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“What does it mean that the Holy Spirit will guide you into all truth?”
The Lord Jesus promised his disciples that when the Spirit of truth came, the Helper from the Father who would convict the world of sin, righteousness and judgment, he would guide them into “all truth”.
Before we look into the meaning of this promise, we need to remember that every member of the Lord’s audience at the discourse that began in the upper room was in a unique and impossible-to-duplicate position.
Western culture separates the wedding ceremony from the wedding celebration, usually by no more than a few hours. Jewish culture in the first century did too, but between the legal contract of marriage [erusin] signed by the husband and the bride’s father and its celebration and consummation [nissuin] lay a considerably longer interval. The marriage supper and its aftermath might take place weeks, months or years after the signing of the contract.
It might even be indefinitely postponed, assuming we are reading the relevant instructions in 1 Corinthians correctly.
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Several years back, my cantankerous next-door neighbor had her front walk redone with great, imposing slate pavers. I’m not sure they harmonized with the look of her property quite as well as the railroad ties she had in prior years, and I bet they cost a bundle, not least for the prodigious amount of labor involved in what initially looked like a fairly small project. It took three men several days to tear up what was there and replace it.
There was only one problem.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
If the quotation in this Breitbart article is even close to accurate, the head of the Roman Catholic church has just thrown one of the most important principles of first century Christian faith under the bus:
“The last thing I should do is to try to convince an unbeliever. Never. The last thing I should do is speak.”
Tom: So now the most revered figure in one of the world’s biggest branches of Christianity insists all testimony to Christ must be non-verbal. What do you think of that, IC?
“Well, you know, many roads lead up the mountain …”
So he said to me.
People say stuff like that all the time when they want to avoid facing God. “I can do it my way,” they say, hoping that saying it strongly enough will make it true. Or, they say, “Everybody’s got a piece of the truth, but nobody’s got it all,” like the story of the blind men and the elephant (if you know that little tale).
An old acquaintance obsessed with classical literature used to observe that her generation was “killing the adverb”. The vocabulary of her schoolmates had degenerated to the point that they no longer modified or qualified their verbs with the eloquence and succinctness possessed by the writers of previous generations.
She would not have found that in the New Testament, even in the most modern English translations. Far from being dead, the adverb is everywhere in the Christian life.
“It is required of stewards that they be found faithful.”
If you ever rise to the spiritual heights of the apostle Paul — and I have lately come to the conclusion that I am unlikely to manage that — you will be nothing more than a servant and a steward. That is the very best you and I may aspire to in the Christian life, and our efforts to remain conscious of the reality that everything we have been given has been temporarily entrusted to us by God are a mark of growing maturity in Christ.
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“How can we know the Holy Spirit is present with us when nobody is expressing strong feelings?”
Some Christians — often women, let’s be honest — evaluate the spiritual temperature of a religious gathering by its perceived emotional intensity; by whether participants spring a leak while praying, singing or sharing their thoughts. If they had their way, there would be a box of Kleenex in every pew and we would take our spiritual temperature by how often they need replacement.
Is this actually a biblical idea?
“There are some things in them that are hard to understand …”
Paul could be a difficult writer. Peter says as much, while affirming that the Holy Spirit carried along his fellow apostle throughout the authorial process.
It’s all too easy to point to examples in Paul’s epistles. The run-on sentences. The apparent digressions and rabbit trails. The practical instruction that turns out to be theology as well, and operates on two levels. It’s not exactly Christianity 101, but this is how God chose to reveal the mystery of Christ and the mystery of his church to the world. Who are we to say he should have done it differently?
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The prophet Zedekiah once forged a pair of animal horns out of iron as an object lesson for the kings of Israel and Judah, who were contemplating going up to Ramoth-gilead to fight the king of Syria. It must have been quite a dramatic moment when he trotted out his artistic creation in front of the two Hebrew kings on their thrones before a gathering of 400 prophets, crying out, “With these you shall push the Syrians until they are destroyed.” Too bad Zedekiah was actually a false prophet regurgitating what he thought King Ahab wanted to hear.
All the same, his literal “forgery” gives us a little bit of insight into the meaning of the imagery in Zechariah’s second vision.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Some people market Christianity like fire insurance, and others buy into it in fear of judgment. Then there are the folks like Joel Osteen who tell us being a believer will make us powerful and successful. Others who claim to represent Christ tell us that knowing Jesus will make us better human beings, improve our relationships or help us cope in bad times. Intellectual believers may say that in their search for truth, the Christian worldview best explains things about which they have always wondered.
Tom: Immanuel Can, there is a certain amount of rationality in most of these motives, but do they really get to the core of the Christian message?
“Clowns to the left of me,
Jokers to the right,
Here I am
Stuck in the middle with you.”
— Stealers Wheel, 1972
Doesn’t it seem these days like the world has divided right down the middle? We’ve got Conservatives and Liberals, Democrats and Republicans, Brexiters and Europhiles, open borders advocates and controlled immigration people, social justice warriors and free speech advocates, the politically correct and the deliberately controversial, individualists and collectivists … and on, and on, and on.
Iron and clay, maybe.
He’s Just Not That Into You was a 2009 romantic comedy that explored why relationships fail or succeed, and why a romantic pairing that appears to have “worked” for years suddenly stops working for one of the partners, whether it’s the man “falling out of love” with the woman or vice versa.
In the various couple-scenarios trotted out by the movie’s producers, it apparently never once occurred to them to introduce one in which the woman was on hormone-based birth control when she first became attracted to her future life partner, then stopped using the pill once they had committed to each other.
Maybe research into all “the pill’s” many side effects wasn’t quite there in 2009.
Actions have consequences. That’s easy to say, but the implications are not always so easy to unpack.
I was thinking about this a few days ago when a friend asked what the church can do (pre-emptively, rather than after the fact) about the frightening increase in children from Christian families who are identifying as gay, lesbian and trans.
My answer was immediate: Encourage committed Christian parents to work less and get by on lower incomes in order to free up time to home school their children from kindergarten on.
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“When does grief become excessive?”
Grief is appropriate in a fallen world. The Lord Jesus taught that those who mourn are blessed, and will be comforted, and that the poor in spirit will inherit the kingdom of heaven. Scripture teaches that God himself may be grieved by the sins of his children.
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Mark’s list of the twelve apostles includes the names of two fathers: Zebedee and Alphaeus. Matthew includes the same two fathers, and Luke includes Alphaeus.
If you wonder why, look no further than their sons, both of whom are called James. To distinguish between them, the gospel writers use the names of their fathers as what are called disambiguators, phrases that clarify the author’s intended meaning.
Good thing too, or the New Testament could get pretty confusing.
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The phrase “the angel of the Lord” occurs 58 times in 19 Old Testament passages. Three of these passages are in Zechariah. The name appears to designate a unique being distinct from and possessing greater authority than other angels, one who identifies himself with deity and acts as if he were God.
We know the Lord Jesus was active on God’s behalf during the OT period. When we add to that John’s claim that no one has ever seen God, and that God has been (and continues to be) made known only through his Son, the Word, the logical conclusion is that the angel of the Lord was a visual manifestation of the preincarnate Christ.
More on that shortly.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
The German mathematician Johannes Kepler once responded to a question about his work in astronomy by saying “I was merely thinking God’s thoughts after him.” If that’s true in math or science or any search for “small-t truth”, it’s most applicable when we come to the study of God’s word. Explaining “Big-T Truth” for our fellow believers so they may grow up in Christ is one of the most important tasks ever given to men, and the challenge to do it right is described by Peter in the words “whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God”.
Tom: IC, we were just emailing each other about a sequential exposition series you’ve been sharing with other men in your own local church. Describe for our readers the small problem you’ve encountered and have needed to work at overcoming in the process.
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“I know the Bible says we’re not supposed to depend on our feelings, but sometimes, honestly, it gets hard to feel my faith. Any thoughts?”
Feelings? Yes, they’re tricky things. You’re right to wonder about whether it’s not just a little too optimistic to simply suppose Christians never ought to feel down. We all have moments in life when things are not just a little dark, but really, really dark. What’s interesting, though, is that the writers of the Bible are far from unaware of this.
“You need to dial down the language,
Mr. Patout,” I said.
“Don’t you lecture me, boy,” he said.
— From
The New Iberia Blues
by James Lee Burke
Some subjects are difficult to talk or write about without giving offense. The use of appropriate language is one of them.
In internet parlance, an “echo chamber” is a sociological phenomenon produced by the algorithms on major websites that respond to our choices of viewing material with suggestions for other options.
Because web designers want users to ingest their content, read their advertising and buy the stuff they are flogging, anything we look at regularly online generates multiple opportunities to do more of the same and fewer and fewer invitations to do anything different. Amazon does it. Google does it. YouTube does it. Your favorite news website probably does it. Everybody does it.
Sometimes it’s merely irritating. Sometimes it’s downright funny. But you must have noticed it.
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“Should Christians in democracies feel obligated to vote?”
Voting is not mandatory. Depending on how you think about it, voting can be anything from a privilege to a perceived civic duty, or even an exercise in futility.
Let me give you an example of the latter. In Canada, a “riding” is an electoral district with fixed boundaries
rarely adjusted by the reigning Powers That Be unless it favors their party’s
“We brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world.”
No matter how public our profile in life may be, and no matter how good our intentions, one of the things we cannot take out of the world with us is any rock-solid evidence that we have reformed its institutions or brought light to the darkness of the culture around us in any lasting, positive way. Unlike the changes that Christ brings to the individual human heart, the effect of any changes we introduce into the system will always be fleeting at best.
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Two months before Zechariah began to receive messages from the Lord for the people of Judah, the prophet Haggai received his first recorded revelation, a message to the two men who represented civic and religious authority among the returned exiles, the governor Zerubbabel and the high priest Joshua. The Lord instructed these two to lead the people in rebuilding the temple, a project they had abandoned almost two decades prior.
Twenty-four days later, work began at the new temple site. Slightly less than a month after that, the Lord sent a word of encouragement to them through Haggai. Ten days later, Zechariah received his first message.
The people of Judah had shown their willingness to obey God when they realized obedience was the only alternative to unrelenting economic misery and personal frustration, but their hearts still needed serious spiritual work.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
David de Bruyn’s series of Letters to Stagnant Christians at Churches Without Chests hit what both Immanuel Can and I considered its peak this week. It’s an insightful post entitled “Confirmation Bias” in which David makes the case that it is possible for Christians to fail to grow in Christ as they should, not because they agree too little with what they hear, but because they agree too much.
Tom: Now, that sounds a bit counterintuitive, doesn’t it, IC?
Immanuel Can: Well, yes. We might wonder how it’s possible to agree too much with anything God says. That seems highly implausible at first. You’re going to have to unpack that a bit, I’m thinking.
Skeptics of Christianity do not like the doctrine of original sin.
“It’s bad enough,” they say, “that you Christians insist we’re all sinners personally; but what is this belief that we all come into the world under the curse of Adam? Adam was one person, and we’re different persons — how can one man’s sin be blamed on others, especially after thousands of years? How is that fair?”
“They … have gone after the Baals, as their fathers taught them.”
Do you ever wonder why so many unsaved people get increasingly bitter as they age? I believe it’s because you become like the things you chase.
Idolatry is the quintessential Old Testament sin, but it also serves as an analogy for other types of extreme self-interest. The word Baal simply means lord or owner, and the New Testament teaches us that ownership of the human heart comes in many guises.
Men and women are different in so many ways I’m not sure they’ve all been quantified.
Of course, these differences exist on a spectrum. There are logical women and emotional men and, in between, every permutation and combination of character qualities, personality quirks, family patterns unconsciously assimilated, and cultural affectations. Nevertheless, no matter how you slice it, men polarize at one end of the spectrum and women at the other. Those of both sexes who hew closer to the middle than the extremes, often through no fault of their own, may find life more difficult in certain respects.
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“Why would God release Satan after 1,000 years?”
Any answer to a “why” that is not clearly spelled out in the text of scripture itself is bound to be somewhat speculative, but it seems to me that the text of Revelation 20 does indeed give us a few clues with which to formulate a reasonable suggestion.
Major or Minor, the vast majority of the Old Testament prophetic text is made up of visions, oracles or messages from God through the prophets to individuals or nations. There are exceptions, of course. Isaiah contains a historic interlude or two, as do Haggai, Daniel, Ezekiel, Jonah and especially Jeremiah, who provides an exceptional amount of useful historical context.
In addition to the history, some prophets also recorded the personal instructions, special insights, correction or encouragement God gave them in the process of serving him, and the substance of their conversations and interactions with him. Jonah does this in every chapter.
But no prophet preserved more of God’s editorial commentary on his own messages than Jeremiah, all the way through the first 2/3 of his prophecy.
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Zechariah is the second of three post-exilic Minor Prophets and the eleventh of the Twelve. Like Haggai, he had a tendency to date at least some of his prophecies, which enables us to map them against events described in Ezra and Nehemiah. It also means we can date the beginning of his recorded ministry to a mere two months after Haggai began his, in the second year of the reign of Darius the Great in 520 BC, just after the people of Judah began a serious second effort at rebuilding the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Roughly eight years ago now, I watched a couple of Mark Driscoll videos and commented on them here. Driscoll, once dubbed “one of the nation’s most prominent and celebrated pastors” by no less than Forbes magazine, took a tumble about a decade back, resigning from his pastorate at Mars Hill Church in Seattle over accusations of arrogance and a “domineering style of leadership”. He reappeared in Phoenix around 2016, after which I lost track of him.
Driscoll’s sermons were edgy and frank, his style ultra-modern. Immanuel Can sent me a link to one of his more recent videos this week, and not much about the man has changed in the last decade, except maybe the addition of a beard and the affectation of some “manly man” stage gear: faded jeans, boots and an outdoor work jacket.
Tom: I’m not sure if you are aware of this, IC, but a decade ago Driscoll’s favorite schtick was to trash the Christian men in his audience while lauding the women and feminists, especially single mothers. He seems to have done a complete about-face, and is now encouraging Christian males to be “traditional men”, and pointing out ways in which the church has been regrettably feminized.
Yesterday I was listening to a secular scholar again. (Okay, it was JP.)
He was speaking about the Bible, its value as a text and its importance in human history. At the same time, he was expressing disbelief about how it had persisted. It’s a “strange old book”, he said. It’s “contradictory” and “cobbled together”. He puzzled over how it was possible it could ever have “such an unbelievable impact on civilization”. But at the same time, he concluded, “However educated you are, you are not educated enough to discuss the typological significance of the biblical stories.”
And then he went on to try.
It is often said that Christianity is countercultural, and I think that’s true — at least, it ought to be true most of the time. If Satan is indeed the “god of this age”, as Paul wrote, and “the whole world lies in the power of the evil one”, as John put it, then, for Christians, aligning ourselves with any new movement in our culture is more likely than not to be a step in the wrong direction.
But even when someone unremittingly evil is pulling the strings, you can’t be sure everything happening around you is intrinsically or pervasively wicked. Satan disguises himself as an angel of light, sometimes using genuinely good things to mask his involvement and agenda. Nor can we trust emerging social trends, however welcome they may initially appear, or rely on them not to suddenly reveal deeply negative aspects we could not anticipate. Satan’s apples are full of cunningly concealed Gillette products, and Christians are wise to mute their approval when others are cheering unreservedly for universal implementation of the latest big idea.
As a consistent method of interpreting the prophetic scriptures, amillennialism fails at the most basic levels.
That’s not a new thought. I first expressed it back in 2019 when reviewing Kim Riddlebarger’s 2013 update of A Case for Amillennialism: Understanding the End Times. I wrote, “The devil may be in the details, but far-reaching doctrinal errors are all in the broad strokes and almost never in the minutia. I’m becoming convinced of it.”
I’m even more convinced of it after reading Matt Waymeyer’s response to Riddlebarger, 2016’s Amillennialism and the Age to Come: A Premillennial Critique of the Two-Age Model.
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“Is it inauthentic or dishonest for two Christians to remain married when they don’t get along?”
It is simply a sad fact of life that not every Christian enjoys the company of every other Christian at every moment. Almost everyone grinds our gears in one way or another. As soon as the honeymoon is over (and sometimes before), you will find out things about your partner you didn’t know and don’t like. Put two very different believers under the same roof, bind them legally and spiritually to one another, and you have a recipe for persistent unhappiness when one or both behave unbiblically.
David de Bruyn’s blog series giving pastoral advice to various types of stagnant Christians continues this week with a post on the importance of church attendance. I have not agreed with every position he takes throughout these letters, but major kudos to David for bringing these issues to our attention and provoking thought and conversation with his posts.
Of course attending church is very important indeed. No difficulties with that.
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The second chapter of Haggai contains two references to the shaking of heavens and earth, the first in verse 6 and the second in verses 21-22. “For thus says the Lord of hosts: Yet once more, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land.” And again, “I am about to shake the heavens and the earth, and to overthrow the throne of kingdoms.”
These promises have far-reaching implications for both Jews and Christians.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
A friend recently sent me a link to this Kirk Dunston blog post on the importance of sexual morality to civilization. Dunston was struck by the relevance of Joseph Unwin’s research to our particular moment in time, as summarized in his 1934 book Sex and Culture.
Tom: Being a philosophy bug, I thought you might find this interesting, IC. I had certainly never come across Unwin’s research before. It sounds fascinating. Basically, as Dunston puts it, he “examines the data from 86 societies and civilizations to see if there is a relationship between sexual freedom and the flourishing of cultures”.
Few would attempt to argue our culture is currently flourishing.
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.*
“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.
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.
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“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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.