Answering a Skeptic

Not all college friendships last a lifetime, but one guy I went to school with has kept in touch for over 30 years. He maintained an attitude of genial bemusement about my Christian faith right up until his own daughter became a teenager, when he abruptly decided that a purely secular worldview was not what he wanted for her after all.

So I can relate to the plight of the writer of A Skeptic’s Journey Through the Bible, an anonymous blogger who says this about himself:

“Growing up a believer, I left my faith in my teens. Now that I’m at the age of starting a family of my own, I need to know in which direction to guide them.”

Fair point. Let’s help if we can.

Anonymous Asks (207)

“What does it mean to ‘take the name of the Lord in vain’?”

Good question. Does it mean to use the words “God” or “Jesus” casually in conversation? For example, is the oft-heard epithet “Oh my god” a case of taking the Lord’s name in vain?

The phrase comes from the third of the original Ten Commandments given to Israel in Exodus 20 and restated in Deuteronomy: “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.”

The context (a list of important but diverse God-given commands) doesn’t leave us much else to parse for meaning. We are pretty much stuck with the words themselves. All the same, the words give us plenty to think about.

Testing the Spirits

The biblical injunction to test the spirit behind a religious teacher or doctrine requires more of us than merely weighing the worth of a teaching by its popularity. Nor should we allow the smile, charisma or demeanor of the one presenting a message to influence our judgment.

In the apostle John’s three letters, the word “Spirit” shows how believers are equipped to detect unseen and intangible forces, even though they are more accustomed to living by what they see and feel.

Mining the Minors: Hosea (37)

Some chapter divisions in our Bibles are more helpful than others. Not every chapter stands on its own. The contents of many may be better understood by looking backward or forward.

I mentioned a couple of weeks back that I found chapter 12 of Hosea difficult to analyze. In this case it’s not the chapter divisions that are the problem; chapter 12 stands just fine as a discrete unit in a larger message. What I find hard to understand is the structure of the chapter itself.

Too Hot to Handle: A Change in the Whether

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

Crawford Paul, who serves as an elder in an Ontario local church, has written a short post entitled “Consider Moving Your Prayer Meeting to Sunday”.

Tom: Now I’m not sure, Immanuel Can, how many churches in North America still have weekly meetings dedicated pretty much exclusively to prayer. It may not be a large number. Mr. Paul’s suggestion seems to be generally well received. But it does bring up the question of how much flexibility churches have in such matters, assuming we are using scripture as our guide, of course.

We might start by asking what constitutes a local church in the first place.

Total Depravity: Can’t We Come Up With A New Term?

I was talking with an ardent Calvinist about this article. He is firmly committed to “total depravity” as meaning that human beings are black, wicked and “dead” so far as God is concerned, devoid of any kind of goodness, light or value: utterly deplorable and despicable. I understand the misguided humility that drives him, but I don’t buy his argument, and I don’t like the term “total depravity”. I think it’s misleading. This is what I wrote to him:

The Meaning of “Death”

One of the things you said you believed, Sam, is that because the Bible calls us “dead in trespasses and sins”, that must mean that we are totally valueless, like a corpse, before God saves us; and that like a corpse, we are incapable of response before God regenerates us. As you said to me, “Dead means dead.”

Improbable Last-Minute Comebacks

Superbowl 51 made history. Too bad I didn’t know that in the third quarter when I turned off the game and went for a drive.

My team was the New England Patriots. I was watching the big game in the lawyer’s lounge during the last hour of a deadly quiet shift at work. Midway through the third quarter, the score was 28-3 … and not for the Pats. By all historical football metrics the game was over. Rather than sit in a funk watching the Atlanta Falcons celebrate their victory, I decided when my shift had ended to make good on an earlier promise to drive a load of boxes over to my landlady’s condo.

Who is the Weaker Brother?

We all know Christians who get offended at just about anything: observing Christmas, reading Harry Potter, owning a deck of cards, instrumental music in church, the “wrong” hymnbooks … you name it, some believer will invariably have something bad to say about it, especially if you are the one doing it.

A pseudonymous writer on Christianity.StackExchange.com asks how to handle such situations in a post called “The Tyranny of the Weaker Brother”. To be fair, he had just given up a much-loved pastime out of respect for a self-professed “weaker brother”, and was probably in a bit of a snit.

Anonymous Asks (206)

“Are Christians obligated to attend every meeting of the local church?”

The way you instinctively feel about this question will likely depend on the type of church you attend. Christians in a declining work that is still trying to run all the programs it did when the meetings were better attended often put pressure on one another to get more involved and to fill the empty shoes of the departed with any fresh body they can draft into service. On the other hand, a highly organized institutional church may be paying people to fill those roles, with the result that Christians can easily come and go from church as they please without feeling that their presence at any particular meeting makes much difference to anyone else.

Of course, the more important question is What does the Lord think?

Faith in Action

“I’ll believe that when I see it,” says someone who doubts the truth of what he has been told.

That statement is absurd. He should know there is no need to believe anything once it is seen. The fact that “one day faith will give way to sight” does not mean faith is inferior to sight; each faculty has a time and opportunity to show its worth. The time for faith is today, the time for sight is tomorrow.

Mining the Minors: Hosea (36)

We are continuing to examine the way the New Testament writers make use of Hosea’s prophecy. Not all NT uses can properly be called fulfilments of Hosea — some are merely allusions or references — but those which are fulfilments may be broken down this way, with all due credit to David Gooding:

1. Fulfilment as the fulfilling of predictions
2. Fulfilment as the final, higher expression of basic principles
3. Christ’s fulfilment of the Law
4. The Christian’s fulfilment of the Law

NT writers may use the word “fulfil” in any of these four senses.

Too Hot to Handle: Collision Impending

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

Germans in Stuttgart staged a protest rally last weekend over “family values”. At least 4,500 people took to the streets to protest new school curriculum that puts special emphasis on “sexual diversity and sexual minorities”.

What’s interesting about the German situation is that against the wishes of many Germans the Merkel government is importing unprecedented numbers of Muslims into its school system while simultaneously pushing an increasingly liberal social agenda, also against the wishes of a not-insignificant number of its citizens.

Tom: I bring this up, Immanuel Can, because our own Canadian government is on precisely the same trajectory and the U.S. is not far behind. It seems to me spectacularly ill-conceived social policy to pit one set of values against another. The cultural collision, when it comes, promises to be loud and destructive.

What are they thinking, IC?

A Change Is Gonna Come

Umm ... not effective?

So sang Sam Cooke.

I guess he’d know. He was writing his soulful anthems back in the ’50s and early ’60s in places like Mississippi and Chicago — not the easiest places for a young person of his particular shade of skin to be. But things were changing then, and in retrospect, those who didn’t know they were changing and who thought they could keep things the way they were forever were just spitting into the wind.

Yes, change is gonna come. And you can’t change that. You’ve just got to be ready and react smartly when it does.

Do You Love the Lord?

Well, do you? It’s a hugely important question. It merits serious thought.

Love for God is fundamental. Jesus taught that the first and greatest commandment in the Law of Moses was to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind”. So then, God claims the right to rule my thoughts, to control how I define and express my self, and to direct my understanding. Allowing him to exercise his rightful domain unimpeded is the first and greatest expression of love toward God.

This truth was fundamental to a right understanding of the Law, and it is fundamental to Christianity. All true goodness follows from it.

Flyover Country: 2 John

What we think of Christ is the most important thing about us.

Our relationship with God depends on thinking rightly about his Son, who came into the world at the Father’s behest to save sinners. Heaven’s gate is forever closed to those who do not come to love the Lord Jesus. Moreover, true Christian fellowship is impossible for us to maintain with anyone who does not think accurate, biblical thoughts about the Savior of the world, just as the apostles and writers of the New Testament taught.

Anonymous Asks (205)

“Does Satan have to get God’s permission to attack Christians?”

You know how this goes: “I’ve got some good news and I’ve got some bad news. Which do you want first?”

Good News and Bad News

Let’s go with the good. God certainly offers a significant level of protection to those who serve him. Satan complained that God had “put a hedge” around Job and his household, preventing Satan from changing Job’s circumstances or revoking the blessings God had given him. Likewise, the Lord Jesus informed Peter that Satan had demanded to sift the disciples like wheat. That sure sounds like an attack to me … but an attack Satan could not have initiated unilaterally.

Grace in the Wilderness

It is essential to our well being that how we think about ourselves and our circumstances (our philosophy) be governed by what we know about God from scripture (our theology). This is especially true when we are experiencing physical pain, mental distress or unwanted and unexplained trials over an extended period.

If our theology does not take charge, we find ourselves in a state of guilt or self-pity. Neither helps.

Mining the Minors: Hosea (35)

I candidly admit to struggling with Hosea 12: the historical references to Jacob and Moses; the back-and-forth between these and the condemnation of the nation’s present conduct; the choice of timing for what appears to be a defense of the prophetic office … let’s just say I need to think and pray about it a fair bit more before I start writing about it.

In the interest of putting chapter 12 off as long as possible, I’m going to do what I promised several months back and devote at least one post to the New Testament uses of Hosea’s prophetic word. Some of these are direct quotations; others are references and allusions.

I trust you will all put this down to cleverness rather than cowardice.

Too Hot to Handle: Where Do You Get Your News?

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

Millennials are among the most flat-out gullible people I have ever encountered. For the most part, they wouldn’t know truth if it smacked them upside the head. Their manipulators and peers circulate fiction as fact on social media 24/7. They mistrust everyone except those they should.

Older folks still watch the six o’ clock news and have newspaper subscriptions. They grew up with media reputed to be fairly trustworthy in an age when the illusion could be reasonably sustained that there existed such a thing as journalistic ethics. Many of these are our fellow believers, people of goodwill for whom the habit of giving others the benefit of the doubt is well ingrained.

The Change Is Gonna Do Us Good

Where is Kodak these days? Remember that company? It used to have its name on most of the cameras and film that you saw around. Kodak was an empire, an institution. Now where is it?

And how about Blockbuster Video? Seen any of those stores around lately? They used to be on every corner.

Laura Ashley clothing? Napster music service?