Judgment and Discernment

Christ’s followers are forbidden to judge. He warned them against it, saying if they did they must expect the same measure would be used with reference to themselves. He then exposed the hypocrisy involved in professing concern about a speck in another person’s eye while ignoring the plank in our own.

I have a dear friend who I have every reason to believe is a devoted follower of Christ. Discussions with Rick have sometimes touched on the danger he believes is involved in coming to conclusions about other people, as to whether they are truly saved, merely church-goers, backsliders, adherents of a cult or whatever other pigeonhole we decide to place them in.

Rick thinks this too judgmental.

Mining the Minors: Hosea (23)

Sometimes — though I believe it is fairly rare in this life — God steps in and judges individuals and nations directly. Miracles of destruction are often the means.

Most times, however, the world being ordered as it is, we find ourselves living with the natural consequences of a bad choice (or series of bad choices), and in hindsight can often even see the steps by which we deceived ourselves into doing things that have a downside far more significant than whatever passing twinge of desire we were seeking to fulfill at the time.

Examples could be multiplied.

Too Hot to Handle: Feeding the Gators

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

Tom: Let’s do something a little different today, Immanuel Can. I was thinking about the social implications of that clip you sent me this morning from the action-adventure video game Red Dead Redemption 2. It seems like that might be worth talking about from a Christian perspective.

Do you want to take a crack at describing it?

Immanuel Can: It’s hard to imagine if a person has not seen modern video games. (Of course, for those who have children, avoiding video games is all-but-impossible nowadays.) A lot are now story-based, but a lot are also what’s called “first-person-shooters”, designed to let players kill a lot of characters as they move through a maze or follow some kind of prepared story line.

How Do You Love the Gospel?

I hear a lot of people talk about their love for the gospel. But then I also hear a lot of talk about how people “love” ice cream, their cars, their mates, their pets, and the NFL.

I’m pretty sure there’s a difference in each case.

There are different ways to love. Some of them are a million miles from the others. So what are people talking about when they say they really love the gospel?

I’m going to give you three different ways. There are probably more, but I’ve seen these three a lot.

Semi-Random Musings (25)

I have always liked the story of Phinehas, Aaron’s grandson. For the uninitiated, Phinehas was a young priest who took it upon himself to execute the son of a Simeonite tribal chief in the act of committing adultery with a Midianite woman by impaling the two on the same spear. As a child, I found his rather decisive move a bit daring (not to mention violent), but also commendable and brave.

After all, a spontaneous impalement is both unilateral and very final. It tends to inspire the neighbors to murmur things like “I say, old boy, don’t you think that’s a bit drastic?” Or worse.

The View from the Ground

The story of Balaam is remarkable on several levels. Its lessons are important enough for the writer of Numbers to devote three full chapters to them. Moses would later cite God’s reversal of Balaam’s failed attempt to curse his people as evidence of his love for them. Joshua would cite it as evidence of God’s ability to deliver them. The prophet Micah would say it is evidence of God’s righteousness. In Nehemiah, the story of Balaam and its consequences would inspire the returned exiles to separation and holiness. In the New Testament, Peter, Jude and John would make reference to the way of Balaam, the error of Balaam, and the teaching of Balaam.

The story of Balaam matters for multiple reasons, and the talking donkey is actually the least of them.

Anonymous Asks (192)

“Does God approve of the death penalty?”

The Law of Moses governed Israelite society in one form or another from around 1450 BC through AD70, when Jerusalem was destroyed and the Jewish people forcibly dispersed throughout the Roman Empire. In that law we find a plethora of offenses that call for the death penalty, among them murder, kidnapping, child sacrifice, rape, witchcraft, blasphemy, false prophecy, profaning the Sabbath, violence against father or mother, adultery, bestiality, homosexuality and perjury.

Did God approve of putting people to death for these things? Of course he did. The Law of Moses was the expression of God’s will for Israelite society. It came directly from him.

Outlooks and Uplooks

Expectation ... fear ... hope. What do they have in common?

Each is a way of anticipating the future. Each inevitably excites a response. This is true even if we refuse to think about what will happen tomorrow or later; we cannot avoid reacting. Even burying one’s head in the sand is a reaction which says “I choose to not think about what the future might hold.”

Mining the Minors: Hosea (22)

“There is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.” So wrote the apostle Paul, and both this line and its surrounding verses have been quoted to us repeatedly over the last two years. It is often pointed out that Paul is believed to have written these things to believers when the Roman emperor was a guy named Nero, portrayed in secular history as a notorious persecutor of Christians.

As bad as his behavior may have been, Nero was as legitimate a ruler as any other, having succeeded to the throne after the death of his grand-uncle Claudius in AD54 (thought by some to have been poisoned by his wife), who had in his turn come to power by apparent chance after the assassination of Caligula. Such were the Roman political intrigues of the first century.

Too Hot to Handle: The State of Theology

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

David B. was kind enough to forward us this link to a recent survey by Ligonier Ministries and LifeWay Research about what Americans believe about God, Jesus Christ, sin and eternity.

Tom: Apparently they are doing this every couple of years now. Having regular new data sets to browse can be useful in noting trends of one sort or another. We discussed the LifeWay 2016 survey in this space, if I recall correctly … yes, I do. That was the one where, based on the frequency of their heretical answers, my fellow writer Immanuel Can was inspired to refer to some of the respondents as not so much Christian as “ ‘Christian-flavored’, like a really, really bad kind of tofu.”

How’s the tofu this year, IC?

The Laughter of Jackals

When I was young, back in the 1970s, disaster movies were in vogue. Perhaps the most memorable was Jaws (1975), but before that were such noteworthies as The Omega Man (1971), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Airport and Earthquake (1974). Afterward came such screen gems as Rollercoaster (1977), Meteor, Hurricane and The China Syndrome (1979). All in all, there were more than fifty such major Hollywood disaster productions released in the period.

And everybody was going to see them and talking about how great the special effects were or how spectacularly people were shown dying in them.

Odd, don’t you think?

On the Supposed Misuse of the Old Testament

Online commentators argue that the apostle Paul misuses the Old Testament.

Some of these are garden-variety cranks, determined to prove all English versions of the Bible inaccurate. They insist reading the Jewish Tanakh is the only way to go. There’s really no placating people like that. Others set Paul against Jesus, maintaining that only the words of Christ really matter, and that the writings of the apostles are unreliable, inferior and downright wrong. Still others, like Pete Enns, object particularly to Paul, arguing that he read the Old Testament out of context, failing to respect what its authors intended to communicate.

How does the average Christian reply to such accusations?

Inbox: Priorities, Priorities

Bellator writes, “Someone asked me to read The Post-Quarantine Church by Thom Rainer. I attach a copy of page 5.”

Well now, there’s an invitation we can hardly pass up!

Turns out the quotes Bellator selected were not related to the author’s recommendations about what our churches most need to learn from the events of the last two years, but rather to his observations about the priorities pursued by church administrators once lockdowns were announced and Christians stopped gathering together for worship.

I consider those priorities disturbing. You may too.

Anonymous Asks (191)

“What is the significance of the staff that produced buds?”

My boss has always been a little sensitive to criticism of people he has appointed to positions of responsibility in our organization. There is good reason for this: after all, he appointed them. Complaints about the suitability of a man or woman he has chosen to serve in one capacity or another may be legitimately construed as personal attacks on his judgment, and they carry with them the implication that maybe someone else would have been better off doing the choosing.

You can imagine how well that sort of comment goes over with him. It doesn’t.

Solomon and Self-Control

Some men are called to govern others: “There is no authority except from God“, “The Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will.”

That does not mean God approves of all rulers or the decisions they make. He once elevated Pharaoh, a proud pagan tyrant, and then publicly humbled him. God said, “For this purpose I have raised you up … so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth.”

Solomon too was raised up by the Lord.

Mining the Minors: Hosea (21)

Hosea uses five different similes and metaphors to describe the state of mind prevailing in Israel in the years just prior to the Assyrian invasion. The first deals with Israel in the religious sphere (adulterers) and the second to Israel in the political sphere (a heated oven).

The latter half of chapter 7 contains three further comparisons, none of which are particularly flattering.

Too Hot to Handle: What Doesn’t Kell You...

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

Modern attention spans are what they are. We try to keep these posts to roughly 2,000 words; conventional internet wisdom has it the average person begins to tune out around then. But there were at least three points we didn’t get around to last week in our discussion of the accusation raised by Tim Keller that the traditional evangelical fundraising model is systemically racist.

Tom: IC, I wanted to start out with this thought: Tim Keller is using woke language and making typical social justice assumptions about his fellow believers, but I don’t want to leave the subject without pointing out the there is nothing wrong with self-examination on the part of Christians, churches, and parachurch organizations.

Why Are We So Unsatisfied?

A few days ago I offered readers a chance to comment on the subject of their level of satisfaction with their church experiences. To say the least, response was underwhelming. We had plenty of readers of that post, but none who took us up on our offer.

Two possibilities follow: (1) readers are so content with their church experiences that they have no point of contact with the article, or (2) readers do not feel comfortable speaking on this subject.

The Commentariat Speaks (23)

In a post last week entitled “A Contradiction in the Church”, the Antemodernist observed that when the Christian community at large is clear and succinct in its condemnation, it is always against a sin that is convenient to hate. As he puts it, “Christians deal with the easy and convenient things, and so leave the important and difficult things growing like cancer.”

Publicly condemning masculine sins — foreign invasions, lust, violence — is the equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel, he suggests. Nobody minds and everybody cheers. But feminine sins — things like cross dressing or the homosexual mimicry of family life — have become virtually untouchable subjects.

I’ll grant him all that and go a step further.

Levitical Interlude #3: The Israelite Woman’s Son

The warden in the movie The Shawshank Redemption greets every new arrival with the words “Rule number one: No blasphemy. I will not have the Lord’s name taken in vain in my prison.”

Now, Shawshank is set in 1947 — not that long ago, all things considered — yet modern movie critics find the warden’s priorities perplexing.

“Ahead of murder?” inquires one.

Yes, even ahead of murder.