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

Niceness: A Unity-Breaking Disease

11 July 2023

I hang out in theology discussion groups some. In a particular (very doctrinally narrow) group, someone recently asked a question about non-theological issues in the group. “What things other than doctrine divide the group?” he wanted to know. As I mulled it over, it occurred to me that one of the biggest divides is our accepted modes of speech. Some of us seem to think that the speech norms of the faculty lounge should govern all Christians all the time; others of us don’t buy that. Now if you’re reading here, you probably already know that I am in the latter group. As far as I’m concerned, kindness is a virtue, but niceness is a disease. We should be willing to speak like Jesus did, and He didn’t say nice things and make everything smooth. He was willing to make things awkward and difficult for the sake of a jagged truth. Among brothers, of course, we have no business slinging a ‘truth bomb’ and then running away; Jesus never did that. We hang around for the whole conversation, and then move forward and work together regardless, because action for Jesus’ sake matters more than agreement on every little thing.

I’d made my defense for a more biblical mode of speech in that very group multiple times already (and mostly been rebuffed), so this particular question would hardly have been worth commenting on by itself. But it sparked another thought: many of the members of the group are also very, very specific about who they’ll fellowship with or collaborate with. “Is there a [___insert affiliation here___] church near my town?” is a frequent question in the group. The responses will always include tales of people who drive 60 miles to get to a church they can stomach, others who are listening to an internet broadcast from another state, and still others who’ve simply given up for lack of a local fellowship they can be satisfied with. Still others, having found a local church that meets their exacting specifications, are busy pretending that all the other local churches don’t exist.

The same people who upbraid me for being coarse and disagreeable — people vastly nicer than I am, who want me to be nicer too — are unable to get along with the majority of their fellow Christians. You’d think that the niceness would make it easier, but it doesn’t seem to. Meanwhile, as rough as I sometimes am with people, I’m deeply embedded in two local churches, we routinely join up with other groups for prayer and sometimes for shared worship services, and our working partnerships span Anglican, Messianic, Charismatic, Baptist, Reformed, and more.

This to say, adherence to faculty-lounge norms of smooth speech does not seem to be the difference that makes a difference. There’s a divide between people who value honest community and people who value niceness, and it shows up in the way we’re able to minister. In my experience, honesty makes you able to minister in ways niceness can’t touch, and gives you partnerships you couldn’t get by being nice. So don’t be nice; be like Jesus. The more you’re like Him, the more you’ll be able to share life with others who are like Him, despite your disagreements. Truth is, talking and being like Jesus is your best shot at getting the disagreements resolved anyway.

Comments Off on Niceness: A Unity-Breaking Disease | Ecclesiology, New Fundamentals, Unity and Community of Christ's Body | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Swan-Diving off the Skyscraper?

8 July 2023

“Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” This was Jesus’ answer when the devil enticed Him to jump off the pinnacle of the Temple (see Matthew 4). The pinnacle was (for the time) a dizzyingly high point. Many Christians look no further than that, take it as the ancient equivalent of being tempted to swan dive off the Empire State Building to see if God would protect you. In this reading, “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God” is a general rule not to do stupid things hoping that God will save you. Look both ways before crossing the street. Skip dessert; your arteries and your waistline don’t need it. Max out your 401(k) contribution. Jesus would.

The problem, of course, is that throughout the Bible, God has people break this rule. Moses is wanted in Egypt, but God sends him back. There’s no water or food in the desert past the Red Sea, but God leads Israel out there anyway. Jesus is a homeless wanderer for three years. They stoned Paul at Lystra, and he barely escaped with his life, but he’s going back to encourage the church there. The Macedonian churches give “beyond their ability.” What gives?

Scripture does expound some general principles about sowing and reaping and handling risks, but trying to find those ideas in this text is biblically ignorant and sloppy. None of that is what “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God” is talking about.

It’s not a ‘general rule,’ it’s a specific quote from Deuteronomy (6:16), as are Jesus’ other responses to the devil’s temptations (cp. Matthew 4:4//Deuteronomy 8:3, Matthew 4:10//Deuteronomy 6:13). Read Deuteronomy 6:16 in context: Moses is warning the conquest generation not to be like their parents, and specifically warns them against the sin their parents committed at Massah (Heb. “Temptation”). That sin is described in Exodus 17:7. See also Deuteronomy 9:22 and 33:8, where Moses brings it up again.

(According to Exodus 17:7, the place is also called Meribah (Heb. “Rebellion”), and by that name it comes up in Psalm 95, which is then a central part of the argument of Hebrews 3-4. So the warning gets repeated in David’s time, and is still an issue for Christians — praise God that we have Jesus’ example to follow in resisting it!)

What, exactly, is the sin at issue here? Read Exodus 17: Israel tempted God at Massah, saying, “Is the LORD among us, or not?” Was the question legitimate? No! This is after all the plagues, after Passover, after He saved them through the Red Sea, after He gave them drinkable water at Marah, after He began literally dropping food (manna) from the sky daily. They are following the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night; it couldn’t be clearer that He has led them to this place in particular. They have every reason to trust that He will provide for them in the place He has led them to.

He had even already warned them at Marah (Exodus 15:25-26) the last time they complained about water. Now, the next time they come up short on water, they accuse Moses (and God): “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to kill us, our children, and our livestock with thirst?” They have no faith that God will bring them to the place He promised. Deuteronomy 6:16 is Moses’ admonition to the next generation not to commit that same sin, and that’s what Jesus quotes.

What does that have to do with the situation Jesus is facing? The temptation is to leap off the pinnacle of the Temple. There’s no danger; it’s not yet His time, and to whom do the assurances of Psalm 91:10-12 apply, if not to Jesus Himself? Does He not fulfill the conditions of 91:9? Jesus could kick off His ministry by floating down from the pinnacle, carried by angels into the throngs of worshippers gathered in the courts of the Temple. What a way to start! Why not?

But no. Jesus has reason to know that God is with Him: the Father spoke over Him from heaven at His baptism, the Spirit descended on Him in the form of a dove, and John witnessed the whole thing. It is the Spirit who has led Him out into the desert, where He has gone without food these past 40 days (an occasion for another temptation that He also answers out of this passage in Deuteronomy). He should remain committed to following the Father’s lead, and not gin up His own solution to the question of launching His ministry — effectively accusing the Father of leading Him to the wrong place.

The recipients of Hebrews faced a similar temptation. These were the people who stayed in place after the stoning of Stephen when everyone else fled, who cheerfully accepted the persecutions of that time to remain where God had called them to be. They are tired, beaten down, and are considering giving up and returning to the Temple worship — effectively accusing God of leading them astray. Hebrews 3-4 treat this as parallel to Exodus 17, but the warning of Hebrews 2 has already made it clear that although the cases are parallel, this would be a much worse sin than the Exodus generation committed in the desert, and would be subject to a much harsher punishment.

We continue to face this perennial temptation today. When a financially tight month tempts us to believe that God is not caring for us, when we discipline children out of panic rather than trusting God’s kindness to us and mirroring it to our children, when we do something flashy and self-aggrandizing at work (or in ministry) rather than trusting God’s leading and His ability to promote us in His time, we face this same temptation. Let’s handle it the way Jesus did: “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.”

1 Comment | Exegesis | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

(Not) Fencing the Table

27 June 2023

“How do you fence the Table?” my friend asked me.

We were talking about the church service I host for homeless folks every Saturday night. For those of you not familiar with the terminology, he was asking how I regulate who is allowed to partake in the communion service.

I had a simple answer: “I don’t.”

I’m very much in the minority here. Across the history of the Church, the vast majority of churches have felt that since the Lord’s Table is a sacred thing, the church leadership should carefully regulate who is allowed to participate, and under what terms. I used to think the same way, but I noticed a few things that changed my perspective.

First, the Bible never tasks church leadership with fencing the table. It never tasks anybody with fencing the Table. The one place it talks about examining someone with reference to coming to the Table, it says “let a man so examine himself.” If I were going to fence the Table, I would need authority to do so–after all, it’s not my table, it’s the Lord’s Table. He has not delegated that authority to me as a church leader; therefore I may not do it.

Second, I noticed that the historical pattern is out of step with Jesus’ own way of being in the world. We fence the Table lest someone profane the body and blood of the Lord by partaking unworthily. Jesus gave Himself recklessly to a world that constantly received Him in an unworthy manner, and in the end gave His very body and blood to His enemies. Is it blasphemous? Of course! But it’s not my blasphemy; Jesus did it Himself. If I’m following Him, then why would I be paranoid about some pagan getting away with a wafer?

Third, I noticed that we haven’t empowered people to examine themselves well. We’ve taken self-examination to mean that you need to descend into morbid introspection and confess all your sins before you partake, lest God strike you down. That’s just not what the passage is talking about: you will ransack that whole chapter in vain looking for a mention of confessing your sins before the Table.

Rather, the passage talks about correctly discerning the Lord’s Body, and that’s what we need to present so people can self-examine and decide whether to partake. We need to say what Scripture says about the Table: “This is the body of Christ,” “This is the blood of Christ.” We need to say what Scripture says about the Body that celebrates at the Table: “You are the Body of Christ.” And we need to let people decide on that basis whether this is something they want to be part of. If they do, then we should do what Jesus did, and give them His body and blood.

Comments Off on (Not) Fencing the Table | Ecclesiology, How To, Speaking as God Speaks, Unity and Community of Christ's Body | 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

Out of the Greenhouse

13 June 2023

“One of the things Christians are disagreed about is the importance of our disagreements.”
-C. S. Lewis

Let me say a hearty “Amen!” We make the mistake in both directions, but soft-pedalling a major disagreement is something we’ll come back to another day. Today, I’d like to address our pernicious habit of making far more of a disagreement than we ought.

When we’re making a mistake of this kind, usually the problem has relatively little to do with the merits of the actual disagreement. Far more often, the problem has to do with pursuing comfort and avoiding hard work.

The comfort pursued has chiefly been of two kinds. The first kind is very personal. Person X and Person Y have a tiff of some sort, X’s ego is bruised, and X lacks the skills or the will to address it properly. So he waits, and in due time, some doctrinal molehill will arise that, properly nourished by his latent discontent, can be turned into a mountain. At that point X will divide from Y, ostensibly over the molehill in question, and entirely too many of us will think that is respectable. In this way as a community we have frequently given at least grudging respect, if not open admiration, to people who should have been sternly ordered into no-nonsense pastoral counseling.

The second kind of comfort we’ve pursued is avoiding the very ordinary rough-and-tumble of interacting with the full range of our fellow Christians. In the West, we’ve been spoiled quite a bit. We’ve been so successful for so long. If you grew up Methodist, chances are excellent that every city you ever moved to had a Methodist church. Ditto for the other major denominations, and a lot of the minor ones.

Once the seeker-friendly movement kicked off, a lot of the denominational distinctives got smoothed out of everyday church life, radically expanding the number of places a generically homogenized evangelical could attend church without being jostled by something unfamiliar. Most of the “worship wars,” in fact, boiled down to people not wanting to be jostled by something culturally unfamiliar — and that was true both for the children of old (mostly 19th-cent. revival, honestly) church culture who didn’t want to be jostled by contemporary music, and for the children of contemporary culture who didn’t want to be jostled by old music.

If we decide — as we are biblically required to do — to fellowship at table with people who are culturally different from us, but whom Jesus has declared clean, then we’ll find ourselves navigating all kinds of things. The guy on my right baptizes babies; the guy on my left celebrates Purim but not Christmas, and the guy across the table plays worship songs on a tuned badminton racket and speaks in tongues. (Okay, I made up the badminton thing. But not the tongues.) A lot of us think of that as insanely uncomfortable, impossible to live with. It’s not. That’s just being out in the field instead of cloistered in the greenhouse.

Comments Off on Out of the Greenhouse | Ecclesiology | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Making Room

6 June 2023

In 1 Samuel 20, Jonathan confronts a dilemma. David, his best friend, comes to him and wants to know, “Why is your dad trying to kill me?” Consider the awkward position this puts Jonathan in. He either has to believe that his dad is plotting his best friend’s murder, or he has to believe that his best friend is paranoid (or lying outright). He protests that surely his dad wouldn’t do any such thing without telling him, but David insists.

Now, this is the kind of thing that breaks up a friendship, or at least becomes a topic we never speak about, a “dead spot” in the friendship where we can’t share what we’re thinking…but not for these guys. They don’t stop talking to each other, and they don’t just “agree to disagree” and never speak of it again, either. I’ll let you read it for yourself, but here’s what I want you to notice: David does not indignantly demand that Jonathan just take his word for it. Jonathan does not minimize David’s assessment and insist that he come to the feast anyway.

They’re both men of conviction; neither one backs down, and neither one tries to bully the other into backing down. Instead, they take each other seriously, make room for each other, and pursue the truth together. They agree on a valid way to test the claim, and God gives them an unambiguous result.

If we’re going to walk closely with one another as family—the “these are My mother and My brothers” sort of family—then we have to find ways to do this. Relationships predicated on agreeing all the time last about 15 minutes on a good day. But if we can make room for each other, hold the space for disagreement while we seek the truth together, then we can walk a long, long way together.

All the way to the New Jerusalem, in fact.

Comments Off on Making Room | Unity and Community of Christ's Body | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Many Tribes, One Lord

30 May 2023

A friend sent me a link to this article by Professor Jay Green at Covenant College. I commend it to your attention; he offers some helpful commentary, and I’ll be using his terminology throughout this post.

Prof. Green’s taxonomy certainly improves on the right-left continuum he’s proposing to replace, but it leaves out an important element: liberal order absolutely depends on Christian values enacted in the public square. This is not a political hypothesis; it is a simple historical fact. The liberal order Green so values as an Emancipatory Minimalist did not spring whole from the head of Zeus, nor was it among the gifts of the Romans. It is the result of a very long, very Christian obedience in the same direction, and it would be instructive to see him classify some historical figures according to his taxonomy. To my eye, Green the Emancipatory Minimalist stands on the shoulders of Boniface, Ambrose, Luther, and Kuyper the Civilizational Maximalists. More, he relies on the thought of folks like William Penn and Roger Williams who defended religious liberty on Christian principles: historical figures who could afford to be Emancipatory Minimalists precisely because they were Civilizational Maximalists, as it were (which I think exposes the key weakness in his taxonomy.)

When he speaks of Emancipatory Minimalists believing “the liberal order is what gives space for the exercise of religious freedom,” he gets it exactly backwards. It was the exercise of Christian freedom and the Christian defense of freedom—over Caesar’s frequent and strenuous objections—that gave us the liberal order. In this article, Prof. Green treats the liberal order as something that’s just there, feet firmly planted in midair, rather than a structure that rests on a particular foundation. When he speaks of Emancipatory Minimalists accepting pluralism as a permanent fixture in the culture, he misses two important facts. 

First, the pluralism he so values is not sustainable, as present events demonstrate. The younger generation of practitioners in fields as diverse as medicine, law, psychotherapy, education, and news media (and all the way down to high school debate) are not simply failing to uphold liberal ideals; they actively reject them as inimical to their own subchristian concepts of class identity, equity, and justice. Some god will be the god of the system, and if we will not have Yahweh, we will have some pretender. We’ve been living off the accrued capital of Christendom for some time, but in the end, pluralism is polytheism. Those other gods are demons, and inviting the demons into a coalition government with Yahweh was exactly what Israel stumbled into time and again. Didn’t work then; can’t work now.

Second, he forgets that he knows the end of the Story. Pluralism is not a permanent fixture; when the assembled throng gathers before the throne on the last day, we will have a magnificent diversity of tribe, tongue, and nation, but not of religion. Pluralism will be a thing of the past, and good riddance. Heaven is not a pluralistic place. “Thy Kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven” is not a prayer for enduring pluralism.

Comments Off on Many Tribes, One Lord | Ecclesiology, Kingdom of God | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Known for Good Things

16 May 2023

Paul required that elders be of good reputation among those outside the faith (1 Tim. 3:7)–and this in a culture that sometimes accused Christians of atheism and cannibalism, that crucified us, threw us to the lions, burned us alive. Paul himself had quite the criminal history as a Christian. So did that escaped jailbird Peter, and many others. They were all following the condemned and executed Jesus, after all. Plainly Paul did not mean that you can’t serve in church leadership if anybody has bad things to say about you. He cannot mean that your godly conduct hasn’t ever been misunderstood by the world. 

Yet we are surrounded by Christians who think that’s exactly what having a good Christian testimony means. These credulous folks have been lulled by a few centuries where being a Christian was generally considered a good, healthy thing, if a bit like kale — a little too wholesome and not a lot of fun. But it has not always been that way. Actually, have a look around. It is not really that way now. 

We are increasingly viewed as enemies of society. We are going to be misunderstood. Sometimes it will be an honest misunderstanding brought about by simple confusion. The devil excels at manufacturing that sort of thing. Sometimes it will be a tactical misunderstanding, and the wounded party will be flopping about like an Algerian soccer player, even though nobody was within 3 yards of him. There’s a great deal of the latter, actually, and our National Evangelical Leadership (all rise!) has been steered by the flopping soccer players of the secular world for some time now. Steered straight into severe compromise, and all in the name of empathy for guy with the pretend-injured leg.

Forget that. In Paul’s mouth, “having a good reputation” means being known for good things. It does not mean that the unbelievers always recognize the good things as good. Suppose a man in your church takes a strong biblical stance on sexuality. Someone objects, and the man doubles down on the truth. Miffed, the objector takes the conflict to Twitter, where your potential elder is accused of “literally killing LGBTQ+ people” by holding the “deeply problematic” views that the Christian church has maintained for two millennia. Suppose the people in your town all agree with the objector and his Twitter post. For the purposes of eldership, does your potential elder have a good reputation, or a bad one?

If you’re at all struggling with that question, you’re already deeply compromised. The man is known for saying true things, good things. He is known for refusing to knuckle under when the truth is unpopular. He is eminently qualified. If you can’t see that — if you take the existence of a coalition against him as disqualifying in itself — then you are giving the pagans veto power over your elder selection process. If you do that — and Big Eva certainly has done that to a large extent — then the leaders that rise in your ranks will always be the ones that soft-pedal, weasel-word, or flat-out deny unpopular truths in order to mollify pagans.

Don’t be that church.

Comments Off on Known for Good Things | Ecclesiology | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

A Different Sort of Grace

9 May 2023

“Of His fulness we have all received, and grace in place of grace. For Law came through Moses; grace and truth through Jesus Christ.”

In the closing sentences of his introduction, John lays out a contrast between Moses and Jesus. Moses gave us one thing, and Jesus is now giving us something in its place. What we got through Moses was the Law. What we get through Jesus is grace and truth.

If that’s all he said, then we could walk away with a simple contrast: law on one hand, grace and truth on the other. But it’s not that simple, because John tells us the substitution is “grace in place of grace.” It’s not law vs. grace. It’s the Law-that-was-grace-already vs. grace-and-truth-through-Christ.

We had one sort of grace; we are now being given a different, a higher, sort of grace. There’s a real contrast here, and John wants us to feel the difference. He also wants us to know that contrast takes place within a continuity of divine grace toward us. Jesus changes everything, and yet Jesus is in keeping with everything that has come before.

When you read what comes before, read it with this in mind.

1 Comment | Exegesis | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »