“Chaaaaarge!”
A half-dozen knights leap over a hill to attack a rabbit.
Unexpectedly, the little white bunny turns and attacks the knights, killing some and wounding others.
“Run away! Run away!”
Scattering shields and armaments, the terrified knights clamber back over the hillock, and duck in shame.
* * * * *
It’s a famous scene called “The Killer Rabbit” from the 1975 comedy feature film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I’m reminded of it every time I converse with a Calvinist.
“Who are you, O man, to answer back to God?”
In Romans 9, Paul teaches that God has mercy on whomever he wills and hardens whomever he wills. The apostle then notes a potential objection: “Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?” I’ve quoted the apostle’s response above: “Who are you to answer back to God?” In essence, God made you, and it is his right to do as he pleases with you. As the Gospel Coalition’s Justin Dillehay puts it, Paul “questions the critic’s right to even lodge the objection”.
October 31 is Halloween to some. This year, it’ll also be the 507th anniversary of the day Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, Germany. That’s as good a day as any to celebrate the beginning of Protestantism, though it took another dozen years or so to formally organize the new denomination.
It was not the first major split in church history, nor was it the last, but Catholics and Protestants have been sparring about it verbally (and sometimes physically) ever since.
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“I just graduated Bible college without finding a partner. Would taking a pastorate improve my prospects?”
Having only just graduated, and being presumably somewhere in your mid-twenties, if your primary concern is attracting women, I recommend starting a rock band. That’s a sure-fire profession for wannabe chick magnets. A pastorate, not so much.
Of course, if you can’t sing or write music, that’s a bit of a problem. Let’s work with your original suggestion a little.
Blessings are unequal. Love is unequal. Reward and punishment are unequal. Even trials and tribulations in this life are — you guessed it — unequal. (Perhaps we should be grateful for that last one.)
To some, God’s economy looks a tad irregular, perhaps even unjust — at least, by the measure of man. Others rationalize the plain wording of scripture away, or deny it by hypothesizing that God actually does treat everyone equally, but just in neat, invisible ways we can’t observe or quantify, a theory for which neither life nor the Bible provides any evidence. Still others don’t read their Bibles enough to notice the issue.
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A word of thanks to any of our readers who have made it through even a portion of our massive Mining the Minors project as we begin winding down the series. To date, we have posted a grand total of 210 straight Saturdays, or over four years, on the messages of the twelve Minor Prophets, a task I felt many questions about attempting back in September of 2020.
At the time, I wondered if such a lengthy series might not be cut short by the Lord’s return. I expect that’s still possible, and if not this series, perhaps the next.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
On her way to work a few months ago, a Muslim driver urged my friend to reconsider her ways in view of coming judgment. The driver knew nothing at all about his passenger, but he was convinced his god will one day be both her judge and the judge of all mankind.
Tom: Not all religions acknowledge judgment is coming, I suppose, but many do. It is not an exclusively Christian teaching. But there are some things about biblical judgment that make it distinctive, Immanuel Can, and perhaps we can explore some of those today.
“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.