“Chaaaaarge!”
A half-dozen knights leap over a hill to attack a rabbit.
Unexpectedly, the little white bunny turns and attacks the knights, killing some and wounding others.
“Run away! Run away!”
Scattering shields and armaments, the terrified knights clamber back over the hillock, and duck in shame.
* * * * *
It’s a famous scene called “The Killer Rabbit” from the 1975 comedy feature film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I’m reminded of it every time I converse with a Calvinist.
“Who are you, O man, to answer back to God?”
In Romans 9, Paul teaches that God has mercy on whomever he wills and hardens whomever he wills. The apostle then notes a potential objection: “Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?” I’ve quoted the apostle’s response above: “Who are you to answer back to God?” In essence, God made you, and it is his right to do as he pleases with you. As the Gospel Coalition’s Justin Dillehay puts it, Paul “questions the critic’s right to even lodge the objection”.
October 31 is Halloween to some. This year, it’ll also be the 507th anniversary of the day Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, Germany. That’s as good a day as any to celebrate the beginning of Protestantism, though it took another dozen years or so to formally organize the new denomination.
It was not the first major split in church history, nor was it the last, but Catholics and Protestants have been sparring about it verbally (and sometimes physically) ever since.
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“I just graduated Bible college without finding a partner. Would taking a pastorate improve my prospects?”
Having only just graduated, and being presumably somewhere in your mid-twenties, if your primary concern is attracting women, I recommend starting a rock band. That’s a sure-fire profession for wannabe chick magnets. A pastorate, not so much.
Of course, if you can’t sing or write music, that’s a bit of a problem. Let’s work with your original suggestion a little.
Blessings are unequal. Love is unequal. Reward and punishment are unequal. Even trials and tribulations in this life are — you guessed it — unequal. (Perhaps we should be grateful for that last one.)
To some, God’s economy looks a tad irregular, perhaps even unjust — at least, by the measure of man. Others rationalize the plain wording of scripture away, or deny it by hypothesizing that God actually does treat everyone equally, but just in neat, invisible ways we can’t observe or quantify, a theory for which neither life nor the Bible provides any evidence. Still others don’t read their Bibles enough to notice the issue.
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A word of thanks to any of our readers who have made it through even a portion of our massive Mining the Minors project as we begin winding down the series. To date, we have posted a grand total of 210 straight Saturdays, or over four years, on the messages of the twelve Minor Prophets, a task I felt many questions about attempting back in September of 2020.
At the time, I wondered if such a lengthy series might not be cut short by the Lord’s return. I expect that’s still possible, and if not this series, perhaps the next.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
On her way to work a few months ago, a Muslim driver urged my friend to reconsider her ways in view of coming judgment. The driver knew nothing at all about his passenger, but he was convinced his god will one day be both her judge and the judge of all mankind.
Tom: Not all religions acknowledge judgment is coming, I suppose, but many do. It is not an exclusively Christian teaching. But there are some things about biblical judgment that make it distinctive, Immanuel Can, and perhaps we can explore some of those today.
“My sheep listen to my voice, and I know them …”
“I know them.”
It’s funny … wouldn’t you expect the Lord to have said, “My sheep listen to my voice and they know me”?
That would be parallelism. That would be equivalent. That would speak of our recognition of the Good Shepherd, just as the first part of the verse emphasizes it. We know his voice, and we know him.
But it’s not that.
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An anonymous Christian man recently produced this wall of text looking for advice about his marriage, appropriately entitled “A Broken Situation”. To cut a long story very much shorter, it’s a fifteen-year marriage during which the husband indulged a porn habit for many years, before finally confessing to his wife and two Christian men, all of whom are now keeping him accountable with the aid of a software package they monitor regularly. For the last three years, he’s also been part of a weekly men’s prayer-and-confession session, which he feels has been a help in keeping spiritually on track.
So here’s the catch: the porn habit ended six years ago. The monitoring and weekly confessing continues, probably until the Lord returns.
The quest to control the input into our own consciousness is probably thousands of years old. We all have our ways of trying to backburner the unpleasantries of life while maximizing the good bits. My brother and I shared a coffee on his deck last week, and we talked about a friend whose way of dealing with things he doesn’t like, even in adulthood, is simply to refuse to acknowledge them. “I don’t think about that,” he’ll say.
If you have no distracting technology to aid you, I suppose affected stoicism or denial are the best available refuges from truth, if a tad primitive.
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“Is hell a literal lake of fire?”
For the average reader with limited Bible exposure, it’s probably useful to distinguish between hades, which is a holding place for the human dead prior to the final judgment, and hell [γέεννα, sometimes pronounced gehenna], also called the lake of fire, the final destination of the wicked dead, the place of permanent separation from God. Hell was not created for mankind at all, but for the devil and his angels. After man’s final judgment, death and hades will be thrown into the lake of fire for all eternity. This is called the “second death”.
As the patriarch Jacob came to the end of his 147 years on this earth, we may be excused for wondering if he was slipping in and out of reality, as many very ancient folks tend to do. When we read the final chapters of Genesis, it may seem like Jacob was sending mixed messages to the world about his lifetime of up-close and personal dealings with God.
Hey, at Jacob’s age, a little emotional incontinence was perfectly understandable. How we assess our experiences often depends on the day.
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God’s fifth complaint through the prophet Malachi in the late fifth century BC completes his critique of the nation. Israel has questioned him five times to date and the Lord has answered all their queries, sincere or otherwise. He will answer three more today. Malachi will make several further comments, both encouraging and challenging, but YHWH has fully laid out his case by verse 15 of chapter 3.
Following these final comments comes four hundred years in which Heaven was effectively silent. Old Testament revelation ended with Malachi. First time Bible readers moving chronologically may find themselves wondering, “Did Israel respond?”
I suppose the answer to that is, “The Israel that mattered responded.” We will see the seeds of a faithful nation-within-a-nation shortly.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
We interrupt our regular scheduled recycled Friday post to bring you a news flash from the Survey Center on American Life: Young Women Are Leaving Church in Unprecedented Numbers.
Tom: I was momentarily troubled, but I kept reading only to realize the women departing evangelical churches in droves are all feminists. At that point, I started to get excited.
I also figured I should call in my comrade-in-arms Immanuel Can to moderate my misogynistic enthusiasm with his usual balanced and biblical viewpoint. IC, check this out!
Immanuel Can: Okay, let me start with the obvious: let’s concede feminism drove a lot of men out of the churches. Those it did not drive out may be fewer, but they are not likely to be driven out now if they’ve lasted this long. Who’s left that could be leaving now? Only the women. So I could make the argument that this is both inevitable and unsurprising.
When I first entered my profession, I was in my mid-twenties. As a brash young man, I remember being irritated by the requirement that I should begin to save for retirement. For one thing, I was young, and young people never think much about being old. I thought I might well even be dead long before my investment came back; I certainly had no assurances I would not. But more importantly, as I was starting out in life, I knew I could make good use of that sizable portion of my income that was going to be carved out for the retirement plan, and there was no way to get at it.
I would have if I could have.
It’s hard to believe digital computing has been around for less than a century.
Perhaps you are old enough to recall the annoying punch cards we were compelled to fill out in public school so our standardized test results could be graded and printed without human intervention, probably my first experience with “computing”. In my teens, a friend’s father paid me to input data on the Commodore PET and first generation TRS-80, staring at ASCII screens for hours on end and hoping I’d remember to save my work before it crashed, as frequently occurred.
Back then, it was all shiny new tech. Less than a single human lifetime removed, it all seems hilariously primitive.
Kamala Harris is Indian. Kamala Harris is black. Kamala Harris wants to open the border. Kamala Harris was never the border czar. Kamala Harris was the best border czar ever, and she’s going to keep us all safe. Vote Kamala. Here are some gushingly favorable faux-headlines about her that nobody wrote, ever.
If you can’t keep up with the endless rewrites to the mainstream version of the 2024 election storyline, join the club. My head is spinning and I don’t even watch the news anymore.
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“Where is the increase in anti-Jewish sentiment coming from, and how should Christians respond to it?”
It should be evident from the long history of worldwide antisemitism that there is no single, definitive answer to this question. “The Gazacaust”, as critics labeled the IDF’s siege of Palestine in the wake of the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, is just one more in a long line of excuses for virulent Jew-hate. Plenty of others exist. If they didn’t, dedicated enemies of Israel would simply make them up.
“I myself will go down with you to Egypt, and I will also bring you up again, and Joseph’s hand shall close your eyes.”
Human beings long for transcendence.
The Bible teaches it. God has “put eternity into man’s heart”. Paul says God rewards those who through patience in well-doing seek immortality, and that reward is the eternal life they are seeking.
Observation also confirms it. Death is a universal reality, but few men welcome it, believers or unbelievers. I’ve seen the panic in their eyes. I’ve heard it in their voices. The idea that there might be no more “me” in the universe is intolerable.
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As we noted last week, the last half of chapter 2 has been Malachi speaking on God’s behalf. As we move into chapter 3, God will return to directly addressing the nation in the first person. Prior to that, we receive a remarkable look into the future announcing the coming of both John the Baptist and the Word made flesh.
“Where is the God of justice?” the people have been asking. God is in the process of providing his answer: “Behold, he is coming.” The manger in Bethlehem might still be 400 years away, yet “the Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness”.
First, the fourth of God’s five complaints against Judah and its priests.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
The only substantive difference between the Great Reset and other conspiracies is that the Great Reset is right out there in the open, more or less declaring itself for what it is in hope that the generation has finally come along that will take up its ideas and make them successful. The movement has its own websites, branding and literally trillions of dollars in backing. If you haven’t come across it yet, you probably will shortly.
Tom: The Great Reset idea is the product of eighty-something German engineer and economist Klaus Schwab, whose detractors refer to him as “the new Karl Marx”, and an organization he founded called the World Economic Forum. Schwab has been pushing his utopian vision since the early ’70s, but the outbreak of COVID-19 across the world this year is the latest pretense for finally implementing it. IC, maybe you can give us a quick executive summary of the concept.
I’ve always really liked Caspar David Friedrich’s painting, “Cloister Graveyard in the Snow”. In it, we see a crumbled cathedral with only a bit of the porch and chapel remaining amid twisted, dark trees. But if you look closely, in the middle ground, you’ll see a trail of monks still marching into the ruins, presumably to continue their monkish duties.
The painting has both a positive and a negative message about religiosity. On the one hand, it suggests faith can persist even when, socially speaking, religiosity is generally perceived be in ruins; but on the other hand, it also reminds us that ritual can persist even when the life of a church is gone.
I guess the message you take depends on the perspective with which you view it.
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The purpose of this series is to show how conclusions drawn from an isolated proof text may lead you astray theologically. Today’s post illustrates just how far this can go when you add unsupported supposition to supposition. The result is the theological equivalent of a house of cards. By the time you work your way up to the attic, you find yourself asking questions for which there cannot possibly be any definitive answers.
The remedy is to say, “Let me think about that some more” way back in the basement, where there’s still a chance to construct a solid foundation for future inquiry.
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Exodus 6:2 plainly states that while God appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as God Almighty (El Shaddai), he did not make himself known to them by his personal name YHWH. This confuses some readers. One asks, “Why does God say he didn’t reveal his name ‘Yahweh’, when he obviously glaringly did so in Genesis, many, many times?”
Some of the answers one gets to such a question on a public forum like Stack Exchange are truly horrendous. One respondent suggests the writer of the Exodus passage believed it, but the writer of the Genesis passages believed differently. Let’s just say the apostle Paul would beg to differ, as would the Lord Jesus.
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“Why isn’t the obvious obvious to everyone?”
This isn’t an actual question. It’s my way of summing up the confusion of a number of different friends and other Christians who are frustrated with their fellow believers. One is frustrated because his church keeps recognizing elders who do not qualify by the standards set out in Timothy and Titus. Another is frustrated because his Christian friends are contemplating not voting in November’s election, thus increasing the likelihood of a Democrat win. Another is incensed that none of the Christians who heaped online abuse on the vaccine-hesitant during COVID have ever apologized for the foolish, uninformed and unchristian things they said. Yet another is frustrated by a pastor who believes the unwillingness to use a gun to defend one’s wife from rape is a biblical virtue.
Each sees the obvious and cannot understand why others don’t. The result is a potential breakdown in fellowship between believers.
Just out of curiosity, I did a blog search for the word “sovereign” before starting this post. According to Google, the words “sovereign” or “sovereignty” are used in 110 of approximately 2,800 posts written by IC or me since 2013, roughly one in twenty-five. That’s not the total number of occurrences, only the total number of posts in which one or the other of these words occur. You can pretty much take it to the bank that every one of those references either explicitly affirms or harmonizes with the sovereignty of God as taught in the Bible.
That may seem odd for two students of scripture who expressly reject the doctrine of divine determinism.
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The bulk of Malachi’s prophecy consists of the prophet quoting God directly, passing on corrective messages from YHWH to his nation and its priests. Verses 10-17 of chapter 2 are the first time the prophet has had anything to say for himself, slipping into the first person plural (“we”, “us”). Also, until this point Malachi has exclusively targeted the priests. Now he rebukes the men of his entire nation.
His primary concern remains the profaning of covenants.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Continuing a discussion arising out of Immanuel Can’s recent and well-received post “Who’s Minding the Store?”
Elders have the job of feeding the flock. IC’s post suggested that not only the Holy Spirit’s leading but a certain amount of human organization, ingenuity and especially careful observation are necessary in effectively carrying out that task. I pointed out some of the things that make that tougher than it looks, and we considered three of them last week. And here we are.
Tom: Since you mention individual gifts, IC, I pointed out in our discussion last Friday that our gifts tend to predispose us to see the world a certain way.
Here’s a simple thought.
But it will be the least simple of my simple thoughts, by far.
The triune God is not just far superior to any of the polytheists’ gods, but also to any monolithic type of god. It is better that we serve one God in three Persons than that we claim God is a big singularity.
At first glance, you might not think so. You might think it’s easier and better to have to explain a God that’s just a big ‘One’ than to have to unravel what it means to say God is triune. You might think, for example, that Muslims and monotheist Jews and even Hindus have an easier job talking about God than Christians do.
Moreover, many Christians have a very difficult time explaining what one-in-three really means, in application to God.
Check that: every Christian does.
Some people think having favorite verses is a bit like having favorite children: it’s just not done. Those who think this way either have yet to produce large families or else are not big on self-awareness. At any given moment, every parent has a favorite child, even if their favor is a moving target and its object a different child every day of the week. The trick is not to let one’s affections direct one’s behavior as Jacob did, very much to Joseph’s detriment.
It’s hardly surprising that my favorite verses come from my favorite book, Hebrews. I’m not the least bit Hebrew myself, but few books of the Bible glorify Christ so explicitly and magnificently, even if this one was primarily targeted at a Jewish audience.
Growing up, no matter how good or bad the sermon, the speaker’s closing comments were usually the last I would ever hear of it. A man would undertake to preach the Word on behalf of its Author. An hour later, the residue had trickled down into the occasional ear, or become the subject of animated discussion at a few lunch or dinner tables. If I wanted to revisit what he had said, I had to reconstruct it from memory. Most of the time, I had forgotten the substance of any given message by the middle of the next week, though a memorable one-liner might stick with me for a while.
Much like the last 2,000 years or so, I imagine, though members of the early church were arguably more attentive than modern audiences. Without Bibles to consult, perhaps they had to be.
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“What does it mean that there is ‘one baptism’?”
I can see how this expression might confuse a new Christian. Technically, there is not “one baptism” in scripture; there are many. I read somewhere once that there are seven.
That would be a neat thing ... if true.
In fact, let’s count and see.
Few Greek words in the New Testament have given translation teams as many fits as the one used by the Lord Jesus in Matthew 19 to describe our world’s future:
“Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, I say to you, in the new world, when the Son of Man will sit on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.’ ”
That’s the ESV. The NIV calls it “the renewal of all things”. The New Living translators went with “when the world is made new”. The KJV, among numerous others, calls it “the regeneration”. Holman goes with “the Messianic Age”, which is interpretation, not translation (though I think he is correct). The CEV says, “in the future world”. The Good News Translation calls it the “new age”, and GOD’S WORD® (how did they ever get that trademark registered?) calls it “the world to come”. The ISV calls it “the renewed creation” and Weymouth goes with “New Creation”.
Talk about variety! But you get the idea, I’m sure.
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There is no way to overstate the danger to Israel posed by the ongoing corruption of their religious leaders in the early fifth century BC. Judah had only recently returned from seventy years of Babylonian captivity intended to correct their idolatry. As far as obvious, literal idol worship was concerned, the exile cured Israel for good. However, the hearts of most of the priests were no more open toward God than the previous generations, and their sinfulness quickly began to manifest in new and offensive ways, the first of which we studied last week.
Malachi’s five complaints show how speedily corrupt spiritual leaders can wreck a nation. God assured the priests he would deal with them. It was only a matter of time.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
In his recent post “Who’s Minding the Store?” Immanuel Can considered the responsibility of elders in deciding what should be taught in the local church they care for. His point was that elders need to really know their congregations in order to provide them with the spiritual food they need. Somebody needs to “mind the store”, so to speak.
Tom: I wanted to get into this a bit further with you, IC, and it seems to me this is a better place to do it than a back-and-forth in the comments to the original post.
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” Thoreau famously wrote.
I hate to say it, but a great number of modern Christians could be described in just that way. Their lives are quietly unhappy — unhappy to the point of deep frustration, and even depression. Having been told that the Christian life should be abundant, joyful, meaningful and overflowing with freedom, they find themselves living in a way that is dull, tired, seemingly pointless, and characterized — when they stop to characterize it at all — by a bunch of have to’s.
In 2008, author John Kloppenborg released the full text of a
“reconstruction” of the
Naturally, it had to be “different”. Nobody was going to be interested in a book affirming the existing gospel accounts in every respect.
Jonathan Noyes at Stand to Reason has an interesting post up this week on the subject of three kinds of doubt Christians may experience.
There is intellectual doubt: questioning the historicity of the Bible, the rationality of Christianity, and so on. There is emotional doubt, where pain, disappointment or unanswered prayers lead believers to question the goodness or existence of God. Then there is moral doubt, fueled by a failing struggle with sin. It can lead us to doubt the ability of God’s grace to transform us, and may result in inertia and despair.
It’s a worthwhile exploration of the subject, but I’d like to add one more kind of doubt to Jonathan’s list: theological doubt.
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“Is it important to know Greek and Hebrew when studying the Bible?”
My father used to caution us to beware of “little Greeks”. Seminary students know a little Greek in about the same way I know “a little French” because I studied it for five years in high school. If I went to Quebec today, I wouldn’t dare utter a word of it. Around any genuine expert, my paucity of actual language knowledge would be laughable.
“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.