Perfectly Sensible

It all seemed to add up just fine ...

Great sins are committed for perfectly sensible reasons.

Absalom murdered his half-brother for raping his sister. His father knew about the rape and had done nothing about it. What was he supposed to do? If he failed to act, justice would never have been served.

King Jeroboam brought idolatry back to Israel. He reasoned it was better than having the people turn on him and kill him. Who blames a man for preferring life to death?

In each case the motives were at very least understandable. It was the methodology that got them in trouble.

Inbox: Message and Motive

“All your goats are belong to us!”

An anonymous reader takes issue with an older post on the error of universalism:

“Why so angry?”

Good question. It was April 2014 when I wrote that one as part of our “Heavenly Myths” series. I’ve lived ten lives since then, it seems to me. I couldn’t remember how I was feeling at the time if my life depended on it. Maybe I was a bit ticked about something.

So I went back and read the post and … nope, not even close.

Bedsheets, Breeches and Bema

The most recent version of this post is available here.

The Millennial Kingdom and the Blame Game

What do these statements have in common?

“hollywood is to blame, so is tv”

— AllergicToEggs

“The devil made me do it”

— Flip Wilson     

Well, yes, they are both examples of the blame game we all play regularly.

That Wacky Old Testament (8)

You know, if you’re going to mock the Old Testament, it really helps to get your ducks in a row first.

It’s Internet Meme-Debunking Saturday again, folks, and Ivana Wynn at Ranker has provided us with yet another soft target: a list of her “Top 20 Bible Passages to Use Against Fundamentalists”, including this gem at #6, “No Bastards May Enter the Church”.

I love it when they make it easy for me.

Too Hot to Handle: The Wrong Set of Chromosomes

The most recent version of this post is available here. 

One Touch Away

We live in a day of distraction, when every tiny, struggling spiritual impulse in our hearts and heads has to hack its way through a jungle of psychic noise just to hear the still, small voice of God. Difficult, I know. But there’s tremendous reward for the effort.

And, hey, few people today have to travel for days just to hear the word of God.

Others throughout history have had a much harder time of it. For us, the truth is one touch away.

Love Is All Around

Mary Tyler Moore died last week, and her passing merits a word or two even if no millennial has the slightest clue who she was.

I am the child of Christian parents who went to the mission field in the sixties with me in tow and came back just in time for Abba, Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds, Get Smart and the tail end of the Guess Who’s first incarnation. Pop culture in the seventies blew me away, and it fascinated my mother in her own way, or so it appeared to me. When we finally got a TV, she watched her share of then-current fare, flipping channels whenever the content became inappropriate for family viewing. I watched with her to the extent I was allowed — and sometimes from behind the couch when I wasn’t.

And boy, did I LOVE those early seventies sit-coms.

Politeness vs. Goodness, and Other Observations

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Ship of Fools, or The Titanic Arrogance of Postmodernity

The most recent version of this post is available here.

The Uncompassionate Christ

“When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”

“… and coming to his hometown he taught them in their synagogue, so that they were astonished, and said, “Where did this man get this wisdom and these mighty works?” … And he did not do many mighty works there.”

You see the problem, of course. A mere four chapters on in our narrative, the “compassionate” Jesus of Matthew 9 by-and-large withholds the benefit of his healing powers from the very people with whom he grew up.

What are we to make of this?

The Blind Spot

What happens when your church is riddled with false teaching and nobody in charge knows it?

If that seems an unlikely scenario, don’t laugh. It can absolutely happen.

It’s next-to-impossible to miss when a speaker goes off the rails doctrinally from the pulpit at 11:30 on a Sunday morning. Whether it’s a pastor, a local Bible teacher or visiting preacher, a public pronouncement that is wildly at odds with a church’s statement of faith will almost always generate serious discussion and immediate blowback. If there’s any question as to what was actually said, your soundman has probably got digital backup or even video. One way or another, error that’s visible and audible to all usually gets addressed.

But modern churches have a huge doctrinal blind spot.

Too Hot to Handle: Woman Overboard

The most recent version of this post is available here.

People Whom One Cannot Instruct

Perhaps if we dropped this on their heads ...

Wayne Grudem devoted years of his life to understanding and expositing a single word in a single verse.

Why, you may ask? Good question.

In an article entitled “Personal Reflections on the History of CBMW and the State of the Gender Debate”, Grudem asks himself the same thing: “Why did I spend so much time on this?”

What he discovered is that nobody’s listening. At least, nobody’s listening that wasn’t listening already.

A Bowl of Fake Rights

Fake rights are all the rage.

Sure, the “right” to almost anything, duly constitutionalized and conferred upon us by government, can be created out of thin air provided there is sufficient public demand. But in the absence of heavenly authority, state-enshrined rights are both morally incoherent and logically inconsistent. In practice they are largely unenforceable.

In short, fake.

The hottest new fake right on the block has to be the “right not to be offended”.

A House In Order

“Thus says the Lord, ‘Set your house in order, for you shall die; you shall not recover.’ ” 

Isaiah’s prophetic directions to Hezekiah were pretty specific to his own situation. Most of us do not get a heavenly heads-up before our final exit from this life (although a few of us get sufficient advance warning from circumstances and surgeons to nearly qualify).

Still, all of us would be well served to apply Isaiah’s instructions to our own situations.

Judeo-Christianity

I once took an inter-cultural understanding class at my local Reformed synagogue.

Now, I should probably explain. For those who don’t know, the Reformed Tradition in Judaism is the most “open” and modern segment of the Community. Quite a number of Reformed Jews are former Gentiles, or married to Gentiles. In fact, you could easily meet, or being going to school with, or working with a Reformed Jew, and never know what his or her religious practices were at all. They’re very well integrated into Western life.

The class was intended to further improve understanding between the most tolerant Jews and the rest of our society. The rabbi who taught the class was charming, intelligent and personable. He was also very helpful in laying out the practices and traditions of modern Judaism to a Gentile audience. He knew his stuff, and I liked him. (I’m sorry to say I hear he’s passed on now.)

The Commentariat Speaks (8)

TechCrunch editor John Biggs mourns the fact that social media is no longer a place where you can air an opinion without fear of adverse consequences:

“Our errant Twitter thoughts can make us targets and we often don’t know we’re being watched. A prominent writer and friend recently mused about what would happen if he posted some political rants. The first thing that leapt to his readers’ minds was the potential for SWATing and doxing and then a visit from the FBI. Then, as evidenced by the above CEO example, you get fired.

Social media has become a very real, very visceral, and very censorial force and it can now only worsen the human condition.”

Now, none of this is news. Ironically, it’s John Biggs’ fellow Democrat voters who fired the opening salvos in the online equivalent of the nuclear arms race.

I Mean It, I Swear

An international team of university researchers concludes that people who curse more are less likely to lie and may possess more integrity than their politer peers.

What fascinates me about the study is not its rather pedestrian conclusions, which are all too predictable given the initial assumptions of psychologist Gilad Feldman and his team. After all, garbage in, garbage out, right?

No, it’s really the assumptions they make about the meaning of honesty that ought to cause Christians to stop and think.

Why? Because apparently the word no longer means what it once did.

Ugh. Not again.

Too Hot to Handle: Abandoning Ship

The most recent version of this post is available here.