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“What does it mean to put God first?”
The phrase has become something of a cliché in Christian circles, but the principle it expresses is entirely biblical. Considering the alternative, for the believer no other way of navigating through life makes any sense. Not only is putting God first obedient and loving, but nothing else works.
That doesn’t stop people trying to find other ways, of course.
“If you then, who are evil …”
The Lord Jesus used the phrase “your Father” a full eleven times in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 through 7, including in this very verse. In full, it reads, “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” He was primarily addressing those who believed in him, trusted in him, and were seeking to follow him. (Throughout scripture, God is never “your Father” to the unbelieving world — I have yet to discover a single instance — though he certainly created it and seeks to call its lost to himself.)
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I’m not going to cut and paste the entire book of Judges into these posts for your reading pleasure but will pick verses here and there to reflect on in greater depth. I hope to travel through the twelve judges whose exploits we find in these chapters at a reasonable pace. I would encourage any readers unfamiliar with the stories to look them up as we move through the book. For most of our regulars, they will be well-known territory.
Then again, maybe your Sunday school teacher judiciously redacted the exploits of today’s judge from the curriculum when you were growing up. I’m not sure I recall getting his story in mine. It’s got some fairly PG-rated moments.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Hmm, this smells like clickbait … or deliberate provocation.
An Amy Julia Becker blog post from early 2015 suggests Christians should scale back our New Year’s resolutions and quit trying to read the Bible cover to cover.
Tom: Mrs. Becker wonders about the helpfulness of reading the Bible in its entirety and practically brags about not having read Nahum “in ages”. You can almost feel the calculated poke in the eye to Christians committed to getting through the whole Bible annually as she adds, “Perhaps you’ll join me.”
Thanks but no thanks.
So I got talking with a guy the other day.
Those of you who know me know I’ve made my career among secular people. Philosophy being my thing, I’ve had a lot of conversations with a lot of different sorts of people — many very far from Christian. But in this case, I was talking to a youngish Christian who had been pulled sideways by reading too much of the Unitarians and various Gnostic sects before getting his grounding in scripture. He’s got shaken about the general reliability of scripture, the Trinity, the deity of Christ, and a variety of other issues, and he’s working his way through them.
I asked him what he thought was the touchstone of truth. He’d already expressed doubts about large sections of scripture, so I wanted to know what he was relying on to show him what was reliable and what wasn’t.
I am reliably informed that in the days of my youth, when I was apparently even more attractive, a sweet young thing from church had a serious crush on me.
The day I got married, or so I hear, she mourned in tears — at the loss of ‘what might have been’, I suppose.
I am supposing because I don’t know. To the best of my recollection, over a period of almost two years, the girl had never said more than ten words to me, nor I to her.
Do you find that odd? I sure do.
There’s an odd and rather bleak passage in Job in which he compares human beings to trees. “A man dies and is laid low,” says the beleaguered believer, but “there is hope for a tree.”
Why? “Though its root grow old in the earth, and its stump die in the soil, yet at the scent of water it will bud and put out branches like a young plant.”
Pouring water on a headstone does not generally produce similar results.
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“How should Christians view retirement?”
There is a little bar on a major street near where I used to live. It’s owned by a Greek fellow who makes what I think is the best (and by far the cheapest) souvlaki dinner in the neighborhood. I have eaten there enough times to lose count. From about 3:30 p.m. onward, up to a dozen retired white men occupy most of its barstools, some of whom I became friendly with over the years. A trip to the bar gets them out of the house and gives their wives a break. They drain their pints with care, milking out of them as much socialization and conversation as possible for their dollar, then head home in time for dinner.
Most don’t wobble when they leave, but two of them passed away in the last twelve months.
“The fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.”
The book is Revelation, and before us is the marriage supper of the Lamb. The Bride is a certain subset of God’s people (we shall not revisit that discussion in detail here), and others among God’s redeemed are present to celebrate. The Bride has clothed herself with “fine linen, bright and pure”.
It’s the most uplifting picture in several chapters of what is, at times, a very dark book, and it is the great hope of the Church.
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The phrase “the children of Israel did evil” (in some modern translations, “people”) appears exactly seven times throughout the book of Judges, once in the introductory summary and once at the beginning of each of six of its twelve historical sections. In order, these are: Othniel (oppressing nation: Mesopotamia, period of national servitude: 8 years); Ehud (Moab, 18 years); Deborah (Canaan, 20 years); Gideon (Midian, 7 years); Jephthah (Ammon, 18 years); and Samson (Philistines, 40 years).
So then, six notable periods of extended oppression from six different nations, totaling 111 of the 300-plus years the judges judged Israel.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
If there’s a single more common inter-generational issue in churches today, I can’t think of it right now:
“My kids want to go to that church down the road …”
Hoo boy.
Tom: I bet that church down the road has a worship team, Immanuel Can.
Immanuel Can: It could be. They could also have a big youth group, a modern music program, and maybe a nice gym too. Or maybe not. I’m not sure those things are always the determining factor, but sometimes maybe they are. Should we care either way?
“Where two or three are gathered …”
I’ve heard this little phrase quoted for years in churches all over the place. I’ve almost never heard it quoted correctly, meaning in its context and referring to the situations to which it actually applies.
When I’ve heard it quoted, almost invariably it is used to suggest that any local gathering of the church, no matter how small, is important enough to the Lord that he will, in some spiritual way, be present and involved with that situation. And really, I can’t say that isn’t true. But I can say for sure that that isn’t what this particular verse was given us to teach us.
Sunday’s ad hoc Easter post (lifted last minute from a reader-supplied YouTube link) implicitly asked a humorous question that I’d like to discuss a little more seriously this morning. That’s really why I posted it in the first place, not to poke fun at evangelical Easter celebrations. In a way, Monday’s Anonymous Asks raised much the same question in so many words: Why is modern Christendom so widely divided on so many points of theology? Should we be worried about it?
More importantly, is there something the Lord would want us to be doing about it?
Paul’s letter to Titus is full of commands to a young man acting as the apostle’s agent among the congregations in the towns of Crete; commands he intended Titus to pass on to new believers he hoped and prayed would grow in the faith and in godliness as the Lord intended. What should maturing faith look like at various ages and in different contexts? Titus received instructions for young and old, men and women, elders and children alike.
So we read words like “remind”, “teach”, “declare”, “urge” and even “rebuke”. Yes, there had to be a little bit of that too.
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“If cessationism is true, then why does God seem to continue to work through Pentecostal churches?”
For anyone unfamiliar with the term, “cessationism” is the teaching that the Holy Spirit of God no longer gives some of the spiritual gifts he gave in the early days of the church, the most comprehensive lists of which may be found in Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12. Cessationists believe the Lord intended certain gifts only to operate in the churches for a short time until the fall of Jerusalem in AD70, and until the completion of the canon of scripture.
Anyway, you’re asking the right person. I happen to be a cessationist, though I don’t usually use the term. My reasons for believing certain gifts are no longer being given may be found here, here and here.
This YouTube short posted by ConversationswithaCalvinist and uploaded just in time for Easter weekend captures … well, it captures something about the state of evangelicalism in 2025:
BAPTIST: All right, guys, I wanted to check in and see what everybody has planned for Easter weekend.
TORAH BROS: Well, last night, we celebrated our seder. All praise to Yahashua.
BAPTIST: Yaha- what now?
PENTECOSTAL: You guys heard that, he just spoke in tongues.
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Verse 7 of Judges 3 will bring us to the next section of Judges, telling twelve stories of the judges God raised up to deliver Israel over the next fourteen chapters. But before we get to these tales, each with their own lessons, the writer or writers of Judges present us with a historical overview of the entire period, along with a preview of some of the enemies Israel will encounter in subsequent chapters as a result of its sins.
Running like a red thread through this era of spiritual decline is the mercy of God …
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Years ago I would regularly come across stories of how this theologian or that one came out of Catholicism and now calls himself an evangelical Christian. More recently I notice some going the other way. Among the reasons usually given for embracing Rome is an emphasis on church history and tradition that doesn’t exist in the same way in Protestant gatherings. Roman Catholicism is thought to have “roots” that go back to the early church.
To seekers of this sort, the value of a church experience is measured by whether their faith community is convincingly in touch with its own past.
We’re in the final half of our final chapter in our thinking about Social Justice and the church. Last week, we were working through what the promoter of that ideology is likely to have caused, and what alternatives we have for dealing with her going forward.
It’s natural to think the thing to do is to “forgive and forget”, as the old axiom goes: we simply note the fault, say, “We forgive you”, and reinvite the contentious “nice lady” into the congregation without further delay. But this would be exceedingly dangerous, even disastrous; for unless her repentance is full, honest and genuine, then the deep motivations that led her to campaign for Social Justice ideology and to trade on the church to do it will remain. So we need to take full and fair inventory of what her faults and motives have really been, assess how complete her awareness of her sin is, and make sure she’s really been freed from what led her into it in the first place.
“… and the Philistines struck down Jonathan and Abinadab and Malchi-shua, the sons of Saul.”
Jonathan’s death was not as ignominious as the death of his father Saul, whose enemies summarily beheaded him, but his is not the storybook ending the reader expects for David’s most loyal friend and fiercest defender.