including some very surprising quarters.
Friday, June 20, 2025
Thursday, April 24, 2025
Friday, April 4, 2025
Thursday, April 3, 2025
God's plans for you
The moderator of the presbytery that first took me under care for inquiry and eventually ordination later went on to serve as a seminary president, and near the end of that run, as I recall, she was making the rounds with an address entitled, "Context is Everything." I never heard the address. I am sure it contained a great many good insights. But I found the title provocative and not a little annoying. "A New Creation is Everything." Now, that would be biblical! But context? It seemed to me that such a grand claim was only bound to advance more of the relativism that was swamping "everything."
That said, let's give her the benefit of the doubt and apply some context to a text that many evangelicals find so inviting: "For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope." (Jer 29:11)
The first and most obvious contextual move would be to examine the verse immediately prior to this one. (Hint: it always is.) "For thus says the Lord: Only when Babylon’s seventy years are completed will I visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place." (Jer 29:10)
But what is this about "Babylon's seventy years"? Ah, the Jewish exiles to Babylon are being addressed. They will be there in Babylon for quite a while, yes, for seventy years. Why? Leviticus 26 records the terms of God's covenant with Israel, and vv. 34-35 specifically forecasts how, if the people would become persistently disobedient in flouting God's statutes, commandments, ordinances, and break his covenant, they should be exiled from the land so that the land itself could rest and enjoy its sabbaths.
Then the land shall enjoy its sabbath years as long as it lies desolate, while you are in the land of your enemies; then the land shall rest, and enjoy its sabbath years. As long as it lies desolate, it shall have the rest it did not have on your sabbaths when you were living on it.
Meanwhile, the last chapter of 2Chronicles records how this prophetic condition of the covenant was, in fact, fulfilled and the penalty paid. Speaking of Nebachudnezzar king of the Chaldeans, it says:
He took into exile in Babylon those who had escaped from the sword, and they became servants to him and to his sons until the establishment of the kingdom of Persia, to fulfil the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had made up for its sabbaths. All the days that it lay desolate it kept sabbath, to fulfill seventy years. (2Chron 36:20-21)
This should be familiar stuff to anyone with a basic knowledge of biblical revelation and salvation history.
So, then, when you ask: "What might God's plans be for me, his plans for my welfare, his plans for me to avoid harm, his plans for a future with hope?", the first thing you should recognize is that he — who is elsewhere known as "Lord of the Sabbath" and who promises a light burden and an easy yoke — wants you to avoid becoming a workaholic who tramples his sabbath days and his sabbatical years, and he wants you to avoid demanding that others do so. Why? Because the sabbath day and the sabbatical year are, by divine design, God's own chosen times to shine, feed, provide, etc., in ways that go well beyond his normal weekday ways of doing so. Denying him these opportunities is, by contrast, self-defeating at the very least; moreover, it is harmful and leads to hopelessness.
Context may not be everything, but it certainly reveals a lot that is easy to overlook when we are bound and determined to do so.
Friday, March 28, 2025
Fourth Sunday of Lent: Isaiah 37:14-38
One of the most arresting Year D texts is the suggested Old Testament lection for this Fourth Sunday of Lent: Isaiah 37:14-38, in which King Hezekiah is evidently so exhausted at the siege of Jerusalem and so disgusted by the blasphemy of the Assyrians that all he can do is take the threatening letter he has received from Sennacherib's envoy into the temple and spread it before the Lord and say, in effect, "Read this for yourself and respond. But don't let this slander against you go unanswered."
The Lord does answer, with a prophecy mocking Sennacherib, one that is fulfilled at the end of the chapter with the most breathtaking result. Meanwhile, the Lord's promise to Hezekiah and Judah was that he himself would defend the city ...
"And this shall be the sign for you: This year eat what grows of itself, and in the second year what springs from that; then in the third year sow, reap, plant vineyards, and eat their fruit. The surviving remnant of the house of Judah shall again take root downwards, and bear fruit upwards; for from Jerusalem a remnant shall go out, and from Mount Zion a band of survivors. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this." (Isa 37:30-32)
That sounds a lot like a seventh sabbatical year—i.e., the forty-ninth in a fifty-year Jubilee cycle—plus the year of Jubilee itself. What faith it must have taken the beleaguered remnant to take two years off and allow the Lord alone to produce the yield on which they would subsist and rest; but what health would have been restored by virtue of that rest and what sounds of "jubilation" would arisen in those two years. A very preachable text for such a time as this.
Monday, March 24, 2025
One more reason Oecolampadius offers the needed refresher course in Christianity: "New life brings repentance."
Here are two sentences that occur near the end of Oecolampadius' "Sermon on the Healing of the Blind Man at Jericho," which — after a very long interruption — I only just finished translating yesterday: "Neither ashes, nor fasting, nor external work grant any justice that is valid before God. New life produces repentance, so that we would no longer sin." The latter sentence is hugely important and merits the following footnote (which will appear, Lord willing, in a forthcoming publication of the whole translation):
Poenitentiam facit nova vita, ita ut non amplius peccemus. The nominative here is clearly nova vita. Poenitentiam, in the accusative case, is the direct object, while the verb peccemus is subjunctive. The cause-and-effect sequence here is striking: it is not that repentance has cajoled new life from God. Rather, we no longer wish to sin because the gift of new life has brought about repentance. This reordering—grace before repentance—would become Karl Barth’s great discovery 400 years later, before he himself would make his way to Basel.
The pedantic footnote is warranted because, when I ran the sentence through every online translator I could find, every one of them reordered the sentence completely incorrectly: "Repentance brings new life," they said. Wrong. Meanwhile, I have had in my files for some time the unpublished translation of a friendly Latin teacher which, when I consulted it, confirmed that, yes, indeed (according to his rendering): "It is the new life that brings about penitence."
So what accounts for this persistently ass-backwards way of translating a text that clearly and unambiguously articulates the proper ordo salutis? Is it a malevolent ghost in the translation machine? I would not necessarily rule it out. Or, more likely, is it that the crowd-sourced theology of Christians the world over, the popular theology that feeds AI algorithms and in effect teaches the machine, is so bad that the machine assumes it must overrule plain, clear, straightforward grammar with eisegesis and crank out bad translations to support bad theology?
Either way, once again, we see how Oecolampadius warrants careful study and fresh translation (without over-reliance on machine translation), for he was not only every bit as important and ground-breaking as Luther was in his day, he was not only way ahead of his time (vis-a-vis Barth), he also offers a much needed refresher in Christianity to a church that so often misunderstands and misrepresents its own theology that the emerging class of robot teachers are likewise learning it and teaching it wrongly.
P.S.: Where this post impinges on preaching Year D, the primary text that should come to mind is Romans 2:4.
Sunday, March 23, 2025
Not elite, but elect
In Tucker Carlson's recent interview with Bob Lighthizer, the two both lamented the destruction of the middle class and hearkened back to the days when a robust middle class made for a healthy egalitarianism. Much as I share their hope for a restoration of the middle class in America, I was struck by the choice of this word "egalitarian" to characterize it. As the culture comes to terms with the distinction, along an egalitarian spectrum, between equity (which simply means fairness, but which has recently been defined in communistic terms as equality of outcome) and equal opportunity, some light needs to be shed on that which stands apart from the egalitarian, that which we often rush to associate with the so-called elite, a term that has its etymological has roots in the idea of election, selection, uniqueness. That leap to an erroneous conclusion, to be clear, amounts to a thoughtless assumption that the "elite" are somehow chosen for or destined to such privilege such by virtue of (1) merit, (2) wealth, and/or (3) influence, when, in fact, they are often more easily distinguished by either their perceived lack of and lust for one or more of these. So, my aim here is not to argue for the legitimacy of the "elite," and certainly not according to these secular, worldly, temporal, human categories.
On the other hand, scripture and theology have spoken for millennia of God's "election," his "calling" to service, his choice of certain people to bear certain responsibilities. This divine election does not make such people "elite," as such. Jesus warned his disciples that unbelievers lord it over one another, but it is not to be that way among his followers. Rather, they are to be servants to one another. Centuries earlier, Moses was described as the humblest of men, and yet he and Aaron were attacked by the Korahites for the uniqueness of their elect position as God's chosen spokesmen, which offended what I have elsewhere called Korah's "hyper-egalitarianism." (See Numbers 16; see also my exegetical essay on "Numbers 12," in Waste Not the Fragments: A Commentary for Year D: Advent). But, as we have said, Moses was not set apart from the people by way of his privilege or arrogance, for he was actually outstanding for his humility. Whatever privileges fell to him as a result of his calling were not the cause of his election, but a gift enabling him to fulfill his responsibilities. As Paul says in 1Corinthians, the members of the church have different gifts, though it is the same Spirit who gives and activates these gifts in the members as they exercise their vocation, the same Spirit who unites the church as the body of Christ (1Cor 12).
The Corinthian church was a divided mess because so many people were all jockeying for elite status based on what they assumed was the superiority of their spiritual gifts, their wealth, etc. Korah, by contrast, tried to homogenize the people entirely and failed to honor God's right to call whom he chose to particular service and — wow! — what a disaster befell Korah and those whom he enlisted in his hyper-egalitarian rebellion. But how much worse is it to think of oneself as "elite" — quite apart from God, quite apart from any sense of "vocation," responsibility, or gratitude to God — by virtue of purely worldly categories (wealth, status, privilege, power, education, esthetics) that simply inflate the ego.
All of this is simply to say that, if the middle class is going to indeed see a renaissance (and I hope it will) and if the secular elite — globalists and the most calculating exploiters of the gargantuan graft machine that is currently being exposed for all the world to see — are to receive an overdue corrective that may even offer some hope for their improvement, I hope that any attendant revival of egalitarianism will not eclipse the crucial need to respect and honor God's "election" of some to divine vocation, because the alternative — as Korah's descent into the abyss attests — would be disastrous.
On the other hand, what blessings arise when honor is given to whom honor is due.
Monday, March 17, 2025
Good news
The Spirit is at work, stirring people with a hunger for the Word.
The Bible revealing Jesus is the main thing, of course. But if you want to a good companion to guide your reading, try these books (all available on Amazon in print or e-book):
- The Word at Work starts on the Second Sunday of Easter.
- The Spirit at Work starts on Pentecost.
- Sitiometrion starts on Christmas Day.
Read them in that order (blue, red, yellow) and, with a break in between, you will cover the Bible three times in four years.
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