Sammy came to visit me yesterday.
I shouldn’t call him that, actually. He’s not a kid. He’s close to thirty now, I would guess; he’s done with college, done with establishing a career, and while he’s not yet married (if he ever chooses to be), he’s a highly successful entrepreneur who owns two flourishing businesses.
But when I knew him he was “Sammy”. I coached him in his teens, you see.
Life isn’t fair.
That’s a concept with which some people have great difficulty. The social justice crowd invests endless time and energy trying to forcibly engineer new institutional dynamics that will lead to identical outcomes for all by embracing diversity, inclusion, multiculturalism and omnitolerance.
Well, that’s the goal in theory.
I’m working my way through Revelation this month for the umpteenth time, not claiming to understand the finer details of the prophetic word much better than I did when I was in my twenties. Despite that, I am more than capable of grasping the broad strokes and basic implications for our world of what the Lord revealed to John in the last book of the Bible.
One of the most obvious takeaways from Revelation for the Christian in these troubled and confusing times is that when the end comes for our current world order, it will not be from incineration by the sun, as the climate change cult would have us believe.
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“Why do you consistently use an initial capital on ‘Bible’ but not ‘scripture’?”
Good question. Most older Christian writers tend to use Scripture rather than scripture. So why am I an outlier in this regard?
My general preference is typically that of modern editors, which is to use as few initial caps as possible, only where setting a word in all lower case would obscure the intended meaning.
Tuesday’s post about the Brunstad Christian Church revealed its members believe in sinless perfection. A submission from a former member of BCC on the website BCCTheTruth contains this quote:
“BCC’s main belief is that humans can become like Jesus. Not in a figurative sense; the belief that we can fully eliminate sin from our lives through faith in God.”
Additionally, some groups of sinless perfectionists teach that anyone who does not fully eliminate sin from his life is not genuinely saved. Since it would be a major blow to me to discover in eternity that they are correct about that, let’s have one more look at the doctrine.
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The word “Armageddon” has become the generic way of referring to almost any end of the world scenario. In scripture, the word only occurs once, in Revelation 16:16, which we are going to look at today.
The book of Revelation describes the biblical end of the world as revealed to the apostle John by the glorified Christ. In this prophecy, Armageddon is the place where all the major Gentile nations assemble to do battle at the climax of the great tribulation period, in which God will bring about Israel’s repentance and recognition of its Messiah while simultaneously judging the nations of the world for their various evils and mistreatment of his people.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Tom: Last week I came across a U.S. federal government site designed to be a resource for fathers and families. While of course we applaud any such effort in a period when the family is relentlessly under attack from all sides, it seems obvious secular governments are not well-equipped to teach the more spiritual aspects of fatherhood.
Fathers do not exist simply to pay the bills and do the heavy lifting around the house. The last time we talked, we compiled a list of fatherly responsibilities from scripture, and it was not a short one. God did not intend fathers to be dispensable, whatever our society may think.
Over the holidays I was browsing a bookshop, and by chance happened to pick up a copy of Søren Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death (1849).
Now, I’m not saying it’s a book everybody’s going to find easy to read. I don’t think it’s one that an unbeliever — no matter how bright — is really going to be able to understand. Nor do I think an average believer will find it straightforward. But if you’ve got the will and the ability, and especially if you are a person of some theological background and an interest in the welfare of Christians generally, I most highly recommend it.
It’s blowing my mind.
“But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty.”
We are living in Paul’s “times of difficulty”. Can any Christian honestly dispute that?
If you ever doubt it for a moment, reflect on what you are seeing on YouTube and your TV, reading about online and in your newspaper — if anyone still reads anything other than the free tabloids they hand out on the subway. I did walk past one fellow delivering the national paper early one morning last week, but the houses of his subscribers were so far apart he had to use his car to do his deliveries efficiently. That’s where print is headed: the way of the dinosaur.
Like marriage.
Some days I’m very glad I am not called upon to do too much judging in this life. Judging my own sin, yes. Discerning good from bad with respect to what constitutes moral conduct, sure. For these things, there is an objective standard: the holy scriptures. Judging correctly involves looking something up in God’s word, then trying to live it out.
That I can do.
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“Why do some churches grow while others die?”
This is one of those questions for which there is no single definitive answer, especially given the way denominationalism has complicated something God made comparatively simple. First century churches were multi-ethnic, their membership driven by common faith and physical proximity rather than theological hair-splitting or spiritual consumerism.
“… golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints.”
Stop for a moment and contemplate with me the wonder of having our prayers presented to God as an act of worship, of having our meditations before God described as “incense” in his sight, a fragrant offering. On my best day, I would never dare put it like that ... but God does. “What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer” indeed!
But would that be ALL our prayers in those golden bowls? I sincerely doubt it.
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Zephaniah gives us a brief glimpse in these closing verses of the glories of the millennial reign of Christ in Israel, maybe the earliest among the Minor Prophets and one of the more fully developed visions of the Bible’s version of our future to date. Zephaniah concentrates primarily on the impact that the presence of Christ will have on his earthly people and his restoration of their perpetually-divided and much-maligned nation.
Where will Christians be in all this? Good question.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
The U.S. federal government is teaching fatherhood. Stop and think how many ways that could go wrong.
Now, the National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse (NRFC) is not a brand new initiative by any stretch. It claims to exist in order to “provide, facilitate, and disseminate current research, proven and innovative strategies that will encourage and strengthen fathers and families, and providers of services.” This looks like it is mostly done through social media, websites and virtual training courses, as well as access to help lines and so on.
Tom: You’ve spent most of your life working with teens, Immanuel Can. How important is it to high-schoolers to have a father present and engaged in their lives?
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| Damocles, R. Westall, 1812 |
The ancient writer Cicero has an anecdote about a man named Damocles, a boot-licking courtier to the ancient despot Dionysius II. Damocles foolishly thought he’d like to see what it was really like to be a king, and so the king granted his wish.
Damocles quickly settled himself into Dionysius’ luxurious couch and began to enjoy the pleasures of rule — being fanned, having serving maids feed him, issuing commands, and so on. But in order to make the experience truly authentic, Dionysius gave one further order: that above Damocles’ head a shining sword would be suspended by a single horse-hair, so that he might be ever conscious that at any moment it might fall and carve the presumptuous pseudo-king in half.
Of course, Damocles soon begged the king to be allowed to return to his former position.
Back in 2019, I answered the question “Why is God so morbidly violent in the Old Testament?” with five solid reasons the God of the Old Testament is not so bad after all, even by our presumptuous, permissive modern standards.
You won’t sell that truth easily to the average non-Bible reader. They are too caught up with the standard media tropes: that the God of the Old Testament was bloodthirsty and capricious, while Jesus was loving, forgiving and tolerant to a fault.
Neither stereotype is accurate. If you look at Jesus closely, he’s exactly like the God of the Old Testament.
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Sometimes witnessing doesn’t work, even when you do it to the best of your ability and everything initially appears to go swimmingly.
I’m sure you’ve had the experience. I know I have. I used to be a great believer in dialectical arguments and persuasive apologetics. I would study up a storm to answer a question from scripture that I believed might be important to someone’s salvation or growth in Christ.
I’m not saying a good apologetic never works, but there are things even the most polished and articulate argument can’t possibly accomplish.
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“What’s the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation?”
When translating scripture from one language to another, experts must take into account that no single word in the receptor language may capture the meaning of the original word precisely. In such cases, they may employ a phrase to replace a single word, or else choose the best possible single word approximation.
I was asked to do a study on sinless perfectionism recently for the first time in my life. You might think that’s a subject we’d have handled here on the blog, given that we’ve been publishing new articles daily since December 2013 and recently passed 3,500 posts; and certainly, we’ve made reference to the concept once or twice. But no, we’ve never gone into the teaching in any depth.
Partly this is because I’ve never encountered someone who believes in it.
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In the course of our studies in the Minor Prophets, it has come to our attention repeatedly that prophetic utterances often apply to multiple times and places, and that their fulfillments may be literal, spiritual or both. It is possible to read Zephaniah 1:1 through 3:7 as applying almost exclusively to the period from the reign of Josiah in Judah through to the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem and the decades that followed. All but a few verses in these passages have already been fulfilled.
From 3:8 on, however, it is evident the prophet is speaking about days that are still future even for today’s reader.