Bible – Page 34

The Names of Christmas, Part 2

December 20, 2018 by Dan Olinger 2 Comments

Last time we noted what the name Jesus means—and that enabled us to understand what the angel is saying to Joseph in Matthew 1—this baby is Yahweh himself, the one who saves his people from their sins.

God has become one of us.

Now Matthew’s commentary on the angel’s words follows unavoidably:

²²Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, ²³Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.

Matthew is writing to Jews, presenting Jesus as the Messiah, the Christ. One of the most obvious ways he does this is by citing prophecies from the Hebrew Scriptures, what we call the Old Testament, and showing specifically how Jesus fulfills those prophecies. Note how often he says, “All this was done, that it might be fulfilled,” or something similar—

Here, of the incarnation
2.15, of his time in Egypt
2.17, of the slaughter of the innocents
2.23, of his upbringing in Nazareth
4.14, of his preaching in Decapolis
8.17, of his healing ministry
12.17, of the Messianic secret
13.13, of the resistance by the religious leaders
13.35, of his parables
21.4, of the triumphal entry
26.54, 56, of his arrest, trial, and execution
27.9, of his betrayal
27.35, of the soldiers’ casting of lots

The first prophecy he chooses to cite reveals the second name of Christmas.

Emmanuel. God with us.

I suspect that neither Isaiah nor his hearers understood the prophecy. They probably thought, God is with us, as he has been with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and with David and Solomon, and with our people throughout our history.

Yes, it includes that idea, but the prophecy embraces a much more intimate “with” than that.

He is going to join us, to become one of us. He’s going to be not just present, but identified with us.

In theological terms, the person of the Son, eternally existent with a divine nature, is going to add to his person a second nature, a human one. He’s going to get tired, and get hurt, and die.

And he’s going to keep that human nature forever.

It amazes me that when God created the world, he knew that giving humans the ability to have a healthy relationship involved giving them the ability to choose—and that meant the ability to choose wrong. And that meant the possibility—nay, the certainty—of sin. And God knew that he would never allow his image to be permanently disfigured in such a way—that he would respond to our rebellion justly, with a sentence of death, and mercifully, with the opportunity for repentance and forgiveness. He would do whatever was necessary to be just and to justify—to rescue—his image. And he knew that justice would require an infinite sacrifice, which we would be unable to pay, and which he would be unable to pay either, because the penalty is death, and he cannot die.

So from the very beginning he knew that by creating humans, beings in his image, on whom he could bestow the joy of his friendship, he was committing himself to become one of them.

Forever.

What a commitment that was!

What a God he is!

Next time, a meditation on what happens when God becomes man.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

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The Names of Christmas, Part 1

December 17, 2018 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

PNo, I don’t mean the names of the day. I mean the names that arise out of what we celebrate at Christmas—the names of the Incarnate One.

What we call the Christmas Story introduces us to two names that are new, and meaningfully so. The first one is now so familiar to us that we’ve completely forgotten its meaning—if we ever knew it all. We meet it in Matthew’s account of the birth of the Son of God, in chapter 1—

¹⁸Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost. ¹⁹Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a publick example, was minded to put her away privily. ²⁰But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost. ²¹And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins.

The first name that comes out of the Christmas Story is “Jesus.” We all know it well today; it’s the personal name of the Son, which he took on when he became human. But most of us completely miss the whole significance of the way it was introduced in Scripture.

To start with, the name has come to us through several languages, and as anyone named Juan or Jean or Johann or Ivan knows, names change when they cross languages. Jesus is the English form of the Greek Iesous, which in turn translates the Hebrew Yeshua, or its longer form Yehoshua, or, as we would say it, Joshua. Yes, Jesus’ name was just Joshua—which explains a bit of translational confusion in the KJV of Hebrews 4.8, where they give the impression that the author is speaking of Jesus giving rest, when he’s actually speaking of the OT Joshua taking Israel into the Promised Land. (See also Ac 7.45.)

Whew.

Where was I?

Have you ever wondered why the angel said to Joseph, “You must call his name Joshua, for he will save his people from their sins”? Have you ever noticed that subordinate conjunction in there, the one that identifies a causal link between the name and Jesus’ saving work?

To us English-speaking readers, that doesn’t make sense—or, more likely, we just sail on past it without even noticing that it doesn’t make sense, because the words are so familiar to us.

But that causal link is in there for a reason. It’s making an important point, one, I could argue, that is the most important point ever made by anyone.

Joseph would have gotten the point—it would have been as plain as day to him, and he would have understood its significance immediately. I suspect that’s why he unquestioningly obeyed the angel’s instructions. He adopted the child, risking—and probably ruining—his reputation in the process. If your fiancée is pregnant, and you marry her and adopt the child, everybody’s going to nod his head and smirk and wink knowingly. Uh-huh. We all know what that means, now, don’t we? And 30 years later they were still smirking when they tried to undercut Jesus’ authority by sneering, “We were not born of fornication!” (Jn 8.41).

Why did Joseph obey, unhesitatingly, when he knew what the cost of that obedience would be to his own reputation, and perhaps to his livelihood as a contractor?

Because he understood the meaning of the angel’s words. He understood the “for,” the causal link.

Because he knew what the name meant.

“Joshua,” you see, means “Yahweh saves.”

The angel said, “You must name him ‘Yahweh saves,’ ”—so far, so good—“because he will save his people from their sins!”

Do you see it?

“He”—the infant—no, the fetus—“he” is Yahweh!

The everlasting God, who makes covenants with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob—and keeps them—who sits high on the throne in Isaiah’s vision, whose train fills the temple, but who reveals himself to Israel by his first name—this God is now a fetus in the womb of a Jewish teenager.

This is much, much bigger than Joseph, or Mary, or shepherds, or wise men, or all of us put together. Nothing like this has ever happened before, or likely will ever happen again.

God has become one of us.

Next time, the second Christmas name.

Part 2 Part 3

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Why Prophecy Is Hard—And Why We Disagree, Part 4

December 13, 2018 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

I’ve asserted my thesis–Biblical prophecy is intentionally designed to be difficult to understand before the time of fulfillment—but to be quite clear afterwards—and I’ve given a couple of biblical passages that appear to confirm it, as well as an example to give us a more concrete understanding of the principle. Now for the hard question in any assertion—

So what?

I know people who have spent their whole lives trying to understand biblical prophecy. I know others who are troubled, or even disgusted, by the arguments and disagreements that spring from such efforts.

Why can’t we all just get along?

I think the matter we’re discussing here helps us put the modern situation into perspective.

The Bible contains a lot of prophecies that haven’t been fulfilled yet.
In many cases, God has designed these prophecies to be obscure until the time of fulfillment.
Just as Isaiah’s hearers, in trying to imagine a scenario in which Isaiah 53.9 could be fulfilled, would have been very unlikely to imagine what actually happened, so we should expect that our interpretations of the obscure prophecies will be off the mark in ways both minor and significant.
Thus it is likely that believers who love God and his Word and study it deeply will come to different conclusions about what precisely the eschatological material predicts.
The current disagreement is not a problem or evidence of some spiritual failure in the church; it’s exactly what we should expect.

So we have different views at the macroscopic level—

Premillennialists say that we should take prophetic passages just as literally as we take historical passages, because
- Changing hermeneutical horses in the middle of the stream is inconsistent, and
- Prophecies that have already been fulfilled have been fulfilled literally.
Postmillennialists say that if we really want to do that, we need to take literally Jesus’ teaching that the kingdom would come not suddenly, but slowly, over a long period of time (Mt 13.31-33).
And amillennialists say that if we want to take it literally, we’re going to have a problem with 7 heads and 10 horns. If there are clear contextual clues that we shouldn’t take it literally, then we shouldn’t take it literally. And isn’t the new covenant supposed to get away from the physical, literal, external stuff anyway, and move to the inner person of the heart (Jer 31.31-33)? And isn’t Jesus’ kingdom eternal, and not limited to a mere 1000 years (Isa 9.7)?

And even among premillennialists there are differences of interpretation—

Pretribulationists say that if we can be surprised by the Rapture (Mt 25.1-13), then it must be the very next thing to happen on the prophetic timeline.
Midtribulationists say that the Rapture is described as the two witnesses being caught up to heaven (Rev 11.12), at the seventh trumpet judgment (Rev 11.15), the “last trump” (1Co 15.52), at the midway point of the 7-year tribulation.
Posttribulationists say that both believers and unbelievers will be resurrected together at a single return of Christ at the end of the Tribulation (Dan 12.1-3).

Every one of these interpreters has a point. But they can’t all be right.

And maybe, based on what we’ve been discussing, just maybe none of them is completely right.

That means that we have to give one another some room to study, and think, and puzzle, and scratch our heads, and wonder. We need to hear one another’s arguments without making our primary goal to win the argument for our side. We need to approach this puzzle with some sense of historical and hermeneutical understanding, one that holds our own views loosely and humbly, one that waits for the Great Clarity that will come when it all comes to pass.

Humility. Tentativeness. Openness, within the bounds of clear biblical teaching.

Brotherly kindness. Cooperative investigation.

Now, I should say that I’m a pretribulational premillennialist. And I’m pretty sure I’m right. :-)

We ought to study, and think, and try to come to some sort of reasonable conclusion that accounts smoothly for all the biblical data. That’s what theology does, as a matter of stewardship of the great divine gift of the Word. We can’t just sit back lazily and be “panmillennialists—it’ll all pan out in the end.”

But we need to recognize our limits as well, and we need to recognize what those limits say about what kinds of doctrines are worth fighting over, and what kinds aren’t.

Hmmm. Maybe I’ll write about that one of these days.

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Why Prophecy Is Hard—And Why We Disagree, Part 3

December 10, 2018 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1 Part 2

I’ve asserted my thesis–Biblical prophecy is intentionally designed to be difficult to understand before the time of fulfillment—but to be quite clear afterwards—and I’ve given a couple of biblical passages that appear to confirm it. Now it’s time to work with an example, making the idea a little more concrete.

One of the most well-known prophetic passages in the entire Bible, at least among Christians, is Isaiah 53. It’s the fourth and last in a series of “Servant Songs” in Isaiah, and the most well known, primarily, I suppose, because Georg Friedrich Handel included much of it in his oratorio Messiah.

He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;
Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows;
With his stripes we are healed;
All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all;
He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter;
It pleased the LORD to bruise him.

We’ve heard the lines often, and they’ve become part of our consciousness, part of our culture, especially at Christmas.

Because of that familiarity, we’re unlikely to hear it the way Isaiah’s hearers—and Isaiah himself—did. The words were not familiar to them; they had to hear them, and try to understand them, for the first time.

And right in the middle of this song the Spirit has Isaiah write something that would have been quite puzzling to him and his Israelite audience:

He made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death.

Put yourself in Isaiah’s sandals.

Whaaaaat?!

That statement doesn’t make any sense at all.

The wicked and the rich don’t die similarly, and they’re not treated the same at the time. The wicked—criminals—are executed, probably by stoning, and their bodies are thrown out with the trash into the Valley of Hinnom, where the vultures pick at their rotting corpses until only the bones remain (Prov 30.17). A very undignified treatment.

The rich, on the other hand, are celebrated and mourned in their death, and their corpses are placed reverently in the family tomb, often a cave, sometimes carved laboriously out of solid rock.

How can both of these things be true for the Servant of Yahweh? How can he die in both disgrace and honor? How can he be numbered with transgressors and yet be buried with the rich?

As I say, our familiarity with these words—and with the prophecy’s fulfillment—means that the words don’t even give us pause. We nod our heads appreciatively, envisioning the fulfillment with perfect clarity—

Executed as a criminal, between two other criminals;
Has a secret disciple, a member of the Sanhedrin, well respected and very wealthy, who uses his influence to acquire the body after execution and places it in his own personal tomb.

Well, as a friend of mine used to say, “Hindsight’s 50/50.” :-) It’s easy to understand the question if you already know the answer, and it’s easy to “solve” a problem if you already know what happens.

But Isaiah and his hearers didn’t have any of that. They scratched their heads, grimaced, and wondered.

What could this possibly mean?

It’s obscure for more than 700 years. And during those years, generation after generation wonders.

And then, in real time and in the sight of all, the prophecy is fulfilled. The promise comes to pass.

And in an instant, the wonder of puzzlement gives way to the wonder of delight, and the fog lifts and understanding comes.

So that’s what it means! Wow!

The prophecy is obscure until the time of fulfillment—but then it’s as clear as day.

This isn’t some meaningless musing of a Nostradamus, whose prophecies are so vague that they could be fulfilled by any number of unspectacular events. No, this is a specific but incomprehensible prophecy, one that is immediately recognizable at its unique and precise fulfillment.

Discovery is a really great teaching technique. You remember what you discover, especially when the discovery hits you hard, right between the eyes. Especially when you solve a puzzle that’s been stumping the experts for centuries.

Maybe that’s why God did it this way.

Next time, I’ll draw some conclusions and applications from all this.

Part 4

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Why Prophecy Is Hard—And Why We Disagree, Part 2

December 6, 2018 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1

In my previous post I’ve stated my thesis:

Biblical prophecy is intentionally designed to be difficult to understand before the time of fulfillment—but to be quite clear afterwards.

Let me explain my basis for concluding that.

To begin with, this principle is directly stated in both Testaments.

In the Old Testament, we find a description of Daniel receiving a prophecy:

¹At that time shall arise Michael, the great prince who has charge of your people. And there shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation till that time. But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone whose name shall be found written in the book. ²And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. ³And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above; and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever (Dan 12.1-3).

Daniel is then told to “shut up the words and seal the book, until the time of the end” (Dan 12.4). So God’s intention, in this case, is that the prophecy not be generally distributed. So far, so good.

Then Daniel sees a vision of two men, one of whom asks the other, “How long shall it be till the end of these wonders?” (Dan 12.6b). To which the other responds

that it would be for a time, times, and half a time, and that when the shattering of the power of the holy people comes to an end all these things would be finished (Dan 12.7b).

Perhaps your immediate response is, “Huh?” “Time, times, and a half a time?” What kind of an answer is that? What does it mean?

Well, you’re in good company, because Daniel himself thought the same thing (Dan 12.8a), and he asked for an explanation (Dan 12.8b). And he was told, “Go your way, Daniel, for the words are shut up and sealed until the time of the end” (Dan 12.9).

In other words, “Never mind; I’m not going to tell you.”

And Daniel is the prophet!

And why is the meaning withheld from the very one who’s supposed to write about it?

Because it’s not for now; it’s for later.

None of your business.

Well, that’s intriguing. God has no intention that anyone, including even the prophet, should understand the prophecy at the time it was given. No one will understand it until it’s fulfilled. Then they’ll understand.

And that’s what God intended all along.

Well, that’s Old Testament. Got anything from the New Testament?

Well, as it happens, I do. Thanks for asking.

In his first epistle, Peter describes the glories of our salvation and the plan of God that brought it about. Along the way he notes that the Old Testament prophets weren’t able to understand those things the way we have been able to (1P 1.10). Specifically, he says, they were puzzled by the apparent conflict between the reigning King, the eternal Son of David (2Sam 7), and the suffering Servant, who was executed without a defense (Isa 53). How could both of those be true of the same person? (1P 1.11).

And Peter notes that God revealed to them “that they were serving not themselves but [us],” who would come later and see those prophecies fulfilled (1P 1.12).

So in these cases, God clearly intended the predictions to be obscure, puzzling.

I should say that I don’t think this was always the case. When Jeremiah prophesied that Judah would be in captivity in Babylon for 70 years (Jer 25.11) and would then return (Jer 29.10), he understood what he was saying, and he intended his hearers to understand as well. He even bought a piece of land and buried the deed (Jer 32.9-15) to show them the kind of confidence that they should have in the Lord’s keeping of this promise.

But it was not at all uncommon for God to give a prophecy that seemed incomprehensible at the time, and he did so intentionally.

Next time we’ll look at an example of such a puzzling prophecy, one that has since been fulfilled. By studying that example we’ll be able to see more concretely how confusing such a prophecy would be initially, but how perfectly clear it would at the time of fulfillment. And that insight may help us understand why God is speaking so obscurely in the first place.

Part 3 Part 4

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Why Prophecy Is Hard—And Why We Disagree, Part 1

December 3, 2018 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

A lot of Christians are confused, and some are even troubled, by biblical prophecy. It seems really hard to understand—what’s with those wheels that Ezekiel saw? and how do you get seven heads and ten horns on a beast? Other Christians are troubled by the fact that nobody can seem to agree on how things are supposed to turn out. Some people have been predicting the Rapture for decades now—and they’ve been wrong every time. And others, who look like perfectly good Christians, chuckle, “Rapture, huh? You don’t really believe that, do you?”

There’s a reason for all this. And when you understand it—the reason, not the prophecies—you’ll realize that there’s really nothing to be upset about.

Let me see if I can clarify some things.

I should begin by defining what I’m talking about. When I say “prophecy,” I’m talking about biblical predictions, places where the Bible says that something’s going to happen in the future. Technically, everything the Bible says is “prophecy,” in the sense that it’s a message from God to humans, delivered through mouthpieces, prophets. But here I’m using the word more narrowly.

The Bible does make a lot of predictions. The first one is in Gen 3.15, where God predicts that “the seed of the woman” will crush the serpent’s head. The last one is Jesus’ statement, “Surely I come quickly,” in Rev 22.20. And there are a lot of them in between.

We can sort them into 2 groups—those that have been fulfilled, and those that haven’t. A great many of those that have been fulfilled are about just 2 events—the exiles of Israel (especially the exile of Judah to Babylon and back) and the first coming of Christ. It can be instructive to study how those prophecies were stated and then how they were fulfilled; I think that study serves as a kind of lab for how we should expect other prophecies to be fulfilled (more on that later).

Most of the ones that haven’t been fulfilled are about the end times—what we call eschatology. And there is where most of the disagreement is among biblical scholars and among everyday Christians.

So why all the disagreement?

I would suggest that it springs primarily from the way God has chosen to give his prophecies.

In short, they’re really hard to understand.

Note that I’ve said that this is “the way God has chosen” to speak to us about these things. The fact that the predictions are obscure is not some kind of defect in God’s ability to communicate, some failure on his part. And I don’t think it’s a problem with our ability to understand, either.

Why do I say that? Because there are all kinds of statements in the Scripture that we understand perfectly well. God can speak clearly when he wants to, and he is completely justified in holding us accountable for those things. He’s told us who we are, where we came from, who he is, and how we can have a relationship with him. These things are clear, and life and death hang on our responding rightly to what he has clearly told us.

But when we cross over into predictive prophecy, it seems as though everything just goes a little crazy. Suddenly we’re knitting our eyebrows, furrowing our foreheads, shaking our heads. Wheel in a wheel in a wheel, indeed.

This stuff is hard. Charles Hodge, the great Princeton theologian of the 19^th century, said frankly that nobody was qualified to interpret biblical prophecy unless he’d spent an entire lifetime doing so—and since he, Hodge, hadn’t, he wasn’t going to make any authoritative pronouncements.

So here’s my thesis.

Biblical prophecy is intentionally designed to be difficult to understand before the time of fulfillment—but to be quite clear afterwards.

God has decided, for reasons of his own, to speak this way. I’ll speculate later on a possible reason for that, but for now I’d like to spend a few posts demonstrating

that my thesis is true,
that it explains the current diversity of views about the end times, and
that it gives us some guidance on how we ought to study and apply these matters.

(If you’re expecting me to finish the series by telling you when Jesus is coming back, you’re going to be disappointed.)

See you next time.

Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

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The Really Important Bible Story that Hardly Anybody Knows About, Part 5

November 29, 2018 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

December 18, 520 BC, has been a pretty good day so far; Haggai’s third sermon has given us a lot to chew on.

But he’s not done yet.

Later the same day, Haggai delivers his fourth and final sermon, and it goes far beyond any of the others.

This sermon is different from the others; for starters, it’s delivered not to the crowd of onlookers or the workers themselves, but to just one man—the governor, Zerubbabel (Hag 2.21).

And it’s brief and to the point.

And cryptic.

Haggai talks about the shaking that’s coming (Hag 2.21b-22). He’s mentioned that before, in his second sermon (Hag 2.6-7). And in that day, he says to Zerubbabel, I’m going to make you a signet ring!

And that’s it. End of sermon, end of book.

What on earth does that mean?

Zerubbabel would know very well what it means. I’ve mentioned that he’s the grandson of the last Davidic king. This statement is about his grandfather.

His grandfather went by several names. Jehoiachin. Jeconiah. Or just Coniah.

And in his reign of just three months (2K 24.8), he was an evil, evil king. So evil, in fact, that God had placed a special curse on him through Jeremiah: he would be cut off, the royal signet ring pulled off of God’s finger and cast aside (Jer 22.24-27). And worse, none of his descendants would ever sit on the throne of David (Jer 22.30).

How about that. God just cursed the Messianic line. To all appearances, his promise to David (2Sam 7.4-17) was over. No eternal Messianic king after all.

The end of hope.

And now, to Zerubbabel, two generations later, he speaks again of the signet ring. What does it mean? Will Zerubbabel become king again?

Not until the shaking (Hag 2.21-23). When would that be?

Well, Zerubbabel never becomes king, so not in his lifetime. And not for the next 400 years, through all of Zerubbabel’s royal descendants (Mt 1.12-16). And along about 5 BC, the royal heir—cursed—is a carpenter in Nazareth.*

He will never be king. Nor will any biological son.

I think he knew that. The very existence of the genealogy in Matthew 1 testifies to the fact that the Jews kept track of such things.

And now he learns that his fiancée—a woman whose character he had never questioned—is with child, and he knows he’s not the father.

Anguished, he ponders his next step. In the dark of night, a heavenly messenger appears to him. The situation is not what you think, he says. Marry the woman. Adopt the baby.

Joseph’s reputation will be ruined if he does what the messenger says. It will cost him everything.

But he does it anyway. Does he know? Does he realize that this is God’s remarkable way of keeping an apparently broken promise? Or does he just figure that you ought to do what a heavenly messenger says?

He adopts the baby.

And in that instant, it all comes together. The adopted child becomes the legal heir to all the promises of God to David. He becomes the eternal king, the child born to bear all government on his shoulders. Yet he is not heir to the curse on Coniah. He can reign.

How much do we owe to this Joseph, the man who sacrificed everything to follow God’s hard command and then disappeared entirely from history? What if he had said, “No, let the next generation do it!”?

There can be no next generation. Daniel predicted the death of Messiah around AD 30 (Dan 9.24-26). This is the time. If Joseph doesn’t do it, the promises are all broken, and it all falls apart.

Back to Haggai’s day. Does Zerubbabel understand any of this? Can he make sense of the prophecy of the signet ring?

We’re not told. Maybe Haggai explained it to him. Maybe he never knew. Maybe he thought, “And this is the thanks I get?!”

But the theme of the sermon is clear to us. God keeps his promises.

He has made plenty more. And he keeps them all.

Walk in the light of that trust.

* What follows assumes that Matthew’s genealogy is the royal line of David culminating in Joseph, while Luke’s genealogy is a non-royal Davidic line culminating in Mary. No space to defend that view here, but it’s common and justified at length in standard reference works and commentaries.

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The Really Important Bible Story that Hardly Anybody Knows About, Part 4

November 26, 2018 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

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So far we’ve seen Judah return from Babylonian Captivity and re-establish themselves in the land. We’ve seen them respond, 16 years later, to Haggai’s urging that they rebuild the Temple. We’ve seen God encourage them that his blessing would be on this Temple, in a special way.

And so the work continues.

But now there’s a new problem.

Routine sets in. The workers go to work every day at the Temple site, and they begin to lose appreciation for the special character of the work they’re doing. And not in the way you’d expect—they don’t say, “Ho-hum, let’s get this job done and move on to the next one.” No, the distortion in their thinking is much more pernicious than that. While continuing their appreciation for the significance of the work itself, they twist its purpose. They begin to make it about themselves rather than the God of heaven.

“I’m working on the Temple!” they think. “I’m a cut above!”

And if “I’m special!” then I suppose I have certain privileges, don’t I? If God appreciates my work for him, then I probably don’t have to care all that much about the details of my own thinking and my own living. That’s for the little people. I’m special. My work makes me so.

On December 18, three months into construction, Haggai trudges up to the Temple site once again.

“I have a question for you,” he says. “It’s about the Law. Call the experts; I want to get their opinion” (Hag 2.11).

If someone is carrying some sacrificial meat, he says, and he rubs up against something, does the holy meat make the other thing holy (Hag 2.12a)? In other words, does holiness rub off?

No, the priests—the experts—say (Hag 2.12b). Holiness doesn’t rub off.

OK, next question.

If someone has touched a dead body, he’s unclean, right (Lev 22.4)? Now, if this unclean person touches something else, does he make the other thing unclean (Hag 2.13a)? Does corruption rub off?

Yes, they say (Hag 2.13b). Corruption pollutes.

So holiness doesn’t rub off, but unholiness does?

Right.

You already knew that, didn’t you? When you wash your hands, rubbing them on a dirty surface doesn’t make the surface clean; it makes your hands dirty again. My pastor from years ago* once said, “When you put on white gloves and play in the mud, you don’t made the mud glovey; you make the gloves muddy.”

These men thought that working on the Temple construction was making them clean. On the contrary, when they showed up every day, they were dragging their corrupt hearts onto the site and defiling it by their very presence (Hag 2.14).

They were undoing with their hearts what they were doing with their hands.

And as a result, God’s judgment on their land continued despite their (merely) external obedience (Hag 2.15-18).

But if they would trust and obey, if they would believe his word, despite the desolation all around them, the blessing would come (Hag 2.19).

So what’s the theme of Haggai’s third sermon? Love first, then obedience.

And so it is with us. We think that our association with other believers, with churches, with institutions, our work for God, enables us to cut corners in our love for him.

But it doesn’t.

God doesn’t want your stuff. He doesn’t even want your frenetic activity—he really doesn’t need your help to advance his kingdom—so much as he wants your heart. Mary knew that, and Martha, I suspect, eventually learned it (Lk 10.38-42).

So stop a minute, rethink, reorient.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

Put the important stuff first.

And then, sure, get back to work. With a reoriented heart, the work takes on a whole new perspective.

* That was Chuck Swindoll, Waltham (MA) Evangelical Free Church, 1966-67.

Part 5

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The Really Important Bible Story That Hardly Anybody Knows About, Part 3

November 19, 2018 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1 Part 2

It’s October of 520 BC, and the returned exiles from Babylon have begun construction on the new (Second) Temple under the leadership of their governor, Zerubbabel, in response to the urging of the prophet Haggai. But just a month into the effort, discouragement has set in.

It appears that there are some older folks watching as the young bucks do the heavy lifting. They’re old enough to remember the First Temple, Solomon’s Temple, now gone for 66 years. Let me tell you, that was quite a piece of work, they say. The gold. The silver. The ivory. And those two columns on the front porch. Six feet in diameter. Three stories tall. Bronze four inches thick around a hollow core. Now that was a temple. This one? Not so much. Ah, well. I guess you can do only so much with rubble.

On the 17^th of October, Haggai returns to the deflated construction workers with another message from God. He confronts the problem directly.

The old men are right—as far as they go, he says. This one isn’t going to have all the gold and silver and ivory of Solomon’s Temple (Hag 2.3). But this time is different. This one isn’t going to be about gold and silver. Gold and silver are trivial; if you need gold and silver to make this Temple great, I can get you all the gold and silver you need. I put the ore in the hills, and I know exactly where it all is. I can get it for you if I want to (Hag 2.8).

But this time I’m doing something much, much bigger than mere shiny things. This Temple is going to be different.

The day is coming, he says, when I’m going to turn the whole world upside down (Hag 2.6-7). I’m going to do something unprecedented, unimaginable. And when I do, the eyes of the entire world are going to be focused on this Temple, the one you’re building—and it will shine with a glory that gold and silver could never approach (Hag 2.7).

You see, what the construction workers couldn’t possibly know is that in a little more than half a millennium, a little baby boy would be brought into this Temple to be dedicated to the Lord, and a prophet named Simeon would be among the first to know that this was a baby like no other (Lk 2.25-35). And a dozen years later, the same boy would sit in this Temple and confound the rabbis there with the wisdom of his questions (Lk 2.41-50). And as a man he would stride into this Temple—“My Father’s house!”—and drive out those who had filled the courtyard with abusive money-making schemes, robbing God’s people in the very place God had designed to be their sanctuary (Jn 2.13-17). Twice! (Lk 19.45-46). And there he would teach (Jn 10.22-38).

And one day—one dark Friday afternoon—as the priests were going about their normal duties in the Holy Place in this very Temple*, with a horrifying crack, the veil of this Temple would be torn in two, from the top to the bottom, without hands, leaving the way open into the very presence of God for everyone.

Gold and silver? Trivial stuff.

This is about eternal things, life-changing things, world-shaking things.

So keep working, the Lord says. Your work matters, even if it doesn’t look like it to the folks looking on. This is really, really big.

What’s the theme of this second sermon?

It’s God who makes the work great.

Any work done for him, in obedience to his commands, is infinitely great, because the one for whom it’s done is infinitely great.

Labor on, my friend.

* Of course I’m aware that by Jesus’ time Herod the Great had massively renovated the Temple, with the effect that it was significantly greater and more impressive than was the one Zerubbabel’s workers constructed. But Haggai doesn’t make that distinction, and neither will I. The building they were beginning work on would eventuate in world-shaking developments.

Part 4 Part 5

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The Really Important Bible Story That Hardly Anybody Knows About, Part 2

November 15, 2018 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1

In my last post I introduced the story of Haggai, one of two prophets who preached to the Jews who had returned from captivity in Babylon. As I noted there, they had rebuilt the altar and reinstituted animal sacrifice, so as to address their most pressing need, a right relationship with God. And they began to rebuild the Temple until local opposition stopped them.

It’s now 16 years later, and the Temple remains in ruins, with a functioning altar standing amidst the rubble. On August 29, 520 BC, the word of Yahweh comes to Haggai. The Lord directs the message to Zerubbabel, the governor, and to Joshua, the high priest. (Obviously, this is not the Joshua we know best; he’s been dead for nearly a thousand years.)

Haggai begins by telling the hearers to “Consider your ways” (Hag 1.5)—in other words, to rethink what they’re doing. Something is wrong with their priorities.

What could that be? Well, they’re living in nicely decorated houses—well beyond what’s functionally necessary—and the Lord’s house still lies in ruins (Hag 1.4, 9b).

And for at least the most recent of these past 16 years, God has been nudging them toward dependence. He has withheld the rain that would provide bountiful crops (Hag 1.10)—something the Lord had promised them if they would but serve him (Dt 7.12-13). Every sector of the economy has been affected—the grain, the grape, the olive, and all the other agricultural products; and the suppression of this key element of the economy has exerted downward pressure on even the wages for labor (Hag 1.11).

And the judgment has not been limited to decreased income. Cash outflow has been increased at the same time:

You have sown much, and harvested little. You eat, but you never have enough; you drink, but you never have your fill. You clothe yourselves, but no one is warm. And he who earns wages does so to put them into a bag with holes (Hag 1.6).

Does that sound at all familiar? Have you ever seen the bills increasing just at the times that you need to cut expenses to match your income? Frustrating, isn’t it?

Now, I’m not saying that when that happens to you, God is judging you, and you need to go out and build a temple—or even put more money in the offering plate. God has many reasons other than judgment to take us through deep waters and fiery trials, and in fact Christ has endured all of the judgment that God has ever had for us.

But at least this common experience helps us understand a little bit of what Judah was going through.

And what does the Lord prescribe as the solution to the problem?

Get some wood. Build the house. Glorify God (Hag 1.8).

I don’t think the solution to divine displeasure is to work harder; the Scripture pictures God as a God of grace, of love, of care. And that is the key to what he’s asking for here.

The problem is not their failure to build the Temple; that’s the symptom. The problem is that they don’t care about their God as much as they care about themselves. And so God tells them, yes, to get wood and build the house—and most important, in that to glorify him, to make him look big, to demonstrate by their actions that they hold him close and hold him reverently, that they value him above all else.

Like every good sermon, this one has a theme, a key takeaway idea. How would you state it?

I’d put it pretty simply: God comes first.

We put him first. In everything—in our thoughts, in our plans, in our labors, and especially in our affections—because if he is first there, he will be first everywhere else.

The account tells us that Zerubbabel, and Joshua, and all the people responded to Haggai’s words as they should have. With the promise of the Lord’s presence and empowerment (Hag 1.13), they get wood, and they begin to build the house. Construction begins just 23 days later (Hag 1.15).

This is a great first step. But as we’ll see, setting off down the path of obedience does not mean that the path will be straight, or level, or free of danger. In less than a month, God’s people will need another sermon.

Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

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