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

Chair, Division of Biblical Studies & Theology,

Bob Jones University

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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

Silent, but Working

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Why doesn’t God do something? Why doesn’t he show himself? Why is he silent?

Over the centuries God’s people have asked that question often. We want help. We want vindication. We want solutions.

But the question “Why doesn’t God do something?!” is deeply misguided.

There are many places in the Bible where we could demonstrate that, but I’m going to suggest the book of Esther.

When my daughters were small, this was their favorite Bible story—I suppose because it involves a strong, smart woman, and plenty of suspense, and rich irony. They would often ask me to tell it, and if I left out a line, they would interrupt and remind me—“No, Daddy, you forgot to say that the Jews don’t bow to anyone but God!”

We all know the story; I don’t need to recount it all here. But perhaps you’ve never noticed that throughout this ancient classic, God’s name is never mentioned.

It’s as though he doesn’t exist.

The closest the writer comes to mentioning God is when Mordecai—who’s apparently named for the Babylonian god Marduk—tells his cousin that perhaps she has come to be queen “for such a time as this” (Est 4.14)—implying some kind of guiding hand in history.

No, God is not mentioned. But throughout the story there’s evidence of his hand at every turn—

  • The evil king Xerxes (that’s the Greek form of the name Ahasuerus) deposes his queen because she won’t degrade herself before his drunken friends.
  • This evil king decides to replace her by a holding a sexual tryout among the most beautiful women of the land, appointing his favorite as queen and relegating the rest to his harem. This is not exactly a godly activity, though culturally allowed. Esther’s beauty gets her into the trial, and eventually he appoints her queen.
  • Her cousin happens to overhear two members of the court plotting to assassinate the king. He reports the plot, saving the king’s life, and a cuneiform tablet recording the deed is added to the voluminous court archives.
  • A proud member of the court, one who clearly has designs on the throne, is enraged by Mordecai’s refusal to bow to him and evidences his racism by planning to kill Mordecai and all his people. He builds an execution stake and goes to ask the king’s permission to execute Mordecai.
  • At the climax of the story, the king has insomnia. Of all things. He asks a servant to bring something from the archives to read; surely that will put him to sleep.
  • The servant, probably rubbing the sleep from his eyes, wanders into the warehouse, yawns, and grabs any old cuneiform tablet from Section 427Q—or whatever—and returns to the king to begin reading.
  • We all know which tablet he grabbed, probably without looking. The king learns, apparently for the first time, that an assassination plot has been foiled by a low-level government functionary.
  • He wants to reward the fellow, so he asks for ideas. “Is anybody in the court?” And there stands Haman the proud, waiting for morning—he wants to be the first in line—to get approval for Mordecai’s execution. The very Mordecai that the king wants to reward.
  • And the story goes on.

Too many coincidences. Too many unifying events in the plot development.

Somebody thought up this plot. Somebody wrote this story. And everybody who reads it, from my little daughters to the most aged saint, knows that. Now what would you think if somebody wandered into this narrative and asked, “Why doesn’t God do something?!”

We’d say he’s clueless. We’d say he needs to sit up and pay attention.

Throughout biblical history—by the most conservative estimates, maybe 4000 years—miracles are quite rare. They occur in spurts, during the lifetimes of Moses and Joshua, Elijah and Elisha, and Christ and the apostles. About 5 or 6% of the time. (If you think the earth is older than that, the percentage is even lower.)

Even in the Bible, at least 94% of the time, God’s not doing miracles. He’s doing ordinary things, directing the affairs of people and nations.

We call that providence.

And he continues that work today, in your life and mine, ordinarily, unspectacularly, beneficially, lovingly, wisely.

We need to sit up and pay attention.

Photo by Wes Grant on Unsplash

The Names of Christmas, Part 3

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Part 1 Part 2

So both of the Christmas names—Jesus and Immanuel—highlight the fact of the Incarnation, that God became one of us. As I put it last time, the eternal God the Son added to his (divine) nature, or set of characteristics, and second, human nature, a different set of characteristics.

That’s a unique event. No other person, not even the Father or the Spirit, has ever had two natures.

We have trouble with unique things, because we like to learn by comparing the new thing to something we already know. And when there’s nothing to compare the new thing to, we end up scratching our heads and asking questions that we have insufficient data to answer.

How does a divine person add a human nature? How does any person add any second nature?

The early church spent 400 years trying to figure that one out, and pretty much every theory they came up with along the way was a heresy. Finally, in AD 451, at the Council of Chalcedon, they managed to formulate a statement of what happened—a statement that has stood the test of the centuries since—but they gave up forever the possibility of actually explaining it.

Really—how does a person with two natures live out his life? How does he think? How can he be both mortal and immortal? How can he be both omnipresent and corporeal? How can he be omniscient and yet say, matter-of-factly, “I don’t know when I’m coming back” (Mk 13.32)?

I’d like to make up a story that I’m pretty sure never happened, just to make the point.

—–

An angel shows up in the executive wing of heaven and approaches the receptionist.

“I’d like to see the Son, please,” he says.

The receptionist replies, “I’m sorry, but you can’t.”

Now, that answer has never before been given to that request, so the angel is puzzled.

“I can’t?! What kind of an answer is that?! Why can’t I?”

“Because he’s not here. He’s out of the office.”

The angel is nonplussed, whatever that means.

“What do you mean, he’s ‘not here’?! He’s omnipresent. How can he not be here? That doesn’t even make any sense!”

“Well, it’s a little difficult to explain, but I assure you that he’s not here.”

The angel, perplexed, gives in.

“OK, I’ll play your little game. He’s ‘not here.’ Well, then, ‘where’ is he? I’ll go ‘there’ and see him.”

The receptionist takes a deep breath.

“Well, I can tell you where he is, and you can go there, but even if you do, you won’t be able to see him.”

“Why not?”

Another deep breath.

“Because he can’t talk.”

“He can’t talk?! Are you kidding me?! How can he not talk?!”

The receptionist clears her throat.

“Because he’s a fetus. He’s not going to be able to talk for a couple of years yet.”

—–

As I say, I’m pretty sure this never happened, first, because our imagined angel seems a little impatient for somebody who’s not a sinner, and more importantly, I don’t think any angels were surprised by the incarnation. Oh—and I doubt that the executive wing of heaven has a receptionist, although I can’t be completely sure of that.

But let’s take some time to think about this.

Paul tells us that among other things, the Son is the agent of providence—by him, all things are held together (Col 1.17). As far as I know, there’s no 25th Amendment in the Constitution of Heaven, whereby a member of the Godhead passes off his duties to another member in anticipation of his temporary incapacitation. So is the Son running the universe from Mary’s womb? as a fetus? as an embryo?

Is it true that “little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes”? Does he learn to walk the first time he tries, or does he “fall down and go boom”? Does Mary ever have to correct his grammar? Does he always get A’s in school? Does Joseph ever have to tell him, “Now, Joshua, if you keep holding the hammer that way, you’re going to hit your thumb!”?

My friend, you think you know this person, but there is more to him than you can ever know. He is unfathomable, unimaginable, indecipherable.

And he did this for you. When you were his enemy and determined to stay that way.

Immanuel. God with us.

Merry Christmas.

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

On My Father’s 100th Birthday

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Today would have been my father’s 100th birthday. He lived only (?!) to the age of 90, but he had a really interesting life—railroad conductor, printer, pilot, kinda travel agent, small business owner. He was never boring. Scary maybe, but never boring.

The thing that I find really remarkable about his life is the amount of change he saw.

He was born on the frontier. His father, after the murder of his own father, headed west from Missouri looking for opportunity. Eventually he homesteaded—that Homestead Act was a real boon to upward mobility—just below the Continental Divide outside Salmon, Idaho, on land that no one had ever tamed before, and he and his wife and 11 children worked like oxen to make a living for themselves.

And here’s the thing. They lived, in 1918, pretty much the same way people lived in Abraham’s day. They built their own houses by hand, carried water in from the creek, fended off the darkness with oil lamps, powered their farming with animals, and did their excretory business in a hole in the ground. Oh, eventually they got electricity, and my grandfather even bought a car before it was all over, but when Dad was born, the routine of daily life hadn’t changed much for 4000 years.

Dad’s mother died when he was 7, and his father when he was 13, and from then on he was raised relatively haphazardly by a series of older siblings as they were able. Graduated from high school a year or two late, eventually served his country in World War II—as part of the greatest generation—and came home to work with his hands to scrape together a thousand bucks or two every year to feed the wife and three kids. Leave it to Beaver, indeed.

Not well educated, but a constant reader, he created a fully organic subsistence farm, before hardly anybody was even talking about such things, on a mere two acres of land in (really) Greenacres, Washington, then piled the whole family into a Rambler station wagon and a ’54 Nash to move clear across the country for a white-collar job. (No, my name’s not Joad.)

After they finally got the kids out of the house, he and Mom retired to southern New Mexico, where within a few short years Mom died and he was left pretty much alone with his tool-sharpening shop. After he’d spent 25 years there, an ER doctor called me from New Mexico and said, “You need to come get your Dad.”

And for the last 6 years of his life, as his well-used but well-worn mind slowly ebbed, I cared for him as he needed it, but left him his independence as much as I thought was safe.

And one evening the two of us sat together at my computer, fired up Google Earth, and went back to Salmon. He guided me up the Salmon River to Baker, where he went to school (yep, on horseback, in the snow) and then north up Sandy Creek to the old homestead. It was right here, on the west side, he said. And I dropped the perspective as low as I could, and we stood on the old land and looked up Sandy Creek to the Divide, where he’d hiked over into Montana one time when he was a teen and got upset with somebody.

In one lifetime, he went from the days of Abraham to Web-based virtual reality on a laptop. In one lifetime, his life changed in pretty much all the ways that the world has changed since it began.

What a time to be alive.

Dad didn’t make it to 100—here, anyway—and I’m confident that he wouldn’t have wanted to. But what a life he had, and what lives he has left behind. Sons and daughters who have all known success, all in remarkably different ways. Two grandsons who are Service Academy graduates, and two granddaughters with great abilities and extensive experiences around the world.

And life, for him, goes on, in a way that I don’t have the experience to describe.

Hallelujah.

Photo by Ember + Ivory on Unsplash

7 Stabilizing Principles in a Chaotic World, Part 2

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Part 1

So, here we go. Principles to deliver us from the fear and anger that characterize too many of us.

Number 1: Providence. There is a God in heaven, who directs in the affairs of people and nations.

The lunatics are in fact not running the asylum. All that stuff that’s got you twisted into knots? Well, the stuff that’s actually true—we’ll get back to that idea later—has come to pass through divine intention. That’s just a fancy way of saying that God’s done it.

That’s true of the stuff we like—God sends sunshine, and rain, and crops, and seasons (Psa 104)—but it’s true of the stuff we don’t like as well. God has his way in the whirlwind and the storm, the prophet tells us (Nahum 1.3).

Whirlwinds are nothing to mess with. In 1998 a tornado wiped out Spencer, SD. A week later I was there. The whole town was just gone. The water tank on top of the hill? Gone. The gas station? Gone, though the concrete pads for the pumps were still there. The corn silos? Gone. The telephone poles? Twisted off 2 feet above the ground. No buildings, except for 1 house that was inexplicably spared. And the whole thing lasted just 6 minutes.

At 8.30 pm there was a town, and homes, and businesses, and normal life. By 8.45 it was all gone.

Who did that? The mayor? The governor? The devil?

Not according to Nahum.

God did it. For reasons of his own, which we may or may not ever understand.

But you know what? There’s still a Spencer, SD. By the grace of God, and through the hard work of a lot of remarkable people, life goes on at Karen’s Beauty Shop and Trinity Lutheran Church and the baseball field.

It’s not likely that anything worse than that has happened to you; if it has, I haven’t seen you post about it on Facebook.

And if it has, then take courage in this: God is working his plan, for you and for everybody else.

And here’s the thing. God isn’t impersonal, or arbitrary, or unfeeling in all of this. He doesn’t throw the switch on the train track just to see what will happen, or just to shake things up for some warped form of amusement.

God cares. He loves—personally, individually, intimately, passionately. And with a wisdom you and I could never fathom, he conducts the symphony of your life for your greatest spiritual benefit and for his greatest glory. He knows what he’s doing, and he acts out of wisely directed love—in a way no one else you have ever known ever could.

This God—the creator of heaven and earth; the keeper of covenant promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the one watching over Israel, who neither slumbers nor sleeps; the lover of our very souls—this God is directing your steps, and mine, and everyone else’s to accomplish his perfect, delightful plan.

No, the lunatics are not running the asylum. God gave us Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama. And most recently he has given us Donald Trump. Love them or hate them, they are all—all—gifts from a wise and loving God, perfectly prepared and perfectly directed for the nation that elected them. That doesn’t mean they’re good, or wise, or effective. But it does mean that he is.

So why live in desperation, or rage, or panic, or frustration? Is there not a God in heaven? Do you not trust him? Does he not give peace?

Maybe, if you have no peace, you have no basis for it. Peace comes not from the political process, or health, or leisure, or physical resources. Peace, peace in your soul, comes from above, not from outside. Peace comes from the Prince of Peace (Isa 9.6), by whom we have peace with God (Rom 5.1), and through whom we find peace even with our enemies (Eph 3).

Think on these things. Breathe them into your reading, and listening, and surfing. And see if maybe your perspective, and thus your reactions, come to reflect peace more than panic.

Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

Photo by Keith Misner on Unsplash

On Existential Providence

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God’s in charge.

He’s sovereign; his will is always accomplished. That includes the big things, and the tiny little things. In my case, tiny little things brought existential results: I wouldn’t exist without them.

My Mom grew up in Brockton, MA, the daughter of hardworking and really interesting Universalists. On graduation from high school, she went to secretarial school and then moved to Baltimore during World War II to work some sort of secretarial job. She got an apartment with a roommate named Nikki.

Dad grew up in the Pacific Northwest, born in Salmon, ID. By age 13 he’d lost both of his parents, and he finished his youth under the freewheeling stewardship of his older siblings, mostly in Spokane, WA, and LA (where he experienced the Long Beach earthquake of 1933). Around 1944 he volunteered for the Army, mostly, I suspect, to get out of the house. Basic training at Camp Roberts in California, then off on a troop ship to the Philippines, as a replacement soldier for the combat-depleted 31st “Dixie” Division, known today as the Alabama National Guard. Spent time on both Leyte and Mindanao, with little combat; made a little extra money by cutting other soldiers’ hair in the jungle.

When the war ended, he returned Stateside and was sent to Fort Meade, MD, during the last days of his enlistment.

One weekend he got a pass and went into Baltimore.

I dunno, I think I’d have gone to Washington. But he went to Baltimore.

He and a buddy or two dropped in to a café to get something to eat. As they were getting seated, Dad noticed another couple of soldiers making a clumsy pass at two girls who were paying their bill at the register. The girls clearly didn’t want to talk, but the guys kept trying.

Dad got up and told them to knock it off. We can all see they don’t want to talk to you; leave them alone, and get out.

They were privates. Dad was a corporal. They got out.

Dad said a few words to one of the girls. Yeah, she was my Mom.

And 8 years later, along came Yours Truly.

So for me, this is really an existential story. I wouldn’t be here if that hadn’t happened. And oh, yeah, neither would my sisters.

What are the odds?

How did a boy from Idaho, 2 miles down from the Continental Divide, end up in the Philippines with a unit from Alabama?

And how did he and the future Mrs. O. end up in Baltimore, where neither of them had ever been before, at the same time for completely unrelated reasons?

And how did they end up at the same hole-in-the-wall café on supper shifts that overlapped by about 10 minutes?

What if he’d come to supper 15 minutes later?

What if a couple of jerks hadn’t hassled the girls on their way out?

What if?

Our lives are an endless stream of details, winding in and out of other endless streams, sometimes apart, but occasionally intersecting. And those intersections are usually brief and trivial and quickly forgotten. What was the name of the guy you greeted on the way into the drugstore yesterday afternoon?

But sometimes those intersections change lives, and those times they change all the world for the people involved.

And God oversees and directs the whole symphony.

The God who raises up kings and sets them down again, who empowers the existence and continuance of the whole universe, who sees that the water cycle and the seasonal cycle continue despite our attempts to contort and convolute them, this God engineers the tiny little details as well.

The tiny little trivial ones, and the tiny little existential ones.

I’m glad of that.

Photo by David Marcu on Unsplash