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

Chair, Division of Biblical Studies & Theology,

Bob Jones University

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On April Fools’ Day

April 1, 2024 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

My practice is to post here on Mondays and Thursdays. As it happens, April Fools’ Day is on a Monday this year, and I thought it might be interesting to share some thoughts on the subject.

Prankstering is a thing. Certain kinds of people really enjoy playing tricks on people, and certain others—fewer, I suspect, than the number of pranksters—genuinely enjoy having tricks played on them.

Grace and peace to them all, and may they have a delightful time on this day.

In my younger years I engaged in some of that myself. I remember attending a wedding with my mother as a college student, and some attenders wanted to do some stuff to the getaway car, so I popped the lock and let them in. I still remember the look of surprise and concern on my mom’s face at the ease with which I got access to the locked car.

In the next few years I found that my excitement and joy at playing tricks on people was diminishing, and today I can say that I haven’t done any of that for a long time.

There are lots of wedding pranks. You get access to the honeymoon suite and put the groom’s underwear in the freezer. You shave his chest. You soap the car windows, paint signs on the rear window, put a noisemaker in the exhaust pipe, tie cans to the rear bumper, fill the inside with balloons. And so grooms make a practice of hiding the car.

I recall when a friend of mine—a buddy from BJU’s judo demonstration team—got married, and the rest of us on the team decided we were going to find his car, get into it, and do nothing but tape a hundred-dollar bill to the steering wheel with a note wishing the two of them a happy honeymoon. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find the car, and he never got the hundred bucks.

Another time a former roommate called me at my GA apartment on a Friday night and asked if he could spend the night there. He was getting married the next day, and he didn’t trust what his groomsmen might do to him that night. He knew he could trust me. That opportunity, and that trust, I took as a privilege, and since then I’ve made it my desire to be the guy people could trust in similar situations.

For a few years I’d post this every April 1: “Yes, I know what day it is. No, I’m not going to lie to my friends.”

It occurs to me that that sounds pretty judgmental.

I don’t think it’s a lie to play a prank on a friend—if you know he’ll enjoy it, if it won’t be an unpleasant experience for him. Nothing wrong with good clean fun.

But not everybody finds that kind of thing, or specific instances of that kind of thing, fun. People trying to have a baby don’t find the topic humorous. Oh, you’re not really pregnant? Ha, ha, ha.

A tech newsletter I subscribe to came out this past weekend with a bunch of ideas for pranking your friends using computers. You can switch the keyboard assignments, so whenever they type an “e” it sends an “I” to their screen / file.

Ha, ha, ha.

What if your friend needs to send an important email at that moment? What if he’s got to get some work done on a tight deadline? How long will it take him to figure this thing out and fix it?

How would you feel in that situation?

Ha, ha, ha? I don’t think so.

And the larger principle of the boy who cried wolf comes to mind. I don’t want to be the kind of person that others will be inclined to distrust, because I’ve fooled them one time too many.

So I don’t do the April Fools’ thing. It’s a personal choice, a preference.

But I also don’t sit in judgment on people who get their jollies that way.

As long as we love God and love our neighbors, always seeking their good, even if at our own expense, we’ll be just fine.

Enjoy the day.

Photo by Waldemar on Unsplash

Filed Under: Culture Tagged With: April Fools' Day, holidays

On Valentine’s Day

February 12, 2024 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Since Valentine’s Day is this week, I’d like to think a little bit about love.

Love is fascinating—all the popular songs are about it.

But it’s a mystery.

For some time there’s been circulating on the internet a series of comments on love by children. I haven’t been able to find its source—everybody quotes it, but as far as I can tell, nobody credits it. Here are a few of my favorites:

  • “No one is sure why it happens, but I heard it has something to do with how you smell; that’s why perfume and deodorant is so popular.” Mae, age 9
  • ”I think you’re supposed to get shot with an arrow or something, but the rest of it isn’t supposed to be painful.” Manuel, age 8
  • “It isn’t always just how you look. Look at me, I’m handsome as anything and I haven’t got anybody to marry me yet.” Brian, age 7
  • “Don’t do things like have smelly, green sneakers. You might get attention, but attention ain’t the same thing as love.” Alonzo, age 9
  • “Be a good kisser. It might make your wife forget that you never take out the trash.” Dave, age 8
  • “Don’t forget your wife’s name. That will mess up the love.” Erin, age 8
  • “Love will find you. Even if you hide from it. I have been trying to hide from it since I was five, but the girls keep finding me.” Dave, age 8

And it’s important.

It’s fundamental to our very nature; we’re made in the image of God (Ge 1.26-27), who, though one in essence, is—and thus has always been—in three persons, in perfect relationship.

And when one of those persons became man, he issued an insider’s commentary on God’s law: it’s all about loving God and loving your neighbor (Mk 12.30-31).

So life is as simple as that:

  • Love God: put Him first
  • Love others: put them first

It’s as simple as closing the door quietly and leaving the hall light out if someone is asleep. As simple as stopping to help someone who’s in difficulty. As simple as thinking about what you can do.

Years ago I was in the Las Vegas airport headed home, and a woman came up to me and asked me, in broken English, if I had a quarter for the pay phone. She was unexpectedly stranded and needed to call a family member. I fished a quarter out of my pocket and gave it to her and walked on toward my gate, feeling satisfied with having helped somebody out.

Then I thought, You could have done better. You could have let her use your phone, so she could make additional calls if she needed to. You could have asked if she was hungry, and bought her a meal if she needed one. You could have asked her where she was from and recommended a church in her town. You could have …

Woulda, coulda, shoulda.

Didn’t.

If I love my neighbor, I want to do him, or her, some eternal good.

Of course, Valentine’s Day is especially focused on local love, on committed love, love more deep and abiding than general love of neighbor. Our culture is filled with stereotypes about that.

Candy. Flowers. Jewelry. A candlelight dinner.

But as long-term couples know, lasting love is as much, if not more, about smaller, less affected things.

Putting your dirty clothes in the hamper. Putting the toilet seat down. Cleaning up after yourself. Keeping your promises.

Listening.

And it’s all based in God’s love for us: we love Him, because He first loved us (1Jn 4.19). If you’re going to love as you should, you need God’s example and His power. You find that, and develop it, in the means of grace: the Word, prayer, and fellowship.

As you walk with God, you’ll know, experience, and live out love.

First things first.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Filed Under: Culture Tagged With: holidays, Valentine's Day

On Being an Ambassador, Part 4: Seeing the Long View

February 1, 2024 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Cultural Diversity | Part 2: Walking the Tightrope | Part 3: Drawing the Line

We are ambassadors for a reason. God is working through history toward a goal that is worth all the difficult choices and cultural confrontations. We do well to remind ourselves of it.

In the beginning, God created us in his image and gave us dominion over a created world that was “very good” (Gen 1.31). Soon that creation was marred, however, distorted by our sin. And immediately God set out to restore what we had broken, to reunite what was estranged (Ge 3.15).

He prepares an earthly line that will eventuate in a man who is God himself. The story takes a while to tell; there is Seth, then Noah, then Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; David, and Solomon, and then a builder in Nazareth named Joseph. He adopts his fiancee’s baby, thereby entitling the child to the throne of his father David. This child, in his short life, will demonstrate himself to be prophet, priest, and king, and will offer the perfect sacrifice—himself—to atone for the sins of all who would believe in him. And with that faith comes the transfer of his righteousness, his legal and moral perfection, to the believer.

And then reunification with the long-estranged God.

And God’s vision continues. It’s not enough that three Jewish men—Jesus’ “best friends”—believe, or that the Twelve or the crowds do. The vision is much bigger than that. God is gathering to himself a people, innumerable and global, to praise his name. The message of this gathering will go to the Jew first, but God’s Spirit will create a new institution, the church, to unite all who will come, to erase national and ethnic boundaries, to manifest the glory of disparate people fellowshipping face to face, worshiping together in the same room, rooms large and small all around the globe.

And those little gatherings are a foretaste of a much larger gathering, myriads of myriads, people from every kingdom, tribe, tongue, and nation, united in their praise, with one voice, to the one who loved them and who bought them with his very blood.

I once attended a worship service in Arad, Israel, one of the oldest cities in the world. In a house on a hill gathered believers from all around the world. The sermon was in Hebrew, but with the aid of live translators and headsets, we heard in our mother tongues—I in English, others in French, Spanish, Arabic, Swahili. A foretaste.

It was always clear in the Hebrew Scripture that the plan was not limited to the Jews. God told Abraham, “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Ge 12.3). Amos preached that Edom and “all the heathen … are called by [God’s] name” (Am 9.11-12). Isaiah foresaw all the nations coming to worship in Jerusalem (Is 2.1-4; 27.12-13). Jesus said,

Many shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven (Mt 8.11).

But that all these peoples would be united in one body, on equal footing, not because they had become Jews, but because they believed in the God of all the earth—that was new revelation, given through Paul (Ep 3.6).

This plan could only result in infinite glory being given to the Planner, whose wisdom and power and grace astonishes even the angels in heaven (Ep 3.10), when they see people who should be mortal enemies united in praise to the One who has brought them together, not just with one another, but with him.

Cultural boundaries, indeed.

This is the God, and the plan, that we represent. What a trust we have been given; God has entrusted his reputation and plan to servants that he knows are unfaithful and imperfect. But he will empower us, enliven us, direct us, and the plan will be accomplished.

To represent such a God is an inestimable privilege.

May he give us wisdom and strength to represent him well.

Photo by Carlos Magno on Unsplash

Filed Under: Culture, Theology Tagged With: missions

On Being an Ambassador, Part 3: Drawing the Line

January 29, 2024 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Cultural Diversity | Part 2: Walking the Tightrope

I think it’s worth looking more closely at where we draw the line between what cultural practices we accept and what we reject—in short, where we draw the line.

What makes a given culture’s norms and practices unacceptable? In a well-known passage, the Apostle John writes,

15 Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 16 For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. 17 And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever (1J 2.15-17).

We are not to love “the world” or “the things that are in the world.” Now, we know that’s not an absolute statement; we’re told to love our neighbors, as well as our wives and children, and the last time I checked, they all resided on Planet Earth. John gives us some insight into what he means in the next sentence; he lists three things that characterize the world’s thinking and values, things that are at odds with the way God looks at things (what we often call a “biblical worldview”):

  • The lust of the flesh
  • The lust of the eyes
  • The pride of life

As we think about these three things, we realize that they indeed characterize the thinking of the world we live in and in which we are ambassadors for Christ:

  • Our culture is devoted to satisfying our physical desires. Because our culture is deeply pornogrified, we tend to think of “the lust of the flesh” as sexual lust, and it does include that, but it’s not limited to that. We want food; we want sleep; we want freedom from pain. And if you’ll think about it, you’ll realize that all these physical desires come from God; Adam and Eve ate fruit—and enjoyed it, and were given free rein to eat from all the trees but one—before they fell into sin. I would suggest that “the lust of the flesh” is the desire to use God’s gifts in ways that he has not intended—and thus to worship the gift rather than the giver. A healthy appetite becomes gluttony; a need for rest becomes laziness; a desire for freedom from pain, which is a God-given sign that we’re using our bodies in destructive ways, leads to drug addiction, which is simply our continuing to abuse the body further.
  • Our culture wants what it sees—material possessions of all kinds, from houses to vehicles to baubles to toys, both men’s and boys’. Gotta have it. I’ll be happy with just one more thing. And as we all know, the stuff eventually loses its shine and we’re driven to move on. Once again, in most of these cases the thing itself can well be a gift from a good and generous God, until we move our affections from God to the stuff.
  • There’s discussion about what “the pride of life” is. Some think it’s the desire for admiration or popularity; others think it’s the desire for experiences, such as exotic travel or extreme sports. Again, the issue is whether we live for the experience, which is temporal, or for the Creator, who is eternal.

As we represent Christ in our culture or in a foreign one, we must live in a way that declares our priorities clearly. When the culture advocates lust of the flesh, we can’t trim our message to appease the libertines. When the culture lives on greed, we can’t cater to it with some sort of Christianized prosperity theology. When the culture worships political power, we can’t simply champion the candidate most likely to give us a piece of that action, even if he’s a narcissist.

We are representing someone else. That’s a higher mission.

Photo by Carlos Magno on Unsplash

Part 4: Seeing the Long View

Filed Under: Culture, Theology Tagged With: missions

On Being an Ambassador, Part 2: Walking the Tightrope

January 25, 2024 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Cultural Diversity

As Christians, we get our instruction from the Scripture. We find there early examples of how Christians crossed cultural boundaries in taking the gospel to ends of their world. One instructive example is the preaching of the Apostle Paul. Since God called him to be the apostle to the Gentiles, we should expect that he would deal with widely diverse cultures—and he does.

On his first journey he travels to central Turkey, beginning at Antioch in the region of Pisidia. He begins by connecting with the people with whom he’s most familiar: on the Sabbath, he goes to the Jewish synagogue (Ac 13.14). Since he’s a rabbi, and even trained at the feet of the highly respected Rabban Gamaliel, the local Jewish community initially welcomes him and gives him a platform to speak. He addresses them at some length (Ac 13.16-41), repeatedly referencing the Jewish Scriptures and demonstrating that Jesus of Nazareth is the promised Messiah. This message would be of considerable interest to his Jewish audience and would stimulate interest in further discussion (Ac 13.42).

A few years later he arrives in Athens. Paul visits the synagogue there (Ac 17.17) but does not confine his outreach to that. He wanders the streets of the city and sees a statue “to the unknown God” (Ac 17.23). He immediately recognizes a point of cultural contact: Paul’s God can be known, because he has revealed himself in Creation as well as in the Hebrew Scriptures. In his discussions with the Gentile Athenians, several hearers seek to learn more, so they take him to a part of the city where people can deliver public speeches to passersby (Ac 17.19-21), and he offers to introduce the hearers to this “unknown God” (Ac 17.22-31).

This speech is very different from the one in the synagogue. He doesn’t cite the Hebrew Scriptures even once, presumably because this audience wouldn’t have the foggiest notion what he’s talking about. He doesn’t claim that Jesus is the Messiah, because, again, that is a meaningless term to the Athenians.

Instead he quotes their poets—Epimenides of Crete (“in him we live and move and have our being,” Ac 17.28a) and Aratus (“we are his offspring,” Ac 17.28b). (Apparently, Paul has read these poets enough to be able to cite them extemporaneously.) I find it interesting that both of these poets are describing Zeus—but Paul deftly redirects to the one true God.

So far these approaches are entirely different. But at the end Paul preaches essentially the same message: the resurrected Christ and the need for repentance (Ac 17.30-31). And in both environments he faces both scoffers and those who want to hear more.

Paul’s example leads us to believe that cultural adaptation is appropriate; ambassadors should be effective at communicating to a culture unlike their own. Yet the ambassador must not misrepresent his king; he must deliver the message that the king wants delivered, without distortion.

I’ve written an earlier series on the fact that some doctrines are more important than others; there are certain specified “fundamentals of the faith” on which we must not yield and for which we must do battle if they are under attack. An ambassador is not going to water down these essential doctrines or try to present them disarmingly.

But there are also many teachings, some of which we hold strongly and dearly, on which we must allow one another freedom, and over which we must not fight. I would suggest, for example, that while I’ll die on the hill of the deity of Christ and salvation by grace through faith, I must not fight with brothers who disagree with me on mode of baptism, or church government, or eschatological system.

A wise ambassador is going to pick his battles. He’s going to seek to bridge the cultural gaps as winsomely and effectively as possible while still delivering the king’s message accurately.

There are things about the gospel that are offensive to every culture, and we cannot and should not seek to avoid or disarm those offenses.

But we don’t always need to sacrifice our effectiveness in order to tell the truth. Christ’s great commission can indeed be obeyed and accomplished.

Photo by Carlos Magno on Unsplash

Part 3: Drawing the Line | Part 4: Seeing the Long View

Filed Under: Culture, Theology Tagged With: missions

On Being an Ambassador, Part 1: Cultural Diversity

January 22, 2024 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

This week my pastor pointed us to 2 Corinthians 5, where Paul tells Christians that we are appointed as “ambassadors for Christ” (2Co 5.20) tasked with the responsibility to represent the King (Ps 2.6-9) by taking the gospel to the ends of the earth—as he commanded us just before he returned to his Father (Mt 28.19-20).

Most of us realize that we aren’t doing a very good job of that; we’re reticent to share the gospel, most often because of cultural pressure, and when we do, we often end up arguing rather than graciously and lovingly persuading. Sure, Jesus overturned tables in the Temple, but he didn’t treat everybody, or even most people, that way.

So representing the King is going to involve stewardship, careful thought about how we go about taking the good news to the whole planet. There’s been a lot written about evangelism, missiology, acculturation, and the other issues involved in a global outreach, and there have been plenty of examples, positive and negative, of attempts to carry it out.

I’d like to share a few thoughts on a biblical basis for proceeding, and point out a few questions that we all ought to consider as we do so.

To begin with, the globe displays a lot of cultural differences. Many Americans, isolated as we are by oceans on both sides, haven’t traveled at all internationally, and many more have cross-cultural experiences that are fairly limited—a quick foray from San Diego into Tijuana, perhaps, or from Detroit over the river into Windsor, or maybe even a cruise to the Bahamas. I realized years ago that one of the best ways to combat your cultural misconceptions is to travel—and when you do, ask questions, listen to the answers, and resist jumping to conclusions.

People are different, and thus cultures are as well.

Why?

Because we’re created by God, who is, well, creative. We see diversity and contrast all throughout Creation, from trees to birds to butterflies to rocks to weather patterns. And people. God doesn’t want us all to be alike.

And so we do things differently. I’ve noted before that in some cultures people are unapologetically late to church, because they stopped to talk to someone they passed along the road, and it’s just not polite to dismiss others with a wave of the hand and a verbal “Gotta get to church”—although that’s fine here in the good old US of A. And how in China, you can’t eat everything on your plate, because that makes the host think he didn’t give you enough.

And in many, maybe most, cases, these differences have no moral weight; they’re simply different ways of doing things.

But we also know that Creation is fallen, and humanity is broken, and we often choose to conduct ourselves badly. Sometimes entire cultures call good evil and evil good. The early Christians famously refused to participate in the civil religion by calling Caesar “Lord”; and they denounced the common practice of exposing unwanted babies and allowing them to die. In fact, they rescued these babies and raised them as Christians, thereby turning an evil practice into a source of both civil and religious good.

As ambassadors, then, we need to navigate the realities of cultural difference, speaking and living in a way that communicates clearly, winsomely, and effectively to people who are different from us, while being wise enough to reject cultural practices that are broken and thus evil.

That’s a tricky business; there are lots of things to consider, and the decisions aren’t always clear-cut.

I intend to take several posts to lay a foundation for making such decisions and to think through some of the issues involved.

See you next time.

Photo by Carlos Magno on Unsplash

Part 2: Walking the Tightrope | Part 3: Drawing the Line | Part 4: Seeing the Long View

Filed Under: Culture, Theology Tagged With: missions

On New Year’s Day

January 1, 2024 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Certain topics typically come up at this time of year. Most common, I suppose, is that of resolutions. People post their resolutions, usually for a couple of reasons: either to hold themselves accountable or to suggest behaviors that their friends might consider.

Sometimes people show their character inclinations by letting the topic devolve into controversy: why my resolution is better than yours, or why the whole idea of resolutions is defective, for this reason or that.

I suppose the most mentioned defect is that so many people resolve to get in better physical shape, and they show up at the gym, crowding out the regulars and often entertaining them by demonstrating that they have no idea how to use the equipment. The regulars, in response, try to calm themselves by remembering that these folks will be here for just a few days before they go back to their couch-potato ways. Happens every year, and we just have to deal with it.

A topic I’ve seen more often this year is a denigration of the whole idea of calendar: why should the year start on January 1? Most of our measuring units for time (years, months, days) are based on cosmic cycles—the week being the notable exception.

[ Sidebar: That’s odd. I wonder why every culture has a 7-day week, when there’s no cosmic cycle to motivate it? That uniformity is … puzzling. ;-) ]

In the case of the year, there’s nothing evidently special about the earth’s orbital position on January 1; why start the year there? Other cultures start the year at other times. The Chinese New Year is on February 10 this year; as I understand it, it’s an anticipation of spring, the resurgence of life.

Hebrew culture has 2 New Year’s Days (well, actually, 4, but the Hebrew Bible, what we call the Old Testament, mentions just 2). The civil New Year, Rosh Hashanah (literally “head of the year”), comes in the autumn, on Tishri 1, which this year will begin on October 2 at sunset. This is associated with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when in ancient Israel the high priest would enter the Holy of Holies to sprinkle atoning blood on the Mercy Seat, the lid of the Ark of the Covenant. It is the holiest day of the year.

The religious New Year begins in the spring, at Passover, on Nisan 1, which this year will begin at sunset on April 22. When Israel left captivity in Egypt, God judged the Egyptians by the death of their firstborn, but “passed over” those who in faith had marked their door frames with the blood of a sacrificial lamb. At that time God said that this would be “the beginning of months to you” (Ex 12.2). Christians will note that Jesus was crucified on Passover.

I would think that would get confusing, having 2 New Years, but the ancient Hebrews, and the modern Jews, seem to handle it just fine.

The arguments will go on. Why should our culture consider one day more of a “New Year’s Day” than any other? Why have one at all?

Both secular and Christian thinkers applaud thoughtful living. Socrates said that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” and Paul admonishes his Ephesian readers to “walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise” (Ep 5.15). We ought to examine our values, our priorities, and our consequent words and actions every day; many Christians choose to spend time in the Scriptures and in prayer daily, and many of those choose the morning, to give the day a thoughtful, evaluative start. I’ve found that to be greatly helpful, as have others.

But similarly, it makes sense to recognize the cycles of our life with times of introspection. That’s something that seems fitting to lots of people. There’s certainly no harm in stopping to think once in a while, despite the ridicule of pedantic cynics over calendrical minutiae.

So feel free to go with January 1, or some other date, chosen randomly or otherwise, and pause for evaluation, contemplation, reprioritization.

Do well, and do good.

Happy New Year.

Photo by Jeremy Perkins on Unsplash

Filed Under: Culture Tagged With: holidays, New Year

On Christmas

December 25, 2023 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

This Christmas season I’ve been meditating on the Virgin Birth of Christ.

We all know the story. Mary gives birth to a baby boy without the participation of a human father. Some anti-trinitarians charge that this is unseemly—that God the Father, or God the Holy Spirit, had sex with a Jewish teenaged girl. This is of course ridiculous and blasphemous. If Mary had had sex with God, then she wouldn’t be a virgin, would she?

The whole point of the story is that this is a birth unlike any other. God, the Creator, caused an embryo to form in Mary’s womb, and she gestated and bore the baby in the normal way.

I suppose that means that Jesus shared Mary’s DNA—that just as the human authors participated with the divine Spirit in the work of inspiration, so Mary participated in the origin and development of the human Jesus; whom the Bible repeatedly identifies as a “son of David.” But we are not informed of the details.

Why did this happen? Why was Jesus not born, in God’s providence, in the ordinary way?

The Bible doesn’t tell us.

Bishop Ussher, the same man who calculated the Creation to have occurred in 4004 BC, postulated that the Virgin Birth kept the defilement of Adam’s sin from passing to Mary’s baby:

“For sin having by that one man entered into the world, every father becometh an Adam unto his child, and conveyeth the corruption of his nature unto all that he doth beget. Therefore our Savior assuming the substance of our nature, but not by the ordinary way of natural generation, is thereby freed from all the touch and taint of the corruption of our flesh; which by that means only is propagated from the first man unto his posterity. Whereupon he being man of man but not by man, and so becoming the immediate fruit of the womb and not of the loins, must of necessity be acknowledged to be that HOLY THING” (James Ussher, The Incarnation of the Son of God, 12).

Paul Enns, author of The Moody Handbook of Theology, agrees:

“The virgin birth was the means whereby the incarnation took place and guaranteed the sinlessness of the Son of God.”

Charles Ryrie takes exception:

“The Virgin Birth … need not be the necessary means of preserving the sinlessness of Christ, since God could have overshadowed two parents so as to protect the baby’s sinlessness had he so desired” (Basic Theology).

Ryrie goes on to say,

“It served as a sign of the uniqueness of the person who was born.”

Since we get our fallen natures from our mothers as well as our fathers—women are sinners too—Ussher’s thesis seems flawed, and Ryrie appears to be right.

I recently read Mitch Chase’s article “Six Reasons for the Virgin Birth,” which seems to me to handle this particular question well:

”There seems to be a connection between the virginal conception of Jesus and the sinlessness of Jesus. Exactly how that connection exists is debated. … The language of Luke 1:35 doesn’t mean that sin is only biologically transmitted through a human father. Mary was a sinner with a sinful nature. However, the work of the Holy Spirit ensured that the human nature of Jesus in the womb of Mary was holy and without corruption.”

Chase goes on to list other reasons for the Virgin Birth; I commend the entire article for your consideration.

Jesus is the only case of God becoming man. We have trouble understanding unique things, and this is no exception. There is much mystery here. The early church spent 400 years wrestling with the question and never did explain it.

But God has become man, and perfect man at that, and will remain one of us for all time and beyond.

We have much to celebrate and meditate on in these days.

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

Filed Under: Culture Tagged With: Christmas, holidays

On Protest, Part 5: The Long View

November 30, 2023 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Initial Thoughts | Part 2: Biblical Principles | Part 3: What Now? | Part 4: Tactics

To wrap up this brief series, I’d like to call on a personal experience to highlight the most important point, the Big Idea.

Some years ago my Dad chose to become a tax protestor. I’ve written about that in an earlier post; I’ll give you a minute to go read it before I apply it to this issue.

…

No, seriously, you need to go read the story, or you won’t understand the point here.

…

OK. Now let’s talk about how my Dad’s experience applies here.

Really, now, why did Dad quit filing his taxes?

Because he didn’t want to pay them. He claimed, based on a book he’d read, that being forced to file a return is a violation of the Fifth Amendment, which says you can’t be forced to testify against yourself. He said, “If the government can show me how much I owe them, I’ll be glad to pay it. But I’m under no obligation to give them that information.” He claimed he was standing up for the Constitution, which is the real government.

Now, the book he’d read said very directly that you must continue to file; you just enter “5th Amdmt” in every blank where you would ordinarily write a number. I’ve never asked a lawyer about that approach, mostly because I’m pretty sure what the lawyer would say. But in any case, Dad didn’t follow the book’s advice; he just quit filing.

And the IRS let it slide. I’m sure they knew where he was, even though he’d recently moved across the country, from Boston to New Mexico. They knew because he was on Social Security, and they were mailing him a check—which he was cashing—every couple of weeks.

But they knew he was old, and retired, and had no savings to speak of, so they figured he wasn’t worth their time.

But as typically happens with believers, God’s Spirit doesn’t let things slide. Dad was in a church that preached the Word, and eventually he got under conviction, and he decided to make it right.

And when he did, it actually turned out better for him than if he’d just kept his mouth shut.

Now, I don’t think we can extrapolate from that to say that confessing your sin always increases your income. But when we get crossways with authorities, governmental or otherwise, God is doing things; he’s at work. And a significant part of that work is conforming us to the image of his Son.

Now, he might have things turn out well physically or relationally, to teach us that we were boneheaded to resist the authorities he has placed over us.

But he might not, either.

Either way, we’re going to be better for having done the right thing. My Dad isn’t here on earth anymore, but if he were, he’d tell you that the cleansing of his conscience and the faith he learned to exercise were worth far more than the piddling “refund” check he got from the IRS.

If you’ll trust in God’s providential working, you’ll never regret it.

That’s the Big Idea.

Photo by Teemu Paananen on Unsplash

Filed Under: Culture, Ethics, Politics, Theology Tagged With: civil disobedience, protest

On Protest, Part 4: Tactics

November 27, 2023 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Initial Thoughts | Part 2: Biblical Principles | Part 3: What Now?

In the previous post I said that if we must disobey a constituted authority, we should do so humbly and accept the penalty.

As a general principle, I think that’s right.

The most famous biblical example of civil disobedience, I suppose, is in Acts 4, when Peter and John tell the Jewish Sanhedrin that they will not obey their order to refrain from preaching about Christ. In that case, their disobedience is public (Ac 4.19-20), and they do accept the civil penalty—which in this case was delayed (Ac 5.17-18) and overridden by an angelic deliverance (Ac 5.19-20). The disciples continued their disobedience (Ac 5.21) and accepted further arrest peacefully (Ac 5.26); they stated their intention to disobey during a second hearing (Ac 5.27-29) and were providentially delivered from execution (Ac 5.33-39)—though they accepted a beating (Ac 5.40). And they continued to disobey (Ac 5.42).

But I do find that the biblical data appear to be broader than that. I find, for example, that Paul responds to unbiblical authorities in several different ways:

  • In Damascus, shortly after his conversion, “the Jews took counsel to kill him” (Ac 9.23-24). These “Jews” are not identified as governmental authorities, but since this very Saul had come to Damascus to carry out the high priest’s authorization to arrest Christians and return them (Ac 9.1-2), presumably for imprisonment (Ac 8.1, 3) and eventual execution, involvement of the Jewish civil leadership is at least strongly implied. Further, Paul later writes that the Roman ethnarch was seeking to arrest him at the time (2Co 11.32). In this case, Paul goes “underground,” sneaking away in the dark of night (Ac 9.25; 2Co 11.33), to live to fight another day. Neither Paul nor the disciples who cooperated in his escape ever show any regret for their decision. So apparently, sometimes you can run and hide.
  • On his first missionary journey, at Lystra, Paul accepts a stoning, which was typically intended to be capital punishment (Ac 14.19). (Of course, we doubt that he had any choice is this case.) Many interpreters believe that Paul actually died and was resurrected—and some suppose that his description of visiting “the third heaven” (2Co 12.2) occurred at this time.
  • On his second missionary journey, at Philippi, we find Paul using his natural-born Roman citizenship slyly; he knows his rights, and he works the system, so to speak. When he heals a demon-possessed girl, the local business interests bring him before the local authorities, who beat them and throw them into prison overnight (Ac 16.22-24). Now, it’s illegal to beat a Roman citizen without trial, and Paul could have stopped this procedure by simply stating his citizenship—as we will see him do later. But here he withholds that information and takes the beating. Then the next day he reveals his citizenship—placing the local leaders under the death penalty if he reports them to Rome (Ac 16.35-37). He demands a public escort out of town (Ac 16.37b)—and on the way, he takes them by Lydia’s house, where the church meets. I can’t avoid thinking that he does that intentionally: “I’d like you to meet my friends. It would be a shame if anything were to happen to my friends, now, wouldn’t it?”
  • After his third missionary journey, back in Jerusalem, the roman chiliarch sentences him to a beating for causing a public disturbance (Ac 22.24). But here, Paul plays his citizen card; he turns to the centurion and says, “Say, isn’t it illegal to beat a Roman citizen without a trial?” (Ac 22.25). And everything screeches to a halt (Ac 22.29).

So what do we make of this?

Paul sneaks out of Damascus to avoid an unjust death. In multiple later cases he uses his legal rights to accomplish his desired ends—once by claiming them up front, and once by claiming them later to force the local authorities to act justly. In every case, he is facing the threat because of his obedience to his heavenly commission.

I think we can all take Paul’s example by acting prudently, wisely, creatively, and in obedience to God’s Word.

Photo by Teemu Paananen on Unsplash

Part 5: The Long View

Filed Under: Culture, Ethics, Theology Tagged With: civil disobedience, protest

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