The Heiser Bolt of Lightning

A couple of weeks ago I promised to devote an entire blog post to the bolt of lightning that hit my synapses when I read a single, throwaway paragraph in Michael S. Heiser’s The Unseen Realm. It was a delightful experience to find that the scriptures account for the cognitive dissonance I and other Bible students experience when we compare many prophecies in their original Old Testament contexts to their fulfillments as described by the writers of the New Testament.

A familiar example of such a “Whuzzat?” moment: Matthew’s use of the words “Out of Egypt I called my son.”

Mining the Minors: Hosea (6)

When Canada rejected Stephen Harper as Prime Minister in favor of a candidate whose most identifiable features were his last name and haircut, I was completely unsurprised.

At the time I often lunched in a semi-trendy midtown café frequented by liberal-leaning twenty-somethings. It’s a small place; even if you are not inclined to eavesdrop, the tables are wedged in so tightly that you can hardly fail to pick up the broad strokes of any animated conversation in the room. Back in 2015, day after day, patron after patron, the subject was politics and nothing but. Young Canadian urbanites hungered for an abrupt swing to the left, and they were determined to make it happen.

And so they did. The country has yet to recover.

Too Hot to Handle: Where There is No Vision ...

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Kevin Miller is an Executive VP at Christianity Today International. In this article he lays out a number of ways that one can go about developing a vision.

Tom: Immanuel Can, Miller is ignoring the elephant in the room: he starts with the unstudied assertion that good leaders must always be men of vision and charges right into how we can all acquire it without addressing why this quality is allegedly a critical component of leadership.

And he’s not alone.

Immanuel Can: You’re right, Tom, there are a lot of people talking about our lack of vision as Christians today. What do you think accounts for this widespread concern, and how legit do you think it is?

Lies, Myths and Misinformation: Christianity Causes Wars

The application of the statement “religion causes wars” to Christianity is actually a double lie.

It’s a lie because its detractors classify Christianity as a “religion” just the same as any other. You be the judge of whether or not that’s fair. But let’s give them that one for the sake of argument.

It’s also a lie because it’s not even accurate to say that the disparate group of things secular people call “religion” causes wars. It’s not just intuitively wrong, it’s statistically absurd.

Another Cat and Dog Story

Trust between two beings is a wonderful and tremendously fragile thing.

Another cat and dog story. Sorry. You find your illustrations where you find them, and I’ll do the same. Pet haters may tune out here.

Dogs and cats are very different beings. Obviously, each member of a species is a unique set of data points on a wide spectrum of behavioral characteristics. Your Rottweiler is not my Shih Tzu. Your amiable moggy is not my brother’s exceedingly defined Siamese. Some animals in each species exhibit more trust than others. But generally speaking, dogs are way more trusting than cats, and cats are way smarter. At least those are the uneducated observations of a lifetime of enjoying God’s creation up close.

A Man With No Handles

“The ruler of this world is coming. He has no claim on me, but I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father.”

What was the Lord talking about here? It is true that he always did what the Father commanded, but I suspect in this time and place he was talking specifically about what might motivate him to go to the cross. He prefaced his declaration by noting that the “ruler of this world” was making his move.

Nevertheless, for all his apparent power, Satan had no claim on him.

Anonymous Asks (175)

“What does the Bible say about church-hopping?”

In the early first century, the world had a grand total of one local church. It may have had thousands of people in it, but “all who believed were together and had all things in common”.

In AD45, you couldn’t church-hop. There was nowhere to hop to.

Doesn’t Always Mean What We Think It Means (7)

In Greek, the words “Jew”, “Jews” and “Jewish” (sometimes translated “Judean”) are all variations on Ioudaios. That term was discussed in what some might call excruciating detail in the second post in this series, the length being necessary because of confusion arising from the way “Jew” is used today in popular secular and religious parlance.

Unsaved folk often refer to Gentiles converted to Judaism as “Jews”. This is most likely an accidental byproduct of unfamiliarity with biblical usage and/or the preferences of actual Jews, as opposed to evidence of a hidden agenda. Real Jews draw a clear distinction between their fellow Jews and converts to Judaism, whom they call proselytes. (Certain well-known evangelicals also use “Jew” to describe Gentiles, but for very specific theological reasons we won’t get into today.)

Suffice it to say that the Bible doesn’t use “Jew” that way.

Mining the Minors: Hosea (5)

Like many features of modern Bibles, chapter divisions are not inspired. The Spirit of God was not their author. They were added by the then-Archbishop of Canterbury in the year 1227 and first appeared in the Wycliffe English Bible of 1382. Generally speaking, they make scripture easier to navigate and we should probably be grateful for them.

At very least, most of us are so used to them that we can’t imagine reading the Bible any other way than chapter by chapter.

Too Hot to Handle: Fellows in the Same Ship

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Scott Mannion believes in the value of fellowship: the communal spirit; taking ownership of problem-solving at the local level, rather than looking to government for answers; “distributing the burden of cognition”, as he puts it. He’s promoting fellowship vigorously, because he believes top-down solutions to our problems are simply not working.

Tom: Mannion’s YouTube video is the first time in a very long while that I’ve heard the word “fellowship” used outside a purely religious context. He certainly gets the concept right. IC, this one was your baby: what was it about the video that grabbed you?

Assumptions and Loaded Conversations

Back in 2012, NBA Commissioner David Stern caught flack for cracking an old joke in an interview with Jim Rome. Rome asked him if the NBA lottery was rigged. Stern came back with, “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?”

Of course, this immediately got him into trouble with the PC set, who took him to be making fun of the very serious issue of wife abuse. I can sympathize with their ire; but in fairness, I think it’s not what Stern was trying to say. He was actually referring to an old (admittedly somewhat tasteless) joke. I think I first read it on a bubble gum wrapper when I was a kid, and I remember seeing it in other places as well. It was one of those things that was “just around”. The joke went like this:

Question: What’s a question you cannot answer either “Yes” or “No”?

Answer: Have you stopped beating your wife yet?

Perhaps Stern and I chewed the same gum, I don’t know.

Thoughts of Eternity

We were crossing a boulevard in downtown San Francisco a few years ago. A street preacher on the far corner had a microphone and an amp, and every reference to “the blood of Christ that cleanses us from all sin” echoed up and down the avenue at serious volume, etching themselves into our eardrums as we drew closer. I guess that’s legal in San Francisco; everything else sure is.

My unsaved friend turned to me and asked, “Why do they do that?” Which gave me twenty uninterrupted minutes to tell her.

Hats off to the loudmouth on the corner.

Two Camps

Jacob was a natural manipulator. Born the second of a pair of twins, he came out of his mother’s womb hanging on to Esau’s heel. That makes sense: why expend your own effort when you can just ride along in big brother’s slipstream? That act, probably completely unconscious, defined him and became his name, and “grasping the heel” became a Hebrew metaphor for taking the easy way out.

Cheating, we call it. And Jacob did it over and over again.

Anonymous Asks (174)

“What tools exist for getting a perspective on Bible history and confirming its accuracy?”

There is no better way to get a bird’s-eye perspective of Bible history than by repeatedly reading the Old Testament from beginning to end. If that sounds like a lot of work, well ... it is. But, for the serious Christian, it’s absolutely worth committing to and making a part of every day of your life.

While you are building that knowledge base, though, there are a few shortcuts you can use.

Seven Sabbaths

Quick question: How many Sabbaths was the Lord Jesus accused of breaking?

Well, we can’t say for certain, as there is no guarantee the writers of the Gospels were attempting to document every occasion on which the Jewish leadership became offended with him for allegedly doing it.

What we do know is that the first four books of the New Testament make reference to seven occasions when the Lord explained the reasons for his behavior.

Mining the Minors: Hosea (4)

As previously mentioned, the book of Hosea is made up of both background historical material as well as the content of the message given by God to the nation of Israel through the prophet. These last four verses of chapter one set up the remainder of the book for us. Chapter two will take us directly into Hosea’s message.

But first, Hosea’s wife Gomer has another child to bring into the world ...

Too Hot to Handle: Culture and the Gospel

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Immanuel Can: I’m going to temporarily suspend our self-imposed five-sentence limit, Tom, in order to tell you a story about something that happened last year when our provincial standardized test was performed.

You need to know that teachers are all given a specific script for what they are and are not allowed to tell students on the day of the test. They are expressly forbidden to go beyond this script, and doing so is grounds for firing. Teachers cannot add any directions, explanations, definitions or any other kind of information to this. They are not allowed to give any guidance once the test begins, no matter what a student wants or needs. It’s standardized, period.

One of the questions on the test asked kids to imagine a picnic, and then write based on their imagining.

Is Your Faith Boring You?

The great mathematician Blaise Pascal claimed all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

Modern people don’t sit in rooms alone very well. They find it boring. And, in fact, being bored is one thing almost all of us instinctively hate. Particularly in our present day of social media, cell phones, portable games and constant mental stimulation, it seems to us that solitude and silence are indicators of something being terribly wrong. On those occasions when we find ourselves momentarily bored we immediately fumble for our phones or look around for some new distraction.

I suspect we are probably less adept than any previous generation at just sitting still and thinking.

Bolt-of-Lightning Belief

I don’t think it’s unrealistic to say the internet has changed the way we find answers to our spiritual questions.

In times past, we might have picked up a book on a subject that interested us, plowed through it in due course, and agreed, disagreed or partially agreed with its author, which either satisfied our curiosity or provoked further investigation. But that’s a fairly laborious process, and not every Christian is up for it.

Typing a string of text into DuckDuckGo is not laborious at all. Anyone can do that.

A House of Trade

“Take these things away; do not make my Father’s house a house of trade.”

Jesus had nothing against pigeons; he made them after all, as John’s first chapter well establishes. Furthermore, the poor pigeons were only present at the temple to serve as sacrifices, a practice the Lord had himself authorized.

But these pigeons were not in the process of being carried to the altar in the arms of guilty or devout Jews. They were caged, on sale, and probably marked up at a premium for the convenience of having a cheap sacrifice handy when you needed one.

The Father’s house had become a house of trade.