Mining the Minors: Hosea (14)

I grew up with two brothers. In their teens, one was good natured, pleasant to be around and (at least outwardly) compliant with the house rules. The other was perpetually contentious and surly, constantly butting heads with our father and any other authority figures with the great misfortune to cross his path.

It is no surprise to find that the latter brother spent more time in my father’s office than the former. No particular prejudice was involved in that.

We’ll come back to that thought shortly. Meanwhile, let’s finish Hosea chapter 4 …

Too Hot to Handle: Not Playing the Game

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

Immanuel Can: Hey, Tom, what’s all this I’m suddenly hearing about “NPC”?

Tom: Oh my, you sure know how to pick ’em. As you have surely noticed, there’s a big media brouhaha around that term, and Twitter has banned it outright as “hateful”. I’ll let writer Brandon Morse explain it:

“If you’ve ever picked up a video game that features other characters that are controlled by the computer, then you’ve run into non-player characters or NPC’s.”

When you call someone an “NPC”, what you are saying is that they are programmed with preset behavioral patterns decided for them by somebody else, be they professors, activist groups or the media. You are telling them they are unable to think for themselves.

Big Questions and the Loss of Faith

A few years ago, this little brain-teaser was making the rounds. Take a run at it, and let’s see how you do:

Three old ladies go to a hotel one evening, hoping to save money by sharing a room. The hotel manager charges each $20 for the night, though he knows the room is only worth $40. Shortly thereafter, the manager feels guilty that he has charged them too much, so he sends the bellboy to return $20 to the old ladies. On the way, the bellboy realizes that he cannot split $20 among three ladies, so he pockets $5 and hands them the remaining $15.

Here is the problem. The ladies paid $60 initially. Since they received $5 each, the net amount they paid for the room was $15 each, which adds up to a total of $45. The bellboy has $5 in his pocket, which if you add it to the $45 makes $50. Where is the other $10 that they paid the manager?

Now, if you’re normal, your instant reaction is, “This is amazing … a hotel room for only $20!”

A Cave Full of Fumes and a Law Etched in Stone

I have mentioned the first century Greek biographer Plutarch in a couple of previous posts as I am currently wading through his compiled Lives of famous Greeks and Romans, including everyone from Theseus (he of minotaur-killing fame) to Julius Caesar. Among the writers of antiquity, I find Plutarch especially of interest because he lived during the period in which the New Testament was written. He is more of a historian than an observer of the culture of his own day, and maintains a studiously neutral approach to his subject matter.

All the same, after about 1,000 pages, you start to get a feel for what makes a man tick: how he thinks about the world, what he values or dismisses, whether he is religious or not, and if so, what his beliefs mean to him and how they affect his life. Plutarch is no exception.

Doesn’t Always Mean What We Think It Means (8)

Compare the usage of the word “condemn” in the following two passages:

“See, we are going up to Jerusalem. And the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn him to death.”

“But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned.”

Assuming you are familiar with both verses in their original contexts, you will probably agree with me that the word is being used to describe two distinct degrees of hazard, one considerably more severe than the other.

Anonymous Asks (183)

“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?”

Last week I began going through Proverbs with a fine-tooth comb in an effort to answer this question. I tried to select those sayings which seem the most foreign to our modern mindset, in order to set the current “wisdom of the world” side by side with the wisdom of God.

So far the wisdom of God is looking pretty relevant to the present day.

Baptized and Led

You are a fly resting on the wall of an auditorium. It is not long before you are able to identify the sort of church you are observing by the way its members use certain scriptural language to describe an experience they had, and one they think should be known by more Christians. You hear testimonies of the baptism of the Holy Spirit being experienced, and teaching given that urges members to seek this blessing.

Who would you think you were among?

Mining the Minors: Hosea (13)

Years ago, the wife of a friend from my college days came home with a rather unusual proposal concerning their marriage. She worked as a nurse in a cancer ward, and had fallen in love with a patient diagnosed as terminal. Her plan was to bring this fellow home and move him in upstairs so she could care for him, while her husband took his things and moved downstairs to live in the basement.

Needless to say, my friend did not think much of that idea.

Too Hot to Handle: Story Time with Harmonica

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

I’m not even sure how to describe this, but I’m going to give it a go.

Publishers Weekly’s ShelfTalker, “In which children’s booksellers ponder all things literary, artistic, and mercantile,” has a piece on a hot new trend sweeping the nation’s libraries: story time with a drag queen.

Mixed groups of three- to eight-year-olds are invited to come and enjoy a spoken word performance from men like “Harmonica Sunbeam” dressed as women (there is a picture with the article but — fair warning — it can’t be un-seen).

Tom: IC, is it possible to normalize something so bizarre and decadent, even with the power and budget of big corporations and the education system fully committed to it?

The Language of the Debate (5)

[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]

Things That Last and Things That Don’t

“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.

My Christian Face

“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.

Anonymous Asks (182)

“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 ...

On Accepting and Receiving

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 ...

Mining the Minors: Hosea (12)

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.

Too Hot to Handle: Brimstone and Deceit

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”.

Contemplating Evil

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.

Things Not Seen

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.

Those Who Don’t Know History

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.

Anonymous Asks (181)

“ ‘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.