Dan Olinger

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

Dan Olinger

 

Retired Bible Professor,

Bob Jones University

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On Abundance, Part 3: We’re Rich!

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Part 1: Needs and Wants | Part 2: Definition

So what does God give us in abundance? What does he pour out on us lavishly, without restraint?

The Scripture names several things, but one much more than the others.

Grace

Pail tells the Ephesians that God has lavished on us “the riches of his grace” (Ep 1.7-8). Since this context is specifically about forgiveness of sins, we can safely conclude here that “grace” is the gift of salvation and specifically forgiveness; God has lavished his forgiveness on us, without regard to the enormity of both the quantity and the quality of our sins. This idea is borne out in Romans 5, where Paul writes that the abundance of “grace and the free gift of righteousness” (Ro 5.17) far outweighs the effect, as deep and pervasive and intense as it is, of Adam’s sin and our acquiescence to it. Down in verse 20, he intensifies the verb by saying that where sin abounds, grace “hyperabounds.”

You can’t out-sin God’s grace. His grace floods and eradicates the stain of the darkest of your sin. No one is beyond the reach and power of that grace.

Good news.

But there’s even more to this grace. We’ve been looking at the grace that forgives; but it doesn’t stop there. God gives abundant grace to sanctify—to change us from sinners into saints, to empower us to live in a way that reflects his forgiveness. Paul says that “God is able to make all grace abound toward you” (2Co 9.8). Now, this is in the context of his urging the Corinthians to be generous in their offering for the poor saints in Jerusalem, so he may be saying simply that since God has given them much, they should be generous with others. But he doesn’t seem to limit the application in that way; he says that his readers “may abound to every good work.” Sure, by being generous in the offering; but if we have “all sufficiency in all things,” surely this extends to more than throwing a Hamilton into the offering plate, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t God’s people “abound” in good works? (1Th 4.1).

Throughout the centuries God’s people have found that their abilities to endure temptation and trial, to love the unlovable, to do justly and love mercy and walk humbly with their God, far exceed what they thought they were capable of doing. They stand in wonder at what God does through them.

Ample grace to save, and ample grace to sanctify.

Love

Twice Paul speaks of abounding love—and not, as we might expect, God’s love for us, but our love for one another. He speaks of the Philippians’ love for him “overflow[ing] more and more” (Php 1.9); and he prays that the Thessalonians may “increase and abound in love one toward another, and toward all” (1Th 3.12). In a day when Christians are finding themselves divided by politics—and by ecclesiastical politics—we find that we can do better; we can abound in love for one another, the kind of love that brings such natural enemies as Jews and Gentiles together into one body, who worship God together (Ep 3.10). Overflowing love can do this.

There are more things that God gives us in abundance. We’ll look at them next time.

Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash

On Abundance, Part 2: Definition

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Part 1: Needs and Wants

As we noted last time, a key word in the Bible for the generosity of God is the word abundance. It’s a fairly straightforward concept: an abundance is more than you need, a surplus. In the extreme, it’s an overflowing, even an effective lack of limitation—there’s always more, like bananas or mangoes or papayas in the tropics.

When I was a boy, we lived on a 2-acre farm in Greenacres (now part of Spokane Valley), Washington. We grew our own beef and vegetables, and a little fruit, and in retrospect I realize that we had a good supply of food, but we didn’t have much money. (As I recall, Dad made $75 a week in his job at the time.) I learned early on that when I poured syrup on the pancakes, Dad would intervene—forcefully—if I overdid it. “What, do you think we’re made of money?” As I watched the little dribble of syrup disappear into the pancake, I felt really, really poor. (Pun absolutely intended.)

A bit later we moved back East, and with Dad making a little more money, we would occasionally eat out in a restaurant. There was an International House of Pancakes nearby (they call it IHOP now, of course), and I noticed something when we ate there.

On the table they had not just a single bottle of syrup, but a whole rack of eight little pitchers, each of them a different flavor. And I noticed something else. Dad didn’t care how much syrup I used.

The reason is obvious—the syrup came with the meal, and you didn’t pay by the ounce, the way you did at home.

To a kid, being able to use all the syrup you want is the Millennium.

And you know what? If you like one flavor of syrup in particular, and you used up all that was in the little pitcher, you could just ask the waitress, and she’d fill the thing up again, all the way to the top!

The thing is bottomless!

No need to conserve. Use all you want. If you run out, there’s plenty more where that came from.

Abundance.

That’s how God gives to his people. He’s the kind of person who loves to pour out good things on his people, with complete abandon.

Now, while we’re defining the concept, we should recognize an abuse.

While God gives us lots of good things, he’s not primarily interested in the trivial stuff.

Sure, he knows about every sparrow that falls, and he’ll see to our tiniest needs (Mt 10.29-31). But his primary interest isn’t to make us rich, or powerful, or popular in temporal ways, and he doesn’t want that to be our primary interest either. Prosperity preachers claim to find support in biblical passages—Jos 1.7; Ps 1.3; Pr 10.22; Lk 6.38; 2Co 9.6; 3J 1.2—but in doing so they demonstrate that they’re focused on the temporal, the earthly, the comparatively trivial, and not on the heavenly treasure that God’s people are to be storing away (Mt 6.19-21). One can’t use such texts to encourage the very greed that the Scripture so roundly condemns (1S 2.29; Lk 12.15; Ep 4.19; 1Th 2.5; 1Ti 3.3). And it’s not difficult to see fruit in the lives of such preachers that undercuts the alleged biblical basis of their theology.

[Side note: there’s a lot of this kind of preaching in poor areas of the world, as you might expect. I see a lot of it in Africa. And I’m puzzled why it doesn’t seem to occur to all the thousands of people at those outdoor meetings that after all these years, they’re not getting any richer.]

In the Scripture, wealth is not proof of God’s blessing (Ps 73.12), nor is it a significant vehicle for God’s blessing (Lk 12.15). But Scripture says repeatedly that God gives abundantly (Jn 10.10).

Well then. If it’s not Bitcoin, what is it that God pours out so lavishly, so generously, so limitlessly and extravagantly, on his people?

Well, you’re going to have to wait a few days to find out. :-)

Next time.

Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash

On Abundance, Part 1: Needs and Wants

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We humans need stuff. We need food, and clothing, and shelter, and we need a way to get those things. The past year has made us aware of how much we need other things, too: love, companionship, interaction, variety.

We also want stuff. We want money—always just a bit more than we have. We want better health—even if we live in ways that seem to contradict that. We want recognition, which these days comes most commonly by way of likes and shares and congratulatory comments.

In Western culture, our natural tendency to want what we don’t have is exacerbated by the advertisements that bombard us pretty much constantly, especially if we’re the kind of person who permanently stores his phone in his hand rather than his pocket. You need this app; you need these shoes; you need that car; you need a vacation in Cozumel.

We’re a needy bunch.

I’ve noticed that my students’ generation, while still inclined to neediness—or wantiness—is trending away from stuff. Minimalism is cool (see under “Marie Kondo”). Newlyweds don’t want fine china anymore.

Good for them. It’s easier to pick up and go when you don’t have to think about tons (literally) of stuff that will be worthless in the long run.

Similarly, my wife and I have reached a stage in life where we really don’t want more stuff for Christmas, or birthdays, or anniversaries. We have what we need, and, apart from the occasional jar of cashews or tub of ice cream, we have pretty much what we want in terms of physical things.

But for a great many people, the wish list on Amazon is still a Very Big Deal. I need. I want. I wish I had.

Now, you’re expecting a blog post excoriating acquisitiveness. There’s a place for that, but my thoughts are running in a different direction.

I’m thinking about wealth.

The Bible says that God is endlessly rich. The old chorus said that “he owns the cattle on a thousand hills,” a concept drawn from Psalm 50.10:

Every beast of the forest is Mine, The cattle on a thousand hills.

When the returnees from exile in Babylon are doing their best to rebuild Solomon’s Temple, and producing a recognizably inferior product (Hag 2.3), God encourages these faithful laborers by telling him that this temple isn’t going to be about the silver and gold; “If you needed silver and gold, I have plenty,” he says (Hag 2.8), but he’s going to make this temple great in other, more substantive and infinitely valuable ways (Hag 2.6-9). And indeed, it was this temple—specifically Herod’s renovation of it—that saw the baby Jesus presented for circumcision, and the boy Jesus astonish the rabbis, and the man Jesus clear out the merchants—and the veil torn open by the Father himself as his Son paid the price for the separation between God and his people.

God is rich in the earthly stuff, and he’s rich in the heavenly stuff as well.

And, as we wish for from the rich, he’s generous too. Over the years he’s blessed a lot of his people financially, starting with Job and continuing to Abraham and many, many others, down to this day. While I’m not rich in American statistical terms, I’m wildly wealthy in comparison with most of the rest of the world, and it’s pretty likely that you are too. I have all I need, as well as a lot of stuff I don’t need.

There’s a word in the Bible that embraces this concept. It’s the word abundance. I’d like to spend a few posts meditating on it—contrasting it with some of the nonsense being proposed by religious shysters these days, and laying out some specifics about the Father’s abundant blessing of his people.

Next time we’ll set out a definition.

Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash

The Other Beatitudes, Part 1: Introduction

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We all know about the Beatitudes, the 9 statements at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5.3-11) in which Jesus identifies various kinds of people as “blessed.” That series of verses has inspired endless devotionals, sermons, articles, and books. It occurred to me recently that the Greek word translated blessed in the Beatitudes (makarios) is fairly common, occurring in lots of other places in the Bible—in all, 50 times in the New Testament, and 42 times in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament. Thus there must be lots of other biblical statements that are essentially “other Beatitudes.”

So why not go looking for them? Why not add to the list of attitudes and behaviors that put people into a condition of blessing?

I suppose we should start the way most of those sermons and books do, by defining the key term. What does it mean to be “blessed”?

The concept is really quite simple. The “blessed” person has received something that advantages him, and as a result, he’s happy. That’s pretty much the way we use the word today.

Now to take all these occurrences of the word, organize them, and draw some guiding principles about God’s blessing and our happiness.

To begin with, we should notice the “oddities” in a few uses.

First, there’s one “secular” use of the word: that is, it’s not speaking of spiritual blessing or God’s blessing. That’s in Acts 26.2, where Paul says that he’s “blessed” to have an opportunity to defend himself before Agrippa.

Second, there’s one instance where the word describes something impersonal. In Titus 2.13, Paul speaks of our “blessed hope,” which is Christ’s return. (There’s one other use that appears to be impersonal: “Blessed are you, O land, whose king is of nobility and whose princes eat at the appropriate time—for strength and not for drunkenness” (Ec 10.17). But as the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament notes (4.365), it’s really the people of the land, not the dirt itself, who benefit from a good ruler.)

Third, there are several uses that are limited in their application, that we shouldn’t consider as applying to us specifically—

  • Individuals: Leah, at Asher’s birth (Gn 30.13); Peter at his confession (Mt 16.17); and God (Is 31.9 LXX; 1Ti 1.11; 6.15) (who technically can’t be “advantaged” by something he receives; here the word means someone whom we praise as worthy)
  • Estimations: Solomon’s wives and servants, in the estimation of the Queen of Sheba (1K 10.8 // 2Ch 9.7); Mary, in the estimation of Elizabeth (Lk 1.45) and of “a certain woman” (Lk 11.27); he who eats bread in the kingdom of God, in the estimation of a man who was dining with Jesus (Lk 14.15)
  • Historical situations: those returning from exile in Babylon (Is 32.20); the childless during the fall of Jerusalem (Lk 23.29); those who endure (Dn 12.12) or die (Rv 14.13) during the Tribulation
  • Social situations: one who has a “quiver full” of children (Ps 127.5); those who carry out judgment on evildoers (Ps 137.8-9); people who have a good king (Ec 10.17); and, comparatively, the widow who does not remarry (1Co 7.40)

The rest of the uses of this word blessed or happy refer generally to certain kinds of people, particularly the people of God, and we can safely take them as applying to us. Since I’ve called this series “The Other Beatitudes,” I won’t be addressing the two passages in the Gospels (Mt 5.3-11; Lk 6.21-22) where the Sermon on the Mount is presented.

Next time, we’ll look at the remaining passages, telling us who is blessed, and why.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

On Divine Down Payment

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There’s a Christian song that begins with the following lines—

“What gift of grace is Jesus my redeemer;
There is no more for heaven now to give.”

I appreciate the sentiment expressed here. The Bible reminds us that Christ is indeed all (Col 3.11) and that his sacrifice and grace are infinite. This is the theme of entire books of the Bible—Colossians, Ephesians, and Hebrews come immediately to mind, but others could be named as well—and multiple songs of multiple styles have been written on the theme.

But for some time I’ve been impressed with a surprising statement in the classic list of the elements of salvation in Ephesians 1. The passage lays out a partial list of what God has done for us—from what Paul calls “all spiritual blessings” (Ep 1.3)—and organizes those elements under the rubric of the Trinity. He begins with the work of the Father (Ep 1.4-6) in choosing and predestinating us to adoption; he then moves to the Son’s work (Ep 1.7-13a) in redeeming us, earning our forgiveness and accomplishing our unification in him. But in this latter section he also speaks of more to come—an “inheritance” (Ep 1.11).

And here is where he says something I find surprising, perhaps even shocking. Moving to the role of the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, who “seals” us (Ep 1.13), confirming our genuineness and accomplishing our security, Paul describes the Spirit as “the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession” (Ep 1.14).

The KJV, which I’ve quoted here, has the word “earnest,” which we don’t use much in this sense these days except in real estate transactions, when we speak of “earnest money” paid by a buyer as a demonstration that he’s serious about buying and will show up for the closing. Other English versions use a variety of terms here—“guarantee” (NKJV ESV), “pledge” (NASB), “down payment” (CSB), “deposit” (NIV). You get the idea.

I’ve heard lots of teaching on this concept, but one day, well into adulthood, it struck me what a surprising metaphor this is. If I were evaluating a student’s sermon, and he used this metaphor, and it weren’t in the Bible, I’d take him aside afterwards and say to him, very paternally and condescendingly, “Now, young man, the Holy Spirit is a personal member of the Godhead, equal in every way to the Father and the Son, and it’s really not appropriate to speak of him as a ‘partial’ payment for anything. That’s irreverent.”

And I would be wrong, because the Bible does indeed use this metaphor, demonstrating that it is appropriate. And further, the person of the Godhead who uses this metaphor is the Spirit himself, who inspired Paul to write it (2P 1.20-21).

The Trinity, the Godhead, gives us the Spirit himself, who indwells us, teaching and convicting and directing us through this life, and he himself says that he’s just a portion of what God has in store for us—there’s more to come.

This is astonishing.

There is, indeed, more for heaven to give.

Now, I’m not criticizing the song. The lyricists, Australian Anglicans Richard Thompson and Jonny Robinson, have very precisely, and I think correctly, written, “There is no more for heaven now to give.” Good for them.

But it does us good to remind ourselves of the limitation of that key word now. There is, indeed, more—much more, infinitely more, in store for God’s people from the abundant storehouses of heaven.

  • Though we have eternal and abundant life now (Jn 10.10; 1J 5.13), there is a level of life awaiting us that we cannot imagine (2Co 12.4).
  • Though we know Christ now, we shall see and know him in unprecedented ways then (Mt 25.34; Rv 22.17).
  • Though we fellowship with the indwelling Spirit now, we shall know him much more intimately then (Re 22.17).

God has given us a down payment of his very person in the Holy Spirit. He’s really serious about his relationship with us. Let us embrace him and anticipate all that is to come.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

On the Fruit of the Spirit, Part 10: Self-Control

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Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Love | Part 3: Joy | Part 4: Peace | Part 5: Patience | Part 6: Kindness | Part 7: Goodness | Part 8: Faithfulness | Part 9: Gentleness

The last fruit on the tree of Spirit-empowered Christian character is self-control. Besides its appearance in this verse, it appears in only two other verses in the New Testament, and they don’t help us much with the meaning in context:

“And as [Paul] reasoned of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come, Felix trembled, and answered, Go thy way for this time; when I have a convenient season, I will call for thee” (Ac 24.25).

“And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge; 6 And to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness” (2P 1.5-6).

All of these occurrences are in lists, which are notoriously unhelpful in providing the kind of context that’s useful for drawing out the meaning of the word.

The adjectival form appears one time, in Titus 1.8, but that’s a list too:

“For a bishop must be blameless, as the steward of God; not selfwilled, not soon angry, not given to wine, no striker, not given to filthy lucre; 8 But a lover of hospitality, a lover of good men, sober, just, holy, temperate” (Ti 1.8).

But fortunately for us, the verb form appears in two verses in 1 Corinthians, both of which give us some helpful context:

“But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn” (1Co 7.9).

“And every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible” (1Co 9.25).

The first is in a context of marriage, specifically as a sexual outlet. Paul says that if a young couple is unable to control themselves with regard to their sexual impulses, then they should get married.

The second is in an athletic context, specifically running a race (1Co 9.24). When an athlete is in training, he needs to exercise self-control over every area of his physical and mental life: he works out even when he doesn’t feel like it, he carefully controls his diet, he visualizes what he’ll need to do to be a winner.

In the Greek Old Testament (the Septuagint), the verb form appears once, when Moses tells Pharaoh,

“For if thou refuse to let them go, and wilt hold them still, 3 Behold, the hand of the LORD is upon thy cattle which is in the field, upon the horses, upon the asses, upon the camels, upon the oxen, and upon the sheep: there shall be a very grievous murrain” (Ex 9.2).

Here it speaks of an external restraint—Pharaoh not “letting my people go.” Similarly Herodotus writes of the Greek generals having an area “under their control” (Histories, 8.49). In a more spiritual sense, an OT apocryphal book speaks of someone who “takes hold of” the Law (Sir 15.1) and of one who “restrains himself” from lust (Sir 18.30)—which reinforces the use in 1Co 7.9 above.

Also in the Septuagint the verb form is used of Joseph “composing himself” before going before his brothers (Ge 43.31).

So “self-control” can include the sexual sense, but it’s broader than that; it speaks of personal discipline in general. So it includes our thoughts and plans, our goals, our words, our actions. It includes our responses to people we don’t like. It includes the way we drive.

In one of many ironies in the Christian life (dying is living, the servant is master, the first are last), our “self-control” emerges not from ourselves, but from the Spirit who empowers us.

Jesus said that we’ll be known by our fruits.

Who are you?

Photo by Gabriele Lässer on Unsplash

On the Fruit of the Spirit, Part 9: Gentleness

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Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Love | Part 3: Joy | Part 4: Peace | Part 5: Patience | Part 6: Kindness | Part 7: Goodness | Part 8: Faithfulness

The eighth of the nine fruits of the Spirit is gentleness. The KJV uses the term “meekness..” The Greek lexicons include ideas such as meekness, mildness, even-temperedness, even friendliness and humility.

The Greek word is relatively rare in the New Testament—it appears just 11 times—but those few uses give us a fairly robust picture of it by their context—

  • It’s used in parallel with compassion (Co 3.12), humility (Ep 4.2; Co 3.12), kindness (Co 3.12), patience (Ep 4.2; Co 3.12), peaceableness (Titus 3.2), reverence (1P 3.16), tolerance (Ep 4.2), and love (1Co 4.21; Ep 4.2).
  • It’s used to describe the attitude of a believer who is
    • correcting those who have fallen into error, in hopes that they may be restored  (2Ti 2.25);
    • restoring a fellow believer who has fallen into sin (Ga 6.1)—and that word “restoring” is used in secular Greek literature of a doctor setting a broken bone;
    • “receiving” the Scripture (Jam 1.21);
    • doing good deeds (Jam 3.13).
  • It’s contrasted with “boldness” (2Co 10.1) and with the attitude of a person intent on maligning someone (Titus 3.2) or disciplining someone for bad behavior (1Co 4.21).
  • It’s said to be a characteristic of Christ (2Co 10.1).

I’ve been going to dentists since I was a boy. My first dentist practiced in an age when the profession didn’t give a lot of thought to the pain involved; pain was just kind of understood to be a part of the experience. He didn’t use a topical anesthetic before he came at me with that 9-foot-long needle that had the real stuff in it. It never occurred to him during a filling that the patient might like a little break 20 minutes in. I learned to just tough it out or focus my thoughts on my happy place (which was most certainly not the dentist’s chair).

As an adult, in another part of the country, I had to establish a relationship with a new dentist. The one I ended up with was, shall we say, enlightened. His training had included some simple techniques that would significantly lower the pain inflicted. A decade or two later, when he retired and sold his practice to a young guy right out of dental school, I realized that by then the training was focusing even more on techniques to lower or even eliminate the pain.

Just had a crown done last week. Piece of cake.

Good for dentistry.

Now.

Dentists are dealing with tiny fragments of bone in our heads, and their motivation derives from the simple desire to have their patients come back, so the practice can be profitable and therefore stable. (And yes, I’m sure that many dentists, and others in health care, have an altruistic motive as well.)

Most of us, though, are not dealing with tiny bone fragments. We’re dealing with the souls of men and women in the image of God, who are going to live somewhere forever, and in the case of fellow members of the body of Christ, are going to live with us forever—and who, as members of Christ, are deeply treasured by him.

We ought to think seriously, then, about the pain we inflict. Some pain is necessary, no doubt; but much of the pain we inflict with our words and actions, even when confrontation is called for, is unnecessary. Some of the pain we inflict comes from our own impatience, or frustration, or self-focus. I’ve done that, many more times than I’d like to admit. And recently.

That’s not a result of the Spirit’s work in us.

We all—all who follow Christ—have within us an omnipotent  person who is influencing us to be gentle. We can do this.

And we ought to.

Part 10: Self-Control

Photo by Gabriele Lässer on Unsplash

On the Fruit of the Spirit, Part 8: Faithfulness

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Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Love | Part 3: Joy | Part 4: Peace | Part 5: Patience | Part 6: Kindness | Part 7: Goodness

The seventh fruit is the Greek word for “faith.” This is a common word, with two distinct meanings. The more common, as you might expect, is “faith”—which is simply trust, believing someone or something. The other is “faithfulness,” or trustworthiness, or reliability—someone who can be believed.

In this passage, the KJV has “faith,” while all the modern versions except the HCSB have “faithfulness.”

Why are they so confident? I suspect because it seems odd to say that “faith” is a product of sanctification after you’re saved, if “faith” is the key to how you got saved in the first place. But faithfulness, trustworthiness, as a result of sanctification makes perfect sense; in Ephesians Paul makes it a specific example of how Christ’s followers differ from the kind of people they were before:

Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another (Ep 4.25).

So something the Spirit of God works in us is faithfulness:

  • We tell the truth.
  • We keep our promises.
  • Our word is our bond.
  • We show up when we said we would.

Why is that important? Paul gives us one reason in the Ephesians passage: “for we are members one of another.” It wouldn’t make any sense for the hand to lie to the eye, or to ignore its responsibilities to the eye, because they’re parts of the same body, and all the parts want the whole body to prosper. Have you ever noticed that when you get something in your eye, your finger doesn’t hurt? But it knows that because it’s articulated, and pointy, and reinforced at the tip with the backing of a fingernail, it can help your eye out with things that the eye can’t do for itself. I’ve noticed that my mouth, even though there’s nothing it can do, still wants to help—try getting something out of your eye with your mouth closed. :-)

So how moronic is it to lie to another member of the body of Christ? or to make a promise you don’t intend to keep?

When my older daughter was about 10, I had the opportunity to take her on a two-week fossil-digging trip out West with a friend. At the time, my younger daughter was too young to come along, but since it appeared that such trips would be likely in the future, I told her that when she was 10, I’d take her on a trip too.

You know how it goes. Complications came along, and 4 years later the trip just wasn’t possible. I had to tell my little girl that I had made her a promise I couldn’t keep. I have never felt lower than in that moment. (Fortunately, she seems to have handled it well, avoiding prison time and other evidences of sociopathy.)

Do you recall the biblical story of Joshua and the Gibeonites? The Lord had commanded Israel to exterminate the Canaanite tribes. The Gibeonites tricked Joshua into believing that they were from far away and therefore not included in the decree, and Joshua promised—with an oath on the name of YHWH (Jos 9.18)—that he would not harm them.

Shortly later, of course, he found out that they had lied.

And he still kept his promise (Jos 9.1-27).

In our day, any such fraudulent contract would be legally void. But Joshua didn’t see it that way.

And centuries later, when King Saul went after the Gibeonites, in violation of Joshua’s oath, apparently God didn’t see it that way either (2S 21.1-9).

I don’t know about you, but I notice when people don’t keep their word, and if it happens repeatedly, I remember. And then I don’t count on them. And sometimes that has consequences for them—they don’t get a position of responsibility that they might otherwise have gotten.

Keeping your word matters.

Jesus said that people will know us by our fruit.

Who are you?

Part 9: Gentleness | Part 10: Self-Control

Photo by Gabriele Lässer on Unsplash

On the Fruit of the Spirit, Part 7: Goodness

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Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Love | Part 3: Joy | Part 4: Peace | Part 5: Patience | Part 6: Kindness

The sixth fruit that the Spirit grows in the developing character of a Christian is “goodness.” Pretty much all the English translations translate the word this way (though NRSV has “generosity”). There are lots of Greek words that involve the idea of goodness, but the two most common generally involve qualitative goodness (“He’s a good musician”—that’s καλος [kalos] for you Greek bodies) and moral goodness (“He’s a good person”—αγαθος [agathos]). (As in all languages, there’s considerable overlap as well.) Here we have the noun form of the latter. Paul is talking about being the sort of person who is prompted by his internal moral character to act morally, to do the good as distinguished from the evil.

This is a tricky business, for a couple of reasons. Most obviously, we’re not only in the image of God, but we’re also corrupted by sin, and that corruption has affected every part of us. So we all have in us a strong tendency to evil, and that tendency never goes away completely; in fact, most of us are dissatisfied that we haven’t made better progress, especially since the standard is “the glory of God” (Ro 3.23). We think of all kinds of things that we shouldn’t do, and often the motivation to go ahead and do those things—disgust, revenge, logistical desperation (as in “how am I going to pay the rent?”) is quite strong.

Most people control their evil inclinations for social reasons, among others; it just wouldn’t be acceptable to kill that guy who cut in front of us in the checkout line at the store, even though he’s acting and speaking rudely and remorselessly, right in front of the children. People would look down on me for doing what I’m thinking, and there might even be more drastic (legal) ramifications, and what would the folks in town think if I got carted off to prison?

We find such social constraints powerful, and they help keep us in line. But we know the evil inclinations are in there. If you’re a Christian, exercising the means of grace and growing thereby, you see progress (sanctification) over time; the inner darkness lifts, and the victories get more frequent. But you still wish you were doing better.

A second complicating factor is our tendency to justify ourselves, to see our situation as an exception. We’re all really good at that. Much of the evil that others see in us, we don’t see as evil, because we have perfectly good reasons for what we did. There’s a reason that the defendant is not allowed to sit on his own jury.

So for this character quality, we’re not very good at evaluating our own progress.

But progress is there, certainly and irrepressibly, if we belong to Christ, because

  • we are in Christ (Ro 8.1), who is perfectly and pervasively good;
  • the Spirit of God is in us (Ro 8.9), bringing this character change to fruition.

Writing to the first church he planted in Europe, Paul assures them of his prayer that God will “fulfill every desire for goodness and the work of faith with power” (2Th 1.11). And why is Paul so confident that God will answer this prayer? Because, as he will write later to what is likely the last church he ever visited, God has “predestinated” those he knows “to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Ro 8.29)—a determination so certain that Paul speaks of their future glorification as already accomplished: “them he also glorified” (Ro 8.30).

All who belong to Christ are being changed, from the inside out, to think and say and do the right thing, to treat their neighbors, and the people who cut in line in front of them, and the drivers who wave just one of their fingers at them, and the people they didn’t vote for, as genuine image-bearers of the Creator God himself, of infinite value and worthy of their time, care, and respect.

One of my friends posted recently, “Joe Biden wasn’t elected. He was installed. Like a toilet.”

Nope. Wrong fruit.

Jesus said that people will know us by our fruit.

Who are you?

Part 8: Faithfulness | Part 9: Gentleness | Part 10: Self-Control

Photo by Gabriele Lässer on Unsplash

On the Fruit of the Spirit, Part 6: Kindness

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Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Love | Part 3: Joy | Part 4: Peace | Part 5: Patience

The most popular modern English versions list “kindness” as the fifth fruit. Perhaps you’ve noticed that the KJV has “gentleness.” These two English words focus on our relationships, or at least our interactions; they’re all about how we treat other people.

As to the underlying Greek word, one Greek lexicon (Friberg, for you word nerds) says it has two nuances: “(1) as a gracious attitude … opposite severity; (2) as moral integrity.” So there’s the relational sense implied in the two English renderings, but also a simple moral sense: being good, doing right.

We can get a richer sense of its breadth of meaning (what the linguists call “semantic range”) by running through the 11 times it’s used in the New Testament—

  • In Ro 2.4 it’s used twice, paralleled with “tolerance” and “patience”;
  • In Ro 11.22 it’s used 3 times, contrasted with “severity”;
  • Ep 2.7 uses it to describe God’s gracious treatment of us;
  • Co 3.12 lists it alongside “compassion, humility, gentleness [a different Greek word], and patience”;
  • Titus 3.4 speaks of it in connection with God’s love for mankind.

These 8 uses of the word are all pretty clearly speaking of the first nuance, the relational one—how we treat other people.

  • Ro 3.12 uses it this way: “There is none who does good; there is not even one.” This is a quotation from Psalm 14.3, where the standard Greek translation, the Septuagint, has our Greek word. Paul has chosen to quote that Greek version rather than translating from the Hebrew himself. The Hebrew word there is tob, the standard Hebrew word for “good.” (Remember that song from “Fiddler on the Roof,” Mazel Tov, Mazel Tov? The phrase means “good fortune.”)

So in this one passage, the Septuagint translators used our word to indicate the basic concept of goodness.

That’s 9 of the 11 uses. The mathematical genii among us will realize that there are 2 more:

  • 2Co 6.6—”in purity, in knowledge, in patience, in kindness, in the Holy Spirit, in genuine love.” Is this kindness, or goodness—or something else? It’s hard to say. It’s a list, which often—as here—makes a poor context for discriminating between senses of a word. This list is part of a larger list of the characteristics of Paul’s ministry among the Corinthians (2Co 6.4-10). We might detect a general emphasis on the relationship between Paul and the Corinthians, which pervades the whole letter. But even against that background, it’s hard to rule out the nuance of “goodness,” even if “kindness” fits quite well.

What’s the 1 remaining use? It’s Ga 5.22, our verse on the fruit of the spirit. Again, a list. So it’s ambiguous.

Forgive all the tech talk, but I think it’s worth doing a mildly serious word study in a case where there are multiple possible meanings—or where the word might in fact have multiple intended shades of meaning. We’d like to get everything that’s actually there.

And now we’re ready to talk application. What does this look like in a person in whom the Spirit is working?

Such people are good—they think, speak, and act in good ways, and in particular in their interactions with others.

How are such people thinking? They’re thinking outwardly; they’re focused not on what they want or need, but on what’s in the best interest of the people around them.

Seems to me we’ve talked about that concept recently. Lessee—it was just a few posts ago—in this series, in fact—oh, yeah, here it is, right at the beginning of this list:

Love.

People who are obsessed with what they want—their rights, their wishes, their needs—don’t act with kindness. They make life unpleasant or difficult for other people just to make their point.

They ruin the shift of a 16-year-old store clerk because they think the store’s policy on mask-wearing is unnecessary or stupid—when the clerk didn’t set the policy and is just trying to do her job, get through her shift, and make a little money for college. Have a nice day yourself, mister. I can sense Jesus just oozing out of your pores.

People know who you are by your fruit.

Who are you?

Part 7: Goodness | Part 8: Faithfulness | Part 9: Gentleness | Part 10: Self-Control

Photo by Gabriele Lässer on Unsplash