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I’ve told this story before, but it perfectly illustrates the mentality addressed in today’s quote.
In the mid-eighties, I was introduced to a fellow college student who claimed to be very interested in Jesus Christ, but had a “few” questions about the Bible first. I naturally offered to help in any way that I could. He handed me a list of familiar posers along the lines of “Where did Cain get his wife?”
Okay, the issues seemed important to him, so fair enough.
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Wikipedia says, “A perpetual motion machine is a hypothetical machine that can do work infinitely without an external energy source. This kind of machine is impossible, since its existence would violate either the first or second law of thermodynamics, or both.”
In the real world, systemic failure is inevitable. The most sophisticated humanly devised machinery eventually breaks down and grinds to a halt.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
As long as there has been a people of God in the world, there have been those who looked to take advantage of them. The Israelites had their false prophets, and Peter warns the young church to expect their share of false teachers. He says, as the translators of the King James Version so eloquently put it, “Through covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you.”
Tom: But of course the trick is always identifying such people, isn’t it, Immanuel Can? I mean, what does that look like in the real world?
In my previous post, “Offensive Christianity”, I argued that many of us misunderstand the choice we have in facing Christ: we think it’s between faith and doubt — but in scripture, it is between faith and being offended.
Everybody struggles with doubt. And perhaps we tend to think that when we do, it signals something very, very bad. Maybe it means our faith has failed. Maybe it means we were never sincere in the first place. Maybe it means we’re lost.
It is remarkable that the only mention of Sabbath-keeping in all the epistles comes in Colossians 2, where Paul identifies it as one of the requirements of Jewish law eclipsed in Christ. The apostle writes:
“Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.”
The Sabbath, Paul says, was a shadow. That’s important.
I recently had a long, serious conversation with a lovely woman who is spending far too much time contemplating a possible course of action she knows unequivocally is destructive and displeasing to the God she claims to love and serve.
My reaction: This will not end well. It never does.
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“How should a Christian respond to being in a loveless marriage?”
People have different personalities and experiences, as well as different levels of character development and maturity, so it should not come as a surprise that we enter married life looking for different things. In general, men are looking for respect from their wives, and women are looking for love from their husbands.
I am getting that from a couple of places.
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Grant Richison inquires what Paul meant when he ends a long statement in Philippians 3 with the words “… that by any means possible I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.”
In English, Richison says, the wording seems to express doubt about the certainty of Paul’s resurrection (and by implication the resurrection of others as well).
“Does he question the assurance of his salvation?” Richison asks. He goes on to examine the passage for clues.
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Zechariah is the penultimate Minor Prophet and the penultimate book of the Old Testament in the order we have it in English, as well as historically. He is also the penultimate prophet in the Hebrew Old Testament, though not the next-to-last book, which is Chronicles.
Given his proximity to the New Testament, we should not be surprised to find Christ so prominent in Zechariah, as we have mentioned. Zechariah’s vision in chapter 3 portrays Messiah in at least four different aspects: (1) as priest, (2) as the angel of the Lord, (3) as the Branch, and (4) as the stone with seven eyes.
Let’s dive in.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
The soul: it’s a heavy topic, and one that not everyone agrees about. Dr. Robert Lanza is a biologist who says that consciousness creates the universe rather than the other way around. He’s what is called a “biocentrist”. His is a relatively new theory, having come into play around 2007. The fundamental notion behind it is that the much sought-after “Theory of Everything” scientists are looking for cannot be found until biology is placed at the head of the sciences.
Tom: It’s interesting, Immanuel Can, to see the spiritual dimension of life acquiring some scientific credibility. Do you want to take a shot at explaining Dr. Lanza’s theory?
“It has been customary to employ the category ‘doubt’ where one ought to speak of ‘offense.’ The relationship … to Christ is not either to doubt or to believe, but either to be offended or to believe.”
— Søren Kierkegaard,
Training In Christianity
I have said this before, and I’ll say it again: the opposite of faith is not doubt.
Doubt dwells with faith, just as stress dwells with growth. Growth of muscles happens by straining them. Growth of skills happens by them being tested. We become by overcoming. Faith needs stress, needs tests, needs stretching into new areas, needs maturing — and where this process is happening, doubt will be present as well. It is the thing faith needs to conquer.
The uncertainties of life are the gymnasium of the soul.
Years ago, an older Christian told me I perplexed him. “You’re liberal on neckties (I declined to wear them) but conservative on scripture,” he said. He probably capitalized “Scripture” to himself when he said it. At that church, traditions mattered more than they probably should.
Neckties and orthodoxy are light years apart in spiritual importance. Unfortunately, in those days they often came as a package deal.
Some necessary background for anyone not up to date on the latest evangelical brouhahas. From Fox News: A Christian radio network recently dropped the daily broadcast of an Ohio pastor over advice he gave a questioning grandma. Alistair Begg says he is “not ready to repent” for telling her she should attend her grandson’s wedding to his transgender fiancé as long as she had privately advised him that in making an appearance at his celebration, she was not affirming his life choices.
Hey, bad advice is everywhere, and some choices are more complex than others.
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“What does it mean that the Holy Spirit will guide you into all truth?”
The Lord Jesus promised his disciples that when the Spirit of truth came, the Helper from the Father who would convict the world of sin, righteousness and judgment, he would guide them into “all truth”.
Before we look into the meaning of this promise, we need to remember that every member of the Lord’s audience at the discourse that began in the upper room was in a unique and impossible-to-duplicate position.
Western culture separates the wedding ceremony from the wedding celebration, usually by no more than a few hours. Jewish culture in the first century did too, but between the legal contract of marriage [erusin] signed by the husband and the bride’s father and its celebration and consummation [nissuin] lay a considerably longer interval. The marriage supper and its aftermath might take place weeks, months or years after the signing of the contract.
It might even be indefinitely postponed, assuming we are reading the relevant instructions in 1 Corinthians correctly.
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Several years back, my cantankerous next-door neighbor had her front walk redone with great, imposing slate pavers. I’m not sure they harmonized with the look of her property quite as well as the railroad ties she had in prior years, and I bet they cost a bundle, not least for the prodigious amount of labor involved in what initially looked like a fairly small project. It took three men several days to tear up what was there and replace it.
There was only one problem.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
If the quotation in this Breitbart article is even close to accurate, the head of the Roman Catholic church has just thrown one of the most important principles of first century Christian faith under the bus:
“The last thing I should do is to try to convince an unbeliever. Never. The last thing I should do is speak.”
Tom: So now the most revered figure in one of the world’s biggest branches of Christianity insists all testimony to Christ must be non-verbal. What do you think of that, IC?
“Well, you know, many roads lead up the mountain …”
So he said to me.
People say stuff like that all the time when they want to avoid facing God. “I can do it my way,” they say, hoping that saying it strongly enough will make it true. Or, they say, “Everybody’s got a piece of the truth, but nobody’s got it all,” like the story of the blind men and the elephant (if you know that little tale).
An old acquaintance obsessed with classical literature used to observe that her generation was “killing the adverb”. The vocabulary of her schoolmates had degenerated to the point that they no longer modified or qualified their verbs with the eloquence and succinctness possessed by the writers of previous generations.
She would not have found that in the New Testament, even in the most modern English translations. Far from being dead, the adverb is everywhere in the Christian life.
“It is required of stewards that they be found faithful.”
If you ever rise to the spiritual heights of the apostle Paul — and I have lately come to the conclusion that I am unlikely to manage that — you will be nothing more than a servant and a steward. That is the very best you and I may aspire to in the Christian life, and our efforts to remain conscious of the reality that everything we have been given has been temporarily entrusted to us by God are a mark of growing maturity in Christ.