Inbox: Christ and Learning

“What about the questions Jesus asked as a boy (Lk 2:46). Did He know the answers or did He learn?”

There is no application of the word “learn” in Luke 2:46. Luke simply says that Jesus Christ was listening to the teachers and asking them questions. There’s no reason to suppose he was asking those questions because of any lack in his own knowledge, rather than the sort of rhetorical and didactic questioning in which he would later so frequently engage with his disciples or with the Pharisees. He would call on their judgment in order to set the stage for deeper thinking on a subject they had so far understood only superficially.

There is but one passage in all of scripture that employs the word “learn” in reference to Christ’s life: Hebrews 5:8.

119: Lamedh

The Lamedh [ל] is the twelfth letter of the Hebrew alphabet and the symbol of learning. It begins the second half of the alphabet and the second half of Psalm 119, thus putting learning at the heart of the human experience, and spiritual learning most central of all.

One of the most important lessons we can ever learn is to worship appropriately.

Too Hot to Handle: Tik-Talkin’

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

Something strange has come up recently on YouTube and TikTok. There’s this spate of home-made videos — short ones — that present the following scenario: usually it begins with a girl who claims to have a boy who is her “best friend”. Some saccharine pop tune plays, and then words appear on screen to the effect that she’s secretly infatuated with him and, allegedly, he doesn’t know. So then, the girl invents some pretext for getting close to him, and suddenly kisses him … and whatever happens happens. Either he seems to respond, or he doesn’t. Then the video ends.

Immanuel Can: There’ve got to be thousands of these things. Sometimes it’s a boy who’s made them, but most of the time, a girl. But always the camera — and the viewers — are the third ‘person’ in the equation, of course. Let’s start with the obvious. Do you think it would be okay for young Christian women to try emulating this trend?

Tom: Oh please.

Just Church (8)

And so we arrive at the present moment.

We've been talking about history — about that old nonsense created by Karl Marx, and then picked up in the middle of the last century by a group of rabid ideologues now known as “The Frankfurt School”. But what’s all this got to do with us? Why should we care? Didn’t all that end with the Berlin Wall? Whom do we, in the West, ever meet who preens himself as a Marxist? So why bother ourselves with dead men and dead beliefs?

Well, because sometimes things don’t quite die. Bad ideas have a horrible way of persisting, and even of being resurrected in new forms. This happened with Marxism, which has now reappeared under the cloak of humanist, racial, environmental and sexual-equality concerns, in what we now know as the “Social Justice” movement. So our subject today is this final switcheroo, when the old dogmas of Marxism got converted into their current form, and managed to seize so much of the public agenda, and even to make serious inroads among professing Christians.

Top 10 Posts of 2024

Our most popular posts of last year dealt with relationships (or the absence thereof), the visions of Zechariah, the importance of thought flow in expository preaching, and the practical implications of Reformed theology. If that seems a mixed bag to you, welcome to ComingUntrue, where we try to come up with a little something for everyone … or possibly you just get stuck with whatever random subject is rattling around in our heads on any given day.

Without further ado, let’s count ’em down!

Inbox: The Questions of Young Jesus

My Christmas present this year from an old friend and mentor was not quite a lump of coal in my stocking, more like a hot potato bouncing from palm to palm to avoid getting singed. He responded to last week’s Anonymous Asks post (subtitled “If Jesus was/is omniscient, why did he ask questions?”) with this query: “What about the questions He asked as a boy (Lk 2:46). Did He know the answers or did He learn?”

I believe the correct theological rejoinder is “Aaargh!”

Anonymous Asks (335)

“What does leaven symbolize in the Bible?”

Lots of things, none of them good. Let me try to make that case.

Symbols can be tricky things. Where our Bible interprets a symbol, we generally have no difficulty at all, but there are also times when the meaning of a symbol is open to question because the Holy Spirit has not told us plainly, “This signifies that.” Leaven was unacceptable to God in some contexts and acceptable in others. We will need to find an explanation for that.

The Old Testament uses leaven as an illustration. The New Testament unpacks its meaning.

First Things First

An illustration, and I’ll try to keep it as brief and clear as possible.

In the process of editing IC’s Christmas Day post this year, I came across one of those inconvenient translation variants that scripture affirms as legitimate despite what seems to be a significant change in meaning. Matthew 4:16 has the apostle quoting the prophet Isaiah concerning the “great light” that dawned on Galilee when our Lord settled in Capernaum for a time.

119: Kaph

If you are going to find Christ in Psalm 119, today’s eleventh “stanza” of the psalm is by far the best place for it. For a consistent prophetic portrayal of the sinless, suffering servant, these eight lines have no parallel in the psalm, which makes our reading a perfect fit for the tail end of the Christmas season, as we move from the contemplation of our Lord’s birth to considering his purpose in coming into the world. By non-coincidence, the letter Kaph [כ], which begins every line, has a dual meaning to Hebrew scholars: “form” and “crown”.

No, I’m really not making this stuff up.

Too Hot to Handle: Spreading the Infection

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

France is getting ‘woke’, or at least so says the New York Times. Young people on the other side of the Atlantic from an entirely different cultural background and with an entirely different history than their counterparts in the U.S. are mobilizing, protesting and even rioting over the treatment of blacks, over gender issues, over colonialism — you name it, they’re up in arms about it. What’s interesting is that, as French president Emmanuel Macron puts it, all this fuss and bother is “entirely imported”. It is the product of American universities and American media.

Just Church (7)

When we left off last week, we were talking about the roots of the Social Justice movement. We traced things back to a philosopher named Hegel, who passed on some basic ideas to another guy, Karl Marx. Marx might well be the most evil character in all of history, judging by the number of people dispossessed, starved, tortured and killed as result of his ideology. (Let nobody tell you that ideas do not have consequences.)

But Marx died way back in 1883, and went to his own consequences. So we might well wonder why we would be thinking about him now. How did some old atheist guy with a bad idea end up causing problems for the Church a century and a half or so after he was dead? Good question. It deserves an answer. So here we go.

Darkness, and Great Light

“The people who were sitting in darkness saw a great Light, and those who were sitting in the land and shadow of death, upon them a Light dawned.”

If there is any such thing as a universal symbol, it just might be light.

In every place and culture all around the world, everybody instinctively associates light with things like truth and insight and joy. Whether it’s our Christmas, or the Hanukkah of Judaism, or Chinese New Year, or some other “festival of light”, it always seems to point to the same sorts of experience: that of being able to see, whereas before, one could not. Is not the celebrated historical period of the secular skeptics called “The Enlightenment”? Even the irreligious are drawn to this symbolism.

To One and All, A Mary Christmas

“… the power of the Most High will overshadow you.”

“So this is Christmas, and what have you done?”

So sing the children in John Lennon’s wretched ditty. I really don’t know why he bothered himself about Christmas when he also wanted to “imagine there’s no heaven”. But each to his own. I’m sure he’s thought better of that since.

At Christmas time, I can’t imagine a more dismal question. Another year over, Lennon accuses, and you haven’t done anything. The poor are still starving, the world is still at war. When are you going to get off your haunches and be worth something?

Ah, there’s nothing like Christmas pudding and the sounds of self-flagellation to improve the seasonal mood.

Anonymous Asks (334)

“If Jesus was/is omniscient, why did he ask questions?”

Good question. You can find several lists online of the questions Jesus asked in the gospels. Curious Bible students have dug up at least 300, minus a few repetitions from overlapping accounts. No single explanation accounts for them all, but one thing we can say with absolute certainty is that Jesus never asked a question to which he didn’t already know the answer.

His Own

“He came to his own, and his own did not receive him.”

“Having loved his own … he loved them to the end.”

If you really wanted to irritate a well-read Christian audience, you could probably preach a sermon that started by quoting both these verses from the gospel of John. Then you could delve into the Greek, noting that the same word [idios] is used for “his own” by the same author in the same book. Finally, you could finish with a flurry by pontificating about how the Lord Jesus loved “to the uttermost” the people who rejected him.

You could. I’m not saying it’s a good idea. You’d have a lineup of sixty people waiting to tell you that using the same Greek word doesn’t mean they are precisely the same people. The latter group is a subset of the first.

119: Yodh

Yodh [י] is the tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet as well as the smallest, the famous “jot” of “jot and tittle” in the KJV of Matthew 5:18, corresponding with the English “i”. In Greek, it is iota, the smallest particle. “Not an iota will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.” A yodh is a single point, but it also has the numeric value of ten in Hebrew.

The Old Testament personal name of God begins with yodh (in orange) and looks like this:

יהוה

Every verse of this section of Psalm 119 also begins with yodh.

Too Hot to Handle: Let’s Get Together

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

Recently asked on an Internet philosophy site:

“If God is everywhere, why do Christians have congregations?”

We Christians may think the question a bit clueless, but to someone who doesn’t know the first thing about the Church or about God’s purposes in establishing it, it’s not unreasonable to consider.

Tom: Immanuel Can, the man has a point. God IS everywhere. You and I can call on him anytime from anywhere, and we’re awfully grateful for it. So why exactly do we get together?

Immanuel Can: In a word, relationship.

Just Church (6)

In our last instalment of this book, we left off talking about ideologies ... secular ideologies, and particularly the kind of beliefs that have given rise to the Social Justice ideology that’s nowadays making heavy inroads in many local churches. Though the love of a humanistic ideology goes all the way back to the Tower of Babel, there are a few new twists in present case. Some of these twists were introduced by a guy named G.W.F. Hegel, who believed that all history is like a great “god” with its own will, direction and trajectory, and that by releasing the power of this great “History” by busting the shackles of the status quo, we would have inevitable moral and social progress.

We left off last time with Hegel’s much more famous disciple, Karl Marx, who was going to take things to a whole new level, and eventually was to become the true father of the modern Social Justice movement ... even for those who’ve never yet heard of Karl Marx. (So toxic are bad ideas that they often continue to infect us long after their founders are pushing up daisies.)

While (((They))) Were Yet Sinners

I was having coffee with an older friend, a well-known Bible teacher for many years, when he surprised me by disclosing that he does not invest a great deal of time in the study of prophecy. Like me, he’s disinclined to do a lot of speculating, and uses his opportunities for platform ministry to exposit areas of scripture about which he can be most confident before the Lord concerning the interpretations he is sharing.

That’s a prudent stewardship of his study time for which he is to be commended. There are times when taking the wrong eschatological position can put you in a very awkward place.

Hmm, That Aged Badly

The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic of the 118th Congress of the US House of Representatives just issued its Final Report, entitled After Action Review of the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Lessons Learned and a Path Forward. One of six bipartisan subcommittees of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, the SSCP comprised ten Republicans and seven Democrats documenting a two-year investigation of what “really happened” during the COVID lockdowns and why.

It’s probably not the definitive word on the scamdemic, and at times it seems a bit self-contradictory, but it’s all we’re going to get with the US government’s stamp of approval on it, and it’s as close to the truth as anyone in power cares to admit. It’s also wildly different from what both government and media told us at the time.