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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Thursday, April 11, 2019
Wednesday, April 10, 2019
Relative Righteousness
“She is more righteous than I …”
Judah’s wife had died. He wasn’t exactly a young man at this point, but as they say today, “He had needs.” The cult prostitute he encountered on the road to Timnah was
an admittedly sinful but pragmatic way of managing those very normal human
impulses so he could get on with the necessary business of shearing his sheep undistracted.
What Judah didn’t know was that the veiled “prostitute”
was actually his daughter-in-law, the former wife of his eldest son. She
provided her services to him that day in exchange for a young goat from Judah’s flock, which
she never received.
Technically, then, not actually a prostitute. Perhaps not a role model exactly, but nobody in this story
really is.
Labels:
Genesis
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Judah
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Righteousness
Tuesday, April 09, 2019
Two Kinds of Anxiety
“I want you to be free from anxieties.”
Now, you may or may not remember this, but it wasn’t the
apostle Paul who wrote those famous words “casting all your anxieties upon [God], because he cares for you.” That was another apostle whose name begins with ‘P’.
All the same, many — maybe most — Christians have
at one time or other heard these words appropriated to remind them to let go of
all their cares and concerns, and hand their worries over to God, who loves us.
Some of us heard the line from our mothers, and so the idea comes with a
boatload of sentiment attached to it.
What it should not become is an excuse for passivity.
Labels:
1 Corinthians
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1 Peter
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Anxiety
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Choices
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Worry
Monday, April 08, 2019
Anonymous Asks (34)
Mileage varies. For me, one of the most powerful evidences of God’s reality is my cat. She is a slightly-dinged-up work
of art. The Theory of Evolution by Whichever-Mechanism-is-Currently-in-Vogue offers
one possible explanation for her existence. The Bible offers me what
I think is a better one: she was designed by an Artist of unparalleled
skill. It also offers me an explanation for why she is slightly dinged up: she’s
collateral damage from the fall of mankind.
So “look all around you” works for me, but it doesn’t work for everyone. Fair enough.
Labels:
Anonymous Asks
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Evolution
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God's Existence
Sunday, April 07, 2019
Parts of Speech
“The Spirit is the one who testifies, because the Spirit is truth.”
“The Spirit of truth … proceeds from the Father.”
“I am … truth.”
It is correct to say that the triune God reliably tells the truth [Gk: alētheuō] and that he always speaks truly
[alēthōs]. He is both accurate and ingenuous.
And yet despite their aptness, these statements are not sufficient. They fall short. Scripture makes such claims repeatedly, but that is not all it says.
The doctrine of God’s veracity and reliability does not turn on verbs and adverbs.
Labels:
Character of God
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God
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Truth
Saturday, April 06, 2019
How Not to Crash and Burn (53)
We are coming to the final few Solomonic proverbs assembled by the men of King Hezekiah. Probably at
this point the transcribers had run out of bigger themes to explore. All
forty-five which remain are two-liners that appear unrelated to one another.
Their brevity is no
reflection on their quality. More than a few of the most famous and familiar
proverbs you will hear quoted by Christians come from this section of the book.
Labels:
How Not to Crash and Burn
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Proverbs
Friday, April 05, 2019
Too Hot to Handle: Branded
In which our regular writers toss around
subjects a little more volatile than usual.
They started in 1988 with a 27-year old “senior pastor” named James MacDonald and a couple hundred interested
Christians and seekers gathered in a Chicago high school auditorium. Today,
they are known as Harvest Bible Chapel, a megachurch with campuses all over the Chicago area and over 100 affiliated
fellowships in North America and internationally.
Tom: Today, the mother church is being investigated for alleged financial shenanigans.
Labels:
Megachurches
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Money
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Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, April 04, 2019
Wednesday, April 03, 2019
Semi-Random Musings (12)
I cannot say what the process of becoming honest is like for the occasional white-liar, but people
who practice deceit definitely have great difficulty quitting.
I have probably detailed in some post or other my own experience of giving up the
practice of lying cold-turkey by forcing myself to publicly confess every
single new falsehood I uttered, and doing so the moment the words left my
lips. It involved a level of red-faced humiliation and personal exposure I was
very much unused to. Rarely was a confession received in quite the way
I expected.
I suppose all bad habits are hard to break.
Tuesday, April 02, 2019
Bit Players in an Eternal Drama
When Jacob returns to
Canaan from sojourning in Paddan-aram, along with his wives, family, servants
and flocks, he finds himself anticipating the inevitable confrontation with his
brother Esau. The same Esau whom Jacob had swindled, and from whom he had fled in fear more
than twenty years before. Esau who, it is reported, has four hundred men with him. That doesn’t
bode well. The writer of Genesis tells us “Jacob was greatly afraid and distressed.”
A reasonable reaction, all things considered.
Labels:
Esau
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Genesis
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Jacob
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Philippians
Monday, April 01, 2019
Anonymous Asks (33)
If we are speaking of suffering in general, whole books have been written in answer to this question. Our own Immanuel Can wrote
an open letter about it to conservative author Dinesh D’Souza in 2016. If you are looking for a philosophical explanation for the necessity of pain in a fallen world, you may find it there.
One thing we can be sure of: the answer is not simple. Another thing we can be sure of is that people who observe
suffering are bound to speculate about its cause. It’s human nature. Perhaps
you remember the question Jesus’ disciples asked upon encountering a blind man:
“Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents?”
They were wrong, of course. Those are far from the only two options.
Sunday, March 31, 2019
That Night
“For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread …”
Well, let me take you back to that night.
Around the table were all the disciples of the Lord, and in the midst of them, the
Lord himself. It was a dinner party of sorts, a Passover seder, actually. Solemn
in the Jewish calendar, but also a time of thankfulness.
Labels:
Christ
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Lord's Supper
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Recycling
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Worship
Saturday, March 30, 2019
How Not to Crash and Burn (52)
“I wanted to become a corporate lawyer — had written the Law School Admissions Test, had taken two years of appropriate preliminary courses.
I wanted to learn the ways of my enemies, and embark on a political
career. This plan disintegrated. The world obviously did not need another
lawyer.”
Admittedly, you have to read between the lines there, but it sounds like it didn’t go well.
Labels:
How Not to Crash and Burn
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Proverbs
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Testing
Friday, March 29, 2019
Too Hot to Handle: The Good, the Bad and the Godly
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Apologetics
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Euthyphro
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Plato
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Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, March 28, 2019
Why Do Christians Disagree?
Religious skeptics, along with many sincere believers young and old, find the lack of agreement among Christians to be a most perplexing and off-putting fact.
Denominationalism is only one manifestation of its reality. Within virtually all denominations we can find numerous ‘minor’ convictions still considered significant enough by their proponents to justify breaches of fellowship with those who hold different views, amicably or otherwise.
Labels:
Corinthians
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Denominationalism
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Hebrews
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John
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Recycling
Wednesday, March 27, 2019
Between Prissiness and Profanity
I’m never sure how sorry we should feel for Esau.
I’m not troubled by the way he lost his birthright by trading it to
his brother for a bowl of lentils. That one’s all on him. Jacob was a savvy
deal-maker to be sure, but there was nothing sneaky about that particular arrangement.
The problem was Esau’s: he failed to value something very valuable indeed. He
despised his birthright. That’s just not very bright, and certainly not very spiritual.
The stolen blessing was another story. That involved some serious
connivance, misdirection and outright lying. Esau had every right to be furious.
The problem was that he was furious about the wrong thing.
Labels:
Discernment
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Esau
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Genesis
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Testimony
Tuesday, March 26, 2019
Faith and Impatience
One of the major
features of the middle chapters of Genesis is a plethora of good people trying
to accomplish good things in the worst possible way.
Sarah trying to bring an heir into the world to fulfill the promises of God via the womb of her
Egyptian servant. Her husband Abraham going along, though it means infidelity to
his own wife. Scripture doesn’t tell us whether Hagar was an especially
attractive woman, so let’s give the patriarch the benefit of the doubt and just
say he unwisely capitulated to Sarah’s poorly-thought-out plan rather than to
something less honorable, like garden-variety male lust.
Then we come to Rebekah.
Monday, March 25, 2019
Anonymous Asks (32)
“I’ve read many stories and testimonies of Christian brothers and sisters, including Jesus, and almost all SKIP a portion in their
lives: the teenage years. So, how and what is an effective way to show, shine,
and represent our faith as hormonally crazy teenagers??”
There’s a very good reason many personal accounts
leave out the teen years: our teen years are frequently riddled with
embarrassing incidents we would rather not even recall, let alone repeat to
others, along with more than a few tales that might not be all that profitable in
the telling. Most of us learn by failing, and some of us learn by failing
repeatedly. Our very first attempts at anything are likely to be our absolute worst,
whether it’s witnessing or asking a girl out on a date. Who wants to hear about that?
Also, people who write testimonies usually
wait until they have lived a bit, which means they have also had time to forget
the things that happened long in the past, or that did not directly and
obviously contribute to the circumstances around their salvation.
Labels:
Anonymous Asks
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Testimony
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Youth
Sunday, March 24, 2019
God, Logic and Nothing
Bestselling author David Berlinski has his own take on the famous philosophical question raised in Plato’s Euthyphro: What makes a good thing good? Two alternatives are posed: (1) the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy; or (2) the pious is holy because it is beloved of the gods.
Berlinski approaches the issue this way:
“To the question what makes the laws of moral life true, there are three answers: God, logic, and nothing. Each is inadequate.”
Now, you just know I’m going to disagree with that last statement, right?
Labels:
Atheism
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Character of God
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David Berlinski
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Euthyphro
Saturday, March 23, 2019
How Not to Crash and Burn (51)
Perhaps the theme of these ten verses is “things that don’t stop”. I can’t say for sure.
But it is certainly true that the simple don’t stop; they charge
right in where their wiser peers do not. The loud neighbor doesn’t stop either.
That’s why everyone hates him, despite his outwardly cheery disposition. The
search for truth never stops, thank God, and, if we’re honest, neither does
enmity in our present age. Finally, the eyes of mankind never stop in their
endless quest for satisfaction.
We will not find what we are looking for in this world.
Labels:
How Not to Crash and Burn
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Proverbs
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Satisfaction
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