I know a woman who is utterly miserable, or so she will tell you if you have time to listen. She lives on welfare with a man she claims to dislike, convinced her daughter is abusing her, and is forever begging for handouts to help with rent or groceries. But when concerned family members point out local job openings in her field, there are always multiple reasons she can’t possibly apply.
They are proposing real solutions ... just not the solution she wants.
“How should Christians regard Jews?”
This is a fairly important question to consider. Historically, there has been little agreement within Christendom about it. Today, there is increasing polarization within the evangelical ranks concerning both the religion of Judaism and the nation of Israel.
The two “poles” look something like this.
“If anyone has no love for the Lord, let him be accursed.”
That’s a very strong statement. Catholics would say, “Let him be anathema”, which simply means “devoted to destruction”. Paul leaves us no fence to straddle: it’s love or destruction. Choose one or the other.
That word translated from Greek to English as “love” refers to affection or approval. It’s also a word that means “to kiss”. In the ancient East, when you saw someone you knew and liked on the street, you would greet them with a kiss. It was a way of publicly identifying yourself with that person; of saying to everyone around, “This is my guy, right here.”
Or you could just turn your head away and walk on by. But what an insult that would be.
Analyzing the structure of any book of the Bible requires basic pattern recognition, a skill quickly developed by most students of the Word who go on to write anything useful about it. Mind you, that doesn’t mean they all see exactly the same patterns. Often there is more in there than any single intellect is equipped by God to dig out.
In the case of the book of Amos, efforts to analyze its structure have been frustrated at times by its apparent randomness. Everyone who comes to it sees something slightly (or in some cases, wildly) different. “There is not a clear ‘story’ or ‘narrative’ to this text,” writes Rebecca Holland.
In short, finding a definitive structural analysis of Amos is no easy task.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Yes, Leftism is just plain goofy.
Philosophers Adam Swift and Harry Brighouse are deeply concerned about the nuclear family.
What happens, worries Swift, when loving your child makes for an uneven playing field for those without equally devoted parents?
The difference between the solution you or I might propose and the one the political Left proposes is that Adam and Harry would prefer to bring us all down to the lowest common denominator rather than aspire to anything inherently more desirable.
“What church do you guys go to?”
The question came out of left field. She had been poking around at her desk, seemingly preoccupied with the day’s business. Normally our exchanges were rare, light and usually practical.
I liked her as a person, but we hadn’t had many deep conversations. There was always a brittleness in her manner if any spiritual matter ever appeared on the horizon — not an uncommon happening if one teaches literature, as we both did. A lapsed Catholic, now essentially secular in all her habits, she usually avoided such topics completely. So to foray into spiritual issues so suddenly was very unlike her.
“An evangelical church up the road. Why?”
“And you are [Sarah’s] children, if you do good and do not fear anything that is frightening.”
The world is a scary place. It was scary when Peter wrote these words, and it’s scary today. Maybe it’s scariest for women, though I can’t say for sure: there are plenty of places in scripture where men are told not to be fearful, and many exhortations not to let our fears control us which we may reasonably assume are intended to apply to both sexes.
In fact, some of the most powerful men in the Bible were scared.
Our old friend Dave B. writes:
“I’d be curious to hear your opinion on the ‘expert’ claims that those vaccinated develop less serious side effects, should they catch the dreaded COVID virus. Is this legit?”
Dave, you ask the best questions. I’m game to share my current opinion about the effectiveness of the vaccines so long as we all recognize it is just that, and that new data is emerging daily.
“Why do so many white supremacists claim to be Christians?”
Interesting question. I’m not actually aware that this is common. I’ve encountered few genuine white supremacists online, but the ones I have run into all reject Christianity, primarily because of its close association with Jews. If they call themselves religious at all, white supremacists generally appropriate Norse mythology as their starting point; for example, a Finnish movement called Soldiers of Odin is currently gaining popularity in Canada’s western provinces.
Well, that’s assuming it is reasonable to refer to an organization with a mere 600 members across the entire globe as “popular”.
“Love … believes all things.”
“Love your enemies.”
“Do not believe them, though they speak friendly words to you.”
The three verses quoted above create a syllogism that isn’t.
First, we have Paul’s statement that love manifests in “believing all things”, whatever that might mean. Secondly, we have the Lord’s command to love one’s enemies, and it follows that if one is to love them, one must “believe all things” while doing so, because that is what Paul says love does. Finally, we have God’s instructions to Jeremiah, emotionally drained by the disloyalty and dishonesty of his own family members, whom he was surely obligated to love even under the Old Covenant … but in this case, Jeremiah’s love was not to manifest in belief. In fact, he was to exercise discernment and see through the lies of his siblings.
Something is wrong with the logic here, and we know it’s not that God has contradicted himself, since that never happens.
The territory occupied by the nation of Israel today is not the territory occupied by the Israel of the divided kingdom period. It is not the territory occupied by the nations of Israel and Judah when they were briefly united under the house of David. According to the prophets, it is also not the territory which will be occupied by the Israel of the future.
There is some land in common, of course. Territory has been gained (the Negev and the Gaza Strip, for example). But when Israel lost the Transjordan to Assyria, it never got it back. Moreover, few modern Israelis are descended from the people who occupied the northern kingdom when Amos prophesied against it.
We understand the prophets more accurately when we correctly identify their intended audience. Let me take a stab at that.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
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| God, cash & prizes: a winning combo! Or not. |
How Do You Read It? is kind of a series within a series, in which Immanuel Can and I discuss common misinterpretations of some very familiar verses. The first two instalments can be found here and here.
Tom: IC, it’s been a year since we did one of these. Have you got one for me?
Immanuel Can: What about “Whatever you ask in my name …”?
Everybody likes gifts, they say. Still, some are better than others.
A funny story: My in-laws were on their way to a wedding. Along the roadside, a hack artist was selling a number of truly horrible original oil paintings. (Doubtless this poor soul labored under the delusion he was some sort of Michelangelo.) Anyway, my relatives pulled over for a look. These ‘masterpieces’ were supposed to be landscapes, but they all looked like they’d been painted with a really fat brush using earth tones, pale blues and dark blacks. (If you imagine an explosion in a factory that produces toothpaste, peanut butter and licorice, you’ve roughly got the aesthetic here.)
Last Tuesday, John Piper used his mega-platform among Reformed Christians to come out in favor of COVID vaccination and to implore his fellow believers to go out and get jabbed:
“My aim in this article is to encourage Christians to be vaccinated, if they can do so with a good conscience and judicious medical warrant.”
Hey, at least he had the decency to include the caveat of “a good conscience”.
There are still a few wonderful things in this increasingly weird world. A good number of them are covered in fur, and occasionally wool.
You do not find many pets in the Bible. Life thousands of years ago was generally harder, and people were poorer, hungrier and more pragmatic. Most verses that mention animals have to do with wildlife and livestock, not domesticated creatures living indoors.
“If God knows I’m hurting, why doesn’t he help me?”
The answer to the first part of this question is perfectly straightforward: God knows. Of course he knows. He’s God. How could he not know? “You discern my thoughts from afar,” wrote David. “Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O Lord, you know it altogether.” The only being in the universe with full knowledge of the human condition is humanity’s Creator.
The second part’s a little tougher to answer. There are just so many possibilities ...
There’s tremendous potential in you as a believer. God has great purposes for you as a believer.
We know these great purposes. He wants us to be conformed to the image of his Son. That’s going to include not only our external activities, but surely it’s also going to include the transformation of our thought lives.
Spiritual fulfillment is not literal fulfillment.
That doesn’t make it less important, of course. We might reasonably make the case that spiritual fulfillment of the prophetic word can be more life changing and longer lasting than its literal counterpart. Examples will follow. The point to keep before us is that the prophecies of scripture often have multiple fulfillments — or perhaps we might say that there are multiple aspects to their fulfillment.
Every prophetic fulfillment of either kind has some connection, however distant, to the work of Christ. The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy. But one cannot fully comprehend the scope of his wonderful work without acknowledging both the literal and allegorical ways it illuminates and resolves the sometimes-obscure utterances of the ancient Hebrew seers.
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:
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?
“The Father loves the Son.”
Are there any better words in all of scripture than this? Personally, I don’t think so.
Many people have a fondness for John 3:16, or Romans 8:35, or Ephesians 2:8-9 … all very great passages, I’ll admit; but for me, nothing anywhere comes close to the freedom, joy and consolation of the words above.
Maybe today I can tell you why.
In addition to our own family gathering this year, I was invited to enjoy an early Thanksgiving celebration with three Christian friends whose extended families refuse to share a meal with them until they get vaccinated. We had a wonderful dinner and an enjoyable evening together, but it was hard to overlook the elephant in the room — or in this case, the herd of elephants not in the room.
Thanksgiving is usually about turkeys, not elephants.
For the uninitiated, Grunge.com is the online equivalent of those tabloid news rags you find next to the gum and chocolate bars at grocery store checkouts — perhaps not quite so tacky, but at least as trivial. Today’s brilliant bits of journalistic intrigue include pieces on where Elvis is buried, how Vladimir Putin feels about religion, what happens to your body when you choke to death, and — my personal favorite — how David Hasselhoff is connected to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Come on, you can’t tell me you wouldn’t click on that! Which is the whole point, of course.
“Is God male or female?”
J. Manning feels there is a “connection between belief in the maleness of God and the deeply ingrained acceptance of the abuse of women in society”. Of the origins of belief in a masculine God, D.T. Williams writes, “It is felt that ascribing maleness to God was due to the superiority of the male in pre‑modem and especially Biblical culture,” and that “as modern culture is more enlightened about recognizing the equality of the sexes, so the maleness of God [is thought to be] an anachronism which should be disposed of.”
All to say that this is one of those matters into which few theologians of the pre-feminist era would have thought to inquire.
“You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness. Therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions.”
These “companions” were not bad guys.
The psalmist is probably speaking of other Israelite royalty, so Jesus had something significant in common with them despite their human failings: they were all kings. People like David, Solomon and Hezekiah. They served God, they honored God, and they led his people out to victory.
Not bad guys at all, some of them.
There is a short, somewhat mysterious passage in the final speech Moses made to Israel before his death in which he declares that when God divided mankind — presumably referring to the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11, which ends with the words “the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth” — that God also “fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God”.
Now, we know what the phrase “sons of God” means to believers from the teaching of the New Testament. However, in the Old Testament, the same expression is consistently connected with angelic beings.
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 teen film Mean Girls (2004) is sort of a cult classic with the kids at the school where I teach. Everyone knows the story, even though the film is getting a bit old now. The star (Lindsay Lohan) is certainly no teenager anymore, as any number of her recent escapades in the press will attest. But somehow the plot line still works. On April 28th, the anniversary of its release, the Toronto Sun, that bastion of fine journalism, proudly proclaimed it “still the ultimate teen movie”.
I sure hope not.
I rarely agree completely with anyone, and I doubt anyone ever completely agrees with me. Moreover, the longer we go on talking, the more likely we are to find points of disagreement with one another.
When IC and I comment here on what others have written, we usually try to quote just enough to allow the writer to fully and clearly make his point in his own words. The goal is to find the sweet spot between unfairly representing an argument and letting it overwhelm our commentary on it; after all, they have their platforms and we have ours.
As this world moves deeper into secular materialism and post-rationality with each passing year, the tremendous practical and material benefits of the Christian faith become increasingly evident in contrast to the chaos, confusion and despair that follow logically from any worldview in which God is absent or unknowable.
One nine year study of over 21,000 believers showed we live on average seven years longer than those who do not know Christ. To quote the Handbook of Religion and Health (2001), faith has been correlated with “well-being, happiness and life satisfaction; hope and optimism; purpose and meaning in life; higher self-esteem; better adaptation to bereavement; greater social support and less loneliness; lower rates of depression and faster recovery from depression; lower rates of suicide and fewer positive attitudes towards suicide; less anxiety; less psychosis and fewer psychotic tendencies; lower rates of alcohol and drug abuse; less delinquency and criminal activity; greater marital stability and satisfaction.”
Sounds like great advertising, right? Wrong. Definitely wrong.
“Are people born good?”
Aristotle argued that men are born amoral and morality is learned, while Rousseau insisted men would be gentle and pure without the greed and inequality promoted by the class system. The philosophical debate has gone on for centuries, and “science” has contributed little to finding an answer.
So then, expert opinion on the question averages out to something like “We’re not really sure.”
IC’s post on immanence/transcendence last week got to me for a number of reasons. (If you haven’t read it, what are you reading this for? Go. Now.)
When I was a little boy, our family crossed the ocean on a liner sizable for its day. I don’t remember much of the journey; I suppose most of it was fairly uneventful. What I do remember vividly is coming up on deck with my father one bright day when the sea was slightly turbulent. It wasn’t stormy, but it was far from calm. Great swells repeatedly arose to starboard, higher (I thought at the time) than the ship itself, gradually dipping and moving slowly and methodically under us. The horizon seemed to disappear and I found myself convinced the deck had tilted at some sort of incredible angle (though I suspect that was only my disconcerted, childish impression).
It was my first experience of “big”, and it stuck.
How many titles are given to God in the Old Testament? Much depends on whether you count slight variations as completely different names or group them together as essentially teaching the same truths about the Almighty. Three attempts to put a hard number on the total got me 14, 17 and 21, which was enough to discourage me from the effort for the time being.
Let’s just say there are many: some that encourage (The Lord My Banner), some that comfort (The Lord My Shepherd), some that reassure (The Lord Will Provide) and some that awe (Jealous, The Most High God).
One of the more intimidating titles is found in the next two verses in Amos.
One of my Neo-Calvinist friends wrote to me yesterday. He said that I should like a favorite preacher of his (David Platt). He said that this preacher “holds to the Reformed theology”. Then he added, “People who truly understand the Reformed theology have a passion for lost souls.”
His first statement is probably true.
If the second one is true, the first one is certainly false.
If a Calvinist loves the salvation message it might make him a nice person but it also makes him a bad Calvinist.
“I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people ...”
Sometimes the lists we find in scripture consist largely of different words that mean essentially the same thing; synonyms multiplied for the purpose of reinforcing the author’s intended meaning through repetition. Other times they do not. This is one of those cases: the four words are not exactly synonyms. While there is some overlap, each word Paul uses to describe types of prayer has a different shade of meaning and each conveys a new thought.
It’s probably a worthwhile exercise to re-examine each of these terms to make sure they really mean precisely what we think they do. I find studies of this sort produce the occasional surprise.
Well, that certainly didn’t take long.
Less than two weeks back I observed that people are getting vaccinated for all sorts of reasons, the vast majority of which are pragmatic rather than moral or religious.
The difference is easy to illustrate. Pragmatic arguments for vaccination include “If you don’t get vaccinated, you may lose your job”, “If you don’t get vaccinated, you won’t be able to go to a restaurant or a football game”, or even “If you don’t get vaccinated, you won’t be welcome in my home for Christmas.”
Contrast that with my favorite strained and unconvincing recent attempt at making the issue moral: “If you don’t get vaccinated, you’ll kill your grandmother.”
Okay then ...
“What does it mean that God is able to keep us from stumbling?”
You are probably thinking of the last two verses of Jude: “Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever.”
Moments before taking my daily stroll through what turned out this morning to be a dark, rainy neighborhood, I happened to come across a question on social media about the relationship of spiritual discernment to common sense.
The writer got me thinking. Obviously both are means by which human beings gain competence in navigating the world, but they are quite different from one another, though common sense and spiritual discernment may occasionally lead us to similar conclusions.
The distinctions may become clearer if we add a third factor to the mix. For the sake of brevity, let’s just refer to this third thing as knowledge, but what I mean by knowledge in this context is information received second-hand, whether from books, media or other people.
The natural man has common sense, the learned man adds to it knowledge, but only the regenerate man has spiritual discernment.
We have come to the final chapter of Amos, and to the seer’s final vision, this time of the Lord and the altar.
As in previous passages in Amos, the altar in question is not the altar in Jerusalem, in the true temple of the Lord, but rather the altar of the facsimile-temple in Bethel, home of one of King Jeroboam I’s two golden calves, variously referred to as “the guilt of Samaria” and, more often, “the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, which he made Israel to sin.”
That last bit is important. Jeroboam “made Israel to sin”.
When I was a little kid, I have to admit I wasn’t much of an athlete. Having been raised with different games and sports than were popular in the country to which my family had returned, I had only opaque knowledge of the rules, and little practice at executing the conventional skills. So I was equally lousy at football, baseball, basketball, soccer and even volleyball, and only marginally competent at hockey.
It would be years before I caught up to my peers who had been raised with those games. Nevertheless, I tried. And I played, whether I was good or not.
As someone who does a fair bit of writing, one of the features of the Bible that most persuades me of its authenticity is the staunch refusal of its writers to satisfy our curiosity about details.
An authentic historical account written for people familiar with the relevant culture and events naturally leaves out all sorts of facts its original audience would be expected to already know and understand. It cuts directly to the chase. This is what we find in scripture’s books of history. Likewise, an authentic letter does not read like a narrative or polemic conveniently disguised in another literary form. It is not an info dump. It is marked as much by what it doesn’t include as by what it does.
In short, each genre of scripture reads just as we might expect it to. Philemon is a fine example of this.
Once or twice in the last year and a half I’ve heard a Christian say something to the effect that they are trusting the Lord to keep them safe from the coronavirus. I suppose that is true of all of us to one degree or another, but the comment got me thinking: How high a priority should our physical safety have in our prayers?
Let’s dismiss binary thinking on this subject right at the front door. I cannot see how praying for better circumstances can ever be categorically wrong when it is accompanied by a heartfelt “Nevertheless, not my will, but yours.” It not a question of good vs. bad use of prayer time, but a question concerning degrees of good. We are looking to have the very best priorities in prayer, right? Ideally, we should be asking for the things Christ himself would have asked of his Father under the same circumstances.
That’s a very high bar, and we will not reach it all the time in prayer, but it should certainly be our goal in coming into the presence of God.
“Is is possible to be born again without knowing when it happened?”
I was once confronted by an older Christian who wanted to know the exact time and circumstances of my salvation. Apparently he asked many others the same thing. He was convinced the experience of becoming a believer only comes about in one way, and that it is impossible not to know how and when it occurred. If you can’t tell people when it happened, he insisted, it’s because you’re not saved.
That is not what Jesus taught.
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.
It was 1966 when Pete Townshend wrote yet another generational anthem for The Who, this one intended as a tribute to the trendy, rebellious Mod movement in Britain. But its lyrics could just as easily have been applied to the hippies the band played to at Woodstock three years later, or indeed to any generation in history whose lifestyle choices made their parents shake their heads in dismay and speculate that society was just about to come down around their ears.
Townshend’s point was that while they might look a little rough around the edges, ultimately these young ruffians would do just fine for themselves. “The kids are alright” became part of the British vernacular, a euphemism for impending success.
“For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. Therefore what benefit were you then deriving from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the outcome of those things is death. But now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life.”
What is freedom? Does it mean what people today think it does? Does it mean doing whatever, whenever? Does it mean liberty to surrender to our own impulses? Does it mean opportunity to do whatever-the-heck we feel like at a given moment? Does it mean being exempt from moral censure or practical criticism regardless of what action we may choose to do?
Does it mean total independence? Does it mean not needing anyone, or not feeling the lack of anything?
The Lord’s supper. The love feast. Communion. The Eucharist. The breaking of bread.
Call it what you are comfortable with. Like baptism, this ordinance-of-many-names has been co‑opted by the institutional church. The Lord’s table has been quietly moved from the home into the precincts of the “sanctuary”, where the permission of church leadership must be obtained in order to participate.
It’s high time ordinary Christians moved it back.
Let’s get this straight right off the top: COVID vaccines are not the “mark of the beast”.
Admittedly, government strategies for implementing universal vaccination are similarly coercive. We are not quite yet at the stage where no one can buy or sell without the say-so of Pfizer or Moderna, but depending on where you live, restrictions imposed on the unvaccinated are becoming more than a little onerous. COVID vaccine passports are the hot button issue of the moment, notwithstanding mounting evidence that the science does not support across-the-board vaccination as a solution to the spread of the virus and its variants.*
So then, if the powers-that-be recognize vaccination will
not solve the problem, why are the vaccinations still being pushed so
frantically? Reasonable people are curious, to say the least, and less-reasonable
people are speculating about a connection to
Must I point out the obvious? Sure, why not.
“Do elders have authority?”
A hundred years ago nobody would have asked this question. Today, authority of every kind is being challenged at every level. Don’t like what the founders wrote in the Constitution? Just reinterpret it. Don’t like the Governor’s latest executive order? No worries, an unelected County Circuit Judge will shortly declare it unconstitutional so you don’t have to comply. Don’t want the fraudulent election results you certified audited? Just refuse to hand over the evidence of your malfeasance. Are the health care rights guaranteed in your province getting in the way of your ability to impose mandated vaccination? Don’t worry, we’ll find a way around that.
It’s the eighth shortest book in the Bible and the second shortest in the Old Testament — only 1,131 words in English in two brief chapters.
But Haggai is full of dates. Almost a quarter of its 38 verses are given over to specifying times right to the very day. The book’s five prophecies to four different individuals or groups are each arranged around these dates.
Even readers unconvinced of the inspiration of scripture are unlikely to see such an obvious pattern as accidental or merely a writing tic. They will generally concede the author must be trying to make a point.
It might be worth a few hundred words to try to work out what the point may be.
Prophetic language in scripture is always more difficult to interpret from a distance.
This uncertainty is especially common when figurative language — a regular feature of the prophetic word — is in play. When a prophecy is fulfilled in a generation or less, its original audience has little difficulty unpacking a nicely turned figure of speech and applying it to their own situation. On the other hand, a 2,700 year distance from the events about which the prophet has spoken or written severely limits the modern reader’s ability to dogmatize about specifics.
The historical record just isn’t that comprehensive, and the culture and language barriers to understanding the text as its original readers understood it increase with every passing generation.