Just Church (18)

For the last two weeks, we've been working on a direct contrast between the church as Christ intended it to be and the church as Social Justice ideology aims to make it. And we've seen that they're not even close to the same thing. This week, let's complete that line of thought.

Chapter 5: A Higher Vision (continued)

What is the Church?

The church is a community of peace.

It’s where every person understands that his or her unique circumstances in life are given by God. It’s a grateful community.

The Church and Activism

But it’s also an active community. The disparities and injustices that persist in this world are not to be left alone. As much as we can, we are to lift up one another, and the lofty are to lower themselves, so that every person achieves the maximum that he or she can, in terms of conquering the challenges and fulfilling the opportunities God has given to him or her. We are to help one another, not live as monads, individuals uninterested in each other’s welfare. It’s a sharing community, a compassionate community, a merciful community.

All the Villains

I’m sure Christians other than Doug Wilson are writing about the delayed release of the nastier bits of the Epstein files, but since I’m not familiar with any of them, let’s go with the online post-millennialist whose website I’m most likely to cruise by on any given day of the week. Douglas, you are on!

Until recently, delays in getting the files into the public domain had been persuasively attributed to a lack of cooperation from the FBI, as usual pursuing its own agenda notwithstanding instructions from Attorney General Pam Bondi to come across with everything they’ve got in their records, as her position entitles her.

A Study in Contrasts

“There is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.”

If the COVID era had a defining passage, surely it was Romans 13. To say that large numbers of Christians employed verses 1-7 to justify passivity under pressure of government mandates and/or fear of negative opinions from our neighbors, families and friends is no exaggeration. While no small number of believers balked at the extended closure of church buildings and seemingly arbitrary health-related rules of conduct enforced on us, others simply submitted to any and all restrictions, no matter how bizarre or ineffective, as “God’s will”.

Romans 13 was their evidence. “Rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad.” Of course, they were also letting our rulers define “good” and “bad” for us.

Anonymous Asks (345)

“What does an eagle signify in the Bible?”

Birds of prey are majestic, beautiful, horrible creatures. If you’ve ever watched a winged predator drop out of the sky to pluck a smaller bird out of the air then calmly shred its screaming victim to pieces, all the while brazenly meeting the gaze of horrified onlookers through the glass pane of a full length 21st storey office window, you will know exactly what I mean. You may taste your own lunch a second time.

Eagles soar with mesmerizing elegance, then eviscerate mercilessly in a matter of seconds. You do not mess with such creatures.

Making Connections

For all the good they do, the English Bible’s chapter divisions often break up the text in ways that don’t much help the interpreter in his task. One of the things I have learned to do over time is to back up from the first verse of the chapter I am trying to understand to the beginning of the “scene” in which it takes place, which may be a chapter or more earlier. Then I continue from the end of the passage to the end of the “scene”.

Sometimes these fall on chapter divisions, and that’s great. Often they don’t.

119: Sin and Shin

The penultimate letter of the Hebrew alphabet has two different names, though it’s technically the same letter. Jews pronounce it Shin [שׁ] when it has a dot over the right side, symbolizing kindness, and Sin [שׂ] when it has a dot over the left, symbolizing judgment or severity. Its three vertical lines (or fiery branches, depending on the font you read it in) denote will, intellect and emotions, although a host of more obscure ideas are also associated with the letter. (The tefillin sports a rare four-branched version of shin.) Shin’s numeric value is 300. Written in full, the five letters of Elohim (aleph-lamedh-he-yodh-mem) also total 300.

Make of that what you will. I’m not sure I can do a lot with it. As with much Hebrew symbolism and numerology, I just file it under “interesting” and move on.

Too Hot to Handle: See You in Court, Brother

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

Wow. Christians going to court with one another.

You’d think this issue would be put to bed speedily by even the most cursory glance at Matthew 5:25-26 or 1 Corinthians 6:1-8. But no, believers are keeping their lawyers on speed-dial in significant numbers. It used to be the primary reason was child abuse, but last year it was something new: property rights.

Tom: Here I thought we’d all be meeting in cell groups in homes sooner than later as a result of lawfare trial balloons from the transgender, feminist or gay lobbies. But no, this is even stranger: we’re doing it to ourselves, Immanuel Can; not just as individuals, but whole congregations. And most of it involves issues related to church buildings.

Just Church (17)

We’re continuing our exploration of what Social Justice ideology does to the church. We began by looking at the scriptural pattern for fellowship, a higher vision for the church. We’ve now shifted to looking at the counter-offer, the kind of dynamic Social Justice produces.

It’s not a pretty picture. Instead of the “fruit of the Spirit” (love, joy, peace, self-control and such), we find that Social Justice thinking opens up a Pandora’s Box of nasty character qualities that issue in a suspicious, mutually-hostile and unloving environment. When we last left off, we’d just introduced the realization that advancing this program inevitably means resorting to the use of some sort of compulsion or force. Let’s build on that.

The Building Blocks of Reality

The Old Testament is full of hints, winks and nudges. Or so it seems to me.

For example, I cannot read Abraham’s words to Isaac, “God will provide for himself the lamb,” without marveling at the subtlety of the wording. It works as a double entendre in either Hebrew or English. Was Abraham a straight man or a prophet? I can’t tell you, but I love that line. From thousands of years down the road we look back and say, “He certainly did.”

That’s not a comment on our cleverness, of course.

Quote of the Day (49)

Assurance of salvation and eternal security are not identical concepts. The former describes my level of confidence in my relationship with God, while the latter refers to what God has actually done, whether I fully understand it and benefit from that knowledge or whether I quiver in terror of eternal damnation every time I catch myself sinning yet again.

Which I will, and so will you. One may feel confidence with no scriptural basis. One may also feel fear for which there is no biblical reason.

Anonymous Asks (344)

“How do you feel about prayer in public schools?”

My family returned to Canada from overseas when I was due to enter grade 4, resulting in the school system bumping me into grade 5 a year early. Awkward and shy, I pretty much accepted everything the way it came, at least initially. Each morning at school started the same way: with the day’s announcements, preceded by rising for the national anthem and a rote recitation of the “Lord’s prayer”.

How did I feel about it?

Emotions and Emoting

The verb “to emote” derives from “emotion”, but with a slight change in emphasis. Merriam-Webster says it means “to express emotion,” then adds “in a very dramatic or obvious way”.

That gets to the root of it. Emotions are spontaneous. Emoting is calculated. Emotions are genuine. Displaying them for others may easily become just a pose.

We’ve all seen actors or singers apparently in the grip of deep feelings of angst, joy or sorrow. A moment’s consideration reminds us they are only doing a job. The singer has probably performed this tune hundreds of times. It is impossible she’s feeling the lyrics the way she appears to be, as she might have the first time she sang them. She’s selling the song for the benefit of her audience, and may feel nothing at all.

119: Resh

The Hebrew letter Resh [ר] signifies poverty or need. Scholars say it looks like a man bent over. It’s appropriate, then, that in these eight verses the psalmist most acutely expresses his awareness of his need and inability to help himself. If you are keeping track, he asks for help in seven different ways.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit,” said the Lord Jesus, “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Significantly, resh (spiritually impoverished) transforms into rosh (head or leader) by swapping out a single vowel. There are no vowels written in the Torah, so this ambiguity is part of the package. The last shall be first.

Too Hot to Handle: ‘Apostles’ and ‘Prophets’

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

Everybody’s looking for greater certainty these days it seems, even Christians. Our own Immanuel Can has written at length about how the resurgence of Calvinism is evidence of it, and I’ve recently done some reflecting on how Christians often speak about the “call of God” to bolster their confidence in what in most cases are just their own decisions.

Tom: This, though, might take the cake, IC. A new and rapidly-growing charismatic movement mostly off the radar of other Protestants. Independent Network Charismatics (or “INC Christians”) find their certainty in alleged “prophetic” voices and the pronouncements of “super-apostles”.

It’s big-bucks too. Christianity Today notes that the Asuza Now conference in the LA Coliseum drew 50,000 people in the rain, and almost nobody knew about it outside the INC movement.

How’d you like to have the apostles and prophets back, IC?

Just Church (16)

When we left off last week, I was laying out for you the plan for fellowship that we find in the Bible. Our purpose was to get a clear sense of what God is aiming at in creating the church, and how we are to respond to that vision. A key element of this was the Christian response to guilt. We noted that Christians are uniquely vulnerable to the recognition of sin in human nature, including their own, but they aren’t to wallow in misery and self-abasement as a result, but rather to use their realization of their own fallibility as an incentive for humility, obedience, compassion, restoration, gratitude and new unity — a “repentance without regret”, remember?

Chapter 5: A Higher Vision (continued)

A Healthy Reminder

Am I only telling you what you already know? Surely you’ve read these passages, no? But it’s still good for us to remind ourselves of who we are and what we’re aiming for, because we can forget; especially since the world is so busy trying to produce its own kind of unity, but without Christ. The calls for unity from the world cannot fail to penetrate the ears of the church; and if we are going to be fortified against those false doctrines, as Paul hoped, then we are going to have to keep the biblical pattern before us with perfect clarity. As we wade into some of the more sordid details of the world’s errors and illusions (as we shall do later in this chapter), it is going to prove positive, encouraging and healthy for us to take a firm mental grip on God’s pattern for unity.

The contrasts will prove stark.

On Millennial Lifespans

Back in November of last year, our own Immanuel Can recommended a relatively short study guide from Regular Baptist Press entitled Why Dispensationalism Matters. The guide is based on a commentary by George Gunn and edited by Alex Bauman, and I’ve been working my own way through it during the last week in between trips outside to shovel the most recent 3-4 inches of snow piling up around my car.

Having just finished it, let me add my recommendation to IC’s.

Into the Wood Chipper

Christianity Today’s Emily Belz worries, “Is This the End of USAID?”, before launching into a list of all the wonderful things the biggest humanitarian agency in the world does for the poor, sick and uneducated in the Third World. Her article’s title is a reference to Elon Musk’s remarks that certain government organizations would probably be going “into the wood chipper”, USAID among them. Belz quotes a former USAID employee who says, “Pray for what’s happening. People are dying every day because of this.”

Perhaps. It will take a little time and investigation to determine that. At this stage, it’s worth the risk to do the due diligence.

Anonymous Asks (343)

“Was Jesus a pacifist?”

As defined by Merriam-Webster, pacifism is “opposition to war and violence as a means of resolving disputes”, often manifesting in a refusal to participate in military action. Extreme pacifists even exclude self-defense as an option when under attack.

Ready for one of my infamous yes-and-no answers? Okay, here we go …

Five Ways We Deceive Ourselves

Self-deception may be the worst kind of deception there is.

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of ways to be deceived, and all can result in grievous errors and long-term consequences that cannot be undone. The lies of a family member, partner or close friend can be exceedingly painful to discover. The lies of religious leaders or respected teachers can be devastating to one’s faith and deeply discouraging to deal with.

No, it’s not the degree of pain it causes that makes self-deception so awful, it’s the difficulty we have exposing it.

119: Qoph

Hebrew sources say the letter Qoph [ק] represents the number 100, the eye of a needle, the back of the head, and possibly … a monkey.

Yes, you read that correctly. Monkeys are not native to Israel or any of its neighbors and scripture mentions them nary a single time. Why ancient Hebrew even had a word for monkey is a bit of a mystery probably related to the commonalities between Hebrew and other Semitic languages (or possibly related to historians and linguists thinking they know more than they actually know about ancient languages).

Either way, I think we can safely say we will not find monkeys in Psalm 119 no matter how long and hard we stare at it.

Too Hot to Handle: Bad Reasons to be Nondenominational

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

Christianity Today reports that about one in six Christians now refer to themselves as “nondenominational”, which is about double the number who did so as recently as the turn of the century.

Tom: Gallup says:

“Increasingly, Christian Americans … prefer to either identify themselves simply as Christians or attend the increasing number of nondenominational churches that have no formal allegiance to a broader religious structure.”

What do you think about that, IC? It’s not all good news, is it?

Immanuel Can: No, probably not. Some of it is.

Just Church (15)

Chapter 5: A Higher Vision

“… we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of people, by craftiness in deceitful scheming; but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into him who is the head, that is, Christ, from whom the whole body, being fitted and held together by what every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love.”

Ephesians gives us a picture of a congregation unified by a single reality: the dynamic attachment of the entire body to Christ, who is the Head of the Church, through whom life flows to the Body. All members “abide” in the same “Vine”, in constant connection with him; and for that reason, all in connection with each other, too. As you can see, all are growing, becoming mature, walking in the truth, using their gifts and helping one another. This also fortifies them against all winds of bad doctrine, so their unity is not only dynamic but durable as well. This is church unity as God intended it to be.

Note to Substack Readers

Expect a little blog chaos for about ten days starting Saturday, as I’ll be in transit. This should not affect the main blog at cominguntrue.com, except to the extent that I probably won’t be able to post your comments or respond to them.

However, the email versions of our posts from the CU Substack at cominguntrue.substack.com will be delayed unless I can get my laptop to cooperate (which it currently will not), since these are sent manually. Don’t worry, all those posts should eventually end up in your inboxes, probably all at the same time around March 3.

Or you could just visit the main blog, which has all kinds of features Substack does not, including archives going back to 2013, blog search engine and numerous feature pages.

Cards on the Table

Over at Stand to Reason, Alan Shlemon has hammered out yet another post to help Christians work through a thorny question that may arise when a member of the family or a friend is one half of a homosexual couple. Twelve of Alan’s last twenty posts have dealt with some aspect of the LGBT thing, which just seems a tad disproportionate given that Alan has other talents. On one hand, I’ll commend him for highlighting an issue that I’m not seeing dealt with in such detail anywhere else. On the other, well, that’s a lot of posts.

I will say I read them all, which is something.

On Christians and Civil Law

DG Hart is the author and co-author of several books, mostly on the politics of faith. He’s an elder in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Pennsylvania and one of writers at OldLife.org. A post at Old Life just prior to President Trump’s first inauguration entitled “Is Donald Trump Mainstreaming Apostasy?” generated an impressive 568 comments from readers, including many from Hart.

Maybe the clickbait title, do you think?

Anonymous Asks (342)

“What’s the Christian perspective on MGTOW?”

MGTOW is an acronym for Men Going Their Own Way, an anti-feminist online community of men who reject marriage and commitment. It may be distinguished from other much-maligned informal men’s movements like the pickup artists (men who share tips about how to persuade women to engage in casual sex), incels (involuntary celibates) or promoters of men’s rights (primarily divorced dads who’ve had a hard time with the system).

While there are differences between the views and objectives of each of these groups, all have this in common with respect to the opposite sex: defeatism. MGTOW is not the exception.

A Monumental Self-Own

On the recommendation of David de Bruyn — with whom I have a lengthy history of compatible tastes in things spiritual — I am in the process of attempting to read Jonathan Edwards. Hailed as “one of the great classics of theological literature”, the subject of A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections intrigues me and provoked me to order the book. Distinguishing between authentic and inauthentic religious emotions (and therefore true and false conversions) is a critical faculty for all mature Christians.

Though I have little hope of success in this area, it seems to me it might be especially helpful to be able to distinguish real from unreal within the confines of one’s own heart.

119: Tsadhe

The letter Tsadhe [צ] symbolizes justice and righteousness in both man and God. In Hebrew, tṣadîq [צַדִּיק] is the word for righteous, and the very first word in this stanza of Psalm 119. A writer at Hebrew Today says a righteous man is “a person who safeguards and protects his eyes from evil things and protects his mouth and speech from saying bad things”.

That’s certainly part of it, though it leaves out the positive aspects of righteousness.

Too Hot to Handle: Rightsizing the Church

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

On his blog, Karl Vaters considers new strategies for church planting and concludes the body of Christ might well function as effectively or even more effectively with 50 smaller churches than a single megachurch.

Tom: Interesting post, IC. He says a lot of things I agree with that not too many other evangelical pastors are saying, and also makes a few statements I find a little naïve or maybe misinformed. First off, it sounds as if he believes megachurches are planted like regular churches, and grow more or less naturally to their colossal size.

Just Church (14)

Last week we were working our way through the topic of guilt. In relation to the church and Social Justice today, it’s a very important topic. Social Justice advocates weaponize it against sincere and well-meaning people in order to get their way. This is quite demonic: taking character dispositions that are perfectly Christian (humility, longing for justice, willingness to accept responsibility for sin and desire to make things right) and turning them into a miserable, guilt-ridden self-reproachment. Rather than expressing a healthy conscience that induces righteous behavior, such false self-reproach is today used by Social Justice advocates to inject into us an unrealistic sense of personal responsibility for all the world’s ills, present and historical, and a misguided desire to alleviate false guilt.

Semi-Random Musings (40)

“So now give me this hill country of which the Lord spoke on that day …”

Caleb son of Jephunneh is eighty-five when he speaks these words to his fellow senior citizen and current leader of Israel’s armies, Joshua son of Nun. Joshua and the high priest Eleazar are in the process of dividing the largely-conquered land of Canaan by lot to assign territory to the various tribes. In the middle of this, Caleb comes to ask a personal favor. In the process, he does some reminiscing.

He’s casting his mind back to a particular day forty-five years in the past.

Cutting to the Chase

I recently labored through the first volume of C.W. Previté-Orton’s Cambridge Medieval History, which covers the period from the late Roman Empire through to the twelfth century in a little under 700 pages. I say “labored”, but some parts (the earlier ones) were actually fairly exciting. However, as the venerable historian’s focus shifted from Italy and Greece to Germany, then Western Europe, I bogged down in a morass of what appeared (from my limited and relatively disinterested perspective) to be mediocre personages doing mediocre things.

I’m sure it wasn’t really that way.

Anonymous Asks (341)

“What is the core message of the Minor Prophets?”

Sometimes a question is too general to be useful. That’s not a criticism of the anonymous person who asked today’s poser. He is probably trying to get a clear, simple reply to an area of Bible inquiry he finds interesting. Sometimes that is easy to do. Other times it isn’t.

This would be one of those.

Faith in Strange Places

Almost everybody who’s ever flipped the pages of a Bible has noticed most versions have bold headings interspersed throughout its paragraphs to help the reader navigate what would otherwise be a daunting wall of text. Most also understand that these are not original content, which is to say they were inserted by English-speaking translators or editors relatively recently. They were added for much the same reason most of our blog posts have little orange headings every few paragraphs. They break up the text and give you an idea what you are about to encounter. They help the eye keep moving.

The heading atop Joshua 9 in my ESV reads “The Gibeonite Deception”. That’s not wrong exactly, but it’s sure not the whole story of that chapter. Sometimes you find faith in strange places.

119: Pe

Pe [פ] is the seventeenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It is also the Hebrew word for “mouth” and refers to the power of speech to change one’s world. (Not by coincidence, pe appears as “mouth” in the third verse of this section of Psalm 119, though not in connection with speech or power.) We can see how the word is used in scripture from Genesis forward, creating several intriguing Hebrew idioms. One example: Pharaoh says to Joseph, “All my people shall order themselves as you command.” The word “command” there is pê. What Pharaoh literally said is that all Egypt would conduct itself “according to Joseph’s mouth”.

That’s some pretty powerful speech, but then we worship a God who spoke our world into being.

Too Hot to Handle: Religion by the Numbers

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

Lyman Stone is a Lutheran believer who likes math. So he has built, in his words, “a complete annual dataset for every religious group in America as far back as I could get data”. That turns out to be 1925. If you want to know how your favorite denomination is doing demographically these days, especially compared to how it has done historically, Stone might well be the most informed guy on the block.

George Barna would be proud. Maybe. Assuming he doesn’t mind the competition.

Tom: You’ve mentioned before that you’re not a big stats guy, IC. What is it you don’t like about parsing data?

Just Church (13)

This week, we’re continuing our discussion of guilt. It’s a key tool being used today by the Woke Left to bludgeon Christians into cooperation with the leftist agenda, and bring that agenda into the church. The Christian recognition of human guilt is leveraged to induce a heightened and unwarranted anxiety about us becoming seen as narrow, discriminatory, unfair, or racially insensitive. In this state, we become vulnerable to the recommendations of seemingly-nice false teachers who claim to lead the way to greater justice and fairness in church life.

Let’s unpack those tactics. We might ask, “Why is guilt such an effective weapon against society in the present moment?” and “How is it even more effective as a weapon against the church?” That’s what we’ll cover this week: and next week, we’ll complete the picture by showing how the kind of guilt we are being invited to experience today is unlike godly guilt and repentance, so we can recognize it for what it is — a strategy of the enemy intended to disorient, fragment and demoralize our people, and thus to render them pliable to an ungodly agenda.

A Toasted Kitten Sandwich

As I write this, we’re not even two weeks into Donald J. Trump’s second presidency, and already the opinions are flying online. Evangelicals who voted for him are generally positive about the way he hit the ground running, others are concerned that too many Christians visibly associated with a secular Trump presidency spells trouble for the church down the road. Still others are, for now at least, holding their peace and waiting to see where this all goes.

Let’s not even talk about the reaction from the Left. You’d think the President had just eaten a toasted kitten sandwich live on national TV. (He didn’t. Let me just head that rumor off before someone starts it.)

Oracles of God

“… whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God.”

Assuming we take the word “speaks” to mean “addresses the congregation when believers gather”, it should be evident Peter wrote these instructions to Christians exercising the spiritual gift of teaching rather than the spiritual gift of prophecy, though we know both were present among members of the first century church.

The reasons for this are twofold.

Anonymous Asks (340)

“I have a couple of books on my shelf written by Ravi Zacharias. What would you do with them?”

If you have been living under a rock and don’t know the name, Ravi Zacharias was a highly influential apologist, writer and evangelist, the head of a $35-40 million international empire ... er, Christian ministry. His books sold two million copies and his YouTube videos received hundreds of thousands of views.

He died in May 2020, shortly following which allegations surfaced of repeated sexual misconduct over many years.

A Track Record with the Lord

“But You, Lord, are a shield around me,
My glory, and the One who lifts my head.
I was crying out to the Lord with my voice,
And He answered me from His holy mountain.

Selah

I lay down and slept;
I awoke, for the Lord sustains me.
I will not be afraid of ten thousands of people
Who have set themselves against me all around.”

When David found himself in trouble, he would remember the dealings he had had with the Lord in other times of trouble. He did this with Goliath, remember? He said to Saul, “Your servant has killed both the lion and the bear; and this uncircumcised Philistine will be like one of them, since he has defied the armies of the living God.” He knew that when he was fighting to rescue “sheep”, the Lord God would be with him, no matter how great the enemy might look. It had been so before; and it would be so again.

119: Ayin

The Hebrew letter Ayin [ע] means “eye” and signifies not just functional vision but spiritual understanding. The words “eyes” and “understanding” appear six and ten times, respectively, in Psalm 119, so we are not surprised to find both in the first few verses of today’s reading, not least because the importance of seeking understanding from God through his word is the major theme of the psalm.

Occasional verses that address others interrupt some sections of the psalmist’s prayer; however, today’s stanza focuses entirely on God.

Too Hot to Handle: Going Crazy

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

What could inspire a pleasant, thoroughly secularized gay man to trumpet the virtue of belief on YouTube?

Well, in this case, it’s a new Pew Research study which reveals that a staggering 56.3% of white, liberal women age 18-29 have been diagnosed with a mental health condition at some point. That’s a mind-blowing number.

Tom: The report also indicates conservatives of both sexes were only half as likely (16.3% vs. 33.6% and 27.3% vs. 56.3%) to be diagnosed with mental health issues as their liberal counterparts in the same age group, which understandably prompted Dave Rubin to start talking about the value of having a fixed set of beliefs.

Just Church (12)

Chapter 4: What Social Justice Does to the Fellowship

I once knew a woman who was raised in a very abusive home.

Her father was so violent and unpredictable in his temper that she never knew when she would be bullied and struck, or for what. Life was a continual “walking on eggshells”, and as she grew up she began to adopt various strategies for survival. As time passed these strategies became ingrained in her personality.

Her father died in her early adult years, and she escaped. Eventually she married a large, kind-hearted man with a particularly generous and even disposition. Never in their years of married life would he raise a hand to her in violence. Nevertheless, the scars of the past ran deep. How deep they ran she did not even know.

The Next Moses

Right in the middle of Deuteronomy, God promised Israel another mediator “like Moses”. Well, technically, he did it roughly forty years earlier, but Deuteronomy is where we find the details.

Exodus 20 tells the original story of this awesome encounter and its consequences, and Moses repeated it to a new generation of Israelites in Deuteronomy 5. God graciously accommodated a terrified people at Sinai (Horeb), unwilling to continue experiencing the Almighty’s presence directly, when he spoke to them from heaven out of the midst of the fire and gave them the first ‘ten words’ out of many commands.

The people then begged Moses to receive God’s message to them on behalf of the entire nation.

The Spirit of Jonah

“But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared.”

The line that precedes these words in Psalm 130 reads, “If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?” The question is rhetorical, and the intended response is “Nobody.” If God gave everyone exactly what he or she deserved, this planet would be a hollowed-out, smoking husk.

But he doesn’t, and there’s the rub. God “devises means so that the banished one will not remain an outcast”. “He is not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.”

Anonymous Asks (339)

“Is there a conclusive argument for the existence of God?”

Sadly, there is no conclusive argument either for the existence of God or anything else. The reason is unbelief. Perhaps I should not use “reason” and “unbelief” in the same sentence. They are in fact mutually exclusive. The unbeliever refuses compelling arguments, persuasive evidence, and even the science he claims to worship when any of these do not agree with his predetermined position.

For such a man, literally nothing is ever conclusive.

Gadflies and Blinded Eyes

Wesley Huff is a Toronto-based apologist and popular YouTube presence with considerable experience in public debates on behalf of the Christian faith. Ammon Hillman is an American classicist who was raised Baptist, but apostatized from the faith in his early twenties and has been passing himself off as a public intellectual and serious Greek scholar ever since.

Bernie sent me one of Huff’s YouTube shorts last week in which he comments on Hillman’s bizarre assertion that the word “Christ” actually means “to be stung by a gadfly”.

Really? Really? Okay, let’s play …

119: Samekh

Hebrew scholars say the letter Samekh [ס] signifies support and protection. The idea is that the perimeter of the letterform symbolizes the Creator and the interior depicts his creation, surrounded on all sides, upheld and protected by him. It’s a nice thought, and it definitely fits with the eight verses of this fifteenth stanza of Psalm 119.

We might note that while the perimeter of the samekh has substance, the interior is a void. Accurate symbolism is not always flattering.

Too Hot to Handle: Alt-Personhood

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

Fox News reports that the Baltimore Book Festival has dropped Rachel Dolezal’s invitation to participate in the festival this year after receiving too much negative public feedback.

You may remember Ms Dolezal from a flurry of media scrutiny in 2015 when it was revealed that the leader of the Spokane chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People wasn’t really a person of color after all, but was in reality a little blonde in blackface.

Tom: IC, I don’t understand. Society says it’s not only okay but morally imperative for me to self-identify as a woman if that’s how I feel about myself, even if I have been born biologically male. It will defend my right to call myself any made-up gender I like, even to the point of stripping you of your right to disagree with me about it in the public space.