Under the Microscope

Early in the last book of the Bible, the apostle John saw a vision of seven golden lampstands, in the midst of which was one “like a son of man”, the glorified Jesus Christ. He told John to write down the things he had seen in a book, and to send that book to seven Asian churches: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea. Then he told the apostle plainly that these seven lampstands in his vision represented those seven churches.

That book John wrote at the Lord’s command was Revelation.

The Original and the Copies

“Though you have not seen him, you love him.”

How do we come to love one whom we have not seen?

This is not a new problem. There are no video clips of the Lord’s healings, sermons or public interactions available on YouTube. We have no pictures of him to look at. The last words he uttered on this planet were spoken almost two millennia in our past. For everyone outside of Judea, and who lived in the years after the Lord Jesus ascended to the right hand of the Father, knowing him and loving him — to the extent we manage it — has been the result of hearing and reading about him.

For many people, Christ himself is little more than an abstract idea. How do you genuinely love an abstraction?

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“Why did Pharaoh give Joseph so much authority in Egypt?”

The question is a reference to the events of the latter portion of Genesis 41, in which the king of Egypt takes a thirty-year old foreign prisoner fresh out of the local hoosegow and promotes him to the second-highest position in the kingdom, allowing him unprecedented discretion and political influence. “All my people shall order themselves as you command.”

It’s fair to say nobody saw that coming, and the first-time reader can be forgiven for saying, “Huh. That’s unlikely.” Because it was.

Out of the Bag

Giving is down. At least at my church it is. So say our elders, and I have no cause to disbelieve them.

When I attended this same local church in my early twenties, two offering bags sat each week during our celebration of the Lord’s Supper on the small, central table, to one side of the bread and wine. At least, they did so prior to our COVID interregnum. For years, after we had passed the bread and wine around, the bags went through the congregation during the weekly meeting at which all the most mature, committed believers were likely to be present, and the fewest visitors troubled by the (incorrect) perception that we expected them to follow suit.

We didn’t.

No King in Israel (26)

I try very hard never to negotiate with God.

Perhaps you struggle with that too. The habit is hard to kick, especially when you want some particular outcome very badly and believe only Heaven can deliver it. But promising God this or that provided he does what I want for me is a pagan instinct, not a Christian one. In his Sermon on the Mount, the Lord Jesus instructed his Jewish followers, for whom vows and oaths were commonplace, not to take oaths at all.

Keeping that in mind, I try never to put myself in the position of promising the Lord things I may not be able to deliver.

Too Hot to Handle: A Hot Mess

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

Young pastors in American churches are a dying breed. So says Eric Conn, and he’s got a major 2017 study in hand from the Barna Group to prove it. The number of U.S. pastors under forty is currently half what it was in 1992, while the number over sixty-five has tripled. The Barna report concludes, “It is urgent that denominations, networks and independent churches determine how to best motivate, mobilize, resource and deploy more younger pastors.”

Tom: That’s a highly debatable conclusion, but not a surprising one. What’s interesting to me, IC, is not so much Barna’s “Aging of America’s Pastors” article, but Conn’s analysis of it. As someone who’s been there, he described vocational ministry as “a hot mess”.

Why Your Pastor Won’t Help You Now

Michael O’Fallon, host of the very worthwhile Sovereign Nations podcast, says he’s perplexed.

Some time ago he discovered a very nasty kind of false teaching was creeping into the churches in his denomination, a false teaching prepared in the fires of Marxism but now channeled by respected evangelical sources. It seemed obvious to O’Fallon that the first people who would be concerned and who would have a stake in understanding the danger would be those charged with maintaining sound doctrine on behalf of the church.

Crossing Jordan

All Christians allegorize, but some do it much more than others. Symbolic language is plentiful in scripture: we find it in poetry, metaphors, figures of speech, parables, prophecy and in the New Testament’s interpretation of the Old. You will find allegories in every book of the Bible and perhaps most often in the teaching of the Lord Jesus, who used symbolic language both to reveal and to conceal. In view of this, even the most literal Bible teachers allegorize from time to time. It’s impossible not to.

Of course, not all interpretations of allegories are on the same level.

Possession of the Pastures

Christians love to quote from the book of Psalms, but some psalms are easier to apply to ourselves than others are.

I was enjoying Psalm 83 this morning while simultaneously noting just how difficult all the Hebrew specifics make it to apply the psalmist’s words meaningfully to present-day believers. The enemies of Israel do not work well as analogies for grumpy HR ladies, obnoxious environmentalist neighbors, or even — to make it more relevant — social misfits with sniper rifles and a burning grudge.

Too soon? Yeah, probably.

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“Why do so many preacher’s kids apostatize?”

I feel as if this is one of those “When did you stop beating your wife?” questions. It assumes the veracity of its premise without any actual investigation. Do “so many” preacher’s kids really abandon their faith when they leave home? What does “many” mean relative to the total number of children born to full-time servants of Christ? If large numbers really did apostatize, how would we know? How many of them come back to the faith later?

Also, who’s keeping the stats: George Barna?

On Nationhood and Prayer

I’ve been praying for Canada lately. If you’ve been following our political scene, we got rid of one failing, bitterly disliked Prime Minister and replaced him with the behind-the-scenes architect of his most abject failures. It’s been 17 months since we had a federal budget, gas prices and food prices are through the roof, youth unemployment is soaring, immigration is wildly out of control and I’m seeing drug addicts and homeless people in every city in Ontario that I visit.

In short, lots to pray about. But how to pray is a good question.

No King in Israel (25)

New readers of Old Testament history may occasionally find themselves lost in a sea of names, places and peoples. Ammonites and Amorites both begin with the letter “A”, but seasoned readers know the Ammonites were fellow Hebrews descended from Lot, as Israel was descended from Abraham, whereas the Amorites were descendants of Canaan son of Ham. They founded the Old Babylonian Empire and ruled Mesopotamia, the Levant and parts of Egypt for four centuries prior to and including Israel’s time in Egypt.

In fact, one reason the Lord obliged Israel to spend so long in Egypt was to give the Amorites opportunity to repent. God told Abraham their iniquity was “not yet complete”. He would judge their sin at the appropriate time, and not before.

Too Hot to Handle: Baptized Into What?

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

I’m going to quote a full minute of a recent sermon on the subject of the New Testament teaching about baptism here because I want to fairly represent what this particular pastor was trying to communicate. A punchy line or two out of a message is fun, but may distort the speaker’s intent. In this case, providing the entire context makes that intent quite clear.

“I believe that the commission to baptize all nations was given to the church.

Contemplating Evil

The most popular course in the Religion and Culture department of one Canadian university is a course titled “Evil and Its Symbols”. It’s the one course where there never seems to be enough room to fit all the applicants. One student quipped that the homework assignment was probably “Go home and do evil.”

Maybe not. But people sure are fascinated with the topic. Why evil exists is a challenge for any Christian to explain; perhaps the biggest. Still, two things bear remembering right away: firstly, that to say that it’s a challenge does not mean that the challenge cannot be met, and secondly, that to explain the existence of evil is not a challenge unique to Christians or even to theists more generally — it’s equally necessary for atheists. Not only that, but it’s a lot harder for them.

Let me justify those statements a bit further in a moment; but first, let me set the stage for today’s post.

Next in Line

Having seen conservative evangelical Charlie Kirk sent to his eternal reward last week in Utah with a single sniper shot to the neck, one wonders which media personality the enemies of the current US regime would like to see ended next.

To be clear, I’m not alleging Kirk was killed by a leftist — that remains to be proven in court. That said, both the Canadian and American political left are not shy about voicing their delight all over social media that the fatal bullet hit home.

So then, no speculation required. They are happy to tell us who they hate most. [Linked graphic has language issues.]

Can Christians Be Lucky?

It’s probably fair to say most Christians dislike the word “luck”. I remember being discouraged from using it as a child and being asked to substitute “blessing” or some such. My parents and Sunday School teachers were (not unreasonably) concerned that I learn to discern the hand of God at work in the world. They also wanted me to not talk like a pagan.

There is wisdom in teaching God’s sovereignty and in speaking of his hand in our daily lives as a matter of course. A child who grows up reckoning without the possibility of God’s personal intervention at any moment as he makes his way in the world is dangerously disconnected from reality. The same default worldview that keeps him from superstitious fearfulness also inoculates him from reverent awe toward his Maker. Atheism is a bad way to go, but it persists. So then, the thought is that people who refer to “luck” and “fortune” are in every instance reckoning without God.

But is that true?

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“Should we take miracles literally?”

If we are talking about the miracles of scripture, absolutely. Once we have conceded the existence of God, there’s no logical reason not to. Any being sufficiently powerful to create and sustain the laws of nature, as the Bible claims God did, is also sufficiently powerful to suspend those laws at his pleasure.

Moral and Ceremonial

How are Christians supposed to relate to the Law of Moses? Acts 15 gives us a play-by-play of the discussion in Jerusalem on that subject between the apostles and elders of the early church in that city. It ended like this: “It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us,” they wrote to the church in Antioch, “to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well.”

I suppose I have always found their decision settled the matter conclusively for me.

No King in Israel (24)

As in other cases, some judges ruled over specific portions of Israel rather than the entire nation. The action in these next two chapters takes place almost entirely outside Israel proper. Jephthah’s dispute with the Ammonites was over territory acquired in battle three centuries earlier under Moses prior to Israel entering the Promised Land. Often referred to as Gilead, this region now belonged to the tribes of Reuben, Gad and the eastern half of Manasseh.

As we saw in the previous chapter, the Ammonites had previously crossed the Jordan to harass Judah, Benjamin and Ephraim, but Jephthah met and fought their army east of the Jordan.

Too Hot to Handle: The State of Theology

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

David B. was kind enough to forward us this link to a recent survey by Ligonier Ministries and LifeWay Research about what Americans believe about God, Jesus Christ, sin and eternity.

Tom: Apparently they are doing this every couple of years now. Having regular new data sets to browse can be useful in noting trends of one sort or another. We discussed the LifeWay 2016 survey in this space, if I recall correctly … yes, I do. That was the one where, based on the frequency of their heretical answers, my fellow writer Immanuel Can was inspired to refer to some of the respondents as not so much Christian as “ ‘Christian-flavored’, like a really, really bad kind of tofu.”

How’s the tofu this year, IC?