Christians and the Law: Controversy

“And some men came down from Judea and began teaching the brethren, ‘Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved’ ”.

These words in Acts 15:1 introduce an issue that challenged the Christian church soon after its inception and would continue to be debated among the believers for years to come.

But why was it such a crucial matter for the early church?

Paul’s background as a Pharisee certainly gave him a ready understanding of the Judaizers’ position, but on the basis of his knowledge of the gospel of grace, he strongly opposed their teaching. Years later he would explain to the Galatians:

“A man is not justified by the works of the Law but through faith in Christ Jesus ... by the works of the Law shall no flesh be justified ...  if righteousness comes through the Law, then Christ died needlessly.” (Galatians 2:16,21)

Paul and Barnabas fought the Judaizers in Antioch for some time before it became clear that the debate must be officially resolved. At last the church at Antioch decided to send a delegation, led by Paul and Barnabas, to Jerusalem to consult the apostles and elders there.

Whatever was decided at the council would determine the practice of the Gentile believers throughout the Roman Empire and throughout subsequent history.

God’s Sovereignty, Man’s Responsibility and the Two Witnesses

In his recent post on Calvinism, Immanuel made the point that pretty much every Christian believes in God’s sovereignty. The debate, he says, is not really about whether God is sovereign, but:

“… what they disagree about is how prescriptive His management of the universe has to be in order for that to be true. Does He have to mandate the movement of every molecule that twitches? Or is it possible that God allows human beings some measure of freedom of choice and action? How “tight” does sovereignty have to be in order to remain sovereignty?”

My personal conviction, and that of many fellow believers (obviously including Immanuel), is that Scripture teaches both the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of man.

The “two witnesses” of Revelation 11 appear to me to illustrate both these principles, and one way in which the two might co-exist (I’m not suggesting that in every instance the two work together in precisely this way).

Let’s suppose in analyzing the chapter that its words are intended to be taken at face value; that is to say, that when John writes “if anyone would”, it means “if anyone would” (as opposed to something along the lines of “if the sovereign God compels anyone to”).

If we do that, is it possible to see the sovereignty of God on display at the same time as man’s will?

Tolerating Evil: Moral Relativism and the Slippery Pole to Hell

The most current version of this post is available here.

Christians and the Law: Why the Confusion?

“And some men came down from Judea and began teaching the brethren, ‘Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved’ ”.

These words in Acts 15:1 introduce an issue that challenged the Christian church soon after its inception and would continue to be debated among the believers for years to come.

But where did this controversy originate?

The Cause 

In order to trace this issue back to its roots, one must go back to the Old Testament and consider what it has to say about the relationship between Jew and Gentile.

Culture, Politics and Christianity

I’ve been asking myself lately where my loyalties really lie.

Christendom is part of the cultural mainstream. That is not news to anyone. That Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, at a cost of something in the neighbourhood of $130,000,000, would get released at all in 2014 is evidence that Hollywood thinks there are plenty of Christianized or at least vaguely Christian-influenced pockets out there to be picked.

(No, this is not going to turn into a movie review. Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro have done such fine jobs eviscerating the movie that I wouldn’t take a crack at Noah even if I’d bothered to see it. Think three words: “Perversely pagan mess”. That should about do it.)

And of course, in addition to cross-pollinating with popular culture, we have our own “vibrant” Christian subculture going on. We have our own fiction writers, our own music, t-shirts, bumper stickers, and now even our own films.

They’ve infected us. We’ve (kinda) infected them, at least to some degree. We’ve become mercantile. And they’ve become aware that we’re a market, and they’re not so uncompromisingly leftist (yet) that they’re willing to let a buck pass without grabbing their share.

In this miasma of kinda-sorta Christendom that doesn’t seem a whole lot like the first century church in the book of Acts — at least not by any spiritual metric I can easily locate — one wonders what exactly the Lord would have to say about us, assuming we’d stop to listen.

Relativism: Facts, Foolishness and Faith

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Tolerance and Relativism

The most current version of this post is available here.

On Christians and Hypocrisy

“Christians are hypocrites.”

When people say it — and they do — they are often thinking of unscrupulous TV evangelist-types whose greed and hypocrisy have been publicly exposed, or perhaps their own bitter personal experience with a person who claimed to be a follower of Christ but acted in a very un-Christlike way.

It is certainly a great shame when people claim to be followers of the Lord Jesus but live lives of self-centredness and prejudice. Often these people make the matter worse by assuming an air of false piety and loudly condemning those who do not match up to their lofty standards of conduct — standards they themselves do not even follow.

Is there a Biblical response to this sort of thing? How should a genuine believer respond?

Believers That Sin & A God In Whom Is No Darkness At All

A more current version of this post is available here.

All Things Dull and Ugly: Monty Python and the Millennium

In 1848, a song with the title All Things Bright and Beautiful appeared for the first time in Mrs. Cecil Alexander’s Hymns for Little Children. It subsequently became a Christian standard, and you are probably familiar with at least some of the lyrics (and almost surely the general concept), so I won’t include them here.

Also, they are considerably less amusing than the lyrics to the parody version written by British comedian Eric Idle for Monty Python’s Contractual Obligation Album in 1980. I include a couple of verses to give you the general idea:

       “All things dull and ugly
        All creatures short and squat
        All things rude and nasty
        The Lord God made the lot

        Each nasty little hornet
        Each beastly little squid
        Who made the spiky urchin?
        Who made the sharks? He did”

It goes on in much the same vein for four or five stanzas, but you get the picture. You can read the whole thing here if you care to, or if you don’t recall it (it has been nearly 35 years). As a teenager, I thought it was hilarious … until I didn’t.

My point is actually not to bang out a few paragraphs about how the members of Monty Python are (or were) horrible, irreverent human beings on their way to hell. They did, in fact, take more than a few shots at religion, but many of their targets made themselves more than fair game.

No, my interest in this particular ball of snark hurled at the cultural wall is its uncanny accuracy.

You see, they really do a nice job of making Scripture’s point for it, at least on this topic.

Debunking Heavenly Mythology IV: Christians Will Spend Eternity In Heaven

Does it really matter where we’re going to spend eternity, frankly?

I mean Christians, of course. It matters a very great deal indeed to the lost where they end up, whether they recognize it now or not. Time will tell, but if the teaching of the Bible turns out to be the truth, the fact that a person doesn’t see fit to believe in or respond to that truth does not mean he or she can escape the eternal consequences of his choice, or of hers. And those who fail to value the Lord Jesus Christ at his true worth — who fail to see him as his Father sees him — will spend eternity without him.

If that doesn’t seem like a big deal now, bear in mind that there is no cause/effect relationship between what is coming to us after death and your opinion or mine about it. That is the nature of objective reality. The idea of “true for you” or “true for me” is a vapid modern platitude to which no rational person genuinely subscribes, though it makes for a great means of deflecting enthusiastic truth purveyors one doesn’t really feel like dealing with.

Trust me, spending eternity without the Lord Jesus Christ will definitely be a big deal when there no longer exists the opportunity to choose it or reject it.

But to Christians, to those who believe, Paul says, “[T]he Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.”

We will be “with the Lord”. That is our destiny as believers, and the goal, the true hope of every believing heart. So for Christians, does it really matter where we spend eternity as long as our Lord is there?

Yes and no.

Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot and the Infinite-Personal God

“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena … Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”

— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

What interests me about Sagan’s monologue is that so much of it is undeniably true — and yet there’s one crucial point on which I would have to disagree. Sagan, as many others have done before and after him, looks at the sheer inconceivable size and scope of the universe and comes to the conclusion that it is simply too big, and we are simply too small by comparison, for us to believe that our lives have any higher purpose, or that there is a God who cares about us.

To which I say, wait, what?

Debunking Heavenly Mythology III: Hark, the Herald Angels Sing

Um … they don’t. Really. Look it up.

Aw, come on, you’re Googling, aren’t you.

It’s okay. I did too. I also got my concordance out. But this particular misconception is not confined to the famous Christmas carol.

Although ... it’s awfully hard to prove a negative. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we have “no unequivocal biblical evidence” of angels singing.

I owe my father for this one, by the way. It’s a small point, but one of a number of things that prompted me to begin looking at the words of Scripture a little more attentively, and actually look things up rather than just believing what I was told.

Dear Preacher: On Calvinism and Pride

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Debunking Heavenly Mythology II: Saint Peter and the Pearly Gates

In a previous post I spent a few hundred keystrokes on the things of heaven, trying to point out how very ill-equipped the best of us is to fully comprehend them, even with the aid of the imagery of scripture, since “No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him.”

But our inability to fully apprehend everything about heavenly things is not a license to manufacture any old view of heaven wholesale. The only reliable source of knowledge about things outside current human experience is the word of God itself.

Passing Thoughts on Fred Phelps

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Debunking Heavenly Mythology I: Angels are Dead People

In a previous post, I spent some time contemplating the things of heaven and trying, however haltingly, to point out how very ill-equipped the best of us is to fully comprehend them, even with the aid of the imagery of scripture, since “no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him”.

That said, there are many, MANY things that we can be very sure heaven is not.

The lack of specificity and detail about many heavenly things is not a license to manufacture any old view of heaven wholesale. Let’s address a common myth or two — and I promise not to make any of this up:

The Things That Are Prepared

The idea of heaven is necessarily a blurry concept to earthly beings. We navigate the world around us via our senses, so it is unsurprising to find a certain conceptual impenetrability to those things we cannot see, touch, taste, smell or hear in this present life. Those who are unacquainted with the Lord might well say, “The reason you can’t conceive these things is that they don’t exist”.

Except they do. We have our Lord’s word on it. He tells his disciples explicitly that “In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?” And he says it as if he’s wondering why on earth we would for a moment expect anything else.

This conceptual fuzziness about heavenly things is a consistent feature of prophetic revelation, both Old Testament and New. Ezekiel peppers his description of the heavenlies with the words “appearance” and “likeness”, as if to say, “I know my account is hopelessly inadequate, but this is the closest I can get”. John, in Revelation, does exactly the same thing, using the word “like” over and over again.

To the believer, it’s emotionally stirring, certainly, but I have to admit to a certain intellectual dissatisfaction with the lack of detail.

On Reorganizing our Concept of Love

The following is excerpted from a sermon I enjoyed last night (I did, in fact, warn the preacher that he was likely to be transcribed):

“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.” (1 John 4:7-8)

“God is love,” says the Bible.

We must be careful that we don’t make of that something sentimental or insincere. God is love, but in our society today, many people believe love is god.

And there’s a difference.

Baal Worship, Howard Cosell and Little Details

In 1931, an excavator named Claude Schaeffer on a dig in Ras Shamra, Syria came across three clay tablets in the ruins of a house belonging to a high priest of the god Baal that have come to be referred to as the Krt Epic or the The Epic of Kret (without any vowels, it’s hard to be consistent in the transliteration of ancient Eastern names).

If you were to cherry-pick a few couplets from the Krt tablets you might observe that they bear a passing similarity to the language of the Psalms:

“To the earth Baal rained, to the field rained ’Aliy. Sweet to the earth was Baal’s rain; to the field the rain of ’Aliy.”

“In a dream of Beneficent El Benign, a vision of the Creator of Creatures, the skies rained oil, the wadis flowed honey. So I knew that Mighty Baal lives; the Prince, Lord of Earth, exists.”

The deity being worshipped is referred to as “mighty” and “beneficent”; his generosity in providing rain for the crops is called “sweet”. He is the “Lord of Earth”.

Even the bit about flowing honey sounds vaguely familiar.