Vacation Time Again

Lord willing, I expect this coming week to be my first real vacation in a while. IC, his lovely wife and Yours Truly plan to spend it with a bunch of fellow believers on an island in northern Ontario, enjoying great food, exceptional Christian fellowship and likely a few pestilent insects so we don’t forget we live in a fallen world. I usually take my laptop along on such excursions, but knowing my own patterns when away, I don’t expect to do much writing on it.

Thankfully, we have well over a decade’s worth of daily posts to draw on, and I thought we might do another themed week in my absence. In 2016, we did Worship Week and in 2017, a Best of IC Week. This time around, I thought we might try …

No King in Israel (21)

Gideon’s son Abimelech wanted to be king of Israel. Following the example of the kings of the nations, and aided and abetted by his kindred in Shechem, he murdered seventy of his half-brothers to consolidate his throne. Unfortunately for Abimelech, his father’s youngest son escaped his hand and lived to curse him in God’s name. God heard and answered Jotham’s “attack prayer” because he offered it in accordance with the Lord’s mind and will, in hope of seeing divine justice done on behalf of his brothers and his father’s family.

Not all curses land on their target. This one did, and the writer of Judges makes sure we understand what was happening behind the scenes in the spiritual realm.

Too Hot to Handle: Tearing Down Strongholds

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

[Editor’s note: When we were young we used to play road hockey. Now we do this. I missed out on this particular email discussion, but I thought the rest of you might enjoy it as much as I did when I woke up to find it in my inbox. And yes, I got called out for not participating, but these days I will take sleep whenever I can get it.]

Bernie: Okay, bear with me ...

Is Your Faith Boring You?

The great mathematician Blaise Pascal claimed all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

Modern people don’t sit in rooms alone very well. They find it boring. And, in fact, being bored is one thing almost all of us instinctively hate. Particularly in our present day of social media, cell phones, portable games and constant mental stimulation, it seems to us that solitude and silence are indicators of something being terribly wrong. On those occasions when we find ourselves momentarily bored we immediately fumble for our phones or look around for some new distraction.

I suspect we are probably less adept than any previous generation at just sitting still and thinking.

The Temptation to Trivia

More and more people in my small circle of acquaintances are recognizing the value of disconnecting from technology on a regular basis. I’m not sure that reflects any larger social trend, but it’s encouraging to me. My cousin (ironically, retired and living a relatively un-frantic existence) recently complained about the frequency with which his phone disturbs the peace, and one of my sons has actually started to take action to limit the number of interruptions in his day from texts and notifications.

For him it’s an existential issue. He’s a creative and gets thousands of texts, emails and even the occasional phone call every week, to the point where he finds he is hardly able to get anything productive done.

Prophets and Profits

Darby Slaton is a Pennsylvania speaker, coach and teacher who bills himself as a prophet and teaches children to unlock their spiritual gifts of prophecy, as covered in last Sunday’s post. The mission statement on his website reads “Empowering people to discover their true identity, recognizing Gods [sic] voice and live out their calling.”

He also does not appear to be a fan of commas or apostrophes, but that’s a generational deficiency of education, not an accusation of heresy.

Anonymous Asks (367)

“Am I my brother’s keeper?”

The question was glib and rhetorical when Cain asked it of God. He meant something like “Why would you ask me where my brother is? Ask him.” Of course, God knew where Abel was and why he couldn’t answer: Cain had just killed him in an envious rage.

So why are we asking ourselves a question that was first mouthed by a murderous liar trying to deflect?

Playing With Fire

Last week we ran IC’s response to a reader concerned about curriculum that his local church had asked him to present to children. I was unable to link to the content he provided online, so I promised to do a deeper dive into the subject later on.* The four-page lesson (pages 39-42 of a KAIO publication) was entitled “Prophetic Practice”, and purported to help children unlock their spiritual gift of prophecy with the help of a local “known prophet” named Darby Slaton.

If the idea of Christians who need blow-by-blow instructions from a manual to teach a simple Bible lesson equipping your kids to lecture you and others with direct “messages from God” doesn’t curl your toes now, wait until you read some of the quotes that follow. Our reader politely and firmly declined to participate in the program … for very good reason.

No King in Israel (20)

Abimelech means some combination of the words “father” and “king”. We first encounter it in scripture as the name of two Philistine kings in Genesis. Why Gideon named the son of his Ephraimite concubine after the manner of Israel’s oppressors is a bit of a mystery, but Abimelech grew up with aspirations far above his station in life, notions that came not from God but from the nations.

His father had been a judge. Abimelech would be king, or so he determined. He began to plot accordingly.

Too Hot to Handle: Good Reasons to be Non-Denominational

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

I was just poking through the archives and realized that last year we did a post together called “Bad Reasons to be Non-Denominational”. It was all about the recent trend toward non-denominational Christian gathering that doesn’t always have a whole lot in the way of specifics and convictions.

Tom: We agreed that wasn’t our preferred way to go, IC. But now I’m wondering if you can think of any good reasons to meet together with Christians without a lot of the historical baggage that goes with a well-established, well-known bloc of believers — like, say, the Southern Baptists.

Inbox: Children’s Ministry Curriculum

A reader writes:

“I had recently just started helping with our children’s program only to stop dead in my tracks when I read this lesson from the curriculum they follow.

I know that something’s really off with this and I’ve been asked to share why I can’t be a part of teaching this to the kids.

Could you look it over and give me your thoughts?”

“Dead in my tracks” is right.

Making Jesus Lord

“Not my president,” pouted large numbers of deeply disappointed Democrats last November. Many are still saying it. I didn’t know it, but the disclaimer did not originate in 2024 or even in 2016. It goes all the way back to George W. Bush’s hair-splitting victory over Al Gore in 2000, which turned on something like 327 votes. Back then, it meant something like “Gore actually won, so Bush is not the real president even if some people say he is.”

Now it means something more like “If I don’t acknowledge it, it isn’t real.”

An Anachronism in the Text

In the process of recounting the circumstances under which a local Hivite lad raped Jacob’s daughter Dinah, the writer of Genesis comments to the effect that her brothers were indignant and angry because this Shechem “had done an outrageous thing in Israel”. Such a thing, they said, must never be.

It should not need saying that rape is always outrageous, in Israel or anywhere else. Yet strangely, the key words in this passage for some critics are “in Israel”. Let me explain.

Anonymous Asks (366)

“What does it mean that Saul is also among the prophets?”

The phrase in question comes up a couple of times in scripture, in 1 Samuel 10 and 19. The writer of 1 Samuel tells us that the (rhetorical) question “Is Saul also among the prophets?” became a proverb in Israel. It definitely meant something to the people of God, though not necessarily anything particularly complimentary to Saul.

Can you imagine becoming the subject of a proverb? It might not be as much fun as we think.

Quote of the Day (50)

David de Bruyn’s morning email is a short prayer checklist entitled “When God Says ‘No’ ”. I’ve made them myself from time to time, and I’m sure I’ve done a post on the subject at some point over the years. You know what that looks like: “My prayer is not being answered in the affirmative, Lord. So what does your word say about that?”

What possible reasons might there be?

No King in Israel (19)

As we hinted in the introduction last week, this series of incidents in chapter 8 effectively illustrates the moral degradation characteristic of Israel during the period of the Judges. The end of the chapter gives us four more strong indications that all was not well in Israel, even in the home of the one man who had personal dealings with God.

Despite God’s undeserved blessing and a marvelous victory, the end of Gideon’s tale leaves a sour taste in the mouth.

Too Hot to Handle: Offenders for a Word

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

Christianity Today’s Caleb Lindgren interviews author Brian J. Wright about his new book, Communal Reading in the Time of Jesus.

Tom: We bounced this article around by email last week, IC, and it was fodder for a few interesting observations. I thought we might revisit it here. One major weakness of Lindgren’s interview is that he never quite gets Brian Wright to define “communal reading” for us, and the term then ends up being used to describe a whole bunch of different things in the course of the interview.

Care to take a shot at defining it?

The Mental Scrapbook

“You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear”, as the famous adage goes. Your raw materials define what is possible with them.

The same is true of your mental life: you cannot make a good life out of bad imaginings.

Your mind is a scrapbook. Like any scrapbook, it collects fragmentary images of whatever you decide to put in there. Over time you fill it up. And eventually, what you have put into it defines the kind of life you’re going to have. That happens because the ‘resources’ you put into your mental scrapbook become the raw materials for your present attitudes, your frame of reference for present experiences, and the repository of images for your present imagination.

Garbage in, garbage out. Good stuff in, good stuff out. It’s that simple.

Small Dramas

Some spiritual experiences are useful to share. Others, I find, I am better off keeping to myself, not because they are trivial but because they are personal, just between me and the Lord. Also, more than a few of these experiences are easily misunderstood.

An example. This morning I wake at 2:15 a.m., as is often the case. I know I’m either up for the day or at least for the next few hours. Long experience has proven trying to go back to sleep when I’m wide awake is wasted time. Upstairs, I can hear my son struggling with what turns out to be an uncooperative file conversion (he works overnight from home), and I overhear an uncharacteristic expression of frustration pass his lips.

Naturally, I go up and intrude. Come on, you would too.

Getting Our Attention

Don’t laugh at me, long time Bible readers. I only just noticed for the first time that in the days when Solomon had his first vision of God, the ark of the covenant and the tabernacle of the Lord, also called the tent of meeting, were in different places. David had brought the ark into Jerusalem and had pitched another tent for it there, but the original tabernacle and the bronze altar made by Bezalel in the days of Moses remained at Gibeon.

I think we can safely say separating the ark of the covenant from the Holy of Holies, where it belonged, was a fairly egregious breach of the revealed will of God. Somehow, nobody seemed to notice.