pride

Crushed.

August 31, 2020 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

We all love the underdog. We cheer for David against Goliath. We love it when the cocky athletic novice gets a whoopin’ from the aging veteran of the sport.

But we don’t like it when the roles are reversed, when we’re the one who’s humiliated.

The Bible gives examples of people getting humiliated. We can learn from them.

Pharaoh

We all know the story of Moses before Pharaoh. Moses appears in his court and delivers the message from God: “Let my people go” (Ex 5.1). Pharaoh’s reply is terse and pointed:

“Who is the Lord that I should obey His voice to let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, and besides, I will not let Israel go.”

We’ve always known how the story turns out—Pharaoh is The Bad Guy. But just as a thought experiment, put yourself in Pharaoh’s sandals. You’re the most powerful man in the world. If you say someone dies, he dies. You tell neighboring kings you want their treasures, and they give them to you. Maybe you know that this Moses was raised in the court 40 years ago; maybe you don’t. But even if you do, you know he’s been keeping sheep in the desert ever since. He’s a has-been, a one-hit wonder who’s now eking out a living playing at county fairs and trying to relive the old glory. And his god? Why should you be impressed with him? What has he done?

But as I say, we all know how the story turns out.

God takes on the gods of Egypt, one by one—starting with the Nile—and in 9 plagues demonstrates that he is greater than them all. And then he turns toward Pharaoh himself and kills his firstborn, the heir, at midnight. And the families of the kingdom are too busy mourning their own loss to mourn his.

He lets God’s people go.

Nebuchadnezzar

There’s another example.

Eventually, as they all do, Pharaoh and his kingdom wane, and another kingdom rises. Babylon defeats Egypt at Carchemish, and Nebuchadnezzar becomes the most powerful man in the world. He builds a capital city on the Euphrates, including an artificial mountain—reportedly for his wife, who missed the mountains of her homeland—with water pumped to the top to supply a waterfall. He stands on the 300-foot-tall wall of the city (that’s what Herodotus says, anyway) highly impressed with himself:

“Is this not Babylon the great, which I myself have built as a royal residence by the might of my power and for the glory of my majesty?” (Dan 4.30).

Again, put yourself in his shoes. He’s telling the truth; no one can dispute it.

But God faces no one mightier than himself. “While the word was in the king’s mouth” (Dan 4.31) Nebuchadnezzar lost his mind, spending the next seven years as the crazy guy down the street, sleeping in the woods and eating grass off the lawn of the county courthouse.

It’s a tribute to Nebuchadnezzar’s personal power that seven years later, when he walked into the palace and said, “I’m back,” everybody apparently agreed. This only increases the contrast between Nebuchadnezzar’s power and that of God, who brought him down in an instant.

Uzziah

One more example, perhaps less well known.

Judah’s king Azariah, or Uzziah, is one of the most successful. He becomes king at 16 and reigns for 52 years (2Ch 26.3)—a veritable Queen Elizabeth (either one). He’s successful in war, and in economy, and in foreign affairs. He’s good at what he does.

One day he decides that if he’s the king, he can be a priest as well.

Now, in God’s design, only two people could be both priest and king. The first was Melchizedek, king of Salem and priest of the Most High God (Ge 14.18); the second is the One for whom Melchizedek’s order was created, the Son of God, king of kings, Jesus Christ (Ps 110.4).

Uzziah’s very badly out of line.

As he had done with Pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar before him, God reaches out and takes Uzziah down. Leprosy breaks out on his forehead—where everyone can see it—and Uzziah lives as an isolate and outcaste for the rest of his life (2Ch 26.19-21).

Would you like to get crushed? There’s a way to do that.

Promote yourself. Rejoice in yourself. Live for yourself.

And God will bring you down.

Pride goes before destruction,
And a haughty spirit before stumbling (Pr 16.18).

Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God,
that He may exalt you at the proper time,
casting all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you
(1P 5.6-7).

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On Listening to the Designer

September 27, 2018 by Dan Olinger 2 Comments

When my wife and I were shopping for our first house, the inspector pointed out a tree on the property. “The branches are rubbing against the roof,” he said, “and that’ll shorten the life of your shingles. Further, the roots will eventually undermine your foundation. If you buy the house, you should cut it down.”

Well, we bought the house, and shortly later I bought me a chainsaw. A very manly one.

It came with a fairly hefty manual, which, you’ll be surprised to know, I read.

Lots of things to remember with a chainsaw. For starters, it has a two-stroke engine, so you have to mix oil with the gas, at a very specific ratio (32:1, to be precise). Second, there’s a compartment there where you need to put a different oil, with low viscosity, for the bar and chain sprocket, to keep things moving along.

And then there’s a section in the manual about kickback. Apparently there are ways you can manipulate the chainsaw that will increase the likelihood that it will come back at you, and you’ll be essentially kissing the business end of the thing, which I’m told can lead to negative patient outcomes.

So I read all that.

Now here’s the thing.

I’m an American. I have my rights. One of the most precious is the right to property, which some political philosophers (Locke, no?) tell us underlies all the other rights. When I plunked my money down on that orange counter, that chainsaw became mine, and I have a right to do whatever I want to with it.

If I don’t want to put oil in the gas, I don’t have to. If I don’t want to use special oil in that other compartment, I don’t have to. And if I want to manipulate that growling beast in ways the manual discourages, I can do that.

It’s my chainsaw. I have my rights.

But I think you’d agree that I’d be an idiot to exercise those rights. I’ll shorten the life of the tool and consequently end up spending more money than I need to, to keep myself in chainsaws. And even more significantly, I could shorten the life of the operator—and even mar this strikingly handsome face.

That would be a loss for everybody.

When the engineer tells you how he designed the machine, you’d better listen to him. Only a fool cares more about his rights.

I think you can see where I’m going with this.

When the designer of your mind and body tells you what the specs are, you’re nuts to cast off those constraints.

As just one example, our culture has set out to redefine sex and sexuality, as to its purposes, its significance, its definition, its safe and appropriate uses.

You can do that if you want to. Really, you can.

You can deny its interpersonal significance and make it a lonely, solo experience.
You can deny its safety limits and embrace random and exhausting and faceless promiscuity.
You can deny its marital limits and take your partner(s) places they’d rather not go, but won’t necessarily deny you.
You can create children with no means or plan to give them a meaningful life.

Yes, you can.

And when you’ve done that, you’ll have what we have in our culture—

The poverty of single-parent homes
Life-changing—and sometimes life-taking—diseases
An increasing sense of frustration, unfulfillment, and discontent
Fundamental distrust between men and women, each viewing the other as the exploiter, and everyone confused and worried about what’s OK and what isn’t, all the rules unspoken, and every encounter presaging danger of future betrayal
And sex without joy.

You know, the designer made it fun on purpose.

He gave it to us as a splendid and magnificent gift.

But we’re using it in ways that not only minimize its effectiveness and usefulness, and deprive us of much of its joy, but may well end up killing us before it’s all over.

I can hear my skeptical friends now—“You know, you’re assuming there’s a designer.”

Without going into all the reasons I think that’s a well-based assumption, let me just observe that our culture is assuming there isn’t a designer.

How’s that workin’ out?

Read the manual. Respect the design specs. Use it well.

Don’t be an idiot.

Photo by Michael Fenton on Unsplash

Fables Again, Differently

September 20, 2018 by Dan Olinger 4 Comments

A week ago I posted about possible lessons from Aesop for weather forecasters. This time I’d like to broach the subject again in a very different context.

In my university’s chapel program today, my colleague Eric Newton briefly referred (about 16:30 minutes in) to my experience of having my faith rescued through the study of OT genealogies. Since others may find the story helpful, I share it here.

In seminary I had to study a lot of theology, including aberrant theologies. Those included the first major theological innovation of the 20^th century, neo-orthodoxy, tied to the thinking of Karl Barth. Barth’s system and writings are complex, but the feature that got my attention was his “two-story” hermeneutic. There are two kinds of history, he said. There’s the stuff that really happened, which he called by the German term Historie. That’s the first story of the house, where we live. But there’s an upstairs too, with another kind of history, Geschichte. That’s the stuff that we believe. Maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t; that doesn’t matter. What matters is that our belief helps us make sense of a confusing world and, more importantly, it energizes an existential experience with God, which is the whole point of being. There’s no staircase in the house; we can reach the second story only by an existential leap of faith.

Neo-orthodox thinkers make this kind of thinking clearer to the average guy by calling the Scripture’s early history “fable.” They don’t intend the term to be an insult; in their minds, it’s a great compliment. Fables are delightful and artful literary works, and they play an important role in our education and broader culture. For example, Aesop told a story about a boy who cried “Wolf!” It teaches us that we shouldn’t lie. That’s important.

Now. In what country did this boy live? In what century?

Ah, my friend, by asking these questions, you’re indicating that you completely miss the point. It doesn’t matter where or when he lived—in fact, it doesn’t matter if he lived at all. The point is the lesson, and historicity is irrelevant. Just learn from the story. Recognize the literary technique, and don’t be such a knuckle-dragging literalist.

Well. That concept hit me pretty hard. What if Barth’s right? What if we’re completely missing the author’s intent? (Authorial intent is a really big deal in biblical interpretation, right?) What if none of it’s true? And then, what’s the point of Jesus being the Second Adam to solve the problem of human sin (Rom 5), if there was no First Adam to originate the sin in the first place?

Maybe it’s all just stories.

At that point in my thinking I made a really foolish mistake. Being too proud to ask any of my teachers—or fellow students—for help, I determined to push through this on my own. That was foolish for a couple of reasons—first, because human beings aren’t designed to suffer alone, and second, because, as I later realized, I was surrounded by people who could have given me the answer without my having to spend weeks in the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

But, foolishly, I spent some time as a doctoral student at BJU wondering whether there’s even a God, and whether there’s light at the end of this dark valley.

Well, there is light. God is gracious; he knows and loves and cares for his children, and as he always has, he overlooked my foolishness and treated me with grace instead of giving me what I deserved.

I was seeking the answer to the question of authorial intent: did the narrators of early biblical history intend for me to read their accounts as fable, or as Historie? Is there evidence in their literature that would answer that question?

Yes, there is. One day it hit me like a brick. It’s the genealogies.

You see, when you tell the story of the boy who cried “Wolf!” you don’t tell how he grew up and had a son, and then a grandson, and then a great-grandson, and how his 200-greats grandson is the mayor of Cleveland. It’s fable; you leave it in the world of fiction.

That’s not what the authors did. They tied those very early people to the people of their generation. And later authors recognized that and extended the genealogical record through 4000 (or so) years of history to the central figure of history, Jesus Christ himself.

Barth was creative, but he failed to analyze the literature carefully. He missed clear evidence of the obvious answer to the most basic question—what did the author intend to say?

Postscript

Paul tells Timothy that all Scripture is profitable (2Tim 3.16). All of it. Even the boring parts. Even the parts you tell new believers to skip.

Don’t do that. It’s all profitable. It’s there for a purpose. Recognize, embrace, and live in the light of that purpose. My 200-greats grandfather, Adam, would tell you the same thing.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

On Christian Convictions, Legalism, and the Fear of Man, Part 4

April 23, 2018 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

We’ve seen that Christians can disagree about how to apply Scripture—about what sorts of things they ought to do, and what sorts of things they ought not to do, and why. In 1 Corinthians 8 Paul tells us how to treat one another during those disagreements. The key principle, he says, is not knowledge—which of you Gets It?—but love: we need to take care of one another.

In the situation Paul describes, one of the believers is mistaken; he thinks something is wrong that isn’t. But, says Paul, he needs to listen to his conscience and respect its restriction, even though his conscience is mistaken—because you don’t want to damage your conscience.

But, as I noted at the end of the previous post, that raises two very important questions—

What exactly does it mean to be a “weaker brother”? and
Is it OK to have a misinformed conscience? Shouldn’t we try to correct that?

Let’s talk about the first one here, and the second one in the next post.

Several times (1Cor 8.7, 9, 10, 11, 12) Paul calls the restrictive brother “weak.” What does he mean by that?

I know several Christians who think that any Christian who thinks something is wrong is by definition “weak.” Well, that’s just nonsense. Some things are wrong, and people who don’t recognize that are not morally higher on the evolutionary scale. We’re not more godly by ignoring God’s moral nature. Hitler is not the best Christian ever.
OK, then, maybe “weak” means somebody thinks something is wrong that isn’t. That would appear to fit the context. But I would suggest that it doesn’t fit the whole context. The situation has a believer not merely thinking that something is wrong, but doing that “wrong” thing despite his compunctions (1Co 8.10, 13). And that makes me think carefully about the core meaning of the word weak. I note that it is specifically the brother’s conscience that is said to be weak (1Co 8.7, 10, 12). What’s a “weak” conscience? Well, at the risk of being pedantic, I’d suggest that it’s one that is not strong. And what’s a strong conscience? It’s one that can do what it’s designed to do: stop you when you’re about to do something wrong.
So I’d suggest that the “weaker” brother is not simply one who thinks a disputed action is wrong. He’s a brother who would be inclined to follow your example into doing something he believes to be wrong. He’s one who could be influenced to violate his conscience.

If my take on the language here is correct, then the problem we’re called to address is fairly limited. You don’t have to limit your practice just because another believer thinks you shouldn’t be doing it. You need to limit your practice only if your actions would encourage another believer to violate his conscience.

I’ve noticed that in many of these disputes—food, drink, clothing, music, whatever—both sides are pretty well dug in. Nobody on the “You shouldn’t do that!” side is going to start doing The Thing. In that case, this passage seems to give the Doer freedom to continue what he’s doing.

But while this understanding gives us greater freedom, it also requires a couple of things from us.

First, the Doer can’t call the Non-Doer “weak” just because the two disagree. The Doer can’t think of himself as superior because of his understanding. Knowledge puffs up; love builds up (1Co 8.1). We need to treat one another better than we do.
Second, Scripture holds the Doer responsible for what the Non-Doer might do. That means that we need to be aware of the consequences of our disputed actions; we need to know if there are people in our circle who might follow our example but who shouldn’t.

And that means that we need to know one another better than we do. We need to talk about these things. And that in turn means that we need to have the kind of atmosphere in our churches that encourages us to talk about things over which we strongly disagree. Our churches need to be Safe Spaces—yeah, I said that—where we can trust one another to listen and understand and care and love and embrace.

We need to not have wars, worship or otherwise.

Man, do we have a long way to go.

Next time, we’ll look at the second question: What do we do about a misinformed conscience?

Part 5 Part 6 Part 7

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On Christian Convictions, Legalism, and the Fear of Man, Part 2

April 16, 2018 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1

So Christians have the means, through the Spirit, to apply the Scripture to their own decisions about how to live. Yet their interpretation skills are imperfect, and they’re involved in a long process in which the Spirit teaches them how to live. So they’re works in progress.

That means that believers, who love God, seek to live for him, and know their Bibles, will disagree about the details.

The issues change over time and space, as cultures change. When I was a boy, Christians argued about whether women should have pierced ears; that’s not really much of an issue anymore. When I was in Mexico years later, I learned that some Christians there don’t think mariachi music is appropriate; I was genuinely surprised by that.

So in every time and in every place, believers will disagree about some sort of application. Right now in the US, Christians disagree about alcohol use; about tattoos; and about lots of other stuff.

In Paul’s day, they disagreed about whether Christians should eat meat that had been offered in sacrifice to idols. Nowadays we don’t offer meat-based life units to idols in Western culture, but I think we can put ourselves in first-century sandals and imagine how they felt.

“That’s idol worship! We can’t act as though that doesn’t matter! Idol worshippers eat that sacrificial meat as an act of devotion to their gods! We don’t want to do anything to give the impression that that’s OK!”
“Come on, they’re just idols. They don’t even really exist. We worship the true God. He’s not threatened by superstition. We don’t want to give the impression that we take those idols seriously.”

We can also imagine how the groups would tend to shake out. Converted idol worshippers would be more sensitive to the religious meaning of those sacrifices; they’d be more likely to want to get as far away from those practices as possible. Jewish Christians—particularly Hellenistic ones—might be more likely to dismiss the concerns.

I suspect the difference would shake out another way as well. The less well educated and traveled would tend to be concerned about the implicit “worldliness” of eating the meat. The more cosmopolitan and well educated—those with more frequent exposure to diverse cultures—would tend to see no problem with it.

And they go to church together.

What to do?

Paul addresses that question directly in a lengthy portion of 1 Corinthians. In chapter 8 he introduces the issue and gives the short answer; in chapter 9 he reminds the readers of his own example; and in chapter 10 he gives the longer answer with some explanation.

But he begins it all with an important principle about how we are supposed to get along—something that’s going to set the tone for the rest of the question:

¹Now concerning food offered to idols: we know that “all of us possess knowledge.” This “knowledge” puffs up, but love builds up. ²If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know. ³But if anyone loves God, he is known by God.

So what’s that all about? What does that have to do with eating meat offered to idols?

Everything.

We all think we’re right. We think we understand the issue of the day, and anybody who disagrees with us is either 1) lying, 2) evil, or 3) just stupid. We see this all the time in political debates these days. The Other Side is so evil that we should “lock her up!” or so stupid that we don’t even need to address their arguments; we just mock them.

Here’s the thing. It can’t be that way in the church. It can’t. We must not think that way about one another.

Suppose I think that eating the meat is fine, and you don’t. Well, you know what your problem is? You don’t understand grace! You don’t understand the gospel! You just don’t get it!
Suppose I don’t think that eating the meat is fine, and you do. Well, you know what your problem is? You don’t love Jesus! You don’t understand holiness! You just don’t get it!

As soon as a believer says, “You just don’t get it!” he’s rejecting Paul’s teaching—regardless of which side of the issue he’s on.

Knowledge puffs up. Love builds up. We need a completely different approach.

And what approach is that?

Next time.

Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7

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