Bottom of the Ninth

Better known by his stage name, Gordon Sumner played and sang for a decade in a hugely successful eighties band, and followed that with an eclectic, critically-praised solo career. His net worth has been estimated at over half a billion dollars. His father Ernest was a milkman and factory worker. Neither are dishonorable professions, but middle class at best.

On Ernest’s deathbed, he said to Gordon, “Son, you used your hands better than I did.” Gordon’s reaction: “That was the first compliment he’d ever paid me, and the timing was pretty devastating ... and unforgettable.”

Wow. Talk about leaving your best pitch for the bottom of the ninth ...

On Walking and Sinking

“To dwell only in the world of objective analysis is to chill your own soul.” So says David de Bruyn in a post entitled “On Adoring Or Analysing”, which concerns a conflict even mature Christians regularly experience. Put succinctly, you cannot do a thing and think about doing it at the same time.

Peter provides a fine illustration of what happens when your thoughts stray from “Let’s just get closer to the Lord” to “Hey, I’m walking on water in the middle of a storm!” All of a sudden, Peter wasn’t walking on water anymore. He was just wet.

Anonymous Asks (363)

“I have committed _____. Will God ever forgive me?”

I think I can safely say yes. As individual acts go, there is absolutely nothing you have ever done that our Lord will not forgive, assuming your repentance and desire for his forgiveness is genuine. We could fill in that blank space above with any sin, crime or misdemeanor, however heinous or grossly offensive to the Almighty. That is my personal belief on the authority of the word of God.

Let me argue that point for any among our readers who may disagree.

Endless … and Pointless

I am back in 1 Chronicles these days, working my way through passages that once inspired a post entitled “Does God Need An Editor?” (Spoiler: my answer was a hard no.)

For those unfamiliar, the first nine chapters of 1 Chronicles are almost entirely composed of Hebrew genealogies: descendants of Adam, Abraham, David, twelve of the thirteen tribes of Israel (mysteriously, not including Dan, none of whose progeny appear in Chronicles prior to chapter 27), Israel’s first king Saul, and a number of the returned exiles from the Babylonian captivity.

That’s a whole lot of Hebrew names one after another with very little intervening detail or editorial commentary. The modern Christian reader quite reasonably asks, “Er … what’s in this for me, if anything at all?”

Good question.

No King in Israel (16)

The Hebrew word šāḥâ [literally, “bow down”; figuratively, “worship”] appears a grand total of four times in the book of Judges. That’s not a lot. But it gets worse. All but one of these four have to do with worshiping idols. The solitary exception, where the word refers to the worship of the God of Israel, is in today’s reading.

That’s a sad commentary on the state of Israel during the period of the judges. Accordingly, we may not expect to find out much about true, biblical worship in these pages.

Then again …

Too Hot to Handle: Culture and the Gospel

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

Immanuel Can: I’m going to temporarily suspend our self-imposed five-sentence limit, Tom, in order to tell you a story about something that happened last year when our provincial standardized test was performed.

You need to know that teachers are all given a specific script for what they are and are not allowed to tell students on the day of the test. They are expressly forbidden to go beyond this script, and doing so is grounds for firing. Teachers cannot add any directions, explanations, definitions or any other kind of information to this. They are not allowed to give any guidance once the test begins, no matter what a student wants or needs. It’s standardized, period.

One of the questions on the test asked kids to imagine a picnic, and then write based on their imagining.

Dismembering the Church

My church recently had a “membership” drive. The goal was to get people to sign up to the church roll, then stand up in front of the congregation and proclaim their membership through what they called a “church covenant”.

I’ve been in my local church for 12 years. I didn’t sign. I won’t.

It’s not because my fellow Christians do not know I’m one of them; they do. And I trust it’s not because I’m passive, uncommitted or uninvolved with church life. I’m in there serving, and I doubt there’s anyone in my congregation who couldn’t tell you that. (If there is, that will be corrected the next time they give me the pulpit, which they do fairly frequently.) And it’s not because they have found I am caught up in some particular sin or wickedness. No one has accused me of that — though I’d admit to being your garden variety hypocrite, in the sense that I continually fall short of the level of holiness God deserves from me. But no one so far has called me “hard hearted” or accused me of some crime.

Days of Confusion

“God is not a God of confusion but of peace.”

“The Lord your God will give them over to you and throw them into great confusion.”

If you pull up the word confusion [mᵊhûmâ, also translated “panic”] in an online concordance, you will quickly discover all but one of the twelve Old Testament references attribute confusion to God. The example I’ve cited above, in which Moses promises the children of Israel victory over their enemies provided they remain faithful to YHWH, is only one of many.

A Word of Warning

Even 99-44/100% is not enough

Jonathan Noyes and Greg Koukl at Stand to Reason got together recently to produce an excellent post on the subject of the inerrancy of scripture. It’s lengthy, but well worth the time it takes to work through. Full credit to the apologists for doing their job. It’s severely needed these days, especially among the younger generation in our churches.

But in setting out why inerrancy matters and what the scripture claims about itself, Noyes and Koukl include a word of warning about the inerrancy argument that I think is worth taking to heart: they believe the Lord never intended us to debate inerrancy with the skeptics of our generation.

Anonymous Asks (362)

“Does the Bible teach that you should ‘be yourself’?”

I can think of at least one example in scripture of a person who was better off being himself than trying to be something he was not. Saul clothed David with his own armor to fight Goliath, but David was unwilling to rely on protection he had never personally tested in battle. He left the best armor in the kingdom behind and used a sling and stones instead of a sword.

We all know the results of that encounter. David being David got the job done.

The Commentariat Speaks (33)

A Bible student on Reddit inquires, “Why does the Apostle Paul write in such long sentences?”

This reader is obviously paying attention when he gets into the word of God, and good for him. My brother and I were discussing this issue only a few weeks back, as it’s something we too have noticed over the years. Some of Paul’s sentences are absolutely legendary. They go on for days.

No King in Israel (15)

The practice of “putting out a fleece” is not widespread among evangelicals these days, at least as far as I know. You’re probably familiar with the phrase though. We might call it the superstitious interpretation of events as divine guidance in an area where God has already revealed his will.

So you ask for a specific bit of circumstantial evidence, and if the thing you have prayed for happens, you interpret it as God’s direction to move forward with your plans. “Lord, if it rains tomorrow, then I will know you want me to go to Bible College even though my parents want me to go to university.” “Lord, if the phone rings in the next five minutes, I’ll know I should leave my husband.” That sort of thing.

This chapter is where some Christians get the mistaken notion that the fleece trick might actually work. It worked for Gideon.

Too Hot to Handle: The Future Church

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

We’ve written here on many occasions about current trends within Christendom and what they say about North American Christians. Last week, for instance, we did a piece on giving by millennials. But I wouldn’t say we do an inordinate amount of speculating about the future, because while we can see from scripture where both the world and the people of God are ultimately headed, it’s difficult (if not impossible) to plot exactly where we are on that timeline.

Tom: Still, Carey Nieuwhof is willing to go out on a limb and tell us where he thinks the Church is headed in the next few years in his article “10 Predictions About The Future Church”.

What did you think of Carey’s musings, Immanuel Can?

Tolerating Evil: Moral Relativism and the Slippery Pole to Hell

This is the third in my series on relativism.

I began by pointing out the two types of relativism, epistemic and moral, and showed that epistemic relativism is irrational. After that, I did a post showing that whether we are thinking of science or religious belief, we really know things only probabilistically … and that this is okay — that high-certainty belief is much better than low-certainty belief, and that in any case, being a Christian means knowing God both as an evidentiary probability and as a relational Person, which means with pretty great certainty; better, even, than a scientist can offer. So it is true that truth exists, and it is true that we can know that truth exists.

So far, so good.

The Religious Flesh

“It is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring. For this is what the promise said: ‘About this time next year I will return, and Sarah shall have a son.’ ”

There is a good reason fruit is often used as a metaphor for children, both in the Bible and elsewhere. You don’t need to be a geneticist to observe that the fruit of a tree carries in it the nature of the tree on which it grows, and expresses that nature to the world in the next generation. Or at least it should. Real-world results with human beings vary, as we have all observed.

Turnabout being fair play, perhaps you will excuse me using children as a metaphor for fruit. Well, metaphorical fruit at least.

Always Struggling

“… always struggling on your behalf in his prayers, that you may stand mature and fully assured in all the will of God.”

Our New Testament preserves four letters Paul wrote during his first Roman imprisonment. From these epistles and from the last chapter of the book of Acts, we learn that in Rome the authorities allowed him to stay “by himself” under guard for two years in what was probably a rented dwelling, awaiting trial. There, he was able to receive visitors and preach and teach unhindered.

During this period he had both “fellow prisoners” and “fellow workers”. Epaphras was one of the former.

Anonymous Asks (361)

“Does marriage hinder your relationship with God?”

Hmm, I suspect somebody has been reading 1 Corinthians 7. “Those who marry will have worldly troubles.” “The married man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided.” “The married woman is anxious about worldly things, how to please her husband.” “I want you to be free from anxieties.”

If the apostle Paul is correct — and several decades of observation strongly suggest to me that he is — then, yes, it’s certainly possible that any given marriage can become an impediment to one’s service for the Lord, peppering life with distractions and putting you in the position of trying to serve two masters, which we know is impossible. I don’t believe it has to, but it can.

Milking a Metaphor

I wrapped up Jonathan Edwards’ Religious Affections the day before yesterday, and I should probably comment on its final few chapters while they are still fresh in my mind.

This book has been a stimulating read from many different angles. The posts it has generated vary as wildly in subject matter — eschatology, authenticity, assurance, the witness of the Holy Spirit and the distinction between natural and moral perfections — as they vary in my level of agreement with Edwards’ observations and assertions.

I’m fine with that. A good, solid, biblical disagreement concentrates the mind better than indifferent assent.

No King in Israel (14)

The angel of the Lord called Gideon a mighty man of valor. Considering that he said it to a man hiding from the Midianites in a winepress, perhaps he meant it tongue in cheek. Then again, many centuries later he would make Simon the coward into a rock and Saul the persecutor of Christians into the foremost teacher and prophet in Christian history. The Lord’s choices invariably appear counterintuitive by human standards.

But even mighty men of valor are not invulnerable. Many have fallen before their time. The key to Gideon’s success was this: the Lord sent him, and the Lord promised to be with him. That’s all God’s servants ever need.

Too Hot to Handle: Religious Freedom, Limited

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

The Independent reports that Belgium’s Walloon region is the latest territory to ban kosher and halal meats. Denmark, Switzerland and New Zealand all got there first, in each case turning a deaf ear to the protests of Jewish and Islamic minorities.

Tom: That’s fine with me. We’ve already established in the U.S. and Canada that there are reasonable limits on religious freedoms, though these have been applied more frequently (and certainly more visibly) against Christians than against religious minorities recently.