Dating Jeremiah

The prophecies of Jeremiah appear in nothing remotely resembling chronological order. The text supplies no explanation for this, but it’s definitely the case. I am confident there is an intentionality in the Holy Spirit’s arrangement of his word, but whatever it may be, his logic defies easy analysis.

Speculations inevitably ensue. Reader suggestions include scribal error, editorial accident, literary device, arrangement by topic or theme, ordering by length of message and even multiple authors.

Refusing a Direct Order

If I have the story right, a few years ago my nephew drove an ax into his own foot while chopping firewood at camp. I imagine it hurt a fair bit. He made his way to one of our northern doctors, who performed a rough and ready repair without anesthesia, which made for an interesting series of sensations he had little desire to repeat.

Life is full of such learning experiences. I’m pretty sure my nephew has had occasion to pick up an ax since, but no such mishaps have resulted. Perhaps he stands differently to cut wood, or hews from a different angle, away from his own body. Maybe he takes care to work undistracted. I don’t know what the change might be, but whatever it is, it seems to have worked.

Anonymous Asks (424)

“Does a wife have to submit to her husband?”

The way we frame a question tells people quite a bit about the assumptions that provoked us to ask it. Moreover, in seeking to answer an anonymous question, the reader finds himself making assumptions about the person asking it that are hard to avoid and may well be entirely wrong. For example, the way today’s question is framed immediately sends my brain down a particular track. I am already making assumptions about the writer — female, issues with authority, chip on the shoulder, etc. — all of which may be complete rubbish.

The Prophetic Curveball

Like Fred MacMurray, Rachel had three sons. Boy, I’m dating myself with that one.

Work with me here. I know the patriarch Jacob’s favorite wife only gave birth to two boys physically: Joseph and Benjamin. No need to argue about that. Her unfortunate death in the immediate aftermath of bringing the latter into the world ensured she would produce no more heirs for Jacob.

But she still ended up with three boys. Some of our readers are getting it now.

Somebody Else’s Mail (23)

Several pieces of internal evidence prompt Bible scholars to link Psalms 9 and 10. The most obvious is an irregular acrostic pattern that begins in Psalm 9 (alef through kaf) and which Psalm 10 completes (lamed through tav), though EW Bullinger asserts seven letters are missing. A second clue is the lack of superscription on Psalm 10, and a third is the fact that in the Septuagint they form a single psalm.

Despite these indications, reading the two psalms back to back also raises more than a few questions.

Too Hot to Handle: Brimstone and Deceit

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

Tom: Here’s a hot topic we’ve yet to discuss, IC — at least, it’s generated some serious heat for [former] Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, sufficient to rate an article in The New York Times.

At issue is the government’s determination to tie federal funding for youth job programs to the expression of politically correct opinion. It’s about $113 million annually, give or take, and approximately 70,000 jobs are at stake.

The Prime Minister dismisses the very predictable negative reaction from Canadian conservatives as a “kerfuffle”.

Tracking True

So it was my birthday, and a friend says to me, “Why don’t we go sailing on the big water?”

I’d sailed in a small way before, but that sounded good. So off we set.

My friend let me take the tiller while he went up to the prow deck and relaxed in the sun. “Just keep your eye on the compass in front of you and trust that,” he said. “So long as it says what it says now, we’re going to be on course.”

Real Guilt and Phantom Guilt

Revisiting the past can be a draining and unpleasant experience.

Let’s start with this: some parents are better than others, but no parent is perfect. That includes parents who were relatively established, mature Christians when they began raising their children. There is just too much we don’t know at 25 or 34. There are things about parenting I am just learning now, three decades later.

So then, at some point, the chickens come home to roost. Your children will either start telling you in which ways you failed, or else their progress in life (or lack thereof) may tell the story more eloquently than any words. You will have one of those very unpleasant “I did THAT?” moments.

Semi-Random Musings (53)

This 2021 post documented how, in not much more than a single generation, Jewish religious leaders went from burning the prophecies of Jeremiah — and physically abusing him for making them — to preserving and circulating those same predictions for posterity, such that Daniel in exile had his own copy of what eventually became Jeremiah 25.

In fewer than 66 years, Jeremiah went from pariah and public menace to one of Israel’s most respected prognosticators, though he probably didn’t live long enough to see his career re-evaluated.

Anonymous Asks (423)

“Why didn’t Jesus write any books of the Bible?”

If we’re going to be pedantic, there’s an argument to be made that he did. The Bible refers to the Holy Spirit as “the Spirit of Jesus”. It also tells us that same Spirit superintended the writing of the Bible. “Men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” and “All scripture is breathed out by God”, literally in-Spirit-ed.

If we accept what the Bible says about the process by which it came into existence, then technically speaking Jesus didn’t just write one book of the Bible, he wrote them all.

A Good Question

“Dad, why does everybody shut their eyes when they pray?” my daughter once asked. It’s a good question, and one that never occurred to me in my own childhood. I know now why I still do it instinctively: it’s because it was drummed into me both by precept and example.

To be fair, I can’t remember my parents instructing their children to do it, though both practiced it. Mind you, they also religiously practiced an afternoon nap, and that didn’t come out of either Old or New Testament. With four children relatively close together in age, I’m pretty sure it came out of sheer exhaustion. I have never felt obliged to mimic that habit.

Somebody Else’s Mail (22)

To date our studies have treated Psalm 9 as another of many that only a future believing Israelite remnant may sing in the text’s absolute and final sense.

Two Saturdays ago, we compared the language of this psalm to the language of the historical books concerning David’s personal dealings with the nations, and found they were an uncomfortable fit. Whereas David subdued individual nations temporarily only to have them rise up again against future Israelite kings, Psalm 9 speaks of God’s final, annihilative judgment of national Israel’s enemies as a collective, something David never saw during his lifetime.

So then, either Psalm 9 is a study in pure hyperbole, or else it is literal and prophetic, in which case David is speaking in a voice other than his own.

Too Hot to Handle: Surveying Evangelicalism

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

The current state of our evangelical Christian churches is not the easiest thing to encapsulate in a few sentences. While each of today’s Protestant denominations originally sprang from a set of shared doctrinal convictions and associated practices, few could ever have been called monolithic, and evangelicals are even less so. Some groups bear the same name but believe and do things very differently indeed.

Tom: My experience with folks from the denominations is primarily online, but our own Immanuel Can has been out church-shopping of late, and may have a better view from the trenches ... er, pews. Does the average modern evangelical church building still have pews, IC?

Mismeetings of the Christian Church

“Blest be the tie that binds
 Our hearts in Christian love:
 The fellowship of kindred minds
 Is like to that above.”

So sang the congregation.

And they sang it every Sunday.

They sang it whenever it was announced that they had a visitor or new congregant come among them.

A nice gesture, wasn’t it?

On Calling Jesus Lord

“No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except in the Holy Spirit.”

“On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord’.”

Critics of the Bible like to pit unrelated verses against one another in hope of identifying a contradiction and thereby discrediting scripture. Yet my personal experience over sixty years has been that examining any pair of apparent Bible contradictions in context generally has the effect of making perceived difficulties vanish in the proverbial puff of smoke.

Semi-Random Musings (52)

Given the eschatological assumptions of postmillennialism, I should probably have expected this, but it really didn’t hit me between the eyes until I saw it in plain language in their own words. That school of prophecy declares, “the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ” not just in the near future but right here and now, in the present moment.

How they explain the current state of the world around us through that interpretive lens is a mystery to me, but there it is. If Christ is indeed acting monarch of the universe in the present moment, it seems to me he is ruling with uncanny self-restraint.

Anonymous Asks (422)

“Where would you call ‘home’?”

Many of the Bible’s great men were strangers, living in places they didn’t truly belong.

Abraham is a fine example, among the earliest. God promised him the land in which he sojourned, but Abraham never possessed that territory during his own lifetime. He lived in tents among people he did not know and with whom he had little in common.

When his wife died, he described himself to the Hittites as a “sojourner and foreigner among you”. He had to solicit a place to bury his dear Sarah because he possessed no real estate of his own.

Not Like the Others

“One of these things is not like the others
 One of these things just doesn’t belong.”

— Sesame Street, before its writers went woke

One of the great privileges of celebrating the Lord’s Supper is that any male believer is welcome to participate vocally. That principle draws its authority from 1 Corinthians 14:31, which says concerning church meetings, “You can all prophesy one by one, so that all may learn and all be encouraged.” The “all” in that verse means “all you men who are gifted prophets”.

We know that because the word Paul uses for “prophets” in the passage is masculine. The Greek language has a separate word for female prophets that we translate into English as “prophetesses”. That’s not the word Paul used in this chapter.

Somebody Else’s Mail (21)

“Sing praises to the Lord, who sits enthroned in Zion! Tell among the peoples his deeds! For he who avenges blood is mindful of them; he does not forget the cry of the afflicted.”

If you read this verse in the NASB, you may be forgiven for thinking David was name-checking a cheesy vampire flick. There, it reads, “He who requires blood”, a statement which sounds odd to modern ears but is nonetheless the most ruthlessly literal of all translations.

The author of Psalm 9 made no such silly Hollywood associations and neither did his original readers. The subject was deadly serious. The ESV rendering above is less literal but a little easier to process. So let’s talk about this title of YHWH, or maybe of Christ, if the distinction is worth considering.

Too Hot to Handle: How Do You Read It? (5)

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

Tom: We’re in the middle of batting around commonly misunderstood Bible verses. Here’s another frequently-quoted line for you, IC, this one from Proverbs:

“As he thinks within himself, so he is.”

I mentioned in another post a few weeks ago that I’ve often found other people understand individual proverbs very differently from the way I understand them. This one is no exception.