Dan Olinger

"If the Bible is true, then none of our fears are legitimate, none of our frustrations are permanent, and none of our opposition is significant."

Dan Olinger

 

Retired Bible Professor,

Bob Jones University

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Change, Part 3: Promise Keeper

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Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Sovereign, Attentive, and Good

As we’ve seen, God is great, the great sovereign over his created order. He is able—and certain—to act on behalf of his people. How will he do that?

2. God keeps his promises.

As the narrative proceeds, God reminds Joshua that he has made promises to the people of Israel:

3 Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon I have given to you, as I promised to Moses. 4 From the wilderness and the Lebanon as far as the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, to the Great Sea in the west shall be your territory (Jos 1.3-4).

The Lord refers specifically to the promise he made to Moses (Dt 11.24), and through him to the people of Israel. And you’ll recall that even earlier, at the burning bush (Ex 3.8), God had commissioned Moses to bring his people out of Egypt “to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey.” And God prefaced that commission by identifying himself as “the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Ex 3.6). Why does he describe himself that way? clearly because he had made the same promise to the patriarchs, beginning with Abraham (Ge 12.7; cf 17.8), then Isaac (Ge 26.4) and then Jacob (Ge 28.13).

God is the kind of person who 1) remembers his promises and then 2) keeps them. It had been about 600 years since God made the original promise to Abraham; for more than 400 of those years Abraham’s descendants had been in Egypt—not in the Land God had promised them—and for most of those 400 they had been slaves.

But God had not forgotten; he had not reneged; he had not failed to keep the Promise.

One of the evidences of sovereignty is that you’re not in a hurry. If you see the White Rabbit hopping madly by, crying, “I’m late! I’m late!” then you know that he doesn’t have his life under control at that moment.

And so now, six centuries of providentially directed history later, it’s time—time to fulfill the promise, time to give Abraham’s seed the land.

As I’ve noted, you and I are not Israel, and we have no claim to the land from the river of Egypt to the Euphrates.

But if God is the kind of person who remembers and keeps his promises, then he remembers and keeps his promises to us as well.

And there are hundreds of them, more than I can list here.

But there a few that might be profitable for us to recall here where we find ourselves in history.

Some apply to us as individual believers.

  • “Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Mt 16.25).
  • “This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day” (Jn 6.40).
  • “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also” (Jn 14.3).
  • “God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it” (1Co 10.13).
  • “The one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ” (Php 1.6).
  • “I will never leave you or forsake you” (He 13.5).
  • “It is God’s will that by doing right you should silence the ignorance of the foolish” (1P 2.15).
  • “Let those suffering in accordance with God’s will entrust themselves to a faithful Creator, while continuing to do good” (1P 4.19).

And others apply to us as Christ’s body, the church, in corporate unity.

  • “I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it” (Mt 16.18).
  • “Never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord’ ” (Ro 12.19).
  • “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart” (1Co 1.19).
  • “May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this” (1Th 5.23-24).
  • “All who want to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” (2Ti 3.12).

He remembers all of these. And he will keep them.

Part 4: Present | Part 5: Trust | Part 6: Obedience | Part 7: Meditation

Photo by Martin Adams on Unsplash

Change, Part 2: Sovereign, Attentive, and Good

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Part 1: Introduction

I’ve proposed using the Old Testament account of Joshua’s succession of Moses as a pattern for us as we face a rapidly and significantly changing world. I suppose I should justify that.

Of course there are differences between our situation and that of Joshua 1:

  • What we’re facing is not just a change of leadership.
  • We’re not emerging from a lifetime of stability in leadership.
  • We’re not Israel. (And no, this isn’t about dispensationalism. :-) )
  • God hasn’t given special revelation as to who our leaders should be.

But there are also similarities:

  • We are a people of God. (I’m speaking here of the church, not the USA or any other political entity.)
  • We are in covenant with God, whose covenant loyalty (Heb hesed, steadfast, loving loyalty) “endures forever” (Ps 136 and often elsewhere).
  • We are in a time of significant change.

And as Paul tells us (1Co 10.6), the Old Testament accounts were written as examples for us.

So what did God say to Joshua in his time of transition? And what do those words tell us about God and His plans for us? In this series I’d like to suggest three statements about God in his words to Joshua, and three things he asks us to do in response.

1.      God is great, and he is in charge.

In fact, he is in charge because he is great.

God says to Joshua,

My servant Moses is dead. Now proceed to cross the Jordan, you and all this people, into the land that I am giving to them, to the Israelites (Jos 1.2).

God begins by calling Moses “my servant.” Now, Moses was the most powerful human these people had ever known. He had faced down Pharaoh and forced him to let his Israelite slaves go. He had held his rod over the Red Sea and parted it, allowing the millions of Israelites to pass through safely and then drowning the most powerful army in the world. For 40 years he had provided for their needs and answered their questions in circumstances that could have turned fatal on them in days. He had led them militarily through hostile territory east of the Jordan.

And he’s just a servant? How powerful must his master and commander be?!

By implication, Joshua—and all the people—are also God’s servants, who must obey His orders. And to make the point, he immediately gives them an order: “Proceed to cross the Jordan.”

The narrative will later tell us (Jos 3.15) that the Jordan is at flood stage during this season. I’ve seen significant rivers that have swelled out of their banks during a flood, and it’s a frightening sight. Your first instinct is not to step out into it. Again, we’ll soon learn that when the people obey, the river will withdraw from them, just as the Red Sea had a generation earlier (Jos 3.16).

So God had graciously already provided them with a basis for courage. He wasn’t asking for blind faith and slavish obedience; he was gently saying, “We’ve been through this before; you know I can bring you through.”

That was 1400 years before the birth of Jesus. How much more evidence do we, living more than 3400 years later, have of God’s power, faithfulness, and tender care? What other evidences do we find in the rest of the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the lives of God’s people in all the years since the last apostle laid down his pen for the last time?

Why are we unsettled? Why are we afraid? Why are we frustrated and angry, lashing out and calling names?

Why do we post things like “Joe Biden wasn’t elected. He was installed. Like a toilet.”?!

What kind of weak, inattentive God do we think we have?

God will stop the flow of the Jordan the moment the priests step into it (Jos 3.15-16). He can do that; he’s in charge. This is the God we serve. 

No, God doesn’t always stop the flow of rivers he asks us to cross. But he can. That’s the point. And he will take us through, flood stage or dry riverbed. 

Part 3: Promise Keeper | Part 4: Present | Part 5: Trust | Part 6: Obedience | Part 7: Meditation

Photo by Martin Adams on Unsplash

Change, Part 1: Introduction

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I hear a lot of talk—and a lot of fear and anger and frustration—about social change. Things aren’t the way they used to be, and a lot of people find the situation deeply troubling.

Things always change; that’s a fact of life. Most of us have the experience of going back to a familiar place—a house, a school, a church, an employer—and noticing that while the physical plant is largely the same, we no longer know any of the people. The disconnect is jarring.

But broader cultural changes, driven by technology, by societal mores, by artistic expression, by a thousand other things, are even more unsettling. When the whole world changes, there are no familiar places to go back to.

The sense of dislocation is exacerbated by the indisputable fact that the pace of change is accelerating. I realized a few years back that when my father was born in 1918 in a homestead ranch cabin on the Western frontier, daily life was largely unchanged from life in Jesus’ time—or even Abraham’s. You got water from a well or a river; you grew your own food, using animals to do the most difficult physical labor; you cooked that food over a fire; you walked or rode carts pulled by animals; you did your excretory business in a hole in the ground a little ways off from the house.

Dad lived to be 90. In that one lifespan, he saw pretty much everything that’s changed since the ancient world. He rode in an automobile; he helped build highways; he rode and worked on trains, both coal-fired and diesel electric; he helped build Grand Coulee Dam; he learned to fly airplanes; he worked in newspaper publishing from the days of hot lead Linotype to digital; and with a little help from his son, he navigated on Google Earth to see the old homestead on Sandy Creek, just upriver from Salmon, Idaho.

All in one lifetime.

And in the mere decade and a half since, what social, cultural, medical, and financial changes have occurred!

Some people feel like we’re accelerating headlong toward a precipice, uncontrolled and uncontrollably.

And on the heels of such thoughts inevitably come fear, despair, desperation, rage.

My brethren, these things ought not so to be.

We forget—so easily—that there is providence: that there is a God, who is mighty and wise and loving, who directs all things—even things like the Babylonian and Roman destructions of Jerusalem, even things like wars and pandemics and famines and corruption as deep as we can imagine—he directs all things to his own good ends and the benefit of his people.

Nothing is headlong; nothing is uncontrolled; nothing is cause for existential despair.

And if nothing on such a macroscopic scale should bring despair, then what about those narrower, more personal changes and challenges? Should we lose hope when our own lives take difficult turns, change in unexpected, undesirable, and indecipherable ways?

There are many accounts of significant changes in the biblical narrative. I suppose the death of Jesus was the most significant—and even there we find that it was not only part of God’s plan, but it was in fact at the very center of that plan. We wonder, here in hindsight, why those thick-headed disciples just didn’t get it.

Of the many other examples, I’d like to focus on just one.

Moses was a leader for the ages. Specially selected (Ex 3) and then empowered by God, he brought the mightiest ruler in the world of that day to his knees through a series of miraculous plagues, then organized perhaps 2 million people for travel, then parted the Red Sea, brought water out of a desert rock, and saw to their organized government under unimaginably contrary conditions during 40 years of wandering the desert.

And then, over a century old, he brought them through hostile territories to the edge of Canaan, the promised land. The new generation and the new army were about to take on the Canaanite peoples who had so frightened their parents.

Time to get busy and get this thing done.

But wait.

Moses isn’t coming. In fact, he’s dead.

The new leader is Joshua, someone with no chief executive experience, with little military command experience.

How is this going to work?

I’d like to spend a few posts thinking about how God handled this transition.

Part 2: Sovereign, Attentive, and Good | Part 3: Promise Keeper | Part 4: Present | Part 5: Trust | Part 6: Obedience | Part 7: Meditation

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Dealing with Intimidation, Part 5: A Sound Mind

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Part 1: Facing a Giant | Part 2: No Panic | Part 3: Power | Part 4: Love

When we’re facing something intimidating, God hasn’t given us a spirit that panics and runs away; rather, he gives us a set of gifts that empower us to do the opposite: to move confidently ahead to take on the challenge. The first of those gifts is strength, or power; why panic if you can take the guy? The second is love, which frees you from fearing the personal consequences of the outcome: what happens to others is of more consequence to you than what happens to you.

The third and final gift is “a sound mind” (KJV), or “sound judgment” (CSB), “discipline” (NASB), “self discipline” (NIV), “self-control” (ESV). Admittedly, those alleged “synonyms” cover a lot of territory; we’re looking at a lot of possible nuances.

We should probably start with the underlying Greek word and work our way out. The word is sophronismos, a noun apparently derived from sophos, “wise,” and phren, “understanding.” It occurs only here in the New Testament, but the related verb, sophroneo, occurs 6 times, of which 3 speak of mental health or sanity (twice of the maniac of Gadara [Mk 5.15; Lk 8.35] and once of Paul as a self-reference [2Co 5.13]), and 3 (Ro 12.3; Ti 2.6; 1P 4.7) speak of wisdom, or “self-control over one’s passions and desires,” as one lexicon puts it. Not long after Paul wrote 2 Timothy, Clement, the bishop of Rome, wrote in an epistle to the Corinthian church that the Corinthian women were managing “the affairs of their household in seemliness, with all discretion” (1Clement 1.3), and Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, wrote to the Philippian church that “our widows must be sober-minded concerning the faith of the Lord” (PPhil 4.3).

So this has to do with clear thinking—not so much raw intelligence, but the ability to analyze a problem and to come up with a practical solution.

I had an uncle like that. His name was Clarence, but everybody called him Red, and family called him Hooligan. As a boy I actually thought that was his name, until a teacher looked at me oddly when I referred to “my Uncle Hooligan.” Red dropped out of school after the third grade, I think it was, and went to work doing whatever he could that was reasonably age appropriate. He spent most of his adult life in construction and excelled at it. My Dad spoke almost reverently of his ability to look at a construction problem and just know, apparently intuitively, what the solution was. When he worked with trusses, it appeared to Dad that Red, the third-grade dropout, was doing trigonometry in his head.

I suspect that his skill was a combination of natural ability and lots of experience.

But we have something far more powerful—a divine gift, designed to enable us to see an intimidating problem through to a successful solution. Even beyond that, this is self-discipline; it’s good judgment; it’s moderation. It’s what a drug addict or an alcoholic doesn’t have. In short, it’s the ability to direct your own behavior, the ability to not be out of control.

You are not at the mercy of your own temperament, or your own personality, or your own weaknesses.

Maybe you’re “not a people person”; maybe you’ve always been shy.

Maybe you’re not intellectually gifted and can’t engage in witty repartee. Maybe, like me, you don’t have a natural sense of compassion that spurs you to take a genuine interest in the lives and difficulties of others.

These characteristics do not control you; God has given you the ability to do what He asks, even if you can’t—even if you have no natural ability.

God has given you the ability to choose to do His will.

And when you put all these gifts together, intimidation loses its greatest power. It can make you afraid, but it cannot make you flee the field; it cannot make you collapse in spiritual exhaustion; it cannot make you escape by turning within yourself; it cannot leave you without workable answers.

Exercising these gifts well may take practice and thus time. But the gifts are there.

We ought to use them.

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Dealing with Intimidation, Part 4: Love

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Part 1: Facing a Giant | Part 2: No Panic | Part 3: Power

God’s second gift to the intimidated is perhaps a surprise. If I’m facing a situation that might provoke cowardice, then it makes sense for God to give me power. I can put that to use right away.

But love? Seriously? What’s love got to do with it?

It may help if we begin by defining our terms.

We’ve all heard that there are 4 Greek words for love. C. S. Lewis even wrote a book about them. They’re usually presented this way:

  • Eros is physical, sexual love.
  • Storge is the love of people who are like you.
  • Philia is natural, brotherly love.
  • Agape is divine love.

As usual, it’s not necessarily like this. For starters, Greek, like English, has multiple words for love, but the exact number depends on your presuppositions about what qualifies as love. Some people suggest 4; some suggest 6; some suggest 7; and a diligent use of a thesaurus, or a resource like Louw and Nida’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains, might yield any number of justifiable synonyms.

Further, in no language, including Greek, do words work like this—neatly classifiable into clearly distinct categories. Sometimes synonyms are just, well, synonyms that can be used pretty much interchangeably. In this case, for example, God is not restricted to agape love; Jesus said that the Father has philia for the Son (Jn 5.20).

Perhaps you’ve heard it said that philia is a natural affection, while agape is an act of the will. As evidence, it’s noted that agapao appears in the imperative, implying that it’s something we can choose to do. Trouble is, phileo appears in the imperative too, 29 times in the New Testament, in the Gospels, the Epistles, and Revelation.

We really need to pay attention to context and not be mechanistic about assigning nuances. Because we’re in the image of God, we’re creative, and we use our words creatively; they are not confined to a single meaning. Nobody uses language like that; I don’t, and neither do you.

So.

The word here in 2 Timothy 1.7 is agape. But because it appears in a list, without much in the way of context—other than that it’s something God gifts to us in situations where one might expect cowardice—we’re not going to be able to make any hard distinctions about why Paul used this word for love and not one of the other ones.

Our time would be spent more profitably meditating on the core question I asked at the beginning of this essay—why does God give us love when we’re intimidated? What’s the point?

And is this God’s love for us, or our love for him, or our love for others?

Here I think the context helps us. There are two other items in the list, and we can expect them to be used in parallel. Power is something given to us to exercise in the intimidating situation. By the grace of God, it resides in us. Similarly, a sound mind—we haven’t talked about that yet—also resides in the person to help him address the situation.

So I’d suggest that this is love that resides in us, that we exercise to respond to the intimidation. Yes, it comes to us from God, as do the other two items, but at the point of application it’s something that we exercise.

Love for whom? Do we succeed in intimidating circumstances because we love God, or because we love others?

I’d suggest that it’s our love for others that makes us effective in intimidating circumstances, in two ways:

  • We’re not cowed into silence by our desire to be thought well of; John Stott writes, “Since he is the Spirit of love we must use God’s authority and power in serving others, not in self-assertion or vainglory.”
  • We’re empowered to overcome the hostility we face by showing grace and mercy in return. “This love is not so much a love that produces ministry as a love that conquers contempt and opposition by forgiveness and refusal to seek revenge” (NAC).

God has given you the ability to place the needs of others ahead of your own, thereby reducing the power of their opposition and the personal stake you have in “winning.” Love is a liberating thing, freeing you from fear and freeing you to go for victory.

Part 5: A Sound Mind

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Dealing with Intimidation, Part 3: Power

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Part 1: Facing a Giant | Part 2: No Panic

When, like Timothy, you’re facing a challenge that seems too big for you, it’s helpful to know that there’s no need to panic, because our Father has not given us a panicking kind of spirit.

But it’s also helpful to know what he has given us. Paul specifies three gifts from an omnipotent, gracious, knowledgeable, and sympathetic Father. The first of these is power.

God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline (2Ti 1.7).

There are two common Greek words for power. One means “authority”; it’s the word used in Mt 28.18—“All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.” It’s also used in Jn 1.12—“to them gave he power to become the sons of God.” That’s not the word used here, but it’s worth noting that we do have divine authority, for the reasons specified in these two verses. Our commission to go and make disciples (Mt 28.19-20) comes directly from Jesus, who does have all the authority in heaven and in earth; and because his work has made us sons of God, we carry princely authority whenever we pursue his will.

But, as noted, the word translated “power” in 2Timothy 1.7 is the other word, the word that means “might” or “strength.” As you’ve often been told, it’s the word from which we get our word dynamite—though, as has often been noted (see, e.g., D. A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies), you probably should ignore that fact, because since dynamite hadn’t been invented in biblical times, it has no impact whatsoever on our understanding of the biblical text.

Very commonly in the New Testament it’s used as one of the three Greek words for miracles. There’s signs, which emphasizes the meaning of the miracle—they’re not just done to entertain us, you know—and wonders, which emphasizes the effect on the eyewitnesses, and then miracles, which is our word, often translated “mighty works,” which emphasizes the power of the miracle-worker. (The three terms are used together in Acts 2.22, 2Corinthians 12.12, Hebrews 2.4.)

Interestingly, though the word power in Matthew’s record of the Great Commission is not this word, Luke’s rendering of the same commission in Acts does include it:

But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth (Ac 1.8).

Luke had earlier noted Jesus’ promise to his disciples that this power would come upon them:

And, behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you: but tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem, until ye be endued with power from on high (Lk 24.49).

And Paul prays for the Ephesian believers that they will “be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man” (Ep 3.16). Same word.

This is something we have. It is the strength supplied by God, manifested in us. It’s an irresistible force, an unstoppable strength; it’s the arm of the Almighty, the raw power evidenced everywhere in his creation.

In fulfillment of Jesus’ promise at the Great Commission, it’s the power that was poured out on the disciples at Pentecost, the power that turned the world upside down (Ac 17.6).

It’s what you need to get things done.

And God has given it to you.

God has given you the strength to do the hard thing, the thing that looks impossible, even though you’re “just not that kind of person.”

As long as your efforts are in the will of God, the strength is there to accomplish them.

Part 4: Love | Part 5: A Sound Mind

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Dealing with Intimidation, Part 2: No Panic

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Part 1: Facing a Giant

As he commissions “son Timothy” (1Ti 1.18) to a daunting task—one likely overwhelming to his timid constitution—Paul begins, surprisingly, by noting what God has not given him—and us. He’ll get to what he has given us in a moment.

But God’s “stinginess” is important to our success. He has not given us a spirit of fear.

For God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline (2Ti 1.7).

This is not the usual word for fear (phobos); using that more common word, God has often reminded us that although we should not fear other people (Dt 31.3-6), we most certainly should fear Him (Dt 31.12-13); as Jesus put it,

Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell (Mt 10.28).

So it would not be true for God to say that He has not given us a spirit that is able to fear, for He has. Fear can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on its object and its justifiability.

This word means something different. As the NRSV, which I’ve quoted here, makes obvious, this is the word for “cowardice”—being controlled by fear to the point that you cannot or will not do the things that you should.

Nobody likes a coward. We glorify heroes, because they do more than we expect; but we will not tolerate a coward. We don’t ask him to be a hero; we simply ask that he do right despite his fear.

Some years ago, I had the opportunity to participate in an exercise with the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office’s SWAT team. They wanted some practice clearing a fairly complex building in a terrorist scenario, and they asked for some volunteers to play the terrorists.

Well, of course.

The deputies and the volunteers met in a room and went over the procedures. Each of the volunteers was issued a handgun and blank rounds and instructed on various limits to the exercise. Then they took us to the building and told us to go inside, position ourselves however we liked, and in 30 minutes they’d be coming in.

Some of my fellow terrorists set up hostage scenarios to complicate the deputies’ situation. I decided to go off by myself. Found a room, evaluated hiding places, and eventually decided just to wait for them inside the door.

Counted my rounds. Seven. OK.

Something this SWAT team did surprised me: stealth was not on the menu.

They came in the end door of the building with a crash, a wave of shouting, and a volley of flash-bangs.

There was no doubt that they had arrived.

Then they began working methodically down the hall in my direction, coordinating movements, pronouncing rooms “Clear!” and moving precisely as planned.

It occurred to me that in a measurable number of minutes, they were going to arrive at my location—and dispose of me. Let me tell you, that was really intimidating. I was terrified.

Even in a simulation.

As they got close, I fired down the hall, and I’m proud to say that I stopped them briefly. But then I made a fatal mistake: I neglected to count my shots. On the eighth trigger pull, the “click” brought the shout “He’s out!” and down came Sennacherib’s Assyrian hordes on my little walled city.

I was surprised, on reflection, at how scared I was, even though I knew that this was make-believe and that these burly brutes weren’t going to hurt me.

Sooner or later, we all come face to face with the fact of our fear. We’re afraid of physical danger, of course, but we’re also afraid of less physical things. We’re afraid of rejection; we’re afraid of failure; we’re afraid of biblical confrontation; we’re afraid of saying the wrong thing at funerals. I’m afraid, and so are you.

But God has not given us a spirit of cowardice; He hasn’t given us a spirit that bails out in a crisis.

God has not given us a spirit that stops short of doing what we must do. Even when we’re afraid.

Part 3: Power | Part 4: Love | Part 5: A Sound Mind

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Dealing with Intimidation, Part 1: Facing a Giant

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“It’s just too much!”

We hear people say that. Sometimes we say it ourselves. Sometimes we face a problem, or a frustration, or an opposition that just seems to overwhelm us.

I had an experience like that recently.

I’m not a mechanical person—mostly because I just don’t want to be. If there’s a problem with the car, or the house, or whatever, I’d rather pay somebody else, who knows what he’s doing, to fix it than put the time and energy into doing it myself.

A while back my riding mower broke down, right in the middle of my mowing the lawn—but then, when else would it? This was beyond my knowledge set, and I made plans to take it to a shop and have it fixed.

But no one would work on it. They’re swamped; they can’t get parts lately; they don’t work on this model.

Nobody wanted my money.

Well, Dan, you’re just gonna have to knuckle down and figure out how to fix it yourself.

It took a while—longer than it would have if the guy with the wrench had known what he was doing—but I’m happy to say it’s back to its old self again, and I have all my fingers as well as my sanctification.

Thank you, YouTube.

Over the decades I’ve faced bigger problems, longer-lasting ones, intimidating ones. And so have you. Since my life has really been relatively easy, chances are you’ve faced bigger ones than I have. I know that’s true for many of my friends.

A situation comes along that you just don’t know how to deal with. You don’t have the knowledge, you don’t have the strength, you don’t have the focus, you don’t have the emotional stability.

It’s all just too much.

There’s a discussion on social media these days over whether God ever gives you more than you can handle. I think the disagreement is largely a matter of definition—what does “more than you can handle” mean?

We do have Paul’s famous observation that everything that comes your way has been allowed—filtered, if you will—by God, and that there is a way of escape (1Co 10.13), though it may be difficult to find. We have Paul’s further assertion that all things eventuate well (Ro 8.28)—though many have observed that quoting that verse at the moment of crisis is not always the best pastoral care.

But when those hard challenges come, where do we turn? What’s in our toolbox? Where’s the instructional video?

There are several instances in the Scripture where God’s people faced significant challenges. We all know about David and Goliath (1Sa 17.40-54), and Joshua’s commission (Jos 1.1-9), and Solomon’s (1K 2.1-4), and Jesus’ farewell address to his disciples (Jn 14-16).

I think we can find some useful information in a lesser-known event, another transition.

Paul’s ministry is a wonder to behold. He achieved astonishing things in his few decades of service to Christ, moving the gospel from its first location outside Israel—Antioch (Ac 13.1-3)—to the extent of the Roman Empire, the world of his day. He planted successful churches all across Turkey (Ac 13.4-16.10), all across Greece (Ac 16.11-18.18), up into modern-day Albania (Ro 15.19), the length of Cyprus (Ac 13.4-12) and Crete (Ti 1.5), and (I’m quite sure) across Spain as well. Most pastors are doing well to plant one church; Paul seems to spin them off every few weeks.

But Paul, like everybody else, has limited time. Soon he is “Paul the aged” (Phm 1.9) looking to pass off his ministry to his proteges, most famously Timothy and Titus.

We know more about Timothy than Titus. It seems that Timothy was less than a natural leader; Paul once prodded him not to let others undercut his authority (1Ti 4.12) and admonished him to take medicine to settle his stomach (1Ti 5.23).

Timothy, apparently, felt too small for the job. He didn’t think he could do what the Word of God, from the mouth of the apostle, had ordered him to do.

In his final letter, Paul urged him on:

I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands (2Ti 1.6).

And then he lifted the haze of doubt and uncertainty and timidity and fear that welled up in Timothy’s heart by saying these words:

For God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline (2Ti 1.7).

I’d like to take a few posts to consider how we can face the giants—and win—based on this brief sentence.

Part 2: No Panic | Part 3: Power | Part 4: Love | Part 5: A Sound Mind

Photo by Astrid Schaffner on Unsplash

On Muddling Through

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8 By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going. 9 By faith he stayed for a time in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land, living in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. 10 For he looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God (He 11).

I’ve heard a lot of people comment these days on the uncertainty of our lives. It seems unusual, they say, the degree to which things are in general upheaval. They tend to focus on Covid, of course, especially with the Delta variant and the looming return of restrictions of various kinds. But they note that there’s more to this feeling, especially in the significant societal and cultural changes that seem to be accelerating.

There’s a part of me that says there’s nothing new under the sun; I’ve always been skeptical of the constant claim that “young people these days have it harder than ever.” But it does seem that the pace of change is speeding up.

I know a lot of people who are pretty much in Full Bore Linear Panic over all this. At the risk of being accused of insufficient empathy, let me offer a few words of psychical stabilization. (And yes, I know that no one in the history of the world has ever been calmed down by being told to calm down.)

I’ve written before on the societal uncertainty that the pandemic has brought, but I’d like to share some further thoughts along that line.

There is a very real sense in the Scripture that we’re mostly blind and consequently just sort of muddling along through life. We’re constantly reminded that we’re not God—though by nature we’d very much like to be—and that our knowledge and wisdom are infinitesimal in comparison with his. Paul tells us that “we walk by faith, not by sight” (2Co 5.7), and the writer to the Hebrews develops that concept at considerable length in chapter 11, a portion of which appears above. Abraham, we’re told, went out, not knowing where he was going.

We all feel like that sometimes.

Maybe you know people who started life with a plan and executed it perfectly. My life, in contrast, began with making a plan and seeing it crash when I was 16, and then just sort of stumbling along as doors opened. At the time, it wouldn’t have impressed any career coaches. But in retrospect, it’s been a straight line and makes a lot of sense.

Life’s funny that way.

To one degree or another, we’re all Abraham. We come from somewhere else and are just resident aliens here, living in tents (most of us metaphorically).

Some immigrants cling tightly to their ethnic identity. When my people came over from the Rhine Valley in 1741, they settled in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, briefly but soon hiked down to a German colony in Newmarket, Virginia, where they helped start a Lutheran Church—that’s what Germans do, right?—and married other Germans. From my youth in Boston I recall fondly the Italian North End and Irish South Boston, and the clear cultural identity of those places.

But eventually, typically, immigrants blend in, intermarry, and assume the culture to which they’ve come. It happened to Judah in Babylon; it happened to the Olingers in America; and it happens pretty much everywhere.

In a spiritual sense, though, we don’t have that option.

We’re from someplace else, and we’ll always be from someplace else, and we can’t—mustn’t—make this place the determiner of our fortunes, our emotions, our spiritual health. The uncertainties that are part of living in a foreign place must not drive us to fear, because we have a Father who knows all and directs all, even though he often doesn’t clue us in to everything that’s going on. What looks like chaos to us looks like a beautiful fractal to him, and he’s doing something spectacular.

We don’t know what that something is, exactly, but we know whose work it is, and that fact gives us the ability to be calm in the midst of the storm, confident in the midst of uncertainty, joyous with anticipation in the midst of societal panic—not because we don’t care, or because we’re not empathetic, or because we’re just stupid, but because we know where it’s all heading.

In short, because we believe Dad—which, given his record, is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

Photo by Katie Moum on Unsplash

Christ Is Not His Name, Part 2: Responding to the Evidence

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Part 1: Evidence for Messiahship

In the last post we noted the fact that Jesus is the Christ—the Messiah, the Anointed One—and that John’s Gospel narrates a series of miracles through which Jesus provides evidence of his Messiahship. I’d like to extend those thoughts in a couple of ways.

First, John’s use of the word signs for these miracles is precise. The Greeks had three words for miraculous events: “miracle” (or more literally “powerful thing”), which emphasized the power of the miracle worker; “wonder,” which emphasized the effect of the miracle on those who saw it; and “sign,” which emphasized the meaning or significance of the miraculous act. So the three synonyms addressed the three elements of the miraculous event: the one who did it, the act itself, and those who saw it happen.

John chooses to use the word that highlights what the miracles meant; as we noted last time, they demonstrate Jesus’ lordship over matter, time, space, physical and divine law, disease, and even death, and by implication, the evil forces. Anyone who directs the actions and effects of these things must be the recipient of an unprecedented anointing from God.

Second, John reinforces the meaning of these actions by including in the narrative account a record of Jesus’ teaching following the miracle.

  • After changing the water to wine, bringing life and joy by his creative authority, Jesus teaches about spiritual life and joy in his interaction with Nicodemus (“ye must be born again”) and with the Samaritan woman (“living water”).
  • After healing the nobleman’s son and the paralytic at the Pool of Bethesda, he proclaims that one day all will “honor the Son, even as they honor the Father” (Jn 5.23), and that the Son has “life in himself” (Jn 5.26).
  • After feeding the 5000 and walking on the water, Jesus presents himself as “the bread of life; he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst” (Jn 6.35). Here he builds on the earlier teaching of being born unto undying life and drinking water that slakes thirst forever. Later he claims repeatedly that he is “not of this world,” climaxing a series of exchanges with the words, “Before Abraham was, I am” (Jn 8.58). This is someone for whom walking on water should not really be surprising.
  • While healing the man born blind, Jesus proclaims, “I am the light of the world” (Jn 9.5)—and later, “I am the door,” opening, in effect, the entrance to what the light reveals.
  • After Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, John recounts Mary’s anointing of Jesus’ feet, signifying that Jesus himself is the sacrifice that empowers all of his followers to overcome death through resurrection. Later Christ speaks of himself as a grain of wheat that brings life by being planted underground (Jn 12.24)—and then, “the way, the truth, and the life” (Jn 14.6) by whom his people will receive life eternal, and “the vine” (Jn 15.1), the source of ongoing life to all who trust in him.

So the meaning of the signs is amply reinforced. There’s no doubt about who this person is.

And yet, remarkably, he is opposed at every turn by people who really ought to know better.

  • After he heals the paralytic, “the Jews sought to kill Him” (Jn 5:18).
  • After the bread of life discourse, many disciples stopped following Him (Jn 6:66) and again “the Jews sought to kill Him” (Jn 7:1); he was accused of “having a demon” (Jn 7:20). The Pharisees accused Him of lying and having a demon (Jn 8:13, 48, 52); the religious leaders tried to arrest Him (Jn 7:30, 32, 44) and to stone Him (Jn 8:59).
  • After he healed the blind man, he was accused of having a demon (Jn 10:20), and they tried again to stone him (Jn 10.31) and to arrest him (Jn 10:39).
  • And after he raised Lazarus from the dead, they finally hatched the plan that led to His execution (Jn 11:48ff).

Will you believe, or not?

In the end, it’s really not about evidence, or the lack thereof.

It’s about whether or not you want to.

Artwork: The Resurrection of Lazarus by Giovanni di Paolo (1403-1482), from the Walters Art Museum