Too Hot to Handle: Abandoning Ship

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

Men have always done it mid-life — some men, anyway, though thankfully Christian men did it somewhat more rarely.

We met the “right” waitress, secretary, serving wench or married woman bathing on a rooftop and bailed on our wives and families. We did it to find happiness (or at least firmer skin or, for a time at least, a cheerier disposition). We did it to demonstrate we were still virile and desirable. Or we did it for some other perfectly scrutable male reason that we wholeheartedly believed was unique to our own experience.

Tom: It took them a while to catch up, Immanuel Can, but thanks to feminism’s influence, women are doing it too, and they’re doing it with a vengeance. Almost 70% of divorces are now initiated by unhappy wives.

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Chapter 1: In the Side Door

“For certain people have crept in unnoticed, those who were long beforehand marked out for this condemnation, ungodly persons who turn the grace of our God into indecent behavior and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.”

One day soon, a very nice person will appear in your church.

It could be a person from a visible minority group, somebody disabled, somebody with a distinctive skin color, or somebody who doesn’t look any different from most of the congregation. It could be a man or a woman; and while it is more likely to be a young-to-middle-aged person, it could conceivably be somebody older as well. Likely, but not certainly, it will be a formally-educated person, somebody with a university degree, perhaps; but not necessarily. They may appear singly or in a group of some kind.

Something Nice

“If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothin’ at all.”

The saying is venerable, to be sure, but not old enough to merit inclusion in holy writ. They’re not the words of a prophet, they’re the words of a rabbit.

Nevertheless, to this generally prudent advice, I would add the following gentle suggestion for my fellow Christians when commenting on politics: If you can’t say something understandable, don’t say anything at all.

Staying in Your Lane

A few years ago I watched a friend melt down in slow motion.

At the time I didn’t know it was coming. If I had known, I might have said something, but I had my own family distractions to deal with and he seemed to be managing. He was one of those good guys who shows up in a local church with a surplus of gift, energy and goodwill, and is immediately drafted into everything. He was recognized as an elder despite a shortage of family qualifications. He ran the youth group and helped with Sunday School, preached regularly, spoke at conferences, worked a more-than-full schedule and he and his wife were relentlessly hospitable, despite not having a large place to share with others.

And then suddenly … POOF! He was gone.

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“What is a post-Christian society?”

I remember first using the term “post-Christian” in the early 2000s. A Roman Catholic co-worker my own age with whom I shared a fair number of views about society was trying to pin down where and when Western culture began to slide into the abyss.

“Post-Christian” popped into my head as a good description of Canada in the new millennium. I probably picked it up from somebody else along the way, but it seemed apt.

A Dead Horse in the Church Parking Lot

To my great amusement, last Sunday’s post inspired a text from a regular reader only a few hours after it went up, requesting I suggest a few remedies for Christians suffering from reduced attention spans, which I suspect is almost every Christian in the Western world and more than a few outside it.

He’s a good friend, but he fell right into my trap, which was very much deliberate. I wanted our readers to stop and think.

119: He

Gabriele Levy’s Alefbet entry for today’s letter reads: “He [ה] represents divine revelation, the breath of the Creator (Psalm 33:6 — ‘By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host’). The world was created with the utterance of the He. It represents the gift of life and creates the verb of being (היה Haya — being).”

Wow, is that ever on the nose, as we will see shortly. The themes of life and being weave throughout this section of Psalm 119.

Too Hot to Handle: Performance-Church

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

Tom: You sent me a horrible parody of a contemporary evangelical church service, IC. You’ve got to know I couldn’t leave that alone. I’m still brushing my teeth to get the taste out of my mouth.

But when they’re snarking the modern eleven o’clock church meeting on YouTube, and especially when it looks horribly familiar to most of your audience, you’ve almost got to concede we evangelicals are done like dinner. And it appears we cooked ourselves.

Does this travesty seem familiar to you?

Immanuel Can: You seem more shocked about it than I. There’s a reason why the piece is funny so many people; it’s recognition. The jokes reflect the current reality of many, many evangelical-type churches.

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Tom here. A Christian author IC knows recently gave ComingUntrue permission to do an online serialization of his yet-unpublished manuscript. IC has graciously volunteered his usual Thursday blog spot to promote it, which we will be doing over the next few months. The book is called Just Church, the graphic to the right is not the official cover, and I’ll be quiet now and let author introduce his own subject.

Introduction

“I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting him who called you by the grace of Christ, for a different gospel, which is not another; but there are some who are disturbing you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.”

There are certainly a great number of such warnings in scripture.

Do you think they’re telling the truth? I do.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Ahem

Folks:

I’ve been reading this little book from Regular Baptist Press lately, and have been rather impressed, I have to say. Not since Ryrie’s Dispensationalism Today have I seen a good treatment of dispensationalism at a very readable and contemporary level. This one’s even simpler than Ryrie, but so far, it has all its ducks in a row.

It’s not long, it’s in big print, and at a level that somebody in their mid teens could handle. But it hits all the right notes. It ties things to issues like supersessionism and the priesthood of believers, yet without using any sort of confrontational tone. It’s steady but gracious in its approach. Whoever the guy is who wrote it, he’s clearly got a deep and happy relationship with dispensational exegesis, but also a knack for speaking in a way that people can easily absorb.

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It’s been many years since I struggled with the issue of the New Testament canon.

I was never in any doubt that the NT was God speaking, or that we had an accurate record of Christ’s life and its implications in our hands today (or, for that matter, that the NT provides unshakable authority for the entire OT canon). My difficulty, seeking to serve the Lord by teaching the Word in my mid-twenties, was finding the best way to explain my confidence in scripture to younger believers.

Somehow, shrugging and invoking divine providence just didn’t feel adequate.

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“What does it mean to be baptized for the dead?”

The so-called Latter-day Saints or Mormons practice something they call proxy baptism, literally baptism for the dead. They believe individuals who have not been water baptized cannot enter the kingdom of God — “Even Jesus Christ himself was baptized,” they say — and so, under ecclesiastical supervision, members of their church will baptize a living person on behalf of the unbaptized dead. In doing so, they believe they are putting in place a critical component of God’s salvation requirements for those who can no longer do it for themselves, but would if they could.

The authority they claim for this practice is the apostle Paul and, more importantly in their view, an alleged revelation to the “prophet” Joseph Smith.

Folly and Shame

“If one gives an answer before he hears, it is his folly and shame.”

Musician and producer Rick Beato demonstrated the truth of Solomon’s words in a recent video. He tracked the viewing time of critics of his theories about human creativity. On average, these viewers consumed only 3:47 of a video over nine minutes long before stopping to pound out their (often very well expressed) objections to what Rick was saying.

The problem? They hadn’t heard the last two-thirds of his case.

119: Daleth

The Hebrew letter daleth or dalet [ד] is also the word for “door”, signifying humility and receptiveness. Alefbet says dal is “the realization that as humans, we having nothing of our own, but are entirely dependent on the creator and that every breath and movement is given to us from him”.

This is certainly the attitude of the psalmist in today’s section. We find him eager to receive knowledge, understanding and practical affirmation of the truth of God in his daily walk, reflecting the underlying meaning of the letter with which each line commences.

Too Hot to Handle: He Made Them Male and Female

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

Immanuel Can: Ordinarily I let you throw out the first pitch, Tom, but let me hurl the first fastball today. The wind-up’s a bit long, but I think it’s worth it for the amount of heat we stand to generate.

Tom: Deal.

IC: Psychologist Paul Vitz (a Catholic) has a book, Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism (2013), and in it he says some very provocative things. In context, he’s been writing about how atheism and the experience of bad, abusive, weak and absentee male parenting (fatherhood) are psychologically correlated. He turns to considering the reasons why men and women tend to experience the effects of ill-fathering in a somewhat different way.

Bottom of the Ninth

I’m beginning to think the ninth commandment is more important than I ever realized.

Traditionally, it reads, “Thou shalt not bear false witness” (KJV), or more colloquially, “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.”

Well … Duh!

“Okay,” I said to myself when I first read it, “that makes sense. In court, telling a lie about someone or something can get an innocent person into serious legal trouble. And to do that would be malicious. Fair enough.”

Prophets, Preachers, Teachers

Recently, I came across an online discussion concerning the relationship between prophets, preachers and teachers, as biblically defined. By some verbal sleight of hand, one of the participants had accepted as valid the proposition that preaching is the functional heir to the prophetic gift.

The question naturally followed: since there were female prophets (prophetesses) in both Old and New Testaments, why can’t women be preachers today?

Collars and Harnesses

Our family’s Shih Tzu wore a harness 24/7 during his younger years. We had originally gone with the traditional dog collar until one sunny summer afternoon in the backyard when he blithely shucked off his cute, leather pet store circlet with a single energetic twist of his muscular little neck. He disappeared through an impossibly tiny gap between the boards of the fence faster than a speeding bullet on the heels of a terrified squirrel.

My daughter, who was probably nine at the time, wept her way through the neighborhood looking for him until some observant elderly gent pointed to her pup sitting in a nearby yard basking in his newfound freedom.

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“Following up on an older post, did the Canadian government ever admit COVID vaccines have injured or killed some of its citizens?”

Not sure which older post that might be. There were a few. This one linked to a news piece confirming England has started making reparations to people injured by the vaccines and/or the families of those killed up to £120,000 per person.

Canada is definitely not doing that.

On Measuring My Spiritual Progress

Written some time back in response to a brother’s email observation that he ought to be a better person than he believes he is.

Dear Fellow Pilgrim,

Well, that’s all very dark and depressing to wake up to. To be honest, if I am thinking only about my own personal state, I might say something similar, though of course I would put it much more eloquently. J