“Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.”
What is the writer to the Hebrews saying in the latter part of this verse?
A casual reading might leave us with the impression that it’s something to do with salvation. We might paraphrase that sort of interpretation this way: “Without being holy, nobody will be able to enter the presence of God and enjoy heaven.”
That’s perfectly true, but I don’t think it’s the writer’s intended meaning.
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“The Bible says nothing about trans people. Why should Christians be against sex transitioning?”
One very compelling reason to be against sex reassignment is that the surgery doesn’t cure gender-related unhappiness even in the short term. Journalists dispute this claim vigorously, but data gathered in clinical studies does not support the prevailing optimism in the secular media about the efficacy of surgical solutions in addressing the misery experienced by gender-dysphoric people.
Jesus of Nazareth was — and remains — unique in his nature.
He was the Word become flesh, and yet dwelling among us. Who is the Word? One with the Father, the creator of worlds, yet becoming man.
What does it mean when we say that the Savior was “separate from sin”?
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Micah 6 plays out like a courtroom drama, but with a few notable differences from your average episode of Law and Order. The God of Israel is both plaintiff and judge. The defendant is the nation of Judah. The prophet Micah takes on the role of prosecuting attorney. The witnesses are the personification of eternal solidity: the backbone of the earth.
It’s an unusual cast of characters, and the trial proceeds a little differently than people familiar with Western justice systems might expect. For one, there is no cross-examination of the Plaintiff’s testimony: who would dare call the Eternal God a liar? There is no jury to give a verdict, which is what we might expect when the only things in the courtroom other than God, his people and his prophet are inanimate objects.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Islamophobia is the hot topic of the day. Once again Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is breaking new legal ground. Motion-103, introduced by Liberal MP Iqra Khalid, is allegedly intended to combat religious discrimination, often referred to in the media as Islamophobia.
Its detractors claim Motion-103 would make for bad law: too broad, too specifically focused on Islam rather than religious discrimination generally, too confused between racism and religious discrimination.
Tom: First of all, are we “phobic”, Immanuel Can?
I was talking to a close friend last week. He’s serving as an elder in a local congregation of believers. A man of their gathering has raised an issue; he feels very strongly that certain forms of worship are simply out of court for Christians. But the form he most particularly dislikes is one that scripture never even really talks about one way or the other. In fact, if I told you what it was, you’d likely be very surprised; it’s something that Christians have done routinely for a long time now.
My pal was struggling with how to handle this guy.
The objector is pretty strong on his beliefs, and he’s not at all happy that the elders are not jumping to his side instantly. But my friend is more thoughtful and scriptural in his convictions; and I think he senses that the objection is more a matter of personal preference than of principle.
Some people refer to the slippery slope argument as a fallacy. They contend that there are many places between the top and bottom of a hill where an out-of-control slide may be arrested, and that therefore one little step downward does not make descent into the abyss inevitable.
In some cases, this may even be true. Most kids who spend endless hours playing first person shooter video games don’t go on killing sprees in high schools. On the other hand, there is plenty of hard data to establish the through-line from single motherhood to offspring criminality.
Some slopes are more slippery than others, I guess.
Lots of quotes today.
First up: Media professionals from CBC, CTV, Global News and other major Canadian media outlets made up the panel at this recent seminar, entitled “Journalists and Online Hate”, put on by Ottawa’s Carleton University School of Journalism and Communication. The video of the event commences with a round of self-abasement from the head of Carleton’s journalism program (white, male, middle-aged), who receives applause for calling himself a “fifth generation settler” and apologizes to the panel on behalf of all white, male Canadians.
An inauspicious beginning, and it’s only downhill from there.
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“What does it mean that ‘the sexually immoral person sins against his own body’?”
The quotation here comes from a longer discourse by the apostle Paul on the importance of Christian doctrine and practice in the area of sexuality. It includes the memorable line “Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute?” — the obvious answer being “Never!” The relevant portion is as follows: “Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body.”
So how does that work exactly?
The book of Hebrews was written to Hebrews. We need to understand it in that light.
Following the display of Pentecost, many Hebrews believed or professed to do so. In the light of that, the writer says in Hebrews 10, “Recall the former days” — for now a number of years had passed since that time — “when, after you were enlightened, you endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to reproach and affliction, and sometimes being partners with those so treated. For you had compassion on those in prison, and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one.”
These Hebrews had suffered a great deal.
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The vast majority of Jacob’s descendants elected not to return to Israel in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah, preferring the lives they had made for themselves in other nations during the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities. 587 years later (or thereabouts), when James wrote his epistle, the twelve tribes were still largely “scattered abroad”, and this almost two decades before the Romans sacked Jerusalem in AD70 and dispersed the Jews yet again.
It may be argued that Jacob’s descendants have been “in the midst of many peoples” and “among the nations” for the better part of the last two thousand years. Israel is still scattered abroad today, despite the existence of a national home for the Jews. Seven million live in Israel, while 8.25 million live elsewhere, six million in the US alone. And these are just the ones who identify as having this very specific type of Hebrew background.
In a sense, then, there is nothing new about what we are about to read in Micah.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Does everything that ever crosses your mind deserve to be aired?
By way of illustration, the Toronto Star prints this piece on “Moms who regret motherhood”. I’ll second the opinion offered by the writer of the story, who says, “All my pity is for the actual victims in these stories” — that is to say, for the children of the mothers who regret them.
Tom: IC, this brings up an interesting question: How much of what flashes through human synapses actually merits further scrutiny?
“I know exactly how you feel.”
How many times have your heard that line, or a line like it, when you were expressing some personal sorrow or woe to another?
And was there ever a doubt in your mind that when the person said it to you, they were wrong?
They had never been you. They had not faced your situation. If they meant well, they were imagining themselves in your place, maybe; more likely, they were transferring some experience of their own and placing it upon you, pushing your real experiences aside in favor of remembering their own. They were feeling empathetic with themselves, not with you.
And in some cases, they were not meaning well at all.
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I have written once or twice about the use of disambiguators in scripture. These are the little bits of information the Bible’s writers supply in order to help us distinguish James (the brother of Christ) from James (the brother of John) or Mary (Magdalene) from Mary (the mother of Jesus).
The Benaiah who served David and Solomon is consistently called the son of Jehoiada. Good to know. With that disambiguator appended to his name it’s impossible to confuse him with two later Benaiahs mentioned by Ezra and Ezekiel, or with Benaiah of Pirathon, another man of valor in David’s service.
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The website universalsalvation.org was an outreach of the UK-based Christianworld Church headed by the late Tony Sharpe that published occasional posts promoting the doctrine of Universalism after Sharpe’s death from a failed heart surgery in June 2004 until some time in 2016. The website does not specifically credit the articles there to Sharpe, but they appear to represent his views on scripture.
Like many other defunct websites, we only find Universal Salvation in The Wayback Machine’s archives. I can think of several possible reasons it is no longer active: (1) the church disbanded; (2) the person who maintained the blog died, as will happen to us all at one point, and subsequently discovered his beliefs did not represent reality; or (3) the person who maintained the blog discovered his error in this life and deleted it (we can only hope).
Either way, we don’t need to caution anybody at Universal Salvation about proof-texting. The same cannot be said for its former readers.
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“How detailed should prayers of confession be?”
John famously wrote, “If we confess our sins, [God] is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” He didn’t add a lot of detail about the confession process, but perhaps this is because the Greek word he used for “confess” carried linguistic freight the English translation does not.
Most people get their ideas about confession either from the Roman Catholic practice or from police procedurals, so the concept of biblical confession requires a bit of unpacking.
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In a previous post, we were considering the danger of using prayer as a sort of blanket to hide under when we ought to be doing something else, and I suggested that there are times when it is inappropriate for us to pray.
We will come back to that idea shortly, but let’s begin with this statement:
All men are either in Adam or in Christ.
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From one end of the Bible to another, the Holy Spirit quite frequently assigns layers of spiritual significance to real personages, cities and nations.
In Ezekiel, for example, the “prince of Tyre” is an analog for Satan himself. Manifestly, the real, human prince of Tyre never appeared in Eden. Likewise, John calls Jerusalem “Sodom and Egypt” in the book of Revelation, perhaps because the people of that city have at times displayed the moral character of both places. Again, in Galatians, Paul uses Hagar and Sarah as allegories for two covenants.
Observing this principle may help us with a few verses in Micah 5 when our attempts to interpret him literally hit the wall. Back to that thought in a bit. Let’s do the comparatively easy stuff first.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
In case you’ve never seen it before, TL;DR is internet shorthand for “too long, didn’t read”. Its existence and very common usage online points to a problem for Christians seeking to communicate the truth of God to others through technology, which is that we are often working with a very short window of attention.
Tom: There is little point in us bemoaning reduced attention spans, Immanuel Can: they are a reality among millennials, and if we want to speak for God in the current environment, we’re going to have to learn to deal.
Churches today need leaders — badly. And biblically speaking, that means they need elders.
“Elder” doesn’t necessarily mean old but it does mean spiritually mature, so some age and experience are required, of course.
Unfortunately, spiritually mature people are in short supply these days. I fear that the majority of my generation, the currently middle-aged, didn’t spend much of their youth reading the Bible or seeking spiritual growth opportunities. Consequently, those now in the best age group to be selected as elders to lead the churches are not quite up to the task.
But churches still need leadership.
John Garner is convinced churches in America are dying. Raised Episcopal, he concedes he hasn’t been inside a church building in quite a while, and neither has anyone he knows from his own generation. Why might that be? Garner observes, “I’m not sure if it’s Covid, a lack of people my age, or just general laziness.” His musings on the subject can be found here, along with useful links to self-reported attendance data from a variety of denominations.
As a reasonably unprejudiced onlooker, my first instinct is to suggest Garner’s problem may be a lack of a living, personal relationship with Jesus Christ (whose name does not appear once in an article about the church of which he is Head).
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One of my seven “sniff tests” for heresy is that an author strings together impressive lists of verses unquoted and out of context, but a closer look shows most or all have nothing to do with the points they are alleged to support. Paul Ellis’s The Silent Queen serves as a great example of this technique, and I promised to do a second post examining his “evidence” that the Christians of the New Testament permitted women to participate in church meetings in exactly the same ways men did, and that Paul taught this as normative.
That’s the context here.
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“If perfection is impossible in this life, why did Jesus tell people to go and sin no more?”
Jesus actually did this twice, and both accounts were preserved for us by John, one in chapter 5 of his gospel, and the other in chapter 8. In my Bible, the latter narrative comes with a disclaimer to the effect that the earliest manuscripts of John’s gospel do not include it, which, frankly, doesn’t bother me a whole lot. I have always loved the story of the woman “taken” in adultery. It portrays the Lord in a way that seems to me wholly consistent with his revealed character. I believe John wrote it and that it is God-breathed just like the rest of his gospel.
Still, opinions vary about that passage. If you discount it, then you only have to answer this question once.
True faith is an expression of submission and obedience.
When a person believes on Jesus Christ, he believes on the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s who Jesus is. A believer receives a Lord who saves and a Savior who lords. The person who expresses faith in this way may never understand all that involves. They simply know they are lost, they realize they need salvation, they cry out for mercy and they put their trust in a Lord who saves, with the emphasis (in their minds) on being saved.
However, once they have come to him, they realize they have come to one who not only saves but also rules. He is Lord.
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Why our English Bibles start Micah 5 where they do is one of those little mysteries to which I will likely never find an answer, but in Hebrew, chapter 5 begins with verse 2. That makes more sense, because the prophet has manifestly changed subjects, moving from a future siege of Jerusalem to God’s answer to a nation’s prayers. It’s a better spot for a chapter break.
In chapter 4, Micah spoke of a king-less Israel longing for the restoration of its monarchy. In chapter 5, he gives us more information about this coming king.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
USA Today has a story about Christ Fellowship in McKinney, Texas, a church that is all-but-entirely online.
Download a worship program if you like. Stream a sermon and share your own thoughts about it in real time through live chat. Donate online or swap goods and services with your fellow believers. Sing along with a tablet hymnal, if that’s your cup of tea.
Tom: This is not merely an evangelical thing. Catholics with iPhones can download a “confession app” to speed up their next visit to the local parish priest.
Are we starting to reach the level of self-parody, Immanuel Can? Or do you see some value in a digital church?
Alison writes:
“Something [has] been bothering me for a really long time. Everybody says, ‘Read the book of Job for comfort, blah blah blah’, but look at Job 1:8.
‘Have you considered my servant Job?’ The speaker is God.
OMG did you get that?!?! It was YHVH who pointed Job out to the Adversary in the first place! He might as well have said, ‘Sic him, Satan!’ ”
[Throws hands in the air and wonders what it’s all about anyway]
That’s a big question, Alison. And though your wording may jar some readers, I think that at the end of the day, it’s actually quite a fair one.
A heresy in the popular sense is a belief or theory at odds with established beliefs or customs. This is the way I will use the word throughout this post, and it’s not far off the way the word is employed by the writers of the New Testament.
Heresies vary in magnitude, detectability and potential consequences. Some heresies are obvious, and therefore easily avoided; others come couched in weasel words and obscured by rhetorical sleight-of-hand. Some heresies are outright damnable; others merit commendation or disapproval.
Few heresies pass my sniff test.
The religious world is full of theories. The sniff test is a set of criteria by which I make my own quick-’n’-dirty assessments of whether to buy into the theory behind any sermon, book, video or random expression of theological opinion. Other believers have their own sniff tests. A friend recently emailed me a link to a video with the tag line “Can you smell the brimstone?” Indeed, I could; the video provoked yesterday’s post.
“Who wants to live forever?” sang Freddie Mercury of Queen, somewhat prophetically, in 1986. He died of AIDS five years later, a shell of himself at the end. Freddie didn’t write the song (guitarist Brian May did), but its answer to “Who wants to live forever?” is a rhetorical “Not me.” It ends with the line “Forever is our today.” If anything, the song is a plea to live life to the fullest in the here-and-now, rather than an expression of yearning for infinite time on earth.
Brian May is no idiot. We live in a fallen world. “What is this thing that builds our dreams yet slips away from us?” he writes. “Who wants to live forever when love must die?” Better to expend whatever one has left in a good cause, no?
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“Is it wrong to marry someone who is much older/younger?”
The Bible teaches Christians to marry heterosexually and in Christ. These are the issues with which every believer seeking a life partner should be most concerned. Further, sprinkled throughout scripture are clear indications of character qualities that make for happy marriages. A believer is wise to look for such attributes in a prospective spouse.
Beyond that? There are few moral limitations I can think of with respect to a partner, but that doesn’t mean there are no practical considerations.
Samuel Rutherford once wrote to his friend, “I find it most true that the greatest temptation out of hell is to live without temptations ... Faith is the better for the free air and the sharp winter storm in its face. Grace withers without adversity. The devil is but God’s master-fencer, to teach us how to handle our weapons.” The Lord has used that last sentence more than once to lift discouragement and despair from my shoulders. I believe it expresses the truth.
So tell me, what kind of faith do you have?
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The last five verses of Micah 4 and the first verse of chapter 5 contain two very different sets of instructions, both directed to the “daughter of Zion”, which we have established is a collective designation for the men and women descended, however distantly, from those Jews whose national identity was epitomized by the city of Jerusalem. Other than a single reference to the “daughter of Zion” by David in Psalm 9, all uses of this phrase in scripture come from a 230-year snippet out of Israel’s extended history.
This being the case, it would not be the least bit unreasonable to conclude Psalm 9 is prophetic, and speaks of the same subject matter with which all these later prophets are concerned. Even a brief scan of the psalm demonstrates this to be true.
We will come back to that.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
A recent article in Global Orthodox reveals Russian society and government are increasingly rejecting Western liberal ideology. One example: the Lower Chamber of Russian Parliament unanimously passed a bill banning the promotion of non-traditional sexual relations or preferences among Russian citizens of all ages on its first reading.
Tom: Thinking of moving to Russia anytime soon, IC?
Immanuel Can: Can I bring my snowblower?
The most extraordinary thought occurred to me today.
I’ve been debating with atheists online again …
Yeah, don’t ask.
Anyway, one of the funny things they do is to call up the alleged records of theist “atrocities”, which of course they then want to attribute to all Christians. Apparently, we’re responsible for everything from the Crusades and Inquisitions to the Holocaust and (according to atheist popularizer Bill Maher) “all the wars”.
If this lack of any historical or theological awareness were not funny enough, a favorite canard of theirs actually involves the Salem Witch Trials.
Briercrest College and Seminary is an evangelical Bible college in Caronport, Saskatchewan where, since 2013, you could get a university degree without going to university. It also continued to run sports programs over the last three years when many other post-secondary institutions had shut theirs down. These two features have made Briercrest attractive to a broader range of students than previously.
Naturally, there is a cost to that.
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Ray Greenley expects to be judged before the great white throne described for us in Revelation 20. He writes:
“All roads ultimately lead to the great white throne judgment, where each of us must stand before Jesus in all of His power and splendor and give account for all of our deeds.”
Greenley is not an outlier in this respect. GotQuestions notes that other Christians believe “the great white throne judgment in Revelation 20:11-15 will be the time that believers and unbelievers alike are judged”.
Personally, I don’t think all roads ultimately lead to the great white throne. It is a common assumption, and it certainly simplifies the judgment question, but it is impossible to make a good case for this from anywhere in scripture, least of all Revelation 20.
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“Does the Bible promote arranged marriages?”
If you are getting your moral direction from Hollywood, you might think the only legitimate basis for marriage is romantic love. If not romance, at very least a pragmatic consideration of one’s own interests is surely in order. For example, a woman in her late thirties who desperately wants children might be willing to settle for marriage to a man for whom she doesn’t have strong feelings, provided they are compatible in their thinking about the importance of family.
But does the Bible teach that something other than our emotions, intellects and will ought to be involved in the process, specifically the direction of others?
“Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we ask you, brothers, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by a spirit or a spoken word, or a letter seeming to be from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come.”
That day, Paul says, shall not come unless there be a falling away first. A “falling away” is a departure from what has always been held, from what has traditionally been known and believed. And this falling away, as we shall see, is on the part of those who profess to be obedient to the teaching of the gospel.
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From John Gill’s introduction to Micah 4:
“This chapter contains some gracious promises concerning the glory and happiness of the church of
Christ in the last days; as of its stability, exaltation, and increase, and
of the spread of the Gospel from it, Mic 4:1, 2; and of the peace and
security of it, and constant profession and exercise of religion in it,
Hmm. Notice anything weird here?
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Tom: Oh no, here we go: Immanuel Can has been getting email again.
Moody Publishers and Justin Buzzard have this to share:
“Everybody in your city has a story. Preaching is your opportunity to share the Bible in a way that engages each one. But how do you do this with both Christians and non-Christians at your service?
“The unexamined life,” said Socrates, “is not worth living.”
Well, he didn’t actually use those precise words, but that’s
how it’s been quoted since — in books, on coffee mugs and
How seriously ought we to take that? True, he’s called the Father of Philosophy, and he was notoriously smart. But the guy wore bedsheets, and died a long while ago. How seriously can you take a guy dressed in bedsheets?
“I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
The Lord Jesus came to create division, and when he returned to his Father, he left us with the division his visit, his person and his claims created. Those who have believed in him enjoy a unity and a commonality previously unimagined, which we sometimes call fellowship. But the difference between his children and those who are not his own is the difference between light and darkness, between righteousness and lawlessness, and between Christ and Belial.
That is not always apparent. It is especially not apparent to those in darkness.
Do you know where this new term “speed of science” comes from? It showed up in memes a few weeks ago and I had no idea. I had never heard it used. Well, I found out today. If you already know, take a bow.
It comes from the answer to a question posed in a European Parliamentary hearing. Dutch MEP Rob Roos asked Pfizer’s Director of International Developed Markets whether Pfizer tested or studied transmissibility before releasing their version of the COVID vaccine to market.
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“Is premarital sex okay if you know you are going to be married?”
I have written a fair bit here about the barnacles that encrust the institution of marriage today: how matrimony as God originally designed it required the approval of neither church nor state; how rings, dresses and ceremonies are extra-biblical window dressing; how even vows are a bit extraneous.
From a heavenly perspective, little of what we do today in preparation for binding two lives together is actually essential. Frankly, even romantic love is optional.
“There was a widow in that city who kept coming to him …”
Don’t measure God’s care for you by what you’ve got and haven’t got; by your problems or your prosperity. Don’t measure those things. They have nothing to do with the character of God.
The character of God is to be measured at the cross — “God so loved the world”, “God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” — that’s where the measure of God’s love is. That never changes.
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Last week we invested a couple thousand words in discussing the three verses Micah and Isaiah have in common. The differences between the two passages in the original Hebrew are so miniscule as to not be worthy of lengthy discussion. It is obvious these two prophetic contemporaries were right on the same page in their messages to the nation of Judah at a time when, if not for the reforms of King Hezekiah, it might well have joined its sister kingdom in Assyrian exile.
However, from this point on the preachers part ways. This week I’d like to consider the differences between the two sermons that follow.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
You may not have heard of him, but Kelvin Cochran was Fire Chief in Atlanta up until last week when he was terminated by the mayor. He was also a Christian. You can read about it here if you’re interested.
There is some disagreement as to precisely why he was fired, but the bottom line is that if he had not published a book entitled Who Told You That You Were Naked?, in which he expressed his understanding of the biblical view of homosexuality, he would still be employed.
Tom: Immanuel Can, former Fire Chief Cochran is not the first and won’t be the last Christian to lose his job as a consequence — whether it’s a remote or a direct consequence — of taking the Bible seriously and saying so publicly. We are both Christians with opinions who still work for a living. What’s your take on this developing trend?
“The medium is the message”, said the great philosopher of mass media, Marshall McLuhan.
It’s his most oft-quoted line, since it’s so often true. When you have a message to send, you’ve got to be very careful about the form (i.e. the “method” or “medium”) in which you’re sending it, or the message itself can become horribly distorted.
Asked in an online forum last week: Is our social media community a church?
Interesting question, and one that almost nobody would have posed with any degree of seriousness prior to COVID. But if you think lurking in a Zoom meeting is “gathering” in anything remotely approximating the biblical sense (and apparently many Christians do), then it’s not unreasonable to ask how far you might take the concept of virtual church.
Naturally, a spate of comments followed.
Many years ago, long before they were woke, crazy and depraved, I was a big superhero comic book fan. I owned shelves full of them. In my early twenties while still in college, I wrote and drew a few published comic books to see if I could make a career out of it. (I probably could have been passable if I had persisted with it, but I would never have been a top-drawer industry professional.)
Superhero comic books are like soap operas in that they tell multiple small stories within larger story arcs that overlap and never really end. The idea is to get the reader invested in the characters and coming back month after month to see what happens next.