I Stand Amused

So, you know, Christians have answers to atheist objections.

What’s funny to me is how different those answers may be without being contradictory. God has given different members of the Body of Christ a variety of complementary ways of looking at the world around us, and completely different, often totally unexpected responses to the diverse needs evidenced in that world. An intellectual perceives a need for an intellectual answer. A historian looks for someone who understands his discipline and responds to it credibly. A plumber or carpenter may expect common sense. A stay-at-home mom ... well, we don’t have many of those anymore anyway.

And if anecdotal evidence means anything, any honest seeker may find himself under conviction by means of encountering other kinds of evidence entirely. We don’t always know what we’re looking for after all, and we may not know ourselves as well as we think we do.

Quote of the Day (10)

From David Cambell’s Illustrations of Prophecy, 1839

Students of prophecy make reference to a future geopolitical entity described in detail in both Daniel and Revelation. In scripture it is called the “fourth kingdom”. Some Bible students also refer to it as the “revived Roman empire” because it will be the spiritual and political reanimation of ancient Rome.

Neo-Rome is consistently depicted as being comprised of ten divisions or kingdoms. Nebuchadnezzar’s dream image in Daniel 2 has ten toes. The fourth beast of Daniel 7 has ten horns, as does the seven-headed monstrosity energized by Satan’s power that John saw in Revelation 13, and the beast on which the great prostitute rides in Revelation 17.

This ten nation confederacy is said to “devour the whole earth, and trample it down, and break it to pieces”. So, you know, fairly significant stuff, at least to those of us who believe these things are still to take place in our world.

Turn It Off

The other night I was out with Bernie and one of his neighbours, a man who works in the correctional system. Bernie has his own business to run. His neighbour had a co-worker in crisis. I had just come from work myself. We had a great time and some good, solid conversation, but in the course of a three hour dinner, every one of our cell phones was active between five and twenty times.

You have probably had similar experiences.

A new initiative in my department at work is migrating 90% of company communications to an intranet social media site patterned after Facebook. We are being discouraged from using email and encouraged to access the forum regularly from our phones when not on the job in order to keep abreast of developments and “share information more effectively”.

The Priests Go First

The most recent version of this post is available here.

The Worship of Angels

A more current version of this post is available here.

Cage Match: Zechariah 14 vs Matthew Henry

Matthew Henry’s commentary on the Bible has gained a reputation as the “best and most widely used work of its kind”. I have its three bulky volumes on my own bookshelf and have found it surprisingly useful at times given its age and the limited number of translations and study tools available when it was written in the early decades of the 18th century. Philip Doddridge said, “Henry is, perhaps, the only commentator … that deserves to be entirely and attentively read through”. Evangelist George Whitfield is said to have read Henry’s commentary daily with his devotions.

So this is not me having another “Rachel Held Evans” moment. Critiquing the opinions of a social justice wannabe looking to amp up pageviews, book sales and personal appearance invitations is not in the same league as tackling a respected and serious writer whose work has been influential for almost three centuries.

That said, there here is no better way to highlight the absurdities inherent in some methods of interpretation — even well accepted and venerable methods — than to simply lay a commentary side-by-side with the word of God.

Too Hot to Handle: Making Merchandise

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Whose I Am and Whom I Serve

How do you characterize your relationship with God?

When people ask you, what do you say? How do you describe it?

Anybody can make a list, even a long list, and many have done so. But if you were addressing unbelievers and had to distill the relationship down to one or two very primary, fundamental elements, which aspects would you choose?

Total Depravity: Can’t We Come Up With A New Term?

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Insulting Our Intelligence

Another Stand to Reason atheist challenge, this one plucked out of an article in Salon:

“[I]t insults our intelligence to be enjoined to believe, now that we have split the atom, discovered the Higgs Boson, and sent a probe to Pluto, in the veracity of a supernatural account of the origins of our cosmos.”

There are probably half a dozen ways to approach a statement like this. I’m just going to go with the obvious …

The Fixed Mindset and the “Praise Bell”

You’ve got to know that when you come across an article entitled “Why Do Women Fail?” in a forum that specifically exists to promote women, somebody is likely to be unhappy with whatever conclusions may be drawn.

Unless the answer is “men”, I suspect.

The fact that the piece is credited to two credentialed women (one a Stanford University professor of psychology, the other the co-founder of the Girl’s Leadership Institute) and flagged with an uncharacteristic editorial disclaimer declaring, “The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the authors” just serves to make it more interesting.

I’m hooked.

A Work in Progress

My clumsy attempt to visually represent the relationships between the various biblical spiritual domains that impact on the afterlife:

Doesn’t Always Mean What We Think It Means (3)

Yahweh’s Restoration Ministry (let’s call them YRM for the sake of brevity) says the Bible is “the most misunderstood book of all time”.

That’s a provocative statement, and not one that’s easy to prove. But given the ubiquity of Bibles in our times, the number of years most of its books have been circulated, and the diversity of interpretations some derive from it, I suppose it may be correct.

Of course, the question that almost asks itself after such a declaration is “If so, then whose understanding of the Bible is correct?” And we can probably guess how YRM would answer that one.

Too Hot to Handle: Immasculate Conception

The most recent version of this post is available here.

John Piper’s Exploding Cigar

Not John Piper

Do you want to be a Jew? John Piper thinks every Christian should:

“God is at pains to explain to you that you are a true Jew. It is a great gift to us that he should tell us that an essential part of our identity is that we are true Jews if we fulfil the obedience of faith. Don’t reject God’s good gift.”

Why does it matter if a Gentile thinks of himself as a Jew or not? It seems like a trivial issue to debate, doesn’t it? Why would anyone go to as much trouble as Piper goes to in this sermon from 1999 just to convince Christians to get excited about being “Jewish”?

I sure don’t want to reject any of God’s good gifts. But this particular “gift” is more like the proverbial exploding cigar: it comes with more than you bargain for when you take it.

Recommend-a-blog (14)

“Eclectic and intriguing” might be my best crack at describing Morally Contextualized Romance ... a fancy way to say ‘marriage’.

Scott and Mychael Klajic are the duo behind the blog, with the experience of eight years together and four children to show for it. The pair previously wrote about Christian marriage at the now-defunct Courtship Pledge website, abandoned after a major technical glitch erased two years of work. The new site is nominally about “God’s hierarchy for marriage” but though nearly every post intersects in some way with the topic, relationships do not seem to be the site’s only (or even its primary) focus.

Not by a long shot.

Doesn’t Always Mean What We Think It Means (2)

What is a Jew anyway?

Specifically, does a Gentile who converts to Judaism become a “Jew”? Many people today say so, and quite a few religious Jews agree with them. There is even a Judaic ritual called giyyur by which, it is alleged, a Gentile becomes Jewish.

Tracey R. Rich says, “A Jew is any person whose mother was a Jew or any person who has gone through the formal process of conversion to Judaism.

Now, if that’s a scriptural answer, there are an awful lot of Jews out there. But the Bible does not appear to use the word “Jew” that way. There is considerable elasticity in the term, but in neither Testament does it dovetail perfectly with the modern, secular usage or even the definition of many Orthodox Jews.

Curious? Let’s have a look at some history.

The Inside Scoop

Those in the news business are forever occupied with beating one another to a story. Old media or new, success is measured in the ability to get the inside scoop.

God, on the other hand, is not in the business of broadcasting his secrets. Communicating is something in which he takes great pleasure, but not something he does casually. His truth is for those who value it and understand its worth, not for those who dismiss or trivialize it.

The value of God’s word is one of its repeated themes.

Of All the Things I’ve Lost, I Miss Myself the Most

The most recent version of this post is available here.

The Institutional Fix

Government should do something. That seems to be the consensus.

Never mind what the issue is. Could be the economy. Could be women’s wages. Maybe aboriginal affairs. Certainly immigration. Definitely climate change. But if only those people we elected would just get to it, things would be better.

People love the institutional fix. Specifically, they love identifying a problem and ranting about it. These days, personal responsibility begins and ends with firing off a critical blog post, Facebook screed or nuclear Tweet. Whatever the problem may be, with any luck someone else will deal with it. Hopefully they’ll start a program.