[Editor’s note: Nobody ever wants to be called racist, and yet the word is everywhere these days. It also doesn’t mean what it used to mean, which means it was one of those words I planned to get to in this series eventually. All too conveniently, Immanuel Can sent me an email this week analyzing the current usage of the term (and the logic behind the change in meaning) better than I might. I have reproduced it below.
Trust you enjoy it. — Tom]
“Then those who feared the Lord spoke with one another. The Lord paid attention and heard them, and a book of remembrance was written before him of those who feared the Lord and esteemed his name.”
There are things that last and things that don’t.
“We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.”
My father had a knack for identifying Christians in the wild. I don’t mean in the obvious places, like in church or at conferences, but on the street, in the malls, or wherever. He was pretty good at it. He may have made the occasional mistake over the years, but I didn’t catch any. So he would quite confidently go up to random strangers and say things like “Excuse me, but are you a follower of the Lord Jesus?” Almost invariably they were.
He said there was something distinctive about a Christian face.
“Conventional wisdom disagrees with an increasing number of Bible proverbs. Is it possible some were of their own time and do not apply to us today?”
What a great question! Most of the Bible’s proverbs are over 3,000 years old, so we certainly cannot discount the possibility that applying all of them literally is borderline-unworkable. It sent me combing through Proverbs from beginning to end in search of the most controversial examples I could find. (I am leaving out Proverbs 31, since I dealt with the cultural relevance of the “excellent wife” here.)
So, let’s see about those “irrelevant” proverbs then ...
Is the difference between accepting and receiving just a matter of semantics? Are we being picky about words that to most people amount to the same thing? We will attempt to show they don’t.
Admittedly, in many cases either word would do, both being used to describe a positive response to a gift or invitation, but there is a difference. The first is the better word to use if you want to leave room for the possibility of some disappointment or reserve on the part of the recipient. The second would be better if you want to go on to describe the great pleasure a gift or invitation evoked.
An illustration may help ...
We can get into a chicken-and-egg sort of argument about whether choosing an idol instead of the one true God leads to immorality (which it does, because all other moral systems are necessarily inferior), or whether it’s the selfish pursuit of desire that leads inevitably to an idolatrous pathway that will permit it (which is also true, as Israel proved in the wilderness).
Let’s just say that however it may begin, immorality and idolatry have a tendency to create the spiritual equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. One feeds the other.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Tom: Here’s a hot topic we’ve yet to discuss, IC — at least, it’s generated some serious heat for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, sufficient to rate an article in The New York Times.
At issue is the government’s determination to tie federal funding for youth job programs to the expression of politically correct opinion. It’s about $113 million annually, give or take, and approximately 70,000 jobs are at stake.
The Prime Minister dismisses the very predictable negative reaction from Canadian conservatives as a “kerfuffle”.
The most popular course in the Religion and Culture department of one Canadian university is a course titled “Evil and Its Symbols”. It’s the one course where there never seems to be enough room to fit all the applicants. One student quipped that the homework assignment was probably “Go home and do evil.”
Maybe not. But people sure are fascinated with the topic. Why evil exists is a challenge for any Christian to explain; perhaps the biggest. Still, two things bear remembering right away: firstly, that to say that it’s a challenge does not mean that the challenge cannot be met, and secondly, that to explain the existence of evil is not a challenge unique to Christians or even to theists more generally — it’s equally necessary for atheists. Not only that, but it’s a lot harder for them.
Let me justify those statements a bit further in a moment; but first, let me set the stage for today’s post.
It’s a white world where I live. Earlier this week we had something like a foot and a half of snow fall in a matter of hours. I woke up to two hours of shoveling. My back is still feeling it.
But this morning I was out on the road again for my very early morning walk, which was a little slower going than usual. I guess the City has to prioritize where the plows go first. Many parked cars on my street were still under so much of the white stuff that you couldn’t tell the difference between an SUV and a sedan. You also couldn’t tell where the sidewalks were, or the fire hydrants, or many of the usual landmarks.
They were all still there of course. You just couldn’t see them.
We are where we are today as a society because we do not know who we are. We do not know who we are because we do not know where we have been, and we do not remember the lessons we should have learned when we were there.
Okay, there are other reasons as well, but ignorance is a big part of it. My kids were never really taught either History or English in high school. Even in the first decade of the new millennium, the ‘woke’ monster was stirring within public education. History had already become a problematic subject, and the great works of Western literature, allegedly full of patriarchal prejudices and badthink, were being chucked aside in favor of contemporary novels propagandizing about teens and abortion.
Having already ruined math, they basically stopped teaching anything else useful. And it’s far worse today.
“ ‘Son of man’ is a title that belongs to Christ. Why is it also used for Ezekiel?”
Ezekiel not only had the title before the Lord Jesus, he had it used to describe him many more times than the Lord Jesus, 93 in total. More importantly, it was God himself who chose to address him that way, though Daniel is also called a “son of man”. But Ezekiel and Daniel are not the only places you find the phrase in the Old Testament; you also find it in Job, Numbers, the Psalms, Isaiah and Jeremiah.
What can we learn from the fact that both Ezekiel and Daniel had the title earlier, and Ezekiel more frequently? Not much, probably, except maybe not to measure spiritual importance by such metrics.
“I am the Lord their God, who brought them out of the land of Egypt that I might dwell among them.”
You and I were saved for a reason: to have fellowship with God. To know, love, commune with, enjoy and be enjoyed by him forever.
Now, that may not be the reason you became a Christian or decided to live like one. Probably it wasn’t. It certainly wasn’t the reason I did. My reasons were all about me. I had been experiencing the consequences of a series of selfish, ill-advised choices, and I didn’t like them at all. But I had been brought up in a Christian home, and I knew the answer to my problems was obedience to Christ. So the day finally came when I hit rock bottom, gave up and said, “You win, Lord.”
That was pretty much the process. I wasn’t exactly looking for fellowship. I’m not sure I even knew what that was.
It took me a few years of serious Bible study to recognize that local context is of considerably greater importance than larger context in correctly discerning the intended meaning of any particular word or phrase.
For example, you may have observed that John uses the phrase “the Jews” in his gospel with a different shade of meaning than do Matthew or Mark, and that Luke uses the same phrase differently in Acts than in his gospel. Likewise, the words “we” and “our” refer to different people in 2 Corinthians than they do in some of Paul’s other epistles.
Failure to note such distinctions inevitably leads to muddled interpretations. Today’s reading in Hosea contains a phrase that will confuse us if we do not attend carefully to its local context.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
The Pew Research Center — a moderately reputable outfit as these things go — just released study data that indicates three quarters of Americans are incapable of distinguishing fact from opinion. When given a series of statements like “Spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid make up the largest portion of the U.S. federal budget” (fact, supposedly), and “Democracy is the greatest form of government” (opinion, surely), most participants were unable to determine which were which.
Tom: Somebody’s responsible for that, IC. Want to hazard a guess who it might be?
There’s a woman in my church — a lovely woman, a mother and a wife, and selfless servant of the Lord’s people, one most highly esteemed. She has been a grief and addiction counselor, and has spent her whole life ministering to others in their moments of darkest sorrow. Her husband is also a wonderful person, and his career for several decades has been as chaplain to the elderly, caring for fragile souls on the doorstep of eternity.
This woman has just been diagnosed with aggressive, metastasizing liver cancer. The fatal kind.
“You shall not fall in with the many to do evil, nor shall you bear witness in a lawsuit, siding with the many, so as to pervert justice, nor shall you be partial to a poor man in his lawsuit.”
Yes, it comes from the Law of Moses, and Christians are not under law. Nevertheless, there is a principle here that transcends time and place. It is worth observing and retaining.
I have found myself thanking the Lord for some strange things lately. One of them is death. Another is the limits of human memory.
The mind of God is a staggering thing to contemplate. The moment we do so we are almost guaranteed to get something wrong. Nevertheless, enough has been written about it in scripture that we can be confident there is nothing God does not know, no prayer he does not hear, no burden of which he is not aware, and therefore no care or adverse circumstance in which he is unable or unwilling to provide grace.
That’s pretty amazing.
“How important are traditions observed by other Christians?”
One Sunday afternoon in my early teens I was craving a snack. That posed a problem: my father did not permit us to go to the stores on Sunday.
“Dad,” I said, “why can’t we go to the store on Sunday?”
“Because Sunday is a day of rest,” he replied.
“That was the Sabbath,” I responded, “and we are not under law, we are under grace.”
Guess what. I got to go to the store.
“Are you a Christian?”
That’s not me asking. That’s renowned Bible teacher John MacArthur. He’s suggesting we all need to do a little self-examination to see if we are “in the faith”. And he thinks scripture supports the practice.
Hmm. I’m wondering if that might not make for a large number of miserable, panicky Christians questioning their salvation for no good reason.
Description is not the same as prescription. Or, to put it less technically, Old Testament historical passages are a questionable source of moral guidance for Christians.
We have noted previously that the book of Hosea goes back and forth between the historical account of Hosea’s marriage and the lessons God was drawing out of that relationship for Israel and, to a lesser extent, Judah. Hosea’s adulterous wife Gomer represented the idolatrous northern kingdom of Israel, while Hosea himself represented God.
Chapter 1 was more or less evenly split between history and prophecy. Chapter 2 was almost entirely prophetic. Chapter 3 takes us back to the historical narrative, and it is here that we have to be careful about the practical lessons we take out of the text for ourselves.