“My sheep listen to my voice, and I know them …”
“I know them.”
It’s funny … wouldn’t you expect the Lord to have said, “My sheep listen to my voice and they know me”?
That would be parallelism. That would be equivalent. That would speak of our recognition of the Good Shepherd, just as the first part of the verse emphasizes it. We know his voice, and we know him.
But it’s not that.
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An anonymous Christian man recently produced this wall of text looking for advice about his marriage, appropriately entitled “A Broken Situation”. To cut a long story very much shorter, it’s a fifteen-year marriage during which the husband indulged a porn habit for many years, before finally confessing to his wife and two Christian men, all of whom are now keeping him accountable with the aid of a software package they monitor regularly. For the last three years, he’s also been part of a weekly men’s prayer-and-confession session, which he feels has been a help in keeping spiritually on track.
So here’s the catch: the porn habit ended six years ago. The monitoring and weekly confessing continues, probably until the Lord returns.
The quest to control the input into our own consciousness is probably thousands of years old. We all have our ways of trying to backburner the unpleasantries of life while maximizing the good bits. My brother and I shared a coffee on his deck last week, and we talked about a friend whose way of dealing with things he doesn’t like, even in adulthood, is simply to refuse to acknowledge them. “I don’t think about that,” he’ll say.
If you have no distracting technology to aid you, I suppose affected stoicism or denial are the best available refuges from truth, if a tad primitive.
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“Is hell a literal lake of fire?”
For the average reader with limited Bible exposure, it’s probably useful to distinguish between hades, which is a holding place for the human dead prior to the final judgment, and hell [γέεννα, sometimes pronounced gehenna], also called the lake of fire, the final destination of the wicked dead, the place of permanent separation from God. Hell was not created for mankind at all, but for the devil and his angels. After man’s final judgment, death and hades will be thrown into the lake of fire for all eternity. This is called the “second death”.
As the patriarch Jacob came to the end of his 147 years on this earth, we may be excused for wondering if he was slipping in and out of reality, as many very ancient folks tend to do. When we read the final chapters of Genesis, it may seem like Jacob was sending mixed messages to the world about his lifetime of up-close and personal dealings with God.
Hey, at Jacob’s age, a little emotional incontinence was perfectly understandable. How we assess our experiences often depends on the day.
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God’s fifth complaint through the prophet Malachi in the late fifth century BC completes his critique of the nation. Israel has questioned him five times to date and the Lord has answered all their queries, sincere or otherwise. He will answer three more today. Malachi will make several further comments, both encouraging and challenging, but YHWH has fully laid out his case by verse 15 of chapter 3.
Following these final comments comes four hundred years in which Heaven was effectively silent. Old Testament revelation ended with Malachi. First time Bible readers moving chronologically may find themselves wondering, “Did Israel respond?”
I suppose the answer to that is, “The Israel that mattered responded.” We will see the seeds of a faithful nation-within-a-nation shortly.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
We interrupt our regular scheduled recycled Friday post to bring you a news flash from the Survey Center on American Life: Young Women Are Leaving Church in Unprecedented Numbers.
Tom: I was momentarily troubled, but I kept reading only to realize the women departing evangelical churches in droves are all feminists. At that point, I started to get excited.
I also figured I should call in my comrade-in-arms Immanuel Can to moderate my misogynistic enthusiasm with his usual balanced and biblical viewpoint. IC, check this out!
Immanuel Can: Okay, let me start with the obvious: let’s concede feminism drove a lot of men out of the churches. Those it did not drive out may be fewer, but they are not likely to be driven out now if they’ve lasted this long. Who’s left that could be leaving now? Only the women. So I could make the argument that this is both inevitable and unsurprising.
When I first entered my profession, I was in my mid-twenties. As a brash young man, I remember being irritated by the requirement that I should begin to save for retirement. For one thing, I was young, and young people never think much about being old. I thought I might well even be dead long before my investment came back; I certainly had no assurances I would not. But more importantly, as I was starting out in life, I knew I could make good use of that sizable portion of my income that was going to be carved out for the retirement plan, and there was no way to get at it.
I would have if I could have.
It’s hard to believe digital computing has been around for less than a century.
Perhaps you are old enough to recall the annoying punch cards we were compelled to fill out in public school so our standardized test results could be graded and printed without human intervention, probably my first experience with “computing”. In my teens, a friend’s father paid me to input data on the Commodore PET and first generation TRS-80, staring at ASCII screens for hours on end and hoping I’d remember to save my work before it crashed, as frequently occurred.
Back then, it was all shiny new tech. Less than a single human lifetime removed, it all seems hilariously primitive.
Kamala Harris is Indian. Kamala Harris is black. Kamala Harris wants to open the border. Kamala Harris was never the border czar. Kamala Harris was the best border czar ever, and she’s going to keep us all safe. Vote Kamala. Here are some gushingly favorable faux-headlines about her that nobody wrote, ever.
If you can’t keep up with the endless rewrites to the mainstream version of the 2024 election storyline, join the club. My head is spinning and I don’t even watch the news anymore.
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“Where is the increase in anti-Jewish sentiment coming from, and how should Christians respond to it?”
It should be evident from the long history of worldwide antisemitism that there is no single, definitive answer to this question. “The Gazacaust”, as critics labeled the IDF’s siege of Palestine in the wake of the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, is just one more in a long line of excuses for virulent Jew-hate. Plenty of others exist. If they didn’t, dedicated enemies of Israel would simply make them up.
“I myself will go down with you to Egypt, and I will also bring you up again, and Joseph’s hand shall close your eyes.”
Human beings long for transcendence.
The Bible teaches it. God has “put eternity into man’s heart”. Paul says God rewards those who through patience in well-doing seek immortality, and that reward is the eternal life they are seeking.
Observation also confirms it. Death is a universal reality, but few men welcome it, believers or unbelievers. I’ve seen the panic in their eyes. I’ve heard it in their voices. The idea that there might be no more “me” in the universe is intolerable.
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As we noted last week, the last half of chapter 2 has been Malachi speaking on God’s behalf. As we move into chapter 3, God will return to directly addressing the nation in the first person. Prior to that, we receive a remarkable look into the future announcing the coming of both John the Baptist and the Word made flesh.
“Where is the God of justice?” the people have been asking. God is in the process of providing his answer: “Behold, he is coming.” The manger in Bethlehem might still be 400 years away, yet “the Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness”.
First, the fourth of God’s five complaints against Judah and its priests.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
The only substantive difference between the Great Reset and other conspiracies is that the Great Reset is right out there in the open, more or less declaring itself for what it is in hope that the generation has finally come along that will take up its ideas and make them successful. The movement has its own websites, branding and literally trillions of dollars in backing. If you haven’t come across it yet, you probably will shortly.
Tom: The Great Reset idea is the product of eighty-something German engineer and economist Klaus Schwab, whose detractors refer to him as “the new Karl Marx”, and an organization he founded called the World Economic Forum. Schwab has been pushing his utopian vision since the early ’70s, but the outbreak of COVID-19 across the world this year is the latest pretense for finally implementing it. IC, maybe you can give us a quick executive summary of the concept.
I’ve always really liked Caspar David Friedrich’s painting, “Cloister Graveyard in the Snow”. In it, we see a crumbled cathedral with only a bit of the porch and chapel remaining amid twisted, dark trees. But if you look closely, in the middle ground, you’ll see a trail of monks still marching into the ruins, presumably to continue their monkish duties.
The painting has both a positive and a negative message about religiosity. On the one hand, it suggests faith can persist even when, socially speaking, religiosity is generally perceived be in ruins; but on the other hand, it also reminds us that ritual can persist even when the life of a church is gone.
I guess the message you take depends on the perspective with which you view it.
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The purpose of this series is to show how conclusions drawn from an isolated proof text may lead you astray theologically. Today’s post illustrates just how far this can go when you add unsupported supposition to supposition. The result is the theological equivalent of a house of cards. By the time you work your way up to the attic, you find yourself asking questions for which there cannot possibly be any definitive answers.
The remedy is to say, “Let me think about that some more” way back in the basement, where there’s still a chance to construct a solid foundation for future inquiry.
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Exodus 6:2 plainly states that while God appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as God Almighty (El Shaddai), he did not make himself known to them by his personal name YHWH. This confuses some readers. One asks, “Why does God say he didn’t reveal his name ‘Yahweh’, when he obviously glaringly did so in Genesis, many, many times?”
Some of the answers one gets to such a question on a public forum like Stack Exchange are truly horrendous. One respondent suggests the writer of the Exodus passage believed it, but the writer of the Genesis passages believed differently. Let’s just say the apostle Paul would beg to differ, as would the Lord Jesus.
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“Why isn’t the obvious obvious to everyone?”
This isn’t an actual question. It’s my way of summing up the confusion of a number of different friends and other Christians who are frustrated with their fellow believers. One is frustrated because his church keeps recognizing elders who do not qualify by the standards set out in Timothy and Titus. Another is frustrated because his Christian friends are contemplating not voting in November’s election, thus increasing the likelihood of a Democrat win. Another is incensed that none of the Christians who heaped online abuse on the vaccine-hesitant during COVID have ever apologized for the foolish, uninformed and unchristian things they said. Yet another is frustrated by a pastor who believes the unwillingness to use a gun to defend one’s wife from rape is a biblical virtue.
Each sees the obvious and cannot understand why others don’t. The result is a potential breakdown in fellowship between believers.
Just out of curiosity, I did a blog search for the word “sovereign” before starting this post. According to Google, the words “sovereign” or “sovereignty” are used in 110 of approximately 2,800 posts written by IC or me since 2013, roughly one in twenty-five. That’s not the total number of occurrences, only the total number of posts in which one or the other of these words occur. You can pretty much take it to the bank that every one of those references either explicitly affirms or harmonizes with the sovereignty of God as taught in the Bible.
That may seem odd for two students of scripture who expressly reject the doctrine of divine determinism.
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The bulk of Malachi’s prophecy consists of the prophet quoting God directly, passing on corrective messages from YHWH to his nation and its priests. Verses 10-17 of chapter 2 are the first time the prophet has had anything to say for himself, slipping into the first person plural (“we”, “us”). Also, until this point Malachi has exclusively targeted the priests. Now he rebukes the men of his entire nation.
His primary concern remains the profaning of covenants.