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.

Leave a Comment » | Dating and Mating | 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

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

A Grifter or a Mark

17 March 2026

One of the things about getting a little older is that patterns begin to emerge. They were always there, but the older I get, the harder it is to ignore them. One of them is the pattern of the a-little-too-wide-eyed take on Bible prophecy anytime a global crisis looms, or a war starts, or whatever. It’s the sort of thing where it’s easy to get drunk on your own passions.

There’s always a fresh supply of 20-somethings (and, embarrassingly, some older folks) who are just fit to burst with the way Things Are Lining Up Like Never Before. I remind them that people said the same thing in the 1980s…and they say things like, “Of course they did, but I’m sure we can all see things far more clearly lining up now than they did in the 80s.” Right, kid…but they said the same thing in the 80s, about the 1940s. And in the 40s, about the turn of the century. And at the turn of the century, too—although back then the postmillennial version was more popular, until WWI ruined everybody’s optimism.

“Sure,” they’ll say. “I’m not saying we should be dogmatic about it” while at the same time heavily implying that anybody who doesn’t think the rapture will happen within the year is just not taking things seriously. For my entire life, popular authors and conference speakers have been incredibly dogmatic about how we are “living in the last days.” (We are, too. Have been—if you’ll pardon a note of philistine biblicism—since the resurrection of Jesus, but that’s not what they mean, and we all know it).

Every generation of prophecy enthusiasts thinks they see something nobody’s ever seen before. And they’re right; every year’s a new year. But that doesn’t mean what they think it does. Every generation of prophecy enthusiasts thinks they invented not-quite-setting-the-date while managing to imply (nod, nod, wink, wink) that we’ll all be watching next year’s Super Bowl from the heavenly grandstands. Someday, somebody’s gonna be right about that, sho’ nuff.

But let’s be honest: this is like buying a Pick Six ticket. Can’t win if you don’t play, but how many times can you say “This is it! This is the one!” with total conviction? The answer to that question has a lot more to do with personality (and immaturity) than it has to do with the likelihood of winning, doesn’t it? Somebody will be right, sure enough; odds of it being you are not great. Live long enough, and unless you’re exceptionally credulous, at some point you grow sober-minded about it. There are a LOT more people saying “This is the one!” than there are winners—and the suckers are the ones so manically high on their own point of view that they can’t imagine they might be wrong.

In biblical prophecy, there have been plenty of people who pointed out all the things that were coming together and said “I’m not saying today’s the day—no man knows the day or the hour—I’m just saying that if you’re paying attention, things are coming together like never before, and I’d be very surprised if we’re all here in a year.” Or five, or thirty, whatever – pick your horizon. Or be cannier than that and never say a number while you imply to the youth group kids that they’d better win their friends to Christ now, because there’s no way they’re gonna graduate. To date, they’ve all been wrong; every last one of them.

And the sad part is, they’ve caused their hearers to become jaded and cynical about biblical prophecy, which is the real cost of the whole madness. Biblical prophecy is edifying and beautiful, and helps us to see our own times clearly even when our time is not the primary referent (as, say in Habakkuk’s case). The task before us is to read the text and the world, and be sober-minded about the whole thing.

Sober-minded people actually study the history, and learn that we thought Things Were Coming Together about the Ottoman Conquest, and the turn of the first millennium, and the Black Death and the Protestant Reformation and the Cold War and the turn of the second millennium—we didn’t learn our lesson the first time, apparently—and heaven knows what else. It’s not all bad; it’s good exercise to look around and think, “If it kicks off today, what might that look like?” (I know, if you’re postmillennial, you think it can’t happen today…but you could be wrong about that; somebody is.)

It’s good to feed your sanctified imagination on the thought that you might be wrong. If you’re the sort of premil that made Hal Lindsey and Tim Lahaye rich, consider what the world would look like if the postmil guys are right, and seven thousand years hence, seminary students will be struggling to remember whether Athanasius relied on C. S. Lewis’ thought, or the other way ’round, because all those early church fathers just run together in your head after a while. If you’re postmil, consider that if Jesus returns today, then the premil guys were right about a lot, and what might it look like for God to bring all things together in Christ in that way? (Do you think He can’t?) If you’re amil, maybe consider that even if you’ve read the mythic/symbolic dimensions of the text correctly from a literary point of view, what if God also realizes it all literally? Wouldn’t be the first time He’s ever done that—His Son did come up out of Egypt, after all.

Speaking of: go back and look at the prophecies of the first advent, especially the ones highlighted in the New Testament. Get a lesson in how to read prophecy from the ones that are already fulfilled. Reflect on the literalness, on the symbology, on God’s twisty way of doing exactly what He promised in a way nobody quite anticipated. Then think to yourself: “If I’d had a mastery of Old Testament messianic prophecy, how much of Jesus’ life could I have predicted before the fact?” Some things, like being born in Bethlehem, sure. But how much?

Right. So a little humility is in order.

As to the second advent, then: no man knows the day or the hour. Some morning, the sun will come up, and Jesus will return before suppertime. That day surely is coming. If in God’s good providence, it’s today, what might that look like? Imagining that is a good exercise; keeps you limber. But there’s a big difference between keeping limber and thinking that you’re seeing your interpretation of Revelation coming to pass in the headlines of the Washington Post. Those guys….

Lemme put it this way: in history, there are very few trends that hold even for a century, let alone across millennia. Death. Taxes. Prophecy wonks being wrong about the Second Coming. It’s that level of consistency. Those guys have been wrong, every single one of them, every single time, without fail, for two solid millennia. That takes skill. And they will continue to be wrong, until one day, finally, they aren’t.

Today really might be the day—be sober, be vigilant, and share the gospel—or ten thousand years from now, so be sober, be vigilant, and pay your bills on time. If it could be any day, then there’s nothing special about today except that it’s the day I happen to be living in, and the only one I can have an effect on. Faithfulness tomorrow is a dream; faithfulness yesterday (if there was any) is a memory; faithfulness today is what actually matters. A grasp of prophecy that encourages daily faithfulness is a great thing! Sensationalism and hucksterism and overblown nonsense of the type that’s never yet been right…that doesn’t build faithfulness.

Biblical prophecy is edifying and glorious when read soberly, but foolish and unstable people twist it to their own destruction, “as they do also the rest of the Scriptures.” If you’re cynical and blase about Scripture, you’re doing it wrong; if you’re drunk on your own passions, you’re doing it wrong; if you’re whipping up people’s emotions about it to sell your book, you’re definitely doing it wrong, and Jesus would flip over your table at the booksellers’ convention.

Two guys can both say “It could be any day,” but one of them means it could be today or tomorrow, or a thousand years from now, and the other one means it could be today, or tomorrow, but there’s no way we’re still around in five years. The former is honest and sober-minded; the latter is a grifter—or a mark.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Why Me?

11 November 2025

Usually we associate “Why me?”with self-pity.

  • The car breaks down: “Why me?”
  • A pipe breaks and floods your bathroom: “Why me?”
  • You come down with a wicked head cold right before you have to give a big presentation at work: “Why me? Why now?”

The answer to those questions is always the same: “Why not you?” The incarnate Son of God was lied about, subjected to a sham trial, mocked, whipped, nailed to a tree and tortured to death, and you want your life to be easy? Get over yourself.

But there’s another time we think “Why me?”

  • God puts it into your heart to lead an initiative to feed the homeless in your city: “I don’t know…I mean, I’ve never done anything like that before…All these other people are so much more qualified.”
  • Your friend is sick, and it crosses your mind how great it would be to pray boldly for her healing: “I can’t do that. Besides, what if it doesn’t work?”
  • The best company you know is hiring for your dream job, and you hesitate to put in an application: “I’m sure there’s, like, a thousand people applying for the job, and why would they pick me anyway?”

Do you hear the “Why me?” behind all those questions?

The answer to both versions of “Why me?” is the same: Why not you? The incarnate Son of God did not let Himself be tortured to death so that your life would be easy. He did it so that you would grow holy and mature, fit for the good works that He planned for you to do. When God built you in your mother’s womb, He built you with a purpose, and He means to see it done.

The Son of God did not allow Himself to be tortured to death because He had nothing better to do that particular Friday. He took all your sin and weakness to the cross so it could die there. He rose from the grave so that you would know that no matter how bad the problem seems right now, there is resurrection on the other side of it. He is ready, right now, to walk with you into the life He intends you to live.

“Why me?” wants to avoid real difficulty, preferring a life of petty comforts and hollow victories over sham obstacles. “Why me?” will settle for a life of mediocrity and smallness.

But you were born for a place in God’s great purposes.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Strong Enough to Dance

9 September 2025

I recently read a rant that started off “Horses built for war don’t dance at weddings.” It then goes on for many paragraphs about how men who are seeking the truth aren’t cut out for bread and circuses, how the system wants you frivolous and weak. When the day everyone thought would never come finally arrives, the author promises, the war horses will be ready. I’d link to the rant so you could read it for yourself, but I’ve already forgotten the guy’s name. (Just as well, I think.)

This is a man who has seen the problem, but doesn’t understand the solution. King David danced. Israel danced on the banks of the Red Sea. Psalms 149 and 150 (which we are all commanded to sing) teach us to praise the Lord with dance. But it’s not just Scripture: at the right times, warriors in every human culture feast and dance and sing. I’ve trained alongside people from the Army, Marines, various SWAT teams, British SAS, road patrol deputies in the Kentucky backwoods where backup is 45 minutes away — they feast. They dance and sing — not always well, but they seem to enjoy it.

But this fellow is too busy being The War Horse to dance at a wedding. He’s too serious to take a lesson from Scripture or history or culture. Don’t be like him. God has called us to be sober-minded, but this is the opposite of sober-mindedness. This is Being Very Stern, and looking at yourself in the mirror while you do it. It will make you grim, ungodly, brittle, and weak. God doesn’t want you to just be strong enough to fight; He wants you strong enough to dance.

Comments Off on Strong Enough to Dance | Discernment, Equality and Difference of Man and Woman, Mere Obedience, New Fundamentals | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Cessationism 101

1 June 2025

If you’re new to this discussion, the claim under consideration is that certain of the spiritual gifts (generally known to their foes under the heading “sign gifts,” e.g., tongues, healing, prophecy, etc.) ceased early on in the history of the church, around the close of the first century. Generally people will identify the cessation of these gifts with the fall of Jerusalem, the death of the apostles, the closure of the canon, or some such. This belief is known as cessationism. The belief that all the biblically attested gifts have continued is known as continuationism. Continuationists don’t typically see “the sign gifts” as a biblical classification; the gift of teaching in operation is just as much a sign of the Spirit at work as the gift of prophecy. (“Charismatic” implies some additional cultural markers that are beyond the scope of this discussion. For our purposes today, just know that anybody who describes themselves as “charismatic” will be a continuationist, but not all continuationists would call themselves charismatic.)

We’ve discussed this issue here before (and here), but I don’t know that I’ve ever summarized the defects of cessationism all in one place. To be clear, this is not my affirmative case for continuationism; that’s another conversation. This is my rebuttal to cessationism; the claim I’m making here is that the biblical case for cessationism makes Swiss cheese look substantial. In order to make my case, I need to clearly articulate the arguments I’m rebutting. To that end, here are the core biblical arguments cessationists will make (if I missed one, put it in the comments!):

  1. The gift of tongues was a temporary sign for (unbelieving) Israel, and is no longer relevant for today. This line of argument points out the connection between 1 Corinthians 14:21-22 and Isaiah 28:11-12, and argues that once Jerusalem was destroyed, the purpose for the sign had ended, and so the gift ceased to be given.
  2. The sign gifts were part of the historically unrepeatable foundation of the Christian faith, and now that the foundation is laid, there’s no further need for them. This argument will cite Ephesians 2:20, Hebrews 2:3-4, 2 Corinthians 12:12 and similar passages that describe the work of the apostles and New Testament prophets as foundational for our faith, and connect the signs to the apostles.
  3. Biblical tongues were discernible languages, not what we know today as ecstatic glossolalia. Here they’ll argue that every biblical occurrence of the gift of tongues was a known language, and argue that the gift of tongues was the ability to speak a language unknown to the speaker (as in Acts 2). They’ll point out (correctly) that Corinth was a busy port city with a ton of languages drifting through it, and argue that 1 Corinthians 14 is addressing how to handle a multilingual church body and the spiritual gifts God gave them to cope with their situation. Modern tongues, by contrast, are ecstatic glossolalia, a learned babbling that has no linguistic content, and also has no New Testament precedent.
  4. 1 Corinthians 13 says that the sign gifts ceased with the closure of the canon of Scripture. The claim here is that 13:8 says that certain gifts will fail/cease/vanish (which it does), and that “the perfect” in 13:10 is the canon of Scripture, so now that we have God’s full revelation, the partial revelation embodied in the sign gifts no longer continues.
  5. Continuing revelation would mean that Scripture is still being added to today. The line of argument here is that if you think modern-day prophecy is really a word from God, shouldn’t you be writing this down? And wouldn’t that be adding an additional book to the New Testament?

Thus far the arguments for cessationism. How do they stand up on examination? Let’s take them in order:

1. “The gift of tongues was a temporary sign for (unbelieving) Israel, and is no longer relevant for today.”

in 1 Corinthians 14:21-22, Paul quotes Isaiah 28 in order to justify his claim that tongues are a sign to unbelievers. In the original context of Isaiah, the sign under discussion is for Israel specifically. We can see that sign play out, for example, in Acts 2, where where the Spirit is speaking through Gentile languages in the heart of Jerusalem. Getting from there to “tongues have ceased,” though, presents some problems. First, work through the logic: Holy Spirit-given Gentile tongues as a sign to unbelieving Jews doesn’t in itself mean the sign is no longer happening. Do we still got unbelieving Jews? Do we believe Israel has a future? Then how does it follow that the sign to them no longer has a purpose? 

Second, the fact that it’s a sign to Jews doesn’t mean it has no other purpose. Paul’s commentary doesn’t say that tongues are a sign to Jews only; he says they are a sign to unbelievers, and this in the context of the Gentile city of Corinth. Do we still got unbelievers? Well, tongues are a sign to them. That’s what this text tells us. Logically speaking, it could be the case that the sign ceased after the first century, but that’s something you bring to this text, not something you get from it. 

2. The sign gifts were part of the historically unrepeatable foundation of the Christian faith, and now that the foundation is laid, there’s no further need for them.

Ephesians 2:20 does indeed say that the apostles and prophets laid the foundation. It goes on to say that Christ Himself is the chief cornerstone of that foundation. We all believe that Christ both laid the foundation and has a continuing ministry. The two simply are not mutually exclusive; why should we believe that apostles and prophets have no continuing ministry just because they were part of laying the foundation? 

Certainly various miraculous signs were associated with the apostles; in 2 Cor. 12, for example, Paul calls the works he did “the signs of an apostle.” There are only two interpretive possibilities here: either he is, or he is not, referring to works done by other people (such as the works mentioned in 1 Corinthians 12-14). If he’s speaking of miracles only done by the apostles (and not to miraculous works done by others), well and good; that’s got nothing to do with what the rest of us do. If he does have in mind the sort of signs mentioned in 1 Corinthians 12-14, then we all agree that people other than the apostles did them. In that case, “signs of an apostle” means the kinds of things an apostle did, but doesn’t mean that only apostles did them. That being the case, there’s no obvious reason to believe that people today could not do the sort of thing an apostle did, even if you don’t believe in contemporary apostles.

3. Biblical tongues were discernible languages, not what we know today as ecstatic speech.

First of all, these two things are not mutually exclusive. Acts 2 tongues certainly are discernible languages, but that doesn’t mean it was not an ecstatic event – read the description. (About which more below.) Second, the context of 1 Corinthians 14:9 is precisely that the genuine gift of tongues is being used and people are not understanding the utterance; hence the exhortation! Paul is making the case that prophecy is superior, because it can be understood. For the public use of a tongue, he requires interpretation (14:5, 27-28) so that the rest of the Body might be built up. He also gives testimony that he has this gift “more than you all,” and that when he uses it, “my spirit prays, but my understanding is unfruitful.” That certainly seems to leave the door open to ecstatic speech that he does not himself understand. (Other interpretations are possible, but I don’t think we can rule this one out.)

Tongues in Acts 2 are described as languages comprehensible by various people present, but whether this occasion would meet modern church criteria for “orderly” is very much in question. They spilled out into the street all talking at once. Some people thought they were drunk – how did that happen? The point is not to advocate for that kind of ruckus in every public meeting, but to point out that ruckus does not mean the gifts of the Spirit are not present.

In fact, the very occasion for Paul writing 1 Cor. 12-14 was that tongues were not being interpreted or used in an orderly manner; his (Holy Spirit-inspired) diagnosis is not “this is not real tongues,” but that the real gift is being abused. The abuse is real, is sin, and absolutely needs to be repented of and corrected. There are present-day churches that very much have the problems the passage describes. Paul offers a diagnosis; “this is not the real thing” ain’t it.

4. 1 Corinthians 13 says that the sign gifts ceased with the closure of the canon of Scripture.

Various theological and practical arguments get offered in support of cessationism – arguments from dispensational consistency and the like (which are beyond the scope of this post; we’re talking about biblical arguments here). But when we set all the theological constructions aside and just focus on what the text says – when I ask a cessationist “Okay, but where does the Bible actually say that these gifts are no longer in operation?” – this is invariably the passage they come to. At least among the cessationists I know, if they’re going to bring (what they think of as) a knock-down exegetical argument, this is it.

Which is really ironic, because the passage simply doesn’t say what it’s claimed to say. It certainly does say that prophecies will fail, tongues will cease, and [words of] knowledge will vanish away. The claim is that this happens with the completion of the canon of Scripture, but in fact Scripture is not mentioned anywhere in the passage. Rather, the point at which these gifts cease, according to the passage, is when our knowledge is complete rather than partial, when we are fully grown, when we see with complete clarity, and know as we are also known. Anybody think the Church has reached that point? Me neither. 

5. Continuing revelation would mean that Scripture is still being added to today.

This objection confuses prophecy with inscripturation. If we examine the biblical record, we see prophets who never wrote a word of Scripture, from the 100 prophets Obadiah saved, 50 to a cave (1 Kings 18:4), to Philip’s four virgin daughters who prophesied (Acts 21:8-9). We see prophets who were already known to be prophets before they ever said the thing they’re known for in Scripture (1 Kings 20:35-43, 2 Kings 22;14-20, Acts 11:28, 21:10). We see instructions for regulating the exercise of prophecy in the local church (1 Corinthians 12-14) with not a word about writing anything down. If “shouldn’t we be writing this down?” was not a major concern to anybody at times when we all agree that prophecy was active, then it’s not obvious why it should suddenly become a concern to us now.

Rather, the biblical picture of prophecy is that the vast majority of it seems to have been timely words given to God’s people for their moment. Only a tiny fraction of it was ever recorded in Scripture; there’s no reason to expect that finishing the process of inscripturation would automatically end all prophetic revelation forever. Practically speaking, ongoing divine guidance speaks to our lives in ways Scripture can’t and wasn’t intended to: Scripture tells us to do good and to share, but the nudge to take time out to buy lunch for this particular homeless guy at this particular intersection and tell him God hasn’t forgotten him – you can’t get that from Scripture. Or the nudge to text that long-lost friend right now. Or a sudden impulse to deliver the groceries you just bought to a family you happen to know in the neighborhood. Or…but the daily life of Our People is full of such things. All the examples I just gave came from my experience (the first led to a friendship that seems to have gotten a homeless man of the street; the second to a comforting text that “just happened” to arrive in a moment of extreme grief; the third fed my family when we had no grocery money). I expect you can supply more examples of your own.

Conclusion

In summary, the biblical case for cessationism simply doesn’t stand up to close examination. The passages either don’t say what they are claimed to say, or there’s a huge leap in logic between what the passage says and the conclusion it’s supposed to justify.

That said, I recognize that my summary of the biblical arguments for cessationism is my summary. While a summary will never express every nuance or variation, it’s a position I used to hold, and I do understand the arguments. I hope I’ve summarized them fairly. How about it? If you’re a cessationist and you think I’ve left out a passage or mischaracterized an argument, add it in the comments! Let’s talk!

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Drawn in the Wrong Place

15 April 2025

Framing eschatology as ‘optimistic’ or ‘pessimistic’ is deliberately tactical; it’s a postmil recruiting tool, and a really useful one, too! (At least for Americans; we are an optimistic people.) As an accurate descriptor of anybody’s Christian eschatology, ‘optimistic’ and ‘pessimistic’ are lazy oversimplifications. We are surrounded by pagan eschatologies from Ragnarok to heat death; all Christian eschatologies are wildly optimistic.

When we’re talking about prophecy, I often recommend that we go back and look at prophecy that’s already been fulfilled in order to get our bearings. As a test case for the labels ‘optimistic’ and ‘pessimistic’ within the biblical milieu, let’s consider the first advent. There’s a raft of prophecies that the coming Messiah would conquer and reign; this is what Peter, et al., expected Jesus was going to be about — an optimistic eschatology if ever there was one! There’s also prophecies that the coming Messiah would suffer and die. How pessimistic! But it turns out that both of those things are true, and it didn’t look how anybody expected.

Anyone who thinks that we win in the end, and knowledge of the glory of Yahweh covers the earth like water covers the sea — all those people are expecting victory, and have reason to live like it.

Of course, if you think that victory to be inaccessible now…I wonder. But that’s not a premil/postmil thing; it’s a “Is the Kingdom of God a present reality?” thing.

But that isn’t a package deal with your eschatology. I’m a convinced premil, because as far as I can tell that’s what the Bible says, and I know that the Kingdom is a present reality, because — wait for it — that’s what the Bible says. Jesus wasn’t embarrassed to talk about the Kingdom coming in the present; can’t think why I would be. If the Kingdom came when He cast out a demon, then it’s coming when we cast out a demon. It’s coming when an addiction gets broken. It’s coming every time we face a temptation and say no, and it’s coming every time God gives us an opportunity to serve and we say yes. We pray for it — “Thy Kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” — and God is pleased to answer our prayers.

Premillennialism’s critics frequently characterize us as thinking that “we lose now, but we win in the end.” Unfortunately, there are actual premillennialists who really think that. But none of them — neither the shallow premil guys nor our critics — have thought about it deeply enough. If Jesus dying on the cross was losing, if Stephen being stoned was losing, then sure, premil means “we lose now.” What nonsense. God never wastes anything; every good deed done here lives forever, one way or another, and God is brilliant at victories that don’t seem like victories as the world reckons things. The final destruction of the world is one more such death, and it will be followed by one more such resurrection! It may be the case that every paper copy and recording of Handel’s Messiah is going to melt with a fervent heat, but do we seriously think we won’t have Handel’s Messiah — with a rousing polyrhythmic djembe section that’s not been written yet — in the Kingdom? And knowing that, is there any reason why we shouldn’t go ahead and write that bit today?

People who think the bright lines in eschatology are between amil, postmil, and premil are fundamentally mistaken about the discipline. It’s a common misconception bred by the fact that far too many of our theologians never get out of the classroom. Here’s what matters far more: When we wake up in the morning to a headline that tells us the kings of the earth have taken counsel against the Lord and His Anointed, what do we do? We know what God is doing — He’s laughing. Psalm 2 says so! He thinks it’s hilarious, mock-worthy. The question is whether we laugh with Him, or whether we go out in the yard and do our best Chicken Little imitation. THAT is the bright line in eschatology, and people who think it tracks with a-, post-, or pre-mil need to get out more. I’ve known postmil folk to fall apart at a headline, and my people here are overwhelmingly premil folk who join in the mockery.

1 Comment | Chicken Bones, Kingdom of God | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Your Preferences are not “Standards”

11 March 2025

I read this post recently, and in the main I agree with it, although I’ve a quibble here and there. It prompted a thought that I want to flesh out here. For the purposes of this post, I’m speaking to young, single Christians who want to get married.

There’s much discussion, even in sensible treatments like Aly Dee’s post above, of the merits and demerits of “lowering your standards.” Conceding the overall discourse of “standards” for a second, the discussion makes sense. You have a wish list of traits you’re looking for, and you want most or all of them in a spouse. That’s what they’re bringing to the table; in market terms, that’s the price you charge for your hand in marriage. Most people are willing to haggle a bit; if your prospect exceeds your expectations in a couple of areas, perhaps you can give some ground in a couple of others. But sometimes, despite your willingness to haggle, you just can’t get the deal done. In market terms, it makes sense to lower the price if the product is just not selling, right?

Of course it does. But you may be looking at the whole interaction through the wrong lens.

Let’s talk about these “standards,” because in my experience, when I ask my young, single friends to give me the list of standards, we too often end up with “loves Jesus,” “wants a family,” “blonde,” and “good calves” all on the same list. They do not belong on the same list. “Blonde” is not a standard, and marrying a brunette is not “lowering your standards.” There simply is no meaningful sense in which blonde hair is a higher standard, and dark hair a lower one. God likes them both.

“But I really like blondes!” you say. No problem. Wherever you’re looking for a spouse, if you have lots of prospects and you only spend Friday evening at home when you absolutely want to, then stick with blondes. Why not date who you prefer? But if the only prospect you have is a brunette, don’t be an idiot. Letting go of a preference is not lowering a standard.

Standards are things God likes. Preferences are things you want. You have no business marrying someone if God isn’t going to like it. You have every reason to consider haggling where your preferences are concerned. True story here: I had my own list, back in my single days. I imagined a woman who was a brunette or redhead, 5’4″, intelligent, a reader, loved the outdoors (among other things). I got three of those five things, and that’s fine. My wife being 5’10” and more of an indoor person does not threaten our marriage in any way.

I was also looking for a woman who loved Jesus, wanted a family, and had a heart for ministry. These things are not in the same category as the other list, and I got all of them. Missing one or more of those things would have fundamentally undermined a godly marriage. Now, as it turns out, we were unable to conceive, and navigating that was one of the more painful things about our life together, but providential suffering doesn’t undermine your marriage. Lack of godly values undermines your marriage.

God likes tall girls and short girls. He likes people with skinny calves and people with muscular calves. He made tons of both. You can learn to like what God likes. You had better not learn to like what God doesn’t.

Nobody is saying you shouldn’t have preferences, and nobody is saying you shouldn’t go for as many of your preferences as you can get. But frankly, if you’re 30 and still single after years of trying, you should be prepared to do a lot of negotiating. So get on your knees, pray, and ask God to give you the wisdom to know what to do, because this is one of the most important judgment calls you’ll ever make.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

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