Full Contact Christianity

Is There An Interpretation?

15 September 2020

In 1 Corinthians 14, Paul gives instructions for the use of tongues in public worship. It profits on one, Paul says, for someone to blather on in a tongue if nobody understands it. The tongues-speaker is welcome to speak to himself and to God in private, but in public worship, Paul says, tongues must be interpreted.

Makes sense, right? Seems simple enough.

Here’s the problem, though: how do you know if there’s an interpretation?

Think it through like a scene in a movie. Someone feels moved by the Spirit to stand up and speak in a tongue, but he’s not supposed to do it unless someone can interpret it. Does he have to find an interpreter in advance? How does that work? (“Hey, buddy — I’m gonna speak in tongues. Do you have the interpretation?”) Does he just speak, and trust that the Spirit will give someone the interpretation? How long do we let him go on before we decide there’s no interpreter, and have him sit down?

See, Paul sets them up for a “try it and see” model here. To even have a hope of following Paul’s instructions, they’ll have to rely on the Spirit, and discern His will together.

And so should we all.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

On Rebaptism

8 September 2020

Zaccheus walks into the temple. Since Jesus visited his home a few weeks ago, he’s a changed man. He has restored everything that he cheated anyone of, like he promised–and that took a while–and word has spread far and wide of the tax collector who has repented. As he passes through the temple gate, whispers spread through the crowd like a wind through dry leaves. He stops inside the gate and looks up at the inner temple. It’s been so long since he was welcome here. So long since he came here to worship.

A wizened priest approaches him, suspicion etched deep in his wrinkled face. “What brings you here, tax collector?”

Not long ago, the man’s tone alone would have been enough to drive Zaccheus out of the temple. But he’s a different man now. Zaccheus bows his head. “I need to be circumcised again.”

Does that sound odd to you?

As circumcision was the rite of entry under the Old Covenant, baptism is the rite of entry in the New. Some folks have taken that to mean that we should baptize babies born into Christian families, but that’s only because they haven’t thought it all the way through. You circumcise an Old Covenant baby after he’s born into the Old Covenant, which was simple enough. Under the New Covenant, though, people are born twice. Which birth do we baptize them after? If baptism is the new circumcision, what is the new birth?

Well…the new birth. So once the person is born again, we baptize them. If the man wanders away, becomes a gambler and a drunkard, joins the Hell’s Angels, sells automatic weapons to third-world dictators, the whole works, and then comes back, does he need to be baptized again?

No. The original baptism counted, and it still counts. His many sins are an insult to his baptism, but they don’t undo it, anymore than cheating on your spouse undoes your wedding. You can’t commit adultery enough times to make your wedding didn’t happen. (You might induce your spouse to divorce you, but that’s a different thing.)

Now, if this man comes to me, repentant of his life and seeking to return to the Lord, will I receive him? Of course! If he wants to be rebaptized as a symbol of his repentance and return, will I refuse him? Of course not!

A couple whose marriage was dead and has come alive again may renew their wedding vows. I see nothing wrong with renewing the man’s baptism. But that is what we’re doing — renewing it.

2 Comments | Baptism, liturgy | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Being Lifted Up

1 September 2020

In John 15, Jesus presents His followers with a vineyard as a metaphor for living in harmony with God. Jesus is the vine, all His people are branches, and–this part is much neglected–the Father is the caretaker.

The traditional 3DM rendering of this passage uses a semicircle, a pendulum that oscillates back and forth between seasons of fruitfulness (work) and seasons of abiding (rest). While it’s true that there’s a need to maintain healthy rhythms of work and rest (a lesson contained in Genesis 1 and a number of other places in the Bible), this passage is actually headed a different — and far deeper — direction.

The first necessary modification to the 3DM picture was suggested by one of my coaches, Jeff Allen. He moved “abide” from one of the extremes on the pendulum to the pivot point, thus:

Jeff’s point is that we don’t actually alternate between work and abiding. We abide in Christ all the time as we alternate between work and rest.

There’s another tweak we have to make in order to understand the passage properly, and that is a correct understanding of the Greek word airo, that is so often translated “He takes away” in v. 2. Airo means to lift up or take away, and so that translation is understandable…but absolutely wrong in this context. The word also means “to lift up,” and in this context, that’s much more to the point.

The conversation here is about the care of a vineyard. At the beginning of the growing season, the caretaker passes through the vineyard, looking for threats to fruitfulness. There are two conditions, not just one, that threaten the fruitfulness of the vines: too much growth, and not enough.

Where the branches are growing too much, they won’t produce good-quality fruit. If a branch is trying to produce too much fruit at the same time, it won’t have the nutrients it needs to make good-quality fruit, so all of the fruit will be stunted and poor. At the other extreme, some branches fall down into the dirt. Down in the dirt, they are in danger, threatened by rot, mildew, and pests.

The branches that are overactive, spreading themselves too thin, get pruned back. In other words, God will cut off some of what you are trying to do, in order to get you to focus all your resources in a smaller, more productive area. That is really hard to take, especially when some of the things God prunes off are things you worked really hard for. They may be good things, but if God is not authoring them for you, now, then it’s time to let them go. The job here is to accept the Father’s pruning with grace, and trust that He knows what He’s doing.

Then there’s the branches that have fallen into the dirt and aren’t producing anything…and this is where that Greek word comes in. “Every branch in me that does not bear fruit He lifts up.” The caretaker lifts the fallen branch back up onto the trellis where it can thrive in the air and sunlight. If you have fallen into the dirt, and you’re not producing anything, your job is to let the Father lift you up, so that you might bear fruit.

There will be seasons in your life where you’re overproducing; there will be seasons in your life where you’re in the dirt. God will take care of you in either condition, and bring you back to fruitful health. The constant through every season is the command given in the passage: Abide in Him.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

A Choice of Judgments

18 August 2020

Once upon a time, David led the nation of Israel into a serious sin. God was going to judge him, but He offered David a choice of which judgment the nation would suffer. The story appears in 1 Samuel 24:11-15:

When David got up in the morning, a revelation from the Lord had come to the prophet Gad, David’s seer: “Go and say to David, ‘This is what the Lord says: I am offering you three choices. Choose one of them, and I will do it to you.’” So Gad went to David, told him the choices, and asked him, “Do you want three[a] years of famine to come on your land, to flee from your foes three months while they pursue you, or to have a plague in your land three days? Now, think it over and decide what answer I should take back to the One who sent me.” David answered Gad, “I have great anxiety. Please, let us fall into the Lord’s hands because His mercies are great, but don’t let me fall into human hands.” So the Lord sent a plague on Israel from that morning until the appointed time, and from Dan to Beer-sheba 70,000 men died.

The 2016 presidential election was just such a choice, and 2020 is shaping up to be more of the same. You don’t have to be a howling fan of one of the options to prefer one over the other. In fact, you can even strongly prefer one over the other, without losing sight of the fact that all of this is divine judgment.

We are being given the candidates we deserve. The ostensible progressive candidate is the kinda guy #metoo was about, and an architect of mass incarceration, to boot. The ostensibly conservative candidate is manifestly neither principled nor conservative, and yet by every meaningful measure, has outperformed any of the real conservative candidates in the past two decades.

I repeat, we are being given what we deserve: liars and hypocrites. If we want better, then we need to repent of our hypocrisies and beg God for mercy. There is no way out of this but repentance.

Christ have mercy.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Shot in the back

11 August 2020

“Tragically, many sectors of the church have become so worldly that they too are hostile to the demands of Jesus. If you call the church to repentance, be prepared for the assaults. Don’t take up the task unless you’re prepared to die.”
-Peter Leithart

That has been my experience as well. You know how often an angry unbeliever has ruined my life?

Never.

Not that it couldn’t or doesn’t happen. I’m aware of plenty of people it’s happened to. I’ve certainly had unbelievers angry at me. But in my life thus far, every time someone has betrayed me and tried to ruin my life and reputation, every single time, it has been a fellow Christian.

One time it was disagreement, personal offense, and wanting me out of the way. Another it was vendetta for wrongs partly real and partly imagined. Twice it was protecting my assailant’s hegemony over his petty fiefdom, which he felt I threatened. Once it was totally ordinary sin and lack of character, and as far as I can tell, I wasn’t even particularly a target; I just happened to be in the way.

As I say, it’s not that unbelievers can’t or won’t do this, and I’m only middle-aged. If the actuarial tables are to be believed, I have a long way to go yet, and there’s plenty of time for the pagans to get around to savaging me. But it’s worth noting how much danger comes from inside the family.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Working Through the Risk

5 August 2020

“We get it, you miss your friends and your normal life. The virus doesn’t care. Don’t be selfish. Stay home. If you can’t order it online or pick it up curbside, you don’t need it.”

It’s time we thought through that message.

Some people really can live that way. Everything they need is delivered to their doorstep, or they go drive by the store and pick up their purchase at the curb. But plainly, these people’s “unselfish” and “safe” lifestyle is dependent on another whole class of people who deliver their goodies to them — and those people definitely cannot work from home.

Question #1: Why should the delivery driver leave his house to deliver goodies to yours? Because your life is of incalculable value, and his is worth $12 an hour (until he gets sick and can’t work, that is)? Surely not.

In the end, though, this is what it comes down to: he does it because he can’t afford not to. And you stay home because you can afford to. Your safety comes at his expense — and you pay him for that. (So tip well, y’all.)

Question #2: If he needs to go out into the world in order to support himself, what do you think he should do for church? Is worship less important than work, or is it more important? He risks no more going to worship than he does going out to make the rent; why shouldn’t he?

So when you decide that it’s too risky to open the church doors…you are denying him the opportunity to worship, because gathering in person seems so risky to you. And remember, the delivery drivers, paramedics, nurses, mechanics, social workers, etc. never stopped working. If there’s such a severe risk that you’d put yourself under house arrest to avoid it, then how dare you demand that they take those risks without the opportunity to gather and draw strength from corporate worship? What gives you the right?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

No One Else Can

28 July 2020

If you’re sleeping with someone else’s spouse, I need not inquire into the motives of your heart to know that you are in sin. God has already told us that there is simply no righteous way to do what you are doing. Before we even look, we know that the motives of your heart are going to be a mess. (What sort of mess, we’ll find out when we look. But there will be a mess, right enough.) As a minister of the gospel it is my solemn duty to name your adultery for what it is and encourage you to get out of it, right now.

But when it comes to what you eat or don’t, which holidays you celebrate, and similar matters, I am not allowed to tell you what to do, and you are not allowed to let me. Colossians 2 and Romans 14 are painfully clear on this point.

Christian liberty does not mean that there is no way to be wrong before God. It means that the nature of the issue is such that it’s your mistake to make. The thing may be fine in itself, but something God is calling you to leave behind as a hindrance for you. I don’t get to make that call for you; my pastoral authority does not extend that far. I can (and do, cautiously) make observations and suggestions, but the matter is between you and God.

God may give you Rolex watches, catalog dresses, snazzy cars, ice cream, good Scotch, fat theology books, interesting movies, thick steaks. These are all good gifts to enjoy, so enjoy them, knowing that a day may come when He calls you to give them up. As David Field recently put it, there is nothing in your life that you did not already lose the day you became Jesus’ disciple. God can, at any time, with anything you have, say, “I’ll have that back now, thank you.” He has given you everything, down to your very breath — and the day will come when you release a breath, and God does not give you another.

So hold it all loosely. God might call you to wear your blue jeans to church in order to mortify your vanity. He might call you to wear a suit and tie to church, to mortify your sloth. He may call you to dye your hair pink for reasons that aren’t quite clear to you, or to quit dyeing your hair pink…or even to quit dyeing your hair its pre-grey natural color (gasp!) because that’s become an idol for you. Now taking one thing with another, hair dye is among those things which perish with the using, and I don’t have the right to tell you what to do. This matter is within your liberty, and that means that you are permitted to do as you like, even though you may be dead wrong.

The point is not that God can’t or won’t require you to move in a particular direction; the point is that nobody else can.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Lost Worlds?

24 July 2020

These days, pretty much everybody who calls themselves “Christian” accepts the resurrection of Jesus, but I’ve noticed a trend among Bible scholars. The more academic accolades they aspire to, the less of the Bible they take seriously in its historical details.

The grace gospel is founded on taking the biblical story seriously, down into its details. God blessed Adam and Eve before they’d done anything to deserve it. Abraham was justified before he was circumcised. David celebrated having no sin imputed to him, despite the fact that he’d sinned grievously.

On that point, this article is well worth reading. Here’s one money quote, to whet your appetite:

Taking Genesis 1-11 seriously invites mockery and ridicule, not to mention exclusion from elite intellectual circles. Walton’s “Lost” series is an attempt to “save” Christians from the embarrassment of believing the Bible, without actually denying our faith….

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Two Kinds of Hard Obedience

21 July 2020

We are Christians. We must seek to obey Scripture. We must particularly obey those passages which seem “hard” to us. There are two kinds of hard obedience, and two corresponding kinds of resistance.

The first kind of hard obedience is pretty well understood: we all know what to do and why to do it, but it’s just difficult. For example, a lot of Christians have a problem with drunkenness. Even when they decide to get sober, it is usually a significant struggle. In this kind of hard obedience, everybody understands very clearly why a good Christian needs to be sober. The hard part comes in the day-by-day slog of doing it.

The common resistance to this kind of hard obedience stems from laziness and/or despair. The drunk doesn’t believe he has the strength to really do it. Lacking hope, the whole thing seems impossibly hard. If he gets on the wagon anyway, he’ll start to build some hope…and that’s where the laziness often gets him. Staying sober is just so much work. So he slacks off, goes dry drunk, and then relapses.

But there’s a second kind of hard obedience that is not primarily about the difficulty of doing it. For example, we’re told three times in the New Testament to sing Psalms. Do we obey? Mostly, no. Why not?

Is it because it’s very hard to find tunes and singable settings and so forth? Not really. First of all, if you bother to really look, all that stuff is out there. Second, even if it weren’t, we have a multi-million dollar Christian music industry devoted to solving the logistical problems of generating and delivering Christian music to the end user. Hundreds of songs are written, recorded, and broadcast every year. Most of you reading this routinely learn new (or at least new to you) songs in church already, not to mention what you pick up off the radio. If our problems with Psalm-singing were merely logistical, we’d be well on our way to obedience in a couple months. (And don’t blame the music-industrial complex for our disobedience; they’re producing what we’re willing to buy. If we wanted albums full of Psalms, rest assured, they’d be delivering.)

It’s not hard for us because there’s anything especially difficult about doing it. In this case, the matter is hard for us because we don’t see why we should. We already have songs we like. The psalms are so long. They don’t fit our musical culture. They talk about things that you can’t sing about on Christian radio. And what about all that “slay my enemies” talk?

In other words, we are so far gone, we can’t even see the sense in obeying. We have been so disobedient for so long that the disobedience has become normal to us, and obedience has become impossibly weird. Why would anyone even want to do that? This is exactly what the author of Hebrews called “being hardened through the deceitfulness of sin.”

And there’s only one thing to do at that point: a practice I call “mere obedience.” Just do the thing. Obey, however ineptly to start with. Settle in for the long haul. Get better at it as you go. Trust that in due time, your obedience will bear fruit, and the reasons for the command will become very clear. It has been my experience that this is the case.

I can tell you now a bunch of reasons why we should sing Psalms. But I didn’t know any of those reasons when I started singing Psalms. I just started singing because the New Testament said I should. It was awkward at first and I had no idea what I was doing. But God was kind, and I grew, and the blessings began to roll in. In hindsight it all seems so inevitable…but only in hindsight.

I began praying the Lord’s Prayer seriously out of mere obedience too (“When you pray, say…” from Luke 11:2). And literally speaking blessing to people I meet (Luke 10:5). And a host of other things that I didn’t know the benefits for until I had been doing them a while. They’ve all proven fruitful.

So what obedience is God setting before you?

Comments Off on Two Kinds of Hard Obedience | Chicken Bones, Mere Obedience, Worship | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Even the Little Ones

14 July 2020

Paul writes to Timothy (2 Timothy 3:16) that “all Scripture is God-breathed and profitable…that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.” In some passages of Scripture, it’s a bit challenging to find the profit. Take, for example, Psalm 137, which ends with “O daughter of Babylon, who are to be destroyed, Happy the one who repays you as you have served us! Happy the one who takes and dashes Your little ones against the rock!”

What do we do with this? One popular approach is to skip brusquely to “we can’t apply this literally, so let’s make up something edifying” as this author has done. I’d like to propose something better: something that starts with taking the psalm seriously in its original context.

Israel is in Babylon, having been brutally conquered and dragged into captivity. The psalm is a lament posing a question: how do they worship in a foreign land? This is not a simple question. The musical service of Zion was originally designed to serve as a parallel at David’s Tabernacle to the Tabernacle sacrificial service at Gibeon. At Solomon’s Temple, the musical and sacrificial services were brought together. (There are ascension offerings and ascension psalms, and so on.) With the Temple destroyed and the sacrifices no longer happening, was it even appropriate to sing the songs of Zion? (The editors who arranged the Psalter set it up so that the following songs answer the question posed in Psalm 137, but that’s a topic for another day.)

As they grapple with the question, their captors are demanding that the musicians sing songs of Zion purely for Babylonian amusement. Can you imagine? You’re a Levite, a son of Korah, your whole life devoted to sacred music in the Temple. All of a sudden, it’s all destroyed, and you’re a slave, and your master demands that you play sacred Temple music for the amusement of his guests at a drunken pig roast. That’s what Israel’s sacred musicians are facing.

And so the psalm closes with a curse on Babylon, and a blessing on the conqueror who does to Babylon what Babylon did to Judah. It’s not hyperbolic language; it’s a literal curse. It quite likely came to pass in the days of Belshazzar, with Darius’ Persian troops receiving the blessing.

So that’s what’s going on. After the cross, applying such a thing is complicated. You don’t get to curse your enemies and just say you’re following the example of the psalmist; the cross really did change some things. Today, we face strong counterexamples.

Jesus did the exact opposite of this curse on the cross (“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!”) Stephen followed His example (“Lord, do not charge them with this sin.”) James charges his readers that blessing and cursing ought not come from the same mouth (Jas. 3:8-12). In tension with that, Jesus Himself pronounced judgment on Jerusalem (Mt. 23:33-39), Peter cursed Simon Magus (Ac. 8:20-23), Paul blinded Elymas (Ac. 13:9-11), and asked God to repay Alexander the coppersmith (2 Tim. 4:14). Of those, two were clear means to the end of furthering repentance (Simon Magus) and the gospel (Elymas), and both had the desired effect (you could also put church discipline in this category). Matthew 23 arguably works this same way, given how it ends in v. 39, although we haven’t seen the fulfillment yet. Paul’s treatment of Alexander the coppersmith is less clearly redemptive, but notice that Paul does not specify what should happen to him, instead leaving him in the hands of the Lord to judge.

Where does that leave us? Before the cross, cursing your enemies was just common sense. Afterward, not so much. The Old Covenant is dead, and under the New, even the curses have a redemptive purpose. We are not allowed to simply follow the example set in Psalm 137; instead, we are called to follow Stephen’s example instead. Or Peter’s, cursing redemptively. So it is the easiest thing in the world to (in practice) just scrap the psalm–for all practical purposes, to mentally remove it from the canon of Scripture. “It’s not applicable today,” we say, and that’s that.

This is precisely where the ancient church comes to our rescue. Rather than simply discarding the psalm as an artifact of its time and place, inscripturated for some reason but utterly inapplicable today, the ancient interpreters take Paul at face value: *all* Scripture is God-breathed and profitable. The goal is not to figure out what we can disregard as “not applicable today,” but to wring every last bit of transformation out of our encounter with the Scriptures that we can get.

So where is the profit here? If we may not have this hatred toward our enemies, the ancient interpreters ask, is there something, some enemy, that we *should* have this hatred toward? Of course there is. “If you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live” (Rom. 8:13). We really should cultivate this antipathy — not toward people, but toward sin. The psalm really should resonate with us, not because we beg God to slaughter our enemies’ children, but because we call on God to destroy our sins.

Even the little ones.

1 Comment | Exegesis, Speaking as God Speaks | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols