Mining the Minors: Joel (2)

The book of Joel is unusual among the Minor Prophets in several ways, and lends itself to a little different treatment than our usual verse-by-verse trek through the text.

Before we get too far into the specific details of Joel’s prophecy, let’s do a quick flyover to consider the larger context and help us formulate a method of approach to provide us with a consistent way of assessing the intended meaning of individual verses as we come to them.

If nobody else, that should at least help me stay on track.

Too Hot to Handle: The Whole of the Law

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

For those who have never heard of Aleister Crowley, a short bio culled from information available at Infogalactic.

Crowley was born into a wealthy Plymouth Brethren family in Warwickshire, England in 1875, and rejected Christianity to become an occultist, poet, painter and novelist. A practicing bisexual, he founded the religion of Thelema, promoted a form of Satanism, traveled the world, climbed mountains, experimented with hallucinogens and claimed to be a prophet of the Egyptian god Horus. In his day, he was referred to as “the wickedest man in the world”. In 2002, the BBC ranked him as the 73rd greatest Briton of all time.

College / University Survival Guide [Part 1]

It won’t be very long now until universities and colleges in North America begin gearing up for the year. And with this, a whole new cohort of Christian young people will enter post-secondary life for the first time.

Are they ready?

Parents often worry about that. Everybody knows that university can be a challenging place in which to hold to your faith. It’s full of new ideas — most of them secular, and not a few genuinely anti-Christian — and new experiences — not all of them perfectly healthy and safe. But it’s also a tremendously exciting time for many young people; and when we consider it part of a natural process of moving from parental control to full independence, then there’s every reason to be positive about it. (And parents, when you consider the alternative, what’s better?)

The False God of Education

My neighbor to the left is an attractive forty-something single mother with a small child and a big fence around her property, which abuts on an ‘L’-shaped swath of grass that is technically the property of the city. From time to time, in the dead of night, the occasional nefarious individual with a large item he wishes to dispose of quietly unloads his castoff between the fence and the street. It’s a whole lot easier and cheaper than driving it to the dump.

My neighbor’s frustration with this practice is obvious.

An Unfortunate Beverage

“Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great, she who made all nations drink the wine of the wrath of her sexual immorality.”

It’s not enough for the chronic sinner to quietly sin in a corner. Whatever tattered shreds of conscience he retains will trouble him just enough that he must rationalize his behavior, and that requires seeking the validation of others.

To secure their approval, he needs them to be thinking the same way he does. The quickest way to pervert their intellects along the same lines as his own twisted reasoning is to introduce them to his favorite sin, so they can experience the very same sort of moral tension with which he is struggling. So the sinner in the corner becomes the cause of stumbling in the public square, and sin spreads. Maybe if everybody’s doing it, it won’t feel so bad.

Anonymous Asks (263)

“What does ‘despising the shame’ mean?”

Hebrews 12:2 calls Jesus “the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God”. I always love verses that talk about Jesus being exalted to the Father’s right hand. That’s our security as believers: the Father’s pleasure in the finished work of his Son. Every demonstration of that is a confirmation that we are loved and protected, and that the penalty for our sins will never come back to haunt us.

The Bridegroom is Here

The Pharisees complained to Jesus about his disciples breaking the Sabbath by plucking and eating heads of grain as they made their way through the fields. If you had asked them why this mattered, they would have replied that they were concerned about the commandments of God. “It’s not lawful,” they said.

But when the people asked Jesus why it was that his disciples did not regularly engage in fasting, they were not asking about commandments or laws, but rather about a widespread, optional religious practice of the day.

Mining the Minors: Joel (1)

In attempting to the put the Minor Prophets in chronological order, dating Joel’s prophecy is one of the bigger challenges. Other prophets leave unambiguous internal evidence that help us date what they wrote; like, for example, dropping the name of a specific king, or mentioning the fall of Nineveh (which we can date to 612 B.C. from secular history) as either historical or else still future.

Joel doesn’t do that, at least not in any way most scholars deem conclusive.

Too Hot to Handle: Screened Out

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

I don’t spend a lot of time browsing the The New York Times, but this article was worth a few minutes. Nellie Bowles describes an increasingly common phenomenon: screens everywhere you go, doing almost everything people used to be paid to do. Touchscreens provide a consistent user experience, don’t take sick days, don’t unionize, and the hourly cost of maintaining them is considerably less than that of employing a person. For all but the wealthiest couple of percentiles of society, technology has become the go-to substitute for human contact.

Just Get Up

Sammy came to visit me yesterday.

I shouldn’t call him that, actually. He’s not a kid. He’s close to thirty now, I would guess; he’s done with college, done with establishing a career, and while he’s not yet married (if he ever chooses to be), he’s a highly successful entrepreneur who owns two flourishing businesses.

But when I knew him he was “Sammy”. I coached him in his teens, you see.

Thought Experiment #6: Fairness

Life isn’t fair.

That’s a concept with which some people have great difficulty. The social justice crowd invests endless time and energy trying to forcibly engineer new institutional dynamics that will lead to identical outcomes for all by embracing diversity, inclusion, multiculturalism and omnitolerance.

Well, that’s the goal in theory.

The Boiling Planet

I’m working my way through Revelation this month for the umpteenth time, not claiming to understand the finer details of the prophetic word much better than I did when I was in my twenties. Despite that, I am more than capable of grasping the broad strokes and basic implications for our world of what the Lord revealed to John in the last book of the Bible.

One of the most obvious takeaways from Revelation for the Christian in these troubled and confusing times is that when the end comes for our current world order, it will not be from incineration by the sun, as the climate change cult would have us believe.

Anonymous Asks (262)

“Why do you consistently use an initial capital on ‘Bible’ but not ‘scripture’?”

Good question. Most older Christian writers tend to use Scripture rather than scripture. So why am I an outlier in this regard?

My general preference is typically that of modern editors, which is to use as few initial caps as possible, only where setting a word in all lower case would obscure the intended meaning.

An Unnecessary Advocate?

Tuesday’s post about the Brunstad Christian Church revealed its members believe in sinless perfection. A submission from a former member of BCC on the website BCCTheTruth contains this quote:

“BCC’s main belief is that humans can become like Jesus. Not in a figurative sense; the belief that we can fully eliminate sin from our lives through faith in God.”

Additionally, some groups of sinless perfectionists teach that anyone who does not fully eliminate sin from his life is not genuinely saved. Since it would be a major blow to me to discover in eternity that they are correct about that, let’s have one more look at the doctrine.

Mining the Minors: Zephaniah (9)

The word “Armageddon” has become the generic way of referring to almost any end of the world scenario. In scripture, the word only occurs once, in Revelation 16:16, which we are going to look at today.

The book of Revelation describes the biblical end of the world as revealed to the apostle John by the glorified Christ. In this prophecy, Armageddon is the place where all the major Gentile nations assemble to do battle at the climax of the great tribulation period, in which God will bring about Israel’s repentance and recognition of its Messiah while simultaneously judging the nations of the world for their various evils and mistreatment of his people.

Too Hot to Handle: The Church and Fatherhood

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

Tom: Last week I came across a U.S. federal government site designed to be a resource for fathers and families. While of course we applaud any such effort in a period when the family is relentlessly under attack from all sides, it seems obvious secular governments are not well-equipped to teach the more spiritual aspects of fatherhood.

Fathers do not exist simply to pay the bills and do the heavy lifting around the house. The last time we talked, we compiled a list of fatherly responsibilities from scripture, and it was not a short one. God did not intend fathers to be dispensable, whatever our society may think.

Unforgivable Sin

Over the holidays I was browsing a bookshop, and by chance happened to pick up a copy of Søren Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death (1849).

Now, I’m not saying it’s a book everybody’s going to find easy to read. I don’t think it’s one that an unbeliever — no matter how bright — is really going to be able to understand. Nor do I think an average believer will find it straightforward. But if you’ve got the will and the ability, and especially if you are a person of some theological background and an interest in the welfare of Christians generally, I most highly recommend it.

It’s blowing my mind.

Times of Difficulty

“But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty.”

We are living in Paul’s “times of difficulty”. Can any Christian honestly dispute that?

If you ever doubt it for a moment, reflect on what you are seeing on YouTube and your TV, reading about online and in your newspaper — if anyone still reads anything other than the free tabloids they hand out on the subway. I did walk past one fellow delivering the national paper early one morning last week, but the houses of his subscribers were so far apart he had to use his car to do his deliveries efficiently. That’s where print is headed: the way of the dinosaur.

Like marriage.

He Said She Said

Some days I’m very glad I am not called upon to do too much judging in this life. Judging my own sin, yes. Discerning good from bad with respect to what constitutes moral conduct, sure. For these things, there is an objective standard: the holy scriptures. Judging correctly involves looking something up in God’s word, then trying to live it out.

That I can do.

Anonymous Asks (261)

“Why do some churches grow while others die?”

This is one of those questions for which there is no single definitive answer, especially given the way denominationalism has complicated something God made comparatively simple. First century churches were multi-ethnic, their membership driven by common faith and physical proximity rather than theological hair-splitting or spiritual consumerism.

Filling Golden Bowls

“… golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints.”

Stop for a moment and contemplate with me the wonder of having our prayers presented to God as an act of worship, of having our meditations before God described as “incense” in his sight, a fragrant offering. On my best day, I would never dare put it like that ... but God does. “What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer” indeed!

But would that be ALL our prayers in those golden bowls? I sincerely doubt it.

Mining the Minors: Zephaniah (8)

Zephaniah gives us a brief glimpse in these closing verses of the glories of the millennial reign of Christ in Israel, maybe the earliest among the Minor Prophets and one of the more fully developed visions of the Bible’s version of our future to date. Zephaniah concentrates primarily on the impact that the presence of Christ will have on his earthly people and his restoration of their perpetually-divided and much-maligned nation.

Where will Christians be in all this? Good question.

Too Hot to Handle: Responsible Fatherhood

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

The U.S. federal government is teaching fatherhood. Stop and think how many ways that could go wrong.

Now, the National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse (NRFC) is not a brand new initiative by any stretch. It claims to exist in order to “provide, facilitate, and disseminate current research, proven and innovative strategies that will encourage and strengthen fathers and families, and providers of services.” This looks like it is mostly done through social media, websites and virtual training courses, as well as access to help lines and so on.

Tom: You’ve spent most of your life working with teens, Immanuel Can. How important is it to high-schoolers to have a father present and engaged in their lives?

Living Under the Blade

Damocles, R. Westall, 1812

The ancient writer Cicero has an anecdote about a man named Damocles, a boot-licking courtier to the ancient despot Dionysius II. Damocles foolishly thought he’d like to see what it was really like to be a king, and so the king granted his wish.

Damocles quickly settled himself into Dionysius’ luxurious couch and began to enjoy the pleasures of rule — being fanned, having serving maids feed him, issuing commands, and so on. But in order to make the experience truly authentic, Dionysius gave one further order: that above Damocles’ head a shining sword would be suspended by a single horse-hair, so that he might be ever conscious that at any moment it might fall and carve the presumptuous pseudo-king in half.

Of course, Damocles soon begged the king to be allowed to return to his former position.

Not So Bad After All

Back in 2019, I answered the question “Why is God so morbidly violent in the Old Testament?” with five solid reasons the God of the Old Testament is not so bad after all, even by our presumptuous, permissive modern standards.

You won’t sell that truth easily to the average non-Bible reader. They are too caught up with the standard media tropes: that the God of the Old Testament was bloodthirsty and capricious, while Jesus was loving, forgiving and tolerant to a fault.

Neither stereotype is accurate. If you look at Jesus closely, he’s exactly like the God of the Old Testament.

Semi-Random Musings (31)

Sometimes witnessing doesn’t work, even when you do it to the best of your ability and everything initially appears to go swimmingly.

I’m sure you’ve had the experience. I know I have. I used to be a great believer in dialectical arguments and persuasive apologetics. I would study up a storm to answer a question from scripture that I believed might be important to someone’s salvation or growth in Christ.

I’m not saying a good apologetic never works, but there are things even the most polished and articulate argument can’t possibly accomplish.

Anonymous Asks (260)

“What’s the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation?”

When translating scripture from one language to another, experts must take into account that no single word in the receptor language may capture the meaning of the original word precisely. In such cases, they may employ a phrase to replace a single word, or else choose the best possible single word approximation.

The Sinless Christian

I was asked to do a study on sinless perfectionism recently for the first time in my life. You might think that’s a subject we’d have handled here on the blog, given that we’ve been publishing new articles daily since December 2013 and recently passed 3,500 posts; and certainly, we’ve made reference to the concept once or twice. But no, we’ve never gone into the teaching in any depth.

Partly this is because I’ve never encountered someone who believes in it.

Mining the Minors: Zephaniah (7)

In the course of our studies in the Minor Prophets, it has come to our attention repeatedly that prophetic utterances often apply to multiple times and places, and that their fulfillments may be literal, spiritual or both. It is possible to read Zephaniah 1:1 through 3:7 as applying almost exclusively to the period from the reign of Josiah in Judah through to the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem and the decades that followed. All but a few verses in these passages have already been fulfilled.

From 3:8 on, however, it is evident the prophet is speaking about days that are still future even for today’s reader.

Too Hot to Handle: Cult of Personality

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

Sunny Shell no longer follows John Piper or any of his ministries, and she certainly doesn’t endorse them to her friends. Why? Well, Piper invited speakers to his Desiring God National Conferences whose character and practices Sunny finds highly questionable, and Piper publicly participated in a “mystical type exercise”. Sunny concludes that Piper has been in some ways “led away from sola scriptura”, and has effectively written him off.

Tom: Now, I’m not about to critique Sunny’s choices here, Immanuel Can. I have more than a few doctrinal quibbles with Mr. Piper myself. But her post brings up a significant issue.

Faith’s Got Legs

It’s been a good winter for walking.

There’s hardly been any ice on the sidewalks, for one thing. For another, you could go out in February and march about in a thin jacket.

My little terrier has been ecstatic, actually. He loves a good walk. Dogs need a couple every day; and unlike in other winters, there have been plenty of smells around for him to get into. He stops everywhere, and he finds everything delightful. My dog trainer would never approve, but I can’t resist indulging him a little bit, and so our peregrinations contain frequent pauses to let him sniff about. Sometimes I actually think we walk his nose more than we walk my legs. But who could begrudge him a winter like this?

Alternative Theories of Atonement

Theologians refer to something called the “penal substitutionary theory of atonement” (PSA), which is a complicated way of trying to explain that Christ died in the place of sinners, taking on himself the full sentence we deserved in order to fully satisfy God with respect to sin. PSA is the traditional way of understanding one aspect of what the Lord Jesus was doing on the cross.

A number of people have proposed alternative theories of atonement — offering, in effect, substitutes for substitution — primarily because they dislike the idea of an angry God displaying his wrath against sin.

A Substitute for Substitution

The cross of Christ saves men and women from the wrath of God.

That notion troubles Matthew Distefano. He’s probably not the only one, but he is the only one I know who is currently writing a book about it, which he has entitled Heretic! An LGBTQ-Affirming, Divine-Violence Denying Christian Universalist’s Replies to Some of Evangelical Christianity’s Most Pressing Concerns.

“Ah yes,” you say, “I can see where this is going.” Probably true.

Anonymous Asks (259)

“What does it mean to be dead to sin?”

The phrase “dead to sin” comes from the language of Romans 6, in almost every translation you can find. Paul starts with “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?” He ends with “So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.”

Fair enough. So what DOES that mean exactly?

Memory Lapse

Every little local church has its characters. That’s not exactly what Peter was referring to when he called us a “peculiar people”, but it remains the case all the same. Some Christians are … well, odd. They study the scripture diligently, which is good, but seem to reliably produce the weirdest possible interpretations of it, which is probably not so good.

Novelty isn’t exclusively associated with error, but when we run into a Christian whose energies are primarily devoted to coming up with interpretations that defy conventional wisdom, a little verification is in order.

To say the least.

Mining the Minors: Zephaniah (6)

The last verses of the previous chapter of Zephaniah contemplate the obliteration of the capital city of Assyria, Nineveh.

Much has been said in the writings of other prophets concerning the evils of the world’s biggest cosmopolitan center in that day. Through Zephaniah, God singles out the sin of self-confidence, though the rulers of Nineveh had plenty more than that for which to account. Nineveh put its trust in a natural moat, rivers that surrounded it on three sides and forced attackers to approach it from the west. Its inhabitants said to themselves, “I am, and there is no one else”, because they could not imagine anyone more powerful than they were.

But of course there was. There was always God. Nineveh fell to the Chaldeans in 612 BC, as the Hebrew prophets foretold, and it was the Lord who gave Nebuchadnezzar his victory over them.

Too Hot to Handle: Ranking Evil

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

History has produced some seriously wicked people. On one level, that’s irrelevant: the comparative gravity or triviality of a man’s sins, as we assess them, makes him no more and no less subject to judgment than any human being born of Adam’s stock. Naturally speaking, we are all hell-bound and desperately in need of Christ.

Tom: That said, some of the people on this list have done incredible damage to the world and to their fellow men and women. Larry Taunton’s team ranked them 1-10. You may or may not agree.

What do you think of the list, Immanuel Can? Does it show a sense of perspective?

Collective Madness

“They said, ‘Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name.’ ”

What is collectivism? It’s not just the belief that it helps to have others around, or that a group can do more than a lone person can. Rather, it’s the belief and practice of making a group more important than any or all individuals in it.

It requires us to define the value of each human being by the crowds to which we suppose them to belong — their cultural, racial, economic, educational, sexual and historical peer-groups. It’s a form of Marxism, really, but Marxism in new clothes, because the evils of Marxism are too well known.

Settled Science

Science promoters reassure us of the safety of the peer review process. Most people imagine peer review consists of teams of scientists performing experiments to verify claims made in published studies. In reality, peer review often consists of little more than proofreading, and vast numbers of allegedly peer-reviewed studies have been demonstrated to be fraudulent. The editor of one of Britain’s top medical journals opined that “much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue”.

Oops.

Messengers and Marketers

The apostle Peter is writing about the letters of the apostle Paul, and he has this to say: “There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.” When something is hard to understand, it can stumble people, becoming an obstacle to faith or discipleship.

Believe it or not, that’s not always a bad thing.

Anonymous Asks (258)

“What does God have to say to single mothers?”

“Go and sin no more”?

Okay, not funny. More than a few single mothers — widows, abandoned wives — get little or no choice in the matter. Still, many young women these days elect to bring a child into the world under less than optimal circumstances, in which case much of what the Lord would say to single mothers is likely to be the same sort of thing he would say to people who have sinned in other ways.

Even “sin no more” was also said to a man. So there is that.

Inerrancy and Trust

Andy Stanley has taken a fair bit of flack for statements like this one about the inerrancy of scripture:

“When a specific view of inspiration is elevated to the status of doctrine, the Bible becomes an obstacle to faith for some.”

Critics have called Stanley everything from a liberal to a heretic, as Jared Wilson documents here. I can’t speak to the heresy part. I’ve read Stanley’s Irresistible, and you can find the critical commentary it inspired on our Book Reviews page. I think it’s misguided, sometimes gratuitously flippant and outright wrong in places, but I wouldn’t call it heretical in the sense that it would cause me to question Stanley’s devotion to Christ and his people, or his general orthodoxy.

Mining the Minors: Zephaniah (5)

Buried amidst all the specific prophesied judgments of Zephaniah 2 is this more general statement: “The Lord will … famish all the gods of the earth, and to him shall bow down, each in its place, all the lands of the nations.”

We should never forget as we read the scriptures that the rise and fall of nations, past and present, is not merely the product of the ingenuity of human generals or the whims of the kings of the earth. Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin are not the people calling the shots. Behind the scenes lie the principalities and powers, the “gods ['ĕlōhîm] of the earth”. In pitting nation against nation, God is displaying his superiority to and sovereignty over every spirit being in the universe, no matter how powerful or influential. He promises to “famish” or starve them, diminishing their glory and demonstrating their relative insignificance.

The rest of the chapter is the evidence that backs up this statement.

Too Hot to Handle: Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before

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

Time has a way of dealing with issues that once seemed irresolvable. In 2018, we passed the 25th anniversary of Gail Riplinger’s New Age Bible Versions, a 1993 offering that rocked the evangelical world by purporting to expose the NASB, NIV and other modern translations of the Bible as literally satanic and their translators as practicing occultists.

Ship of Fools, or The Titanic Arrogance of Postmodernity

“We’re setting sail
To the place on the map
From which no one has ever returned
Drawn by the promise of
the joker and the fool
By the light of the crosses that burn

Drawn by the promise of
the women and the lace
And the gold and the cotton and pearls
It's the place where they keep all the darkness you need
You sail away from the light of the world on this trip, baby

You will pay tomorrow
You’re gonna pay tomorrow
You will pay tomorrow”

— Ship of Fools, World Party (1986)

Those are pretty “Christian” lyrics, really.

Oh, they’re not genteel, kindly or polite, to be sure; but they’re real, they’re true and they’re accurate — at least when we apply them to our present society.

One and Done

Little is known about the writer of Psalm 89, but it’s still a great deal more than we know about the writers of some other psalms.

Ethan the Ezrahite was a Levite musician, poet and prophet who came to prominence as a young man during David’s reign, continuing his ministry into the reign of Solomon and perhaps even that of his ill-fated son Rehoboam, which lasted from 931-913 BC.

Evidence for that last statement to come …

That Flash of Anger

You’re talking to a friend about a third party. It really doesn’t matter who — I’ve had these conversations about Madonna, about family members, and even about the CEO of Canadian Tire. But, though the conduct of the subject of your discussion has precisely zero impact on either your friend or you, it seems blatantly obvious to you that this individual has done something morally and biblically indefensible, something that any right-thinking person would usually condemn.

Then your friend sets out to defend what that person did. Oh boy.

Anonymous Asks (257)

“Who authored the Psalms?”

Scripture clearly identifies many of the psalmists with superscriptions. Sometimes we even get a little bit of detail about the circumstances in which they wrote. For example, the superscription for Psalm 3 is “A Psalm of David, when he fled from Absalom his son”, and Psalm 7 is called “A Shiggaion of David, which he sang to the Lord concerning the words of Cush, a Benjaminite”.

Please don’t ask what a “shiggaion” is. It’s one of those words Strong’s Concordance labels as “doubtful”.

Evidence We Can Point To

Apologists gotta apologize.

You can’t blame them, really. It’s how apologists are made, and the body of Christ would not be complete or anywhere near so well defended if we didn’t have them. But sometimes, no matter how hard we want to demonstrate that some assertion we disagree about in scripture is intellectually, historically, scientifically or factually defensible, we are going to hit a wall.

Mining the Minors: Zephaniah (4)

Lee Child writes about two fictional Colorado towns called Hope and Despair, both established by settlers on their way west to California. In his story, the Rockies are visible from the flatlands around Hope, blue and dominating, tantalizingly close. However, the territory west of Hope is mildly elevated, providing a clearer picture of the real distances. Only a few miles further west, the wagon trainers in Child’s story come to realize their earlier optimism was the product of an optical illusion, and that they are still hundreds of miles from their goal. Hence the name Despair for the second town.

Prophetic distances are equally hard to estimate from afar.