When he used the phrase “in my name”, did the Son of God have a specific name in mind? Was it one of those names mentioned in Isaiah 9:6: “Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace”? Was it the one the angel charged Mary to give her firstborn, or perhaps a title given to him elsewhere in the New Testament?
Each name and title suggests an aspect of his person or activity. This post explores a few of the ways we may use his name.
When God disciplines his people under either Old or New Covenants, it is not simply an expression of righteous anger. It is not merely a case of giving people what they deserve. Reproof and discipline in this life are acts of love designed to produce repentance, not an early preview of the torments of hell — though that is what certainly awaits the unregenerate if God’s warnings are ignored. But we have a God who declares he is not willing that any should perish, and he behaves consistently with that statement.
I like to think that if more people understood this we might see more repentance.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Tom: We haven’t done a post on commonly misunderstood Bible verses in a while, IC, so I thought that might be fun subject to get back to for a week or two. This one is a favorite, particularly south of the border:
“If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”
To be fair, I’ve heard it prayed by Christians here too, beseeching the Lord that Canadians would suddenly and inexplicably vote to abolish abortion on demand, or oust Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal Ontario government, or whatever.
Okay, I’m writing this post because I came across something so bizarre I didn’t even know what to say to it at first. You’re going to have to bear with me, because you’ll probably have trouble believing anyone could get anything so wrong. But I promise you this is the truth.
I was writing back and forth with one of my Calvinist friends. As you know, I’m not one of them myself, but that doesn’t keep me from liking quite a few of them as people.
Don’t ask. I like a lot of strange things.
The God-Shaped Heart by Timothy Jennings has quite a bit to commend it. Yesterday I detailed five of its better features. If you haven’t read that post, some terms I will use in today’s post will not make much sense.
Unfortunately, there are also a few yawning mineshafts to be avoided in Jennings’ book, some of which are more obvious than others. For this reason, I would be cautious about commending it despite the fact that it contains some helpful observations about God’s law and a useful analysis of the various ways in which human beings may respond to it.
In short, Christians who lack the ability to assess Jennings critically in the light of scripture should probably steer clear.
Timothy Jennings is a Tennessee-based psychiatrist who is convinced Christians don’t really know God as they should. His 2017 book The God-Shaped Heart is perhaps best described as a minor controversy: minor because it failed to crack ECPA’s Top 100 bestseller list in any of its first five years of publication; controversial because Jennings takes a view of substitutionary atonement that rubs a fair number of his critics the wrong way, this reader among them.
If you read the reviews, it’s evident those who love the book really love it. And to be fair, there are some useful thoughts amidst the yawning mineshafts. You just don’t necessarily want to recommend it to anyone who doesn’t have his or her feet firmly planted on solid rock.
“What do you think of this app?”
In case any of our older readers have eyesight as dodgy as mine, I’d better describe what this inquisitive young fellow has sent me. We are looking at a small computer program you can download to your cell phone called Bible Study for your Mood.
The app consists of a series of black or gray buttons, each with a one-word emotional state on them: Anger, Anxiety, Depression, Faith, Courageous, Tired, Confidence, Hopeful, Peaceful, Helpless, Forgiven, Strong, Afraid, Love, Worry ... and so on. Pushing a button takes you to a Bible verse that corresponds with your current mood, and gives the relevant book/chapter so you can look it up and keep reading.
That last part is important.
The little band of Jewish disciples who followed the Messiah in “the days of his flesh” asked to be taught to pray. The Lord’s answer was in the form of a pattern prayer, one that was appropriate at that time while the kingdom of God was being announced as “at hand”.
But repentance was required of those who would be the King’s subjects and, for the most part, that was not forthcoming.
There is a point when national decline accelerates to such an extent that even those most in denial about it cannot ignore it anymore. I suspect we have arrived at it in Canada in the last few weeks.
Everybody knows something is disastrously wrong. Due process, the law and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms are all being ignored. Thousands have taken to the streets to express their unhappiness with the choices made for them by their government. Nobody knows what will happen next. In this recent video, Jordan Peterson and writer Rex Murphy call it “The Catastrophe of Canada”. Canadians who are not still getting their news from the CBC would agree that “catastrophe” is no exaggeration.
Back in Hosea, the same sudden awareness of impending disaster had come for Israel: “Ephraim saw his sickness.”
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
We had a good time with this last week, so Immanuel Can and I have agreed to revisit our growing list of commonly misinterpreted Bible verses and discuss three more examples.
Tom: How about this one?
“For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.”
How do you read that, IC?
Immanuel Can: I think the first question has to be “two or three whats”, or “two or three of whom”?
Michael O’Fallon, host of the very worthwhile Sovereign Nations podcast, says he’s perplexed.
Some time ago he discovered a very nasty kind of false teaching was creeping into the churches in his denomination, a false teaching prepared in the fires of Marxism but now channeled by respected evangelical sources. It seemed obvious to O’Fallon that the first people who would be concerned and who would have a stake in understanding the danger would be those charged with maintaining sound doctrine on behalf of the church.
“If righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.”
“If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.”
Back in 1993, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope gave astronomers their first glimpse of what appeared to be a distant galaxy with a double nucleus. That just doesn’t happen, so a number of possible theories were immediately floated. To the best of my knowledge, no definitive explanation for this anomaly has ever been found.
I have used the expression “tar baby” in a couple of posts here over the years.
A tar baby is a wonderful old metaphor for a sticky situation, and particularly a sticky situation that never needed to happen. But its age and origin make it an obscure figure of speech — so obscure I later discovered even my own mother had never heard of it.
Well, that’s a situation that cannot go uncorrected!
“Do Christians in today’s working world ever find themselves confronted by issues not directly addressed in the Bible?”
This may sound off-topic, but work with me here. I have never been a fan of applying the slave/master verses of the New Testament to modern employment arrangements. The two situations are simply not analogous. I have known people who felt trapped in dead-end jobs, but even in the worst modern employment situations, the employee is legally free to take his leave any time he chooses on a mere two weeks notice. It’s not the law of the land or the middle manager he reports to that make him feel trapped, but rather his personal financial situation.
That’s not to say there is nothing in the New Testament to address the issues faced by Christians in today’s working world, but let’s be careful what we do with those slave and master passages.
“I’ll believe that when I see it” is an often-heard doubter’s response to an account or prediction he does not choose to accept. If we take his words literally, he limits certainty to what can be verified by one of his senses, in this case sight.
Some people are prepared to step beyond that if they consider their instructor or source to be reliable. In doing so they exercise faith in the source.
I grew up believing that my parents owned the house we lived in and the property on which it was built. But I did not keep my illusions for long.
Shortly I discovered there was a third party involved in this arrangement, and a great big interest-bearing loan with a 20 year term that enabled Mom and Dad to keep a roof over our heads. In the early-to-mid-80s, those interest rates were often in excess of 15% for months on end.
Back then, there appeared no prospect that I would be able to do what my parents had done in the first few years of my own marriage. For me, property ownership was right out of reach.
Anyway, enough of my problems; we have plenty of Israel’s to consider in Hosea 5.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
We’ve done maybe seventy of these exchanges now on various subjects, Immanuel Can. But what we’ve never done is a post on commonly misunderstood scriptures. Everybody does those. I’m feeling left out.
So why don’t we just do it like the Lord Jesus did with the lawyer and ask the questions, “What is written? How do you read it?” That’s a pretty solid precedent to work from.
Tom: I’ll start. Let me lob you a softball here, IC.
“For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”
“I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life.”
Have you noticed that our age is great for pretending not to know what the Bible says it could and should know?
Honestly, it’s enough to make one cynical.
“To this end we always pray for you, that our God may make you worthy of his calling and may fulfill every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power.”
The word “resolve” in my ESV translates a Hebrew noun that shows up elsewhere in Paul’s writings as “desire”, “good pleasure” and sometimes even “good will”. So the phrase “resolve for good” is not so much concerned with cultivating a steely determination as it is with the orientation of a believer’s desires.
I mean, how exactly do we arrive at an understanding of what “good” means in the first place?
Several years ago I was walking downtown with a friend when some teenagers outside the grand old institutional church building on the corner enthusiastically accosted us to take some Christian literature from them and read it. After we politely extricated ourselves, my friend asked me “Why do they do that?”
Her thought was that this was a little bit inappropriate for members of our once-polite society, as if the act of sharing a gospel tract on the street were more than a minor intrusion.
“What are the pros and cons of getting a formal Christian education?”
In one sense I’m the wrong guy to ask. I never felt the need to go out and get one. Blame my parents for a Christian upbringing that went heavy on familiarity with the Bible. My father also spent a short time in a U.S. Bible school but did not finish his program. The lack of accreditation had no measurable impact on his ability to serve the Lord. I never heard him express a single regret about the decision.
My own feeling is that there is nothing you can learn in a classroom that you can’t learn from reading the same material for yourself, but then I felt the same way about university and still do.
I was baptized in Wynburg, South Africa just before reaching my 20th year. My counselor put a card in my hand after the service. It read “Kept by the power of God.”
I wondered whether that would really be true of me. Was I not responsible to abide in Christ according to his word? If I didn’t, would I not be cast forth like a fruitless branch? So I set 1 Peter 1:5 and John 15 at war with each other in my mind. I tried to soften the force of the Savior’s warning, but his word stayed firm and demanding: I must abide in Christ. That made me responsible, didn’t it? But Peter said I was kept by God’s power; clearly that made him responsible.
“Bad company corrupts good morals.”
When the apostle Paul wrote it, he was probably quoting Menander, a Greek dramatist and popular writer of antiquity who had lived some 300 years prior, and it served his purposes just fine. But he could as easily have pulled half a dozen quotes from the Old Testament out of his sleeve to confirm the same truth.
Here are just two: Solomon wrote, “The companion of fools will suffer harm” and “Make no friendship with a man given to anger, nor go with a wrathful man, lest you learn his ways and entangle yourself in a snare.”
Make no mistake, wickedness is infectious in a way goodness is not.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
David Rönnegard is 37. He has a PhD in philosophy from the London School of Economics, and is a researcher and teacher in corporate social responsibility in Stockholm. But far too soon David’s friends and family will be using “had” and “was” rather than “has” and “is” to describe him.
Dr. Rönnegard has stage four lung cancer.
In two previous posts (The Atheist’s New Clothes and What You Don’t Know Can Kill You), I pointed out that Christianity’s two skeptical critics, atheism and agnosticism, are essentially irrational and explained why they just cannot be taken seriously.
In this post and the next one, I’m answering the obvious first comebacks. These are what I get from the atheists and agnostics themselves, or from those who have been trusting in them. Theism, they say, must surely be susceptible to exactly the same criticisms I have raised against atheism and agnosticism — and perhaps, they venture, even more susceptible: for their supposition is that if their own positions are weak, then surely anything “religious” must be even less well thought out.
Sorry. Not so.
I can show them, but they usually don’t like it much when I do.
“Adulteresses!”
Say what you like about James, he knew how to get a reader’s attention.
And people have said a fair bit about James over the years, not least Martin Luther, who famously called his letter an “epistle of straw”. There’s no getting around the fact that there are aspects to the missive that are theologically difficult, a tone about it that is markedly different from Paul, Peter, John and even Jude, and a strong Jewish flavor to it that can confuse Christian readers.
“Have you seen this opinion piece on how the Federal government engaged evangelicals on Covid?”
So inquires a commenter named Ted at Blog & Mablog.
Thanks for passing that on, Ted. But let’s get a couple of preliminary observations out of the way before we parse the article by Megan Basham for DailyWire.com.
“As a parent, where would you draw the line with allowing your children to read/watch/play video games about demons, wizardry, etc.?”
This sounds a lot like the famous Harry Potter question that was bandied about in Christian circles twenty years ago when the Rowling books were at their most popular and the movie adaptations were just starting to come out. Christian parents were all over the map on that one, from mindlessly legalistic at one end of the spectrum to imprudently casual at the other.
Still, there is probably a more biblical answer than “Let’s split the difference.”
No, that is not a typo, nor are we referring to the “many dwelling places” in heaven.
Now, there are indeed promises given in scripture so plainly that only unbelief can cause us to miss the benefit of them. For example, in Old Testament times God showed his care for Abraham, the “father” of those who believe, by condescending to put himself under oath. The writer to the Hebrews tells us that “when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it with an oath, so that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us.”
I grew up with two brothers. In their teens, one was good natured, pleasant to be around and (at least outwardly) compliant with the house rules. The other was perpetually contentious and surly, constantly butting heads with our father and any other authority figures with the great misfortune to cross his path.
It is no surprise to find that the latter brother spent more time in my father’s office than the former. No particular prejudice was involved in that.
We’ll come back to that thought shortly. Meanwhile, let’s finish Hosea chapter 4 …
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Immanuel Can: Hey, Tom, what’s all this I’m suddenly hearing about “NPC”?
Tom: Oh my, you sure know how to pick ’em. As you have surely noticed, there’s a big media brouhaha around that term, and Twitter has banned it outright as “hateful”. I’ll let writer Brandon Morse explain it:
“If you’ve ever picked up a video game that features other characters that are controlled by the computer, then you’ve run into non-player characters or NPC’s.”
When you call someone an “NPC”, what you are saying is that they are programmed with preset behavioral patterns decided for them by somebody else, be they professors, activist groups or the media. You are telling them they are unable to think for themselves.
A few years ago, this little brain-teaser was making the rounds. Take a run at it, and let’s see how you do:
Three old ladies go to a hotel one evening, hoping to save money by sharing a room. The hotel manager charges each $20 for the night, though he knows the room is only worth $40. Shortly thereafter, the manager feels guilty that he has charged them too much, so he sends the bellboy to return $20 to the old ladies. On the way, the bellboy realizes that he cannot split $20 among three ladies, so he pockets $5 and hands them the remaining $15.
Here is the problem. The ladies paid $60 initially. Since they received $5 each, the net amount they paid for the room was $15 each, which adds up to a total of $45. The bellboy has $5 in his pocket, which if you add it to the $45 makes $50. Where is the other $10 that they paid the manager?
Now, if you’re normal, your instant reaction is, “This is amazing … a hotel room for only $20!”
I have mentioned the first century Greek biographer Plutarch in a couple of previous posts as I am currently wading through his compiled Lives of famous Greeks and Romans, including everyone from Theseus (he of minotaur-killing fame) to Julius Caesar. Among the writers of antiquity, I find Plutarch especially of interest because he lived during the period in which the New Testament was written. He is more of a historian than an observer of the culture of his own day, and maintains a studiously neutral approach to his subject matter.
All the same, after about 1,000 pages, you start to get a feel for what makes a man tick: how he thinks about the world, what he values or dismisses, whether he is religious or not, and if so, what his beliefs mean to him and how they affect his life. Plutarch is no exception.
Compare the usage of the word “condemn” in the following two passages:
“See, we are going up to Jerusalem. And the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn him to death.”
“But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned.”
Assuming you are familiar with both verses in their original contexts, you will probably agree with me that the word is being used to describe two distinct degrees of hazard, one considerably more severe than the other.
“Conventional wisdom disagrees with an increasing number of Bible proverbs. Is it possible some were of their own time and do not apply to us today?”
Last week I began going through Proverbs with a fine-tooth comb in an effort to answer this question. I tried to select those sayings which seem the most foreign to our modern mindset, in order to set the current “wisdom of the world” side by side with the wisdom of God.
So far the wisdom of God is looking pretty relevant to the present day.
You are a fly resting on the wall of an auditorium. It is not long before you are able to identify the sort of church you are observing by the way its members use certain scriptural language to describe an experience they had, and one they think should be known by more Christians. You hear testimonies of the baptism of the Holy Spirit being experienced, and teaching given that urges members to seek this blessing.
Who would you think you were among?
Years ago, the wife of a friend from my college days came home with a rather unusual proposal concerning their marriage. She worked as a nurse in a cancer ward, and had fallen in love with a patient diagnosed as terminal. Her plan was to bring this fellow home and move him in upstairs so she could care for him, while her husband took his things and moved downstairs to live in the basement.
Needless to say, my friend did not think much of that idea.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
I’m not even sure how to describe this, but I’m going to give it a go.
Publishers Weekly’s ShelfTalker, “In which children’s booksellers ponder all things literary, artistic, and mercantile,” has a piece on a hot new trend sweeping the nation’s libraries: story time with a drag queen.
Mixed groups of three- to eight-year-olds are invited to come and enjoy a spoken word performance from men like “Harmonica Sunbeam” dressed as women (there is a picture with the article but — fair warning — it can’t be un-seen).
Tom: IC, is it possible to normalize something so bizarre and decadent, even with the power and budget of big corporations and the education system fully committed to it?
[Editor’s note: Nobody ever wants to be called racist, and yet the word is everywhere these days. It also doesn’t mean what it used to mean, which means it was one of those words I planned to get to in this series eventually. All too conveniently, Immanuel Can sent me an email this week analyzing the current usage of the term (and the logic behind the change in meaning) better than I might. I have reproduced it below.
Trust you enjoy it. — Tom]
“Then those who feared the Lord spoke with one another. The Lord paid attention and heard them, and a book of remembrance was written before him of those who feared the Lord and esteemed his name.”
There are things that last and things that don’t.
“We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.”
My father had a knack for identifying Christians in the wild. I don’t mean in the obvious places, like in church or at conferences, but on the street, in the malls, or wherever. He was pretty good at it. He may have made the occasional mistake over the years, but I didn’t catch any. So he would quite confidently go up to random strangers and say things like “Excuse me, but are you a follower of the Lord Jesus?” Almost invariably they were.
He said there was something distinctive about a Christian face.
“Conventional wisdom disagrees with an increasing number of Bible proverbs. Is it possible some were of their own time and do not apply to us today?”
What a great question! Most of the Bible’s proverbs are over 3,000 years old, so we certainly cannot discount the possibility that applying all of them literally is borderline-unworkable. It sent me combing through Proverbs from beginning to end in search of the most controversial examples I could find. (I am leaving out Proverbs 31, since I dealt with the cultural relevance of the “excellent wife” here.)
So, let’s see about those “irrelevant” proverbs then ...
Is the difference between accepting and receiving just a matter of semantics? Are we being picky about words that to most people amount to the same thing? We will attempt to show they don’t.
Admittedly, in many cases either word would do, both being used to describe a positive response to a gift or invitation, but there is a difference. The first is the better word to use if you want to leave room for the possibility of some disappointment or reserve on the part of the recipient. The second would be better if you want to go on to describe the great pleasure a gift or invitation evoked.
An illustration may help ...
We can get into a chicken-and-egg sort of argument about whether choosing an idol instead of the one true God leads to immorality (which it does, because all other moral systems are necessarily inferior), or whether it’s the selfish pursuit of desire that leads inevitably to an idolatrous pathway that will permit it (which is also true, as Israel proved in the wilderness).
Let’s just say that however it may begin, immorality and idolatry have a tendency to create the spiritual equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. One feeds the other.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Tom: Here’s a hot topic we’ve yet to discuss, IC — at least, it’s generated some serious heat for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, sufficient to rate an article in The New York Times.
At issue is the government’s determination to tie federal funding for youth job programs to the expression of politically correct opinion. It’s about $113 million annually, give or take, and approximately 70,000 jobs are at stake.
The Prime Minister dismisses the very predictable negative reaction from Canadian conservatives as a “kerfuffle”.
The most popular course in the Religion and Culture department of one Canadian university is a course titled “Evil and Its Symbols”. It’s the one course where there never seems to be enough room to fit all the applicants. One student quipped that the homework assignment was probably “Go home and do evil.”
Maybe not. But people sure are fascinated with the topic. Why evil exists is a challenge for any Christian to explain; perhaps the biggest. Still, two things bear remembering right away: firstly, that to say that it’s a challenge does not mean that the challenge cannot be met, and secondly, that to explain the existence of evil is not a challenge unique to Christians or even to theists more generally — it’s equally necessary for atheists. Not only that, but it’s a lot harder for them.
Let me justify those statements a bit further in a moment; but first, let me set the stage for today’s post.
It’s a white world where I live. Earlier this week we had something like a foot and a half of snow fall in a matter of hours. I woke up to two hours of shoveling. My back is still feeling it.
But this morning I was out on the road again for my very early morning walk, which was a little slower going than usual. I guess the City has to prioritize where the plows go first. Many parked cars on my street were still under so much of the white stuff that you couldn’t tell the difference between an SUV and a sedan. You also couldn’t tell where the sidewalks were, or the fire hydrants, or many of the usual landmarks.
They were all still there of course. You just couldn’t see them.
We are where we are today as a society because we do not know who we are. We do not know who we are because we do not know where we have been, and we do not remember the lessons we should have learned when we were there.
Okay, there are other reasons as well, but ignorance is a big part of it. My kids were never really taught either History or English in high school. Even in the first decade of the new millennium, the ‘woke’ monster was stirring within public education. History had already become a problematic subject, and the great works of Western literature, allegedly full of patriarchal prejudices and badthink, were being chucked aside in favor of contemporary novels propagandizing about teens and abortion.
Having already ruined math, they basically stopped teaching anything else useful. And it’s far worse today.
“ ‘Son of man’ is a title that belongs to Christ. Why is it also used for Ezekiel?”
Ezekiel not only had the title before the Lord Jesus, he had it used to describe him many more times than the Lord Jesus, 93 in total. More importantly, it was God himself who chose to address him that way, though Daniel is also called a “son of man”. But Ezekiel and Daniel are not the only places you find the phrase in the Old Testament; you also find it in Job, Numbers, the Psalms, Isaiah and Jeremiah.
What can we learn from the fact that both Ezekiel and Daniel had the title earlier, and Ezekiel more frequently? Not much, probably, except maybe not to measure spiritual importance by such metrics.
“I am the Lord their God, who brought them out of the land of Egypt that I might dwell among them.”
You and I were saved for a reason: to have fellowship with God. To know, love, commune with, enjoy and be enjoyed by him forever.
Now, that may not be the reason you became a Christian or decided to live like one. Probably it wasn’t. It certainly wasn’t the reason I did. My reasons were all about me. I had been experiencing the consequences of a series of selfish, ill-advised choices, and I didn’t like them at all. But I had been brought up in a Christian home, and I knew the answer to my problems was obedience to Christ. So the day finally came when I hit rock bottom, gave up and said, “You win, Lord.”
That was pretty much the process. I wasn’t exactly looking for fellowship. I’m not sure I even knew what that was.