Does God Judge Nations?

A question from a list of what Andy Stanley refers to as “old covenant leftovers”, various ways he believes the modern church mixes what he calls “obsolete” theology with the New Testament teaching of Christ and his apostles:

• “Why would a Christian believe God judges nations at all?”

Stanley intends this as a zinger, but I’m not at all sure it zings. It may be a bullet point in a bulleted list, but it has the pinpoint accuracy of a wet snowball lobbed by a lethargic six-year-old in a too-tight snowsuit.

How Not to Crash and Burn (36)

Some situations are not in our control. For the average man or woman, this is often the case. We may take comfort in the knowledge that our heavenly Father is able to do for us far more abundantly than all that we ask or think.

More often, though, we might observe that the course of our lives is a product of choices we have made day after day when we got out of bed in the morning, or when we found ourselves with our backs against the wall.

Three more-or-less random proverbs speak to these situations.

Too Hot to Handle: A Hot Mess

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What Kind of Disciples Are You Making?

God tests men’s faith. Women’s too. It’s what he does.

Why? Because faith is hugely important to him. It might be the most important thing of all. As scripture tells us, “without faith it is impossible to please him.”

Impossible. Not difficult, very difficult or in the 99th percentile of difficulty. Completely impossible. It cannot be done. Faith is critical to any relationship with God.

Unhitched and Unhinged

It is important to grasp that Andy Stanley’s desire for believers to “unhitch” our Christianity from the Old Testament, a plea he articulates in his new book Irresistible, is not limited to how we preach the gospel. Stanley is calling for the comprehensive abandonment of the Hebrew roots of our faith.

This is what makes his idea such a poison pill. Those who swallow it will come to regret it.

Anonymous Asks (16)

“I have a friend at my public high school and she isn’t really walking with God anymore and the clothes she is wearing are not God-honoring at all. She says she is close to Him but she’s really not. What do I do?”

Of the twenty to thirty kids who came and went more-or-less regularly from our 1980s youth group, I’m guessing perhaps 30-40% are still walking with the Lord today. Of the remainder, some are living morally decent but secular lives. Some would still call themselves Christians but don’t really fellowship with other believers anymore. Some are in a major mess, or in the process of trying to climb out of it.

Almost every serious Christian goes through this with a close friend at one point or another. It is very discouraging to witness someone else’s spiritual decline, especially when your own heart and life are deeply invested in their welfare.

Getting Unhitched

Andy Stanley wants us to “unhitch the old from the new”.

By “old”, he means our Old Testament. By “new”, he means ... okay, you get that.

By “unhitch”, he means declaring the Old Testament so obsolete, incorrect and potentially faith-destroying that we distance ourselves from it rather than try to explain, defend or rationalize it to others.

To say the least, Stanley’s new book, Irresistible: Reclaiming the New that Jesus Unleashed for the World, is a bit of a grenade in the baptistery. It also sounds to me like a sustained argument for intellectual cowardice, but I’ll leave that to Stanley’s readers to decide.

How Not to Crash and Burn (35)

I’m writing at the office today, so it’s time for an office-themed post.

Our Bible’s Solomonic proverbs are roughly 3,000 years old. The ones the king of Israel preserved from other sources are even older. Still, many remain surprisingly useful and informative — even when we attempt to apply them to the goings-on in a modern commercial office building.

Here are three that still work. Mostly.

Too Hot to Handle: Baptized Into What?

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Present Perfect

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Devout … and Out

Lydia of Thyatira was a devout woman, a worshiper of God. When the Lord opened her heart, she became a convert to the faith. Many devout Greeks in Thessalonica were also persuaded by the message of Paul and Silas. Titius Justus was yet another devout man. He demonstrated his nascent faith by giving Paul shelter when the apostle was opposed and reviled in Macedonia.

But not all devout people responded favorably to the gospel when it was presented to them in the first century. In Pisidian Antioch, the “devout” women served as shock troops for the Jews persecuting Paul and Barnabas.

In ideological conflicts, we call such people “useful idiots”. They believe in what they are doing, but are grossly misinformed or insufficiently attentive. They are being cynically manipulated by others.

The Merchant of Menace

We don’t get a lot of detail about pre-Genesis Satan in our Bibles, though few things have had a more dramatic and far-reaching influence on our world than his interference in God’s creation.

There is no straightforward literal retelling of the history of Lucifer’s rebellion to be found in either Old Testament or New. Rather, we are treated to a series of vignettes that cast light on various aspects of the demonic rebel heart. They illuminate Satan’s real nature by comparing him to historic figures and to the sort of people we know very well indeed: characters that populate our literature and people whom we can observe all around us.

Satan is a liar, an accuser and a murderer. So says the scripture. So it is.

But Satan is also a deal-maker, a trafficker, a trader and a businessman. Perhaps we are less inclined to think of these things as intrinsically evil.

Anonymous Asks (15)

“How do you not focus on what people think of you?”

I was a missionary’s kid. My first few years of public school were spent in another country, with a dominant culture that was anything but North American. I missed the Beatles, Star Trek (until it was syndicated) and the Adam West Batman TV show. I missed Woodstock. I heard about the U.S. putting someone on the moon from halfway across the world and days after it happened. I didn’t play hockey or football or baseball. When I returned to North America, I didn’t know any of the bands that were popular and I had an obvious British accent. I wore the wrong clothes and had the wrong haircut. To top it off, in school I was placed with kids I was well ahead of intellectually but well behind culturally and interpersonally.

All of this created pretty much the perfect storm of Grade 5 nerd-dom. Socially speaking, I couldn’t do anything right in school. Not a thing.

They Ate and Drank with Him

“God raised him on the third day and made him to appear, not to all the people but to us who had been chosen by God as witnesses, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.”

Based on his personal experience, Peter could have finished this sentence any number of impressive ways. He could have said, “God made him appear to us ... who saw with our own eyes the rolled-back stone and the empty tomb,” or “... who witnessed him perform miracles,” or “... who were shown the marks of his crucifixion in his hands and his side,” or even “... who saw him taken bodily into heaven and heard the testimony of angels about it.”

Instead, he talks about sharing food with the risen Christ: “God made him appear to us who ate and drank with him.”

How Not to Crash and Burn (34)

In raising his children, my father maintained a keen sense of the big picture. He would always encourage my mother when things seemed most hopeless. I can assure you that happened with regularity: my father traveled, and Mom had an unvarnished, highly realistic, frequently-reinforced view of all the basest aspects of male teen behavior.

Somehow she survived. Hope, maybe.

Too Hot to Handle: Heresy and Clerisy

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Total Depravity: Can’t We Come Up With A New Term?

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An Iceberg in the Gulf of Mexico

I sat in an office meeting last Saturday morning listening to my fellow managers discuss internal company changes that were, to everyone there, more than a little disconcerting. The afternoon shift supervisor had a clear note of panic in his tone as he anticipated what personnel moves upper management might be contemplating.

Understandably. Nice guy, but he’s got a doctorate in something esoteric that’s all but useless in the real world and I’m quite sure hasn’t the slightest idea what he’ll do if he’s suddenly unemployed.

I’m not about to tell you that I’m a whole lot better qualified myself, or that looking for another job has any great appeal to me. In fact, there are hundreds of thousands, and I suspect millions, all across North America who are staring down similar situations these days.

It’s not just potential unemployment that’s scary, is it.

Having It Both Ways

Charles Cutler Torrey was an American historian, archeologist and scholar. In 1901, he founded the American School of Archeology in Jerusalem and taught Semitic languages at Yale for almost 30 years.

Eighty-eight years ago, Torrey’s record was as credible as any other secular authority whose job was analyzing and dating ancient manuscripts. Then his book Pseudo-Ezekiel and the Original Prophecy (1930) was released, setting out his theory that the canonical book of Ezekiel was actually written much later than originally thought, in the third century B.C.

Torrey’s book remains of sufficient interest that it was reprinted both in 2008 and 2013. Amazon calls it “culturally important”.

Anonymous Asks (14)

“How do you stay on a spiritual high?”

Hmm. I think we might be asking the wrong question here.

Ezekiel was probably never closer to God than the day his wife died, but I suspect that day was in many ways the lowest point of his life. A “spiritual high” it was not.