An anecdote only: I won’t try to turn it into a thesis since it’s merely an observation.
The habit of using the Law of Moses as a way of filling in any perceived blanks left by the writers of the New Testament seems well ingrained among the supersessionist Reformers I encounter. For example, there are many discussions online about tithing these days. These almost inevitably take on a quasi-legalistic tone (“What must I do?”).
When you think about it, this makes some sort of sense.
“If it is not he, who then is it?”
Good question, Job. If it is not God who gives the earth into the hand of the wicked … if it is not God who keeps his appointed rulers from dispensing justice … then who can we blame? When we suffer inexplicably, whom but God may we reasonably charge with afflicting us?
Most deep thinkers eventually arrive at this question, and not all are omni-determinists. Job was several millennia pre-Calvin.
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“Why do people struggle with lack of faith?”
On its own, the word “faith” is content-free. There is no such thing as generic faith. To talk about believing without asking what you are supposed to believe is like trying to order dinner at a restaurant when you’ve never been given a menu and the waiter refuses to tell you what the options are. A question so unspecific is quite impossible to answer meaningfully.
Faith always has to be in something or someone. It cannot exist in a vacuum.
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The subject of faith has been on my mind this week, and we’ll revisit it tomorrow in our usual Monday “Anonymous Asks” post. Faith does not come easily to many, and even those of us habituated to trusting in Christ to meet our physical and spiritual needs on a daily basis find occasions when we too struggle to believe the Lord will do the things he has promised.
Far more important in the long run is faith that saves. One man’s honesty about his personal struggle to find it touched me the other day, and I’d like to share it with you.
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Joseph had two sons during his glory years in Egypt, Ephraim and Manasseh. When his father Jacob was old and full of years, he blessed the two boys and adopted them as his own sons, meaning that Joseph effectively received the birthright in his generation, the double portion of Jacob’s inheritance that Reuben, his older brother, had forfeited by sleeping with his father’s concubine. In Canaan, Ephraim and Manasseh grew to be among Israel’s most powerful and numerous tribes, and Manasseh held territory on both sides of the Jordan.
We have previously mentioned irony in Judges: there’s lots and lots of it. We come to more of it today. The last chapter of Jephthah’s story involves conflict between two brother tribes.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
In Matthew 16, upon Peter’s confession, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” Jesus responds with two promises, which we may briefly restate as: (i) “On this rock I will build my church”, and (ii) “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven …”
Tom: There’s more to these promises, obviously, but I wanted to consider a couple of issues. First, whether these are two separate promises, or if the second is merely some kind of amplification of the first, and second, when can we anticipate the realization of these promises.
I hear a lot of people talk about their love for the gospel. But then I also hear a lot of talk about how people “love” ice cream, their cars, their mates, their pets, and the NFL.
I’m pretty sure there’s a difference in each case.
There are different ways to love. Some of them are a million miles from the others. So what are people talking about when they say they really love the gospel?
I’m going to give you three different ways. There are probably more, but I’ve seen these three a lot.
Six years ago, a new Gillette commercial indicting all men for the sins of some prompted this discussion of biblical masculinity between IC and me. We concluded the sort of male behavior encouraged in scripture is not toxic, and that the problem is not that men today are too masculine, but that they are not masculine in biblical ways … and that’s when they are masculine at all.
It wasn’t just Christians who were turned off by Gillette’s politically correct hectoring. The ad was brutally panned within hours of airing, and I was curious how much money Procter & Gamble was prepared to lose to make the ideological point it was pushing. Well, now we know.
The words “mercy” and “grace” appear hundreds of times in scripture. We use them in the vast majority of our public prayers. They are among the most common words heard in churches and among Christians conversing.
As with so many words we use to express religious truths, both terms easily become jargon; clichés so comfortable we don’t even think about what we are saying. Grace especially has a broad semantic range, creating some overlap in meaning. (For example, the throne of grace is where we receive mercy and find grace.) Nevertheless, the concepts are not interchangeable despite their similarities and their occasional appearance in the same scriptural context.
It’s Tuesday. Let’s differentiate.
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“Why did Jesus weep at the grave of Lazarus?”
This week has been hard. An unsaved friend of over 30 years is on his way out of this world. He can’t communicate directly anymore, and his younger sister, the “baby” of the family, has been passing messages back and forth to me. I have every confidence the Judge of all the earth will do justice with respect to my friend, but his poor sister has no clue. Her desolation when she talks about losing her brother would break your heart.
Am I grieving for my friend? Absolutely. But I’m grieving even more for his family, who do not have the resources I do.
Matt Littlefield is posting about the rapture on his Substack account, and I couldn’t let that slip by without a little light commentary.
The post is entitled “Missed Another Rapture?”, and it’s about the false claims and erroneous connections made by some fringe dispensational Bible enthusiasts eager to be assured the Lord’s return will happen in their lifetime.
I don’t generally pay attention to the prediction-makers in Christendom. I truly believe it’s a fool’s errand to presume esoteric knowledge the Lord never intended us to pursue.
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I find it interesting that the scriptures rarely spend much time describing the conflicts in which Israel engaged (Jericho and Ai being exceptions). In a Tolkien novel, a battle may take multiple chapters to cover. Same with a secular history. But the writers of scripture are teaching moral lessons, and are not interested in martial minutiae unless it serves their spiritual purpose in writing.
In this case, the writer dispenses with a great victory over Ammon in a single verse.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Evolutionary biologist Colin Wright, who believes sex-associated personality differences are at least partly genetic, is deeply unhappy anyone would dare to challenge his worldview, set limits on his contribution to the public discourse, and disrupt his ongoing pursuit of intellectual fulfillment.
Who is doing such a thing, you ask? Why, it’s not the “moral majority” or the Christian Right; Wright dismisses Creationists as irrelevant. No, it’s the social justice Left.
Tom: It turns out the current state of evolutionary psychology has finally collided with the “blank slate” ideology of progressives, IC, and the sparks are making both sides unhappy. How unfortunate for “science”!
When I was young, back in the 1970s, disaster movies were in vogue. Perhaps the most memorable was Jaws (1975), but before that were such noteworthies as The Omega Man (1971), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Airport and Earthquake (1974). Afterward came such screen gems as Rollercoaster (1977), Meteor, Hurricane and The China Syndrome (1979). All in all, there were more than fifty such major Hollywood disaster productions released in the period.
And everybody was going to see them and talking about how great the special effects were or how spectacularly people were shown dying in them.
Odd, don’t you think?
Early in the last book of the Bible, the apostle John saw a vision of seven golden lampstands, in the midst of which was one “like a son of man”, the glorified Jesus Christ. He told John to write down the things he had seen in a book, and to send that book to seven Asian churches: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea. Then he told the apostle plainly that these seven lampstands in his vision represented those seven churches.
That book John wrote at the Lord’s command was Revelation.
“Though you have not seen him, you love him.”
How do we come to love one whom we have not seen?
This is not a new problem. There are no video clips of the Lord’s healings, sermons or public interactions available on YouTube. We have no pictures of him to look at. The last words he uttered on this planet were spoken almost two millennia in our past. For everyone outside of Judea, and who lived in the years after the Lord Jesus ascended to the right hand of the Father, knowing him and loving him — to the extent we manage it — has been the result of hearing and reading about him.
For many people, Christ himself is little more than an abstract idea. How do you genuinely love an abstraction?
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“Why did Pharaoh give Joseph so much authority in Egypt?”
The question is a reference to the events of the latter portion of Genesis 41, in which the king of Egypt takes a thirty-year old foreign prisoner fresh out of the local hoosegow and promotes him to the second-highest position in the kingdom, allowing him unprecedented discretion and political influence. “All my people shall order themselves as you command.”
It’s fair to say nobody saw that coming, and the first-time reader can be forgiven for saying, “Huh. That’s unlikely.” Because it was.
Giving is down. At least at my church it is. So say our elders, and I have no cause to disbelieve them.
When I attended this same local church in my early twenties, two offering bags sat each week during our celebration of the Lord’s Supper on the small, central table, to one side of the bread and wine. At least, they did so prior to our COVID interregnum. For years, after we had passed the bread and wine around, the bags went through the congregation during the weekly meeting at which all the most mature, committed believers were likely to be present, and the fewest visitors troubled by the (incorrect) perception that we expected them to follow suit.
We didn’t.
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I try very hard never to negotiate with God.
Perhaps you struggle with that too. The habit is hard to kick, especially when you want some particular outcome very badly and believe only Heaven can deliver it. But promising God this or that provided he does what I want for me is a pagan instinct, not a Christian one. In his Sermon on the Mount, the Lord Jesus instructed his Jewish followers, for whom vows and oaths were commonplace, not to take oaths at all.
Keeping that in mind, I try never to put myself in the position of promising the Lord things I may not be able to deliver.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Young pastors in American churches are a dying breed. So says Eric Conn, and he’s got a major 2017 study in hand from the Barna Group to prove it. The number of U.S. pastors under forty is currently half what it was in 1992, while the number over sixty-five has tripled. The Barna report concludes, “It is urgent that denominations, networks and independent churches determine how to best motivate, mobilize, resource and deploy more younger pastors.”
Tom: That’s a highly debatable conclusion, but not a surprising one. What’s interesting to me, IC, is not so much Barna’s “Aging of America’s Pastors” article, but Conn’s analysis of it. As someone who’s been there, he described vocational ministry as “a hot mess”.
Michael O’Fallon, host of the very worthwhile Sovereign Nations podcast, says he’s perplexed.
Some time ago he discovered a very nasty kind of false teaching was creeping into the churches in his denomination, a false teaching prepared in the fires of Marxism but now channeled by respected evangelical sources. It seemed obvious to O’Fallon that the first people who would be concerned and who would have a stake in understanding the danger would be those charged with maintaining sound doctrine on behalf of the church.
All Christians allegorize, but some do it much more than others. Symbolic language is plentiful in scripture: we find it in poetry, metaphors, figures of speech, parables, prophecy and in the New Testament’s interpretation of the Old. You will find allegories in every book of the Bible and perhaps most often in the teaching of the Lord Jesus, who used symbolic language both to reveal and to conceal. In view of this, even the most literal Bible teachers allegorize from time to time. It’s impossible not to.
Of course, not all interpretations of allegories are on the same level.
Christians love to quote from the book of Psalms, but some psalms are easier to apply to ourselves than others are.
I was enjoying Psalm 83 this morning while simultaneously noting just how difficult all the Hebrew specifics make it to apply the psalmist’s words meaningfully to present-day believers. The enemies of Israel do not work well as analogies for grumpy HR ladies, obnoxious environmentalist neighbors, or even — to make it more relevant — social misfits with sniper rifles and a burning grudge.
Too soon? Yeah, probably.
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“Why do so many preacher’s kids apostatize?”
I feel as if this is one of those “When did you stop beating your wife?” questions. It assumes the veracity of its premise without any actual investigation. Do “so many” preacher’s kids really abandon their faith when they leave home? What does “many” mean relative to the total number of children born to full-time servants of Christ? If large numbers really did apostatize, how would we know? How many of them come back to the faith later?
Also, who’s keeping the stats: George Barna?
I’ve been praying for Canada lately. If you’ve been following our political scene, we got rid of one failing, bitterly disliked Prime Minister and replaced him with the behind-the-scenes architect of his most abject failures. It’s been 17 months since we had a federal budget, gas prices and food prices are through the roof, youth unemployment is soaring, immigration is wildly out of control and I’m seeing drug addicts and homeless people in every city in Ontario that I visit.
In short, lots to pray about. But how to pray is a good question.
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New readers of Old Testament history may occasionally find themselves lost in a sea of names, places and peoples. Ammonites and Amorites both begin with the letter “A”, but seasoned readers know the Ammonites were fellow Hebrews descended from Lot, as Israel was descended from Abraham, whereas the Amorites were descendants of Canaan son of Ham. They founded the Old Babylonian Empire and ruled Mesopotamia, the Levant and parts of Egypt for four centuries prior to and including Israel’s time in Egypt.
In fact, one reason the Lord obliged Israel to spend so long in Egypt was to give the Amorites opportunity to repent. God told Abraham their iniquity was “not yet complete”. He would judge their sin at the appropriate time, and not before.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
I’m going to quote a full minute of a recent sermon on the subject of the New Testament teaching about baptism here because I want to fairly represent what this particular pastor was trying to communicate. A punchy line or two out of a message is fun, but may distort the speaker’s intent. In this case, providing the entire context makes that intent quite clear.
“I believe that the commission to baptize all nations was given to the church.
The most popular course in the Religion and Culture department of one Canadian university is a course titled “Evil and Its Symbols”. It’s the one course where there never seems to be enough room to fit all the applicants. One student quipped that the homework assignment was probably “Go home and do evil.”
Maybe not. But people sure are fascinated with the topic. Why evil exists is a challenge for any Christian to explain; perhaps the biggest. Still, two things bear remembering right away: firstly, that to say that it’s a challenge does not mean that the challenge cannot be met, and secondly, that to explain the existence of evil is not a challenge unique to Christians or even to theists more generally — it’s equally necessary for atheists. Not only that, but it’s a lot harder for them.
Let me justify those statements a bit further in a moment; but first, let me set the stage for today’s post.
Having seen conservative evangelical Charlie Kirk sent to his eternal reward last week in Utah with a single sniper shot to the neck, one wonders which media personality the enemies of the current US regime would like to see ended next.
To be clear, I’m not alleging Kirk was killed by a leftist — that remains to be proven in court. That said, both the Canadian and American political left are not shy about voicing their delight all over social media that the fatal bullet hit home.
So then, no speculation required. They are happy to tell us who they hate most. [Linked graphic has language issues.]
It’s probably fair to say most Christians dislike the word “luck”. I remember being discouraged from using it as a child and being asked to substitute “blessing” or some such. My parents and Sunday School teachers were (not unreasonably) concerned that I learn to discern the hand of God at work in the world. They also wanted me to not talk like a pagan.
There is wisdom in teaching God’s sovereignty and in speaking of his hand in our daily lives as a matter of course. A child who grows up reckoning without the possibility of God’s personal intervention at any moment as he makes his way in the world is dangerously disconnected from reality. The same default worldview that keeps him from superstitious fearfulness also inoculates him from reverent awe toward his Maker. Atheism is a bad way to go, but it persists. So then, the thought is that people who refer to “luck” and “fortune” are in every instance reckoning without God.
But is that true?
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“Should we take miracles literally?”
If we are talking about the miracles of scripture, absolutely. Once we have conceded the existence of God, there’s no logical reason not to. Any being sufficiently powerful to create and sustain the laws of nature, as the Bible claims God did, is also sufficiently powerful to suspend those laws at his pleasure.
How are Christians supposed to relate to the Law of Moses? Acts 15 gives us a play-by-play of the discussion in Jerusalem on that subject between the apostles and elders of the early church in that city. It ended like this: “It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us,” they wrote to the church in Antioch, “to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well.”
I suppose I have always found their decision settled the matter conclusively for me.
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As in other cases, some judges ruled over specific portions of Israel rather than the entire nation. The action in these next two chapters takes place almost entirely outside Israel proper. Jephthah’s dispute with the Ammonites was over territory acquired in battle three centuries earlier under Moses prior to Israel entering the Promised Land. Often referred to as Gilead, this region now belonged to the tribes of Reuben, Gad and the eastern half of Manasseh.
As we saw in the previous chapter, the Ammonites had previously crossed the Jordan to harass Judah, Benjamin and Ephraim, but Jephthah met and fought their army east of the Jordan.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
David B. was kind enough to forward us this link to a recent survey by Ligonier Ministries and LifeWay Research about what Americans believe about God, Jesus Christ, sin and eternity.
Tom: Apparently they are doing this every couple of years now. Having regular new data sets to browse can be useful in noting trends of one sort or another. We discussed the LifeWay 2016 survey in this space, if I recall correctly … yes, I do. That was the one where, based on the frequency of their heretical answers, my fellow writer Immanuel Can was inspired to refer to some of the respondents as not so much Christian as “ ‘Christian-flavored’, like a really, really bad kind of tofu.”
How’s the tofu this year, IC?
There’s a woman in my church — a lovely woman, a mother and a wife, and selfless servant of the Lord’s people, one most highly esteemed. She has been a grief and addiction counselor, and has spent her whole life ministering to others in their moments of darkest sorrow. Her husband is also a wonderful person, and his career for several decades has been as chaplain to the elderly, caring for fragile souls on the doorstep of eternity.
This woman has just been diagnosed with aggressive, metastasizing liver cancer. The fatal kind.
“Whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.”
If you remember the context of today’s quote, the “right thing” James is writing about means prefacing our public declarations about plans for the future with the words “if the Lord wills”. Anything else is presumption.
“Do the right thing,” he says. “The future is not ours to boast about.”
John 9 begins with the healing of a man born blind. The story, like so many others in John, is unique to that gospel. The chapter is not even primarily about the healing itself, which takes up a mere seven verses. Strange as it may seem to a first-time reader to find Jesus making mud with his own saliva and anointing a man’s eyes, it’s no stranger than some of his other healings. John’s account is concerned primarily with the repercussions of the event, which take him almost five times as long to tell as the actual healing.
John gives us 41 verses devoted to a man’s story, but no record of his name. That’s actually fairly common in all the gospels, since their subject is Christ, not us. In a way, the man himself is incidental. In another way, he’s anything but.
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“What’s the key to making marriage last?”
Almost anybody with a properly functioning arm and a working pair of eyeballs can hit a dartboard. It’s a lot harder to hit the bullseye. If you asked me “What’s a key to making marriage last?” or “What are some important ways to make a marriage last?”, well, that’s easy. When you ask, “What’s the key?”, that’s much tougher.
Do I really have to pick just one?
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The Powers-That-Be love managing public opinion. They expend
millions of dollars and
After all, the most effective lies are 90% true.
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After four chapters devoted to the history of and repercussions flowing from the life of a single judge (Gideon), we come to a chapter in which the entire life’s work of two judges (Tola and Jair) and the manner in which they each delivered their nation are summed up in a mere five verses. Thirteen more are devoted to setting up the story of the next judge (Jephthah). Sixty-four years covered in eighteen verses.
We might view the relative brevity of these next two accounts as an imbalance of sorts, especially if we are used to reading secular history.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Immanuel Can: Hey, Tom, what’s all this I’m suddenly hearing about “NPC”?
Tom: Oh my, you sure know how to pick ’em. As you have surely noticed, there’s a big media brouhaha around that term, and Twitter has banned it outright as “hateful”. I’ll let writer Brandon Morse explain it:
“If you’ve ever picked up a video game that features other characters that are controlled by the computer, then you’ve run into non-player characters or NPC’s.”
When you call someone an “NPC”, what you are saying is that they are programmed with preset behavioral patterns decided for them by somebody else, be they professors, activist groups or the media. You are telling them they are unable to think for themselves.
I’ve heard that Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time may be the most famous book people have never read.
That’s right: Never.
People sure do talk about it. It’s sold ten million or so copies. Lots of people cite the title of the book, laud it, and claim to have found their opinions confirmed by it — but few of these have actually ever read it.
In a way, maybe that’s understandable. It is, after all, a fairly challenging book. For a mathematician, it’s a good read, perhaps; for the average person it’s a quick road to Slumberland. Even though it’s pretty short it only takes a few pages to render most folks unconscious.
Simple answers to vexed questions are lovely things. They are also exceedingly rare.
Last week at the island, IC and I asked why so many young men we read about and know personally have “gone Reformed” or are thinking seriously about it. As someone who’s very satisfied with the scriptural faithfulness, consistency and durability of the teaching handed down to me by previous generations in my own tradition, I’m deeply curious what is drawing our youth toward a theological alternative characterized by determinism, allegory, abrogated promises and, yes, on the younger end, an increasingly undeniable tendency towards unabashed antisemitism.
In Sunday’s post, we noted the first century baptism of the Holy Spirit in Samaria took place when Peter and John first prayed, then laid hands on believing Samaritans. That’s in Acts 8. We also noted the Holy Spirit did not deem this step necessary when he baptized Jews in Jerusalem in Acts 2 or Gentiles in Caesarea in Acts 10. These simply believed and were filled with the Spirit, glorifying God in other languages.
The experience of Acts 8 prompts a few questions about this “laying on of hands”. Where did it come from? What does it signify? How did the early church practice it? Did miracles always accompany it? We’re going to try to answer these questions today.
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“Is it possible for fallen angels to repent?”
In C.S. Lewis’s Narnia stories, Aslan never tells anyone any story but their own. When he walks with Edmund after his restoration, Lewis comments, “There is no need to tell you (and no one ever heard) what Aslan was saying.”
I’ve always thought those lines insightful. Scripture is silent about many things that inspire our curiosity, the status of spirit beings who “left their proper dwelling” among them.
We speak of the baptism of the Holy Spirit as an event that took place in the first century, at the very beginning of church history. That’s correct. Notwithstanding the practices of some charismatic groups, most Christians today do not expect groups of new believers to receive the Holy Spirit accompanied by tongues of fire and the expression of the prophetic word in foreign languages as in Acts 2. If we are honest, nothing that we see happening in those churches today corresponds authentically to the events we read about in Acts.
So then, we consign the baptism of the Holy Spirit to the past, where we believe it belongs. It was a historic manifestation of the power of God by which “in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body”.
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You may have heard the expression “sow it with salt” before. It’s most commonly associated with the incident we are reading about today, in which Abimelech destroyed the city of Shechem and sowed it with salt thereafter. Salting the earth apparently became common in the ancient Near East. Hittite and Assyrian sources both mention the practice, but none predates the Judges account.
Maybe Abimelech was a trendsetter.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
The Pew Research Center — a moderately reputable outfit as these things go — just released study data that indicates three quarters of Americans are incapable of distinguishing fact from opinion. When given a series of statements like “Spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid make up the largest portion of the U.S. federal budget” (fact, supposedly), and “Democracy is the greatest form of government” (opinion, surely), most participants were unable to determine which were which.
Tom: Somebody’s responsible for that, IC. Want to hazard a guess who it might be?
Back in 2012, NBA Commissioner David Stern caught flack for cracking an old joke in an interview with Jim Rome. Rome asked him if the NBA lottery was rigged. Stern came back with, “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?”
Of course, this immediately got him into trouble with the PC set, who took him to be making fun of the very serious issue of wife abuse. I can sympathize with their ire; but in fairness, I think it’s not what Stern was trying to say. He was actually referring to an old (admittedly somewhat tasteless) joke. I think I first read it on a bubble gum wrapper when I was a kid, and I remember seeing it in other places as well. It was one of those things that was “just around”. The joke went like this:
Question: What’s a question you cannot answer either “Yes” or “No”?
Answer: Have you stopped beating your wife yet?
Perhaps Stern and I chewed the same gum, I don’t know.
“Too long have I had my dwelling among those who hate peace. I am for peace, but when I speak, they are for war!”
The perennial burden of the believer in a faithless, self-interested, predatory and relentlessly aggressive world is that he simply does not fit in, no matter how hard he or she may try. If our hearts are truly in the process of being remade in the likeness of the Lord Jesus, we are bound to find ourselves emotionally at odds with our co-workers, neighbors and especially the power structures of the societies in which we live.
How can we not? We are of a completely different disposition, and it goes right down to our spiritual genetics.