Is brokenness desirable?
Unless you are around great numbers of mainstream evangelicals on a regular basis, you may not think so. But if you have been in such esteemed company, you’ve probably heard the enviable qualities of a broken spiritual state touted so enthusiastically over the last few years that you may have come to believe Christians ought to seek out and cultivate it.
Okay, let’s consider that.
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There’s no getting around the fact that the Bible’s pictures of wickedness are frequently female. We’re going to study one today.
Commentators occasionally feel the need to apologize for this, as if maybe the Holy Spirit might be a tad misogynistic, or perhaps the prophets of God went off the reservation and used imagery consistent with their patriarchal biases that he might not have personally approved.
Hey, we all know the Lord Jesus loved women …
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Immanuel Can: The only verse in the Bible that everyone today seems to know is “Judge not lest ye be judged.”
Tom: Sounds about right.
IC: Okay, so that verse seems to people to be conveying something important. Maybe it needs some closer examination.
Tom: Fair enough. Well, it seems to me there’s an obvious incentive on the part of those who use it to rebut any potential critique of their own behaviors — or the behaviors of those for whom they choose to be advocates. I mean, quoting a verse to an unbeliever would carry no weight at all, so it’s clearly a device to disqualify dissenting Christian opinion and shut down any debate before it begins.
It’s saying to you and me, “Aha, see, you’re not allowed to have a view on this.”
“Some bells cannot be unrung.”
So goes the saying when something has been done that cannot be undone. The ink has been spilled, the glass has been shattered, the clock cannot be rewound, the world has moved on. The arrow has flown, the words said cannot be recalled to the mouth, and “send” has been pressed. There is no going back, no fixing things “as they were”, or maybe “as they should have been”.
From now on, for good or for ill, things can never be the same.
As is often the case, this week’s instalment of Doug Wilson’s letters column turned out to be thought provoking. A reader notes that he can’t recall a single time in the lengthy history of Doug’s blog that Doug has spoken about his own struggles with specific sins.
It raises a perfectly reasonable question: When is public confession of my sins appropriate, and when isn’t it? What constitutes a legitimate Christian “confession session”?
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“He hated congregational religion. He hated the smiles and the manners of the Sunday-dressed Scottish Protestant, the emphasis on a communion not with God but with your neighbours. He had tried seven churches of various denominations in Edinburgh, and had found none to be to his liking. He had tried sitting for two hours at home of a Sunday, reading the Bible and saying a prayer, but somehow that did not work either. He was caught; a believer outwith his belief. Was a personal faith good enough for God? Perhaps …”
— Ian Rankin, Knots & Crosses
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“Is the sanctity of human life a biblical concept?”
Scripture is clear throughout that human life has intrinsic value. God made man in his own image and after his own likeness, a statement made about no other created beings in the universe.
That alone should make us cautious about taking the life of another.
We live in a broken culture. Not breaking. Broken. They did not see fit to acknowledge God, and God has given them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.
In Romans, that manifests in heartlessness and ruthlessness, dishonesty and disobedience, among a litany of other bad things. In reality, a debased mind manifests in all these ways at the expense of others, but it is also unbelievably self-destructive and internally contradictory.
Debased thinking is fundamentally unfit to accomplish anything. But debased people make the best pawns imaginable.
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In interpreting Zechariah, a great deal depends on the systematic theology of the reader. When you start with an ironclad overview of the prophetic scriptures in mind, it’s next to impossible to interpret individual passages without inflicting your prejudices on them. I’ll try to keep that in mind as I go along.
The next two visions are considerably more difficult. They must be, as scholarly opinions about their meanings are all over the map. I’ll give a quick summary of the major viewpoints and then, in most cases, tell you where and why I disagree with them, and what I’d suggest as alternatives.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Tom: There’s a line I keep hearing these days that goes something like this:
“We should keep unity for the sake of the gospel. Major on the majors, and not on the minors. We shouldn’t fight over secondary issues.”
Immanuel Can, some things are worth fighting over. Jude urges his readers, who appear to be a very general believing audience, to “contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints”.
So what’s really worth contending for, and what should be set aside for the sake of unity? In short, what makes something “major” or “minor”?
Immanuel Can: Ah. What do I mean, or what do most other people I meet seem to mean? Can you clarify?
Tom: I take it there’s a significant difference then.
“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…’ ”
I’m going to write today as briefly, as bluntly and yet as informatively as I can.
I will do this because I feel we are dangling presently on a precipice of a major social crisis. The Christian position in this must be made clear, and made clear now, if Christian choices are to be well made.
The following is absolutely fictional and increasingly common. There is no Brad and definitely no Jill, in case that is not obvious. There are, however, way too many people in their position.
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You still up, Tom?
Sadly. Surprised you are. Don’t
you have to be out the door by
Can’t sleep. Decisions, decisions …
What’s on your mind, Brad?
Two girls. Well, women, obviously. Friends who started coming to my Thursday Bible study.
Ed Shaw is attracted to men. Out of love for Jesus Christ, he never acts on those impulses. He hopes and expects to die a virgin.
That gives him enormous credibility as the author of 2015’s The Plausibility Problem: The Church and Same-Sex Attraction, in which Shaw affirms the scriptural basis for the orthodox Christian position on homosexuality.
In doing so, Shaw has a challenge for the church.
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“Why are there so many Christian interpretations?”
Knowledge is fundamentally divisive. The moment any of us determines to “get to the bottom” of this or that subject, he begins to depart from the popular narrative about it. One possibility is that he gets labeled a conspiracy theorist and marginalized by society. Another is that he becomes an expert and people start turning to him for advice.
Any exposure to increased information, true or false, creates divisions.
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I’ve told this story before, but it perfectly illustrates the mentality addressed in today’s quote.
In the mid-eighties, I was introduced to a fellow college student who claimed to be very interested in Jesus Christ, but had a “few” questions about the Bible first. I naturally offered to help in any way that I could. He handed me a list of familiar posers along the lines of “Where did Cain get his wife?”
Okay, the issues seemed important to him, so fair enough.
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Wikipedia says, “A perpetual motion machine is a hypothetical machine that can do work infinitely without an external energy source. This kind of machine is impossible, since its existence would violate either the first or second law of thermodynamics, or both.”
In the real world, systemic failure is inevitable. The most sophisticated humanly devised machinery eventually breaks down and grinds to a halt.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
As long as there has been a people of God in the world, there have been those who looked to take advantage of them. The Israelites had their false prophets, and Peter warns the young church to expect their share of false teachers. He says, as the translators of the King James Version so eloquently put it, “Through covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you.”
Tom: But of course the trick is always identifying such people, isn’t it, Immanuel Can? I mean, what does that look like in the real world?
In my previous post, “Offensive Christianity”, I argued that many of us misunderstand the choice we have in facing Christ: we think it’s between faith and doubt — but in scripture, it is between faith and being offended.
Everybody struggles with doubt. And perhaps we tend to think that when we do, it signals something very, very bad. Maybe it means our faith has failed. Maybe it means we were never sincere in the first place. Maybe it means we’re lost.
It is remarkable that the only mention of Sabbath-keeping in all the epistles comes in Colossians 2, where Paul identifies it as one of the requirements of Jewish law eclipsed in Christ. The apostle writes:
“Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.”
The Sabbath, Paul says, was a shadow. That’s important.
I recently had a long, serious conversation with a lovely woman who is spending far too much time contemplating a possible course of action she knows unequivocally is destructive and displeasing to the God she claims to love and serve.
My reaction: This will not end well. It never does.
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“How should a Christian respond to being in a loveless marriage?”
People have different personalities and experiences, as well as different levels of character development and maturity, so it should not come as a surprise that we enter married life looking for different things. In general, men are looking for respect from their wives, and women are looking for love from their husbands.
I am getting that from a couple of places.
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Grant Richison inquires what Paul meant when he ends a long statement in Philippians 3 with the words “… that by any means possible I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.”
In English, Richison says, the wording seems to express doubt about the certainty of Paul’s resurrection (and by implication the resurrection of others as well).
“Does he question the assurance of his salvation?” Richison asks. He goes on to examine the passage for clues.
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Zechariah is the penultimate Minor Prophet and the penultimate book of the Old Testament in the order we have it in English, as well as historically. He is also the penultimate prophet in the Hebrew Old Testament, though not the next-to-last book, which is Chronicles.
Given his proximity to the New Testament, we should not be surprised to find Christ so prominent in Zechariah, as we have mentioned. Zechariah’s vision in chapter 3 portrays Messiah in at least four different aspects: (1) as priest, (2) as the angel of the Lord, (3) as the Branch, and (4) as the stone with seven eyes.
Let’s dive in.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
The soul: it’s a heavy topic, and one that not everyone agrees about. Dr. Robert Lanza is a biologist who says that consciousness creates the universe rather than the other way around. He’s what is called a “biocentrist”. His is a relatively new theory, having come into play around 2007. The fundamental notion behind it is that the much sought-after “Theory of Everything” scientists are looking for cannot be found until biology is placed at the head of the sciences.
Tom: It’s interesting, Immanuel Can, to see the spiritual dimension of life acquiring some scientific credibility. Do you want to take a shot at explaining Dr. Lanza’s theory?
“It has been customary to employ the category ‘doubt’ where one ought to speak of ‘offense.’ The relationship … to Christ is not either to doubt or to believe, but either to be offended or to believe.”
— Søren Kierkegaard,
Training In Christianity
I have said this before, and I’ll say it again: the opposite of faith is not doubt.
Doubt dwells with faith, just as stress dwells with growth. Growth of muscles happens by straining them. Growth of skills happens by them being tested. We become by overcoming. Faith needs stress, needs tests, needs stretching into new areas, needs maturing — and where this process is happening, doubt will be present as well. It is the thing faith needs to conquer.
The uncertainties of life are the gymnasium of the soul.
Years ago, an older Christian told me I perplexed him. “You’re liberal on neckties (I declined to wear them) but conservative on scripture,” he said. He probably capitalized “Scripture” to himself when he said it. At that church, traditions mattered more than they probably should.
Neckties and orthodoxy are light years apart in spiritual importance. Unfortunately, in those days they often came as a package deal.
Some necessary background for anyone not up to date on the latest evangelical brouhahas. From Fox News: A Christian radio network recently dropped the daily broadcast of an Ohio pastor over advice he gave a questioning grandma. Alistair Begg says he is “not ready to repent” for telling her she should attend her grandson’s wedding to his transgender fiancé as long as she had privately advised him that in making an appearance at his celebration, she was not affirming his life choices.
Hey, bad advice is everywhere, and some choices are more complex than others.
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“What does it mean that the Holy Spirit will guide you into all truth?”
The Lord Jesus promised his disciples that when the Spirit of truth came, the Helper from the Father who would convict the world of sin, righteousness and judgment, he would guide them into “all truth”.
Before we look into the meaning of this promise, we need to remember that every member of the Lord’s audience at the discourse that began in the upper room was in a unique and impossible-to-duplicate position.
Western culture separates the wedding ceremony from the wedding celebration, usually by no more than a few hours. Jewish culture in the first century did too, but between the legal contract of marriage [erusin] signed by the husband and the bride’s father and its celebration and consummation [nissuin] lay a considerably longer interval. The marriage supper and its aftermath might take place weeks, months or years after the signing of the contract.
It might even be indefinitely postponed, assuming we are reading the relevant instructions in 1 Corinthians correctly.
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Several years back, my cantankerous next-door neighbor had her front walk redone with great, imposing slate pavers. I’m not sure they harmonized with the look of her property quite as well as the railroad ties she had in prior years, and I bet they cost a bundle, not least for the prodigious amount of labor involved in what initially looked like a fairly small project. It took three men several days to tear up what was there and replace it.
There was only one problem.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
If the quotation in this Breitbart article is even close to accurate, the head of the Roman Catholic church has just thrown one of the most important principles of first century Christian faith under the bus:
“The last thing I should do is to try to convince an unbeliever. Never. The last thing I should do is speak.”
Tom: So now the most revered figure in one of the world’s biggest branches of Christianity insists all testimony to Christ must be non-verbal. What do you think of that, IC?
“Well, you know, many roads lead up the mountain …”
So he said to me.
People say stuff like that all the time when they want to avoid facing God. “I can do it my way,” they say, hoping that saying it strongly enough will make it true. Or, they say, “Everybody’s got a piece of the truth, but nobody’s got it all,” like the story of the blind men and the elephant (if you know that little tale).
An old acquaintance obsessed with classical literature used to observe that her generation was “killing the adverb”. The vocabulary of her schoolmates had degenerated to the point that they no longer modified or qualified their verbs with the eloquence and succinctness possessed by the writers of previous generations.
She would not have found that in the New Testament, even in the most modern English translations. Far from being dead, the adverb is everywhere in the Christian life.
“It is required of stewards that they be found faithful.”
If you ever rise to the spiritual heights of the apostle Paul — and I have lately come to the conclusion that I am unlikely to manage that — you will be nothing more than a servant and a steward. That is the very best you and I may aspire to in the Christian life, and our efforts to remain conscious of the reality that everything we have been given has been temporarily entrusted to us by God are a mark of growing maturity in Christ.
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“How can we know the Holy Spirit is present with us when nobody is expressing strong feelings?”
Some Christians — often women, let’s be honest — evaluate the spiritual temperature of a religious gathering by its perceived emotional intensity; by whether participants spring a leak while praying, singing or sharing their thoughts. If they had their way, there would be a box of Kleenex in every pew and we would take our spiritual temperature by how often they need replacement.
Is this actually a biblical idea?
“There are some things in them that are hard to understand …”
Paul could be a difficult writer. Peter says as much, while affirming that the Holy Spirit carried along his fellow apostle throughout the authorial process.
It’s all too easy to point to examples in Paul’s epistles. The run-on sentences. The apparent digressions and rabbit trails. The practical instruction that turns out to be theology as well, and operates on two levels. It’s not exactly Christianity 101, but this is how God chose to reveal the mystery of Christ and the mystery of his church to the world. Who are we to say he should have done it differently?
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The prophet Zedekiah once forged a pair of animal horns out of iron as an object lesson for the kings of Israel and Judah, who were contemplating going up to Ramoth-gilead to fight the king of Syria. It must have been quite a dramatic moment when he trotted out his artistic creation in front of the two Hebrew kings on their thrones before a gathering of 400 prophets, crying out, “With these you shall push the Syrians until they are destroyed.” Too bad Zedekiah was actually a false prophet regurgitating what he thought King Ahab wanted to hear.
All the same, his literal “forgery” gives us a little bit of insight into the meaning of the imagery in Zechariah’s second vision.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Some people market Christianity like fire insurance, and others buy into it in fear of judgment. Then there are the folks like Joel Osteen who tell us being a believer will make us powerful and successful. Others who claim to represent Christ tell us that knowing Jesus will make us better human beings, improve our relationships or help us cope in bad times. Intellectual believers may say that in their search for truth, the Christian worldview best explains things about which they have always wondered.
Tom: Immanuel Can, there is a certain amount of rationality in most of these motives, but do they really get to the core of the Christian message?
“Clowns to the left of me,
Jokers to the right,
Here I am
Stuck in the middle with you.”
— Stealers Wheel, 1972
Doesn’t it seem these days like the world has divided right down the middle? We’ve got Conservatives and Liberals, Democrats and Republicans, Brexiters and Europhiles, open borders advocates and controlled immigration people, social justice warriors and free speech advocates, the politically correct and the deliberately controversial, individualists and collectivists … and on, and on, and on.
Iron and clay, maybe.
He’s Just Not That Into You was a 2009 romantic comedy that explored why relationships fail or succeed, and why a romantic pairing that appears to have “worked” for years suddenly stops working for one of the partners, whether it’s the man “falling out of love” with the woman or vice versa.
In the various couple-scenarios trotted out by the movie’s producers, it apparently never once occurred to them to introduce one in which the woman was on hormone-based birth control when she first became attracted to her future life partner, then stopped using the pill once they had committed to each other.
Maybe research into all “the pill’s” many side effects wasn’t quite there in 2009.
Actions have consequences. That’s easy to say, but the implications are not always so easy to unpack.
I was thinking about this a few days ago when a friend asked what the church can do (pre-emptively, rather than after the fact) about the frightening increase in children from Christian families who are identifying as gay, lesbian and trans.
My answer was immediate: Encourage committed Christian parents to work less and get by on lower incomes in order to free up time to home school their children from kindergarten on.
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“When does grief become excessive?”
Grief is appropriate in a fallen world. The Lord Jesus taught that those who mourn are blessed, and will be comforted, and that the poor in spirit will inherit the kingdom of heaven. Scripture teaches that God himself may be grieved by the sins of his children.
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Mark’s list of the twelve apostles includes the names of two fathers: Zebedee and Alphaeus. Matthew includes the same two fathers, and Luke includes Alphaeus.
If you wonder why, look no further than their sons, both of whom are called James. To distinguish between them, the gospel writers use the names of their fathers as what are called disambiguators, phrases that clarify the author’s intended meaning.
Good thing too, or the New Testament could get pretty confusing.
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The phrase “the angel of the Lord” occurs 58 times in 19 Old Testament passages. Three of these passages are in Zechariah. The name appears to designate a unique being distinct from and possessing greater authority than other angels, one who identifies himself with deity and acts as if he were God.
We know the Lord Jesus was active on God’s behalf during the OT period. When we add to that John’s claim that no one has ever seen God, and that God has been (and continues to be) made known only through his Son, the Word, the logical conclusion is that the angel of the Lord was a visual manifestation of the preincarnate Christ.
More on that shortly.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
The German mathematician Johannes Kepler once responded to a question about his work in astronomy by saying “I was merely thinking God’s thoughts after him.” If that’s true in math or science or any search for “small-t truth”, it’s most applicable when we come to the study of God’s word. Explaining “Big-T Truth” for our fellow believers so they may grow up in Christ is one of the most important tasks ever given to men, and the challenge to do it right is described by Peter in the words “whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God”.
Tom: IC, we were just emailing each other about a sequential exposition series you’ve been sharing with other men in your own local church. Describe for our readers the small problem you’ve encountered and have needed to work at overcoming in the process.
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“I know the Bible says we’re not supposed to depend on our feelings, but sometimes, honestly, it gets hard to feel my faith. Any thoughts?”
Feelings? Yes, they’re tricky things. You’re right to wonder about whether it’s not just a little too optimistic to simply suppose Christians never ought to feel down. We all have moments in life when things are not just a little dark, but really, really dark. What’s interesting, though, is that the writers of the Bible are far from unaware of this.
“You need to dial down the language,
Mr. Patout,” I said.
“Don’t you lecture me, boy,” he said.
— From
The New Iberia Blues
by James Lee Burke
Some subjects are difficult to talk or write about without giving offense. The use of appropriate language is one of them.
In internet parlance, an “echo chamber” is a sociological phenomenon produced by the algorithms on major websites that respond to our choices of viewing material with suggestions for other options.
Because web designers want users to ingest their content, read their advertising and buy the stuff they are flogging, anything we look at regularly online generates multiple opportunities to do more of the same and fewer and fewer invitations to do anything different. Amazon does it. Google does it. YouTube does it. Your favorite news website probably does it. Everybody does it.
Sometimes it’s merely irritating. Sometimes it’s downright funny. But you must have noticed it.
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“Should Christians in democracies feel obligated to vote?”
Voting is not mandatory. Depending on how you think about it, voting can be anything from a privilege to a perceived civic duty, or even an exercise in futility.
Let me give you an example of the latter. In Canada, a “riding” is an electoral district with fixed boundaries
rarely adjusted by the reigning Powers That Be unless it favors their party’s
“We brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world.”
No matter how public our profile in life may be, and no matter how good our intentions, one of the things we cannot take out of the world with us is any rock-solid evidence that we have reformed its institutions or brought light to the darkness of the culture around us in any lasting, positive way. Unlike the changes that Christ brings to the individual human heart, the effect of any changes we introduce into the system will always be fleeting at best.