Smeagol on a Leash

The title?

Ah, yes. Well, to get that, you’ll have to have seen the blockbuster film Lord of the Rings, or have read J.R.R. Tolkien’s original trilogy. There’s a scene in there involving a loathsome little creature named Gollum or Smeagol. He’s a kind of nasty little creature of the dark, a sinister and malevolent little dwarf, who is taken captive by two of the adventure’s heroes, as an alternative to having to kill the homicidal little maniac on the spot.

Smeagol doesn’t take well to being ‘rescued’ in this fashion; and his obstinacy and treachery compel the heroes to put a rope around his neck and lead him where he is bound and determined not to go. The subsequent convulsions of wheedling and drama are truly magnificent. You can see his performance right here.

So now you’ve got an idea of my central metaphor for the day.*

Denying the Obvious

“Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false …”

That the end times will be associated with mass deception is not generally disputed. Both the Lord and his apostles warned of it. I used to wonder how the whole world might be taken in so successfully. Are most people really that gullible?

Well, yes, apparently.

Oversimplifying the Age to Come

I always enjoy a little light holiday reading, so in the last week I have been working my way through Matt Waymeyer’s heavily footnoted 2016 book Amillennialism and the Age to Come: A Premillennial Critique of the Two-Age Model.

I will probably review Waymeyer’s excellent and scrupulously thorough dissection of the two-age model at some point in the near future, but in the meantime, a few very general observations about the amillennialist system of interpretation that reading about it again brings to mind.

Anonymous Asks (283)

“Why should I care about the sovereignty of God if it has no practical effect on my life?”

If we reject divine determinism as unbiblical, we may be tempted to conclude that the sovereignty of God has no practical consequences for believers. In fact, this is quite untrue.

An Empty Stomach Will Do

When the prodigal returns to his father’s house in the Lord’s parable in Luke 15, his motive is quite self-serving and pragmatic. “I perish here with hunger.” For all the insight we have into his thought processes, his resolve to confess his sin to his father may have had more to do with his empty stomach than an abiding sense of guilt or an accurate assessment of the scale of his own perfidy.

Mining the Minors: Haggai (6)

The Chaldean Empire was ruled from Babylon until that fateful night recorded in Daniel 5. After the death of Belshazzar, it staggered on a few years, but the relatively bloodless conquest of the empire’s capital city effectively signaled the rise of the Medo-Persians to the world stage. Cyrus quickly subdued his Median allies and moved on to other conquests, making the Persian Empire the virtually uncontested world power for the next 200 years or so.

This well-established historical note makes the last few verses of Haggai all but impossible to apply to Zerubbabel personally, though there are certainly those who will try.

Too Hot to Handle: Friendship and Testimony

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Earlier this season, TV host Ellen Degeneres took some serious flack for sitting side by side with former U.S. President George Bush at an NFL game in Dallas, especially because she and Bush appeared to be having a good time with one another. Twitter promptly erupted into the usual outrage-fest, with commenters calling Bush a “war criminal” and so on, obliging Degeneres to defend herself:

“I’m friends with George Bush. In fact, I’m friends with a lot of people who don’t share the same beliefs that I have. We’re all different and I think we’ve forgotten that that’s okay that we’re all different.”

Tom: No shortage of Christians expressed approval of Degeneres’ comments.

Hope, and the Problem with People

Last week we were talking about hope. I hope you found it hopeful.

Our key text was 1 Corinthians 13:7: “Love hopes all things.” And we were pondering the exposition given to it by the Danish Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. If you didn’t read that one, I really encourage you to go back and read it before forging ahead. Some of what I will say depends heavily upon it.

The big realization with which we left off was this: Christian hope is not ever to fail. It is to persist all the way to its fulfillment in eternity. We are to hope until we see the object of our hope, the blessing, the justice and the righteousness guaranteed to us by God, in eternity. All of life is to be lived in hope.

Now, let me mess that up.

Going to the Dogs

“They are all silent dogs; they cannot bark, dreaming, lying down, loving to slumber.”

Our late Shih Tzu was not a silent dog, but he was probably as close as you’ll ever get. He almost never barked, and when he did, about the most you’d get from him was a polite, solitary “Arf.” If you didn’t respond to that, you were on your own.

A non-barking dog is world’s greatest pet when you live in an apartment and want to maintain some sort of decent relationship with your neighbors. But our little guy would not have made much of a watchdog.

Top 10 Posts of 2023

We could probably sum up the inadvertent theme of this year’s top ten new posts with the words, “Jews, More Jews and Book Reviews”. If only I had managed a book review of something related to the people of Israel, we could have done it all in a single post.

There’s no denying how personal politics became in 2023. Everybody has an opinion, informed or otherwise. Without further ado, here are our ten most-read new posts of 2023.

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“Do I need institutional accreditation to pastor?”

It very much depends on what you mean when you use the word “pastor”. There are at least three possibilities I can think of. (1) You are contemplating making a livelihood from preaching and teaching in a local church. (2) You desire the work of an elder and are just using “pastor” in a less formal sense as a synonym for “shepherd”, which it is. (3) You are using the word in a completely informal sense, meaning you just want to care for God’s people even if nobody but the sheep and the Lord notices you doing it.

Reasoning About Reasons

Years ago, I sat on a civil court jury. A fellow had incurred a fatal injury and his family was looking for monetary redress from a panoply of defendants.

The duty assigned to me and to my fellow jurors was first to assess the evidence and determine if, in fact, there was any blame to be allocated. But the job was a great deal subtler than that. If we determined that something or someone was to blame for this man’s regrettable demise, our second task was to allocate responsibility between the guilty parties, using a number for each culprit less than and totaling 100 (say, for example, 50% to the victim, 25% to his employer and 25% to the company that leased the equipment on which he died).

Apparently, basic math was a prerequisite for jury duty. Who knew?

Mining the Minors: Haggai (5)

Exactly three months after the returned exiles of Judah obediently began to rebuild the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem following a hiatus of at least seventeen years, the prophet Haggai delivered yet another message from the Lord to his people. Unlike the previous two, which were messages of undiluted encouragement, this one did not seem designed to spare anyone’s feelings.

Sometimes we need an accurate assessment of our spiritual state in order to move forward.

Too Hot to Handle: Nonsense That Remains Nonsense

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Tom: C.S. Lewis has a line I love. He says, “Nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.” It applies nicely to lots of religious words and concepts.

I felt a little like that reading the Moody Publishers piece you sent me this week, Immanuel Can. The author of “Worship Leaders: We Are Not Rock Stars”, Stephen Miller, has written a short promotional piece entitled “Worship Leaders are Theologians”, in which he uses one extra-scriptural term to define another. My head is spinning trying to sort out all the modern church-speak.

How far away are we getting from the New Testament here, IC?

Quitting Before the Final Whistle

“It’s not over ’til it’s over” — so goes the famous saying in the world of sport. Pity the poor competitor who thought his team had secured victory, began celebrating, and forgot the last-ditch home run, the injury-time goal, the buzzer-beating long shot, or didn’t quite get into the end zone before spiking the ball. Apparent victory suddenly turns to horror and shame.

Who would choose to be that man?

In scripture, we find this observation: “Love hopes all things.” A hundred times, perhaps, I have seen and heard this phrase … from the pulpit, on plaques, on the radio, and of course, in every wedding ceremony since Adam. Never have I thought much about what it means.

“Love hopes all things.” Sounds nice. So what?

Missing the Obvious

The tendency to read familiar Bible passages the way we have always read them is almost overwhelming, and sometimes we miss the obvious. Our assumptions about the meaning of any word or phrase invariably default to the way we first heard them or had them explained to us. Viewing them more accurately is the task of a lifetime of attentive reading and study.

The dissenting views of other Christians and the proliferation of translations helps. Hearing a text the way someone else hears it forces us to ask which interpretation — if any — is the correct one.

Anonymous Asks (281)

“What’s the difference between legitimate criticism and the kind of judgment Jesus condemned?”

“Judge not, that you be not judged,” said the Lord Jesus, providing critics of the Christian faith with their all-time favorite verse, which they translate into something like “Never form an opinion about how we live or what we are doing, and definitely never express one.”

Well, we know the Lord didn’t mean that. He also said, “Judge with right judgment,” so the first verse is manifestly not intended to be taken as a blanket statement.

Right at the Last

It’s Christmas again. We’re right at the last of the year.

It makes you think, doesn’t it? When you’re young, it makes you think of toys and candy and holidays. You’re all about looking forward in your youth. Later, you’re more about looking on: about watching your own children experience the same pleasures, more than feeling them yourself. And as life moves on, and more and more of your lifespan slips into the rear-view mirror, you can’t help but gradually shift to a looking back sort of mood: the end of each year becomes an occasion for mental stock-taking and thinking about what it’s all added up to.

Harking the Herald Angels

“So this is Christmas,” sang John Lennon, “and what have you done?”

That Lennon — never one to get a point.

Whatever Christmas means, you can trust me: it’s not about what you’ve done. When you get stock-taking at the end of the year, you can easily get more than a little depressed. How has the year worked out? Did you achieve all the goals you set for yourself? Did you always live up to the mark, always do your best, and always win what you hoped? How’s it all been going?

Merry, merry Christmas indeed!

Mining the Minors: Haggai (4)

Three old trees of considerable size overshadow my backyard. Between them, they block most of the sun’s rays and tend to kill off the grass near the house. Every year, once the snow is gone and the temperature is regularly above zero, while those big trees are still bare and letting the sun through, I go out with a couple bags of the hardiest, quickest growing grass seed I can find on sale and sow the affected area to catch the spring rains. If the timing is right, I’ll often see little green shoots in a week or two. By June, the whole lawn looks lush.

Next year I’ll have to do it all over again, but that’s how it goes.