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.

The Queen Question

The introduction to Psalm 45 calls it a love song and tells us the Sons of Korah wrote it. The psalm portrays a glorious, conquering king. By verse 5, his enemies, in so many words, have become his footstool. Hmm, now where have I heard that before?

I jest. There’s no difficulty identifying the king as our Lord Jesus Christ. The writer to the Hebrews quotes verses 6 and 7 of this very psalm and plainly tells us they speak of “the Son”, distinguishing him above all created beings, no matter how powerful and glorious.

Possession of the Pastures

Christians love to quote from the book of Psalms, but some psalms are easier to apply to ourselves than others are.

I was enjoying Psalm 83 this morning while simultaneously noting just how difficult all the Hebrew specifics make it to apply the psalmist’s words meaningfully to present-day believers. The enemies of Israel do not work well as analogies for grumpy HR ladies, obnoxious environmentalist neighbors, or even — to make it more relevant — social misfits with sniper rifles and a burning grudge.

Too soon? Yeah, probably.

Who Reads Anymore?

I’ve heard that Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time may be the most famous book people have never read.

That’s right: Never.

People sure do talk about it. It’s sold ten million or so copies. Lots of people cite the title of the book, laud it, and claim to have found their opinions confirmed by it — but few of these have actually ever read it.

In a way, maybe that’s understandable. It is, after all, a fairly challenging book. For a mathematician, it’s a good read, perhaps; for the average person it’s a quick road to Slumberland. Even though it’s pretty short it only takes a few pages to render most folks unconscious.

The Faithful Have Vanished

“The faithful have vanished”, David wrote.

Not that the faithful have been exterminated and evil has finally won the day.

Not that the faithful have apostatized or lost their salt.

They’ve vanished. Elvis has left the building, folks.

This is not simply David’s personal experience here. No way, not without at least some exaggeration or hyperbole.

Is Your Faith Boring You?

The great mathematician Blaise Pascal claimed all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

Modern people don’t sit in rooms alone very well. They find it boring. And, in fact, being bored is one thing almost all of us instinctively hate. Particularly in our present day of social media, cell phones, portable games and constant mental stimulation, it seems to us that solitude and silence are indicators of something being terribly wrong. On those occasions when we find ourselves momentarily bored we immediately fumble for our phones or look around for some new distraction.

I suspect we are probably less adept than any previous generation at just sitting still and thinking.

Nothing New Under the Sun

“There is nothing new under the sun,” wrote the Preacher in Ecclesiastes a little over 3,000 years ago. People have been quoting him ever since, and the manifest accuracy of his statement is both reassuring and humbling for the Christian in search of truth.

Humbling, because it implies that none of the ideas that come to us as we read the word of God and discover great ‘new’ things about it are actually original to us. Someone always got there before us; we just don’t necessarily know whom. Reassuring, because the fact that others have walked the same path before us and come to exactly the same conclusions about scripture provides confirmation that we are correct in our understanding of it.

119: Introduction

Psalm 119 is the longest chapter in the Bible by any metric you might choose.

In English, it’s 176 verses and approximately 2,445 words long (depending on your translation). The English verse divisions reflect a highly regular underlying structure based on the Hebrew alphabet, with each of its 22 sections made up of eight pairs of ideas. All eight verses in each section begin with the same Hebrew letter, and the letters are in order.

It is probably the most carefully crafted chapter in the entire Bible.

The Atheist’s New Clothes

“The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ ”

Sometimes the Bible just hits the nail on the head.

You run into a lot of people who pride themselves in being atheists. They rattle on about how they are the only intellectual option … that every scientist is an atheist … that no one who has any sense would be anything else … and so on. Their smugness, their self-satisfaction, their certainty seem so great that the unprepared believer is often blown back on his heels.

The Price of Proximity

God is holy.

Not a new thought, I know, but one that, in the opinion of the Holy Spirit, merits mention three times in the nine verses of Psalm 99: “Holy is he! Holy is he! The Lord our God is holy!”

Amen. In fact, he’s so holy that in the Old Testament, those closest to God tended to pay a price for their proximity.

A Bulwark Never Failing

Around 1052 B.C., King David conquered a Jebusite stronghold in the hills and made it the capital of his kingdom. He repaired and built up the city that has come to be known as Jerusalem, Zion, the City of David and Ariel. His son Solomon enhanced it and made it truly world class, and the later kings of Judah supplemented and strengthened it. It has been attacked by history’s greatest empires, razed repeatedly but always rebuilt, and unlike many ancient cities of the East, it’s still there today.

The Sons of Korah called Zion “the city of our God”.

One and Done

Little is known about the writer of Psalm 89, but it’s still a great deal more than we know about the writers of some other psalms.

Ethan the Ezrahite was a Levite musician, poet and prophet who came to prominence as a young man during David’s reign, continuing his ministry into the reign of Solomon and perhaps even that of his ill-fated son Rehoboam, which lasted from 931-913 BC.

Evidence for that last statement to come …

Anonymous Asks (257)

“Who authored the Psalms?”

Scripture clearly identifies many of the psalmists with superscriptions. Sometimes we even get a little bit of detail about the circumstances in which they wrote. For example, the superscription for Psalm 3 is “A Psalm of David, when he fled from Absalom his son”, and Psalm 7 is called “A Shiggaion of David, which he sang to the Lord concerning the words of Cush, a Benjaminite”.

Please don’t ask what a “shiggaion” is. It’s one of those words Strong’s Concordance labels as “doubtful”.

Utopia as a By-Product

Henry Giroux wrote that a utopia is “an imaginary community or society that possesses highly desirable or near-perfect qualities for its members”. He was generalizing based on the way the concept has been used (and misused) for over five centuries, trying to distill a jumble of ideas down to a basic concept everyone can agree about. The word itself comes from a 1516 book of the same name written by Sir Thomas More, but Plato’s Republic took a crack at the same ideas almost 2,000 years earlier, and it may be argued that even the Tower of Babel was an early, misguided stab in that direction. It would be hard to find a time when men have not dreamed of and yearned for social perfection, though always on their own terms and by their own standards.

Literally, utopia means “no place”. You would think more people might take More’s not-too-subtle hint.