“Then Isaac trembled very violently.”
If Isaac had gotten his way, Esau would have become a great nation. Jacob’s offspring would have served his elder brother’s children. Maybe Hamas would be targeting Edomites today instead of Israelis.
If Isaac had gotten his way, God would have undeservedly blessed a son who despised his own birthright, and back-burnered the son who valued it.
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The Lord’s table is a sufficiently important subject that I’ve felt the need to touch on it recently outside this series. Today’s post is probably more effective if you read it in connection with that one.
Our reading in Malachi is the first of five complaints made by the Lord against his people approximately a century after they were allowed to return to their historic homeland by a Persian monarch with respect for Israel’s God. Sadly, all that God had done on their behalf didn’t keep Judah and Israel from going astray in a variety of new ways.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Writer Andrew Sullivan gives this advice to churches:
“If the churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction, perhaps they might begin to appeal anew to a frazzled digital generation. Christian leaders seem to think that they need more distraction to counter the distraction. Their services have degenerated into emotional spasms, their spaces drowned with light and noise and locked shut throughout the day, when their darkness and silence might actually draw those whose minds and souls have grown web-weary.”
Tom: “The greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction.” What do you think, IC? Is technology dangerous to Christians?
I was listening to a preacher a few days ago … just online, you know. And he said something that’s stayed with me and keeps running around in my head, because it’s just so smart. It’s something that solves a perplexity for me that I have to confess I’ve struggled with for years. I want to pass it on to you.
My perplexity has been this: When do you just say what the Bible says, and when do you hold back?
The preacher said this: “I’m through protecting people from scripture.”
Life changes us. Some people get better, some get worse, but nobody remains unchanged. At least, that’s the conclusion I’m coming to. Either my memory is failing me — a possibility I won’t completely discount — or my old friends and acquaintances are different people than they were in their teens, twenties and thirties. Time and circumstances have either refined or greatly eroded their characters, depending on how they responded to what life has served up.
That can be a scary thing to witness up close.
“While people are saying, ‘There is peace and security,’ then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.”
The day of the Lord will catch the world by surprise. I used to find this strange. I don’t anymore.
The vast majority of human beings are instinctively uniformitarian in their outlook. They don’t read history, and even if they do, they don’t imagine the sort of catastrophes that occurred in other times and places could possibly happen during their lifetimes, let alone a once-in-human-history event like the day of the Lord. In one of the earliest books of the New Testament, Paul writes that the day of the Lord will come like a thief. In one of the last books, Peter says exactly the same thing. Few on earth will see it coming.
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“Why does God test us?”
Regardless of your personal beliefs about the origin of man, it’s evident bad things happen to good people. The difference between a Christian worldview and a naturalistic one is that the latter offers no explanation for suffering and unpleasant choices beyond the luck of the draw. If randomness rules, then these serve no higher purpose than weeding out the weak. If God does, then perhaps misery has meaning.
I could offer all kinds of anecdotes and speculations in response to a question like this, but it’s one that scripture answers in plain language very early on. Who needs my opinion when we can read the words of the Holy Spirit through men like Moses and Job?
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After almost eleven years and nearly 4,000 posts, my closest friends are getting a little warier about our conversations and emails, suspicious that almost anything interesting they may introduce in conversation will probably end up on the blog in some form or another. That’s not entirely true — I try to respect people’s privacy. If you’re just spitballing a theological idea with me by text or email, I won’t quote you on it, and I certainly wouldn’t use your name. You may change your mind about it next week, after all.
That said, if you’ve refined your thoughts sufficiently to voice them from the platform or put them up online, it’s game on. Maybe my pals are right to be cautious!
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“I have loved Jacob but Esau I have hated.”
Few statements in scripture are so frequently alleged to teach something they really don’t. Paul’s famous quotation of Malachi is not about election to individual salvation or damnation, not in Romans 9 and definitely not in its original context, which we will look at today. Rather, let me suggest it concerns the election of two nations to strategic roles in human history (as discussed here): one as the beneficiary of grace and the other as an object lesson never to be forgotten. “Loved” and “hated” are relative terms that have more to do with God’s sovereign dispensation of mercy and justice than with his emotional state.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Earlier this month, the Cultural Research Center of Arizona Christian University released its 11th and latest detailed analysis of the results of its January American Worldview Inventory 2020 survey. In a long list of bullet points, CRC Director of Research George Barna noted that, among other disturbing trends, 44% of respondents who self-identify as Christian said they believe the Bible’s teaching about abortion is “ambiguous”, and that 34% said abortion is morally acceptable if it spares the mother from financial or emotional discomfort or hardship.
Tom: The Christian news website Not The Bee (“your source for headlines that should be satire, but aren’t”) took the survey at face value and pushed back hard with a salvo of scripture, and good for them.
“So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.”
Eating and drinking to the glory of God?
What a strange idea. I get the “eating” part, and I get the idea of “glorifying God”. But what does our action of eating have to do with God’s glory?
That’s going to take some explaining.
Luke documents that Paul initially worked as a tentmaker when staying in the city of Corinth. Making tents paid the bills so that every Sabbath, Paul could be found in the synagogue, trying to persuade Jews and Greeks that Jesus was the Messiah. We don’t have any further detail, but it sounds like he may have plied his secular trade as many as six days a week during this period.
That was before the invention of sewing machines. If his fingers got sore, it was not from flipping the pages of one too many Bibles.
“Some were tortured … Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment … They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated — of whom the world was not worthy — wandering about in deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.”
One of the most compelling arguments for the sincerity of the many witnesses to the resurrection of Christ, on which the Christian faith depends, is that first century believers continued to claim Jesus was alive in the face of decades of the most intense Jewish hostility, and later widespread Gentile opposition. Not all gave their lives for their faith, but most or all risked martyrdom along the way.
Rational men, it is argued, will not die for something they know to be a lie. It’s a point not easily disproved.
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“Is it wrong for a woman to propose marriage to a man?”
Funny story, or maybe not. When I tried to generate a suitable picture to accompany this post, I made 25 attempts with my usual AI tool to show a woman proposing to a man. Eventually, I gave up. No combination of carefully worded prompts could induce the algorithm to produce anything but the most traditional image of a man on one knee holding a ring. I could get the woman to change positions, but I could not get the man to stand up and appear to be the object of feminine desire. Every one of the terabytes of data to which this tool has access was telling it I couldn’t possibly want what I appeared to be wanting.
I had an easier time generating an image of Israel being nuked. Hmm. Maybe we can learn something from that.
Once upon a time, there was a tabernacle constructed in accordance with the will of God revealed on Mount Sinai. In that tabernacle, outside the veil on the north side, was a table of acacia wood covered with gold, atop which were plates and dishes for drink offerings and the bread of the Presence, twelve loaves in two piles. The high priest was to replace the bread regularly and arrange it before the Lord every Sabbath, after which he and his sons were to eat it in a holy place.
When we talk about the “table of the Lord”, we are not talking about that sort of physical, literal table. Not at all.
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The name Malachi appears exactly once in scripture, giving us no connection to the historical books of the Old Testament by which to identify or describe its very last recorded prophet. That’s unless you want to count John the Baptist as the last, and there’s a pretty good case to be made for him. Nevertheless, since our mission here has been to explore the twelve Minor Prophets, we’ll leave John out of it. Except we can’t. John is going to make a cameo appearance in Malachi’s final verses, making for about the neatest possible segue from Testament to Testament.
Go ahead, tell me the Bible is just a bunch of books cobbled together by human authors and editors.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Mike Leake has a few words to say here about stewardship of the word of God. Leake says that preachers and teachers tend to approach their responsibilities one of two ways. In Scenario 1, like the servant in the parable of the talents. In Scenario 2, like Paul instructed Timothy, guarding “the good deposit”.
Tom: One approach attempts to improve on what has been given while the other simply attempts to retain what has been given.
What do you think of his analysis, and how do you approach the word of God when you’re responsible to share it with others, IC?
It seems everybody today is complaining about the lack of leadership in the local church. Those appointed to lead are not leading at all, or they’re leading too much. Either the whole church is failing to stand for anything, or else arbitrary and inflexible leadership is killing off the life of the church by strangling it with tradition, routine and rules. No one likes how things are running, but no one is terribly sure what a better style of leadership would look like.
Oh, there’s no end of advice out there.
Doug Wilson’s weekly letters column is equally a source of regular entertainment and occasional edification. I trek by it dutifully every Tuesday, as I do with several other writers who hold alternative theological views about this and that. My theory is that you can’t meaningfully address an area of perceived error without allowing its adherents to express themselves in their own words. If we don’t understand each other’s positions, we will always end up talking past one another.
Well, that is the theory, as I say. How it plays out is another kettle of fish.
The book of Revelation has been on my mind lately. Immanuel Can and I were talking about it yesterday, as he’s been preaching from it all year. I haven’t been studying it in depth, but it keeps coming up in connection with other things, like our Mining the Minors instalments on Zechariah, which inevitably lead you into Revelation. The similarities of theme and language are impossible to ignore.
Then there’s this Gaza business in the news, which makes all the dispensationalists go “Uh oh” and a fairly sizable chunk of the Reformers start writing about how there will never be a national restoration of Israel. One’s view of Revelation plays into how Christians respond to that too.
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“Is there any way the new heavens and new earth could be happening now?”
The idea that the new heavens and new earth prophesied in scripture exist today “in seed form” is a concept embraced by a subset of the post-millennialist prophetic school. They would say this seed “grows and spreads and becomes more and more manifest until it finally culminates in the Final Coming of Christ, which introduces the Eternal State”.
I feel like that’s a major stretch.
Before we can ever enter into a relationship with God, we must understand certain fundamental truths about him. The writer to the Hebrews makes this explicit: “Whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.”
He exists. He rewards. These things are about as basic as it gets. Unless we entertain some hope, however microscopic, that there is a God to be known and that there is something to be gained by knowing him, we will never seek him out or respond to the convicting work of his Spirit in our hearts.
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The New Testament writers quote, allude to, or possibly allude to Zechariah more often than any other Minor Prophet. Given the sheer number of passages that reference his writing, I will only attempt to deal in any depth with direct quotations or obvious repurposings of the prophetic word.
It seems as the time grew shorter for Messiah to enter the world, the Holy Spirit was all the more eager to testify to his coming at every possible opportunity.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Last week we were discussing how we can best live out the truth that, denominations notwithstanding, the church of God remains one Body, not many.
Tom: I do think the number of available evangelical church options out there can be beneficial in some ways, especially for elders. For instance, when you find that great new couple who want to join your church but can’t restrain themselves from talking about the glories of speaking in tongues, or the blessed benefits of Reformed Theology, or why women ought to worship audibly, the multiplicity of options allows you to easily point them to the gathering in your neighborhood that might suit them better in that respect without a lot of hard feelings.
After all, it's not like you’re saying, “If you don’t like the way we do it, there’s no place for you in the Church.”
One of our most popular features is our weekly Too Hot to Handle post.
Tom and I started it because we wanted to get beyond safe topics. If the word of God is really our guide, we decided, how can we confine ourselves to applying it to the sorts of tame issues that keep us all feeling comfortable? Isn’t it a sharp and quick sword, a sword of division? And doesn’t it have to be our guide in all things, not just in those that are polite, conventional and suitably religious?
We wanted to push those limits, to see how far the word of God can take us. Pretty far, we’re guessing.
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For years, conservatives have conserved next to nothing, hamstringing their own cause by refusing to use the very effective cancel culture tactics of the militant left. These are certainly unpleasant, but a philosophy that maintains it is better to lose nobly than win ugly and which disapproves of what you say but defends to the death your right to say it (even when it’s rank wickedness) simply does not work in war, however dignified and mature it may appear.
That includes culture war.
As the world gets nuttier and nuttier, so do the popular theories about what’s really going on. As I write, it’s been about twelve hours since a twenty-year old man was killed by Secret Service snipers at a rally in Pennsylvania after shooting at President Trump, injuring the former president and killing at least one member of his audience. Or so we are told. It might even be true.
What is certain is that the narrative will evolve. Initial reports that Thomas Matthew Crooks was Antifa were quickly amended to claim he was a registered Republican.
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“What does it mean to take communion unworthily?”
Today’s question comes from 1 Corinthians 11:27, which reads, “Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord.”
At the beginning of his public ministry, Jesus established a base of operations near the Sea of Galilee at Capernaum, about 40 miles from Nazareth where he had grown up. Matthew tells us he made this move right after the arrest of John the Baptist, in fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy.
It was near Capernaum that he called his first disciples, preached the Sermon on the Mount and calmed the storm. It was from the same region that he sent out the Twelve into the rest of Israel to proclaim the kingdom of heaven.
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As we have discussed several times in the process of trying to interpret the prophecies of Zechariah, commentators have tried a variety of approaches to the text. One of the least successful (but most respectful) of these remains Martin Luther, who wrote, “I give up. I am not sure what the prophet is talking about.”
Hey, better than blabbering on without any idea where you are going.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
For the last fifty years, the media has quietly endorsed it. Politicians in every country in the world have worked tirelessly to build public support for it. Mega-corporations love it: who wouldn’t like to have the entire planet to choose from when optimizing for low taxes, inexpensive manufacturing and cheap labor?
Tom: Globalism is officially out of the closet, Immanuel Can. The Economist declares: “The danger is that a rising sense of insecurity will lead to more electoral victories for closed-world types. This is the gravest risk to the free world since communism. Nothing matters more than countering it.”
“Nothing matters more.” That’s pretty clear. So tell me, IC, is it possible to be a Christian globalist? Can we hold such an ideological position coherently and biblically?
“There are three types of lies,” Mark Twain famously quipped, “lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
I know he was overstating the case somewhat, but my time in higher education has given me plenty of opportunity to see that he was not far off. Statistics have a way of impressing people with the apparent solidity of the numbers they generate. Many of us, especially the numerically inclined, tend to think they’re telling us something profound, truthful and scientific. But I have discovered that often they are not, and until you know how the numbers were obtained and how they are being interpreted, you can never be quite sure how solid they really are.
Anyone who has attempted to maintain an email subscription to ComingUntrue over the years knows Blogger’s email tool is notoriously unreliable. Often, we do not even receive our own posts. Substack is basically a newsletter subscription service that is proving increasingly popular and much more reliable.
Effectively immediately, I’m going to try publishing each post to Substack as we create them in hope this may make life easier for our friends who prefer email delivery to browsing the web. You won’t get all the features available at the regular website (sidebars, archive pages, topical studies, search box, etc.), but you’ll get the content of each post seven days a week (we hope) in a clear, readable form.
When truth is revealed, men have an obligation to hear it. The Lord will judge those who claim to speak it, and he will also judge the hearers for the way they receive it, which is to say that we need to accept and respond to the things we hear that are true, and reject the things we hear that are not.
What scripture doesn’t talk about all the time is how difficult that process can be for the onlooker.
Today I am going to generalize, because there’s no way to discuss the topic at hand usefully without doing so. Since it is my occasional, bitter experience that some people detest generalizations, I will dutifully warn you up front that you are in for endless amounts of them if you read on. Best come back another time if you find yourself emotionally triggered by statements about averages offered in the absence of hard evidence.
You heard me right. I’m not even going to offer statistics to support the assertions that follow. Why not? Because people of a non-generalizing disposition who dislike what I have to say will simply dispute the data. Again, bitter experience. That, and those capable of pattern recognition don’t need statistics to back up what they already know.
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“Why are Christians homophobic?”
Homophobia is a ridiculous pejorative that applies literally to almost no Christians in the real world. It fails miserably as language, in that if it means anything at all, it means “fear of that which is the same”. The term is a convenient way to deflect arguments that address the dangers and evils of a lifestyle that exalts sodomy. I do not use it.
That said, if you don’t celebrate perversion, anyone who inquires why that might be will probably use the word, so we may as well formulate an answer for them.
From the department of straining at gnats and swallowing camels, The Standard Bearer ran a series of posts by David Englesma in 2017 and 2018 criticizing the standard premillennial interpretation of Romans 11, culminating in this one and this one. Based on this chapter (though not exclusively), premillennialists anticipate (in Englesma’s own words), “a mass conversion and salvation of Jews, and their restoration as an earthly kingdom of God in Palestine”.
That’s a fair representation of my beliefs, an exegetical hill I’ll happily die on.
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We are coming down the home stretch in Zechariah, moving topic by topic, though not necessarily in the order these future events will take place. Today’s four verses are set in millennial Israel, describing the geographic upheaval that will take place at the second coming of the Lord Jesus and continue into the millennium, as well as a couple of statements concerning the rule of Christ during this period.
That rule is a well-established Old Testament fact. Zechariah can sum it up in two sentences.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Joel Kotkin of The Daily Beast coins the term “Great Rebellion” to describe the phenomenon of eroding trust in elite opinion-shapers: scientists, politicians, economists, corporatists and the media. He’s not alone: Village Voice and even the Huffington Post have just run similar articles.
Tom: The peasants are revolting, Immanuel Can.
I’m going to start this post with an apology. I’m sorry.
I usually don’t go all egg-headed and philosophical in this space. I think that usually truth can be spoken plainly and simply, and it’s my aim to do that. Every now and then, though, I run into something that is bugging a whole bunch of people — Christians among them — and that just can’t be treated without going off the grid. This is one of those issues. If I lose you, don’t worry; this probably isn’t an issue that’s come up for you, and it needn’t worry you. Tomorrow there may well be a post that suits you more directly.
On the other hand, if you’ve run into the arguments below, you might be very glad for some help with them even if it takes us into deeper waters. So I’m going to risk it.
My Christianity is not my father’s Christianity. His was not his father’s, nor his grandfather’s, which was different again.
You will understand that I am not talking about differences in the substance of what was and is believed or practiced. We have a common salvation. The faith was once for all delivered. Paul taught the same things in all the churches and in all his letters. If one departs from these things, he is preaching “another Jesus” and “a different gospel”.
That’s definitely not what I have in mind.
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Cultures do not suddenly plummet into the abyss for no reason. Yes, corrupt and self-serving leadership plays its part, and we have seen plenty of that in the last few decades. Still, assuming democracy is indeed the least-worst governmental option, and assuming it works as claimed to any degree at all, we have to look beyond leadership to explain how we have gotten into our current mess.
The man on the street has to be called to account.
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“What does it mean to ‘call upon’ the Lord?”
The expression “to call upon” the Lord sounds admittedly archaic today. We don’t talk about calling upon the doctor, the lawyer or the bankruptcy trustee.
With reference specifically to God, the words “call upon” are a translation of the Hebrew qārā' or qārā' šēm, which means to address by name, to single out or identify. The first time the phrase appears in scripture is in Genesis 4, where the statement is made, “At that time people began to call upon the name of the Lord.”
What time was that? So glad you asked.
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“We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.”
Have you ever played Telephone Tag? (Maybe where you grew up people called it Broken Telephone or Chinese Whispers.) It’s a game played sitting in a circle. It begins when someone outside the circle whispers a sentence to a person selected at random, who then whispers it to the person on his right. The message continues around the circle until it reaches the person sitting to the left of the original starting point, who then declares aloud what he thinks he heard.
If the circle is large enough, you’ll frequently find the product of the exercise bears little resemblance to the original message.
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Martin Luther said of Zechariah 14, “Here, in this chapter, I give up. For I am not sure what the prophet is talking about.” Apparently he wrote two commentaries on Zechariah, both of which ended abruptly with chapter 13. John Calvin likewise demurred to offer an interpretation, for which many of us are eternally grateful.
There is no problem interpreting Zechariah 14 if you take it literally, believe God is God and that he keeps his covenants with no cute allegorical cheats. None. So I am definitely not boldly going where no man has gone before. Lots of men have gone there. They just didn’t spiritualize everything they ever encountered in the Old Testament and apply it to the Church. Steer clear of that interpretational dead-end, and you’ll be fine. So let’s have at it!
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Sometimes you come across something so odd you don’t know what to think about it. For example, when Immanuel Can sent me this link last week, I responded with, “Seriously? Is this real????”
Tom: Turns out it’s as real as obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), and probably worth making Christians aware of, assuming they have not encountered it already.
The post IC linked me to is not about OCD per se, but about a particular variety of OCD referred to in the article as “religious scrupulosity”. Like other forms of OCD, religious scrupulosity is a biochemical aberration. As we discussed last week, Christians who try to give spiritual help to a person suffering from a biochemical condition which affects their spiritual lives, and who dive into counseling them without acknowledging and accounting for these underlying physical causes, are likely to frustrate both themselves and the person they are counseling.
Maybe I should let you explain it a little bit, IC.
He was a walking nightmare — tall, balding, all angles-and-bones, a vulture of a man. His beady eyes peered out predaciously over his hawk-like nose, and his battered tweed jacket emanated chalk dust clouds as he strode up and down the aisles. We students cowered in fear, praying he would not ask us the next question. Chances are we couldn’t answer it.
Hey, chances are we couldn’t even understand it, so high over our heads was his vocabulary.
But cowering would not save us. He would pick someone at random. “You,” he would say. “What does ‘ephemeral’ mean?” His respondent would not know. He would repeat the question, stepping closer to the cringing child. No answer.
He would persist: “Don’t you have a dictionary? … Can’t you ask anyone?”
Silence.
If you’ve been paying attention to politics in Europe and south of the border, you’ll know that the so-called rules-based international order — the neo-liberal status quo in the West — is staggering around like a drunk looking for somewhere quiet to vomit. Tens of millions of voters across Europe, Canada and the US simply aren’t buying anything their leaders are telling them anymore.
Projecting power around the globe ain’t what it used to be, folks.
Inclusion is exclusion by another name. Somebody always pays the price.
This morning I went shopping at a retail chain that normally collects for cancer research, hospitals, the homeless and other causes with moral legitimacy. They could have been doing that today. Instead, they were virtue-signaling like so many of their competitors, rainbow flags everywhere, and the senior behind the cash register politely inquired whether I would like to donate a couple dollars to “the Pride”.
I just about lost my teeth … and the ones I have are not dentures.
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“Why did God punish David and Bathsheba’s innocent child with death?”
I came across this question at the GotQuestions website and was curious how they would answer, as it’s something I’ve reflected on at length. It’s a reference to the events of 2 Samuel 12, in which God afflicts the bastard child Uriah’s wife bore to David, who subsequently dies of the illness much to David’s sorrow.
The sad death of comparative innocents is one of the more perplexing mysteries we ever encounter, and the GQ writers usually offer solid, biblical answers to difficult inquiries. Moreover, scripture doesn’t tell us God’s motivation in this instance, it simply tells us what happened, which means the writer of the post was obliged to conjecture.