The most recent version of this post is available here.
“Love often manifests itself in giving people what they can’t appreciate and don’t want, and
in demanding from them precisely what they most want to retain for themselves.” — Tom
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Friday, March 22, 2019
Thursday, March 21, 2019
One Wild and Awful Moment
Hidden away in the deep wilderness of Canada’s Algonquin
Park is a memorial plaque dedicated to a grandfather and a teenage grandson who
lost their lives in a storm on one of the lakes.
How it got there is a mystery to passing canoeists. The location is quite remote.
The plaque itself is of considerable size and weight,
apparently being made of bronze. Time has softened the edges of some of the
letters and greened the surface; but the plaque has not been moved since it was
put there half a century ago. It is solidly drilled into the rock face. Someone
went to a lot of work to ensure that their loved ones would not be forgotten.
Labels:
Death
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Hope
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Recycling
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Resurrection
Wednesday, March 20, 2019
No, But …
“And Abraham said to God, ‘Oh that Ishmael might live before you!’
God said, ‘No, but …’ ”
Two lines out of context. Allow me to supply some.
Abraham is once again
in conversation with God. This is the fifth time God has brought up the subject
of his covenant promises. Months or years are passing between each remarkable
event, but every time the Lord appears or speaks or encounters Abraham in a
vision, he elaborates further on what he intends to do on Abraham’s behalf. In
Genesis 12, he promises to make from him a great nation, give him a great name, bless the
whole world through him and protect him from his enemies. Each new encounter
provides details the previous ones did not.
Tuesday, March 19, 2019
The Missing Backstop
“It was I who kept you from sinning against me.”
Francis Thompson famously referred to the “Hound of Heaven”, his metaphor for a God whose hand is so relentlessly upon the affairs of a person’s
life that the divine influence can be neither evaded nor ignored.
There have been times when I too had a
very strong impression God was personally on my case, and that all my efforts
to circumvent or evade his will were doomed to end in utter futility. At other
times, his impact on my choices and the circumstances around them, if present
at all, has been incredibly subtle. Absent evidence of God’s direct involvement,
to ascribe any specific decisions I have made in this life to the
influence of providence would be, I think, quite presumptuous.
Labels:
Abraham
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Genesis
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Providence
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Sarah
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Temptation
Monday, March 18, 2019
Anonymous Asks (31)
This is a question which occurs to nearly every
young believer at one point or another. Some struggle with it more than others.
If you’ve run your question by fellow Christians, someone has probably quoted you Romans 10:9: “[I]f you
confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”
Labels:
Anonymous Asks
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Assurance of Salvation
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Confidence
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Faith
Sunday, March 17, 2019
Less Different Than We Think
“My brothers, show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory.”
“Rich” and “poor” are relative terms. Welfare
recipients in Western society are not poor by the standards of East Africa.
Likewise, many Africans would consider our Western middle classes incredibly
rich, and yet hundreds of thousands around us are much better off than we are.
When James speaks of rich and poor, he
specifies the sort of thing he means. The contrast between these two types of men is not
merely a matter of degree; their lives are so different they might
as well be different species. The very least of it is in how they present to the world. The poor man wears shabby clothing, and not
because he didn’t bother to pick up a decent used Arrow shirt from the
local Goodwill. He simply has nothing better. There are no welfare cheques in
his future. The rich man across the way is decked out in fine garments and sports
an ostentatious gold ring. He probably dressed down for the occasion.
That paints the picture for us just fine.
Saturday, March 16, 2019
How Not to Crash and Burn (50)
Today’s verses are vaguely linked by the unexpected: unanticipated changes
in circumstances; sudden, radical changes in behavior; the moment when the
thing on which you have glutted yourself loses its appeal; and the moment when
you find you have become so hungry anything at all looks like food.
Hey, these things happen. We don’t always see them coming, but they happen.
Labels:
Family
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Friendship
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How Not to Crash and Burn
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Proverbs
Friday, March 15, 2019
Too Hot to Handle: The United Method
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Division
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Too Hot to Handle
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Tradition
Thursday, March 14, 2019
The Unbearable Heaviness of Individuality
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Galatians
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Politics
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Responsibility
Wednesday, March 13, 2019
Written On Their Hearts
“Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith,
preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham …”
“Scripture imprisoned everything under sin …”
Yes, the scripture is indeed the word of God. All the same, I have great confidence in assuring you that scripture —
graphē, if you prefer Greek — did not do a single thing described in these verses. Not literally. A piece of
paper, papyrus or animal skin does not “foresee”. It does not “preach”. It does
not “imprison” anyone.
It can’t. It couldn’t. Ink, paper, the printed medium — these things are inanimate.
Tuesday, March 12, 2019
Flooded Out
Secular historians advance the argument that
the spate of flood myths found everywhere around the globe is the natural
result of local peoples preserving stories about local floods. These do not,
the experts say, provide evidence for the truthfulness of the Genesis flood
account.
That line of reasoning makes a certain sort
of superficial sense: there are lots of local floods, and some of the flood
stories out there are surely a product of those. But some are not. When you
actually examine the content of these flood stories more closely, you find that
a non-trivial number of them have features in common with the book of Genesis,
and therefore with each other, that no local experience and lore can explain.
Monday, March 11, 2019
Anonymous Asks (30)
“Is the unforgivable sin knowing the Holy Spirit and accepting his existence and then opposing him, or is it having Satan in you
without you knowing about it and then claiming it’s the Holy Spirit, and vice versa?”
Well, that’s quite a mouthful. Let’s try to unpack that.
There are a couple of things about this
question that show the person who asked it is at very least headed in the right
direction in his thinking. For instance, he grasps that the unforgivable sin is
closely related to the person of the Holy Spirit. That is definitely true.
Labels:
Anonymous Asks
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Luke
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Mark
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Matthew
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Unpardonable Sin
Sunday, March 10, 2019
The Worst Myth Ever
When comparing the flood account from the Epic of Gilgamesh Tablet XI to that of the Genesis flood, I took a few paragraphs at the outset to
establish that the two accounts are roughly contemporary: they were written and
edited within a couple hundred years of one another.
The reason this is important is that
secular historians commenting on tales of the miraculous reliably resort to the “primitive man” argument: the notion that in times past, men could
believe in miracles because they were ignorant of the laws of nature, and
therefore wrote about unusual — even impossible — events uncritically
and unselfconsciously.
Labels:
Epic of Gilgamesh
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Flood
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Genesis
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Myth
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Noah
Saturday, March 09, 2019
How Not to Crash and Burn (49)
Did you know there are very few references in the Bible to
domesticated dogs? Maybe the puppies under the dinner table in Matthew 15, but that’s about it.
Moreover, the Bible does not have much good to say about man’s best friend. I don’t have a real handle on canine history in the Middle East
3,000 years ago, but I can work my way through the entries in a
concordance, and the picture isn’t pretty. There are no Shih Tzus in arms
or Chihuahuas in purses. The average mutts on the street are scavengers or
predators, more like wolves or jackals than Jack Russells. The word “dog” is both a Hebrew and Greek euphemism for a
male cult prostitute or some other sort of really
bad person. If you want to grovel, you
refer to yourself as a dog, and if you want to really grovel, a
dead dog.
Labels:
How Not to Crash and Burn
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Lies
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Proverbs
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Society
Friday, March 08, 2019
Too Hot to Handle: No Way to Hide Your Lyin’ Eyes
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Tom: I had never heard the name Jussie Smollett before last week, IC. Had you?
Immanuel Can: No. To be blunt, his activities were of absolutely no interest to me, or to anyone I knew,
before a couple of weeks ago. But he’s got my attention now.
Tom: I suppose we should briefly summarize the unraveling Smollett fiasco for anyone who hasn’t
been paying attention … do you want to do the honors?
Labels:
Homosexuality
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Lies
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Media
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Racism
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Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, March 07, 2019
Acting Christian
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Conscience
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James
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Obedience
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Soren Kierkegaard
Wednesday, March 06, 2019
Flood Myth-takes
It is often said today that the flood
account in Genesis is spiritual truth taught in the form of myth. Confronted
with the claims of secular scientists about the age of the earth and of
humanity, many Christians have beaten a hasty retreat from reading Genesis
literally into reading it more like one of Jesus’ parables: it means something
important, sure — just not quite what it says.
I say meh to that.
Labels:
Babylon
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Epic of Gilgamesh
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Flood
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Genesis
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Noah
Tuesday, March 05, 2019
A Tale of Two Floods
Scratched into twelve clay tablets in cunieform script, the ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh is thought to be the oldest written story in existence. Well, parts of it anyway. It recounts the adventures of a quasi-historical king of Uruk believed to have ruled
around 2700 B.C. Tablet XI of the Epic contains one of three surviving Babylonian flood stories, each of which has a number of elements in common with the Genesis flood account.
The Gilgamesh account is only one of many flood myths found in various ancient cultures around the
world. Christians who discover the spate of other flood stories in circulation
are alternately reassured and disconcerted: reassured because one might
reasonably expect a genuine historical event to wind up recorded in more than a
single place, even if grossly distorted by time, miscommunication and cultural baggage;
disconcerted because not a few of these flood stories are alleged to be older
than the story in Genesis.
Should we be reassured or concerned? Let’s consider.
Labels:
Babylon
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Epic of Gilgamesh
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Flood
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Genesis
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Noah
Monday, March 04, 2019
Anonymous Asks (29)
“Does Jesus love us all equally?”
Equality is the signal obsession of our
age. I’m not sure people living hundreds or thousands of years ago would have asked
this question or even thought much about it.
So let’s ask another one: does it really matter?
We already know Jesus loves us. You probably learned it in Sunday School: Jesus loves me, this I know; for the Bible tells me so. And one of the most famous verses in scripture tells us that
“God so loved the world …” God gave his Son for us, and his Son gave himself on our behalf. That’s love.
Labels:
Anonymous Asks
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Christ
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Equality
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John the Apostle
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Love
Sunday, March 03, 2019
Lightning and Molasses
Last week I took issue with an argument made by
the higher critics that Genesis 2 teaches that
animals were created after mankind rather than on the fifth and earlier part of
the sixth days, as described in chapter 1.
Their argument, if you recall, is based on a
straightforward linear reading of chapter 2. The creation of man is
described in verse 7, they say, followed by the creation of beasts, birds
and livestock in verse 19, then the creation of woman in verse 22.
That “contradicts” the order given us in chapter 1.
My response was that the narrative is not
linear, and that all the events of chapter 2 are not given to us in
consecutive order. There is no reason they should be.
Labels:
Cain
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Genesis
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Higher Criticism
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Seth
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