Adorning Doctrine

According to Wikipedia, homiletics is “the application of the general principles of rhetoric to the specific art of public preaching”. For those who have not studied rhetoric, its general principles are usually broken down as follows: ethos (the establishment of trust and credibility), pathos (appealing to the emotions) and logos (appealing to reason and logic). So then, homiletics has to do not so much with the content of the message, but rather with its composition and delivery. It is about taking a proposition and making it persuasive.

For Christian preachers, the starting point is the truth of God. Homiletics is about adorning it rather than veiling it, undermining it or otherwise sabotaging the attempt to communicate it.

No King in Israel (10)

If we were looking at chapter 5 of Judges purely from a literary standpoint, we might call it largely redundant. While it contains a few interesting bits of information we will comment on here, for the most part it simply recapitulates much of the historical narrative from the previous chapter in the form of a Hebrew song of praise to God. A secular editor might be inclined to cut to the chase and move us right on to Gideon’s storyline.

Thankfully, our Editor had a better idea.

Too Hot to Handle: Forgive Us, But …

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

In Islam, the word tawbah refers to the process of asking Allah for forgiveness. The ritual is comprised of three stages:

• Recognizing your sins and mistakes;
• Feeling ashamed to having violated Allah’s trust;
• Making a promise to never repeat the mistake.

Western culture, on the other hand, has largely dispensed with the practice of seeking forgiveness, not least because a public confession of wrongdoing may create liability issues. So you get bafflegab like, “I regret if anyone was offended by ...” instead of a sincere apology.

Tom: Immanuel Can, can you recall the last time someone unsaved asked you to forgive them?

Scales and Panes

I was chatting with a young man yesterday.

He considers himself a Christian. And maybe he is. I hope he is. But he’s certainly confused about something very basic to salvation; and maybe it will surprise you what it is.

He doesn’t really understand sin.

Now, understanding what it is we are saved from is pretty necessary to salvation, so I’m concerned. I want him to have a correct grasp of how sin relates to the holiness of God. And I’m troubled that his teachers have not taught him this.

So I’m going to try to do a short explanation for you. And I’m going to start with this question:

How bad is sin?

Spirit and Spiritual

God is sovereign, and may accomplish his purposes through whomever he chooses, often including men and women whose actions are not consistently in harmony with his Spirit. That is to say, there is a vast difference between being used by the Holy Spirit of God from time to time and being a spiritual person. Obviously, the second state is preferable to the first by orders of magnitude, and the Christian who aspires to anything less than being a spiritual person is selling him- or herself short.

The writers of the New Testament use the adjective “spiritual” in a couple of slightly different senses.

Spiritual in Origin and Energy

The first sense is obvious and common. A spiritual gift is a gift given and empowered for use by the Holy Spirit. The gift itself is spiritual in terms of its origin and energy, but the presence of such gift tells us nothing about the spiritual state of the person using it. The Christians in Corinth were “not lacking in any gift”, yet Paul says to them, “I could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ.”

The Magnitude of the Temptation

Faced with sufficient, ongoing sexual temptation, almost any man will succumb. Women will get the job done when nothing else works. That was certainly the case with Solomon. I note that in describing his descent into idolatry in later life, the writer of 1 Kings makes this comment: “His heart had turned away from the Lord, the God of Israel, who had appeared to him twice.”

That’s mind boggling to consider, isn’t it. God appeared to Solomon twice. You would think that validating a man’s belief in the transcendent so thoroughly, and doing it not once but on two separate occasions years apart, would guarantee lifelong faithfulness to the Lord and his commandments.

That was not the case with Solomon. Actually, it was not the case with many men and women privileged to experience a personal encounter with God.

Anonymous Asks (356)

“What does it mean that ‘Satan entered into’ Judas?”

The quote we are concerned with comes from the upper room in John 13. Jesus responds to a question about the identity of his betrayer by saying, “It is he to whom I will give this morsel of bread when I have dipped it,” after which he dips the little piece of bread and hands it to Judas in plain sight of the other disciples, forever dividing his self-identified disciples into “fake” and “real”.

How did Judas feel about being outed like this in front of all his peers?

Changing with the Times

When I was a youngster, it was common for the person setting up for the communion service to place a collection box, bag or plate side by side with the cup and loaf on the table. At the appropriate time near the end of the hour, an usher or other member of the congregation would circulate first the broken bread, then the cup, and finally the designated mode of offering collection to the congregation, after which we would have a few announcements, close in prayer and head downstairs for coffee.

With minor variations, such was the norm in all the local churches in Ontario that I visited with my father as a boy. It struck me the other day that I don’t see this arrangement anymore, and I don’t miss it one bit.

No King in Israel (9)

The fourth judge of Israel was a woman named Deborah. Yes, there was a female judge. Deborah was also a ‘prophetess’, a term the politically sensitive programmers of my word processor are desperate to render obsolete and refuse to dignify by acknowledging as legit English. I therefore refuse to stop typing it: it’s in my Bible, after all. Such is life in 2025.

Brace yourself for the inevitable if you dare to Google-search the combo of ‘Deborah’ and ‘judge’. Tanya Hendrix conjectures, “She was a warrior.” Christianity.com is confident being a judge and prophetess means Deborah “preached” and led “worship services”. The Jewish Women’s Archive hypothesizes, “Torah scholars would come to learn from her” and that she was “a worker at the temple”.

*Sigh*. Oh well, as Michael Buffer used to so memorably intone, “Let’s get ready to rumble!”

Too Hot to Handle: Church of the Revolving Door

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Almost all in-groups, public or private, have some form of disciplinary process in place. At work, if you engage in behavior the company defines as “harassment”, you will generally find yourself in front of a supervisor and a Human Resources rep, either to be written up or dismissed. The NFL regularly suspends players who don’t comply with its codes. Even Twitter will freeze your account for expressing what it considers to be inappropriate political views. All of this is standard procedure.

Tom: If you read a fair bit of recent online commentary, you might be forgiven for thinking that contemporary evangelical churches are the only institutions in existence that have no self-policing mechanisms in place.

The Butler Did It

When John Milton, the famous 17th century poet and eventual author of the epic Paradise Lost realized in mid-life that he was going totally blind, he felt a rising sense of panic. How could a wordsmith be of any value, to God or anyone else, when he had not even the use of his own two eyes?

When the great night finally descended, he was reduced to dependency and darkness. And understandably, he agonized over why the Lord would allow such a thing. He recorded his struggles in a short poem — perhaps his most-quoted piece of work.

“When I consider how my light is spent …” he began. With half a life left to give, what point would there be in him losing the one great talent he had? It would remain, he worried, “lodg’d within me useless”, and yet his “soul [was] more bent to serve therewith [his] Maker”. How could he give an account to the Lord if he could no longer serve, and in fact, could no longer even see?

Noble Stones and Offerings

I read a chapter of the Old Testament every morning and a chapter of the New, and I’ve commented more than once on the weird “coincidences” that occasionally result when two chapters paired entirely at random wind up speaking to precisely the same subject.

I say “random”, because there are 929 chapters in the OT and 260 in the NT, two numbers that, if you know your math, have no common denominator greater than 1. In short, the chances of any two chapters I read pairing up more than once in a single human lifetime does not exist. Thus, on any given day, each propitious thematic pairing is its own unique and delightful surprise. I documented a couple of these “happy accidents” in 2021, and they continue to crop up now and again. I’m not a superstitious guy, as I have often been at pains to note, but the frequency with which I experience biblical déjà vu makes me wonder what gives.

The connection between is morning’s pair of lengthy readings was unusually glaring.

More by Running Than by Considering

When I worked in print years ago, every shift started the same way. The lead would put a job into production by stacking all the marked-up hard copy on a central table, where typesetters would queue up to grab themselves a handful of pages and go to work coding or correcting the content to produce the desired output.

One of my fellow employees became notorious for loitering at the table, picking through the hard copy looking for what we referred to as the ‘cake’: pages of straight text with no complex tables to code and no graphics to insert, or corrections that amounted to nothing more than adding a few periods to the end of existing paragraphs.

You couldn’t miss what he was doing; he was always holding up the line. The only time ‘Norm’ ever attempted anything more challenging was if you put it right in his hand and assured him he had no other option.

Anonymous Asks (355)

“What does it mean that Jesus will return like a thief in the night?”

Some Christians have a difficult time with the way the writers of scripture consistently and flagrantly compare the timing of our Lord’s second coming to the unexpected entrance of a thief operating in the dark. Perhaps they feel it’s undignified for God to do anything less than appear in blazing glory, defying evil and routing all opposition before the splendor of his appearing. Perhaps they feel he should announce himself with trumpets.

They need not be troubled. He will, and he will. We’ll get to that shortly.

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.

No King in Israel (8)

The gory doings in Judges continue this week (and probably the next two) with the story of Jael and Sisera. I will probably not dwell on Jael’s novel use for a tent peg at great length, but scripture devotes two chapters to the deliverance of Israel from the king of Hazor and its aftermath, so we should probably examine some of the historical background to the chapters that Sunday school teachers tend to leave out.

Of special interest (to me at least) is the song preserved in chapter 5, which gives us far more detail about the battle than the summary in chapter 4, which takes all of four words: “the Lord routed Sisera”.

So he did. No great credit to Barak, the leader of Israel’s armies.

Too Hot to Handle: How I Didn’t Meet Your Mother

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Rod Dreher says nobody meets their spouses at church anymore.

Catholic, Protestant, whatever: some Christian folks are making the case you’ll have better luck finding a spouse in a bar or restaurant, through friends or online than you are going to have finding a man or woman in your own local church worth partnering up with for life. And Dreher agrees.

That’s quite a claim, IC. Where did you meet your wife?

Immanuel Can: At church, first. But we didn’t get interested in each other until we started working together, serving the Lord at a university. My experience may or may not be indicative, though.

As Perfect as Me

“Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?”

A few years ago, I remember hearing about an evangelist who claimed he’d managed to conquer sin absolutely, and eliminate it from his life. In fact, he said he hadn’t committed one in twelve years.

His wife, apparently, backed him up on that.

Now, if you’re a woman that has lived with a man for any period of time longer than fifteen minutes, you probably suspect the wife has gotten into the cooking sherry. It’s just not reality. Sinless perfection just isn’t possible on this earth. And if you meet someone who says he’s achieved it, he probably needs to take a second look — if at nothing else, at the sin of pride.

But I don’t need to tell you that. You know from your own experience. As I do, from mine.

Semi-Random Musings (42)

Some people are naturally more reactive than others, but everybody has moments in which their words and actions are the product of pure emotion rather than common sense, let alone real wisdom. A few days ago, we posted here about David’s very public emotional reaction to the death of his son Absalom at the hand of David’s nephew Joab, the commander of Israel’s army, in violation of the king’s own edict to keep the rebel safe. It was the natural reaction of a loving father, but the optics were horrible coming from a head of state in whose cause many loyal men had just fought and died.

Thankfully, David had time for a sober second thought or two, or at least so it seems.

The Right Woman for the Job

In the last few days, I’ve come across two different discussion threads online about the problem of Christian wives disrespecting their husbands in public.

One case involved a pair of friendly couples from the same local church. The first couple had observed on several different occasions the way the wife of the second couple treated her husband in public. The first husband and wife (surprisingly) agreed that this woman’s treatment of her man was inappropriate, unchristian and a terrible testimony to anyone watching.

Readers floated a few suggestions: maybe the observing husband should talk to the disrespected husband; maybe somebody should talk to church leadership about the problem, and so on.