What Does Your Proof Text Prove? (1)

Someone just murdered my favourite verse ...

It’s time for a new semi-regular Coming Untrue series, I think.

Writing four to five blog posts every week for more than three years involves a fair bit of research, as you might imagine. I don’t keep track, but I suspect I average as many as ten hours a week just looking things up, whether it’s Greek or Hebrew in Strong’s, cross-checking other people’s statements of fact, or looking up verses that others have quoted as evidence of this or that. Hey, I’m not complaining; I benefit greatly from the exercise.

But one thing I notice is that way too often Christian writers cite proof texts that have little or nothing to do with what they are alleged to demonstrate.

Too Hot to Handle: The Unfair Advantage of a Loving Family

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Exit, Stage Left

What makes a church a church?

The presence of Christ among his people? Yes, that’s surely critical. That we meet in his name, according to his will and doing the things that he himself would do if he were here with us? Yes, that is our assurance of his presence. That we follow the pattern of the early believers and commit ourselves to the apostles’ teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread and prayer? Absolutely.

Question: What happens if we stop remembering the Lord in the breaking of bread? Are we still a church any sense that matters to God?

I’ll Tell You Later

Not everything is instant ...

We live in the age of instant gratification.

If I want to watch a movie, I can skim Netflix and play one in seconds. It takes me longer to make up my mind than it takes to start playing my selection once I’ve decided. If I want to listen to the Strolling Bones’ hot new CD, I don’t have to rush to the mall (assuming I can find a record store still in business) or wait for Amazon to deliver it to my front door, I can stream it right now or download it from iTunes in seconds. If I want dinner, I can microwave something in five minutes, or, assuming I have unusual patience, have it delivered in forty-five.

Spiritual insight isn’t like that. Not at all. Sometimes God says, “I’ll tell you later.”

The Race Metaphor

Yesterday I talked a little bit about images and figurative language in scripture. I think sometimes we can end up reading more into a Bible metaphor or simile than the Spirit of God ever intended. Or we get caught up in the details of the picture itself and fail to grasp the spiritual reality it is meant to depict.

The writer to the Hebrews talks about running a race:

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us …”

Here the writer and his original Hebrew audience (that’s the “we”; the rest of us are simply reading someone else’s mail) are compared to men and women running a race. We do well to ask ourselves two questions. Firstly, what is this “race” that is to be run? Secondly, what are the specific intended points of agreement between running and whatever it is this “race” is intended to typify?

Quote of the Day (31)

It helps to know what we’re looking at.

Figures of speech in the Bible have limits, as most people who are regularly obliged to listen to sermons are well aware.

A word picture is a helpful way to describe a particular aspect of a spiritual reality. Unsurprisingly, we find the word of God to be full of them: images from the parables of the Lord Jesus, the poetic metaphors of the Psalms, the similes of Isaiah or the illustrations of the apostles — lovely, practical stuff sufficiently simple and clear to express profound truths even to our children.

Taken beyond their intended range, however, these figures quickly devolve into goofiness and bad doctrine.

Just Get Up

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Dawn of the Pod People

If you’ve ever watched a science fiction flick, you’ve probably seen people in pods.

Maybe they were traveling to another galaxy in suspended animation. Maybe they were hooked up to a computer matrix, bamboozled into believing in a counterfeit reality. Maybe they jumped into a one-man escape capsule to hide from aliens with freaky extensible jaws. Whatever the story logic, the image of people in personal life support units is near-universal in the sci-fi genre.

And hey, we’re living it.

Too Hot to Handle: How Do You Read It? (3)

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Under Collective Judgment

I am not my dad. I don’t make quite the same mistakes. I make different mistakes. Likewise, I don’t do many things half as well or half as spiritually as my father does. We’re very different in many ways.

I’m definitely not my dad’s father. I never knew him. Many of his ways seem foreign to me. He lived in another era, one characterized by different assumptions and habits.

And my great-grandfather? You gotta be kidding.

A Horse Plunging Headlong

I’ve been listening to unhappy people this week: people that have sinned, have hurt others and have hurt themselves.

It’s refreshing when someone gets it; when they realize that their own choices and desires took them places they do not want to be, and that these patterns need to be changed. It’s a good thing to see correctly the relationship between cause and effect, between actions and consequences.

But it’s even better when it dawns that our most significant sins are the inevitable consequence of refusing to take the Lord at his word.

False Unities and Lines of Division

As Christians living in a day in which we have every possible advantage in understanding what God has revealed of himself to mankind down through the centuries, the importance of having our hearts and heads thoroughly marinated in the word of God cannot be overstated.

There is no area of human investigation that matters more. None.

But in a fallen world, the word of God divides. The more we read it and follow it, the more we will find ourselves separated from those who don’t.

Inbox: The ‘Stealth Pastor’

After reading our recent post on “The Role of a Senior Pastor”, David B. asks a perfectly legitimate question:

“From the ‘brethren assemblies’ perspective, what is your opinion on the ‘full time worker’?”

From any perspective, denominational or otherwise, there’s a point well worth considering here, and that is that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”. Things are what they are at their core, not merely what you label them. A garbage dump smells like a garbage dump even if you call it a Post-Consumer Product Management Initiative.

Sometimes your nose tells you what your eyes may not.

Recommend-a-blog (22)

The Tel Gezer calendar
(Attribution)

If it seems like I haven’t done one of these in ages, it’s because I haven’t. Too much time invested in surveying the political landscape, clearly.

Bible Chronology Studies is a refreshing change from that sort of thing, though not necessarily in an area of study all believers will embrace with enthusiasm. Some of us are deeply interested in what’s “under the hood” of our Christian faith; others are just happy to turn the key and take it up to the (legal) limit.

The website is the work of what I estimate must be thousands upon thousands of hours of independent study by a thus-far-anonymous Christian writer (not that there’s anything wrong with that) apparently obsessed with getting it right.

Living Under the Blade

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Too Hot to Handle: Not Quite What They Expected

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Of Trees and Floods

“Then Hezekiah said to Isaiah, ‘The word of the Lord that you have spoken is good.’ For he thought, ‘Why not, if there will be peace and security in my days?’ ”

I have no clue what you’re thinking about right now. Not a one. That’s normal, I think.

Despite this, when we read novels and the writer tells us precisely what is on the mind of the protagonist, we barely notice how bizarre that is. After all, it is the author’s story and it is his prerogative to drive its narrative or provide insight into its characters via whatever literary technique he chooses.

Not in the real world. If a news reporter presumes to inform us what President Trump really intends when he thumbs his latest tweet into his iPhone for the nation, we rightly think she is overstepping her role just a bit. How could she possibly know for sure?

Bible history is a little different.

That’s MY Mail You’re Reading

I came across a very cool website.

RationalWiki is basically a repository of unbelief designed to show people how and where the Bible is (in their view) untrue. Somebody has gone to a lot of effort to attempt to debunk scripture and compile evidence of its alleged irrationality.

Possibly the coolest section of all is the page on ‘failed’ prophecy, which begins this way:

“Some Christians claim that fulfilled prophecies prove the Bible’s inerrancy … mainstream Christians will actually claim that, for example, the Gospels are historical evidence of Isaiah being accurate prophecy (rather than works written with a copy of Isaiah to hand to claim fulfilment of prophecy), therefore the Bible is accurate and Jesus is Lord.”

You know, I think they’re probably correct about Christians claiming such things, though they don’t provide specific examples. But they have a bigger problem: they’re reading my mail. Small wonder they’re a bit confused.

The Message You’re Sending

“There’s always someone looking at you.”

The line was penned by Sir Bob Geldof way back in 1979, long before personal computers with memories that the average person cannot easily erase, long before the Internet, before the NSA was on your hard drive and tracking your every movement through your cell phone, before your TV started watching you while you watch it, and before the unblinking eye in the sky that is Google Maps. It seems more than a little prescient, but Geldof had become (briefly) famous, and the world was paying more attention than he would have liked.

Always Ready?

The faithful are always to be ready to give an answer to anyone who asks us why we hope in God. The apostle Peter says this is especially true when we are being attacked for our beliefs.

But some questions are not really questions. They are not sincere inquiries. They are rhetoric, intended to demoralize and destroy belief.

I point this out because it’s easy not to notice. For the enthusiastic or pedantic among us, everything is a witnessing opportunity ... even when it isn’t.

But sometimes it’s better to be silent and let God speak.