“For those who love God all things work together for good.” So wrote the apostle Paul, and so we believe. Of course, as with other frequently quoted verses of scripture, a variety of interpretations and applications exist and are commonly (and sometimes unreflectively) held by fellow believers.
Supposing your elders tasked you with expositing that familiar quotation from Romans on a Sunday morning, you might find you have to clear away a few cobwebs first.
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Today’s instalment takes us to the eleventh of our twelve judges of Israel. We are getting there.
At least eight tribes provided Israel with leadership and deliverance during the period of the judges, and perhaps as many as ten.* The tribal affiliation of at least two judges is questionable, so we cannot confirm precisely which tribes did not receive representation in leadership during the period. We can say with certainty that Reuben, Simeon, Levi and Gad go unmentioned.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Theistic evolution is a concept that has become increasingly acceptable throughout Christendom. As long as God is said to have directed it, evolution is a pill many otherwise-solid Christians seem prepared to swallow.
Tom: I read Terry Mortenson’s article on compromise this morning. It seems as good a starting point as any. He names a number of well-reputed conservative stalwarts whose own statements suggest they have gone (or went) a little soft on the issue — James Orr, Dyson Hague, George Frederick Wright, R.A. Torrey — to one degree or another, some as far back as the early 1900s. Other less conservative believers like Andrew Klavan accept evolution outright, convinced it’s so obvious that believing it is simply common sense.
People: you just can’t count on them.
That’s one of the things you can count on about human nature. We don’t have what it takes to see things through.
Oh, we mean well enough … and we intend to try our best … but often our best is a lot less impressive in the delivery than we thought it was going to be.
And let’s face it: most of us are just not in anything for the long haul. While the idea is new and the fire in us is fresh, we’re all enthused about whatever’s going on. But fires cool, and new turns old, and we lose interest.
A career, a program, a plan, a commitment, a hobby or a marriage … all fine in the short term, but give any of them enough time and everything turns out to be work.
So we quit. And honestly, sometimes by the time we do it’s just as well that we do.
An anecdote only: I won’t try to turn it into a thesis since it’s merely an observation.
The habit of using the Law of Moses as a way of filling in any perceived blanks left by the writers of the New Testament seems well ingrained among the supersessionist Reformers I encounter. For example, there are many discussions online about tithing these days. These almost inevitably take on a quasi-legalistic tone (“What must I do?”).
When you think about it, this makes some sort of sense.
“If it is not he, who then is it?”
Good question, Job. If it is not God who gives the earth into the hand of the wicked … if it is not God who keeps his appointed rulers from dispensing justice … then who can we blame? When we suffer inexplicably, whom but God may we reasonably charge with afflicting us?
Most deep thinkers eventually arrive at this question, and not all are omni-determinists. Job was several millennia pre-Calvin.
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“Why do people struggle with lack of faith?”
On its own, the word “faith” is content-free. There is no such thing as generic faith. To talk about believing without asking what you are supposed to believe is like trying to order dinner at a restaurant when you’ve never been given a menu and the waiter refuses to tell you what the options are. A question so unspecific is quite impossible to answer meaningfully.
Faith always has to be in something or someone. It cannot exist in a vacuum.
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The subject of faith has been on my mind this week, and we’ll revisit it tomorrow in our usual Monday “Anonymous Asks” post. Faith does not come easily to many, and even those of us habituated to trusting in Christ to meet our physical and spiritual needs on a daily basis find occasions when we too struggle to believe the Lord will do the things he has promised.
Far more important in the long run is faith that saves. One man’s honesty about his personal struggle to find it touched me the other day, and I’d like to share it with you.
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Joseph had two sons during his glory years in Egypt, Ephraim and Manasseh. When his father Jacob was old and full of years, he blessed the two boys and adopted them as his own sons, meaning that Joseph effectively received the birthright in his generation, the double portion of Jacob’s inheritance that Reuben, his older brother, had forfeited by sleeping with his father’s concubine. In Canaan, Ephraim and Manasseh grew to be among Israel’s most powerful and numerous tribes, and Manasseh held territory on both sides of the Jordan.
We have previously mentioned irony in Judges: there’s lots and lots of it. We come to more of it today. The last chapter of Jephthah’s story involves conflict between two brother tribes.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
In Matthew 16, upon Peter’s confession, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” Jesus responds with two promises, which we may briefly restate as: (i) “On this rock I will build my church”, and (ii) “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven …”
Tom: There’s more to these promises, obviously, but I wanted to consider a couple of issues. First, whether these are two separate promises, or if the second is merely some kind of amplification of the first, and second, when can we anticipate the realization of these promises.
I hear a lot of people talk about their love for the gospel. But then I also hear a lot of talk about how people “love” ice cream, their cars, their mates, their pets, and the NFL.
I’m pretty sure there’s a difference in each case.
There are different ways to love. Some of them are a million miles from the others. So what are people talking about when they say they really love the gospel?
I’m going to give you three different ways. There are probably more, but I’ve seen these three a lot.
Six years ago, a new Gillette commercial indicting all men for the sins of some prompted this discussion of biblical masculinity between IC and me. We concluded the sort of male behavior encouraged in scripture is not toxic, and that the problem is not that men today are too masculine, but that they are not masculine in biblical ways … and that’s when they are masculine at all.
It wasn’t just Christians who were turned off by Gillette’s politically correct hectoring. The ad was brutally panned within hours of airing, and I was curious how much money Procter & Gamble was prepared to lose to make the ideological point it was pushing. Well, now we know.
The words “mercy” and “grace” appear hundreds of times in scripture. We use them in the vast majority of our public prayers. They are among the most common words heard in churches and among Christians conversing.
As with so many words we use to express religious truths, both terms easily become jargon; clichés so comfortable we don’t even think about what we are saying. Grace especially has a broad semantic range, creating some overlap in meaning. (For example, the throne of grace is where we receive mercy and find grace.) Nevertheless, the concepts are not interchangeable despite their similarities and their occasional appearance in the same scriptural context.
It’s Tuesday. Let’s differentiate.
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“Why did Jesus weep at the grave of Lazarus?”
This week has been hard. An unsaved friend of over 30 years is on his way out of this world. He can’t communicate directly anymore, and his younger sister, the “baby” of the family, has been passing messages back and forth to me. I have every confidence the Judge of all the earth will do justice with respect to my friend, but his poor sister has no clue. Her desolation when she talks about losing her brother would break your heart.
Am I grieving for my friend? Absolutely. But I’m grieving even more for his family, who do not have the resources I do.
Matt Littlefield is posting about the rapture on his Substack account, and I couldn’t let that slip by without a little light commentary.
The post is entitled “Missed Another Rapture?”, and it’s about the false claims and erroneous connections made by some fringe dispensational Bible enthusiasts eager to be assured the Lord’s return will happen in their lifetime.
I don’t generally pay attention to the prediction-makers in Christendom. I truly believe it’s a fool’s errand to presume esoteric knowledge the Lord never intended us to pursue.
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I find it interesting that the scriptures rarely spend much time describing the conflicts in which Israel engaged (Jericho and Ai being exceptions). In a Tolkien novel, a battle may take multiple chapters to cover. Same with a secular history. But the writers of scripture are teaching moral lessons, and are not interested in martial minutiae unless it serves their spiritual purpose in writing.
In this case, the writer dispenses with a great victory over Ammon in a single verse.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Evolutionary biologist Colin Wright, who believes sex-associated personality differences are at least partly genetic, is deeply unhappy anyone would dare to challenge his worldview, set limits on his contribution to the public discourse, and disrupt his ongoing pursuit of intellectual fulfillment.
Who is doing such a thing, you ask? Why, it’s not the “moral majority” or the Christian Right; Wright dismisses Creationists as irrelevant. No, it’s the social justice Left.
Tom: It turns out the current state of evolutionary psychology has finally collided with the “blank slate” ideology of progressives, IC, and the sparks are making both sides unhappy. How unfortunate for “science”!
When I was young, back in the 1970s, disaster movies were in vogue. Perhaps the most memorable was Jaws (1975), but before that were such noteworthies as The Omega Man (1971), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Airport and Earthquake (1974). Afterward came such screen gems as Rollercoaster (1977), Meteor, Hurricane and The China Syndrome (1979). All in all, there were more than fifty such major Hollywood disaster productions released in the period.
And everybody was going to see them and talking about how great the special effects were or how spectacularly people were shown dying in them.
Odd, don’t you think?
Early in the last book of the Bible, the apostle John saw a vision of seven golden lampstands, in the midst of which was one “like a son of man”, the glorified Jesus Christ. He told John to write down the things he had seen in a book, and to send that book to seven Asian churches: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea. Then he told the apostle plainly that these seven lampstands in his vision represented those seven churches.
That book John wrote at the Lord’s command was Revelation.
“Though you have not seen him, you love him.”
How do we come to love one whom we have not seen?
This is not a new problem. There are no video clips of the Lord’s healings, sermons or public interactions available on YouTube. We have no pictures of him to look at. The last words he uttered on this planet were spoken almost two millennia in our past. For everyone outside of Judea, and who lived in the years after the Lord Jesus ascended to the right hand of the Father, knowing him and loving him — to the extent we manage it — has been the result of hearing and reading about him.
For many people, Christ himself is little more than an abstract idea. How do you genuinely love an abstraction?