“… and the Philistines struck down Jonathan and Abinadab and Malchi-shua, the sons of Saul.”
Jonathan’s death was not as ignominious as the death of his father Saul, whose enemies summarily beheaded him, but his is not the storybook ending the reader expects for David’s most loyal friend and fiercest defender.
Do you ever find yourself looking at a passage of scripture you’ve read a hundred times and realizing you never really processed it? I had one of those moments this morning in Mark 4 as I read and re-read what commentators refer to as “The Parable of the Seed Growing”. This short parable is unique to Mark’s gospel. Perhaps it is so easy to gloss over because it contains similar imagery to the parable of the sower in Matthew 13 (and earlier in this same chapter).
Or perhaps other people pay closer attention to detail that I do.
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“Does an unmarried couple who have sex become married in God’s eyes?”
Some years ago, I had a late night phone call from an old friend to whom I hadn’t spoken in years. He was reviewing his relationship history. Many of these, frankly, had been sinful and ended in disappointment. The most recent was no exception. Despite professing to follow Christ, he has been initiating and falling into uncommitted sexual entanglements most of his life.
“I’ve been ‘one flesh’ with over thirty women,” he confessed. “Which relationship does God regard as ‘the one’?”
Mark structured what later became the second chapter of his gospel around four questions, all of which begin with the word “Why?” (The other synoptics contain much of the same material, but not within a single chapter.) Two of these queries came from scribes, a third from the Pharisees, and another from the people. As we might expect, three of the four were challenges to the Lord’s authority; the other may have been simple curiosity.
In one memorable instance, they never even got to ask the question. Jesus correctly discerned what they were thinking and answered it before they could express it.
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A public appearance by the angel of the Lord in front of large numbers of people is quite exceptional. Indeed, for God to mete out justice personally to sinners during their lifetimes is also a comparatively rare event. A formal, exhaustive accounting for all the evil men have done awaits them at the end of their lives, as the book of Hebrews tells us. Under normal circumstances, that is where God judges sin.
All the same, throughout human history, God has necessarily overlooked much evil, or else all our lives would be very short ones. The divine standard is not to be applied to men until after death.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
It’s been years since I paid a great deal of
attention to the charismatic movement, but David de Bruyn’s
post on The
Pentecostalization of Christian Worship at ReligiousAffections.org is a
real
Tom: Mr. de Bruyn’s thesis is fairly simple: the current patterns of worship in the charismatic movement are not leading Christians within it anywhere good. Worse, these practices are catching on throughout the evangelical world. I’ve experienced them myself in my early twenties, but never really stopped to analyze the significant differences between the way charismatics engage in “worship”, and the historic patterns of worship across many other Christian traditions. Far more importantly, the charismatic approach differs radically from the patterns of worship we observe in the scriptures.
What did you think of the post, IC?
Immanuel Can: So many things … where shall we start?
“See to it that no one comes short of the grace of God; that no root of bitterness springing up causes trouble, and by it many become defiled.”
Bitterness.
The word literally means “acidity”, and refers in scripture to wicked covetousness or wicked resentment. It is associated with cursing and anger. A related adjective is used in James 3:14 of wicked jealousy. What’s clear is it speaks of bitter hatred against others felt to be justified by their advantages.
The result? The defilement of many. That means their being stained so as to be rendered unfit for sacred service. This angry, resentful spirit between Christians can defile them in their relationship with God. The writer to the Hebrews says we are vigilantly to watch over the congregation, and make sure this doesn’t happen.
Because it can. So easily. Especially today.
You’ve just made a major move, one you believe served the Lord’s interests while also having potential spiritual benefits for your family and other relationships. It wasn’t even a hard choice. Work opportunities had dried up locally and you’re too young to retire. All the churches where you lived are dead, dying, or riddled with theological peculiarities. Godly friends suggested a change of location might be the answer. Less-godly friends said you were crazy to leave. More local job opportunities fell through.
Then your landlady mentioned she wants to do a major reno on your apartment, an invasive process that might take weeks or months to complete. It was time. So you took a risk with a job opportunity several hundred miles away, packed up the car and found yourself a new place to unload your furniture, such as it is.
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At its leanest and meanest, the Reformed package requires some variant of Calvinism, plus Covenant Theology. Supersessionism and/or postmillennialism are often associated with these but are not, so far as I know, mandatory in order to call yourself Reformed. Some of these concepts fit together better than others; for example, supersessionism harmonizes quite naturally with CT. If there is only one covenant people through all the ages, it follows that someone has to be in and someone else has to be out.
Not all these theological components fit together quite so well as that pair.
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“What’s wrong with ‘always learning’?”
Today’s question is about a description of life in the “last days” from Paul’s second letter to Timothy. It reads as follows:
“But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people. For among them are those who creep into households and capture weak women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions, always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth.”
That’s a long list of unpleasant character qualities and behaviors that were already appearing in the churches of God in Timothy’s time (the instruction to Timothy to “avoid such people” implies some of them were already around), and are increasingly present today.
“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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The word šāpāṭ, frequently translated “judge”, appears 21 times in the Hebrew version of the book of Judges, beginning with the second chapter. It’s far from the first time the word occurs in scripture, also being present at least 30 times in the first six books of the Bible. The vast majority of this content almost surely dates earlier than Judges, establishing the meaning of the word for us as its initial readers understood it.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Once again, Christianity Today has the sort of article everybody who serves the Lord Jesus and loves the Body of Christ should be reading and thinking about. I don’t agree with everything they have to say by a long shot, but they regularly provide a starting point for serious discussion of major evangelical issues. Kudos to them for that.
Tom: In this particular piece they’re talking about missions and what makes that whole thing tick. Immanuel Can, did you find anything CT had to say interesting?
Immanuel Can: Oh, plenty. This is something I know a fair bit about.
We pick up this week in the middle of a list of choices the church has to make today. On the one hand, there are the values scripture lays out for church life; on the other, the things Social Justice today instructs us to value instead. The goal is simply to see the alternatives before us.
We began with the choice between a heavenly and a worldly “kingdom”. Then there was the choice between advocating salvation or system-blaming. Whether we should live by contentment or resentment came next, and then the choice between having confident faith in God and taking self-willed, self-confident action against the world. Finally, we considered the tension between individual responsibility to God and the attraction of surrender to a thoughtless collective — a theme continued in our first item below.
We're going to complete that list of contrasts today, and then draw some conclusions.
A while back I pointed out that the apostles use the word “gospel” in slightly different ways at different times, emphasizing certain aspects of what we might consider an acceptable presentation of the good news and omitting others entirely.
Never is this more evident that in the third of Peter’s four references to the gospel found in his first epistle. His use of the word, and the context around it, open up what may be described as a theological can of worms.
Or perhaps later commentators on 1 Peter opened that can all by themselves.
The facts are these: about 57 A.D., give or take, the apostle Paul traveled to Jerusalem, where he was arrested something less than seven days after his arrival. Initially at least, he was (falsely or mistakenly) accused by the Jewish religious authorities of profaning the temple. Later he was also accused of disturbing the peace, a charge more likely to be taken seriously by the Romans than any merely religious disagreement between members of a subject people group. His Roman custodians took him first to Caesarea and finally to Rome when he made an appeal to have his case heard by Caesar himself. He was imprisoned there for approximately two years.
Contrary to what I thought as a teen and young adult, Paul did not die in Rome. Not that time at least. I had my chronology muddled for years. In any case, even if martyrdom was not the result, we can reasonably conclude these four-plus years in Roman custody were not exactly fun and games.
And they were entirely voluntary.
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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.
“God raised him on the third day and made him to appear, not to all the people but to us who had been chosen by God as witnesses, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.”
Based on his personal experience, Peter could have finished this sentence any number of impressive ways. He could have said, “God made him appear to us ... who saw with our own eyes the rolled-back stone and the empty tomb,” or “... who witnessed him perform miracles,” or “... who were shown the marks of his crucifixion in his hands and his side,” or even “... who saw him taken bodily into heaven and heard the testimony of angels about it.”
Instead, he talks about sharing food with the risen Christ: “God made him appear to us who ate and drank with him.”
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All over the world and all through history, wherever you have kings, dynasties invariably follow — at least until some nasty person ends them prematurely. I suppose over the course of the last several millennia, there may have been one or two gentle fellows who ruled a nation for thirty years and then thought, “Say, I’m not going to live forever, am I? Maybe the throne should go to the man who will do the best for my kingdom.”
Well, there may have been. I have no evidence of it. What happened instead was that — good, bad or indifferent — son replaced father if someone didn’t kill dad first.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
What constitutes “hate speech”? A fairly standard definition goes something like this: “Speech that attacks a person or group on the basis of attributes such as gender, ethnic origin, religion, race, disability, or sexual orientation.”
Tom: Now, personally I’d consider even that arguable, not least because the word “attacks” is nebulous, which leaves hate speech to be defined by the party claiming injury (a bad idea), not to mention it takes for granted that “sexual orientation” is a valid concept even though science has not yet demonstrated it is anything more than a personal preference.