” in Luke 2:46. Luke simply says that Jesus Christ was listening to the teachers and asking them questions. There’s no reason to suppose he was asking those questions because of any lack in his own knowledge, rather than the sort of rhetorical and didactic questioning in which he would later so frequently engage with his disciples or with the Pharisees. He would call on their judgment in order to set the stage for deeper thinking on a subject they had so far understood only superficially.
There is but one passage in all of scripture that employs the word “learn” in reference to Christ’s life: Hebrews 5:8.
Under the Law of Moses, the sacrificial system reminded devout Israelites of their sins, failures and shortcomings year after year. In this respect, it was much like a nagging mother: you know she’s right, but you wish she’d please stop talking. As the writer to the Hebrews puts it, “It is impossible for the blood for bulls and goats to take away sins.”
If that’s what Israel was looking for, it went home disappointed. The fix was only temporary.
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The purpose of this series is to show how conclusions drawn from an isolated proof text may lead you astray theologically. Today’s post illustrates just how far this can go when you add unsupported supposition to supposition. The result is the theological equivalent of a house of cards. By the time you work your way up to the attic, you find yourself asking questions for which there cannot possibly be any definitive answers.
The remedy is to say, “Let me think about that some more” way back in the basement, where there’s still a chance to construct a solid foundation for future inquiry.
Some people think having favorite verses is a bit like having favorite children: it’s just not done. Those who think this way either have yet to produce large families or else are not big on self-awareness. At any given moment, every parent has a favorite child, even if their favor is a moving target and its object a different child every day of the week. The trick is not to let one’s affections direct one’s behavior as Jacob did, very much to Joseph’s detriment.
It’s hardly surprising that my favorite verses come from my favorite book, Hebrews. I’m not the least bit Hebrew myself, but few books of the Bible glorify Christ so explicitly and magnificently, even if this one was primarily targeted at a Jewish audience.
He was a walking nightmare — tall, balding, all angles-and-bones, a vulture of a man. His beady eyes peered out predaciously over his hawk-like nose, and his battered tweed jacket emanated chalk dust clouds as he strode up and down the aisles. We students cowered in fear, praying he would not ask us the next question. Chances are we couldn’t answer it.
Hey, chances are we couldn’t even understand it, so high over our heads was his vocabulary.
But cowering would not save us. He would pick someone at random. “You,” he would say. “What does ‘ephemeral’ mean?” His respondent would not know. He would repeat the question, stepping closer to the cringing child. No answer.
He would persist: “Don’t you have a dictionary? … Can’t you ask anyone?”
Silence.
All sins create distance between man and God.
Still, even before the sun rises tomorrow, the proud man can stick a pin in his swollen ego; the narcissist can begin to learn empathy; the drunkard can put the bottle down before his liver finally packs it in; the liar can start telling the truth; and the thief can commit himself to making his victims whole. John the Baptist taught wholesale, on-the-spot lifestyle modification to all he baptized. When you just stop doing certain things and start doing the opposite, all kinds of wonderful stuff can happen.
Then there are the “broken window” sins.
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“What does ‘despising the shame’ mean?”
Hebrews 12:2 calls Jesus “the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God”. I always love verses that talk about Jesus being exalted to the Father’s right hand. That’s our security as believers: the Father’s pleasure in the finished work of his Son. Every demonstration of that is a confirmation that we are loved and protected, and that the penalty for our sins will never come back to haunt us.
“Now Moses was faithful in all God’s house as a servant, to testify to the things that were to be spoken later, but Christ is faithful over God’s house as a son.”
Servants and sons operate on different levels, says the writer to the Hebrews. Two differences right there in this single verse. First, Moses the servant was, Christ the Son is; that is to say the Son still being faithful when the servant has long ceased from service. Second, Moses the servant was in the house, Christ the Son is over it. Those are different spheres of responsibility.
Malaysia’s top court has ruled that non-Muslims can no longer use the word “Allah” when referring to God. This despite the long-standing trend of Christians and other groups using the same name to refer to God in scriptures, prayers, songs and normal conversation.
The word isn’t a local Malay one, but rather a borrowing from Arabic. However, some Malaysians have no other word in their current vocabulary to refer to the Supreme Being. But apparently the two-thirds of the Malaysian population that profess Islam are now going to have exclusive use. Authorities worry that failure to distinguish Allah as a unique understanding of Divinity could result in confusion and lead people to be converted away from their religion. So they’ve legislated away the confusion.
Sounds about right to me.
Stock characters are those fictional roles we recognize instantly: you know, the incompetent police officer, the clueless secretary, the crooked lawyer, the rebellious teen, the uptight schoolmarm … and so on. You see them on TV all the time.
There’s a new one going around lately: the adult child. This is the mid-twenties son or daughter who still lives in his parents’ basement, having his meals cooked and his laundry done for him, blithely confident that the world outside — the world of careers, responsibilities and independence — is overrated. His harried, weary parents pray for him to move out and make his way in the world or for some nice girl to come and snap him up. But he knows very well that for now he has it good. Being too old for his parents to control but too needy for them to abandon, he is free to devote his time and assets to playing video games, going to clubs, flirting with girls and hanging out at the beach. A periodic trip to the employment office is all that is necessary to convince his parents of his helplessness.
The book of Hebrews was written to Hebrews. We need to understand it in that light.
Following the display of Pentecost, many Hebrews believed or professed to do so. In the light of that, the writer says in Hebrews 10, “Recall the former days” — for now a number of years had passed since that time — “when, after you were enlightened, you endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to reproach and affliction, and sometimes being partners with those so treated. For you had compassion on those in prison, and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one.”
These Hebrews had suffered a great deal.
“How shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation?”
The “great salvation” spoken of in Hebrews provokes a variety of reactions. Some who hear it are offended by the message itself. After all, it tells them the very best they can do in this life is of no account to God, and that there is no way to approach the Infinite on anything but his own terms, which turn out to revolve around glorifying a Jewish carpenter rejected and murdered by the world of his day.
You can understand why people might initially find that proposition makes them grind their teeth. It seems like nonsense to them.
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“Are Christians obligated to attend every meeting of the local church?”
The way you instinctively feel about this question will likely depend on the type of church you attend. Christians in a declining work that is still trying to run all the programs it did when the meetings were better attended often put pressure on one another to get more involved and to fill the empty shoes of the departed with any fresh body they can draft into service. On the other hand, a highly organized institutional church may be paying people to fill those roles, with the result that Christians can easily come and go from church as they please without feeling that their presence at any particular meeting makes much difference to anyone else.
Of course, the more important question is What does the Lord think?
Some things in my life that might look like faith to the uninitiated are really just me being me.
I’m not alone in this. Like many other Old Testament saints, Jacob’s faith rates a mention in Hebrews 11. But it’s interesting to see the act of faith for which he is commended, and to consider the many acts for which he is not.
It would, of course, be foolish to think the Hebrews list of acts of faith is exhaustive: the writer concludes with the words “time would fail me to tell”, which statement strongly implies numerous acts of faith left unmentioned among which may well be a number of Jacob’s.
My college painting teacher had a name for improbable color choices or brushstroke combinations that gave a pleasing and unexpectedly-mature aesthetic to student-level work.
He called them “happy accidents”.
Most often he was correct. Sometimes things happen at random that just work.
A recent YouTube video from Australian pastor Matt Littlefield is introduced with this statement:
“Since the middle of the 19th century there has been a large movement in the Church to make a distinction between Israel and the Church, as two separate peoples. This distinction is unbiblical. The Church has to be Israel, otherwise the New Testament makes no sense.”
Can we amend this to “makes no sense to me”? Those are two very different claims.
Another instalment in the re-presentation of our 2013-2014 series about studying the Bible using methods deduced from the Bible itself. The series introduction can be found here.
The second Bible study tool we are discussing is context. For justification, see the previous post on this subject.
It should come as no great surprise that the Bible is full of quotations, most of which are from some other book of the Bible. New Testament writers especially tend to reinforce their points with quotations from the Old.
I’ve been thinking about the commandments.
People say that in the Old Testament, God is full of these things. Rabbis claim there are 613 of them, as a matter of fact — an odd number, to be sure. Why should God have an opinion on these particular items? Why not 614? Why not fewer?
And the nature of the commandments — everything from killing each other, to what people eat, to how they wash, to how they match their fabrics … and still the list is not exhaustive, for it leaves many aspects of life totally unmentioned and spends what we might deem far too much time on others.
Why does God care about all these particulars?