Dan Olinger

Continuous Improvement, Part 2: Inch by Inch

January 18, 2024 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Deming’s fourteen principles included a second one that has greatly influenced my thinking: being satisfied with slow, iterative change, so long as it is constant because it is built into the system. That, too, reflects something in God’s relationship with us.

During Jesus’ earthly ministry, he has three years to save the world. We would certainly feel a lot of pressure in that situation. And that pressure would be compounded if we had to set up a system that would perpetuate itself for thousands of years—particularly if we found that our disciples unanimously and continuously Just Didn’t Get It.

A remarkable thing about Jesus’ ministry is that he never seems to be in a hurry. As he’s traveling through Galilee, he sees a funeral and stops to raise the lone widow’s only son back to life again (Lk 7.11-17). As he’s walking to a village to heal Jairus’s daughter (Lk 8.41-42), he pauses and asks, “Who touched me?” (Lk 8.45). And he takes time to talk to the woman, to comfort and encourage her. Though he sometimes expresses frustration over the thickheadedness of his disciples, he doesn’t fire them and look for someone else. At the end of his earthly ministry, though they are still essentially numbskulls, he instructs them patiently and at length about what’s coming next and what their responsibilities will be.

A little improvement here, a little improvement there. That’s good. We’re moving in the right direction.

It should be no surprise, then, that he works with us in the same way. At our conversion, a lot happens from the divine side, but we’re still just babies, dependent on constant care, feeding on milk and not solid food (He 5.12; 1P 2.2). Yet God has committed himself to us for the long term, uniting our efforts with his in the lifelong process called sanctification (Php 2.12-13). With our active participation, he begins to conform us to the character of his Son, a process that will take our entire lifetimes, even with the Spirit’s empowerment. And even at the end, we still won’t be there, and God will have to take us the rest of the way to perfect Christ-likeness—and he certainly will (1J 3.2).

He knows, of course, that all along that lifelong pathway we’ll stumble, sometimes from weakness, sometimes from inattention, sometimes from sheer bone-headedness. Even Paul didn’t do any better than that (Ro 7.14-25).

But our Father is utterly committed to our long-term reclamation, and he is in this with us for the long haul. He knows our dusty frame (Ps 103.14), and he knows that we’re going to progress in tiny steps, and that sometimes we’ll take steps backward. Though we are frustrated by the fickleness of our love for God and by the consequent inconsistency of our spiritual growth, he is not.

Why not?

Because God’s plans are never frustrated.

And because he loves us.

We’re going to get there, by God’s grace and with his empowerment. You can take that to the bank.

So, every day, we seek continuous improvement. As my pastor said recently, we just take the next step. What that next step is, is different for each of us, but by God’s grace we can see that far, and we can take the step in confidence that he will empower it.

I hope you don’t take this brief series to imply that God is following Deming’s fourteen principles; God is what he is timelessly, and Deming, through common grace, is following God’s principles rather than vice versa.

It shouldn’t surprise us that God is the perfect Father, the perfect Master, the perfect Director and Accomplisher of his good and eternal plans—that he has delivered us from all fear and empowered us to become like Christ, no matter how long it takes or how slow and inconsistent the process.

Take the next step, with confidence.

Photo by carlos aranda on Unsplash

Continuous Improvement, Part 1: No Fear

January 15, 2024 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Thirty years or so ago, when I was working for BJU Press, my boss assigned me the task of researching what was then commonly called “Japanese-style management,” to see whether we could apply some of its principles to our production processes. For several years the Japanese car companies had been cleaning the clocks of the American manufacturers, and companies of all kinds were beginning to take notice.

So I did some research. Interestingly, the Japanese companies were following the advice of an American statistician named W. Edwards Deming, who argued that companies, particularly in manufacturing, should evaluate their processes statistically and make changes to their processes that were called for by the hard numbers, rather than just acting on hunches. Deming composed a list of fourteen principles to guide company management in this process of continuous improvement.

I was particularly influenced by two of these principles. The first was the absolute necessity of removing fear from the workplace. Every employee must consider himself an equal member of the team, whose input is valued. (In many cases, the line worker’s input is more valuable than the boss’s, because he’s closer to the details of the process and more likely to see where the problems lie.)

The second was the idea of continuous improvement. A company often tries to roll out a new process or organization or morale campaign, with lots of horn-blowing and pom-pom shaking and fancy new slogans, but nothing about the process and the team dynamics really changes; it’s all just pomp and circumstance. Work harder! Try more! Rah rah rah!

Deming says you can’t become a perfect organization just like that. There’s no program or reorganization that is the magic solution to your problems. Instead, you must empower everybody in the organization to notice imperfections and to speak up about them. In the case of the Japanese automakers, they empowered every worker on the assembly line to pull the chain and stop the line if he saw a problem. Yes, it costs money to stop the line; but if you see a problem, stop the line.

Because management has removed fear from the workplace (see previous principle), the employee knows he won’t get cut off at the knees when he notices and immediately reports a problem.

And quality goes up, just a little bit.

And day after day, it goes up just a little bit more.

These days that approach to management is called continuous improvement, or total quality management.

And it works.

It’s interesting to me that God’s treatment of his people reflects both of these principles.

First, God removes fear from the relationship. He does this in a couple of ways. First, he begins the relationship by assuring the believer that although he was angry at his sin before salvation, that is no longer true. He is propitiated: the enmity has been removed, and he will never be angry at the believer again.

A friend of mine, a pastor, heard me say that in class once and challenged me on that. Isn’t God angry at us when we sin? Doesn’t he chastise his people (He 12.5-9)? Yes, he chastises us, but as a perfect father, out of restorative and corrective love, not out of anger. Christ’s sacrifice propitiated the Father, and he is no longer angry. For him to become angry at us, I would suggest, would devalue the sacrifice of his Son. Was Christ’s work effective, or not? Has he propitiated the Father, or not? I said to my friend, there are Christological implications in seeing the Father as ever angry at his children.

A lot of Christians continue to live under the fear of their Father. They know that their sin continues, despite all their efforts to eradicate it. Paul admits this of himself (Ro 7.14-24). But Paul ends that confession with a shout of triumph:

I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. … There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit (Ro 7.25a, 8.1).

And he has already said, “We have peace with God” (Ro 5.1).

The second way he has removed fear is by assuring us of a good, and eternal, outcome. We will persevere (Jn 10.27-29); God’s enemies will be defeated (Re 20.10); and we will have abundant life eternally (Re 21.1-7), as well as in the present (Jn 10.10). Confidence, like love, casts out fear.

We’ll address the second principle next time.

Photo by carlos aranda on Unsplash

Part 2: Inch by Inch

A Little Story about Worship

January 11, 2024 by Dan Olinger 3 Comments

Since my previous post was about the congregational singing part of worship, I’d like to share a little story about another part of worship—the offering.

The first time I took a team of students on a short-term mission trip to Africa, we spent the first 6 weeks in the Kenyan bush, east of Nairobi, in a village called Isovya. We spent a Sunday or two working with a little Presbyterian church there, and on other Sundays various subgroups traveled farther out into the bush (if such a thing were possible) to preach, teach, and provide music in other churches.

The churches were typically mud brick, with a metal or thatched roof, a dirt floor, backless benches, and no glass in the windows. The people would trickle in, and when enough were there, the service would start.

The singing was always energetic; I hold a special place in my heart for the a capella (with maybe a plastic jug as a drum) singing out there in the bush. There is a tonal quality to it that I haven’t found anywhere else in the world.

Then there would be preaching, with an interpreter if called for. One of those Sundays I preached in one of those churches. The congregation was responsive, and the whole service was a delight.

After the preaching they would have the offering. Now, sometimes they would get a few coins, but in many churches there are a good many members who don’t have any money to give. So they bring what they have. Bench by bench, they come forward and place their offering—some fruit, some grain, maybe a pair of sandals crafted from worn-out tires (or tyres, as they would spell it there). This time there were even a couple of live chickens.

Now, as a practical matter, the church can’t really use any of these items, so they do the practical African thing: they hold an auction, and the members who do have some money bid on the items until they’re all auctioned off. That bid money then becomes the offering.

At this service there was a small plastic bag of cowpeas. The bidding commenced, and the bids kept coming. I noticed that an old man, sitting in what American Southerners would call the “Amen Corner,” kept bidding. He really wanted those cowpeas.

He persisted, and he succeeded. The cowpeas were his.

He rose stiffly from his bench, walked slowly to the table, picked up the bag, and then continued walking, up the steps to the platform where I was sitting. And he presented the cowpeas to me.

I was stunned.

My immediate reflex was to decline the offer; he needed the cowpeas far more than I did. But this was an offering, a gift to God, whom that man saw me as representing. The worst thing I could possibly do in that moment would be to reject his gift.

So I bowed slightly, looked him the eye, and told him “Thank you” in Kikamba, the local tribal language.

What a profoundly moving experience.

I later learned that he was an elder in the church. We took the cowpeas back to Isovya and gave them to a Kamba family there in the village.

Worship is a profound thing. God’s people bring what they have, and they offer it to God, who has need of nothing, who is in no way enriched by what they give, but who nonetheless “seeks such to worship him,” according to the Son (Jn 4.23). And that worship, in spirit and in truth, causes the Father to rejoice, and supplies the needs of his people, and gives the givers the opportunity to see God supply their needs and bring them peace.

Different people groups worship in different ways, demonstrating the richness and diversity of God’s creative and providential work, but in every place, in every time, that worship demonstrates God’s goodness in multiple ways.

On Congregational Singing As a Team Sport

January 8, 2024 by Dan Olinger 2 Comments

There’s been a lot of writing—and arguing—about worship, especially over how it ought to be done. I’m not going to rehash the existing hash, which is now solidly stuck to the bottom of the pan. But I did have a thought recently about the specific area of congregational singing.

As a prefatory note, I’ll observe that many these days seem to think “worship” and “congregational singing” are exact synonyms. I would suggest that worship is much broader than congregational singing; I think the whole Sunday gathering is worship—if it’s done with the right attitude—and that in fact our whole regenerate lifetimes should be worship. The word means, after all, ascribing value, “worthship” (what the Hebrews called chabod [“glory”], or “weight”), to God.

But that’s another post. Here I’d like to address just a part of that, the congregational singing.

To begin with, it’s worth noting that if the singing is part of worship, then it is an offering to God. While worship is a joyous thing, bringing delight to those offering it, the worshipers are not the audience; they are the worshipers. As such, they should be focused primarily on bring delight to God; their delight will certainly follow, but it is a side effect, not a goal.

That principle has a good many ramifications, of course. Most obviously, we should offer God what he wants, not necessarily what we want. That’s the thinking behind the Presbyterians’ “regulative principle”—the idea that we should offer in worship only what the Bible specifically commands. Even those who don’t follow the practice should be able to agree that its underlying principle—offering God what he wants—is indisputable.

Of course, the “worship wars” were all about arguing over how we can know what kind of music God likes, and that degenerated into pretty much everybody taking his toys and going home.

But to my point. When we sing as a congregation, we are offering a sacrifice of praise to God. We need to make it the very best offering we can. And I would suggest that we need everybody on board for that to happen. That means that even those who can’t sing well need to contribute. The offering is from everyone.

I’ve never been much of a singer; I was in my high school’s chorale, since I could hit the notes, but I never had any tonal quality. It’s a mystery to me where vibrato comes from, and my abuse of my speaking voice is the stuff of vocal coaches’ nightmares. As I’ve grown older, the tonal quality has stayed flat, the likelihood of my hitting the correct note has decreased, and the breath support is pretty much nonexistent.

So should I just mouth the words and let the singers make the offering?

I don’t think so. (Though if enough of my fellow church members say otherwise, I’ll respect their judgment.) I’m not singing for my own enjoyment, or to impress my fellow pewsitters.

I’m singing to God. He knows what my voice is capable of, and he wants to hear from me.

So I sing.

Anybody who’s been on an athletic team knows what’s going on here. We all—together—do the best we can, and we are brought together by our joint participation.

And God is praised.

Our own enjoyment, as I’ve said, is a side effect, not a goal, but by God’s grace we do reap enjoyment from our team effort. We are delighted as individuals, and we are drawn together as teammates.

Every Sunday, when we gather, we thrive by singing our praise to God—together—and by uniting our hearts in worship. It’s no surprise, then, that one day, in a perfect world, we will gather, from every kingdom, tribe, tongue, and nation, and sing our praise to the Lamb with one voice.

Until then, let us praise him. Together.

Photo by David Beale on Unsplash

On Reading The Message

January 4, 2024 by Dan Olinger 5 Comments

For many years I’ve made a practice of reading through the Bible in a year. I also like to read as many different versions as possible, for reasons I detail in the link in the previous sentence.

This past year I read through Eugene Peterson’s The Message, which I’d never read before. Since I usually prefer to read versions at the formal end of the spectrum, this choice was unusual for me; Peterson famously sought to make The Message speak in everyday, even casual language. I suppose we could argue over whether this work is a dynamic translation or a paraphrase, but it’s definitely “looser” than the versions I usually read.

A blog post is not the place for a detailed formal book review, but I noticed something in reading this translation that I hadn’t anticipated, something that I suspect would logically affect other similar versions as well.

I was struck from the outset at the general uniformity of style. In most formal Bible translations—indeed, in most literature, period—you get stylistic variations from genre to genre. Narrative is straightforward, descriptive, matter-of-fact. Poetry is much more stylized and terse, denser in meaning and implication. Legal documents are rigidly formal and plain. Speeches are often flowery.

Further, within narrative, different characters have different ways of speaking. Their personalities and character qualities show up in their speech. You learn about the characters from the form of their words as well as their content.

In The Message, a lot of that—maybe most of it—disappears. Abraham sounds like Moses sounds like David sounds like Peter sounds like Paul. Even God talks the same way as everybody else. That’s most evident in dialogue, but it carries over into the prophetic and epistolary literature as well.

When a translation preserves those stylistic differences, you can tell the difference between Peter, the impetuous fisherman, and Paul, the highly trained rabbi from Hellenistic Tarsus. You can tell the difference between Ezra, the ready scribe in the Law of Moses, and Amos, the shepherd from Tekoa. And the more slowly and attentively you read, the more you notice, the more there is to savor.

Now, I think plastering over those stylistic differences lowers the literary quality of the work, and it renders it more difficult for us readers to pick up on the subtleties that were designed into the stylistic variations among the genres and the characters in the Scripture.

That said, I’m a firm believer in making the Scripture accessible to the ploughboy, and if losing those stylistic subtleties were the price of making the Word comprehensible to readers of a given educational or socioeconomic stratum, that’s a price I’d be willing to pay, every time.

But I don’t think that price is necessary. I wish Peterson’s eminently understandable text preserved more of those subtleties.

As I’ve said, I suspect that this is a characteristic of all paraphrases, and likely of translations of the more dynamic sort—those closest to paraphrases. The literary style becomes the style of the translator / paraphraser.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t read these works, of course; as one of my college Bible professors commented, the power of the Word of God is not limited by the imperfections of its translators. We ought to read every Bible we can get our hands on. I’ve learned some things from Peterson, as has everyone who has read from The Message.

But works like this should most certainly not be the only Bible translation you read.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

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

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.

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On Seeing God

December 18, 2023 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

I ended my previous post by noting that although Moses was not allowed to see God’s face, God’s people will eventually see him. I’d like to meditate further on that.

In mentioning Moses I was referring to the well-known incident at Sinai, where Moses asked to see God’s face and was denied; God instead placed him in a fissure in the rock and, as he put it, covered the fissure with his hand, removing it just so as to allow Moses to see his “back” (Ex 33.17-23).

This occurred after Moses, Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and the 70 elders of Israel had gone up on Mount Sinai “and saw the God of Israel: and there was under his feet as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone, and as it were the body of heaven in his clearness. And upon the nobles of the children of Israel he laid not his hand: also they saw God, and did eat and drink” (Ex 24.9-11). Immediately after that, the others returned to the camp while Moses and Joshua went further up the mountain, “and the glory of the Lord abode upon mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it six days: and the seventh day he called unto Moses out of the midst of the cloud. ¹⁷And the sight of the glory of the Lord was like devouring fire on the top of the mount in the eyes of the children of Israel. ¹⁸And Moses went into the midst of the cloud, and gat him up into the mount: and Moses was in the mount forty days and forty nights” (Ex 24.16-18). During those 40 days, God gave Moses instructions about the tabernacle and the priesthood (Ex 25-31).

And because of the apparent delay, the people worshiped a golden bull idol, and Moses, returning, broke the tables of the Law in his rage (Ex 32). In the succeeding days he met with God, “face to face” (Ex 33.11), and it was here that he asked to see God’s “glory” and was denied.

But then God instructed him to return to the mountain, where “the Lord passed by before him” (Ex 34.6) and revealed himself with the classic wording that is repeated throughout Scripture. On his return from the mountain, his face “shone” so much that he covered it when he spoke with the people (Ex 34.29-35).

God revealed himself to Moses in unprecedented and spectacular ways, even as he refused to show him his “face.”

Interestingly, six centuries later the prophet Elijah had a similar experience in the same place.

He was running from Jezebel, running for his life. He hid in a cave—another sort of fissure—and the voice of God commanded him to step out and stand in the open. There “the Lord passed by” to the sound of a mighty wind, “but the Lord was not in the wind” (1K 19.11). Then followed an earthquake, and then a fire, but the Lord was not in them either. And finally, as we all know, “a still small voice” (1K 19.12)—a voice that commissioned him for his next ministry, and a significant one.

And these two men, Moses and Elijah, were summoned to a different mountain centuries later, a “high mountain” in Israel, to see the shining face of God in another way, a better way, at the Transfiguration (Mt 17.1-8). There they communed with Jesus, the Word of God, the perfect expression of the Father (He 1.3), the one who said, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (Jn 14.9). They spoke face to face, discussing Jesus’ coming “exodus,” the pivotal event in the history of the world.

They saw, and they knew.

And they were safe.

As my previous post noted, we, too, shall see him, and we shall even be like him (1J 3.2). We will no longer see as now, in a mirror, dimly (1Co 13.12).

May that day soon come.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

When You’re Really Scared, Part 4: Response

December 14, 2023 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Background | Part 2: Panic | Part 3: Presence

Now David moves from God’s presence to God’s action. God is not just an observer here; he responds to what he sees.

David says that God distinguishes between his people and his enemies (“the wicked”), and he acts to accomplish different outcomes for the two groups. In the situations that frighten his people, he is “trying” us (Ps 11.5a)—not in the sense that he needs to know how things will turn out for us, or how we will respond to the fear; God is omniscient, and he doesn’t need to “find out” anything. No, he is putting us to the test in that sense that he is exercising us for our own betterment.

We all know how this works with athletes; a coach puts them through hard things to make them stronger, better athletes. So God exercises us with hard things, sometimes scary things, to make us stronger, more like his son. Paul talks about that process in Romans 5:

We glory in tribulations also: knowing 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 5.3b-5).

Hardship brings endurance; endurance brings experience of success; experience of success brings confidence of success the next time.

So God’s intention for us is entirely benevolent, even when things are hard.

But for the wicked, things are very different. The hard things they experience are warnings of judgment, which they must anticipate.

Upon the wicked he shall rain snares, fire and brimstone,
And an horrible tempest: this shall be the portion of their cup (Ps 11.6).

The word snares is a bit surprising; why would God rain down animal traps? Is he speaking of sending destructive things their way?

Could well be. But readers of the Hebrew text have noticed that if you swap a couple of vowels in the word for “snares” (pachim), you get a word that means “coals” (picham), which makes a lot more sense in the context of “fire and brimstone.” (And since the vowels in Hebrew weren’t written during biblical times, the distinction could have been unnoticed at the time.) Several of the modern English versions (e.g. CSB ESV NIV) render it that way.

This kind of fiery judgment is what awaits the wicked. It happened to Sodom and Gomorrah; it will be the end of Gog (Ezk 38.22), and of the beast of Revelation (Re 14.10), and of the devil (Re 20.10), and of the wicked at the Great White Throne (Re 21.8).

The KJV’s “horrible tempest” is a “raging wind,” raging especially in the sense of “hot.” Mediterranean peoples are well aware of the sirocco, which blows sand from North Africa across the Mediterranean Basin. It’s hot, biting, and destructive to crops as well as just generally unpleasant.

In another Psalm, the same David writes,

If a man does not repent, God will whet his sword; he has bent and readied his bow (Ps 7.12).

It turns out that David’s enemies aren’t the only ones flexing a bow (Ps 11.2).

But David notes that God is not all anger. He is also love—and he loves his people thoroughly, truly, and perfectly.

For the righteous Lord loveth righteousness;
His countenance doth behold the upright (Ps 11.7).

The second line reads in Hebrew, “the upright shall behold his face.”

The Lord told Moses that no one could see his face and live. Moses was allowed to see his “back” (Ex 33.23).

But we have seen the glory of God in the face of Christ (2Co 4.6), and one day we shall see his face (Re 22.4).

David said in yet another psalm,

One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after;
That I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,
To behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple (Ps 27.4).

May it be so for us all.

Fear not.

Photo by Alexandra Gorn on Unsplash