Tangible First

22 September 2026

In our local ministry, we invest heavily in high-concept praxis. High-concept thoughts are interesting, to be sure, but not as an end in themselves. The interesting thought is a tool for challenging what we think we know, reworking things from first principles. That has a way of opening up fertile fields of application, and the application is the point. None of it really matters until it manifests in something tangible.

Take my years of work with homeless folks. It all starts with tangible presence in ways that matter in their world: a cup of coffee, a hug or a handshake, a bowl of chili, a gentle touch dressing a wound, a not-so-gentle touch to move someone away from starting a fight. Those tangible things are also symbols of larger possibilities: a caring conversation, a well-timed joke that diffuses tension, relaxed dominant awareness that holds the space and keeps it safe for everyone. But those are extensions of the immediate and tangible things. Without the tangible things at the center, the extensions all become hollow.

In bodywork, the same tangibility applies: touch is the center. Touch between humans can be a sacrament of general revelation: the image of God present to the image of God. When I quiet myself to be extensively present to another person in the contact, I know things I “shouldn’t” know, and my hands know what to do at a level that doesn’t make cognitive sense. That place of extensive presence is where all the techniques come from, and if you can find your way there, you don’t need a book full of techniques. The client’s body will tell you what to do. Sometimes, you’ll later find a technique you “made up” written down in a book. The point of entry for this is not a bunch of woo-woo meditations; it’s contact. (Fun side note: when we find that place the techniques come from, that place of intensive presence and attention, we also find that we are not alone there. There are other beings who notice that sort of thing, not all of them friendly–a discussion for another time.) 

In martial arts teaching, the same again: contact is the core. I could spend all day talking, but I can use my body to show a student a concept, an opening, a way of moving. Moments of movement are worth hours of words. After the movement, the words mean something and can be helpful (even essential, sometimes). Beforehand, less so.

I know that I speak very easily of this world as magical in ways many people have been catechized not to see, even if it is where they actually live. It wasn’t easy for me to get to this point, and (on my good days) I don’t expect it to be easy for anybody else, either. But at this stage of my life, I find that I simply have no time for a theology that refuses to deal in the full spectrum of reality.

I understand that some people have their doubts. I don’t know their history; perhaps they are within their epistemic rights to doubt my account of my experience; that’s something they’ll have to sort out with the Lord. I have to deal with what I’m responsible for. When Thomas rejoined the other 10 disciples after Jesus had appeared to them, even if he were within his epistemic rights to doubt, they were certainly responsible not to join him. They knew better. Of course that makes for some tension, but so what? I am proclaiming that which I have seen with my own eyes, which I have heard, which I have looked upon, and my hands have handled. I no longer have the luxury (if you could call it that) of doubt.

I insist on a theology that addresses the factors I have to address and that allows me a way to defer unsolved questions while still moving forward at the pace of real life. I’m a geek’s geek; of course I want to know all the answers to all the unresolved questions about how everything works all the time. But the reality is that the weddings, the funerals, the addictions, the week’s counseling appointments, the suddenly detonating crises that should have been last year’s counseling appointments—a day’s worth (at least!) of those things arrive every single day, whether we have our questions answered or not. We have to keep moving. We rely on what we know is real, and trust that the explanations will get better in time. Everything else, we can argue about over a pint. The physicists still don’t know how the four fundamental forces relate to each other, but in the meantime, engineers keep building bridges that work, and we all keep driving on them.

On the intellectual side, I’m about recovering a more robust doctrine of creation and anthropology. The entire creation is magical from end to end—I mean that in the most literal possible sense—and the human being is the signature on the work, the crown of creation. All of it was spoken into existence, is upheld by the word of Christ’s power, and we, above all, are magical, a divinely inspired meeting of dust and breath. We have no business refusing to engage the world as we know God actually made it.

That doesn’t justify every new age folly we could possibly get into. As the Christian experimental scientists of the Royal Society argued a few centuries ago, you can’t sit in a chair and deduce it all from first principles; you gotta go look and see what God actually did. He is nothing if not surprising. That was the foundation from which such luminaries as Robert Boyle, Michael Faraday, and Lord Kelvin worked; it will suit us as well. So it won’t do to just decide that we can (say) treat a migraine in Sacramento from a coffee shop in Denver, on the grounds that humans are magic, there’s a quantum field, whatever blah blah.

…but what would make us sure that we couldn’t? No, we’re just going to have to try it and see. 

And in fact, I’ve done that exact thing. The client reported a debilitating migraine coming on, and 30 minutes later, after treatment, reported that it had simply vanished. I’ve treated two colleagues who were too far away to meet in person, one for digestive (and spiritual) issues, and the other for a sprained shoulder, the latter while she was sleeping. These sessions are always conducted in an attitude of prayer on my part (as any medical treatment should be, cf. James 5:14-15). In only one of the three cases could the client actually hear what I was praying. All of them were successful. 

Other people can theologize about whether such things are possible; for me, that is no longer an open question. My job is to keep doing the work God gave me to do. Along the way, I’d love to work out how such things are possible: what sort of world is it, where such things can happen?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Generation Tutorial

15 September 2026

We are fond of touting the difficulties of modern life, the ways in which everything has gotten more interdependent, more fraught with unintended consequences, more complex. That discourse tempts us to overlook some key ways in which modern life has gotten drastically simpler. Let me illustrate.

About a year and a half ago, I found myself on the side of a dark highway, with red and blue lights flashing behind me. The friendly highway patrolman explained that he’d pulled me over because a number of my lights were burned out — taillights, brake, and the bulb illuminating my rear license plate. I was both surprised and greatly annoyed, because the vehicle had been in the shop literally that morning for an oil change and inspection, and they were supposed to have checked all the lights. (Don’t guess I’ll be going back to that place ever again.) So here I am, in the middle of a road trip, hundreds of miles from home with minimal tools, and I need to replace some light bulbs. When we arrived at our destination, I located an auto parts store and bought all the bulbs I needed. The taillight and brake light bulbs were easily accessible, and a job I’d done before. No problem there. But I couldn’t figure out how to get to the license plate bulb.

If you’re under 30, you know what happened next: YouTube to the rescue! Standing in my motel parking lot at 7:15 in the morning, I got out my phone and searched for how to change the license plate bulb on a 2003 Camry. Sure enough, there was a tutorial that walked me through the entire process. I had to take out the entire liner on my trunk lid to get to it, but once I’d done that, the rest was easy. Less than half an hour later, the job was done, the trunk liner was reinstalled, and the car was road-worthy again, all before my night-owl wife was even awake.

Now, I’ve worked on these kinds of superficial fixes for my car all my life. I’m no mechanic, and I can’t do serious car repair without help, but for this kind of stuff? Like anything else mechanical, if you just look at it long enough, you can work out what you need to do. All it really takes is time, observation, trial and error, and some basic tools. (Usually. Every once in a while, you have to limp your project, half-assembled, to the auto parts store to get some other part, or a little advice.) Back in my 20s, I’d just have picked away at the problem until I eventually figured it out. It would have taken me at least twice as long, but I would have gotten there. With this job in particular, I would have wasted a bunch of time trying to find some way to get it done without taking the entire trunk lid liner out. Knowing in advance that it was going to be way easier to just pull the whole thing completely out and then put it back when I was done was a huge time-saver for me. (Some of you guys are shaking your heads. Yeah, I know. But I don’t know a lot about cars, so I fumble around a fair bit with an unfamiliar task.)

But that day, no such fumbling was necessary. In a matter of minutes, using nothing but the phone in my pocket, I found out what it was going to take to get the job done. Tools and materials, how long it would take, exactly, step by step, what to do–all of it. And crucially, I knew all this before I ever committed to the first step.

This experience is ubiquitous. Whatever it is you want to do, there’s a YouTube tutorial for it — if not a half-dozen or more, all vying for your eyeballs. Older generations have been slow to catch on to this because even if we’re aware that tutorials exist, our first instinct is still to talk to our friends or just figure it out. We tend to only go for the tutorials if we’re stuck, or we already know we’re out of our depth. But Gen Z is Generation Tutorial. They hardly do anything new without consulting a video tutorial first, for the very good reason that, no matter what the task, the tutorial exists. Why wouldn’t you use it?

Like everything else, the ubiquity of tutorials is having a liturgical effect over time. But what is that effect?

On the positive side of the ledger, ubiquitous tutorials condition us to believe that things can be done. Many tasks that once might have been left to professionals (or simply left undone) for lack of simple knowledge are now easily accessible to the average person with a few simple tools. That knowledge used to be available in libraries, specialized manuals, or a skilled friend-of-a-friend, if you could make the time and connections to get access; now all you need is a quick search and a few minutes to watch the video. The minimal nature of the investment encourages us to explore and find out what’s possible, which is wonderful.

However, all this has a dark side too. As we discussed last week, advertising catechizes us to believe and behave as though everything is to us and for us, and consumer culture catechizes us to believe and behave as though the world is infinitely customizable to our whims. In a similar way, tutorial culture catechizes us to expect that we can know the procedure and the costs of any endeavor before we commit to it. In domains where this is simply not true–courtship comes to mind–that expectation leads to three significant failures: a doomed quest for certainty before investment, giving up, and prioritizing cognition over skill.

One response is a desperate, and largely doomed, attempt to procure certainty before investment. The online world is full of influencers that will confidently opine on the hidden meaning of your prospective date’s hairdo, height, birth order, makeup or lack thereof, job, clothing, the presence or absence of other people or objects in their profile pictures. Where literally everyone over 35 would say “Just go on a date; you’ll find out,” many Gen Z folk are waving off because “She mentioned travel; sounds feminist” or “He has a picture with a fish. Ew.” This overheated discourse easily descends to a Romans-staring-at-chicken-entrails level of dumb. The vast majority of the good marriages you know — you do know some people with good marriages, don’t you? If not, that’s half your problem. Find some good models. Ahem. As I was saying, the vast majority of good marriages you know happened despite one or more such superficial obstacles. One of them despises musicals, and the other was a musical theater kid. She never liked nerds. He never thought he’d be with someone that didn’t love camping. And then they got to know each other, and somehow….

That’s just how it goes, folks. Your preferences are not standards; get over yourself. When you actually get to know the person, those kinds of things are just not real problems. The real problems are much bigger than that, and the good matches nearly always have superficial “problems.” Trying to make such superficial factors into indicators of some big character defect is unnecessarily keeping you home on Friday night.

Another response is to just give up. Having never built the muscles to engage with an uncertain task and figure it out as they go, many members of Generation Tutorial are so daunted by the complexities of courtship that they simply opt out. Older generations urge them to get out there, meet some people, and just see how it goes, but that feels too dangerous. We need to acknowledge that they are, in fact, facing certain dangers that our generations didn’t face before social media, but we also need to realize that many of these young adults haven’t been strengthened by a lifetime of just trying something and figuring it out; they haven’t had to. Maybe the first step is not going on a date; maybe it’s tackling a home repair and seeing if you can figure it out yourself before you ask the internet for help.

Tutorial culture also encourages us to believe that we can execute once we know the steps. A lot of tasks can be executed that way, if clumsily. But for a lot of others, experience and embodied skill matters, and it ain’t as easy as that working pro made it look on YouTube. Having a cognitive grasp of the task may be useful, but it’s only part of the answer. Most things that involve relating to another human fall into this category, including courtship. There are too many variables, and the situation is simply too fluid, for pre-defined procedures to be as useful as we’d like. That pre-defined procedure is like memorizing the solution to a particular math problem. That’s fine, as far as it goes, but what about all the other math problems?

I first encountered this problem in a clear way when my brother and I got interested in learning to juggle. Ever the geek, I went to the library and checked out a half-dozen books on juggling. My brother, natural athlete that he was, went to the store and bought two tubes of raquetballs. Guess who learned to juggle first? Recently, I found myself explaining this principle to a friend as we were discussing bodywork. For even the most complicated maneuvers I use in a session, I can explain how to do it in well under half an hour, I said, “but that doesn’t mean you can actually do it.” Acquiring the palpation skill, use of felt sense, and on-the-fly clinical judgment to correctly execute those skills often took me hundreds of hours of hands-on practice.

Tutorial culture is a boon; it is a form of wealth. We ought to make excellent use of it to bring tasks within reach that were formerly closed off to us. At the same time, we must resist the ways in which it catechizes us toward untrue beliefs and unhelpful habits. We can’t always be certain before we invest in the beginning of something. “He who loses his life, the same will find it.” Sometimes, you just have to invest and see; trying to make every little thing into an omen of success or failure is just seducing yourself into a certainty that has nothing to do with reality. And refusing to play isn’t really an option if we’re called by God to be in the game: “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it.” Resist the need to know everything ahead of time; some things are best learned by doing them. You can’t learn to swim by sitting on the pool deck.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Have It Your Way

8 September 2026

Right where you’re sitting, do a quick exercise for me: I’d like you to see how many advertisements you can see from where you are right now. Include company marks and logos; those are for brand recognition, and that counts as advertisement.

How many? I’ve lost count. You might see brand names on your phone case, TV, and other electronics, publisher’s logos on the spines of various books, a distinctive swoosh on the side of a sneaker, tags on clothing, a sticker on a water bottle advertising your favorite coffee shop…to say nothing of the advertisements that may be on your screen even as we speak. The list goes and goes. Go out for a drive, and count again: billboards, signs in shop windows, manufacturer’s logos on cars, tires, and everything else you see…again, impossible to count.

Go on social media, and everything vies for your engagement. Polls, quizzes, pandering posts looking for a ‘like,’ ragebait looking for a comment that will drive their engagement stats up further.

As David F. Wells famously observed (even before social media) in God in the Wasteland, this constant assault of advertising and engagement-seeking has a liturgical, formative effect on you. You are being told, always and everywhere, that everything seeks your attention and recognition. Everything is to you and for you. Nobody says that out loud, but the message is the more powerful for all that. You might have conscious defenses to it if it were said out loud. Instead, they enact it countless times throughout your day. It’s just the constant backdrop of your life.

The initial response to this world of advertising was to optimize the goods and services for it through a process now known as McDonaldization: applying the core principles of the fast food industry (efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control) to other sectors of society. If you could be certain that your Burger King onion rings will taste exactly the same no matter where you are in the country, then mass advertising can move you to buy them. Everything is standardized and reliably on offer anytime you want it.

The next logical step was increasing the available options. Make it possible for any individual consumer to tailor the product to them. This trend reaches its logical endpoint in something like a social media or Spotify feed, where the algorithm feeds you results that are completely personalized. The very ubiquity of this trend has made it possible for some companies to build their brand on resisting it (e.g., In-N-Out’s famously small menu), but most have (sensibly) yielded to consumer expectations. At Burger King, you can “have it your way.” At Chick-fil-a, Popeyes, and most other fast food establishments, there is now a kaleidoscopic array of sauces with which to modify your meal. (I recall some uncharitable observer quipping that the essence of American cuisine is “twice as much food as you need, drowned in the condiments of your choice.”)

This has been our world for a long time. In the late-90s rom com You’ve Got Mail, main character Joe Fox observed, “The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat, non-fat, etc. So people who don’t know what the hell they’re doing or who on earth they are can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self: Tall. Decaf. Cappuccino.” Is it true? A lot of people seem to think so: Google “what your Starbucks order says about you” and behold the pages of results.

This set of trends catechizes us to interact with the world as though everything is to us, for us, and infinitely customizable to our preferences. We are the little godlings of the market, and if one vendor won’t satisfy our every whim, we can be certain there are a dozen other vendors eagerly vying for our attention and the blessing of our dollars.

But not everything works that way. In fact, most of the important things don’t. In a world that wants us to forget this, it pays to make an effort to remember.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Hope in Edom

1 September 2026

This week we’ll read Genesis 36. Go on and read it; I’ll wait.

What are we to do with this passage? Let’s be honest: if you finished Genesis 35 and skipped right to the beginning of 37, you would never miss the chapter you’d left out. It doesn’t seem to further the plot at all. What’s it even doing here?

Three things: faithfulness, blessing, and hope.

Faithfulness

God is faithful to His promises. He promised Abram that He would make his name great, and that nations would come from him. Part of that promise was fulfilled in Abram’s lifetime. God did indeed make him great, and Abraham got to see the fulfillment of that promise well before he died. But making him the father of nations, as his new name claimed? Isaac, Ishmael, and the sons of Keturah were well launched, but nations? Ishmael maybe — at least a starter nation, but the time Abraham died — but Isaac still had a long way to go.

God had made similar promises to Isaac and Rebekah: “Two nations are in your womb.” As with Isaac, Jacob is greatly blessed, but “nation” is a bit aspirational. With twelve sons, you can see where it could become a nation, at least. Outside the seed line, though, we get to see God delivering on His promises already. Ishmael’s sons were “twelve princes according to their nations” (Gen. 25:12-18). Here in Genesis 36, we again get to see God Delivering on his promises to Abraham and Isaac. Esau’s grandsons become chiefs, and their descendants grow to the point that they have kings well before Israel develops a monarchy.

As readers, we should take this as a downpayment on the promises to Isaac and Jacob. Be patient; the line of promised seed will also become a nation in due time.

Blessing

There’s a kind of Tale of Two Esaus in the story here: the Esau we encounter before Jacob goes up to Laban, and the Esau we encounter when he comes back. Jacob isn’t the only one that has matured some over that 20-year gap. The first Esau is a knucklehead. He’s not weak or soft; he’s not that kind of spoiled rich kid. He’s a man of the field. But all he cares about is being out in the field, hunting. He cares so little about legacy that he gives up his birthright for a bowl of soup.

Older Esau is a different guy entirely. He’s strategically intermarried with the Horites, settled in Seir, and building a kingdom. His grandsons are chieftains, and they in turn spawn kings. This Esau is no longer a hunting-camp bum; he’s a nation-builder. What happened?

There’s a lot we don’t know. The narrative follows Jacob for his 20 years with Laban, and doesn’t tell us much about what happened to Esau during that time. But the last thing we saw before Esau disappeared from the story for a while was Jacob blessing him to be sustained by the land, live by the sword, and become independent of his brother. All these things have happened by the time we meet older Esau.

What we are seeing here is the power of a father’s blessing. We can talk about the ethics of this particular blessing some other time–“blessing” your sons with civil war is maybe not the best idea ever–but the point for our purposes today is that Esau took Isaac’s blessing to heart. He has come to embody everything his father envisioned for him. Fathers, take a lesson from Isaac here: launch your children into the world with a blessing.

Hope

There’s a note inserted in the Septuagint text about the Edomite kings; it tells us that Bela, the first king, is Balaam, and that Jobab, the second king, is Job. We can’t establish either of these identities with absolute certainty, but we can establish that both Job and his friend Eliphaz are Edomites, and it’s likely that Balaam is Edomite as well. This should incline us to hope.

In the biblical Story, the Edomites are not the good guys. They are a thorn in Israel’s side, oppressing them periodically through the Old Testament and on into the New–Herod the Great, the man who had the infants of Bethlehem slaughtered, was an Idumean (Edomite). So when we find that even among the bad guys, there are people like Job, that should incline us to hope. God is at work even among the bad guys. And while, taking one thing with another, we have no right to be surprised that the bad guys act like bad guys, we shouldn’t be too surprised to find among them the occasional stinker who nonetheless knows God (Balaam), the occasional godly man who’s making an honest misjudgment (Eliphaz), and even the occasional righteous man where even God says “there is none like him in all the earth.” (How many Israelites did God ever say that about?)

It isn’t fair. Job’s not a member of the club. And anyway, if he’s so good, what’s he doing with them?

He’s where God put him. And don’t they need the witness more than you do? Just be thankful he’s there.

Application

Coming out of this chapter, be encouraged that God makes good on His promises–always has, always will, no matter what. Remember that “life and death are in the power of the tongue” and use your voice for blessing, especially with your kids. Look for people who know God in unexpected places, even among the bad guys. You may be surprised what you find.

4 Comments | Exegesis, Preaching, The Story of Our People | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

The Dinah Debacle

25 August 2026

This week, we read Genesis 34. Go and read it; I’ll wait.

There’s two things to talk about here: the set of lessons the text teaches, and our response to the text as God gave it to us.

The Hebrew description makes it seem likely that this is a rape rather than a seduction, but it’s not certain. This presents us with the first big problem in our response: we need to know! Was she raped, or wasn’t she? As moderns, we need to know the answer to that so we know how to feel about the story. For us, bit of mutually consensual fooling around is one thing; a rape is something else entirely, because to us her consent is the biggest factor. That the story seems not to see it that way feels to us like a devaluation of consent, a weak view of rape. Actually, it’s a robust view of the destructiveness of fornication; so robust a view that we’re deeply uncomfortable with it. From the point of view of the story, the issue is that either way, Shechem has humiliated and defiled Dinah. We viscerally reject the idea that she could be humiliated and defiled by exercising her bodily autonomy and sexual agency…but it’s true nonetheless. And that defilement creates a situation that’s very difficult to put right.

Remember where and when we are in this story. In preindustrial culture, nobody survived alone for long; we lived in groups because we had to. The group’s survival depended on a large amount of heavy manual labor, which men are far more capable of enduring than women. For both men and women, ability to perform the physical tasks necessary for survival diminishes severely with age, so they needed to have a lot of children, particularly sons, who could care for them as they got older. A young woman’s immediate survival depended on her father and brothers, and her long-term prospects depended on getting married and producing offspring who could care for her in her age.

This to say, Dinah needed to get married. Finding a husband for Dinah was undoubtedly already on Jacob’s to-do list. Given his own wealth and power, he would have been looking to marry her to someone powerful and well placed. However, in the culture of the time, a woman who is not a virgin for any reason, including rape, has greatly diminished prospects for marriage. Put simply, no one will want her. As a result, in this one act, Shechem has ruined her whole life–a terrible thing to do to a young woman even if, in the heat of the moment, she consents. “She agreed to it” is a poor excuse for destroying a teenage girl’s entire life.

Now, for some men in that time and place, that destruction would be the entire point of the act, whether a rape or a seduction. The act of taking her virginity, however accomplished, greatly reduces the competition for her as a wife. Other men will no longer be interested, and his bargaining power with her father and brothers goes up enormously. Jacob and his sons had to expect that Shechem would be up to something like that…if he was even interested in marrying her at all. But the story makes it very clear that Shechem is doing no such thing, and he is at pains to assure them of his honorable intentions. He isn’t haggling for a discount; he’s eager to step up to whatever they ask of him in order to marry Dinah.

Difficult as it is for us to grasp, the Bible presents Shechem as genuinely caring for Dinah. It may help us to remember Abimelech’s complaint about Rebekah: “One of the people might soon have lain with your wife, and you would have brought guilt on us.” (Gen. 26:10) Presumably Rebekah would have objected; Abimelech assumes that her objections wouldn’t have prevented one of his men from taking her anyway. In the custom of the land, rape is commonplace; appalling as it is, rape-for-marriage would be too. In a Romans 1, universal-law sense, it would not be entirely fair to say that people do not know better, but the worst we can say about Shechem is that he has followed the customs of his people, and the text itself says he is “more honorable than all his father’s house.”

This brings us to the second big problem we have with the story, which is the way in which they plan to put the situation right: turn it into a marriage. Now, I trust we’re all on the same page that it’s overkill to respond to a rape by murdering the entire city’s men and enslaving all the women and children. But let’s be honest, if Simeon and Levi had staked Shechem to an anthill, and then after a decent interval of 15 hours or so they cut off his head, we’d probably be ok with that, wouldn’t we?

…which is to say, we are more like Simeon and Levi than we think: we would rather see a satisfying revenge than see Dinah taken care of; we just lack the ruthlessness to take things as far as they did. If we focus on revenge and murder the only man now willing to marry Dinah, where does that leave her? We’d all be satisfied that justice was served, but what’s she going to do in her old age? Who’s going to take care of her?

Jacob disagrees with us; he takes the long view. Shechem is willing–eager, in fact–to marry her, and the truth is, he should be taking responsibility for her well-being now, since he’s the one who violated her. So Jacob says ok, and means it. Simeon and Levi say ok, and are planning to betray the city. Here’s a detail frequently missed in telling this story: the marriage actually happened. Shechem circumcised himself immediately, and apparently it took more time to convince everybody else. When the slaughter was over, Simeon and Levi took Dinah from Shechem’s house. They didn’t pretend they were going to marry her to Shechem; they actually went through with it, and then murdered their sister’s new husband and took her back–first defiled and humiliated, now a widow as well, and still with nobody to care for her in her age.

Before we go any further, let’s get clear on what circumcision means here. This isn’t just removing some flesh from the foreskin; it’s the sign of the covenant with Abraham. What they’re telling Shechem is “You all have to convert.” They all do; they join themselves to the God of Abraham. It’s a great evangelistic moment; an entire city comes to know God. The new covenant equivalent would be the whole city professing faith in Christ and getting baptized…right before we murder them all. After Simeon and Levi have accomplished the slaughter, their other brothers descend on the city and plunder it. They don’t just take all the stuff; they enslave all the women and children.

At this point, Jacob is right to be afraid. Nomads and sedentary societies always have a bit of a tense relationship, and his sons have just violated the most sacred treaty there is. These people literally joined their family, and the sons of Jacob still murdered them. If they’ll do that, what treaty would they not break? Jacob is now in a position where there’s no promise he can make, no guarantee he can offer, that anybody around him will believe. He’s entirely too dangerous to have as a neighbor; he may be a decent enough guy, but there’s no telling when his boys are going to murder you all. The most natural thing for the Caananites to do is exactly what Jacob says: band together and exterminate the threat.

Do Simeon and Levi have an answer for this problem? Nope. The strategically correct answer to Jacob’s objection would be something like “Yeah, we thought about that, but here’s our plan for dealing with it….” They don’t seem to have even thought about it. They were mad, they killed a bunch of people, end of story. This is why, later on, Jacob will pass over them for the ruling blessing. Treacherous, murderous, and impulsive in ways that are apt to get the whole family killed, they’re simply not fit to lead.

3 Comments | Exegesis, Preaching, The Story of Our People | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Trusting at the Strawberry Patch

18 August 2026

Imagine you were to hear of a high mountain glen that grows all the wild strawberries you can possibly eat. It’s very remote, but you make the long hike, and sure enough, there are whole fields of the best strawberries you’ve ever tasted. You feast on them for supper, camp nearby, and after a breakfast of strawberries again the next morning, you hike back out with a big basket of strawberries in your pack.

The next year, you come again, and for some reason, there are hardly any strawberries at all; you get a snack and go home with an empty basket. But the following year you take a chance, and once again, there are all the strawberries you can eat. And so it goes, year by year — some years few or none, some years a great abundance.

Now, in the years of plenty, did you earn the abundance? In the years of lack, were you cheated? Suppose someone else lives on the mountain, miles above the trailhead where you have to start your hike. He gets more berries, more often than you, and for far less work. Does that make you angry?

God made a world of discrete graces. Some things are only given in specific times, places, ways. You might work very hard to place yourself in a position to receive whatever is given; another person might achieve a similar posture of reception with no effort at all. But your labor, whatever it is, has no bearing on the gift. What you receive is all of grace; you couldn’t — and in fact, didn’t — earn it. If there is nothing, you were not cheated; if you are filled to overflowing, you were not overpaid — because it was never payment to start with.

And so it is that spiritual disciplines are a wild, unpredictable grace. If you are willing to go places most people won’t go, to do things most people won’t do, you will be able to see things most people will never see and receive gifts that most people never receive…sometimes. God will never cheat you. If God is leading you to engage a discipline, it will be worth it. But take it from an old hand: you will frequently find your expectations confounded. You will be tempted to feel cheated. Meanwhile, others will be tempted to think of whatever gifts you did get as sheer luck.

Neither is true.

If you made a discipline of being in the right place at the right time, that’s not luck. At the same time, we are rarely promised any specific benefit in exchange for our discipline. That’s not how spiritual disciplines work. A spiritual discipline forges a posture of reception; it puts you in the right place with a basket in hand. That’s all it does. What you receive in that posture of reception is whatever God is pleased to give you. Part of the discipline is trusting that He knows better than you what you need.

Leave a Comment » | Parables | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Can a Christian Write Paranormal Fiction?

11 August 2026

Yes.

Fictional folk tales of other worlds and otherworldly creatures have a very long history; the Bible says nothing against them. We’re firmly in the territory of “doubtful things” here, and in this territory, one of the keys in a matter like this is “let each one be fully convinced in his own mind.” Read Romans 14; that’ll get your feet under you. Then tackle the issue: study it through, think it out for yourself, and then be settled in your convictions. 

As you think it through, one of the things you should be thinking about is the category itself. A work of fiction is ‘paranormal’ as opposed to what? The answer, in our culture, is ‘as opposed to a fictional world that a materialist would be happy with.’ Do you see the problem?

Why should a Christian default to setting stories in a materialist world? Answer: because most North American Christians believe the biblical stories, but don’t actually believe the world is the sort of place the Bible says it is. They are materialists by reflex, with a whitelist of biblical miracles. So they think it’s a “Christian” endeavor to write a story Richard Dawkins would approve of. This is just a sign that their aesthetics (and their theology) have not been formed by a deep and thoughtful attention to the Bible and the world God actually made. 

Let’s not be those people. The world we actually live in was spoken into existence by God and is continuously upheld by the word of His power. If matter-made-of-divine-words is not a magical world, what would be? In the (true) stories God tells, there’s a magical duel (Moses vs. Pharaoh’s magicians), a guy with supernatural strength that seems tied to the length of his hair (Samson), An angel that gives people energy by touching them (Daniel), a floating axe head (Elisha), a talking donkey (Balaam), healing by touch (Jesus, repeatedly), shadow (Peter), “charged” cloths (Paul), and unconscious power transfer (woman with the flow of blood). We have fire-breathing creatures, a man outrunning a horse (Elijah), a guy who commands the sun and the moon (Joshua). And that’s just the uncommon stuff. We also have a metal that transforms from soft to hard and sharpenable when you dunk it in oil; a fruit that turns into wine thanks to a tiny creature that grows right on the grape’s skin, eats sugar, pees alcohol, and farts carbonation; poisons that combine into something essential to life (and it’s on your kitchen table); rocks that pull on metal from a distance, influencing the behavior of iron filings without even touching them.

And don’t even get me started on birds flying: it’s not movie magic; they actually do that. 

Can a Christian tell a story set in a magical world with magical creatures in it, about people who abuse the magic of the world around them, and others who treat their magical world the way they should, and use its properties in right ways? Well…what else would we write about? 

Things you should read as you’re thinking this through: 

Leave a Comment » | Alternate Cosmologies, Functioning Supernaturalism | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

What About Music?

4 August 2026

One of the problems that consistently plagues small assemblies — especially house churches — is the question of what to do about music. If you’re blessed with a bunch of musically talented folks, great! But many groups are not. What do you do? Play a worship song off somebody’s phone and try to sing along?

You can, of course, but it’s wiser not to. In an age of mass media, too many of our expectations are shaped by consuming professional-grade productions. We have access to professional quality musicians in unprecedented numbers, on recordings that are carefully engineered to sound far better than the actual performers sound live. We need to re-calibrate our expectations to how real people sound. Like cooking and storytelling and dancing, singing is a human ability. We all — or nearly all — have it. Sure, it follows a bell-curvey distribution, so not all of us are equally capable, but I’ll bet you anything if you start singing together, and keep at it, the group will be decent at it after 6 months.

Pick songs you can sing a capella — grab some old Sacred Harp or Free Church of Scotland tunes if you like; there are living traditions there worth interacting with — and go to work.

People sing, the world over. If you want to go to the symphony, you have to go to a city, but singing? All you need is vocal cords; we all got those. Mothers sing to their babies; uncles sing around the cookfire after dinner; workers sing to keep a rhythm going; your friends sing happy birthday, or Auld Lang Syne on New Year’s. People sing; it’s a human trait. Consumer culture makes us think we can’t, the same way photoshopped Victoria’s Secret ads make ordinary women think they’re ugly. It’s a lie. You may have one or two people who can’t carry a tune to save their lives, but I’ll bet you dollars against bent toenail clippings that the majority of your people can sing; they just haven’t ever developed the talent God gave them. Time to develop it.

…and sing the Psalms, too! The New Testament three times (Ephesians, Colossians, and James) says we should be a psalm-singing people. Of course we also sing more than the 150 biblical psalms (some fragments of those new song lyrics show up in the New Testament), but we haven’t any business leaving the Psalms out.

Leave a Comment » | House Church, Worship | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

More Than a Symbol

28 July 2026

If you want to understand what the Bible teaches about baptism, the first thing is to notice that the Bible uses baptismal language in a bunch of ways that we wouldn’t. We’ll come back to that. The second thing is to get a thicker understanding of symbols. Baptism is a symbol, but modern people hear that statement and don’t really understand what it means. We are trained to think “symbol” is a floating signifier arbitrarily related to the thing it’s pointing to, in the same way that there’s no necessary correspondence between a sheet of green metal and a city. A roadside sign that says “I-70 W Denver” is just pointing the direction to Denver. If you pull off on the shoulder next to that sign and say “We’re here!” to the kids in the back, you have kinda missed the point.

Thus far the modern grasp of symbols, which is accurate as far as it goes, but there’s more to it than that. The roadside sign at the municipal border that says “Denver Welcomes You” is related to the city in a different way. Both signs point to the same city, but the latter sign also means that you’ve arrived; it both indicates and accomplishes the welcome. At this point “We’re here!” is the right thing to say.

Similarly, placing a ring on my bride’s finger with the words “With this ring I thee wed” was a symbol that accomplished what it signified. Now, that ring had been on her finger before (to test the fit), and we did not suddenly become married right there at the jewelry counter. It required the proper context; we had to mean to be marrying. But in the proper context, the symbol both signified and accomplished a marriage, and responding with a loud snort and “It’s just a symbol!” would be…how shall I put it?…unwise.

Baptism is a symbol, but it also accomplishes a great deal of what it signifies. In the symbolic lexicon of the Bible, passing through water means a very particular thing: just as there is a “scarlet thread of redemption” that runs through the whole Bible, there is a blue thread of water and baptism that runs through the whole Bible, from the primordial waters over which the Spirit once brooded to the river of the water of life that flows from under the throne in the New Jerusalem. Being washed signifies priesthood; passing through water separates you from the wicked world and marks you as part of the new people of God. Christian baptism specifically follows Jesus’ example; in Jesus’ prototypical baptism, the water was applied, the Spirit descended and the Father spoke from heaven. At Cornelius’ home, Peter preached the blood of Jesus, the Father sent the Spirit…what was left but to apply the water? They did, at once, “and the three agree as one.” The fact that the water is administered by Christ’s visible representatives on earth means that there’s an earthly expression of the Body that is recognizing and accepting the baptized. Peter baptizing Cornelius not only signifies Cornelius’ full acceptance into the Body, it accomplished it: afterwards, Peter stayed and ate with them. (My essay “Washed” has all this in more detail and with biblical support.)

Our modern baptismal theology doesn’t exactly contradict any direct statement of Scripture, in the sense that we have a set of half-decent work-arounds for the passages that are a tough fit for our theology. However, it clearly remains the case that the New Testament readily uses baptismal language in ways a modern evangelical wouldn’t dare. That’s telling. When you find the Bible saying things you wouldn’t, one of you has wandered off the range, and I don’t think it’s the Holy Spirit! If we were writing Romans 6, we would feel a desperate need to clarify, hedge, pile up paragraphs of explanation about what baptism doesn’t do, and anyway it’s a metaphorical use here, etc. We can argue about the proper interpretation of the passage, but the one unassailable fact is that Paul, seeing no need for all the qualifications we would pile up, clearly does not see things the way we do.

Paul reminds them of the day they came to Christ, the day they were baptized. (Remember that the NT knows nothing of delaying baptism: converts are baptized immediately.) From the beginning, the act of baptism is communal; even Jesus didn’t baptize Himself. We are baptized by someone, into a Body, in the presence of the Father and under the ministry of the Spirit. We may get baptized by ones, but in baptism we are never alone. The Body put them in the water – that’s death; you can’t live down there – and brought them out again, initiated by resurrection into the Body and henceforth considered members. They come up out of the water and into something: fellowship with the believer that baptized them. On that day, Paul says, they were united with Christ in His death and resurrection, and therefore they should live like it. We should not be embarrassed to speak the same way. And we wouldn’t be, if we understood the this-worldly reality of fellowship in the Body.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

The Fig Tree Gospel

21 July 2026

Nathanael said to [Jesus], “How do You know me?” Jesus answered him, “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.” Nathanael said to Him, “Rabbi, You are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” (John 1:48-49)

In John’s Gospel, life is first mentioned in 1:4, but the author doesn’t really unpack what he means by it until chapter 3. Meanwhile, John the Baptizer introduces Jesus as the one who “was before me” (1:15) and therefore as the Word (1:14), “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (1:29), the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit (1:33), the Son of God (1:34); Andrew introduces Him as the Messiah/Christ (1:41), as does Philip (1:45), and Nathaniel recognizes Him as Son of God and King of Israel (1:49) — which Jesus describes as Nathaniel believing (1:50). Following the first sign, the disciples believe in Him (2:11), and following His signs in Jerusalem, many “believed in His name” (2:23).

There’s no mention thus far of eternal life, but we have a small army of converts who believe in Him. Zane Hodges once pointed out that there’s a point where Peter clearly does believe that Jesus is the source of eternal life (Jn. 6:68) and clearly does not believe in the death, burial, and resurrection (Mt. 16:21-23), and yet we all think he’s saved nonetheless. Zane argued that established the primacy of the promise of life over Of course it would be much harder to make that same mistake today, but apply the same logic: all kinds of mistakes are still possible.

From one angle of view, searching for the right proposition, it would seem that they believed a splatter pattern of related things. From another perspective, they’re all focused on the same thing: Jesus. The propositions are there, sure, but you will ransack the Scriptures in vain trying to nail down The Saving Proposition with any kind of biblical authority, because it doesn’t exist. No passage of Scripture even poses the question, still less answers it. Different evangelistic encounters in Scripture employ different propositions. There’s one Person; many propositions that point out the Person in question. I could fairly say “The one who died for us and rose again” — that’s a totally reasonable answer, and the one Paul employs in 1 Cor. 15, but it doesn’t capture what Peter believed (Mt. 16:22), does it? We could say “The one who’s the Son of God” which captures what the man born blind believed in John 9, but the woman of Sychar in John 4 doesn’t seem to know anything of that. We could say “He’s the promised Messiah,” which is what she believed, but the man in John 9 doesn’t seem to be aware of it.

My claim is simple: what matters is that they’re all looking to the right Person, and what matters today is that we direct people to the right Person. The task is simple: start from where they are; point them to Jesus; share as much of Him as you can.

4 Comments | Bare Minimum Gospel Foolishness, Person/Proposition, The Free Grace Food Fight | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

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