Hebrew scholars say the letter Samekh [ס] signifies support and protection. The idea is that the perimeter of the letterform symbolizes the Creator and the interior depicts his creation, surrounded on all sides, upheld and protected by him. It’s a nice thought, and it definitely fits with the eight verses of this fifteenth stanza of Psalm 119.
We might note that while the perimeter of the samekh has substance, the interior is a void. Accurate symbolism is not always flattering.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Fox News reports that the Baltimore Book Festival has dropped Rachel Dolezal’s invitation to participate in the festival this year after receiving too much negative public feedback.
You may remember Ms Dolezal from a flurry of media scrutiny in 2015 when it was revealed that the leader of the Spokane chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People wasn’t really a person of color after all, but was in reality a little blonde in blackface.
Tom: IC, I don’t understand. Society says it’s not only okay but morally imperative for me to self-identify as a woman if that’s how I feel about myself, even if I have been born biologically male. It will defend my right to call myself any made-up gender I like, even to the point of stripping you of your right to disagree with me about it in the public space.
So the present system, whatever it is, and all authority must fall. You can only lift the burden of some of your guilt by joining in an unrelenting war against authority and the existing order — by becoming an “ally” of “the oppressed”.
Bernie sent me this chart a few months back. Purportedly, it originates with the CDC and breaks down by percentages the main reasons given for women having abortions in the US during some unspecified period. Bernie (wisely) included the stipulation that he was “looking to verify numbers from a second source”. He added, “But this is pretty much exactly what I suspected so I’m inclined to believe it.”
Me too. Still, let’s do our due diligence.
The Talmud — ancient commentaries of Judaism — says there are 613 distinct commandments in the Law of Moses: 248 positive commands (“Do this”) and 365 negative commands (“Don’t do this”). These numbers are not undisputed within Jewish scholarship, but you’ll come across the number 613 more often than not.
That may seem like a staggeringly large number of laws, but it’s really not. Not at all.
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“Will serial killers go to heaven with no punishment if they believe in Jesus, repent and ask for forgiveness?”
The great King David once plotted the murder of his own faithful servant in order to cover up his adultery with the man’s wife. Yet upon his confession of guilt, Nathan the prophet told him frankly, “The Lord also has put away your sin.” David himself writes concerning that same incident, “a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise”. That sounds like forgiveness to me. I think we’ll see David in heaven. In fact, I’m sure of it.
Admittedly, that doesn’t deal with the “serial” aspect, does it?
I read a great deal, as is probably obvious to frequent visitors of this space. So when I come across similar ideas five or ten minutes apart in two or more different places, I don’t necessarily take it as an omen — it could be sheer coincidence — but it sometimes gives me pause, and the occasion to reflect a little.
That happened to me again last Monday, for probably the umpteenth time, resulting in a “hmm” moment.
The letter Nun [נ] is the symbol for soul, the heavenly spark housed in the earthly container of the body. The soul is the self, taking in intellect, will and heart. The shape of the letter leads many to associate it with humility: nun is “the servant bent over”. Hebrew numerology students love to add up the sum of the letters in words to figure out what they signify. The letters in the name “David” add to fourteen, so they associate the great King of Israel with this letter, as well as Messiah, his descendant; the perfect servant and the epitome of humility. (Nun is the fourteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet.)
Nun is also the word for “fish” in Aramaic, and Hebrew scholars refer to it as the fish that swims in the water of the Torah. Some of this is a bit too mystical for me, but I find these things of interest.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
The Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University (“CRC”) has released yet another study on the beliefs and values of the American public. We have commented on and critiqued a few of these polls before in this forum with respect to their findings, and our concerns about possible shortcomings in the methods employed by the data gatherers.
Tom: I don’t really want to get into all that again, IC. But there is a word that came up in their first press release concerning this new batch of data that interested me greatly, because I believe it’s a pretty accurate way to describe the general direction of the evolution of public thought over the last century or more.
Last week, we left off halfway through listing the things Social Justice types tend to believe. We had seen that they think justice is a thing that has to happen in this world, now; that the real problem of humanity is not sin but discrimination; and that this discrimination happens primarily through systems and institutions, so that everybody who is in those systems is guilty of the sin of “complicity” with racism, sexism, exclusion, or whatever new pejorative label the Left can come up with, even if they personally have never hurt anyone and hold no unkind attitudes at all. We saw that they view everybody as fated to be mere products of his or her particular social location in race, culture, sex, faith, sexual practice, disability ... or any other divisive category they can invent.
These are also things we’ve all seen in the secular world in the last few years — in education, in the mass media, in politics, in entertainment and the commercial world. But that’s not the complete list, of course. There are several other things Social Justice enthusiasts believe with equal fervency, and so we continue listing them this week.
Mature Christians in every denomination recognize that the ability to teach the Bible is a gift that comes from the Holy Spirit of God, as is plainly stated in Romans and 1 Corinthians. Fewer are able to reel off a list of criteria by which gifted teachers may be easily identified, especially when that gift is in early stages of development.
In practice, some believers instinctively associate gift with charisma, others with seminary training, still others for some intangible quality in a teacher’s ministry that reminds them of Bible teachers who influenced them early in their own Christian lives.
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Joe Rogan recently interviewed former US State Department Cyber Division head Mike Benz for his podcast. If you have ever watched Rogan on YouTube, as well over 68 million people did when he interviewed incoming President Donald Trump back in October, you’ll know his style is unusual compared to other media figures in that he tends to let his guests actually talk, making his podcast one of the most genuinely informative opinion platforms available.
He certainly let Benz talk. You can find the first part of the interview transcribed here and the second here, or you can just watch the whole thing here. (Caution: Rogan can be fairly profane.)
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“Are lustful thoughts natural, and how do I deal with them when they keep coming back into my mind?”
God made the average young man to procreate. There are always exceptions to the average, of course, as the Lord Jesus noted to his disciples — that’s how it becomes an average in the first place. You need the outliers on both ends to put you smack bang in the middle of the pack.
You sound like you’re right there in the middle, Anonymous: a normal human, Christian male.
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For almost nine years, I have been reading the New Testament as closely as possible to the order in which I believe its writers composed its various component letters, gospels and prophecies. That’s well over a dozen times through. As I have commented here, it’s a very different experience from reading the NT in the order we find it in our Bibles. The intended significance of certain passages is much more obvious when you read your mail in the order the mailman actually delivered it.
The relative importance of Paul’s teaching about the return of Christ positively jumps out at the Bible student who stops to put his reading material in chronological order.
The letter Mem [מ] symbolizes water and is associated with the number forty. If that seems an odd pairing, we should consider that the first “forty” in scripture denotes the duration of the Genesis flood in days. Thereafter, the number is often associated with testing or judgment.
In the New Testament, water is most frequently associated with the Holy Spirit of God. It is not without reason that we call that great, singular event in which the Spirit came to indwell all who are in Christ and bind together Jew and Gentile into one body a “baptism”. But water serves other purposes than cleansing and testimony. It meets the perpetual need of humanity. Jesus cried out to the thirsty, “Come to me and drink.” John comments, “He said this about the Spirit.”
How does the Spirit operate in the human heart? Well, he uses the word of God, which is where our psalmist comes in once again.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
We’ve run a couple of posts recently about Christian Nationalism and its appeal to young men, especially those raised on the supersessionist aspect of Reformed Theology.
Tom: I see two different problems cropping up, but I believe they are both coming from a common source. On the dispensational side, I see young men disillusioned with their denominations because they feel like the staid routine their older brothers in Christ have established gives them no outlet for their youthful energies and the desire to effect change, and may inspire them to look for something more real and relevant. On the Reformed side, I see older men panicking over the particular ways the energies of their young men are manifesting themselves. They wanted activism and now they’ve got it. They just don’t like the shape it’s taking.
IC, without getting into a lot of detail about Christian Nationalism, with its accusations of antisemitism and so on — because we have done that elsewhere — I’d like to talk a bit about the package we are offering young men when they come to church, and whether it’s deficient in any way. In short, is the problem them, or is the problem us?
Immanuel Can: Or is the problem with our society? I think it is.
“… and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh, it is a very nice word, indeed! — it does for everything.”
(Henry Tilney, in Jane Austen’s novel,
Northanger Abbey, 1817)
The word “nice” is tricky. Like so many of our English words, it has had some different shades of meaning, which have switched as time passed. The quotation with which this chapter starts relates to this: through her character, Jane Austen is making fun of the different ways that single word can be taken.
In its present use, it most often means the sort of thing you probably thought of when I first talked about the nice lady — pleasant, friendly, kind, and so on. It will probably come as a real surprise to most people that when the word “nice” was originally coined, it meant “ignorant”.
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An international team of university researchers has concluded that people who curse more are less likely to lie and may possess greater integrity than their politer peers.
Sure. Of course. Christians will buy that one hook, line and sinker, right? Didn’t think so.
What fascinates me about the study is not its rather pedestrian conclusions, which are all too predictable given the initial assumptions of psychologist Gilad Feldman and his team. Garbage in, garbage out. No, it’s really their preconceived ideas about the meaning of honesty that ought to cause Christians to stop and think. Why? Because apparently the word no longer means what it once did.
Ugh. Not again.
The book of Acts ends with Paul’s first Roman imprisonment, from which he was eventually released and which was a comparative walk in the park.
Acts is the final historical book of the New Testament, so we must infer anything further about Paul’s life and ministry from his later letters. Without an independent witness to Paul’s travels, trials and tribulations, we only know what went on by reading between the lines of the apostle’s subsequent correspondence with local churches, friends and associates.
Everything we know about the circumstances of his second imprisonment comes from 2 Timothy.
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“Should Christians from different denominations date or marry?”
As with so many questions, the answer very much depends on your personal situation. Why do you attend the church you currently attend? Obviously, the most desirable answer is “Out of conviction about the interpretations of scripture taught there.”
But that’s not always why people are where they are, is it?