When Life Really Hurts

There’s a woman in my church — a lovely woman, a mother and a wife, and selfless servant of the Lord’s people, one most highly esteemed. She has been a grief and addiction counselor, and has spent her whole life ministering to others in their moments of darkest sorrow. Her husband is also a wonderful person, and his career for several decades has been as chaplain to the elderly, caring for fragile souls on the doorstep of eternity.

This woman has just been diagnosed with aggressive, metastasizing liver cancer. The fatal kind.

Incomplete Obedience

“Whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.”

If you remember the context of today’s quote, the “right thing” James is writing about means prefacing our public declarations about plans for the future with the words “if the Lord wills”. Anything else is presumption.

“Do the right thing,” he says. “The future is not ours to boast about.”

Outside with Christ

John 9 begins with the healing of a man born blind. The story, like so many others in John, is unique to that gospel. The chapter is not even primarily about the healing itself, which takes up a mere seven verses. Strange as it may seem to a first-time reader to find Jesus making mud with his own saliva and anointing a man’s eyes, it’s no stranger than some of his other healings. John’s account is concerned primarily with the repercussions of the event, which take him almost five times as long to tell as the actual healing.

John gives us 41 verses devoted to a man’s story, but no record of his name. That’s actually fairly common in all the gospels, since their subject is Christ, not us. In a way, the man himself is incidental. In another way, he’s anything but.

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“What’s the key to making marriage last?”

Almost anybody with a properly functioning arm and a working pair of eyeballs can hit a dartboard. It’s a lot harder to hit the bullseye. If you asked me “What’s a key to making marriage last?” or “What are some important ways to make a marriage last?”, well, that’s easy. When you ask, “What’s the key?”, that’s much tougher.

Do I really have to pick just one?

Semi-Random Musings (44)

The Powers-That-Be love managing public opinion. They expend millions of dollars and man-hours creating and perpetuating narratives and establishing outer limits for acceptable mainstream discourse (also called the “Overton Window”). These preferred versions of reality are so bewilderingly convincing that the average Christian reader throws up his hands in despair as he seeks to discern what is really going on.

After all, the most effective lies are 90% true.

No King in Israel (23)

After four chapters devoted to the history of and repercussions flowing from the life of a single judge (Gideon), we come to a chapter in which the entire life’s work of two judges (Tola and Jair) and the manner in which they each delivered their nation are summed up in a mere five verses. Thirteen more are devoted to setting up the story of the next judge (Jephthah). Sixty-four years covered in eighteen verses.

We might view the relative brevity of these next two accounts as an imbalance of sorts, especially if we are used to reading secular history.

Too Hot to Handle: Not Playing the Game

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

Immanuel Can: Hey, Tom, what’s all this I’m suddenly hearing about “NPC”?

Tom: Oh my, you sure know how to pick ’em. As you have surely noticed, there’s a big media brouhaha around that term, and Twitter has banned it outright as “hateful”. I’ll let writer Brandon Morse explain it:

“If you’ve ever picked up a video game that features other characters that are controlled by the computer, then you’ve run into non-player characters or NPC’s.”

When you call someone an “NPC”, what you are saying is that they are programmed with preset behavioral patterns decided for them by somebody else, be they professors, activist groups or the media. You are telling them they are unable to think for themselves.

Who Reads Anymore?

I’ve heard that Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time may be the most famous book people have never read.

That’s right: Never.

People sure do talk about it. It’s sold ten million or so copies. Lots of people cite the title of the book, laud it, and claim to have found their opinions confirmed by it — but few of these have actually ever read it.

In a way, maybe that’s understandable. It is, after all, a fairly challenging book. For a mathematician, it’s a good read, perhaps; for the average person it’s a quick road to Slumberland. Even though it’s pretty short it only takes a few pages to render most folks unconscious.

Simple Answers to Vexed Questions

Simple answers to vexed questions are lovely things. They are also exceedingly rare.

Last week at the island, IC and I asked why so many young men we read about and know personally have “gone Reformed” or are thinking seriously about it. As someone who’s very satisfied with the scriptural faithfulness, consistency and durability of the teaching handed down to me by previous generations in my own tradition, I’m deeply curious what is drawing our youth toward a theological alternative characterized by determinism, allegory, abrogated promises and, yes, on the younger end, an increasingly undeniable tendency towards unabashed antisemitism.

The Laying On of Hands

In Sunday’s post, we noted the first century baptism of the Holy Spirit in Samaria took place when Peter and John first prayed, then laid hands on believing Samaritans. That’s in Acts 8. We also noted the Holy Spirit did not deem this step necessary when he baptized Jews in Jerusalem in Acts 2 or Gentiles in Caesarea in Acts 10. These simply believed and were filled with the Spirit, glorifying God in other languages.

The experience of Acts 8 prompts a few questions about this “laying on of hands”. Where did it come from? What does it signify? How did the early church practice it? Did miracles always accompany it? We’re going to try to answer these questions today.

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“Is it possible for fallen angels to repent?”

In C.S. Lewis’s Narnia stories, Aslan never tells anyone any story but their own. When he walks with Edmund after his restoration, Lewis comments, “There is no need to tell you (and no one ever heard) what Aslan was saying.”

I’ve always thought those lines insightful. Scripture is silent about many things that inspire our curiosity, the status of spirit beings who “left their proper dwelling” among them.

What Happened in Samaria?

We speak of the baptism of the Holy Spirit as an event that took place in the first century, at the very beginning of church history. That’s correct. Notwithstanding the practices of some charismatic groups, most Christians today do not expect groups of new believers to receive the Holy Spirit accompanied by tongues of fire and the expression of the prophetic word in foreign languages as in Acts 2. If we are honest, nothing that we see happening in those churches today corresponds authentically to the events we read about in Acts.

So then, we consign the baptism of the Holy Spirit to the past, where we believe it belongs. It was a historic manifestation of the power of God by which “in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body”.

No King in Israel (22)

You may have heard the expression “sow it with salt” before. It’s most commonly associated with the incident we are reading about today, in which Abimelech destroyed the city of Shechem and sowed it with salt thereafter. Salting the earth apparently became common in the ancient Near East. Hittite and Assyrian sources both mention the practice, but none predates the Judges account.

Maybe Abimelech was a trendsetter.

Too Hot to Handle: Facts and Opinions

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

The Pew Research Center — a moderately reputable outfit as these things go — just released study data that indicates three quarters of Americans are incapable of distinguishing fact from opinion. When given a series of statements like “Spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid make up the largest portion of the U.S. federal budget” (fact, supposedly), and “Democracy is the greatest form of government” (opinion, surely), most participants were unable to determine which were which.

Tom: Somebody’s responsible for that, IC. Want to hazard a guess who it might be?

Assumptions and Loaded Conversations

Back in 2012, NBA Commissioner David Stern caught flack for cracking an old joke in an interview with Jim Rome. Rome asked him if the NBA lottery was rigged. Stern came back with, “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?”

Of course, this immediately got him into trouble with the PC set, who took him to be making fun of the very serious issue of wife abuse. I can sympathize with their ire; but in fairness, I think it’s not what Stern was trying to say. He was actually referring to an old (admittedly somewhat tasteless) joke. I think I first read it on a bubble gum wrapper when I was a kid, and I remember seeing it in other places as well. It was one of those things that was “just around”. The joke went like this:

Question: What’s a question you cannot answer either “Yes” or “No”?

Answer: Have you stopped beating your wife yet?

Perhaps Stern and I chewed the same gum, I don’t know.

Peace and War

“Too long have I had my dwelling among those who hate peace. I am for peace, but when I speak, they are for war!”

The perennial burden of the believer in a faithless, self-interested, predatory and relentlessly aggressive world is that he simply does not fit in, no matter how hard he or she may try. If our hearts are truly in the process of being remade in the likeness of the Lord Jesus, we are bound to find ourselves emotionally at odds with our co-workers, neighbors and especially the power structures of the societies in which we live.

How can we not? We are of a completely different disposition, and it goes right down to our spiritual genetics.

Dreams and Meanings

I don’t think I’ve had a spiritually meaningful dream in my life.

Well, let me qualify that just a little. I’m sure I’ve had dreams psychiatrists would call meaningful in that they revealed truths about my subconscious preoccupations, some of which are surely spiritual. I wouldn’t argue with the experts about the contents of my cranium either; it seems logical to me that when you have the same dream dozens of times, surely something is consistently on your mind that you haven’t resolved to your own satisfaction.

But personal messages from God in my sleep? Not a one.

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“What is a bruised reed?”

Today’s question comes out of something I heard in a meeting recently. A well-meaning, sincere brother in Christ expressed the opinion that the “bruised reed” mentioned in Isaiah 42:3 was a musical instrument of some sort.

Yeah, it was a first for me too. But it’s always interesting to find that even very smart people make associations that would never occur to you in a month of Sundays.

A Prophecy Primer

Over the last couple weeks, we’ve looked at self-proclaimed practitioners of the spiritual gift of prophecy, how they say God “speaks” to them, the sorts of things they claim he speaks about, and what they do with their gift. The most common threads in all this mystical mumbo jumbo are (1) money, (2) women, and (3) eagerness to get children involved.

If these are not aircraft carrier-sized red flags, I’m not sure what else we should call them.

What If I Miss the Rapture?

Before I moved earlier this year, I was part of a weekly home church gathering. The rapture loomed large in a few of those studies and became the subject of a couple posts here, as often happens with Bible passages I am wrestling my way through with friends.

In one of those posts I made reference to an ex-evangelical named Joshua Rivera who now writes for Slate.