I hear a lot of people talk about their love for the gospel. But then I also hear a lot of talk about how people “love” ice cream, their cars, their mates, their pets, and the NFL.
I’m pretty sure there’s a difference in each case.
There are different ways to love. Some of them are a million miles from the others. So what are people talking about when they say they really love the gospel?
I’m going to give you three different ways. There are probably more, but I’ve seen these three a lot.
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I have always liked the story of Phinehas, Aaron’s grandson. For the uninitiated, Phinehas was a young priest who took it upon himself to execute the son of a Simeonite tribal chief in the act of committing adultery with a Midianite woman by impaling the two on the same spear. As a child, I found his rather decisive move a bit daring (not to mention violent), but also commendable and brave.
After all, a spontaneous impalement is both unilateral and very final. It tends to inspire the neighbors to murmur things like “I say, old boy, don’t you think that’s a bit drastic?” Or worse.
The story of Balaam is remarkable on several levels. Its lessons are important enough for the writer of Numbers to devote three full chapters to them. Moses would later cite God’s reversal of Balaam’s failed attempt to curse his people as evidence of his love for them. Joshua would cite it as evidence of God’s ability to deliver them. The prophet Micah would say it is evidence of God’s righteousness. In Nehemiah, the story of Balaam and its consequences would inspire the returned exiles to separation and holiness. In the New Testament, Peter, Jude and John would make reference to the way of Balaam, the error of Balaam, and the teaching of Balaam.
The story of Balaam matters for multiple reasons, and the talking donkey is actually the least of them.
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“Does God approve of the death penalty?”
The Law of Moses governed Israelite society in one form or another from around 1450 BC through AD70, when Jerusalem was destroyed and the Jewish people forcibly dispersed throughout the Roman Empire. In that law we find a plethora of offenses that call for the death penalty, among them murder, kidnapping, child sacrifice, rape, witchcraft, blasphemy, false prophecy, profaning the Sabbath, violence against father or mother, adultery, bestiality, homosexuality and perjury.
Did God approve of putting people to death for these things? Of course he did. The Law of Moses was the expression of God’s will for Israelite society. It came directly from him.
Expectation ... fear ... hope. What do they have in common?
Each is a way of anticipating the future. Each inevitably excites a response. This is true even if we refuse to think about what will happen tomorrow or later; we cannot avoid reacting. Even burying one’s head in the sand is a reaction which says “I choose to not think about what the future might hold.”
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“There is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.” So wrote the apostle Paul, and both this line and its surrounding verses have been quoted to us repeatedly over the last two years. It is often pointed out that Paul is believed to have written these things to believers when the Roman emperor was a guy named Nero, portrayed in secular history as a notorious persecutor of Christians.
As bad as his behavior may have been, Nero was as legitimate a ruler as any other, having succeeded to the throne after the death of his grand-uncle Claudius in AD54 (thought by some to have been poisoned by his wife), who had in his turn come to power by apparent chance after the assassination of Caligula. Such were the Roman political intrigues of the first century.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
David B. was kind enough to forward us this link to a recent survey by Ligonier Ministries and LifeWay Research about what Americans believe about God, Jesus Christ, sin and eternity.
Tom: Apparently they are doing this every couple of years now. Having regular new data sets to browse can be useful in noting trends of one sort or another. We discussed the LifeWay 2016 survey in this space, if I recall correctly … yes, I do. That was the one where, based on the frequency of their heretical answers, my fellow writer Immanuel Can was inspired to refer to some of the respondents as not so much Christian as “ ‘Christian-flavored’, like a really, really bad kind of tofu.”
How’s the tofu this year, IC?
When I was young, back in the 1970s, disaster movies were in vogue. Perhaps the most memorable was Jaws (1975), but before that were such noteworthies as The Omega Man (1971), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Airport and Earthquake (1974). Afterward came such screen gems as Rollercoaster (1977), Meteor, Hurricane and The China Syndrome (1979). All in all, there were more than fifty such major Hollywood disaster productions released in the period.
And everybody was going to see them and talking about how great the special effects were or how spectacularly people were shown dying in them.
Odd, don’t you think?
Online commentators argue that the apostle Paul misuses the Old Testament.
Some of these are garden-variety cranks, determined to prove all English versions of the Bible inaccurate. They insist reading the Jewish Tanakh is the only way to go. There’s really no placating people like that. Others set Paul against Jesus, maintaining that only the words of Christ really matter, and that the writings of the apostles are unreliable, inferior and downright wrong. Still others, like Pete Enns, object particularly to Paul, arguing that he read the Old Testament out of context, failing to respect what its authors intended to communicate.
How does the average Christian reply to such accusations?
Bellator writes, “Someone asked me to read The Post-Quarantine Church by Thom Rainer. I attach a copy of page 5.”
Well now, there’s an invitation we can hardly pass up!
Turns out the quotes Bellator selected were not related to the author’s recommendations about what our churches most need to learn from the events of the last two years, but rather to his observations about the priorities pursued by church administrators once lockdowns were announced and Christians stopped gathering together for worship.
I consider those priorities disturbing. You may too.
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“What is the significance of the staff that produced buds?”
My boss has always been a little sensitive to criticism of people he has appointed to positions of responsibility in our organization. There is good reason for this: after all, he appointed them. Complaints about the suitability of a man or woman he has chosen to serve in one capacity or another may be legitimately construed as personal attacks on his judgment, and they carry with them the implication that maybe someone else would have been better off doing the choosing.
You can imagine how well that sort of comment goes over with him. It doesn’t.
Some men are called to govern others: “There is no authority except from God“, “The Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will.”
That does not mean God approves of all rulers or the decisions they make. He once elevated Pharaoh, a proud pagan tyrant, and then publicly humbled him. God said, “For this purpose I have raised you up … so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth.”
Solomon too was raised up by the Lord.
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Hosea uses five different similes and metaphors to describe the state of mind prevailing in Israel in the years just prior to the Assyrian invasion. The first deals with Israel in the religious sphere (adulterers) and the second to Israel in the political sphere (a heated oven).
The latter half of chapter 7 contains three further comparisons, none of which are particularly flattering.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Modern attention spans are what they are. We try to keep these posts to roughly 2,000 words; conventional internet wisdom has it the average person begins to tune out around then. But there were at least three points we didn’t get around to last week in our discussion of the accusation raised by Tim Keller that the traditional evangelical fundraising model is systemically racist.
Tom: IC, I wanted to start out with this thought: Tim Keller is using woke language and making typical social justice assumptions about his fellow believers, but I don’t want to leave the subject without pointing out the there is nothing wrong with self-examination on the part of Christians, churches, and parachurch organizations.
A few days ago I offered readers a chance to comment on the subject of their level of satisfaction with their church experiences. To say the least, response was underwhelming. We had plenty of readers of that post, but none who took us up on our offer.
Two possibilities follow: (1) readers are so content with their church experiences that they have no point of contact with the article, or (2) readers do not feel comfortable speaking on this subject.
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In a post last week entitled “A Contradiction in the Church”, the Antemodernist observed that when the Christian community at large is clear and succinct in its condemnation, it is always against a sin that is convenient to hate. As he puts it, “Christians deal with the easy and convenient things, and so leave the important and difficult things growing like cancer.”
Publicly condemning masculine sins — foreign invasions, lust, violence — is the equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel, he suggests. Nobody minds and everybody cheers. But feminine sins — things like cross dressing or the homosexual mimicry of family life — have become virtually untouchable subjects.
I’ll grant him all that and go a step further.
The warden in the movie The Shawshank Redemption greets every new arrival with the words “Rule number one: No blasphemy. I will not have the Lord’s name taken in vain in my prison.”
Now, Shawshank is set in 1947 — not that long ago, all things considered — yet modern movie critics find the warden’s priorities perplexing.
“Ahead of murder?” inquires one.
Yes, even ahead of murder.
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“What’s the difference between righteousness and holiness?”
New Christians may hear these two biblical words as pretty much synonymous. After all, both qualities are on regular display when a believer is living a godly life, and we may be forgiven if we sometimes find them difficult to distinguish.
Nevertheless, the writers of the Bible do use these words differently, and we should probably make the same careful distinctions they do.
If I had entitled this article “Doing What I Ought” you might have thought “If he knows what he ought to do, why doesn’t he quit talking about it and just do it?” If I had written “you” instead, some might have decided to bypass this article altogether.
Instead, the title reads “we”, because both of us need to pay attention to what the Holy Spirit says about our privileges and responsibilities. There are things we should be doing, or doing with greater zeal. So before you turn away, think of this article as a reminder to us both.
A simile is a figure of speech in which the words “like” or “as” are used. A metaphor is a figure of speech where the terms of comparison are simply offered without the prepositions. In English at least, Hosea 7 is chock full of both types of comparisons. The nation of Israel is compared to at least five different things: (1) adulterers, (2) a heated oven, (3) an insufficiently baked cake, (4) a senseless dove, and (5) a bow that fails the archer.
With such a diverse selection of imagery, you would think the prophet would have no trouble making his point. But when hearts are hard enough, nothing gets through.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Tim Keller has been under fire around here lately. In mid-February we fisked a Daily Wire column by Megan Basham that listed Keller among thought leaders credibly accused of enabling Francis Collins to flog COVID propaganda to evangelicals by introducing him as a “friend” during a joint interview for BioLogos.
Collins is a man of the Left, a self-described ally and advocate of the gay and trans lobbies, has facilitated and funded experimental transgender research on minors, and has publicly defended experimentation on fetuses obtained from abortion. It’s one thing to engage personally and privately with such an individual in the name of Christ. It’s quite another to represent him to believers as fellow member of the flock and a trustworthy expert on science.
R.J. sent me an article this week and asked me what I thought.
I read the title: “Vampire Churches”. Instantly, visions of caped characters sweeping across the congregation, making “Nyuh ha ha” noises all the while sprang into my mind. I could see them clamping eager fangs on the swooning portly matrons of row three, their stodgy husbands standing by and intoning, “This is just not on!”
I read a little further. The article seemed passionately worried about the defection of pop writer Anne Rice from Catholicism. Strangely, I was not as troubled as the author about that.
The first historical interlude in the book of Leviticus is the longest of the three and culminates in the judgment-by-incineration of Nadab and Abihu, the elder two sons of Aaron, high priest of Israel.
This is neither the first nor the last time in scripture that God has introduced something new to human society only to have mankind promptly make a shambles of it.
We do not know the time interval between creation and the Fall, but it is not unreasonable to assume it was a comparatively short period. Man’s first mistake occurred at the first possible opportunity. The first murder occurred in the very first generation after the establishment of the new order brought on by Adam’s transgression. And when God rebooted the world with a global flood, Noah promptly got drunk and ended up cursing his own grandson.
There are individual sins and there are corporate sins. A woman who has an abortion commits the former; a nation that enshrines her right to do so in its law commits the latter. I leave it to you to weigh which is the greater offense.
From Sinai onward, upon becoming conscious of having personally violated God’s laws, individual Israelites could bring their offerings to the tabernacle or temple all year round to have their transgressions covered over. But Israel’s corporate transgressions also needed a way of being covered over, being arguably more offensive to God than sins any lone Israelite might commit, and therefore more likely to be the source of an outbreak of divine wrath against the entire nation.
“Are there people who will never change?”
A friend of a friend served as an elder in his local church for many years. From all reports he was good at it. When he chose to step away from his responsibilities in his fifties, people wondered why, and a mutual acquaintance was nosy enough to inquire.
Here is the essence of his reply. Excuse the paraphrase.
The Lord Jesus used the model of a flock when foretelling Pentecost and the formation of his church. He said this flock would need only one Shepherd, meaning himself. He thereby ensured his sheep would be brought safely home at the end of the day. None of his flock would be missing and the gates of Hades would not prevail against it, for he gave to each believer eternal life and no one could pluck them from his hand.
In this teaching the Lord was preparing his Jewish disciples for a hiatus in God’s program for establishing Israel as the head of the nations.
When Adam fell, he took with him our entire unfortunate race. When Adam died, we all died with him. When Adam transgressed, transgressing became part of how I experience being human.
Adam did not intend to become a murderer. The real murderer was the serpent. All the same, it was through Adam that Satan carried out his murderous plans, and he made Adam an unwitting party to the genocide of his entire race.
In scripture as in modern law, murder need not be a hands-on business.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Tom: We’re in the middle of batting around commonly misunderstood Bible verses. Here’s another frequently-quoted line for you, IC, this one from Proverbs:
“As he thinks within himself, so he is.”
I mentioned in another post a few weeks ago that I’ve often found other people understand individual proverbs very differently from the way I understand them. This one is no exception.
Imagine yourself sitting in the center row of a darkened theater at an evening performance of a show entitled Cabaret. Tonight’s offering is a musical, and yet it is a musical unlike most others. It’s almost entirely devoid of the kind of cheerfulness that is usually associated with that particular genre, focusing as it does on the excesses of the Weimar Republic in the days just before the outbreak of World War II. Such humor as the play has is heavily ironic, filled with innuendo, and ultimately black.
Leviticus is a Latin word derived from the Greek Leuītikos, meaning “levitical”, or “having to do with Levites”. The third book of the Old Testament is not the only place we find the Law of Moses laid out in detail for us: Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy preserve laws as well, but they are primarily historical books. Leviticus is unusual in that it contains almost nothing else but law after law after law.
There are three notable exceptions. We will definitely get to those.
“One who loves another has fulfilled the law.” So wrote the apostle Paul in Romans. Again, in Galatians he reminds his readers that “the whole law is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ ”
His point is that Christians behaving lovingly don’t need to worry about whether they are acting in the will of God or conforming in every detail to God’s law, because they are doing what God wants without even thinking about it. Their conformity to godliness has become as automatic and unconscious as breathing.
But love is only higher than law when it’s actually love.
“Are you more likely to trust politicians who claim to be Christian?”
Some people are reluctant to claim to be Christians. Jordan Peterson has dodged the question for years, sometimes more adroitly than others, for reasons he explained in a recent video clip: “Who would have the audacity to claim that they believed in God if they examined the way they lived? Who would dare say that? To have the audacity to claim that means that you live it out fully, and that’s an unbearable task, in some sense.”
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.