Second Part of the Lesson

12 November 2024

In Deuteronomy 8, Moses is preparing the generation that is about to enter Canaan. Other than Joshua and Caleb, the oldest of them are just shy of 60. They are now facing the challenges their fathers balked at, all the reasons that they have been wandering in the desert these past 40 years. At this crucial juncture in their lives, Moses reminds them of the lessons they have learned during their years of maturation in the desert.

“So He humbled you, allowed you to hunger, and fed you with manna which you did not know nor did your fathers know, that He might make you know that man shall not live by bread alone; but man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the LORD.” (Deuteronomy 8:3)

You got hungry in the desert, Moses reminds them. This is not idle wishing for luxuries; food is a legitimate need. Their legitimate need was going unmet. Fathers had nothing to feed their crying children. Mothers with nursing infants had nothing to eat themselves; how would they feed the baby? This was no accident, Moses says. It was not poor logistical planning on God’s part. He knew exactly what He was doing. God could have fed you at any moment; he could have made sure you never missed a meal. He could have made sure you had enough food for breakfast and second breakfast and elevensies, and lunch, and afternoon tea, and….

God allowed you to be hungry. That’s the first part of the lesson. Then what? “…and fed you with manna which you did not know, nor did your fathers know.” When you were days into the desert with nothing edible in sight, your belly gnawing at your backbone…food miraculously fell out of the sky. And not just any food; something you’d never seen before, something so unexpected that you named it “What is it?” (That’s what “manna” literally means in Hebrew.) When you asked God for food, you had something in mind–a loaf of bread, a cucumber, whatever–but this wasn’t it. This…this is entirely different than anything you imagined. Reflecting on this moment, Asaph will later write:

“He had commanded the clouds above,
And opened the doors of heaven,
Had rained down manna on them to eat,
And given them of the bread of heaven.
Men ate angels’ food;
He sent them food to the full.”
(Psalm 78:23-25)

Angels’ food. I was talking through this passage with my daughter yesterday, and she said, “I wonder what the nutrition facts are on manna?” It had to be pretty nourishing, since it seems that at times they had nothing else to eat. And it tasted “like wafers made with honey” according to Exodus 16:31. That’s pretty good for health food! That’s the second part of the lesson: God meets your needs, miraculously, in a way you never imagined.

Now comes the punchline. Why would God choose to do it this way? Why not just feed them to start with? “…that He might make you know that man shall not live by bread alone; but man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the LORD.” God is not teaching you that you don’t really need bread; you do, actually. He’s teaching you that in the end, you can’t just live on bread. You need Him! And not just a little of Him: every word that comes from His mouth. You need food, make no mistake–but you need the food He is going to provide. Nothing else will do.

In other words, you need to humbly depend on God, which is how Moses introduced the thought to start with: “He humbled you….”

Now fast-forward to Jesus’ day. After His baptism, Jesus is led by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness for 40 days of fasting. We often imagine that Jesus spends the fast in serene communion with the Father, and then faces three temptations at the end, but no. Luke records that Jesus was “being tempted for 40 days by the devil.” The three temptations recorded at the end of the fast are the grand finale, the crescendo of 40 solid days of spiritual attack.

In a masterpiece of biblical understatement, both Matthew and Luke record that at the end of the fast, “He was hungry.” Imagine you’d found Jesus in the desert just at the halfway point, 20 days into His fast. He’s had nothing to eat for almost 3 weeks. He’s already going to be looking gaunt and emaciated, yes? What would you say that He needed at that point? Food, of course! And you wouldn’t be wrong–somebody who hasn’t eaten in nearly 3 weeks desperately needs a meal.

What is God doing about Jesus’ legitimate need? He’s waiting. He’s humbling Jesus, allowing Him to be hungry. At the pinnacle of that hunger, the devil hits him with “If You are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.”

We’ve talked about this temptation elsewhere, so I won’t repeat all that here. But I saw something new in my most recent pass through this passage, and I think it’s worth pointing out. Jesus quotes from Moses’ speech in Deuteronomy: “Man does not live by bread alone; but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” He’s drawing on the narrative resources of His people to read the situation He’s in; that much I knew. But Jesus hasn’t experienced the second part of the lesson yet. He’s still in part one, literally starving in the wilderness. Because Jesus knows the story of His people, He has learned from their experience. Knowing where He is in the story, He can anticipate what will come next. The angels’ food is just around the corner. So He hits the devil with the punchline, and when He has triumphed over all the temptations, Matthew tells us, “angels came and ministered to Him.”

What do you think they brought Him to eat?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Micro-Christendom in Practice

4 November 2024

I got to guest on a podcast this past week. “Micro-Christendoms and Local Government” released a few days ago. It’s episode 24 of The Civitas Podcast, hosted by Peter Leithart and James Wood.

The Civitas Project is a mostly an academic endeavor out of Theopolis Institute, focused on what they’re calling “ecclesiocentric postliberalism.” That’s a jawbreaker of a term, but it describes a very practical reality. The classical liberal order–the political and social world championed by the likes of John Locke and John Stuart Mill–is dying. The old-line secular liberals weren’t able to contend with the “anything–no, really, anything!–goes” relativism of the potsmoderns, who in turn lack the resources to contend with the dictatorial howlings of everybody from rabid feminists to woke fascists to Muslim fundamentalists. We live in a world that is rapidly abandoning relativism for a new morality hostile to anything true, good, or beautiful. That’s the “postliberal” part. The “ecclesiocentric” part argues that any sane response to the world we now live in has to begin with the church at the center. The Civitas Project exists to figure out what, exactly, that might mean. The project existed for a few years before going public with the podcast, and has also produced a book of essays, Hell Shall Not Prevail, which is well worth reading.

On the podcast, Peter and James mostly interview academics from a wide variety of fields. If you’ve been hanging out here long, Gentle Reader, you know that I’m not entirely without academic chops, but I gotta tell you, I’m nowhere near the stratospheric level of the average Civitas guest. So how’d I end up on the show? Peter and James got interested in coming down to the other end of the spectrum to chat with some practitioners. Peter was kind enough to think of me, and given his area of interest, I immediately thought of Joe Anderson. The resulting conversation was a great deal of fun, and you can hear it online or wherever you get your podcasts. I hope you enjoy it!

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Reading Both Books

29 October 2024

Read the first few chapters of Matthew, and take note of the Old Testament prophecies he cites. When Matthew cites Micah 5:2, the meaning is very clear. God made a predictive prophecy about where the Messiah would be born, and that prophecy is fulfilled when Jesus is born in that exact town. But that’s not the only thing “fulfill” means here.

Consider “Out of Egypt I called My son.” The son in question in Hosea 11 is Israel—not just the man Jacob (although he’s included) but the whole nation that came from him. “When Israel was a child I loved him” might refer to the man Jacob, but “out of Egypt I called My son” can’t mean just that one guy, because that guy died in Egypt, and what was called out of Egypt was not that one man, but all his descendants, 400 years later. So “Out of Egypt I called My son” is the utterance of a prophet, but it’s not a predictive prophecy; it’s a comment on Israel’s history. In what sense can it be “fulfilled”?

In order to grasp Matthew’s point here, we must first pay careful attention to the meaning of Hosea. Knowing that Israel is God’s son, Matthew shows how Jesus walks in the steps of Israel. He’s making two points: first, that Jesus is Israel (in a meaningful sense that Matthew will spend the whole book exploring), and second, that the land of Israel has become spiritual Egypt—a point that would be reinforced by John the Baptist when he calls the remnant out into the desert to pass through water. Jesus adds to Hosea; we can’t read Hosea 11 anymore without also thinking of Jesus’ flight from Herod as well as the Exodus. The words of the prophet have been “fulfilled,” made more full than they were before.

We don’t want to read something into the text that isn’t there. At the same time, we don’t want to miss something that is there—and the New Testament writers show us repeatedly that there’s a lot more there than one might think at first glance. From Jesus Himself proving the resurrection by exegeting a verb tense in Genesis to the fulfillments of the first few chapters of Matthew to the dizzying displays of Hebrews, the New Testament authors show us a way of reading the Old Testament that we wouldn’t have come up with on our own. It had to be revealed to us.

In theologically conservative circles, we have gotten our hermeneutics from the Book of Nature (mostly as read by E. D. Hirsch), which is very useful as far as it goes. But there’s two books, and the Book of Scripture also has something to teach us about how to read. We should read both books.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

It’s Not All Foreplay, Pt. 2

22 October 2024

We ended part one with a question: it’s easy enough to see why pagans might believe that all intimacy is ultimately the same, and all leads to sexual intimacy, but what would possess Christians to think that?

Fear, that’s what.

Some of it is fear of adultery. It’s a massively destructive sin, and sensible people don’t want to be anywhere near it. But then, sensible people don’t want to be in a house fire or a high-speed auto accident either, and don’t on that account cut off the electricity in their houses or refuse to drive on highways. Sensible people recognize that everything has risks, and if you think electricity is risky, reading by candlelight is not exactly risk-free. A 30-minute drive on the highway has its risks, sure, but the 60-minute drive it takes to stay off the highway also has its fair share of risk exposure. Our problem, in this case, is that we’re sensitive to the risks of one course of action, and utterly blind to the risks of the other.

Adultery’s damage is well-known. The damage done by fearing and avoiding meaningful interaction with the opposite sex is less well understood, but no less real. Lacking an appreciation for the benefits of healthy cross-gender interaction and friendship, we see nothing there but danger. We ought to know better, because our advice to just stay away from the opposite sex does not track with how Scripture tells us to behave (but we’ll get to that).

Part of the perceived danger comes from a mythology we’ve allowed self-justifying adulterers to build up for themselves. “I don’t know how it happened!” they say. “One thing just led to another!” Too many Christians take these ridiculous claims at face value, and we really ought to know better. It’s fairly difficult to have sex by accident, unless you’re already so far compromised that the final PIV detail hardly matters anyway. But foolish Christians buy this nonsense, and then build on it: since apparently nobody, not even the adulterers, really knows how adultery happens, they conclude that men and women just need to avoid each other. Any intimacy of any type is a threat, and so they treat all intimacy as the same thing. Ironically, their fear of becoming like the world is the very thing that causes them to become like the world (no surprise if you remember Prov. 29:25). But God has not given us a spirit of fear (2 Tim. 1:7), so let’s not forget what He’s told us about sin. We are not ignorant of Satan’s devices (2 Cor. 2:11).

Some while back, I sat in a marriage counseling session with a husband who’d cheated and a wife who was deciding what to do about it. “I don’t know what happened!” he said. You know what I told him? “You just blew a hole in the bottom of the boat that is your marriage, and you’re taking on water fast. You need her help” I pointed at his wife “or you’re sunk. You need her to believe that this isn’t going to happen again. ‘I don’t know what happened!’ doesn’t inspire confidence.” As we dug into it, what we found is that his initial “I don’t know what happened” response was a defense mechanism. He didn’t want to think about it. It was just easier to say “I don’t know what happened” than it was to face the truth: he did know, and he’d been conscious the entire time. Part of my job was to help him do the hard work of facing what he’d done and excavating how it happened so they could prevent it in the future. Over the next half-hour or so, he faced his sin squarely, dug into how he got there, and then we made a plan to keep him out of similarly tempting situations in the future. Thirty minutes after his initial “I don’t know,” all three of us had a clear understanding of what happened. It didn’t actually take that much work; it just took the honesty and will to actually face it.

What we found, of course, tracks with Scripture (and common sense). He didn’t commit adultery by accident; both parties knew what they were doing. At a certain point, there was a decision involving a zipper, and nobody concerned was in any way confused about the implications. Sexual arousal is designed by God to be the sort of thing that gathers momentum as it goes, a bit like a long, steep playground slide. When they’re already three-quarters of the way down the slide, it’s easy enough to see how “one thing led to another” until they ended up in the mud puddle at the bottom. But how did they end up on that slide to start with? Answering that question is where Scripture is a big help.

God tells us: “Each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death. Do not be deceived, my beloved brethren.” The process certainly is deceptive—hence the warning against being deceived—but it’s not a mystery. God has told us all about it: we need to police our desires.

The deception comes in not believing God about this. When the desire passes through your mind, it’s not just a harmless pleasant thought. If you find yourself thinking, “I can’t…but it would be fun,” you’re already in trouble. If you think you can nurture the desire without getting hurt, you’re deceiving yourself. It’s already hurting you. And then, if you think about it long enough, it’s going to infect your behavior, one way or another. The same lies will still be with you: “It’s not hurting anybody. Besides, who’s gonna know?” If you think you can play with the sin a little bit without anything serious happening, you’re wrong. Desire conceives and gives birth to sin; sin matures and gives birth to death. So the thing to do is address the desire.

Let’s take an example. Say a particular couple’s sexual relationship is on the rocks, no matter why. He’s out there in the working world, he’s sexually hungry, and an opportunity—a willing coworker who’s particularly interested in him, say—crosses his path. What is he supposed to do with this situation?

Say no, of course, but that’s not nearly enough. He needs to kill the desire. His desire for sexual communion is a good and godly thing, and there’s exactly one person he’s to fulfill that desire with. When that desire gets misdirected onto anybody else, the thing to do is starve it ruthlessly. Don’t toy with it; don’t think about it. Give it no occasion for expression, and pray until it dies. He should turn his attentions to his wife (cf. 1 Cor. 7:2-5), and if for whatever reason his wife cannot or will not meet his legitimate needs, then he should embrace the ascetic struggle and suffer like Jesus would rather than give the enemy a victory. Jesus’ legitimate human needs were going unmet in the wilderness (food), in the Garden (companionship and emotional support), and on the cross (physical safety). We should be prepared to follow Jesus; a servant is not greater than his Master.

But this is not to say that the man has to go it alone. Christians are meant to live giving and receiving daily encouragement. Particularly in times like these, a believer needs the support of his brothers and sisters. How does that work? Stay tuned.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Denying the Incarnation

15 October 2024

A few weeks back, someone posted this quote in a theology forum I sometimes frequent. I’m told it’s from The Golden Path by John R. Rice:

“God’s ministers sometimes feel that they should first teach Christians the Bible and Christian living and later hope they will win souls, but they do not make as good Christians of young converts as the pastors and evangelists make who teach people to win souls as the main Christian duty. For God Himself presses on the soul winner to be clean. He ‘purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit.’ All over America, some Bible teachers and pastors teach Christians a code of conduct without soul winning, and make Pharisees – don’ters.

But when God’s Spirit puts the inward urge in a Christian that he must “by all means save some,” there is a real striving for spiritual holiness, a consecration of life and talents that rules cannot make.“

Now thus far, I love this. While I think it’s possible to overemphasize anything, including the duty to evangelize, in general I favor an approach to discipleship that majors on putting people into play, and handling the rest of it along the way. I particularly like the language of “don’ters.” I’ve seen that problem firsthand, been part of it in my youth, and I’m very grateful to have been rescued from it.

Dr. Rice continues:

“Everywhere I go as an evangelist, I find pastors shocked, grieved, troubled and struggling because of the drift of their people away from clean, holy living, their entanglements in the world’s amusements and pleasures and aims. Even in the most fundamental churches, I find the young people going continually away from the standards the church has set in many, many cases. But I find that trouble among churches fundamentally sound in doctrine is far more prevalent where there is not a strong soul-winning program in the church. In those great churches over America (and I am acquainted with many of them) where the whole program of the church is centered around soul winning, I find there is a holy enthusiasm for Christian living. Christians who earnestly labor at soul winning feel they are citizens of a heavenly country, that they are not supposed to be like the people of this world. They are trying to snatch people from fire, and they tend to hate the garments spotted by the flesh.

I have been bombarded with thousands of letters from Christians, particularly young Christians, asking, “What is wrong with dancing? What is wrong with moderate drinking? And why not join in with other moral, good people in lodges and secret orders?” But I have found in literally hundreds of cases that Christians who set out to win souls decide for themselves, from an inner compulsion by the Spirit of God, that this or that worldly thing is not for them the way of happiness and the way of blessing. God Himself has pledged to help to purge and cleanse the life of a Christian to win souls! Oh, there are blessings a soul winner has beyond those of any other Christian.“

Dr. Rice’s application is questionable, but the underlying sentiment is exactly correct. Concern for the lost will determine how you handle peripheral matters. It is precisely in ministering to the lost that I found myself having a Bud with the construction crew that worked on my building (and nothing less would have driven me to drink tasteless rice beer). I’ve brewed beer for Jesus’ sake too; we did a couple community beer-brewing nights where we “cast [our] bread upon the waters” the way they did 5,000 years ago. As promised, it returned after many days, and the better for the aging. Of course, if I were a host with a residential rehab for guys in recovery, I’d probably be a teetotaler, and for exactly the same reason — Christlike concern for the people God put in front of me. (And that sort of thing is kind of the least of it. I’ve been places that would scare the hide right off your average seminary-trained pastorling — I know, because I was one! — places “good” people don’t go, but I was following Jesus, and that’s where I ended up. The key to those environments is to do what Jesus did: listen to the Spirit. He won’t steer you into sin.

Occupy yourself with the people Jesus was occupied with, and you too may find that He calls you to have a Dos Equis with the boys, accept the invitation to a dance, or join the Elks. Which is to say, Jesus might call you to do what He Himself did — go where the people in need are, even if “good” people don’t go there, for the same reasons that Jesus went those places.

Jesus never joined in anybody’s sin in order to “reach” them, but He was constantly joining in whatever they were doing. Zacchaeus lived at his house; Jesus joined him there. Somebody at Cana had a wedding and served wine; Jesus joined them (and provided a rather large amount of the wine, come to think of it). Tax collectors and sinners (and their contemporary equivalents) eat; Jesus joined them in it. The town hussy was drawing water at the well; Jesus asked her for some. All of which, if you apply your theology even a little, is a natural extension of the Incarnation.

There’s a school of thought in ministry that Christians ought to be distinguished from their worldly counterparts by their don’ts: the neighborhoods they don’t go to, the invitations they don’t accept, the occasions they don’t attend, the people they don’t spend time with. Practically speaking, that kind of life is a denial of the Incarnation. It is a refusal to follow Jesus and behave as He behaved.

I want to be clear here: I’m not saying that you have to hang out on skid row to follow Jesus. I don’t have any idea where Jesus is calling you to go. Remember, Jesus didn’t spend all His time with the hookers and drunks; He dined with Simon the Pharisee and worshiped at the Temple too. But I’ve been walking with Jesus a long time, and I’m pretty sure He’s going to call you to go to places where you’re going to be very uncomfortable, places where you’ll be tempted to make an excuse and not go. This is going to happen because Jesus is making you like Him, and He was equally willing to hang out at a country club luncheon or around a burn barrel in an alley on the bad side of town. He went where His Father sent him, empowered by the Spirit who rested on Him. You are directed by the same Father and empowered by the same Spirit — do you really think you won’t end up in similar places?

Jesus joined us as one of us in our world in order to draw us into His. When Jesus shows up in a place, He’s bearing the Spirit. He’s different from everybody else, and so should you be, but for the right reasons. It’s not about your clothes or where you go or who you go with; it’s about the Spirit that indwells you. If you’re not being a light, then it doesn’t matter that you got invited into the room. But it doesn’t matter that you’re “being a a light” if you’re in an empty room — you might as well be under a basket, or buried in the backyard.

So be like Jesus — provide wine to the wedding, eat with Zacchaeus, have a private chat with that girl at the well. Be “a friend of tax collectors and sinners.” Because He would. Joining in what people are doing in order to gain them is literally the basis for His whole earthly ministry. It should be the basis for yours too.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

God Made Wine

8 October 2024

Many common beliefs are basically unsupportable, and spread for sociological reasons totally unrelated to the merits of the idea. For example, the initial spread of Darwinism and the current scientific establishment’s death-grip on the neodarwinian synthesis both rather obviously owe their success less to their ability to answer the relevant questions, and more to the sentiment that “we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.” The calumny that Christmas, Easter, and Halloween are pagan holidays repurposed by the church likewise flourishes because of an unwitting alliance between 18th-century French intellectuals and present-day evangelicals drunk on father-hatred. The odd notion that anybody thought the earth was flat in the days of Christopher Columbus is another. There are plenty more.

Mostly such ideas die when the sociological reasons fade. No longer in the grip of a passion that makes them want it to be true, reasonable observers note that the evidence was never all that good, and move on with their lives. One such idea, mostly dead but occasionally flourishing in out-of-the-way corners of the church, is the notion that wine in the Bible was really just grape juice. Now, as I say, this notion is mostly (and deservedly) dead, but occasionally it comes up, to the detriment of poor folks who are ensnared by it and therefore miss what the relevant passages are actually saying. I’d like to help administer the coup de grace. Hence this post.

It will help to know at the outset that there are a handful of biblical words that are translated “wine.” The common Hebrew word is yayin. That’s what Noah got drunk on when he had too much in Gen. 9:21, for example, and what was prohibited to the priests on duty in Lev. 10:9, but you’ll also find it offered to the Lord as a drink offering in the firstfruits offering (Lev. 23:13) and the twice-daily ascension offerings (Num. 15:1-16). There’s also a Hebrew word for new wine (Heb. tiyrosh). Likewise, there’s a common Greek word for wine (oinos) and another for new wine (gleukos). It’s possible to get drunk on both gleukos (Acts 2:13) and oinos (Genesis 9:21, 1 Sam. 1:14-15, Isa. 29:9, 49:26 in the LXX, the Greek Old Testament, and Eph. 5:18, Rev. 17:2 in the New Testament). This to say, there is no biblical word for “grape juice that’s nonalcoholic.”

Do you wonder why? I did too, many years ago, so I did a little research. As it turns out, this is one of those cases where we are the weird ones. Before 160 years ago, nobody really needed a separate word for grape juice, because what we think of as “grape juice” today was basically impossible. You know that cloudy stuff you find on grape skins? That’s yeast. It’s literally impossible to make grape juice without introducing yeast cultures to it; fermentation begins the moment the skin of the grape is broken. (A wise man might take that as a particularly broad hint from a loving God; as we will see, some men took it as a challenge.) In a warm climate like harvest-time Israel, freshly-stomped grape juice was already fermenting as it ran into the buckets and was poured off into new wineskins (Luke 5:38-39). That’s why there are passages that talk about getting drunk on new wine.

Now, there was a way to stop the process, and they sometimes used it. Yeast feeds on sugar, but high concentrations of sugar inhibit or kill yeast, so if you boil the juice down into a syrup, the yeast can’t grow. So you can store the syrup without it fermenting, and then add water to reconstitute the juice when it’s time to serve it. Easy, right? However, this process also had problems: while yeast can’t grow in the syrup, various molds and bacteria can, and will spoil it entirely. You have experienced this yourself if you’ve ever had a batch of homemade jam go bad on you.

So how did we come to think of (nonalcoholic) grape juice as a thing? To answer that question, I need to introduce you to Dr. Thomas Bramwell Welch, a Methodist minister, doctor, and dentist serving in Vineland, NJ. Born in Glastonbury, England, in 1925, Dr. Welch emigrated to the States and became involved in the poorly-named Temperance movement. The teetotaling Temperance advocates (then and now) face a very serious problem in the church service: it’s difficult to maintain that wine is evil when you’re simultaneously serving it at the Lord’s Table…and they were! Remember, grape juice as you and I know it today did not yet exist.

Some Temperance churches would fresh-squeeze grapes when they were in season and serve the juice before it had time to ferment; some would refuse to serve communion at all when fresh grapes were unavailable. Others, not content to ban the sacraments most of the year, resorted to recipes that involved procedures like boiling raisins to make a kind of tea, or mixing raisin puree and water. The more extreme Temperance advocates would serve water at communion in order to avoid serving anything that might be alcoholic. But most churches simply continued serving wine; that’s what the Bible said to do, and the alternatives were both unappealing and nonsensical. The 1864 General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church pointedly nixed the alternatives, recommending that “the pure juice of the grape be used in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper.”

Enter Dr. Welch, who served his church as the communion steward. In 1869 Dr. Welch, working in his own kitchen, successfully applied the (then-new) techniques of Louis Pasteur to sterilize grape juice, killing the yeast so it wouldn’t ferment in the bottle. He served it in his church, and advertised Dr. Welch’s Unfermented Wine to surrounding churches, but garnered little interest. For four years, he continued to produce a small quantity of his Unfermented Wine for a few local churches that used it, but it never really took off, and so he quit. Two years later, his son Charles Welch took up the cause, convincing him to start again. Charles advertised Welch’s Grape Juice heavily, and by 1880, the Methodist Episcopal Church had begun to require serving unfermented juice wherever practical. Charles went on to launch multiple advertising campaigns, extolling various (and dubious) health benefits of grape juice and even serving it at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. Growth was explosive; Charles would move the business to a factory in New York to keep up with the demand. The rest, as they say, is history. Today you can buy Welch’s grape juice in any grocery store, and most American evangelical churches think of it as the default choice for communion.

But is it? Scripture is quite clear that what’s in the communion cup is oinos, and it’s equally clear that oinos is something one can get drunk on. It’s not grape juice. And why should it be? Scripture repeatedly presents wine as a blessing from God (Gen. 27:28, Psalm 104:15, Prov. 3:10, Ecc. 9:7, John 2) a suitable sacrifice (Lev. 23:13, Num. 15:5, 7, 10), and part of communion with God (Deut. 14:26). Scripture presents the lack of wine as either a form of fasting (Num. 6:2, 20, Jer. 35) or a curse from God (Isa. 24:7, Jer. 48:33).

The New Testament pointedly tells us not to judge one another in matters of food and drink (Rom. 14, Col. 2:16), which means that we are free either to drink or to abstain. Timothy had evidently chosen to abstain; at a certain point in his life, Paul told him to start drinking a little for his health (1 Tim. 5:23).

So how shall we then live? Today, we live in the world Welch made, and you can have your pasteurized grape juice in communion year-round. If that’s your conviction (or your church’s practice) then drink your Welch’s with gladness and simplicity of heart. Nothing could be less fitting than turning the feast of unity into an occasion for division. By the same token, barring medical necessity, if the church you’re part of (or visiting) serves wine, drink your wine with joy and thanksgiving; taste and see that the Lord is good! In any case, don’t seek to bind other’s consciences on such matters; no less an authority than Paul himself tells them not to listen to you (Col. 2:16-17).

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Changing the Slope?

2 October 2024

Most people object bitterly to being on the downhill side of the slope of oppression, but they don’t actually want a level playing field. They just want to claw their way to the uphill side of the slope. To make it concrete: over the course of human history, many, many people have objected to being slaves, but relatively few people have objected to being masters — which is to say that mostly, people don’t actually object to slavery. There have been plenty of slave revolts, but very few times when a society of masters voluntarily surrendered their role. (And by “very few,” I mean it’s never happened ever, not anywhere, except in the Christian West, where it’s happened culture-wide, twice.)

As regards slavery, hopefully we’ve learnt our lesson, and we can use that big picture to have a look at the details of our own lives. Want to know how someone really feels about justice and oppression? Watch how they behave toward people who are downhill from them. There are always moments when you find yourself in a superior position, whether it’s with restaurant servers, grocery-store baggers, children, pets. How you behave in those positions will reveal your real attitude toward injustice and oppression. It’s really a disturbingly simple question: when you can do unto others what they can’t do back to you…what do you do? How do you treat people when they’re at your mercy?

Every human faces this question, and every human has favored work-arounds to justify their own injustices to themselves. The white supremacist talks about the “natural order;” the activist talks about “punching up;” no matter how you talk about it, the matter reduces to that simple question: How do you treat people who can’t (or won’t be allowed to) respond in kind?

If you are generous and honest, well done. If you’re reacting to this post like I touched your eyeball, well…repent.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

The Way Your Story Works

12 September 2024

We are the stories we tell ourselves, but not in the simple way where we just get to dictate everything. The world is not a blank screen; there is a big story happening around us, and we all fit into it.

Your actual life is a product of the interaction between the big story going on around you and the story you tell. If you tell yourself nothing but kitten and rainbow stories, you don’t get a kitten-and-rainbow life; what you get is a life where you enjoy some things and are hopelessly out of touch with others. If you tell yourself nothing but grim stories? Same, without the enjoyment. Some people seem to like it that way, but neither of these kinds of folks accomplish much, nor are they much fun to be around.

But if you can tell yourself a story where everything is not perfect, but it is meaningful; where you fail, but there’s room to keep trying; where you have a purpose, even if you don’t quite know what it is yet…then the story of your little world has gear-teeth to mesh with the story of the world that is happening around you.

That’s when you start to get somewhere.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Worldly Amusements

29 August 2024

If you go back a few generations in certain parts of the American church, you will encounter a strong current of thought that Christians ought not partake in “worldly amusements.” Drinking, dancing, card- and pool-playing all get roundly condemned, along with moving picture shows and various other pastimes. Sometimes it would take a thoroughly amusing turn: some of my older relatives have informed me that when TV was new, it was off-limits as a “worldly amusement,” but when color TV came out, somehow black and white TV became ok!

Despite the poisonous legalism, they were onto something. Evangelicals typically fear being branded as legalistic, so (ironically) we focus on the legal aspects of a leisure-time activity. We ask if it’s morally wrong for some clear reason, and if not, well, that’s really all we have to say about it. But in a consumer culture drowning in entertainment options, we need to ask more questions than that.

One of the questions has to do with opportunity cost, and this is where our Holiness-movement forbears might have a point worth considering. What am I giving up in order to give the next 90 minutes to this innocent and fun activity at hand? Now, there is a tight-shoed and wicked way to apply that question. If absolutely everything has to be filled with maximal purpose, and if purpose is defined in the hopelessly short-sighted and narrow way such people tend to define it, we will become very dull, joyless folk, incapable of enjoying anything. But if we refuse to entertain the question, we cannot escape becoming distracted, vapid idiots flitting from one amusement to another.

One of the enemy’s basic weapons is distraction. He doesn’t actually have to destroy us to keep us off the battlefield; it’s enough to keep us focused on our own amusement. We can’t allow that.

The job here is to find the road between the ditches. God “gives us richly all things to enjoy,” and it’s wrong not to enjoy them. He also gives us a mission to fill the earth and subdue it, to disciple the nations, to reconcile the world to Himself, and we must be about it. Rightly construed, each of these reinforces the other. The God who is reconciling the world to Himself is the God who wants His good gifts to be enjoyed. We win the world in part by inviting them to enjoy His good gifts with us. Look around your life: who can you invite to join you?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

It’s Not All Foreplay

13 August 2024

“Spiritual intimacy leads to physical intimacy.” I was told that a number of times growing up, by various parties in and around my church, but especially (and repeatedly) by a godly older couple I highly respected. Their practical application of that idea was a corollary to the Billy Graham rule: a man and a woman ought not to have serious conversations about deep spiritual things. Aside from your spouse, men ought to talk with men, and women with women, (or maybe couples with couples) and that’s that. (I’ve both written and said my piece about that error elsewhere, and won’t belabor it here.)

More recently, I had an unbelieving colleague with whom I did some very high-quality, very careful bodywork over a period of about a year. Everything was going well until one day, out of the blue, she began a conversation that turned into an invitation to adultery. To her dubious credit, she was very forthright: for her, being seen well and known well created sexual tension, which she wanted to relieve by taking our working relationship into the bedroom. I declined, which she certainly expected—the invitation was framed in a “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” kind of way—then I declined further contact, which seems to have surprised her; and when she continued to reach out to me, ultimately asked her not to contact me again.

Now, the same type of work I did with her, I’ve done with others of both genders over the years with no such difficulty. So what caused her to have such a problem? The same misbelief that the godly older couple in the first paragraph was suffering from: thinking that all intimacy is ultimately the same thing.

Let’s go back to the beginning. The world was formless and empty. God forms the world by dividing a series of contrasting pairs one from the other: light and darkness, sea and sky, dry land and sea. Then He fills the newly-divided world: the greater lights to rule the day and the lesser to rule the night, fish in the sea and birds in the sky, and land-dwelling animals. Then He signs the portrait: “male and female He created them.”

God created genuine variety, not a world of monist mush. Many of the different things He made are perichoretically related in surprising ways, but they are different things, each with its own glory. One of the fundamental truths about God and His creation (as Francis Schaeffer famously observed) is that all things are not the same to Him. He doesn’t just recognize distinctions; He literally makes distinctions. Christians ought to be automatically suspicious of any claim that starts out, “It’s all the same thing, man!”

One of the distinctions we ought to recognize is between a marriage and every other human relationship. Different kinds of relationships are different, each with its own unique glory. There’s not a single staircase of human relationship with casual interaction at the bottom and a marriage bed at the top, the only variable being how far up the stairs you climb with a particular person. Relationships differ in kind as well as degree. There’s more than one staircase, and they don’t all go to the same place.

This is something that Christians ought to already know: we will have eternity—literally all the time in the world—to know each other better. There’s not a single person on the New Earth that you won’t meet, and with that kind of time on our hands, we’ll all get to know each other very well indeed. As well as you can get to know your spouse in 50 or 60 years of successful marriage, that’s nothing to how well you’re going to know, say, Deborah or Samuel one day. And you still won’t end up married to them. “In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage,” like Jesus said.

Similarly, same-sex friendships like Jonathan and David, Ruth and Naomi, are held out as examples of close friendship and love: a different kind, not a lesser degree, of relationship. Contemporary revisionist takes on those relationships (wrongheaded for reasons I’ve gone into elsewhere) are actually a symptom of the very error we’re addressing. The revisionists’ inability to imagine a close relationship that’s not sexual is precisely the problem, and they’re projecting their own lack of imagination on everyone else.

Contemporary people think they live in a world of monist mush, and they’ve deified their lusts to the point that many of them will bed virtually anybody under a highly flexible ‘right’ set of circumstances. Many really do only have one relational staircase. That staircase leads inexorably to sexual intimacy, and every step below it is some combination of audition and foreplay, all the way down to a casual conversation with a stranger on the sidewalk. Which is kinda gross, if you think about it for a moment.

Framed that way, the failure of imagination is easy to see, and it ought not to surprise us that pagans would struggle in this way. It’s baked into their basic premises about the world; the mystery is that they don’t struggle more often. But what in the world would possess Christians to get tripped up like that?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

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