Much of scripture is historical. No surprise there. We learn that in Sunday School.
History is just the words and doings of men recorded by other men, but Bible history is a little different in that the Bible’s historians recorded what they did not just to provide an accurate account of what happened, but with spiritual ends in view. Sometimes the conversations and speeches the Bible’s historians documented for us were essentially truthful; other times they were not.
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It has been observed that verses 2-8 of Nahum’s first
chapter are a poem or hymn about the wrath of the Almighty that appears to have
been written in the acrostic style of some Psalms
We might sum up Hebrew scholar Aron Pinker’s conclusions about it by simply saying the pattern is too consistent to be accidental and too inconsistent for his peers to agree about.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
James Smith’s Los Angeles Review of Books has a piece up called “How to Find God (on YouTube)” about a gang of “apostles” and “prophets” we discussed in this space last year.
Tom: You may remember our conversation about Independent Network Christianity (or INC), the post-Pentecostal charismatic internet church movement from California. (By “post-Pentecostal”, I mean that they are signs-and-wonders focused, as you might expect, but have no connection to denominational Pentecostals like the Assemblies of God. They are total freelancers.)
How do you feel about autonomous “Christian” movements, IC? Are they suspicious by definition?
When we began posting here almost ten years ago, I never planned on doing book reviews. Somehow or other it happened anyway: Andy Stanley even provoked five posts with a single paperback (Irresistible was and remains an epically awful idea).
Anyway, now seems as good a time as any to put links to all my reviews in one place so they can be easily located if anyone is interested. Our most recent posts are at the top, which is the opposite of my usual practice with these pages, but makes the page way easier to edit. (Too bad I didn’t figure that out ten years ago.) You can find the link to the new Book Reviews page with the links to all the rest of our ongoing features at the top of our home page right below our logo, or access individual reviews via the topic sidebar on the right.
“Shallum the son of Jabesh conspired against him and struck him down at Ibleam and put him to death and reigned in his place …”
“Then Menahem the son of Gadi came up from Tirzah and came to Samaria, and he struck down Shallum the son of Jabesh in Samaria and put him to death and reigned in his place …”
“Pekah the son of Remaliah, his captain, conspired against him with fifty men of the people of Gilead, and struck him down in Samaria, in the citadel of the king's house with Argob and Arieh; he put him to death and reigned in his place …”
“Then Hoshea the son of Elah made a conspiracy against Pekah the son of Remaliah and struck him down and put him to death and reigned in his place …”
Ah, the kings of Israel. Their history is very much like that of all the idolatrous nations around them. Somebody gets the kingship, then somebody else murders him and takes over. And each one is as bad as the last.
“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” as Roger Daltrey famously intoned.
Many modern Christians want to have their cake and eat it too, believing they can somehow reconcile pseudo-science with the miraculous events they find in their Bibles. They do this by mythologizing the early chapters of Genesis and anything else they find inconvenient to the secularized mind, often including Job, David and Goliath, Jonah and the big fish, and so on.
The point at which accommodationists believe Genesis moves from myth to history may vary from one to the next, but the intellectual contortions required for mythologizing scripture are the same wherever one draws the line.
Some writers distinguish between the phrases “kingdom of heaven” and “kingdom of God” in the New Testament, asserting they are intended to mean different things. This post from KJVBible.org is a typical example. Gaines R. Johnson claims, “Knowing the doctrinal difference between the terms ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ and ‘Kingdom of God’ is the key to understanding the complete time line of Biblical history past, present, and future, the proper place of the Church and the prophetic future of Israel.”
That’s a stack of pretty impressive claims, and it warrants a bit of investigation.
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“What did Solomon mean when he wrote that money answers everything?”
It has been said that every virtue carried to extremes becomes a vice, which is probably true. Every good thing indulged in to excess does much the same. This is surely true of money.
The verses prior to Ecclesiastes 10:19 contrast a kingdom run by self-indulgent drunks and gluttons with a kingdom administered by wise, self-controlled princes and officials who know the proper place for leisure and pleasure in their own lives. Obviously, the citizens of the second kingdom will have a better time of it than those of the first.
Those of us who love to study the word of God often spend a pleasant hour or two comparing scripture with scripture in meditation, and by seeking to understand its concepts by grabbing our concordances and tracing the way its writers use various words and phrases.
Sometimes this is fruitful. Other times it can be perplexing.
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Nahum begins his oracle, appropriately enough, by identifying its divine source and describing him for his readers. Who is the Lord, you might ask? Scripture answers that question in many ways at many different times. Here the answers appear to skew toward God’s destructive characteristics: jealousy, vengeance, wrath and power. It’s an intimidating prospect.
Still, we ought to bear in mind that for the victims of relentless oppression, God’s declaration of these characteristics about himself to their oppressors is cause for celebration.
It means justice is finally coming.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Tom: How much Jordan Peterson have you been watching lately, IC?
Immanuel Can: A fair bit, actually. The guy’s an interesting cat.
Tom: Good. I was afraid I’d have to come up with something original. :) Have you seen him express his thoughts on identity politics?
IC: Yes. It seems to me he’s very strong on the view that one should sort oneself and one’s own life and relationships out first, before getting involved in any sort of collective. So he’s saying to our generation of young people, Don’t focus on complaining about how unfair the world is, or on mobilizing others to do likewise, unless you’re also prepared to address the obvious areas of need for improvement in your own life. Makes sense.
“If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.”
Most of the time I enjoy writing these posts.
Sometimes, not so much.
Like today.
Today, I feel the truth of what I heard a preacher say once: “When you point your finger at somebody else, there’s always three pointing back at you.” Or, as the scriptures would put it, “Not many of you should become teachers ... for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.”
So I’m on my way to the crematorium the other day …
It occurs to me that line probably requires a bit of backstory. It wasn’t a people crematorium. Technically, it wasn’t even traditional cremation. No fire was involved. This was a “green alternative” process known as aquamation, or water cremation, which uses 90% less energy to produce the same ash residue as intense heat would.
It’s also half the price of regular cremation, and it was for pets, one of which lay in a Walmart bag on my back seat.
“On that night the king could not sleep.”
It has been pointed out that Esther is unique among the books of the Bible in that it contains no direct reference to God or religion. There are several indirect references to what appears to be divine providence or at least the potential for it, but nothing explicit.
For example, Mordecai tells Esther, “If you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place [Hmm, what place might that be?], but you and your father's house will perish” [I wonder how he could be so sure about that]. Esther responds by telling him to have the Jews fast on her behalf for three days. In scripture, a fast is not a fad diet, but rather an appeal to God.
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“How should Christians respond to someone who leaves the faith?”
The New Testament references several who turned away or would turn away from trusting Christ for one reason or another. Paul writes to Timothy concerning Demas, a fellow worker mentioned in Colossians and Philemon, that he “has deserted me and gone to Thessalonica”. Why? He was “in love with this present world”.
In a move that was all-but-inevitable from the moment they started ordaining women, Church of England bishops have announced they are launching a “major project on gendered language” in the next few months, with the goal (at least in some quarters) of moving away from the use of gendered pronouns for God. It might start with prayer language, but would quickly escalate to the rewriting of hymns, creeds and scripture itself.
“Our Parent who art in heaven,” anyone?
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Nahum is the seventh Minor Prophet in our modern Bibles and the fifth in the chronological order we are following in these studies, as well as one of the four shortest. (I promise not to turn this mini-series into 42 instalments!) Today’s post provides general background information on Nahum’s oracle and examines the terminology used in its first verse.
Boring? Maybe for some. Not for me. I figure we can all use a reminder that God keeps his promises about dealing with the wicked when their time has come, especially in the current year, when the wicked of our own day are in the process of taking off their masks of respectability and letting their true characters be seen.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Immanuel Can: Some years ago I had the movie The Big Kahuna recommended to me.
While for the most part it’s a movie with an unexpectedly charitable take on the motives of conservative Christians, there are a few moments in which the writer cannot resist taking a shot. One is in a conversation between Phil, the main character (a weary agnostic salesman played by Danny DeVito) and Bob (an evangelical junior salesman played by Peter Facinelli). Apparently, the younger man has committed the gross offence of having spoken to a valued customer about his faith without making any sales pitch for the industrial lubricant company both men are paid to represent.
DeVito’s character, Phil, is irate at the missed sales opportunity.
So … what if atheists took themselves seriously?
So seriously, as a matter of fact, that they actually tried to live out the rational implications of their own rejection of all possibility of God or gods? What then?
As I said in yesterday’s post, getting answers to this question turned out to be more difficult than it might initially appear.
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Reading the Bible regularly, repeatedly and without an agenda is a great safeguard against monomania.
Stephen G. Fowler is a medical doctor and student of psychoanalysis. I will probably have more to say about his 2017 book Probing the Mind to Free the Soul in a future post, but my interest today has more to do with his interpretation of a particular proverb than his subject matter or technical arguments.
Let’s just say his reading of the text may be more than a little influenced by his preoccupation with psychoanalysis.
Self-righteousness and hypocrisy are unappealing qualities, whether in gospel preaching or in discussing the word of God with believers. They provide one’s audience with a convenient excuse to dismiss ideas they might otherwise find persuasive … or worse, convicting.
Nobody wants to look like a Pharisee, right?
As a result, Christians seeking to avoid accusations of fake
piety are tempted to
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“Why did God use a lying spirit to deceive Ahab?”
The death of Ahab king of Israel is a fascinating story. The prophetic word through Micaiah the son of Imlah gives us a rare inside look at the interaction between the Almighty and the spirit-host of heaven. God had determined wicked Ahab’s time had come, so he inquired of the heavenly beings around him, “Who will entice Ahab, that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?”
A discussion ensued in which various spirits made suggestions, none of which the Lord deemed satisfactory.
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Three unrelated thoughts about failures of memory.
Critics of dispensational teaching frequently insist that it cannot be valid because we do not find it discussed explicitly in the writings of the church fathers or, to the best of our limited knowledge, throughout the next couple of millennia of church history. I have always found that a weak argument, not least because both our knowledge of church history and of the opinions of the church fathers are so fragmentary. In fact, precious truths are far more easily lost than we might think.
Perhaps that’s why Proverbs says, “Buy truth, and do not sell it.” Some things are invaluable.
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Sometimes the writers of the New Testament directly quote the prophets of old. Other times, they make allusions or obscure, paraphrastic references to prophetic subject matter. Readers may find it a little more difficult to be confident about whether these really mean what people say they mean. There are also cases, I think, where the writers of the New Testament are said to have a particular Old Testament passage in mind, and on closer examination it turns out they were probably thinking of something else entirely.
Let’s finish up our study in Micah by examining a few such passages in the New Testament. Some of these we can be very sure of, others not so much.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
The Chicago Tribune reports the Trump administration has quietly nixed the use of a number of social justice buzzwords in official documents. The Center for Disease Control and the Departments of Health, Justice, Education and Urban Development have all been advised that the words “vulnerable”, “entitlement”, “diversity”, “transgender”, “fetus”, “evidence-based” and “science-based” are off the table.
Tom: You’re a language guy, IC: Why does the terminology we use around the subject of controversial issues matter so much?
I’ve spent quite a bit of time talking with atheists.
You might wonder why. You might say, “People have to be open to the voice of God, or they hear nothing at all. ‘He who has ears to hear, let him hear,’ said the Lord. A man whose ears are already shut gets nothing — and, if we follow the Lord’s example — should get nothing, for he does not unite his hearing with any measure of faith. And without faith, it is impossible to please God.”
Even secular common sense accepts this. “A man convinced against his will remains an unbeliever still,” goes the axiom.
So why bother to talk to people whose minds are already made up? A fair question.
There’s an old bromide about a glass that may be considered half empty or half full, depending on whether the person drinking it is an optimist or a pessimist. Nobody ever stops to ask what we are in the process of consuming, which seems to me to be the more fruitful inquiry.
Before we ever begin a discussion of whether its half-emptiness or half-fullness is more desirable, Christians need to learn to ask this simple question: “What’s in the glass?”
Some substances you don’t want to drink at all, even if it’s only six ounces.
I had just finished Sunday’s post when Antemodernist dropped a new post of his own into my inbox. In this one, he starts with a question posed by a Calvinist: “What does praying to an Arminian God actually accomplish, since he can’t compel anyone to believe?” The Calvinist went on to assert, “Arminians pray like Calvinists when they pray for salvation.”
Antemodernist answers the question, but first explores a much more difficult one: “What does praying to a Calvinist God actually accomplish?”
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“If the Bible teaches the equality of the sexes, why has inequality always been the norm?”
This will probably come as a shock to some readers, but the Bible doesn’t teach equality, either of the sexes or of any other kind. If you doubt that, a concordance will sort you out in short order. There is a single verse in the New Testament where the word “equality” in the KJV may be construed to promote financial fairness, but the importance of strict equality of status, authority, privilege or even personhood is nowhere to be found in scripture.
I probably disagree with Michael Heiser as much as I agree with him. As I commented in an earlier post, Heiser “seems like a guy who has gone down a bit of a theological rabbit hole and may be in danger of seeing nothing but rabbits everywhere he looks”. That said, I have found what Heiser calls his “divine council worldview” exceedingly useful in broadening and fine-tuning my understanding of how God works. His books The Unseen Realm and Reversing Hermon are well worth reading and a good place to start if you have never heard of the man.
I was understandably saddened to read that Mike will not be writing any more books.
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Among the religious documents of the world, the Bible is unique in many respects. Not the least of these is the assurance it provides to those who believe it. We may better understand the appeal of the worship of YHWH in ancient times when we set it side by side with the worship of other ancient deities.
No other religious experience of that era in human history was framed in terms of relationship. The historians who write about the worship practices of other nations do not even use the word. The pagan invoked “my god” repeatedly, but there was nothing about his religious experience that would assure him the deity he addressed (assuming he or she could even be identified) cared for anything but a peace temporarily negotiated through blood sacrifice and offerings.
YHWH accepted offerings, but he was not like that.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
This topic is considerably less incendiary than the current Palestinian situation or the question of whether or not churches should be led by one man, but when Squidoo.com posted its list of “ultimate questions” and asked which ones its audience considered most important, this one finished second:
“Why do people insist on looking outside themselves for a reason for their life?”
Tom: Immanuel Can, what do you think about that: is there more than me, and why should I care if there is?
The congregation I was in last weekend was singing this new song:
“Holy Spirit, come invade us now
We are your church
We need your power …”
Eh?
These people believe the Spirit of God is outside of believers, and has to be called on to “invade”? They think the church of God does not actually have the Spirit of God already?
Surely not! But why were they singing such nonsense?
Back in 1939, theorist Kurt Goldstein coined the term “self-actualization” to describe the motive to realize what he called “one’s full potential”.
In Goldstein’s view this drive might take the form of creative expression, pursuit of knowledge or the desire to contribute to society in some personally-defined way. Goldstein believed self-actualization was any organism’s “master motive” and its most basic drive in life. Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory built on Goldstein’s concept and is probably the most familiar expression of it.
Among others in Christian circles, Rachel Held Evans seems to have bought into Goldstein’s theories.
Darlene Parsons and/or Wanda Martin at The Wartburg Watch are deep into it over complementarian commander-in-chief John Piper. In an article entitled “John Piper Backs Himself Into a Corner and Even Reformed Complementarians Are Confused”, TWW points out that Piper has well gone well beyond any biblical mandate he might have for his views on the roles of the sexes.
If you have no idea what a complementarian is in the first place, join the club. Large numbers of Christians have never encountered the term. Though the idea has apparently been around for years, I only heard it used for the first time very recently.
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“Is Christianity wish fulfillment?”
The idea that the Christian faith is a form of confirmation bias or a pleasing fantasy concocted by people who simply can’t cope with the hard realities of life has been floating around in one form or another for thousands of years. The old catchphrase “pie in the sky” was a flippant dismissal of the sort of person who puts all his stock in the belief in life after death rather than embracing a philosophy of “Eat and drink for tomorrow we die” like sensible, realistic people do.
To that I reply, “Say what???”
Being transformed into the image of the Son of God does not depend on me.
Thank the Lord for that.
There are things about Christian service that can be learned. Skill sets can be developed. Techniques can be applied. Practice sometimes makes perfect. I could, for instance, wholly apart from the Spirit of God, acquire a greater understanding of Hebrew and Greek through diligent study and as a consequence become a more accurate Bible teacher.
Whether much of eternal value would come from that apart from the Spirit of God is a separate question, but it can certainly be done.
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I find the next three verses of Micah’s prophecy very difficult to interpret, so much so that I almost put this post off another week to let it percolate. I like to do the spadework first, reading a passage repeatedly and then doing any relevant word studies before consulting the commentaries.
In this case, repeated readings and word studies still left me with major questions. I finally tapped out after checking eight or ten popular commentaries, few of which provided any satisfying insights, and concluded another week wasn’t likely to produce an epiphany.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
You’ve seen the meme going around. Or maybe you haven’t. It reads like this:
“I took my girlfriend to see it. She knew nothing about Wonder Woman. In the opening training scene she leaned over and whispered, ‘Those are all women?’ After the movie, she had to take a moment in the car. She said, ‘So that’s what representation feels like. I had no idea that kind of role model was missing from my life.’ Then we cried. Thank you, Wonder Woman.”
Tom: Anything about that sweet story make you the slightest bit suspicious it isn’t 100% non-fiction, IC? (Hint: the claim, “Then we cried” is strongly suggestive.)
Immanuel Can: This is a guy we’re talking about, right? I just want to check, because it’s by no means apparent to me.
Nearly nine years have passed since Fred Phelps went to meet his Maker, and it’s fascinating to observe how abruptly and extensively the acceptable bounds of public discourse have narrowed in the interval. Homosexuals are far from the only identity group it is no longer permissible to criticize, and many other subjects are now off the table. Still, more than a few of the thoughts expressed in IC’s post from 2014 remain relevant. — Tom
Fred Phelps, notorious pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas has died at age 84. I doubt many people are ready to cry much about that. According to The Independent, he rose to national notice after becoming the subject of the Louis Theroux documentary The Most Hated Family in America (2007). But for most, he is the man remembered for showing up at the funerals of dead homosexuals to exhibit a sign reading “God Hates Fags.”
Yesterday we looked at the unnecessary death of Josiah, Israel’s last great king. Today, I’d like to look briefly at four complementary passages concerned with the period of time during which Josiah reigned over Judah. I’m hoping these may help to refine our thoughts about the relationship between leaders and the led.
We often bemoan a lack of godly leadership in our day. That is not always our real problem.
The following quote purports to come from a 2020 Facebook post written by a woman who holds herself out to be the Handbell Choir Director at First Congregational Church of Houston, Artistic Director at Houston Chamber Ringers and a former music teacher.
Honestly, my first instinct is that it’s got to be the product of internet trolling.
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“Are home churches biblical?”
The first church in Jerusalem was made up of many smaller home gatherings. The Jewish believers displayed their new Spirit-empowered unity by “attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes”. Some commentators suggest the words “breaking bread” in Acts 2 simply refer to sharing an ordinary meal in common. It is certainly possible to construe them that way; however, breaking up into smaller groups gathering in private homes to remember the Lord Jesus would simply have been good strategy.
The people through whom God accomplishes his purposes are not always the guys at the top of your list or mine.
Sure, once in a while there’s a Moses or a David that comes on the scene and is almost singularly responsible for changing the course of a nation, reshaping popular opinion, or in some measure reversing a seriously destructive spiritual trend. From the safety of ample historical distance, it seems to us like God made a couple of good calls there — as he did with Joshua, Nehemiah, Hezekiah (for the most part), and many more.
But in the Old Testament, for every one of those obvious-in-hindsight choices, there’s a Jehu, a Samson or a Joab running around stabbing, pummeling, dropping houses on people or feeding evil queens to the neighborhood canines.
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Last week we suggested that in his final chapter, Micah is speaking with the voice of Israel’s remnant in a manner that may be understood both historically and prophetically.
Both ways of looking at the chapter were predictive at the time these words were given to Micah to share with his nation, but they were fulfilled with respect to the first timeframe, and still await fulfillment in the second. One is a matter of history, and we can look back through the later prophets and historians of the Old Testament to see how the things Micah predicted occurred roughly a century afterward.
The second way of looking at the chapter connects it with the book of Revelation.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Woodcrest Church has a helpful “Denomination Selector”. No, really, I’m not kidding.
The survey* asks the user to agree or disagree with a series of 24 statements along the lines of the following:
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and so on.
Malaysia’s top court has ruled that non-Muslims can no longer use the word “Allah” when referring to God. This despite the long-standing trend of Christians and other groups using the same name to refer to God in scriptures, prayers, songs and normal conversation.
The word isn’t a local Malay one, but rather a borrowing from Arabic. However, some Malaysians have no other word in their current vocabulary to refer to the Supreme Being. But apparently the two-thirds of the Malaysian population that profess Islam are now going to have exclusive use. Authorities worry that failure to distinguish Allah as a unique understanding of Divinity could result in confusion and lead people to be converted away from their religion. So they’ve legislated away the confusion.
Sounds about right to me.
I haven’t done one of these statistics-based posts since 2017, an exercise in self-control unprecedented for yours truly. So if you hate minutiae, come back tomorrow. Today is trivia time, along with maybe one or two observations along the way that are not completely insignificant.
Some people are more fun to know via the Internet than to put up with in real time.
Queen Elizabeth’s death last year set me to thinking about the lifespans of monarchs as I have been reading my way through Samuel, Kings and Chronicles. Let’s just say none of the kings in our Old Testament ever came remotely close to her longevity, let alone the number of years she ruled.
It’s hard to miss the fact that for most of the kings of Israel and Judah, the privilege of leadership went hand-in-hand with a relatively short lifespan.
Now that raises some interesting questions.
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“How can I become a more cheerful giver?”
Paul wrote that God loves cheerful givers. A quick look at the context shows he is using “cheerful” to mean the opposite of “reluctant” or “under coercion”. Giving, then, should be enthusiastic and voluntary, rather than induced by external or internal pressures like guilt or duty.
Have you managed that every time you’ve given to the Lord? Me neither. And yet it’s obviously the most desirable state to be in, and something worth working on.