When I was a kid I listened to a lot of rock music.
Most of it I got off the radio. I owned a few albums of my own, but was never the avid collector some of my friends were. I had some favorites, and I tended to stay with them for as long as they pleased me, then move on.
One thing I noticed right away, both on my albums and on the
radio, was the
I always thought that was weird.
The late Eugene Peterson translated The Message directly from the original Greek without reference to other English versions of the New Testament in hope that he could capture the rhythms, idioms and subtleties of the original language for a modern audience. That’s a laudable goal, and if Peterson’s efforts help new Bible readers engage with the text and older readers hear it in a fresh way, then they will not have gone to waste. We use The Message from time to time in our weekly Bible study, and it almost never fails to provoke a reaction. When Peterson is “on”, he can be brilliant, and even when he’s off, he tends to get the conversation started with a bang.
Biblical marriage requires a one-flesh union, but not every one-flesh union is a marriage.
After uniting for life the first man and woman in history, the Holy Spirit editorializes in Genesis 2, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” The Lord Jesus affirms this statement in Matthew 19. It is not mere patriarchal opinion.
Now notice what he did not say. Sometimes that is as important as what is said.
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“Should churches be seeker sensitive?”
A few weeks ago, I went to a church I’d never attended before. I took a couple of friends, one of whom is searching for meaning in her life and finally considering the possibility that her problems may have a spiritual component. From my perspective, the main attraction of this particular church was that it was close to her home and the online statement of faith looked orthodox.
The perfect is the enemy of the good and all that, right? I just wanted to get her there, and get her some spiritual food.
I am anticipating an interesting Bible study this afternoon. Our little house group has been doing an overview of the books of the New Testament in the order they were written (as best we are able to determine), rather than the order they are found in our English Bibles, and we have reached 1 Corinthians.
Because it is an overview, looking at main themes and ideas rather than granular detail, we usually try to cover an entire book in roughly an hour or so. That works well for Galatians, James and 1 and 2 Thessalonians. It doesn’t work quite so well for a book like 1 Corinthians, which has sixteen chapters on a variety of subjects, so we have had to split the book into five sessions. The section we are studying today begins with chapter 11, and the much-maligned headcovering passage.
Wish me luck. Or grace. Or something.
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Sometimes the study of Bible prophecy presents no easy answers. The pieces just do not seem to fit. Efforts to make a particular vision or oracle map onto what we know of the past creates conflict with the established historical record. Efforts to make it map onto the future creates conflicts with scripture. Or maybe both.
What can I tell you? Despite best efforts, this is one of those days.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Karen Wolff at Christian Books for Women gives some tips for the Christian on maintaining an upbeat attitude that are almost generic enough pass for the musings of whatever secular positivity guru happens to trending on the shelves in Chapters this week. She says obeying Paul’s injunction to “take every thought captive to obey Christ” involved purposefully replacing any negative thoughts we have with positive ones.
Tom: Such a thing is not always easily done, and I’m not even sure we have a scriptural warrant to pursue it. Certainly Wolff provides none, simply assuming the validity of her own premise. But her thoughts on the subject are similar to other believers I’ve encountered over the years.
“Moses said, ‘Please show me your glory.’ ”
What makes a person give up everything in order to follow Christ?
What motivates a lifetime of obedience and service?
What makes men into real men, spiritual men, dedicated men, godly men, and what makes women into women of substance?
Well, let’s see what the Bible says about that.
Ken Charman’s post entitled “A Career Suicide Note” at The Daily Sceptic is an entirely understandable venting of reasonable Boomer frustration.
Before you get offended, I am not using “Boomer” in the “Ok, Boomer” sense, lading it with the patronizing and refined disdain of the youthful set. I’m a Boomer myself, though just barely. Ken may not be, as he only refers to himself as over fifty, and Baby Boomers are technically 57 and up at present, born between 1946 and 1964.
My inexplicable obsession with statistics has been chronicled here and here, but I do try to keep a handle on it, recognizing it ain’t everyone’s cuppa. Mind you, the first stats post was in 2017, and the second only last year, so they are coming faster every time. As one hard-bitten detective might say to another on your favorite cop drama, “Uh oh, he’s decompensating!”
I’ll try not to run on too long.
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“Should I join an accountability group?”
Jeremy Myers says accountability groups fail miserably in that they “force” members to lie. His sexual temptation accountability group fell apart when police arrested a fellow member and successfully prosecuted him for molestation. Naturally, his attraction to minors had never come up once in all the group’s conversations about lust.
Understandable? I think so. I mean, would you talk about it? I wouldn’t. I’d spend all my energy trying not to even think about it.
Is brokenness desirable?
Unless you are around great numbers of mainstream evangelicals on a regular basis, you may not think so. But if you have been in such esteemed company, you’ve probably heard the enviable qualities of a broken spiritual state touted so enthusiastically over the last few years that you may have come to believe Christians ought to seek out and cultivate it.
Okay, let’s consider that.
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There’s no getting around the fact that the Bible’s pictures of wickedness are frequently female. We’re going to study one today.
Commentators occasionally feel the need to apologize for this, as if maybe the Holy Spirit might be a tad misogynistic, or perhaps the prophets of God went off the reservation and used imagery consistent with their patriarchal biases that he might not have personally approved.
Hey, we all know the Lord Jesus loved women …
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Immanuel Can: The only verse in the Bible that everyone today seems to know is “Judge not lest ye be judged.”
Tom: Sounds about right.
IC: Okay, so that verse seems to people to be conveying something important. Maybe it needs some closer examination.
Tom: Fair enough. Well, it seems to me there’s an obvious incentive on the part of those who use it to rebut any potential critique of their own behaviors — or the behaviors of those for whom they choose to be advocates. I mean, quoting a verse to an unbeliever would carry no weight at all, so it’s clearly a device to disqualify dissenting Christian opinion and shut down any debate before it begins.
It’s saying to you and me, “Aha, see, you’re not allowed to have a view on this.”
“Some bells cannot be unrung.”
So goes the saying when something has been done that cannot be undone. The ink has been spilled, the glass has been shattered, the clock cannot be rewound, the world has moved on. The arrow has flown, the words said cannot be recalled to the mouth, and “send” has been pressed. There is no going back, no fixing things “as they were”, or maybe “as they should have been”.
From now on, for good or for ill, things can never be the same.
As is often the case, this week’s instalment of Doug Wilson’s letters column turned out to be thought provoking. A reader notes that he can’t recall a single time in the lengthy history of Doug’s blog that Doug has spoken about his own struggles with specific sins.
It raises a perfectly reasonable question: When is public confession of my sins appropriate, and when isn’t it? What constitutes a legitimate Christian “confession session”?
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“He hated congregational religion. He hated the smiles and the manners of the Sunday-dressed Scottish Protestant, the emphasis on a communion not with God but with your neighbours. He had tried seven churches of various denominations in Edinburgh, and had found none to be to his liking. He had tried sitting for two hours at home of a Sunday, reading the Bible and saying a prayer, but somehow that did not work either. He was caught; a believer outwith his belief. Was a personal faith good enough for God? Perhaps …”
— Ian Rankin, Knots & Crosses
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“Is the sanctity of human life a biblical concept?”
Scripture is clear throughout that human life has intrinsic value. God made man in his own image and after his own likeness, a statement made about no other created beings in the universe.
That alone should make us cautious about taking the life of another.
We live in a broken culture. Not breaking. Broken. They did not see fit to acknowledge God, and God has given them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.
In Romans, that manifests in heartlessness and ruthlessness, dishonesty and disobedience, among a litany of other bad things. In reality, a debased mind manifests in all these ways at the expense of others, but it is also unbelievably self-destructive and internally contradictory.
Debased thinking is fundamentally unfit to accomplish anything. But debased people make the best pawns imaginable.
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In interpreting Zechariah, a great deal depends on the systematic theology of the reader. When you start with an ironclad overview of the prophetic scriptures in mind, it’s next to impossible to interpret individual passages without inflicting your prejudices on them. I’ll try to keep that in mind as I go along.
The next two visions are considerably more difficult. They must be, as scholarly opinions about their meanings are all over the map. I’ll give a quick summary of the major viewpoints and then, in most cases, tell you where and why I disagree with them, and what I’d suggest as alternatives.