Torah as Wisdom Literature

29 August 2023

tl;dr: The Law isn’t law for us, but it *is* wisdom literature!

In my early Bible classes growing up, I was taught that there were three divisions to the Torah: moral, ceremonial, and civil. It wasn’t until seminary that I realized that as helpful as those categories sometimes can be, they are not organic to the Torah — you’ll search the Torah itself in vain for any such division. In the actual books of Moses, the Law is presented as a whole, and you can die for murder, gathering sticks on the Sabbath, or offering strange fire on the altar.

Therefore, when Paul says that we are not under the Law, he doesn’t mean just the ceremonial portions. He means the whole thing. The Law is a whole, and we are not under the Law as a rule of life, period. No part of it.

That said, Paul also says the Law is holy and just and good, and if you’re having trouble seeing that, then pray Psalm 119:18: “Open my eyes, that I might see wondrous things in Your Law.” We’re supposed to be singing the Psalms in the New Covenant anyway (see Eph. 4:18-21, Col. 3:16, Jas. 5:13), so this is a good start! Jesus Himself, and the NT writers who followed Him, all made great use of the Law in making spiritual and moral arguments. Paul does the same (see, for example, 1 Cor. 9:9, 14:34, 1 Tim. 5:18). So while we’re not under the Law as a rule of life, Paul continues to appeal to it. Why?

Because it’s holy and just and good. It reveals God’s character, and the truths thus revealed apply to our situation, even if we’re not in ancient Israel and aren’t going to do exactly what they did. So Paul borrows a command about how Israelites treat their oxen to make an analogy to how the church treats its elders.

Likewise, since we’re in possession of a civil law code created by Almighty God Himself, nothing could be sillier than to ignore it in our pursuit of the common good. He made it for Israel, not for us in the Gentile nations, but He says He made it for us to marvel at.

“Surely I have taught you statutes and judgments, just as the Lord my God commanded me, that you should act according to them in the land which you go to possess. Therefore be careful to observe them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples who will hear all these statutes, and say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.’ For what great nation is there that has God so near to it, as the Lord our God is to us, for whatever reason we may call upon Him? And what great nation is there that has such statutes and righteous judgments as are in all this law which I set before you this day?” (Deut. 4:5-8)

If we’re looking at the Law and all we have to say is, “Thank goodness we’re not under that!” then we’ve missed something crucial. We ought to be asking how we can appropriate that wisdom and apply it well in our own situations.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Wearing the Old Jacket?

22 August 2023

I was raised with a particular picture of what the terms “old man” and “new man” mean in the Bible. We took them to refer respectively to our continuing proclivity for sin, and our new nature in Christ. We would illustrate this (literally) as two tiny people fighting it out for dominance in the human heart. As it turns out, that picture was entirely wrong.

Colossians 3:9-10 says you already have put off the old man and put on the new. Ephesians 4:20-24 says the same thing: you already put off the old man, you are being renewed in the spirit of your mind, and you already put on the new man. (The grammar in Ephesians 4 is arguable, and it would be difficult to nail down if that were the only passage we had, but the grammar in Colossians is very clear, as is Romans, and Ephesians 2:15 nails it down nicely, as we’ll see below.) Romans 6:6 says the old man was crucified with Christ.

The renewing of your mind is an ongoing process, but the old man/new man transaction is not. Moreover, the old man and the new man are not inside of you; you are inside of them. Think of it like a jacket: when you take an old jacket off and put a new one on, you aren’t still wearing the old jacket. You were in the old man, but he was crucified with Christ and you put him off, and now you have put on the New Man, and you are in Him. It is helpful here to remember that “Adam” literally means “man.” You were in the old Adam, and now you are in the new Adam, Christ. The old man is your corporate identity in Adam, and the new man is the Body of Christ, as Ephesians 2:15 pointedly says.

So if I have put off the old man, Adam, and have put on the new man Christ, why I am still drawn to sin, and I still sin regularly? Ephesians 4:20-24 gives us a hint already — our mind is being renewed. Some part of the process is still under way, which means it’s not done yet. Romans fleshes it out a little more, and the best way to see it is to start with a puzzle. At the end of Romans 7, Paul–already a believer–cries out, “Wretched man that I am — who will deliver me from this dead body?” In the beginning of Romans 12, Paul challenges us to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. So the question is, what happens between these two passages that transforms the dead body into a holy and acceptable sacrifice?

The answer is in Romans 8:10-11. Your body is dead, which is to say, unresurrected. The world still waits for the redemption of our bodies. Christ paid for it at the cross, but the reality for which He paid has not yet come to fruition. But in the meantime, the Holy Spirit is alive in you, and so God does something which is fundamentally impossible: He gives life (now!) to your dead body through the Holy Spirit. So you are a hybrid being. Your inner man is redeemed (“I delight in the law of God according to the inward man”), but your body is not yet redeemed. Your inner man is alive, and your body is dead. Therefore there is a struggle between the two. The struggle will one day be resolved by the resurrection of your body. Until then, your mind is being renewed, and God is working a miracle in your body, to allow your dead body to be a living instrument of righteousness. It makes no sense and it shouldn’t be possible, but there it is — a continual miracle.

The ascetics grasped the death of the body and the life of the spirit, but rushed to the wrong practical solution. Instead of trusting God to work the miracle of life, they attempted to be sanctified through what they could do, which was bring death. Unable to strengthen the spirit, they decided to weaken the body. But that is not the solution that Paul presents to us in the passage. The passage doesn’t say to put the body to death; it says to put the body’s deeds to death. And Colossians 2:16-23 tells us that the various artificial restrictions designed to weaken the body are actually of no value in our struggle against sin.

Of course there is a bodily discipline that profits, but it is discipline, not destruction. The ascetics got it fundamentally wrong. But we’re trying the same thing anyway — and I believe that’s why the two nature view is so popular. It gives us something to do: fight that sin nature! The only difference is, we have “spiritualized” the struggle by making it against an immaterial “sin nature” rather than our material flesh. But making the enemy less visible doesn’t change the fundamental nature of the error.

The thing most necessary for us is something which we cannot do for ourselves: for God to give life to our bodies, for God to work the continuing miracle in us that makes it possible for us to present our bodies to Him as a holy and acceptable sacrifice.

It is easier to fight against sin than it is to lean on God. (Actually, it’s not easier — it’s impossible. But it’s easier on our pride, which is the point.) We can fight against sin without involving God in any immediate way. Rather than admit my helplessness and cry out to God to deliver me right now, I can struggle, trying to whip my sins from sheer force of will. It’s a doomed effort, but it’s that or admit I can’t do it and become a mystic.

The miracle we’re talking about is not just an arrangement of mental furniture or a set of secret principles that I can choose to live by. Someone Who is not me shows up and does things in my heart that make it possible for me to live righteously, when otherwise I could not. That offends us. We hunger for the illusion that we can do it, that we have it under control. In the Protestant world, we’re more than happy to admit that we would be powerless to resist sin without the finished work of Christ in the past, so long as we are spared the humbling experience of moment-by-moment dependence on Him. But that is what we are called to: we put off Adam and put on Christ.

Only He can save us.

***

Editorial note: if the discussion in the comments below intrigues you and you’d like to hear more, read Portraits of Righteousness.

7 Comments | Functioning Supernaturalism, Mystical Union | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Two Objections

25 July 2023

The previous post addressed the continuing role of imprecatory psalms in the Christian’s life. I regularly hear two objections to this.

The first is “but where’s the specific New Testament command to pray these kinds of prayers specifically?” This one is really just a matter of basic reasoning. If you’re commanded to sing the psalms, then the different sorts of psalms are necessarily included. Demanding a specific verse for the imprecatory subset of the psalms is like saying “I see the verses where Paul prohibits stealing in general, but where’s the verse about boosting cars?” What’s wanted here is not another verse, but a course in elementary logic.

To my eye, that one is more an excuse than an argument. If the commands to sing the psalms and the New Testament examples of imprecations don’t convince someone, then more verses aren’t likely to do the job either.

The second, more substantive, objection is that praying such prayers would be vengeful, and God forbids vengeance in the New Testament: “Beloved, do not avenge yourselves, but rather give place to wrath; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,’ says the Lord. Therefore ‘If your enemy is hungry, feed him; If he is thirsty, give him a drink; For in so doing you will heap coals of fire on his head.'” (Rom. 12:17-20)

This is one of those cases where you have to pay close attention to what the passage actually says. Romans says you may not take vengeance for yourself, but pay attention to the rationale Paul gives. God doesn’t say “Vengeance is bad.” God says “Vengeance is Mine” — and then He says He’ll repay.

Now, when God says that He’ll do something, do we usually take that as grounds not to pray about that thing? Or as grounds to pray for it? He promises to meet our needs, and we pray: “Give us this day our daily bread.” He promises to take vengeance — is there a reason we shouldn’t ask Him to do what He said He would? Paul doesn’t seem to think so: “Alexander the coppersmith did me much harm; may the Lord repay him according to his deeds.”

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Break Their Teeth? Really?

18 July 2023

Regular readers here know I’m a big advocate of singing the Psalms. On the (unfortunately rare) occasions that believers seriously engage in that project, a question comes up pretty quickly: “What do I do with these psalms?”

It ain’t all “As the deer panteth for the water” in the Psalter. There are also prayers that God would break the arm of the wicked (Psalm 10) or their teeth (Psalm 58), pursue and persecute them (Psalm 35), drive them away and kill them (Psalm 68) and so on. What’s a Christian to do with these prayers?

Sing them, that’s what. Three times the New Testament says we should sing psalms (Ephesians 5:19, Colossians 3:16, and James 5:13). The phrase “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” is possibly open-ended enough to include more than just the 150 biblical psalms, but it’s certainly not talking about singing less than what God gave us.

As to how we pray them appropriately, it’s important to read them in context. It’s easy for us to read these psalms in terms of middle-class North America, which is pretty tame by comparison to the times and places these psalms were actually written. You may wonder “When would I ever pray that?” because you’ve never faced the kind of adversity that the psalmist was facing. David has Saul trying to kill him, and murdering every man, woman, and child in the city of priests along the way. It’s not so hard to see how these prayers are appropriate in actual life-and-death struggle with genuinely murderous enemies who are killing innocent people.

In less dire situations, the prayers should reflect the reality at hand. You don’t ask God to break the teeth of your barista because she messed up your latte order. Not even if she did it on purpose. “Let the rich glory in his humiliation, for as a flower of the field he passes away.” If that’s what adversity looks like for you, you’d better milk it for all the spiritual benefit you can.

You don’t pray “let his wife be a widow; let his children be vagabonds and beggars” because someone is running a little mean-girl scheme to get your funding reduced. Asking God to cause their designs to come to nothing and their trap to return on their own head might be more appropriate.

That said, there’s one more thing to remember: “With what judgment you judge, you will be judged, and with what measure you measure, it will be measured back to you. That cashes out in two ways: first, the way you forgive other people in this life is how God’s gonna treat you in this life, so bear that in mind when you make your requests. When you ask God to permanently stop someone who’s killing innocent people, you’re effectively also asking Him to do the same to you if you’re ever killing innocent people. You can and should be fine with that, but if you’re not, don’t pray that prayer.

Second, remember that “in wrath remember mercy” is also a biblical prayer, and something we should take to heart. Jesus asked His Father to pardon His murderers. Stephen, following Jesus’ example, prayed a similar prayer, and God honored that prayer by taking the young man who ran the coat check at the murder and turning him into the most famous missionary and church planter in Christian history. Modern martyrs — the Stams, those killed by the Ayore and the Waorani, the persecuted Russian and Chinese saints who died in the gulags and camps — rightly continue the tradition.

Do those examples mean that imprecations should be a thing of the past in the New Testament? It’s a good question, but the answer is no. Imprecatory psalms are invoked in the New Testament. Jesus invokes an imprecatory psalm in John 15:5. The early church follows suit in Acts 4:25, as does Paul in Romans 11:9. Peter applies the threat of Psalm 110 immediately and directly to his audience, in order to provoke repentance in Acts 2:34. There are other examples, but those will suffice to demonstrate that at minimum, Christians should still be reading these psalms and putting them to use in prayer and preaching. Clearly, if you’re serious about following the examples set by Jesus and His early followers, you can’t just exclude the rougher psalms out of hand; they didn’t.

One could use these examples and others to construct a more nuanced argument about the way we use these psalms now. In making that argument, you’ll also have to account for the existence of fresh New Testament imprecations. 2 Timothy 4:14, 1 Corinthians 16:22, Galatians 1:8-9, and Matthew 23 come to mind offhand, and to cap the stack, Revelation 6:10, by saints who can’t possibly be sinning because they’re already dead. There’s a great conversation to be had about how to do this well, but that is a post for another day.

For today, the reason you shouldn’t be averse to imprecatory prayer is very simple: the Bible plainly isn’t. Evangelical culture is, and that aversion is driven by sentiment, not Scripture.

2 Comments | liturgy, New Fundamentals, Prayer, Social Reality of the Fall, Speaking as God Speaks, Worship | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

What’s that Tree for?

20 June 2023

Did you ever notice that Adam didn’t do anything to bring on the temptation? He didn’t leave a gate open that God told him to close, and then get a snake in the Garden. He was doing everything right, and the snake showed up anyway. Trouble and temptation are not the result of the Fall; they’re the occasion for it. Man is born for trouble; that’s just part of the Story God is telling.

When I teach Creation and the Fall to my middle-school kids, they unfailingly ask about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: “Why did God put that tree in the Garden to start with?” The answer is that it was a tool for Adam’s maturation. That Tree was God’s gift to Adam and Eve, the site where they would learn good from evil. In biblical terms, knowing good and evil is not a bad thing; it’s a way in which we become like God — as God Himself says in the account (3:22). God will later bless Solomon for asking for this exact thing (1 Kings 3:9).

In order to live in the world God had made for them (which included the serpent), Adam and Eve would need knowledge of good and evil. The Tree would have been the site where Adam and Eve attained knowledge of good and evil one way or the other, but they were meant to gain knowledge by resisting temptation, not by yielding to it. By yielding, they seized knowledge by illegitimate means, and died.

The Tree is a gift, but it’s like someone giving you a chainsaw for Christmas — it’s a good gift, but if you handle it badly, it’ll kill you all the same. The biblical account teaches us that knowledge of good and evil is inherently dangerous, and do notice that it’s not just knowledge of evil. There is a knowledge of good that can kill you too. The vital thing is to handle the gift in the way God tells us to handle it.

Adam and Eve had been given everything they needed to know to handle the temptation in front of them. If they’d simply remembered God’s instructions, if they’d waited until the cool of the day to meet with God and ask Him what He thought, if…. But they didn’t.

By way of analogy, imagine a kid whose parents own a bed & breakfast. Reaching the age where he’s curious about sex, the kid conceals a camera in someone’s room on their wedding night. What the kid observes is a Good Thing, but him observing it is not! The way he’s supposed to acquire that knowledge is by participating in his own wedding night in due time, not by watching someone else’s. Grasping illegitimately for that knowledge is sin, it damages him, and he doesn’t really learn the same things that he would have if he’d waited and gone about it the right way.

So it is for us. Knowing good and evil is becoming more like God, but we don’t need to grasp after it. He will take us there in the right way. Our job is to trust Him and be faithful to what He has already given.

1 Comment | Meditations, Real Ministry Training, Theopoetics | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Taking it Literally…Literally?

2 May 2023

In the tribe I come from, we regularly talk about Literal-Grammatical-Historical hermeneutics. We’ll call it LGH for short, or (many of us) “literal hermeneutics.”

We all know what we mean, but the terminology is a bit strange for newcomers, because — how to put it delicately? — we don’t mean the word “literal” literally.

That’s not as crazy as it sounds. Within the history of biblical interpretation, there have been eras when the text was subjected to the most ridiculous flights of fancy. Things like the four rivers flowing out of Eden being a reference to the four cardinal virtues, or the Levitical dietary laws actually prohibiting, not the eating of certain animals, but the vices figuratively associated with those animals. There’s nary a hint in the actual text itself (nor in the later inspired references to it) of such interpretations. Against that backdrop, “literal” interpretation meant that the four rivers flowing out of Eden were actual rivers, and the prohibition against shellfish meant — follow me closely here — that Israelites weren’t allowed to eat shellfish.

Pretty straightforward, right?

So then what do we do with “He shall cover you with his pinions”? If we’re interpreting it literally, then don’t we take that to mean that God has feathers?

“Of course not,” we say. “Don’t be silly.”

But the thing is, a newcomer who asks such a question is not being silly. He’s taking the word “literal” in its ordinary sense: literal as opposed to metaphorical. Take a look at some basic dictionary definitions:

in accordance with, involving, or being the primary or strict meaning of the word or words; not figurative or metaphorical:the literal meaning of a word.

following the words of the original very closely and exactly:a literal translation of Goethe.

true to fact; not exaggerated; actual or factual:a literal description of conditions.

being actually such, without exaggeration or inaccuracy:the literal extermination of a city.

(of persons) tending to construe words in the strict sense or in an unimaginative way; matter-of-fact; prosaic.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/literal

To a normal person’s ears, when we talk about “interpreting the Bible literally” we are the ones that sound crazy. Many passages are obviously metaphorical, and even we admit that. So if you read a metaphor literally, wouldn’t that be a very basic hermeneutical mistake?

“Well, yes, it would,” we say. “But that’s not what we mean by it.”

And it’s not. We mean that we interpret the utterance according to the original author’s intent, not according to some exercise of allegorical ingenuity imposed on the text after the fact. But again, this is not a particularly obvious way to take the word “literal.”

New Zealand pastor Bnonn Tennant had an interesting take on this recently. I quote:

I think the term literal is functionally meaningless; it is just a pious way of begging the question in favor of whatever interpretation “seems” obvious to the person reading it. In other words, “literal” is a shorthand way of saying that scripture should be read according to the normal rules of communication….

The problem with this, he goes on to point out, is that what we think of today as the normal rules of communication are not the standard everywhere and for all time:

As a simple example, consider how scripture speaks of the moon being turned to blood. A “literal” hermeneutic will say this means the physical moon becomes perceptibly red. This is the most “natural” way to read it—for a 21st century Western Christian. If a newspaper said such a thing, we would assume that the physical moon is in view; but also that physically being transformed into blood is not. That’s the “literal” sense to 21st century English readers inculcated in an Enlightenment worldview.

But what makes us think that worldview is the natural way to read the text of Scripture? It’s certainly not the worldview of the people who wrote it. To the extent that we intend to be guided by authorial intent, we obviously have no business substituting our worldview for theirs.

Tennant suggests dropping “literal” from our description of the hermeneutic and substituting “theological.” His argument is that “literal” doesn’t really mean what we’re trying to say (as above) and that “theological” better captures our desire to read the text as a theologically coherent whole. I would be concerned that “grammatical-historical-theological” hermeneutic signals a tendency to use our theology as a background assumption of our interpretation, rather than allowing our theology to be chastened by the text as we should. That’s not, of course, what Tennant means — but I’m concerned he’s just trading one set of “that’s not what I mean by it” conversations for another.

What do you think?

6 Comments | Hermeneutics, Meditations | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Nothing But Game Days

11 April 2023

I was talking with a friend recently about the relationship between the weekly worship service and daily practice, and she expressed surprise at me saying “Sunday’s game day.” From her perspective, Sunday is practice, and when we go out into the world Monday morning, that’s game day.

I was speaking from the perspective of worship. From that angle, your personal, private devotions are important in the same way that running your sprints and hitting the weight room regularly and doing your own skill drills are important if you’re going to be on a basketball team. You can’t improve if you don’t practice, but the goal is to show up prepared, with the rest of the team also prepared, so you can do your best work together. Corporate worship is when we do our best work together.

She was speaking from the perspective of mission. From that angle, the weekly service is a bit more like reviewing the game film the day after the game. It’s taking a break from the work to come back into the courts of heaven, lay it all before God, make necessary course corrections, be assured of His love and power, and then be sent out to do it all again this week.

Which perspective is correct? Well, that’s a bit like asking whether worship or mission is more important. Both, obviously. God has us oscillating back and forth between them for a reason — we need both to keep us healthy and whole.

2 Comments | Ecclesiology, Meditations | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Natural Motivation

4 April 2023

I was part of a discussion of heavenly reward recently. The Bible speaks quite a bit about heavenly rewards for faithfulness here on earth, but most Christians don’t teach on the subject. Some skip it because they foolishly think only the faithful will be in heaven to start with, so they conflate conditional rewards with the gift of eternal life. Others skip it because it seems to debase obedience: “We ought to serve out of love,” they will say, “not to fill up some celestial piggy bank for ourselves.”

Jesus does not agree: He directly taught people to lay up treasure in heaven.

Paul does not agree: He encourages us to compete for “an imperishable crown.”

The author of Hebrews does not agree: he holds up Moses as an example to follow, “for he looked to the reward.”

Why, though? God could simply command our obedience: certainly we owe it to Him. Why does He bother to offer reward?

First of all, because rewards move us. This is basic to human nature; from the very beginning God built us to tend and keep the Garden; we’re supposed to notice what generates a return and what does not, and do more of the former. God wants us to know the good results that come from our labor, so the better we understand the rewards God has in store for us, the more we are moved to do what He has for us.

There’s more to it, though:

  • People climb Everest every year; at this point enough people have done it that there’s little prospect of meaningful reward, but people keep doing it. It’s a magnificent achievement, and that’s enough.
  • Soldiers run into enemy fire to drag a wounded buddy to safety; it’s not like they’re gonna get a Nike sponsorship out of that. Everybody I know who’s done that gives the same reason: “He’d do it for me.”
  • Farmers work like nobody in the world at harvest time, to get the crop in ahead of the storms. Random people at the beach will dive into dangerous surf just to pull a total stranger out of the water. Why? In both cases, they say the same thing: “It had to be done.”

Rewards are not arbitrary; they’re coupled to God’s mission in the world. It’s a bit like a car salesman getting the “Salesman of the Year’ trophy for selling more cars than anybody else. There’s no point in false ‘humility’ about it (“I don’t want the trophy; I just want to sell cars.”) The trophy is happening because he just wants to sell cars; the bonus is happening because he made a ton of money for the boss; it’s a share in the spoils of victory.

God crafted our psyches; all our basic motivations come from His hands. We labor for a return. We attempt crazy, ridiculous, enormous tasks because He does, and we’re like Him that way. He likes it, and so do we. We risk ourselves for each other because He loves, and we love after Him; we risk ourselves for outsiders because Jesus did the same for us. We do difficult and necessary work because God does; when we fell; He set about the mending of the world because it needed to be done, and only He could do it. At our best, we’re like Him that way; we do it because someone has to, and we’re there. God loves all of that, and rewards are designed to ‘cut with the grain’ of the motivations He implanted in our natures to start with.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Empire and Patriarchy

28 March 2023

Empire and patriarchy are very nearly swear words in contemporary culture, and a great many Christians are being blown sideways by that particular wind of doctrine. If we are going to follow Jesus, then we must make our peace with both.

We are citizens of the New Jerusalem, a city that is not yet on Earth, but it will be. When it comes, it will be the capital city of the whole planet, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory and honor into it. On that day, it will be the Bride, the Church, and a political entity. We are not called to make it all happen tomorrow, but we are called to live into what we know to be true. So to the extent that we are able to now, we  mirror the culture and customs of the coming City, which is to say that we are envoys of the coming Empire to end all empires, governed by Jesus, the King of kings. You can go to heaven without grasping this truth, but you can’t be a faithful, discerning follower of the King of kings without grasping what a king of kings actually is: an emperor. 

Does that mean we’re fans of every empire going? Of course not. Jesus is the standard by which all empires are measured; the civil authorities are His agents for good, responsible to live up to the calling He’s given them. Our resistance to evil imperial power and our submission to good imperial power are both grounded in our prior submission to Jesus as agents of His empire. 

Likewise, you can’t be meaningfully Christian without being a heartily willing participant in patriarchy. We are children of God the Father, from whom the whole family in heaven and earth derives its name. Our leader is the ascended man Jesus, our Lord and Brother and High Priest and King. This patriarchy–rule by our Father and the Man He has ordained–is absolutely necessary to a faithful Christian walk. 

As with empire, so with patriarchy: resistance to evil patriarchal power is grounded precisely in our prior submission to the rule of our Father in heaven. And submission to good, God-ordained patriarchal power is grounded in that same submission. 

In either case, trying to avoid empire or patriarchy because some exercises of power are evil is like trying to avoid food because you’ve had bad tacos. No matter how prevalent bad tacos might be, the solution to bad food is good food, and the solution to bad patriarchy is good patriarchy. In the world our Father made, patriarchy is inevitable, and a good patriarchy is one where the men ruling are themselves ruled by God their Father and Jesus their King. Reject rule by good, godly men, and you will get rebel men instead. Good luck with that.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

He Planned to Succeed

7 March 2023

John tells us his purpose in recording the signs Jesus did: “And truly Jesus did many other signs in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.” (Jn. 20:30-31)

John is unique among the books of the New Testament in that it contemplates an unbelieving audience. Does that mean that once we believe, we have nothing further to learn from the book? Not at all!

In a modern evangelical setting, we tend to think that John’s evangelistic purpose means it’s a gospel tract – when they believe, John has accomplished what he set out to do. Not quite. John is not a modern evangelical, and this is not some 100-word “Ticket to Heaven” pamphlet.

John intended to succeed, and he had no intention of leaving his new, baby believer readers to their own devices. His gospel is meant to be read, believed, and then re-read as a believer. What happens when they believe? John tells us: “…and that believing, you may have life in His name.”

This “having life” thing — how does it work? Well, John’s already told us that too: this is not something that happens when you die; the life Jesus gives begins now, when you believe (3:36) and continues forever (5:24). If John convinced you before you got to 20:30-31 — which he’s certainly trying to do — then your life has already begun!

Moreover, Jesus has already told us that simply possessing life is not His goal for you: “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” And earlier: “He who believes in Me, as the Scriptures have said, out of his belly will flow rivers of living water.”

How does one live abundantly, you ask? Especially now that Jesus is gone?

The Last Discourse to the rescue! In 13:1, John frames the discourse in such a way that it also advances his evangelistic purpose, but let’s not miss what this whole teaching is. Starting in 13:31, Judas has left the room. Jesus is speaking only to believers — the 11 faithful disciples — and He’s teaching them how they will live when He has returned to heaven. As we listen with their ears, we learn how to conduct abundant lives today.

So listen! I just sat down and re-read John 13-17. I’d encourage you to do the same today.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

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