Didn’t See THAT Coming

Photo: Seth Lemmons

If you have a modern translation of the New Testament, you’ll find John 5:4 appears to have gone AWOL.

The missing text was there in my youth. I remember it vaguely from my first King James. The NASB and some older versions still retain it in square brackets for the three people in the world with worse memories than me. But having collected and compared early versions of that passage from all over the Middle East, modern scholars have concluded the verse-and-a-half was not part of divine revelation, but rather a parenthetical explanation added later on by a helpful scribe, originally tagged with asterisks (yes, they really used those back then).

If so, of course, they are correct in removing or flagging the text, but I have always found it useful in understanding the passage.

Everywhere a Sign

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Too Hot to Handle: Let’s Get Together

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Whistling Past the Graveyard

For any number of reasons I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately.

I don’t suspect I’m overly morbid, nor is dwelling on the reality of death something I particularly enjoy. Nonetheless, the happy decades in which I attended mostly weddings are diminishing into obscurity in the rear-view mirror and ahead of me looms a rather dismal string of unwished-for funerals — with my own being perhaps the crowning conclusion.

What are we to make of this thing called death that awaits us all? How should we think of it? There are two broad strategies most people embrace.

Things You Don’t Know You Know

The question came right out of the blue.

It was entirely ingenuous, I think. There was nothing calculating about the teenage girl who asked it. I don’t think she was looking for a pass on any particular sin; she was just curious how God works.

It was Sunday School, and I was discussing Matthew 5:28 — the part where the Lord says, “Everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” I wasn’t trying to be especially relevant or anything, but you know teenagers.

So she says, “But if you’re already guilty before God just from looking, why wouldn’t you just go ahead and act on it then?”

Good question.

Authentic Me

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Does God Need An Editor?

For a new believer taking his first pass through the Bible, nothing tests one’s faith in the words “all scripture is ... profitable” like the first nine chapters of Chronicles.

Even to scholars, these passages are formidable. If there is anywhere in scripture with more unpronounceable Hebrew names per square inch of text, I have yet to come across it. Try reading just one chapter aloud and you’ll see what I mean. And hey, let’s get real here: exactly how does it help me as a struggling Christian to know that Tarshish and Ahishahar were both sons of Bilhan?

It almost makes one wonder if God’s word might have benefited from a slightly more ruthless editor.

Almost.

The Good Wine

“Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.”

The system is a cheat. Not news, I know.

Apart from Christ, people inevitably act in what they perceive to be their own best interests, and never mind the rest of us. The master of the feast at the wedding in Cana was telling the bridegroom the oldest tale in the human storybook.

Yet Another Rigged Election

Does God really prepare some people for destruction and others for glory?

It’s a good question.

Most Christians accept that God is, by definition, able to control all that he creates down to the last detail; it is difficult to read the Bible and come away with any other picture of him. But the question of how and to what extent his sovereignty is exercised within the human heart is what generally divides believers.

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

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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

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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)

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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.