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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Change, Part 7: Meditation

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Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Sovereign, Attentive, and Good | Part 3: Promise Keeper | Part 4: Present | Part 5: Trust | Part 6: Obedience

The third and final prescription God has for Joshua in a time of momentous change is also straightforward:

This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth; you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to act in accordance with all that is written in it. For then you shall make your way prosperous, and then you shall be successful (Jos 1.8).

3. Meditation

“Meditate” (Heb hazah) refers to an animal sound, a coo or a growl. It came to carry the idea of pondering over something by talking to yourself about it. 

What does Joshua meditate about? What has God given him? “The Book of the Law.” This is probably a reference specifically to Deuteronomy (the “second Law”), but of course Joshua had all five books of Moses.

We have an advantage over Joshua in that we have the completed Word of God. God’s inspired instruction to us goes far beyond the Law of Moses. Joshua had a record of the past works of God, His requirements of Israel, and His promises to them. As Warren Wiersbe once noted, “If Joshua was able to conquer Canaan having only the first five books of the Bible, how much more ought we to overcome now that we have a complete Bible!”

What do we know that Joshua didn’t?

There’s a lot, of course, but I think it can be summarized in two classes of revelation:

  • The Canon, which includes the rest of the Old Testament and the New Testament—the persistent failures of Israel through the period of the judges, the kings, and the Assyrian and Babylonian conquerors, as well as God’s ongoing faithfulness to them even in judgment; and the record of the Incarnation and atoning work of God’s Son, including expositions of its significance and a snapshot of its outcome at the Heavenly Throne.
  • In particular, God has revealed Himself to us perfectly and completely in the incarnate Son. As we get to know Christ as revealed in the Scripture, we will 
    • Come to know the Father better (Jn 14.9). 
    • See in the image of Christ the goal of the Father’s sanctifying work in us (Rom 8.29). 
    • Understand the meaning of His everlasting presence (Mt 28.20). 

That’s a lifetime of meditation and rumination, with persistent and substantial benefits throughout.

How did this turn out for Joshua? He models our response (Jos 1.10-11). 

10 Then Joshua commanded the officers of the people, 11 “Pass through the camp, and command the people: ‘Prepare your provisions; for in three days you are to cross over the Jordan, to go in to take possession of the land that the Lord your God gives you to possess.’ ”

He believes God—he takes his promises as certain to be fulfilled—and he acts on that belief by obeying what God has told him to do. 

This was not without risk. They were going into battle. And so are we. But we rest our hopes not on Moses, or on Joshua. We rest on Jehovah, Lord of the heavenly armies, Creator of heaven and earth, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, faithful Keeper of covenant promises, and our tender Shepherd and loving Father. 

So in chaotic times we turn the page. We take our Father’s hand, and we walk fearlessly, joyously, with Him to a delightful outcome. 

I hereby command you: Be strong and courageous; do not be frightened or dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go” (Jos 1.9).

These words call to mind Jesus’ similar promise as He sent His disciples forth. “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go … and make disciples of all nations,” he said, and then he added, “Behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Mt 28.19-20). 

This is God’s promise to us all, including both those who are confident and those who are fearful. 

He is with us. His plans will be accomplished, for our good, and most especially for His glory. 

God reigns.

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Dealing with Intimidation, Part 5: A Sound Mind

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Part 1: Facing a Giant | Part 2: No Panic | Part 3: Power | Part 4: Love

When we’re facing something intimidating, God hasn’t given us a spirit that panics and runs away; rather, he gives us a set of gifts that empower us to do the opposite: to move confidently ahead to take on the challenge. The first of those gifts is strength, or power; why panic if you can take the guy? The second is love, which frees you from fearing the personal consequences of the outcome: what happens to others is of more consequence to you than what happens to you.

The third and final gift is “a sound mind” (KJV), or “sound judgment” (CSB), “discipline” (NASB), “self discipline” (NIV), “self-control” (ESV). Admittedly, those alleged “synonyms” cover a lot of territory; we’re looking at a lot of possible nuances.

We should probably start with the underlying Greek word and work our way out. The word is sophronismos, a noun apparently derived from sophos, “wise,” and phren, “understanding.” It occurs only here in the New Testament, but the related verb, sophroneo, occurs 6 times, of which 3 speak of mental health or sanity (twice of the maniac of Gadara [Mk 5.15; Lk 8.35] and once of Paul as a self-reference [2Co 5.13]), and 3 (Ro 12.3; Ti 2.6; 1P 4.7) speak of wisdom, or “self-control over one’s passions and desires,” as one lexicon puts it. Not long after Paul wrote 2 Timothy, Clement, the bishop of Rome, wrote in an epistle to the Corinthian church that the Corinthian women were managing “the affairs of their household in seemliness, with all discretion” (1Clement 1.3), and Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, wrote to the Philippian church that “our widows must be sober-minded concerning the faith of the Lord” (PPhil 4.3).

So this has to do with clear thinking—not so much raw intelligence, but the ability to analyze a problem and to come up with a practical solution.

I had an uncle like that. His name was Clarence, but everybody called him Red, and family called him Hooligan. As a boy I actually thought that was his name, until a teacher looked at me oddly when I referred to “my Uncle Hooligan.” Red dropped out of school after the third grade, I think it was, and went to work doing whatever he could that was reasonably age appropriate. He spent most of his adult life in construction and excelled at it. My Dad spoke almost reverently of his ability to look at a construction problem and just know, apparently intuitively, what the solution was. When he worked with trusses, it appeared to Dad that Red, the third-grade dropout, was doing trigonometry in his head.

I suspect that his skill was a combination of natural ability and lots of experience.

But we have something far more powerful—a divine gift, designed to enable us to see an intimidating problem through to a successful solution. Even beyond that, this is self-discipline; it’s good judgment; it’s moderation. It’s what a drug addict or an alcoholic doesn’t have. In short, it’s the ability to direct your own behavior, the ability to not be out of control.

You are not at the mercy of your own temperament, or your own personality, or your own weaknesses.

Maybe you’re “not a people person”; maybe you’ve always been shy.

Maybe you’re not intellectually gifted and can’t engage in witty repartee. Maybe, like me, you don’t have a natural sense of compassion that spurs you to take a genuine interest in the lives and difficulties of others.

These characteristics do not control you; God has given you the ability to do what He asks, even if you can’t—even if you have no natural ability.

God has given you the ability to choose to do His will.

And when you put all these gifts together, intimidation loses its greatest power. It can make you afraid, but it cannot make you flee the field; it cannot make you collapse in spiritual exhaustion; it cannot make you escape by turning within yourself; it cannot leave you without workable answers.

Exercising these gifts well may take practice and thus time. But the gifts are there.

We ought to use them.

Photo by Astrid Schaffner on Unsplash

Dealing with Intimidation, Part 4: Love

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Part 1: Facing a Giant | Part 2: No Panic | Part 3: Power

God’s second gift to the intimidated is perhaps a surprise. If I’m facing a situation that might provoke cowardice, then it makes sense for God to give me power. I can put that to use right away.

But love? Seriously? What’s love got to do with it?

It may help if we begin by defining our terms.

We’ve all heard that there are 4 Greek words for love. C. S. Lewis even wrote a book about them. They’re usually presented this way:

  • Eros is physical, sexual love.
  • Storge is the love of people who are like you.
  • Philia is natural, brotherly love.
  • Agape is divine love.

As usual, it’s not necessarily like this. For starters, Greek, like English, has multiple words for love, but the exact number depends on your presuppositions about what qualifies as love. Some people suggest 4; some suggest 6; some suggest 7; and a diligent use of a thesaurus, or a resource like Louw and Nida’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains, might yield any number of justifiable synonyms.

Further, in no language, including Greek, do words work like this—neatly classifiable into clearly distinct categories. Sometimes synonyms are just, well, synonyms that can be used pretty much interchangeably. In this case, for example, God is not restricted to agape love; Jesus said that the Father has philia for the Son (Jn 5.20).

Perhaps you’ve heard it said that philia is a natural affection, while agape is an act of the will. As evidence, it’s noted that agapao appears in the imperative, implying that it’s something we can choose to do. Trouble is, phileo appears in the imperative too, 29 times in the New Testament, in the Gospels, the Epistles, and Revelation.

We really need to pay attention to context and not be mechanistic about assigning nuances. Because we’re in the image of God, we’re creative, and we use our words creatively; they are not confined to a single meaning. Nobody uses language like that; I don’t, and neither do you.

So.

The word here in 2 Timothy 1.7 is agape. But because it appears in a list, without much in the way of context—other than that it’s something God gifts to us in situations where one might expect cowardice—we’re not going to be able to make any hard distinctions about why Paul used this word for love and not one of the other ones.

Our time would be spent more profitably meditating on the core question I asked at the beginning of this essay—why does God give us love when we’re intimidated? What’s the point?

And is this God’s love for us, or our love for him, or our love for others?

Here I think the context helps us. There are two other items in the list, and we can expect them to be used in parallel. Power is something given to us to exercise in the intimidating situation. By the grace of God, it resides in us. Similarly, a sound mind—we haven’t talked about that yet—also resides in the person to help him address the situation.

So I’d suggest that this is love that resides in us, that we exercise to respond to the intimidation. Yes, it comes to us from God, as do the other two items, but at the point of application it’s something that we exercise.

Love for whom? Do we succeed in intimidating circumstances because we love God, or because we love others?

I’d suggest that it’s our love for others that makes us effective in intimidating circumstances, in two ways:

  • We’re not cowed into silence by our desire to be thought well of; John Stott writes, “Since he is the Spirit of love we must use God’s authority and power in serving others, not in self-assertion or vainglory.”
  • We’re empowered to overcome the hostility we face by showing grace and mercy in return. “This love is not so much a love that produces ministry as a love that conquers contempt and opposition by forgiveness and refusal to seek revenge” (NAC).

God has given you the ability to place the needs of others ahead of your own, thereby reducing the power of their opposition and the personal stake you have in “winning.” Love is a liberating thing, freeing you from fear and freeing you to go for victory.

Part 5: A Sound Mind

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Dealing with Intimidation, Part 3: Power

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Part 1: Facing a Giant | Part 2: No Panic

When, like Timothy, you’re facing a challenge that seems too big for you, it’s helpful to know that there’s no need to panic, because our Father has not given us a panicking kind of spirit.

But it’s also helpful to know what he has given us. Paul specifies three gifts from an omnipotent, gracious, knowledgeable, and sympathetic Father. The first of these is power.

God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline (2Ti 1.7).

There are two common Greek words for power. One means “authority”; it’s the word used in Mt 28.18—“All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.” It’s also used in Jn 1.12—“to them gave he power to become the sons of God.” That’s not the word used here, but it’s worth noting that we do have divine authority, for the reasons specified in these two verses. Our commission to go and make disciples (Mt 28.19-20) comes directly from Jesus, who does have all the authority in heaven and in earth; and because his work has made us sons of God, we carry princely authority whenever we pursue his will.

But, as noted, the word translated “power” in 2Timothy 1.7 is the other word, the word that means “might” or “strength.” As you’ve often been told, it’s the word from which we get our word dynamite—though, as has often been noted (see, e.g., D. A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies), you probably should ignore that fact, because since dynamite hadn’t been invented in biblical times, it has no impact whatsoever on our understanding of the biblical text.

Very commonly in the New Testament it’s used as one of the three Greek words for miracles. There’s signs, which emphasizes the meaning of the miracle—they’re not just done to entertain us, you know—and wonders, which emphasizes the effect on the eyewitnesses, and then miracles, which is our word, often translated “mighty works,” which emphasizes the power of the miracle-worker. (The three terms are used together in Acts 2.22, 2Corinthians 12.12, Hebrews 2.4.)

Interestingly, though the word power in Matthew’s record of the Great Commission is not this word, Luke’s rendering of the same commission in Acts does include it:

But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth (Ac 1.8).

Luke had earlier noted Jesus’ promise to his disciples that this power would come upon them:

And, behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you: but tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem, until ye be endued with power from on high (Lk 24.49).

And Paul prays for the Ephesian believers that they will “be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man” (Ep 3.16). Same word.

This is something we have. It is the strength supplied by God, manifested in us. It’s an irresistible force, an unstoppable strength; it’s the arm of the Almighty, the raw power evidenced everywhere in his creation.

In fulfillment of Jesus’ promise at the Great Commission, it’s the power that was poured out on the disciples at Pentecost, the power that turned the world upside down (Ac 17.6).

It’s what you need to get things done.

And God has given it to you.

God has given you the strength to do the hard thing, the thing that looks impossible, even though you’re “just not that kind of person.”

As long as your efforts are in the will of God, the strength is there to accomplish them.

Part 4: Love | Part 5: A Sound Mind

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Dealing with Intimidation, Part 2: No Panic

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Part 1: Facing a Giant

As he commissions “son Timothy” (1Ti 1.18) to a daunting task—one likely overwhelming to his timid constitution—Paul begins, surprisingly, by noting what God has not given him—and us. He’ll get to what he has given us in a moment.

But God’s “stinginess” is important to our success. He has not given us a spirit of fear.

For God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline (2Ti 1.7).

This is not the usual word for fear (phobos); using that more common word, God has often reminded us that although we should not fear other people (Dt 31.3-6), we most certainly should fear Him (Dt 31.12-13); as Jesus put it,

Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell (Mt 10.28).

So it would not be true for God to say that He has not given us a spirit that is able to fear, for He has. Fear can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on its object and its justifiability.

This word means something different. As the NRSV, which I’ve quoted here, makes obvious, this is the word for “cowardice”—being controlled by fear to the point that you cannot or will not do the things that you should.

Nobody likes a coward. We glorify heroes, because they do more than we expect; but we will not tolerate a coward. We don’t ask him to be a hero; we simply ask that he do right despite his fear.

Some years ago, I had the opportunity to participate in an exercise with the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office’s SWAT team. They wanted some practice clearing a fairly complex building in a terrorist scenario, and they asked for some volunteers to play the terrorists.

Well, of course.

The deputies and the volunteers met in a room and went over the procedures. Each of the volunteers was issued a handgun and blank rounds and instructed on various limits to the exercise. Then they took us to the building and told us to go inside, position ourselves however we liked, and in 30 minutes they’d be coming in.

Some of my fellow terrorists set up hostage scenarios to complicate the deputies’ situation. I decided to go off by myself. Found a room, evaluated hiding places, and eventually decided just to wait for them inside the door.

Counted my rounds. Seven. OK.

Something this SWAT team did surprised me: stealth was not on the menu.

They came in the end door of the building with a crash, a wave of shouting, and a volley of flash-bangs.

There was no doubt that they had arrived.

Then they began working methodically down the hall in my direction, coordinating movements, pronouncing rooms “Clear!” and moving precisely as planned.

It occurred to me that in a measurable number of minutes, they were going to arrive at my location—and dispose of me. Let me tell you, that was really intimidating. I was terrified.

Even in a simulation.

As they got close, I fired down the hall, and I’m proud to say that I stopped them briefly. But then I made a fatal mistake: I neglected to count my shots. On the eighth trigger pull, the “click” brought the shout “He’s out!” and down came Sennacherib’s Assyrian hordes on my little walled city.

I was surprised, on reflection, at how scared I was, even though I knew that this was make-believe and that these burly brutes weren’t going to hurt me.

Sooner or later, we all come face to face with the fact of our fear. We’re afraid of physical danger, of course, but we’re also afraid of less physical things. We’re afraid of rejection; we’re afraid of failure; we’re afraid of biblical confrontation; we’re afraid of saying the wrong thing at funerals. I’m afraid, and so are you.

But God has not given us a spirit of cowardice; He hasn’t given us a spirit that bails out in a crisis.

God has not given us a spirit that stops short of doing what we must do. Even when we’re afraid.

Part 3: Power | Part 4: Love | Part 5: A Sound Mind

Photo by Astrid Schaffner on Unsplash

Dealing with Intimidation, Part 1: Facing a Giant

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“It’s just too much!”

We hear people say that. Sometimes we say it ourselves. Sometimes we face a problem, or a frustration, or an opposition that just seems to overwhelm us.

I had an experience like that recently.

I’m not a mechanical person—mostly because I just don’t want to be. If there’s a problem with the car, or the house, or whatever, I’d rather pay somebody else, who knows what he’s doing, to fix it than put the time and energy into doing it myself.

A while back my riding mower broke down, right in the middle of my mowing the lawn—but then, when else would it? This was beyond my knowledge set, and I made plans to take it to a shop and have it fixed.

But no one would work on it. They’re swamped; they can’t get parts lately; they don’t work on this model.

Nobody wanted my money.

Well, Dan, you’re just gonna have to knuckle down and figure out how to fix it yourself.

It took a while—longer than it would have if the guy with the wrench had known what he was doing—but I’m happy to say it’s back to its old self again, and I have all my fingers as well as my sanctification.

Thank you, YouTube.

Over the decades I’ve faced bigger problems, longer-lasting ones, intimidating ones. And so have you. Since my life has really been relatively easy, chances are you’ve faced bigger ones than I have. I know that’s true for many of my friends.

A situation comes along that you just don’t know how to deal with. You don’t have the knowledge, you don’t have the strength, you don’t have the focus, you don’t have the emotional stability.

It’s all just too much.

There’s a discussion on social media these days over whether God ever gives you more than you can handle. I think the disagreement is largely a matter of definition—what does “more than you can handle” mean?

We do have Paul’s famous observation that everything that comes your way has been allowed—filtered, if you will—by God, and that there is a way of escape (1Co 10.13), though it may be difficult to find. We have Paul’s further assertion that all things eventuate well (Ro 8.28)—though many have observed that quoting that verse at the moment of crisis is not always the best pastoral care.

But when those hard challenges come, where do we turn? What’s in our toolbox? Where’s the instructional video?

There are several instances in the Scripture where God’s people faced significant challenges. We all know about David and Goliath (1Sa 17.40-54), and Joshua’s commission (Jos 1.1-9), and Solomon’s (1K 2.1-4), and Jesus’ farewell address to his disciples (Jn 14-16).

I think we can find some useful information in a lesser-known event, another transition.

Paul’s ministry is a wonder to behold. He achieved astonishing things in his few decades of service to Christ, moving the gospel from its first location outside Israel—Antioch (Ac 13.1-3)—to the extent of the Roman Empire, the world of his day. He planted successful churches all across Turkey (Ac 13.4-16.10), all across Greece (Ac 16.11-18.18), up into modern-day Albania (Ro 15.19), the length of Cyprus (Ac 13.4-12) and Crete (Ti 1.5), and (I’m quite sure) across Spain as well. Most pastors are doing well to plant one church; Paul seems to spin them off every few weeks.

But Paul, like everybody else, has limited time. Soon he is “Paul the aged” (Phm 1.9) looking to pass off his ministry to his proteges, most famously Timothy and Titus.

We know more about Timothy than Titus. It seems that Timothy was less than a natural leader; Paul once prodded him not to let others undercut his authority (1Ti 4.12) and admonished him to take medicine to settle his stomach (1Ti 5.23).

Timothy, apparently, felt too small for the job. He didn’t think he could do what the Word of God, from the mouth of the apostle, had ordered him to do.

In his final letter, Paul urged him on:

I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands (2Ti 1.6).

And then he lifted the haze of doubt and uncertainty and timidity and fear that welled up in Timothy’s heart by saying these words:

For God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline (2Ti 1.7).

I’d like to take a few posts to consider how we can face the giants—and win—based on this brief sentence.

Part 2: No Panic | Part 3: Power | Part 4: Love | Part 5: A Sound Mind

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Jesus Is Jehovah, Part 9: “Your Years Shall Not Fail”

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Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: “Prepare Ye the Way” | Part 3: “I Have Seen the LORD” | Part 4: “Call upon the Name of the LORD” | Part 5: “He Ascended Up on High” | Part 6: Excursus—Descent into Hell | Part 7: “The LORD Will Come in Fire” | Part 8: “Let All the Angels of God Worship Him”

In the previous post we noted that Hebrews 1 begins the author’s task of demonstrating the superiority of Christ in all things by demonstrating his superiority to the angels. He does this by citing a series of quotations from the Hebrew Scripture, what we Christians call the Old Testament. We looked last time at a quotation from Deuteronomy in Hebrews 1.6.

Just a few verses further we find another Old Testament YHWH passage (Ps 102.25-27) cited and applied to the Son:

“In the beginning, Lord, you founded the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands; 11they will perish, but you remain; they will all wear out like clothing; 12like a cloak you will roll them up, and like clothing they will be changed. But you are the same, and your years will never end” (He 1.10-12).

The author of Hebrews, as is his custom, is quoting not the Hebrew Old Testament but its Greek translation, the Septuagint, which was in very common use in the first century. In verse 10 the Septuagint has the word “Lord” (Gk kurie), and consequently the Greek of the verse, and the English translations, have it as well. It’s proper to note that the word does not occur in the Hebrew text, having been added by the Septuagint translators. (I noted last time that the Septuagint is of uneven quality.)

So the word “Lord” (in Hebrew, either Adonai or YHWH) does not in fact occur in Psalm 102.25. But “YHWH” does occur earlier in the Psalm; in fact it occurs 8 times in 28 verses (Ps 102.1, 12, 15, 16, 18, 19, 21, and 22). As you might suspect from the frequency and extent of the appearances, the entire psalm is addressed to YHWH. And for good measure, the name “God” (Elohim) appears in verse 24.

Beyond the name statistics, however, the context—the entirety of Psalm 102—makes the impact of this application all the more impressive.

  • The psalm is addressed as a plea prayer, requesting deliverance (Ps 102.1-2)
    • From extreme physical ailment (Ps 102.3-5);
    • From psychological torment (Ps 102.6-7, 9, 11);
    • From powerful enemies (Ps 102.8);
    • From the wrath of the addressee, God (Ps 102.10).
  • The psalmist is confident that God can deliver him from such a complex, multifaceted problem because
    • He is a mighty king (Ps 102.12a);
    • He has an eternal reputation (Ps 102.12b);
    • He is compassionate (Ps 102.13a, 14);
    • He keeps his promises (Ps 102.13b);
    • He does infinitely impressive works (Ps 102.15-16);
    • He cares for the downtrodden (Ps 102.17-20); and
    • He is the kind of person whom it is right and reasonable to worship (Ps 102.21-22).

The Psalmist climaxes his prayer by contrasting his temporality (“do not take me away at the midpoint of my life”) with God’s eternality (“you whose years endure throughout all generations”) (Ps 102.24)—and then comes the closing stanza, a hymn to the eternality and power of the Almighty and the security those who trust in him, most of which is the portion quoted in Hebrews:

25Long ago you laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. 26They will perish, but you endure; they will all wear out like a garment. You change them like clothing, and they pass away; 27but you are the same, and your years have no end. 28The children of your servants shall live secure; their offspring shall be established in your presence.

Once in this Psalm the writer calls this person God, and 8 times he calls him YHWH.

The writer to the Hebrews calls him Jesus.

Part 10: Other Possibilities

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Jesus Is Jehovah, Part 8: “Let All the Angels of God Worship Him”

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Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: “Prepare Ye the Way” | Part 3: “I Have Seen the LORD” | Part 4: “Call upon the Name of the LORD” | Part 5: “He Ascended Up on High” | Part 6: Excursus—Descent into Hell | Part 7: “The LORD Will Come in Fire”

Nobody knows who wrote Hebrews. Many potential authors have been suggested; my personal favorite suggestion is Apollos, “mighty in the Scriptures” (Ac 18.24), but nobody thought of him for centuries, a fact that doesn’t bring historical confidence. But whoever the author was, this epistle / sermon rings with divine authority and rhetorical beauty.

The author’s purpose is to demonstrate to Jewish believers, who were apparently wavering in their Christian faith and considering returning to traditional Judaism, that Jesus is far superior to anything in the old system. He’s superior to the angels (ch 1); to the Mosaic system (ch 3); to the Levitical priesthood (ch 5-7); and to the Old Covenant (8-10). He’s just better; there’s no reason to go back.

The author begins with a series of quotations from the OT to demonstrate that Jesus is superior to the angels (He 1.4), who in Jewish tradition were the ones who brought the Law from God to Israel (Ac 7.53).

  • “Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee” (He 1.5, quoting Ps 2.7).
  • “I will be to him a Father, and he shall be to me a Son” (He 1.5, quoting 2Sa 7.14, the Davidic Covenant).
  • “Who maketh his angels spirits, and his ministers a flame of fire” (He 1.7, quoting Ps 104.4).
  • “Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever: a sceptre of righteousness is the sceptre of thy kingdom. 9 Thou hast loved righteousness, and hated iniquity; therefore God, even thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows (He 1.8-9, quoting Ps 45.6-7).
  • “Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands: 11 They shall perish; but thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment; 12 And as a vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail” (He 1.10-12, quoting Ps 102.25-27).
  • “Sit on my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool” (He 1.13, quoting Ps 110.1).

“Mighty in the Scriptures,” indeed.

It’s noteworthy that this list includes the direct statement that the Father calls the Son “God” (He 1.8). This is a clear affirmation of the deity of Christ, though it’s not an example of calling the Son “YHWH.”

Speaking of which, where is that ascription in this list?

Well, if you were paying close attention, you might have noticed that I skipped a verse:

  • “Let all the angels of God worship him” (He 1.6).

I skipped it because for years it was a serious interpretational problem. For centuries we had no Hebrew manuscripts that contained that verse anywhere in the Old Testament. It was in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the OT, in Deuteronomy 32.43, the ending of the song of Moses. But with absolutely zero Hebrew manuscripts containing it, and with the Septuagint’s reputation as of, well, uneven quality, textual scholars didn’t have the kind of evidence they like in order to view the passage as genuine.

Some suggested that it was a loose paraphrase of Psalm 97.7, but that was a stretch, for both textual and contextual reasons.

So. What to do?

And then, in 1947, a Palestinian shepherd boy was amusing himself by throwing rocks at the entrance to a cave some distance up the face of a cliff, and he was delighted when he hit his target. The rock entered the cave—and the boy heard something break.

Long story short, behold, the Dead Sea Scrolls. Which included multiple ancient copies of Deuteronomy, including several that contained the phrase at Dt 32.43—

Rejoice, O ye nations, with his people: let all the angels of God worship him; for he will avenge the blood of his servants …

Whaddaya know. It’s genuine.

And so, to our point. Who is the “him” that the angels of God are being ordered to worship? You need to go back through the context quite a ways to find the antecedent, but it’s right there in Dt 32.36:

For the LORD shall judge his people, and repent himself for his servants, when he seeth that their power is gone, and there is none shut up, or left.

Moses orders the angels to worship YHWH.

The author of Hebrews cites the order as the Father’s statement on the incarnation of the Son (He 1.6): “Let all the angels worship him!”

As, indeed, they did:

Unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. … Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men! (Lk 2.11, 14).

Jesus is Jehovah.

By the way, I notice that this is my 400th post on this blog. I can only hope that the writing has been anywhere near as profitable for you as it has been for me.

Part 9: “Your Years Shall Not Fail” | Part 10: Other Possibilities

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

On Muddling Through

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8 By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going. 9 By faith he stayed for a time in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land, living in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. 10 For he looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God (He 11).

I’ve heard a lot of people comment these days on the uncertainty of our lives. It seems unusual, they say, the degree to which things are in general upheaval. They tend to focus on Covid, of course, especially with the Delta variant and the looming return of restrictions of various kinds. But they note that there’s more to this feeling, especially in the significant societal and cultural changes that seem to be accelerating.

There’s a part of me that says there’s nothing new under the sun; I’ve always been skeptical of the constant claim that “young people these days have it harder than ever.” But it does seem that the pace of change is speeding up.

I know a lot of people who are pretty much in Full Bore Linear Panic over all this. At the risk of being accused of insufficient empathy, let me offer a few words of psychical stabilization. (And yes, I know that no one in the history of the world has ever been calmed down by being told to calm down.)

I’ve written before on the societal uncertainty that the pandemic has brought, but I’d like to share some further thoughts along that line.

There is a very real sense in the Scripture that we’re mostly blind and consequently just sort of muddling along through life. We’re constantly reminded that we’re not God—though by nature we’d very much like to be—and that our knowledge and wisdom are infinitesimal in comparison with his. Paul tells us that “we walk by faith, not by sight” (2Co 5.7), and the writer to the Hebrews develops that concept at considerable length in chapter 11, a portion of which appears above. Abraham, we’re told, went out, not knowing where he was going.

We all feel like that sometimes.

Maybe you know people who started life with a plan and executed it perfectly. My life, in contrast, began with making a plan and seeing it crash when I was 16, and then just sort of stumbling along as doors opened. At the time, it wouldn’t have impressed any career coaches. But in retrospect, it’s been a straight line and makes a lot of sense.

Life’s funny that way.

To one degree or another, we’re all Abraham. We come from somewhere else and are just resident aliens here, living in tents (most of us metaphorically).

Some immigrants cling tightly to their ethnic identity. When my people came over from the Rhine Valley in 1741, they settled in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, briefly but soon hiked down to a German colony in Newmarket, Virginia, where they helped start a Lutheran Church—that’s what Germans do, right?—and married other Germans. From my youth in Boston I recall fondly the Italian North End and Irish South Boston, and the clear cultural identity of those places.

But eventually, typically, immigrants blend in, intermarry, and assume the culture to which they’ve come. It happened to Judah in Babylon; it happened to the Olingers in America; and it happens pretty much everywhere.

In a spiritual sense, though, we don’t have that option.

We’re from someplace else, and we’ll always be from someplace else, and we can’t—mustn’t—make this place the determiner of our fortunes, our emotions, our spiritual health. The uncertainties that are part of living in a foreign place must not drive us to fear, because we have a Father who knows all and directs all, even though he often doesn’t clue us in to everything that’s going on. What looks like chaos to us looks like a beautiful fractal to him, and he’s doing something spectacular.

We don’t know what that something is, exactly, but we know whose work it is, and that fact gives us the ability to be calm in the midst of the storm, confident in the midst of uncertainty, joyous with anticipation in the midst of societal panic—not because we don’t care, or because we’re not empathetic, or because we’re just stupid, but because we know where it’s all heading.

In short, because we believe Dad—which, given his record, is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

Photo by Katie Moum on Unsplash

Christ Is Not His Name, Part 2: Responding to the Evidence

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Part 1: Evidence for Messiahship

In the last post we noted the fact that Jesus is the Christ—the Messiah, the Anointed One—and that John’s Gospel narrates a series of miracles through which Jesus provides evidence of his Messiahship. I’d like to extend those thoughts in a couple of ways.

First, John’s use of the word signs for these miracles is precise. The Greeks had three words for miraculous events: “miracle” (or more literally “powerful thing”), which emphasized the power of the miracle worker; “wonder,” which emphasized the effect of the miracle on those who saw it; and “sign,” which emphasized the meaning or significance of the miraculous act. So the three synonyms addressed the three elements of the miraculous event: the one who did it, the act itself, and those who saw it happen.

John chooses to use the word that highlights what the miracles meant; as we noted last time, they demonstrate Jesus’ lordship over matter, time, space, physical and divine law, disease, and even death, and by implication, the evil forces. Anyone who directs the actions and effects of these things must be the recipient of an unprecedented anointing from God.

Second, John reinforces the meaning of these actions by including in the narrative account a record of Jesus’ teaching following the miracle.

  • After changing the water to wine, bringing life and joy by his creative authority, Jesus teaches about spiritual life and joy in his interaction with Nicodemus (“ye must be born again”) and with the Samaritan woman (“living water”).
  • After healing the nobleman’s son and the paralytic at the Pool of Bethesda, he proclaims that one day all will “honor the Son, even as they honor the Father” (Jn 5.23), and that the Son has “life in himself” (Jn 5.26).
  • After feeding the 5000 and walking on the water, Jesus presents himself as “the bread of life; he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst” (Jn 6.35). Here he builds on the earlier teaching of being born unto undying life and drinking water that slakes thirst forever. Later he claims repeatedly that he is “not of this world,” climaxing a series of exchanges with the words, “Before Abraham was, I am” (Jn 8.58). This is someone for whom walking on water should not really be surprising.
  • While healing the man born blind, Jesus proclaims, “I am the light of the world” (Jn 9.5)—and later, “I am the door,” opening, in effect, the entrance to what the light reveals.
  • After Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, John recounts Mary’s anointing of Jesus’ feet, signifying that Jesus himself is the sacrifice that empowers all of his followers to overcome death through resurrection. Later Christ speaks of himself as a grain of wheat that brings life by being planted underground (Jn 12.24)—and then, “the way, the truth, and the life” (Jn 14.6) by whom his people will receive life eternal, and “the vine” (Jn 15.1), the source of ongoing life to all who trust in him.

So the meaning of the signs is amply reinforced. There’s no doubt about who this person is.

And yet, remarkably, he is opposed at every turn by people who really ought to know better.

  • After he heals the paralytic, “the Jews sought to kill Him” (Jn 5:18).
  • After the bread of life discourse, many disciples stopped following Him (Jn 6:66) and again “the Jews sought to kill Him” (Jn 7:1); he was accused of “having a demon” (Jn 7:20). The Pharisees accused Him of lying and having a demon (Jn 8:13, 48, 52); the religious leaders tried to arrest Him (Jn 7:30, 32, 44) and to stone Him (Jn 8:59).
  • After he healed the blind man, he was accused of having a demon (Jn 10:20), and they tried again to stone him (Jn 10.31) and to arrest him (Jn 10:39).
  • And after he raised Lazarus from the dead, they finally hatched the plan that led to His execution (Jn 11:48ff).

Will you believe, or not?

In the end, it’s really not about evidence, or the lack thereof.

It’s about whether or not you want to.

Artwork: The Resurrection of Lazarus by Giovanni di Paolo (1403-1482), from the Walters Art Museum