Theology

How God Makes Well-Rounded Christians, Part 2: Obedience

August 28, 2025 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

So what does Paul pray for the members of the church at Colossae? He begins this prayer (Co 1.9-23) with a basic request (Co 1.9) followed by its typical result (Co 1.10a) and then amplifies that result with four descriptors (Co 1.10-12). As I noted in the previous post, the final descriptor (thankfulness) opens the door to a long list of specific things for which believers should be thankful (Co 1.13-23).

That’s a lot to digest. Let’s start at the beginning, chewing slowly and thoughtfully.

[ Sidebar: I’ve noticed in recent years, particularly among what we used to call “the young, restless, and reformed,” that many preachers like to use the metaphor of unpacking a box when they exegete a passage; they’ll say, “Let’s unpack this passage.” I rather suspect that they have a favorite preacher who uses the expression, and they’re imitating him (Piper? Mohler? Macarthur?). I have to admit that since I’m a hopelessly out-of-touch old coot, I don’t know who the exemplar preacher—the Yoda, if you will—is. But in any case, I’ve always used a different metaphor, that of chewing and digesting. I do have considerable experience at chewing, and I find great pleasure in it. And there’s always Jeremiah 15.16 to consider:

Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of mine heart: for I am called by thy name, O Lord God of hosts.

So there’s that.

End sidebar. ]

Paul’s primary prayer is straightforward:

We … do not cease to pray for you, and to desire that ye might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding (Co 1.9).

The second infinitive, “to desire,” is, I think, simply a restatement of the first, “to pray.” (In Greek, the word “and” can often be translated “even,” as introducing an appositive, a restatement.) And what is that prayer, that desire? That they would know God’s will, or, more expansively, “be filled with the knowledge of his will.”

For the believer on the way to spiritual maturity, the essential thing is to be determined to live according to the will of God. That means, of course, not just knowing what God wants, but being oriented toward it (being “filled with it”) and then doing it. Paul is praying that they would obey God. That’s where it all starts.

And that’s why he immediately says, “in all wisdom and spiritual understanding.” These words have to do with more than just knowing. We must not picture the hypercranialized space aliens who just know all kinds of stuff and always win at “Jeopardy!” Wisdom and understanding have to do not so much with intellect, but with application: knowing how to use what you know to do practical things. I once read somewhere that knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable; but wisdom is knowing that you don’t put ketchup on ice cream.

It’s more extensive than that, of course; wisdom and understanding include creative thinking, problem-solving, and what Bloom called synthesis. It’s the opposite of the ivory tower. It’s the ability to get stuff done.

So if Paul is attaching the concept of wisdom to the knowledge of God’s will, he is praying for us to do what we know, to live out who God has designed us to be.

Well then. We begin here.

But how? How are we to know the will of God?

To the college students I’ve taught for many years, the will of God has to do with three w’s: what (is my career going to be), where (am I going to live), and who (am I going to marry). Those are important questions, of course, but the teaching on the will of God in the Bible doesn’t focus on that. It focuses instead on the kind of person you’re going to be. For example, Paul writes elsewhere,

This is the will of God, even your sanctification, that ye should abstain from fornication (1Th 4.3).

And there’s more; grab your search software (or, if you’re over 75, your concordance—and a good magnifying glass) and have a field day.

God’s well-rounded people start every day, and the rest of their lives, with the question, “Based on what I know of the Bible, what does God want me to do?”

That’s a start.

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How God Makes Well-Rounded Christians, Part 1: Introduction

August 21, 2025 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Decades ago one of my professors (the late Charles W. Smith, for those who may remember him) suggested that a good way to study prayer was to focus on Paul’s prayers at the openings of his epistles. I took note of that and started noticing the kinds of things Paul prayed for his churches. I found then, and I still find, that my prayers, particularly the requests, could use a significant upgrade.

Why the need? In my case, it was because I was focused on the wrong stuff—or at least, my focus was too narrow: help this sick person feel better, provide more money for this person or that ministry, that sort of thing.

Paul, on the other hand, is focused like a laser beam on the Big Idea: the spiritual growth and well-being of those to whom he ministers. Along the way, he’s not just asking God for things; he’s instructing his readers (including us) as to what kinds of “things” we should be giving our attention to.

I’d like to pursue this idea here by spending a few posts working through Paul’s prayer in the opening to Colossians. This follows naturally on my recent meditations on the supremacy of Christ as the firstborn, which Paul lays out in one portion of this prayer (Co 1.15).

The prayer itself is in Colossians 1.9-12, but at the end of it he moves quickly past a comma to offer an extended reflection on the works of God in our salvation, for which we should be thankful—a reflection that runs through the end of the chapter.

When taken as a whole, then, Paul’s prayer lays out the works of God in our salvation, works that cover every facet of our “inner man”—what we often call the heart, the mind, the psyche, the emotions, the wishes, the dreams. God does a complete renovation of the house that we call our selves (2Co 5.1). There is nothing in us that his work doesn’t touch. Hence the title of this series: “How God Makes Well-Rounded Christians.”

Note the subject and verb. I don’t intend this series to be a list of more stuff ya gotta do, or a list of virtues for you to work on, a la Benjamin Franklin. This is work that God does in you; you can’t do it without him.

But the Bible does indicate that although justification is monergistic (God does it without our help), sanctification, or growth in Christ-likeness, is synergistic: we play a role in making it happen, by God’s grace. (Even Calvinists teach that. Yes, they do.) For example, Peter speaks of “making effort” toward spiritual growth (2P 1.5). Paul speaks of “presenting our bodies” (Ro 12.1), of “bringing holiness to completion” (2Co 7.1), and of “working out our own salvation” (Php 2.12); the author of Hebrews speaks of “striving for … holiness” (He 12.14).

So it’s wise stewardship to know the goals that God is working toward in us, and to be purposeful is seeking opportunities to work with him in developing the characteristics that will get us there.

That’s one purpose of this series. There is a second.

If any of us finds that these characteristics are missing—not just imperfect, but missing, strange, out of the ordinary—then it’s time to go back to the beginning and ask the big question. Has God begun a work in us by justifying us? We know that he has if we have repented and believed (Mk 1.15; Ac 3.19; Ro 5.1). But in Western “Christian” culture it’s easy, particularly for those raised in Christian homes, to just go along, be agreeable, give the right answer to the questions in Sunday school—but never genuinely repent.

This series is chance for all of us to inspect our inner selves and ask, is God in fact sanctifying me? Am I making progress in Christ-likeness?

If the answer is “No,” there’s a free and simple solution.

Next time, we’ll begin looking at Paul’s prayer for his Colossian readers, and for us.

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On Justice, Part 4: Accomplished

July 10, 2025 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: We All Want It | Part 2: The Perp | Part 3: Progress

The second paragraph of Revelation 20 turns its attention to what happens during the thousand years when Satan is confined in the abyss. But in the third paragraph (Re 20.7-10) the focus returns to “that old serpent, the devil, and Satan”—specifically, his behavior once he is released. And—spoiler alert—we find that the confinement has not reformed him; he continues in his evil ways.

He pursues his work as a deceiver (Re 20.8). During Jesus’ earthly ministry, the Lord taught that “the devil … is a liar, and the father of it” (Jn 8.44). Here Satan continues to be what he is, revealing his nature as an enemy of the truth. He “deceive[s] the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth” (Re 20.8). He lies on a massive scale, deceiving whole people groups, millions strong, across and around the globe. There’s simply no end, temporally or spatially, to his evil.

And these nations, millions strong and utterly deceived, decide that their enemy is not the one lying to them, but the people of God. They gather their forces to surround Jerusalem, “the camp of the saints … , and the beloved city” (Re 20.9).

What chance does a single city have against the combined armies of the world? Why doesn’t he pick on somebody his own size?

Well, because he’s a bully, and attacking the weak is what bullies do.

But we know that bullies are not in fact strong; they attack the weak because they themselves are weak, and they are cowards.

So is the snake.

And when bullies strut their stuff, typically someone stronger, who has a sense of justice, comes along and trounces them. And pretty much every member of the human race loves to see that happen.

Thus we can anticipate the next verse without even reading it.

There is a God in heaven, who is just and right, and whose knowledge and power are infinite. He’s going to know about the 10-year-old thug who’s stealing the second-grader’s lunch money. And he’s going to know about the father of lies who’s deceiving the whole world into turning against his largely helpless people.

The time for justice has come.

As the armies mass around Jerusalem in John’s vision, “fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them” (Re 20.9).

Well. That changes things.

But justice requires more. The father of lies himself needs to face payback for the evil and destruction he has wrought.

So we reach verse 10:

And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.

Torment. Day and night. Forever.

Intensive, and extensive, and infinitely so.

A fitting punishment for such a being.

We don’t really know how Satan got this way. I don’t believe Isaiah 14.12-15 is telling us anything about that; I think it’s simply a description of the king of Babylon, predicted by Isaiah more than a century before. I do think, though, that Ezekiel 28.11-19 is a double reference to the king of Tyre and to Satan; and there we learn merely that “iniquity was found in” him (Ezk 28.15).

How? Well, because of pride, apparently (Ezk 28.17). But where did the pride come from?

It’s a puzzle, indeed.

But as uncertain as Satan’s origin is, there is no uncertainly about his future. He will face justice, and God’s people will be delivered.

Justice.

Even so.

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On Justice, Part 3: Progress

July 7, 2025 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

Part 1: We All Want It | Part 2: The Perp

So what’s going to happen to this character, “that old serpent, … the devil, and Satan” (Re 20.2), the originator and perpetrator of all the evil in the world?

God is not the sort of person to be overpowered, and he is not the sort of person to let injustice go unresolved. To put it in the vernacular, he takes care of business.

The first three verses of Revelation 20 set the stage for this resolution.

¹And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. ²And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, ³And cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season (Re 20.1-3).

This single sentence gives multiple indications that God is greater than Satan. To begin with, he is overpowered by an “angel” (Re 20.1). Now, we’ve learned elsewhere in Scripture that angels are spiritual beings, created by God to be his servants (He 1.14), and particularly to deliver messages from God to humans (e.g. Lk 1.11 ff). They are greater than humans (Ps 8.5), but of course much less great than their Creator, God.

And just one of them is given divine tools sufficient to seize and to bind Satan (Re 20.2). If one angel is stronger than Satan, then God certainly is too.

So what about those tools? Is this a literal kay and a literal chain? Despite my bias toward taking the Scripture literally whenever possible, I don’t think so. The book of Revelation contains a lot of language that is clearly non-literal, and I strongly doubt that Satan can be bound by a literal chain. When we first meet him, he’s in the form of a serpent, and in Job, he’s a being who appears before God in the heavenly court, with no mention of snakishness (snakitude?). Since it seems that he’s non-physical, then he is bound and locked in a confinement that is effective for his non-physical nature.

We’re told that he is confined this way “for a thousand years” (Re 20.2). Now here I’m going to take the time statement literally (thus identifying myself as a premillennialist), primarily because John repeats it in every verse through the end of the paragraph (Re 20.3, 4, 5, 6, 7), seemingly emphasizing it, making a point of it.

The place of confinement is described as “a bottomless pit” (Re 20.3), literally an “abyss.” This word appears in the Greek translation of the OT a few times, initially in the creation account, where “darkness was upon the face of the deep” (Ge 1.2). Moses describes the Promised Land as “a land of … depths that spring out of valleys and hills” (Dt 8.7). In later Jewish and Christian writings it came to refer to the dark abode of the dead, similar to what we would call “hell.”

So Satan is temporarily bound in this deep (and by implication inaccessible and inescapable) place.

Why?

“That he should deceive the nations no more” (Re 20.3).

Here’s a second indication that God is greater than Satan. God forcibly protects the welfare of his people. He will not allow Satan’s destructive deception to continue. There is coming a time when injustice will end.

Why so long before God does this?

That’s a legitimate question. Many of God’s people, within the Scripture and since, have asked that question, and God does not attack them for asking.

But he also doesn’t answer their question.

The third indication of his greatness is that God chooses the timing, because he is in charge.

As the old child’s prayer reminds us, God is great (empowering his servants to bind Satan at the determined time) and God is good (acting to protect his people).

We’ll trace this story to its complete resolution next time.

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On Justice, Part 2: The Perp

July 3, 2025 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: We All Want It

As we noted last time, we all want justice, but in spite of our best efforts, it continues to elude us. We’re surrounded by accounts of injustices, and while some of those accounts are probably exaggerated, not all of them are, not by a long shot.

Broken people, broken world.

The world has not always been broken, however, and it will not always be.

Scripture tells the story of how the brokenness arrived. It tells of a snake who deceived the first woman and of a man, her husband, who cooperated, even though he knew perfectly well what he was doing (Ge 3.1-6; cf 1Ti 2.14).

Yeah, a talking snake. A lot of people think that’s just ridiculous, and it’s easy to see why they do.

But I don’t. I view the Scripture as divinely inspired, inerrant, and authoritative, and I’ve explained why here.

So I’m biased toward the biblical accounts. All evil, including the world’s injustice, came from a talking snake.

So who was he?

The account says simply that he was a snake, and that he was “more crafty” than any other creature. In Job, possibly written even before Moses wrote Genesis, we meet someone named “The Satan” (Job 1.6), or “The Adversary,” who clearly opposes God; but beyond a handful of later references (1Ch 21.1; Ps 109.6; Zec 3.1-2), the Hebrew Scriptures have nothing else to say about him.

With the incarnation, though, he seems to get busy, throwing all his forces at the Christ when he is apparently most vulnerable. Satan appears in all four Gospels (Mt 3x; Mk 5x; Lk 6x; Jn 1x) and in Acts (2x).

He shows up often in Paul’s epistles (10x), and he explodes onto the scene at the end of history (8x in Rev). It’s at the very end of the story (Re 20.2, 7) that we find the answer to the question we have had from the beginning: who is the snake?

John tells us:

²And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years.

Now, is it possible that Eve’s tempter was a different snake? I suppose so, theoretically, but I note that John has already called this creature a “dragon,” which would nicely continue the flow of the story, but he pauses to add that he’s a “serpent,” which looks an awful lot like an inclusio, a bookend reference back to the beginning of the Canon; and he calls him “that” serpent, a relative pronoun that indicates a previous reference—something that linguists call an “anaphoric” use. And then, John calls Satan “that old serpent,” a strong indication that our “inclusio” theory is correct.

So this creature—and he is merely a creature—started all this trouble, this pain and suffering and exploitation and injustice, and now the Scripture is going to tell us what happens to him.

Some people object that God seems to be taking his sweet time addressing the problem, and they assume that this indicates some sort of moral failing in God—if he even exists.

I don’t have the time or space here to address the large question of the problem of evil, but I intend to as occasion presents itself down the road. In the meantime, given my own observational and intellectual limitations, and given God’s demonstrated faithfulness to me over a lengthening life, I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt. Suffice it to say that justice is coming, and that God’s view of time infinitely exceeds ours.

In the next post we’ll turn to an examination of this climactic passage revealing God’s dealing with his persistent but infinitely inferior enemy.

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On Justice, Part 1: We All Want It

June 30, 2025 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

“Joseph Sledge’s timing could not have been worse. While serving a four-year sentence for stealing t-shirts in 1976, the 36-year-old man from Georgia escaped from a prison work farm in eastern North Carolina. That same day, Josephine Davis and her daughter Ailene were brutally murdered in their farmhouse in nearby Bladen County. Sledge immediately became the prime suspect and was charged with their murders upon his re-capture” (Matt Ford, “Guilty, Then Proven Innocent,” The Atlantic, 2/9/2015).

Two inmates where Sledge was being held after his capture told police that Sledge had told them that he had killed a couple of white women.

Open and shut case, right?

No.

Bloody fingerprints found at the scene were not Sledge’s. Several hairs could not identify anyone. The bloody shoeprints didn’t match Sledge’s shoes.

And those inmates?

We’ll get back to them.

Two years later Sledge was convicted of double murder and sent to prison. He insisted that he was not guilty. After 25 years his request for DNA testing was granted.

For the next nine years, they couldn’t find the hairs.

Finally, in 2012 they found them.

The DNA testing excluded Sledge as a suspect.

Six months later one of the two informants—the only one still living—testified that he had lied by repeating information he’d heard from police and prison staff, in return for a $3000 reward and the dropping of some charges he was facing.

More than 18 months later, Sledge was declared innocent and freed. He was 70 years old, and he had spent more than half of his life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

Five years later, he died.

There are more details, if you have the stomach for them.

The injustices in this story are numerous and pervasive. It’s common for us to assume motives, but I try to resist doing that, because only God knows the heart. But even if we assume everyone involved had the best of intentions—except, of course, those informants—there’s still plenty to criticize. The basis for the original conviction was of course weak. I’ve written of my time on a jury, where half the members would not vote to convict—even though they thought the defendant was guilty—because the entire case was based on the statements of a single witness. A truism in the law is that it’s better to let a guilty person go free than to convict an innocent one.

Further, the archiving of the physical evidence was at best inept. They couldn’t find the hairs for nine years?! That’s just really hard to believe.

And another 18 months to release the man after it was indisputable that he was innocent.

Even at their best—and this is not one of those times—our justice systems are imperfect and frustrating and, well, unjust.

And we hate that, or at least we should.

As creatures from God’s hand and in his image, we want justice to be done. We want evils to be corrected, miscreants to be fairly punished. And we especially want the really evil people—the Hitlers and the Pol Pots and the Idi Amins and the Ted Bundys and the Wayne Gacys and the Jeffrey Epsteins of this world—to face what they’ve got coming. We want their evil to end.

We want peace. We want safety. We want justice.

And if there’s just one person who’s behind all this evil, who’s responsible for all of it, and intentionally so—

We want to see him crushed, violently and painfully and permanently.

Well.

The Bible talks about that, and in fact its larger story moves to its climax by recounting the final justice given to the Evil One.

We’ll talk about that next time.

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A Book Donation and a Kind Providence

June 26, 2025 by Dan Olinger 4 Comments

I missed a couple of blog postings last week. During that time I had an experience that refreshed my thinking about providence. Today’s the day I share it.

One of my major concerns over the last few years has been what to do with my physical library. I knew that when I retired I’d lose my comfortable shelf space in my office, and there’s no way I can move all those books into my house. Further, I hardly use them anymore and haven’t for years; virtually all my study and other reading is electronic, for a couple of reasons. First, almost all of what I need access to is now available in electronic form, and my Logos library and Kindle library are more than sufficient for my needs, even before retirement. Second, in electronic form I can make the type bigger, whereas many of my physical books I now struggle to read.

For a few years I’ve been offering my books to my students; come on by my office, I say, and take whatever you want. But hardly anybody’s interested; their reading is electronic too, and like me they don’t want to lug heavy boxes of books around every time they move.

So what to do?

I sent a bunch of them to West Africa Baptist College in Wa, Ghana, where I’ve taught several classes. I also knew that Central Africa Baptist University in Kitwe, Zambia, was compiling a very good theological library, and I was planning to send everything else over there, but I couldn’t get it all together before the shipping deadline.

Then I heard from a friend who works for Operation Renewed Hope that a church in eastern Tennessee was flooded during Hurricane Helene, and both the pastor and his assistant had lost their entire libraries.

Well, maybe they could use mine.

So when school ended I packed my books into 23 heavy boxes—I estimated close to half a ton—and, on a day convenient to both the church and me, loaded them into my van. (Boy, do I love Stow-‘N-Go seats!) Earlier I had mentioned to a retired pastor in my church what I was planning, and he offered another 8 boxes, maybe 400 pounds, of really good books as well.

The convenient day was Thursday, June 19. (Yep, Juneteenth. A good day for giving.) The evening of the 18^th I saw a news report that a rockslide and flooding had closed I-40 on the NC/TN state line. That was by far the most efficient route. After a couple of text exchanges, I opted for I-26 north (officially west) to I-81 and then south into eastern Tennessee. That would add an hour to the trip each way, but I considered that a minor issue.

The wife and I set out at 7.30 Thursday morning, with the sun shining, a full gas tank, and almost a ton of books. North to Asheville and its morning rush hour, then north through the beautiful mountains and valleys of northwestern North Carolina, all the way to Johnson City, Tennessee (which isn’t all that far from Olinger, Virginia, and the Olinger Baptist Church, but that’s another story).

Heading southwest on I-81, we ran into the hardest rainstorm I’ve ever driven in. It was astonishing. Traffic slowed to under 40 mph, and with everybody’s wipers and flashers in action our little line of vehicles managed to come out on the other side no worse for the wear.

Then south a few miles on winding country roads to the church. It sits literally just across the street from the Pigeon River, which dominates that part of the state and is large at this location. I could just imagine what it looked like during the hurricane, surging out of its banks and overwhelming everything in its path.

The assistant pastor was waiting for me. When he told me his name, it startled me; he looked just like someone else I know by that name. I stared stupidly at him for a few seconds, then asked, “Are you related to [person with this name, and meeting this description]?” He laughed. “That’s my Dad.” Well, that means his Mom used to work with me at BJU Press, and he’s the nephew of two personal friends, including a member of my deacon care group at church. I had no idea that I had any connection with anyone at this church.

So a portion of my library is going to a family I treasure.

Cool.

Helene brought a lot of suffering to a lot of good people. There’s no minimizing or dismissing the depth of that suffering.

But all along the way God cares for his people and places little lights that remind us that he’s there.

Photo credit: Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere at Colorado State University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Baccalaureate, Part 3

May 26, 2025 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1 | Part 2

But you’re thinking (I hope) that those aren’t our greatest needs. They’re just the temporal ones. We have greater needs: forgiveness, relationship, grace, mercy, peace. Love.

What do you know? They’re all free, too.

Everything you need is free.

God is so, so good.

Yes, bad things do happen. Yes, the world is broken. Suffering is real, and injustice is real, and hate is real.

But God has assured us, and the experience of millions of his people has taught us, that these evil things are not senseless or purposeless or permanent. Paul tells us that

tribulation worketh patience; ⁴And patience, experience; and experience, hope: ⁵And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us (Ro 5.3-5).

Every athlete knows that the workouts—the suffering, if you will—are what strengthens you so that you can win. The coach is not a sadist; he is wise, and he is good. Any of the athletes on BJU’s national championship teams can tell us that.

God is good.

Another poet, the American e e cummings, captured that thought artfully, though surprisingly:

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

God is indeed good.

So where do we go from here? What’s around the corner at this pivotal point in our graduates’ lives?

Back to the child’s simple prayer:

God is great.
God is good.
Let us thank him.

And, I might add, let us trust him, even in a chaotic and, for some, frightful world.

The British lyricist Michael Perry captured this spirit perfectly, I think, in just one stanza in his great hymn “O God Beyond All Praising”:

Then hear, O gracious Savior,
     accept the love we bring,
that we who know your favor
     may serve you as our king;
and whether our tomorrows
     be filled with good or ill,
we’ll triumph through our sorrows
     and rise to bless you still:
to marvel at your beauty
     and glory in your ways,
and make a joyful duty
     our sacrifice of praise.

May it be so for all of us. Let’s pray.

²⁴The Lord bless thee, and keep thee:
²⁵The Lord make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee:
²⁶The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace (Numbers 6.24-26).

Amen.

Baccalaureate, Part 2

May 22, 2025 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1

Another, very different perspective:

John Gillespie McGee Jr., a British pilot in WW1, captured this concept more lyrically in his poem High Flight:

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds,—and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air ….

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew—
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

A century ago another poet, an American college English teacher named Odell Shepard, in one stanza of a poem he called “Whence Cometh My Help,” wrote of the mountains this way:

All the wisdom, all the beauty I have lived for unaware
Came upon me by the rote of highland rills;
I have seen God walking there
In the solemn soundless air
When the morning wakened wonder in the hills.

The greatness of God is vividly apparent all around us, even to those who deny he exists.

God is indeed great. Insuperably great. Unimaginably great.

Years ago there was a commercial for Sherwin Williams paint. The opening shot was of the space shuttle on the launch pad, with a voiceover counting down: “3 … 2 … 1 … ignition!” And those two solid-rocket boosters kick in, and the screen fills with flame and then white smoke, until all you can see is white. And then, the white subtly changes. A door opens away from you, and you’re looking at a typical American bathroom. The voice says, “We developed the paint for the space shuttle. [Door opens.] Chances are, we can handle your bathroom.”

I say this reverently: Chances are the God who “made the stars also” can handle the challenges of your life.

God Is Good

To his protégé Timothy Paul calls God

the living God, who giveth us richly all things to enjoy (1Ti 6.17b).

Years ago it occurred to me that everything we really need—literally everything—is free. That’s the way God has arranged the universe.

Don’t believe me? Hear me out.

What do you need more than anything else in the world? If you lack it for 30 seconds, it will be literally all you think about until you get some.

Yep, air. Or more specifically, oxygen.

Free.

We’re sitting at the bottom of an ocean of it—an ocean that God has kindly diluted with nitrogen so you won’t burst into flame at the slightest spark. God’s even given you a scoop on the front of your head so you’ll get your share of the stuff. Some of you he gave a larger scoop to, and you have the gall to be upset with him about that. Shame on you.

What’s the second most necessary thing? Water. They say you can last 3 days without it—some maybe as much as 8 to 10 days under certain conditions. But not long.

Most of the globe is covered with it. And that water mass feeds a delivery system that brings it right to your feet, purified, for free. (Unless you live in the Atacama Desert, which hardly anybody does.) And again, many of us complain when it rains. Especially at the beach.

Granted, I pay a water bill, but I’m not really paying for the water; I’m paying for someone to clean it up and bring it to my house. But the water—it’s free.

What’s next? Food. Grows right out of the ground, from plants that are already there. Free. Again, I pay for my food, but only because I don’t feel like growing it myself. So I pay somebody else to grow and harvest and deliver it; and sometimes I go out to a restaurant and pay somebody else to cook it and bring it to my table. But the food? The food’s free.

And then there’s light, and heat, and all the other physical necessities. All free.

God has been remarkably good to us.

We’ll finish this thought—and the rest of the sermon—in the next post.

Baccalaureate, Part 1

May 19, 2025 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

The evening before I retired, I was privileged to be asked to deliver BJU’s Baccalaureate Sermon. I’ll publish the text here, in several parts.

__________

Theological students like to debate the complexities of theology: election and human will; theories and extent of the atonement; Trinity issues; the hypostatic union; the problem of evil.

These are consequential matters, and they should be debated. Such discussions and explorations are an important part of preparing the Christian student for whatever his divine calling may be.

But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve found my appreciation increasing for the simple things, the basic things—the central things.

And it has occurred to me that these central things are perhaps best summed up in the simple child’s prayer:

God is great;
God is good;
Let us thank him.

The Apostle Paul began his magisterial epistle to the Romans by observing,

The invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and godhead; so that they are without excuse (Ro 1.20).

As you graduating students learned in your Bible Doctrines class, this concept is what theologians call “general revelation.” It’s most famously expressed in the opening to Psalm 19:

1 The heavens declare the glory of God;
And the firmament sheweth his handywork.
2 Day unto day uttereth speech,
And night unto night sheweth knowledge.
3 There is no speech nor language,
Where their voice is not heard.
4 Their line is gone out through all the earth,
And their words to the end of the world.
In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun,
5 Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber,
And rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race.
6 His going forth is from the end of the heaven,
And his circuit unto the ends of it:
And there is nothing hid from the heat thereof.

This is the concept that Paul used on Mars Hill, in presenting to the Athenians the basic things—the central things.

I’d like to attempt that here this evening.

God Is Great

Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, [that] the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? [there is] no searching of his understanding (Isaiah 40:28).

Evidences of God’s limitless greatness lie all around us in His creation.

The fastest any human has ever traveled is 25,000 mph (Apollo 10’s return from the moon, being accelerated by the earth’s gravity). Now suppose we start at the surface of the sun—some of you are thinking, we shouldn’t do that; it’s way too hot. Well, I’ve solved that problem; we’ll go at night :-)—and we head out toward the planets at that fastest-ever speed. How long will our journey take us?

Mercury: 60 days
Venus: 56 (more) days
Earth: 39 days
Mars: 78 days
Jupiter (assuming we safely navigate the asteroid belt): 567 days
Saturn: 700 days
Uranus: 1500 days
Neptune: 1650 days

We’ve been traveling for a total of 12 years and 9 months, and we’ve just reached the edge of the solar system.

Now, to Boomers like me, we don’t believe that, because we still think Pluto is the outermost planet, because our first-grade teacher, Mrs. Devlin, wouldn’t have lied to us about that.

But at any rate, we find that now we’re headed toward the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, visible from the Southern Hemisphere, just to the left of the Southern Cross. That’ll take us 155,333 years.

Once we get there, we find that we’re on one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy, pretty far out toward the edge. So we head for the nearest edge of the galaxy.

670 million years.

And we find that there are other galaxies. The closest, Andromeda, will take us 53 billion more years.

I hope you brought a book to read.

The astronomers tell us that there are clusters of galaxies out there. I have no idea how they know that, but we’ll take them at their word. Let’s head for the nearest edge of our galaxy cluster.

2.67 trillion years.

How about the edge of the observed universe?

131 trillion years.

After a while these numbers just become meaningless, don’t they? Fee, fi, fo-fillion, trillion.

And it’s not over; I suspect that when we reach the “edge” of the observed universe, we’ll just see more universe. How much farther? No one knows.

Now, these numbers are actually unrealistically low, for a couple of reasons:

They assume that the planets are all lined up perfectly on one side of the sun, which has never happened and is never likely to happen.
They also ignore a basic tactic of interplanetary travel, which involves the physics of sling-shotting the spacecraft around the heavenly bodies so you don’t have to keep the rocket engines firing constantly. In our example, you couldn’t possibly carry enough fuel to make the journey even to the nearest planet.

But the numbers speak for themselves.

God is great.

Now, I’ve said all that to say this.

Do you know how the Bible recounts God’s creation of what we’ve just described?

Genesis 1.16—“He made the stars also.” Five English words; two in Hebrew.

That’s just a side remark, almost a throwaway line: “Oh, yeah, he did that too.”

God is indeed great.

To be continued.