119: Zayin

I don’t always believe everything Hebrew scholars say about their alphabet (or anything else). As I may have mentioned, they have a tendency to be whimsical.

Nevertheless, they suggest the letter Zayin [ז] represents movement and struggle, not to mention the number seven. Literally, it means “weapon” or “sword”, and looks like one — or so it is claimed — if you angle your eyeballs exactly the right way when you squint at it.

I’m still trying to see it, but then I’m about as Hebrew as a polar bear. To me it looks more like a club or maybe a wooden mallet.

Too Hot to Handle: Woman Overboard

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

Last week we discussed the “new normal” — that almost 70% of divorces are now initiated by unhappy wives — and suggested a number of possible reasons for a phenomenon that is growing not just in the world but in our churches: young women brought up in Christian homes, most or all of whom have made professions of faith, seem increasingly able to walk away not just from their husbands but from their families, often to raise the children of their new partner.

Tom: We talked about the Internet and the work environment, IC, and the family-associated problems of over-protection and legalism.

But let’s leave the family for a moment.

Just Church (3)

In our last segment of this serialization, we were looking at how a new belief system is currently penetrating evangelical congregations. We saw that it begins with someone, or some group of people, who seems very, very nice ... well-intended, kind, and focused on making sure everybody is welcomed and included, and nobody is made to feel pushed to the margins, especially because of things like “race” and “gender”. It all sounds, at first, like a matter of simple Christian fairness, so it seems hard even to express a hesitancy about it.

However, as this new push for inclusion continues, it becomes apparent that more and more serious changes are involved. Every part of church life is starting to morph, and new people are becoming the voices that are heard first in important church decisions. Should you be concerned? You don’t know. Aspects of the new spirit that is coming over your congregation seem harmonious with Christian kindness; but if you’re attuned to the spirit of things, you’ll also notice a kind of hardness creeping in, a sort of coldness and unkindness to anybody who implies any problems with the new program might exist. And maybe you wonder if it’s all so thoroughly loving and Christ-like as it was first presented to be.

But even if you don’t have those intuitions of concern, you will notice practical changes are going on. Some seem necessary. Others ... you’re not so sure. And this is where we pick our story up.

All But Forgotten

Dying is the great leveler.

I work for an estate service these days, and I’ve seen the closing chapters of men and women on the high end of the financial spectrum up close and personal.

You may not know this, but the rich often die as unpleasantly or mundanely as the poorest of the poor, some more so. The deathbeds of the wealthy sit in rooms with loftier ceilings and more elaborate decor, but they are still deathbeds. The sheets have a higher thread count and those who lie under them are declared deceased in silk undergarments, but the process is no different.

When you’re old and sick, there are things no amount of money will buy.

The Tears of Esau

“He found no chance to repent, though he sought it with tears.”

Esau couldn’t turn back the clock and undo losing his birthright and blessing to Jacob. That’s really what the writer to Hebrews is talking about here. Genuine repentance for sin and reconciliation with God are always options unless your heart is so hard you would never do it or your mind so dull you don’t realize it’s necessary or desirable.

But a do-over that gives you back the thing you lost? That’s rarely possible, and it wasn’t for Esau. Blessing and birthright were gone forever. So Esau experienced all kinds of regret but no real repentance.

What we’re seeing in the mainstream American media for the last week or two is the tears of Esau. In some cases, they are the tears of a crocodile. But the clock will not roll back regardless.

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“Was Jesus a Palestinian?”

The word “Palestine” has an interesting etymology. It appears five centuries before Christ in the secular history of the Greek Herodotus as Palaistínē [Παλαιστίνη]. The similarities to our modern noun are obvious. The Greek word in turn derives from pᵊlištî, a Hebrew word that appears as early as Genesis.

Other ancient languages like Akkadian and Egyptian had similar constructions, so it’s probable Hebrew simply transliterated it from another local tongue as “Philistine”. To the Hebrews it meant “immigrant”, to the Egyptians “sea people”.

The Forgotten Priestly Function

The priesthood in Israel performed numerous functions, all of which have some spiritual application to Christian living.

The Israelite and Judean priesthood offered sacrifices to God, prefiguring the praise and worship of believers. The priesthood performed an intercessory function, offering sacrifices to cover sins. The priesthood taught the law, just as Christians who let the word of Christ dwell in them richly are able to teach and admonish one another in all wisdom. Moreover, the priesthood judged between clean and unclean, just as the Christian must learn to avoid earthly ties and partnerships.

119: Waw

The first Waw [ו] in the Torah (pronounced vav) begins its sixth Hebrew word, thus joining the words for “heaven” and “earth”. This is also the twenty-second letter of the Hebrew Bible (our Genesis 1:1), so scholars believe it represents all twenty-two individual powers of creation and all the letters of the alphabet together. (The Hebrew alphabet, as mentioned several times in this series, has only twenty-two letters.)

Literally, ו means “hook” or “peg”. Hebrew sages say the letterform portrays Jacob’s ladder, reaching down from heaven to earth. It’s a nice thought, but personally I think those sages may have waxed a little fanciful.

Too Hot to Handle: Abandoning Ship

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

Men have always done it mid-life — some men, anyway, though thankfully Christian men did it somewhat more rarely.

We met the “right” waitress, secretary, serving wench or married woman bathing on a rooftop and bailed on our wives and families. We did it to find happiness (or at least firmer skin or, for a time at least, a cheerier disposition). We did it to demonstrate we were still virile and desirable. Or we did it for some other perfectly scrutable male reason that we wholeheartedly believed was unique to our own experience.

Tom: It took them a while to catch up, Immanuel Can, but thanks to feminism’s influence, women are doing it too, and they’re doing it with a vengeance. Almost 70% of divorces are now initiated by unhappy wives.

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Chapter 1: In the Side Door

“For certain people have crept in unnoticed, those who were long beforehand marked out for this condemnation, ungodly persons who turn the grace of our God into indecent behavior and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.”

One day soon, a very nice person will appear in your church.

It could be a person from a visible minority group, somebody disabled, somebody with a distinctive skin color, or somebody who doesn’t look any different from most of the congregation. It could be a man or a woman; and while it is more likely to be a young-to-middle-aged person, it could conceivably be somebody older as well. Likely, but not certainly, it will be a formally-educated person, somebody with a university degree, perhaps; but not necessarily. They may appear singly or in a group of some kind.

Something Nice

“If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothin’ at all.”

The saying is venerable, to be sure, but not old enough to merit inclusion in holy writ. They’re not the words of a prophet, they’re the words of a rabbit.

Nevertheless, to this generally prudent advice, I would add the following gentle suggestion for my fellow Christians when commenting on politics: If you can’t say something understandable, don’t say anything at all.

Staying in Your Lane

A few years ago I watched a friend melt down in slow motion.

At the time I didn’t know it was coming. If I had known, I might have said something, but I had my own family distractions to deal with and he seemed to be managing. He was one of those good guys who shows up in a local church with a surplus of gift, energy and goodwill, and is immediately drafted into everything. He was recognized as an elder despite a shortage of family qualifications. He ran the youth group and helped with Sunday School, preached regularly, spoke at conferences, worked a more-than-full schedule and he and his wife were relentlessly hospitable, despite not having a large place to share with others.

And then suddenly … POOF! He was gone.

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“What is a post-Christian society?”

I remember first using the term “post-Christian” in the early 2000s. A Roman Catholic co-worker my own age with whom I shared a fair number of views about society was trying to pin down where and when Western culture began to slide into the abyss.

“Post-Christian” popped into my head as a good description of Canada in the new millennium. I probably picked it up from somebody else along the way, but it seemed apt.

A Dead Horse in the Church Parking Lot

To my great amusement, last Sunday’s post inspired a text from a regular reader only a few hours after it went up, requesting I suggest a few remedies for Christians suffering from reduced attention spans, which I suspect is almost every Christian in the Western world and more than a few outside it.

He’s a good friend, but he fell right into my trap, which was very much deliberate. I wanted our readers to stop and think.

119: He

Gabriele Levy’s Alefbet entry for today’s letter reads: “He [ה] represents divine revelation, the breath of the Creator (Psalm 33:6 — ‘By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host’). The world was created with the utterance of the He. It represents the gift of life and creates the verb of being (היה Haya — being).”

Wow, is that ever on the nose, as we will see shortly. The themes of life and being weave throughout this section of Psalm 119.

Too Hot to Handle: Performance-Church

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

Tom: You sent me a horrible parody of a contemporary evangelical church service, IC. You’ve got to know I couldn’t leave that alone. I’m still brushing my teeth to get the taste out of my mouth.

But when they’re snarking the modern eleven o’clock church meeting on YouTube, and especially when it looks horribly familiar to most of your audience, you’ve almost got to concede we evangelicals are done like dinner. And it appears we cooked ourselves.

Does this travesty seem familiar to you?

Immanuel Can: You seem more shocked about it than I. There’s a reason why the piece is funny so many people; it’s recognition. The jokes reflect the current reality of many, many evangelical-type churches.

Just Church (1)

Tom here. A Christian author IC knows recently gave ComingUntrue permission to do an online serialization of his yet-unpublished manuscript. IC has graciously volunteered his usual Thursday blog spot to promote it, which we will be doing over the next few months. The book is called Just Church, the graphic to the right is not the official cover, and I’ll be quiet now and let author introduce his own subject.

Introduction

“I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting him who called you by the grace of Christ, for a different gospel, which is not another; but there are some who are disturbing you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.”

There are certainly a great number of such warnings in scripture.

Do you think they’re telling the truth? I do.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Ahem

Folks:

I’ve been reading this little book from Regular Baptist Press lately, and have been rather impressed, I have to say. Not since Ryrie’s Dispensationalism Today have I seen a good treatment of dispensationalism at a very readable and contemporary level. This one’s even simpler than Ryrie, but so far, it has all its ducks in a row.

It’s not long, it’s in big print, and at a level that somebody in their mid teens could handle. But it hits all the right notes. It ties things to issues like supersessionism and the priesthood of believers, yet without using any sort of confrontational tone. It’s steady but gracious in its approach. Whoever the guy is who wrote it, he’s clearly got a deep and happy relationship with dispensational exegesis, but also a knack for speaking in a way that people can easily absorb.

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It’s been many years since I struggled with the issue of the New Testament canon.

I was never in any doubt that the NT was God speaking, or that we had an accurate record of Christ’s life and its implications in our hands today (or, for that matter, that the NT provides unshakable authority for the entire OT canon). My difficulty, seeking to serve the Lord by teaching the Word in my mid-twenties, was finding the best way to explain my confidence in scripture to younger believers.

Somehow, shrugging and invoking divine providence just didn’t feel adequate.

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“What does it mean to be baptized for the dead?”

The so-called Latter-day Saints or Mormons practice something they call proxy baptism, literally baptism for the dead. They believe individuals who have not been water baptized cannot enter the kingdom of God — “Even Jesus Christ himself was baptized,” they say — and so, under ecclesiastical supervision, members of their church will baptize a living person on behalf of the unbaptized dead. In doing so, they believe they are putting in place a critical component of God’s salvation requirements for those who can no longer do it for themselves, but would if they could.

The authority they claim for this practice is the apostle Paul and, more importantly in their view, an alleged revelation to the “prophet” Joseph Smith.