Somebody Else’s Mail (16)

In his book The God-Shaped Heart, Timothy Jennings makes what I believe is a helpful distinction between two manifestations of divine rule in the world: design law and imposed law.

Design law includes things as disparate as gravity, love, motion, health, mathematics, friction, thermodynamics, authority structures, liberty, exertion, and so on — principles intrinsic to the proper functioning of our world and human society as designed by God. Do X, and Y will be the natural result, either for good or ill. Design law is just the way the world works.

Imposed law refers to both God’s commands and all other codes, rules, regulations and ordinances enforced with penalties, whether imposed by God or by men under his authority.

Somebody Else’s Mail (15)

Sometimes God gets angry. When his servants sin egregiously, even they may become the objects of his righteous and thoroughly justifiable anger:

“The Lord was angry with me because of you.”

“The Lord was so angry with Aaron that he was ready to destroy him.”

“The Lord was angry with Solomon, because his heart had turned away from the Lord.”

“He has cut down in fierce anger all the might of Israel; he has burned like a flaming fire in Jacob, consuming all around.”

But the consequences of God’s anger (not to mention its duration) are not always precisely the same.

Somebody Else’s Mail (14)

The apostle Paul once wrote about his desire to know Christ and share in his sufferings, becoming like him. In doing so, he was responding to God’s own desire that those closest to him understand his heart. In both Old and New Testaments, we find the Lord putting his most faithful servants through hard experiences to teach them how God thought and felt.

Accordingly, we find the Lord testing Abraham in order than he might understand what it is like to give up a beloved son, testing Ezekiel in order that he might know what it’s like to lose one’s beloved, or testing Jeremiah so he would know the cost of telling the truth. I believe such trials were never arbitrary, and never inflicted on anyone who couldn’t handle them. They were expressions of trust and intimacy from friend to friend. Perhaps you have been through similar trials and come out with a better understanding of our heavenly Father and his beloved Son.

Somebody Else’s Mail (13)

Not all long-term friendships get off on the right foot.

The relationship between the tribes of Judah and Benjamin is a fascinating historical study. Israel’s second king, our beloved psalmist, was from the more dominant, numerous and historically significant tribe of Judah, while its first king, Saul, hailed from the comparatively tiny tribe of Benjamin.

What Benjamin lacked in size it made up in pugnacity. “Benjamin is a ravenous wolf”, prophesied the original Benjamin’s dad, and so it came to be.

Somebody Else’s Mail (12)

Because so many psalms are prophetic, we are wise when we come to them to ask the question posed to Philip by the Ethiopian eunuch concerning the prophecy of Isaiah that he was reading at the time. He inquired, “About whom does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?”

It was an excellent question. We must ask it of ourselves (and of the scriptures) today.

Somebody Else’s Mail (11)

Last week we looked into the apostle Paul’s use of Psalm 5:9 in the book of Romans. For Christians, this is usually the bottom line: we’re interested in how the things that were written in the Old Testament apply in our own experience. That’s normal, natural, and even biblical, but it’s useful to keep in mind that whatever the NT writers may have legitimately made of them, these passages also had an original context and an original audience.

Today we’re looking at what these words meant when David wrote them something in the order of 3,040 years ago.

Somebody Else’s Mail (10)

I mentioned last week that we would take a little time out from expositing Psalm 5 in context to look at Paul’s use of verse 9 in a famous passage in Romans 3 that begins by posing this question: “What then? Are we Jews any better off? No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin.”

The selection from Psalm 5 is part of a list of Old Testament quotes from various sources that Paul assembles to prove his point, and this is where his critics begin to object to his usage of Psalm 5:9 and other verses. So let’s take a look at their objections today and see if we can’t come to a better understanding of what Paul was trying to accomplish in Romans 3.

Somebody Else’s Mail (9)

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.

Somebody Else’s Mail (8)

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.

Somebody Else’s Mail (7)

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.

The Giving and Taking of the Spirit

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.

Somebody Else’s Mail (6)

The word Selah appears in the Old Testament a total of 74 times, primarily in the Psalms, but also a few times in the prophecy of Habakkuk. If that seems odd, you may want to read this post and possibly this one. Hebrew scholars entertain the possibility that in the midst of his prophetic utterances, Habakkuk quoted something constructed very much like a traditional Hebrew psalm (though not one preserved in the Psalter). If that is in fact the case, it should not surprise us to find the prophet using the language of a psalmist. Selah is one of those words peculiar to Psalms.

We are about to encounter it for the first time in Psalm 3.

Somebody Else’s Mail (5)

We were looking last week at the future, earthly opposition to God and his Messiah described for us in Psalm 2. David tells us that the rulers of the nations in those days will take their stand against both, craving freedom from the moral restraints Christ’s righteous government of our world will impose upon them. The psalmist cautions them from resisting the Lord’s Anointed. But as Isaiah would later write, “Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end.”

A fallen world will not want that, even if it comes packaged with all manner of millennial blessings.

Somebody Else’s Mail (4)

Some day soon a Jew is going to rule this world, and he’s going to do it from the throne of David, making beleaguered Jerusalem the capital city of our planet.

There may be notions more offensive to modern sensibilities, but I can’t think of any at the moment. Let’s just say the nation of Israel is not currently in vogue. But that’s what the Bible teaches. It’s called the Second Coming of Christ, the hope of Israel, and the literal fulfillment of the Davidic Covenant. It’s an idea so audacious that it even riles up a significant segment of Christendom.

Guess what? The Gentile nations of that coming day will not be thrilled about it either.

The End of All Argument

Is Jesus Christ a created being? Orthodoxy says no, the heretics say yes, and the argument has been going on for centuries. Even today, Jehovah’s Witnesses will plainly tell you, “God created Jesus before creating Adam.” One of the most common texts employed to attempt to demonstrate Christ’s ‘createdness’ is John 3:16, along with other verses in the New Testament that use the word monogenēs [“only begotten” in the familiar language of the KJV]. John uses the term four times.

The reasoning is that if Jesus was “begotten”, then there had to be a point before which he did not exist.

Somebody Else’s Mail (2)

I have a second introductory post coming next week, but I’m eager to get going, so let’s just jump in.

The author of Psalm 1 is unknown. Naturally, most scholars attribute these first six verses to David. For me, that’s a bit like the answers you get from ten-year-olds in Sunday School to questions about who did this or that in the Bible: they always guess either “God” or “Jesus”. Kids are not stupid. Those odds are usually better than 50/50; that’s just how Sunday Schools roll. Hopefully, they think, there’s something better at stake than yet another pencil. Maybe so do the scholars.

Somebody Else’s Mail (1)

Reading somebody else’s mail can be a profitable exercise. We can learn much about the Lord and his ways from truths he has not directly shared with us, just as I can learn a great deal about my natural father’s character by reading his letters to my brother or sister. We can take very personal lessons from things that happened to people from wildly different cultural backgrounds in distant times and places. After all, God is the same God. He never changes his character.

That is not true of his tactics and strategies. Those may vary quite a bit.

I Said, You Are Gods

“Jesus answered them, ‘Is it not written in your Law, “I said, you are gods”?’ ”

Bible commentators often say the New Testament (NT) interprets the Old (OT), not the other way around. This principle is generally solid, though it can be taken to extremes; for example, by erroneously concluding that we cannot interpret any OT scripture properly without reference to the NT. Manifestly, we both can and should.

A Little Consistency, Please!

Book III of Psalms begins with Psalm 73. The superscriptions over the next 11 psalms tell us a man named Asaph wrote them. Asaph was a Levite singer and musician commissioned during David’s reign. Among other things, he was a harpist and a cymbal player. He and his fellow Levites sang and played David’s psalms as well as their own.

Most psalmists were prophets. Orthodoxy accepts that without question. Asaph too was a prophet, as his psalms establish beyond any reasonable argument to any reader using consistent interpretive principles.

In the Wilderness of Judah

Well over two-thirds of the Bible’s 150 psalms have titles or introductory notes that scholars refer to as superscriptions. These provide information about authorship, usage, musical directions and sometimes even the circumstances in which the psalm was written. From the late 1800s until relatively recently, a majority of Bible scholars questioned the value of these superscriptions, believing Hebrew scribes likely added them centuries later than the original text. It may be for this reason that not all modern translations include them.

At least one expert on Old Testament studies has reconsidered that view.