Dan Olinger

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

Dan Olinger

 

Retired Bible Professor,

Bob Jones University

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On Stillness, Part 2: Thinking in the Silence

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Part 1: It’s a Good Thing

Years ago I read that the brain is not a bucket to be filled, but a muscle to be exercised. That is, your head is not limited in capacity in such a way that you need to save it for just the most important stuff. Rather, it can keep adding material forever; in fact, the more you exercise it, the more it can hold.

That concept has heavily influenced my thinking, my studying, and my teaching. Our minds don’t need rest; they want to be active. Oh, they do need change, or variety; I’m often encouraging my students to study in sprints rather than marathons, to stop and think about something else for a while. But even when we’re asleep, our minds are busy, making up stories, many of which make no sense at all. Thinking is what we do by nature.

The advantage to thinking in silence is raising the focus, and thus the quality, of how we’re thinking. I know it’s alleged that kids these days, I suppose largely because of Starbucks, need background noise in order to think—that sheer silence overwhelms them. I haven’t seen that demonstrated; in fact, I see indications that when my students think they’re “multi-tasking,” they’re really just doing several things poorly. (And I have the test scores to prove it.)

So what should we do with the silence that we find so rejuvenating?

The few biblical passages I noted in the previous post at least imply that we should be using the quiet time to think.

To think about what?

Again, the Scripture gives us some direction.

Think About God

The well-known passage cited earlier says simply, “Be still, and know that I am God.” Similarly, while hiding from King Saul in the Judean desert—where it gets really quiet, especially at night—David wrote,

5      My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast,
and my mouth praises you with joyful lips
6      when I think of you on my bed,
and meditate on you in the watches of the night;
7      for you have been my help,
and in the shadow of your wings I sing for joy (Ps 63).

I suppose David had an advantage there, in that as he lay on the desert ground at night, with no light pollution, he had a spectacular display of God’s glory in the canopy of stars and planets and meteors and the bright ribbon of the Milky Way. Saul doesn’t seem like such a big deal out there.

There’s a lot to think about with reference to God. (Understatement of all time.) I find it highly profitable to list, organize, and meditate on God’s personality—his qualities, what theologians call his attributes. I’ve worked a list of them into my prayer life, meditating on a different one each day. I find that having such an attribute in your head at the beginning of the day tends to give greater clarity—and peace—when the day gets noisy.

There are lots of places you can get information on God’s attributes. Any systematic theology book will have a section, usually a whole chapter, devoted to them. Many people have been helped by J. I. Packer’s Knowing God; Arthur W. Pink and A. W. Tozer both have books on the topic as well. Tozer’s book Knowledge of the Holy is also helpful. If you want something more challenging, the Puritan Stephen Charnock’s work is the standard.

There are also several helpful websites—

Next time, we’ll get further guidance from the Bible on what to think about in the silence.

Part 3: Thinking on God’s Works | Part 4: Thinking On God’s Word | Part 5: In Your Heart

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Bigger Than Anything, Part 2

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Part 1

The Nation (Ex 12) 

  • Some 400 years later, the people of Israel are slaves in Egypt, and God miraculously delivers them, with the greatest show of power the world had ever seen (Ex 12.33-36). He promises to give them a permanent homeland, one that’s fertile and beautiful and peaceful. He makes a covenant with them at Mt. Sinai, and they promise—unanimously—to do everything He tells them (Ex 19.8). 
  • Now the people are a nation. So He tells them to take the land, and they get scared and quit (Num 14.1-4). That’s discouraging. 
  • They wander in the wilderness for 40 years, eating food and drinking water that God miraculously provides. Their clothing and shoes don’t wear out (Dt 29.5). But all they do is complain (Nu 11.1). Even their leader, Moses, fails so badly that God won’t let him enter the Promised Land (Dt 32.48-52). 
  • But the nation does enter it. They live in houses they didn’t have to build, and they eat from gardens they didn’t have to plant (Dt 6.11). God has taken them another major step toward the killing of the snake. 

The Royal Line (2Sa 7) 

  • God chooses a shepherd boy to lead this nation. And He promises that David’s royal son will reign forever. 
  • But David’s son Solomon, despite receiving unequaled wisdom from God, breaks God’s Law (Dt 17.17) by marrying multiple foreign wives, and by the end of his life he’s worshiping their false gods (1K 11.4). And his son, Rehoboam, splits the kingdom. 
  • From that day, the Northern kings are unremittingly evil, and most of the Southern kings, offspring of David, are evil too. 
  • But every so often, there’s a good one. One of them, Hezekiah, gets sick one day, and God tells him to get his affairs in order, because he’s going to die. Hezekiah begs, and God gives him another 15 years (2K 20.1-7). 
  • And when he dies, his son, Manasseh, becomes king, at the age of—12 (2K 21.1). And he is the worst king of Israel to that point. But God is still working His plan. 
  • Several generations later Jehoiachin is king. He is so evil that God curses him: no offspring of Jehoiachin will ever sit on the throne of his father David (Je 22.24-30). The messianic line is cursed.
  • And Judah goes captive to Babylon, and that’s the end of it (2Ch 36.15-21).

Or so it seems. 

The Seed (Mt 1) 

  • About 6 centuries later, a carpenter from Nazareth is the heir to the throne. But he can never be king, since he’s under the curse. He meets a godly young woman and eventually makes the arrangements with her father, and they are engaged. 
  • One horrible day he discovers that this woman that he had thought was so godly, who he thought loved him, is with child. She has apparently been with another man. 
  • As he sleeps one night, he sees an angel, and he learns the truth (Mt 1.20). Mary has not been unfaithful; her child is the Son of God. And Joseph is to adopt this Child. 
  • This will ruin Joseph’s reputation. But he decides to trust God and obey the angel. 
  • And in that simple act, God uses him to enable the rescue of you and me from our sin. As Mary’s son through Nathan, Jesus has no legal claim to the throne of David, which comes through Solomon. But as Joseph’s adopted son, He is the only rightful heir, and He is unaffected by the curse on Jehoiachin. 
  • And 30 years later, He crushes—crushes—the serpent’s head. 

Epilogue 

  • And then He builds His church. He gathers disciples, fills them with His Spirit, and sends them to the ends of the earth (Ac 1.8). He finds a proud but hateful Pharisee, a mass murderer in the very name of God, and revolutionizes him to be an apostle to the Gentiles (Ac 9.15-16). Paul and his partner Barnabas begin the daunting task of taking the message to all nations (Ac 13.1-3). 
  • And after just one trip, Paul and Barnabas, who is the nicest guy you’d ever want to meet (Ac 4.36), have such a disagreement that they decide to go their separate ways (Ac 15.39). And now there are two teams spreading the gospel, instead of one. 

This God? He’s bigger than giants, bigger than kings and their armies, bigger than all the forces of nature, bigger even than sin and failure and frustration and distraction. Big enough to use the sin He hates to accomplish His will, whether in twelve angry brothers or an adulterous shepherd boy or a much-married wise man or even the death of His Son. 

He’s bigger than anything.

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Bigger Than Anything, Part 1

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We have some odd ideas about God.

I hear students say, “We won our soccer game. Isn’t God good!”

Well, yes he is. But he was good to the team that lost, too.

“I passed my test. Praise God!”

But he would be worthy of praise just as certainly if you hadn’t passed.

The Bible’s story is very different from this sort of self-referential, circumstance-based thinking. God is good all the time. And he’s great all the time. He’s bigger than anything.

  • The shepherd boy goes up against a giant, and he kills him with a sling (1Sa 17.48-51). God’s greater than giants.
  • The Assyrian army surrounds and besieges Jerusalem, and the Angel of the Lord kills 185,000 Assyrian soldiers as they sleep in their tents (Is 37.36). God’s bigger than emperors and their armies.
  • Nahum says that God’s way is in the whirlwind and storm (Na 1.3). Have you ever seen a tornado? I’ve seen a town shortly after it was obliterated by one. Who sent that storm? God did. He’s bigger than the greatest natural forces we can ever imagine. 

Let me go a step further.

He’s even bigger than sin! He doesn’t sin, and He doesn’t like us to sin, but it doesn’t frustrate Him or mess up His plans. He even uses it to accomplish His purposes. 

Watch how it happens. I’d like to lay out the biblical story—what some call its “metanarrative”—in a couple of posts. It’s not a story in which we’re the heroes, or even the main characters. But it changes our lives and our fortunes.

The Promise (Ge 3) 

The story I got in Sunday school was simple:

God makes a beautiful world, Adam ruins it, and God has to figure out a way to rescue him and still be just.

Simple enough for a child. But not accurate. That’s not really how the story goes—or perhaps more correctly, that’s not the point of the story.

This is more like it:

  • God hasn’t made this difficult, but Adam and Eve sin anyway. And God knows, and He confronts them. He pronounces judgment on each of them, and then He turns to the serpent, and in the midst of judgment, He speaks grace to Adam and Eve (Ge 3.15). 
  • There will be a “seed.” And that “seed” will crush the serpent’s head. Out of unexpected failure, and shock, and fear, comes Hope. 
  • Adam and Eve clearly don’t understand. She has a son and names him Cain, “getting,” because she’s gotten what God promised, a seed (Ge 4.1). Boy, is she ever wrong. 
  • But God is doing what He wants. This is not Plan B; there is no Plan B. This is what He intended all along. 

The People (Ge 12) 

  • God finds a pagan man, an idol worshiper (Jos 24.2), and makes a completely unreasonable demand: Leave your home and your family, and go somewhere else. Where? I’m not telling you. Just go (Ge 12.1). 
  • And Abram believes, and he goes. But he’s not exactly perfect; he’s afraid of a king, so he lies and tells him that his wife is his sister (Ge 12.13). And only direct intervention from God preserves the purity of the woman Abram’s supposed to protect. That’s a pretty serious failure. 
  • Then Abram tries to help God keep his promise by having a child with his wife’s servant (Ge 16.3). That’s disappointing. 
  • But by the time it’s over, Abram (now Abraham) and Sarah have a son, and everybody’s laughing (Gen 21.6). And that son has a son named Israel, who’s a cheater (Ge 25.26); and that son has 12 sons, 10 of whom sell their spoiled little brother into slavery (Ge 37.28); but they become the 12 tribes of Israel, and God has taken the first big step toward keeping His promise to crush the serpent’s head. 

Next time, the story continues.

Part 2

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On Filling Up Our Sins

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They are not pleasing to God, but hostile to all men, 16 hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved; with the result that they always fill up the measure of their sins. But wrath has come upon them to the utmost (1Th 2.15b-16).

Paul is writing here of his unconverted Jewish opponents, those who followed him around from city to city and tried to undercut his evangelistic and church-planting work. In the process of noting their doom, he uses an odd expression: “they fill up the measure of their sins.”

What does that mean? And is it unique to Paul’s Jewish opponents, or is this something that other cultures should be wary of?

I think it’s easier to answer the first question if we begin by answering the second.

Similar language appears in 3 other places in the Scripture:

  • In Genesis 15.16, God tells Abram that his descendants will be exiled for 400 years, after which they will return to the Promised Land of Canaan, “for the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet full.” Here we learn that God is showing mercy to the Canaanites, whose land God has promised to Abram and his descendants, by giving them 400 years to repent (or, as my Dad would have said, “straighten up”). God knows, as he knows all things, that they won’t repent, but rather “fill up” their sins, bringing judgment on themselves.
  • In his prophecy of the coming world kingdoms, Daniel reveals (Dn 8.23) that an evil ruler (commonly interpreted to be Antiochus IV “Epiphanes”) will arise “when the transgressors have filled up.”* Again, the context is of evil cultures exceeding all moral norms and “maxxing out” their sinfulness.
  • Finally, in his condemnation of the scribes and Pharisees of his day, Jesus tells them to “fill up … the measure of the guilt of your fathers … from the blood of the righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah … whom you murdered between the Temple and the altar” (Mt 23.32-35). He concludes the outburst by saying, “Truly I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation” (Mt 23.36). That is, the bowl of guilt has been filled to the brim; it’s time for judgment. And what a judgment it was—the city of Jerusalem and the cherished Temple reduced to rubble, and the Jewish people scattered to the four winds for nearly 1900 years.

The picture in all these passages is consistent. Mankind, inclined to evil, rejects God’s will and pursues his own. In kindness and grace, God withholds punishment, giving mankind ample opportunity to come to his senses and repent, righting the wrongs that he has perpetrated. But he sees the apparent lack of punishment as “getting away with it,” and he accelerates down the slope of rebellion without compunction or restraint.

But God is just as well as merciful, and his compassionate mercy does not allow for perpetual unrighted injustice. A day of reckoning will surely come. The vessel of sin will eventually be full, and the time for justice will arrive. Wrong will be righted. The offender will be held to account.

Since God does not change, this principle applies to our culture as certainly as to any in the past. We live in a society that is rapidly filling up the measure of its sins—in its arrogance against God and his people, in its rejection of his wise design for sexual behavior, in its worship of all things temporal, in its love for violence, in its denial of justice to the poor and otherwise powerless and favoritism toward the powerful and favored.

God’s people can take comfort in the surety of coming justice, from a God who can execute it in ways far more just, pervasive, and thorough than anything we can devise for ourselves.

* For the nerds among my readers, I note that the verb “filled up” in 1 Thessalonians is anapleroo, the same verb in the Septuagint (LXX) of Gn 15.16. The verb in Daniel (LXX) and Matthew is pleroo.

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On Unity

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I think this is a good time to post a few thoughts on the theological and biblical basis for unity.

In the Bible, everything starts with God—not just chronologically (Ge 1.1), but essentially, ontologically; he is the grounding, as well as the beginning, of all things (Ro 11.36).

One of the most basic biblical teachings about God is that he is One (Dt 6.4). That implies a couple of ideas: first, that he is not divided; he is one in essence and thus is internally consistent. A second implication is that he is unique; there is no one like him and thus there are no other gods competing for his position (Dt 4.35, 39; Isa 44.6; Jn 17.3).

Now, those of us whose Bibles include the New Testament recognize that God exists in three persons, called the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I don’t intend to go into a defense or explication of the Trinity here, but just to note that the existence of three persons in the Godhead in no way compromises the essential unity of God. Jesus himself, who is God (Jn 1.1), calls the Father “the only true God” while distinguishing him from himself (Jn 17.3) even as he notes that “I and my Father are one” (Jn 10.30).

God is united in plan, purpose, and work as well as in essence. As just one example, all three members of the Godhead unite in the work of founding and preserving the church, the expression of the people of God from the New Testament period through today:

  • Founding (Ac 2.33, 38)
  • Baptismal formula (Mt. 28.19-20)
  • Salvation (2Co 1.21-22; 1P 1.1-2)
  • Sonship (Ga 4.6)
  • Inclusion of Gentiles (Ro 15.16)
  • Gifts (1Co 12.4-6)
  • Perseverance (Jude 20-21)
  • Benediction (2Co 13.14)

The fact that God acts in unity with himself means that our actions as well should be driven by his Oneness. As early as when Israel was constituted as a nation, God based his people’s behavior and interaction on his own unity. The Ten Commandments, which were the core of Israel’s “Constitution,” are presented twice in the Scripture, in Exodus 20 and in Deuteronomy (“second Law”) 6. In both places, God begins by reminding his people that He is One (Ex 20.2-3; Dt 6.4-5).

He sees his Oneness as the basis for all we do.

In our age, as I’ve noted, we as God’s people don’t find our identity primarily in national terms the way Israel did; the church consists of people “from every nation, tribe, people, and tongue” (Re 7.9; cf Mt 28.19). What is it that unites us?

Two things. Or one, depending on how you define them. Or him.

The Scripture says repeatedly that we are one “in Christ” (Jn 15.5-6; Ep 1.3-6; 10; 22-23), who in turn is “in the Father” (Jn 10.28-30; 1Co 3.23). Our unity as God’s people, then, depends entirely on God’s unity (Ep 4.4-6; Jn 17.21-23).

The Scripture also notes that we are one “in [the] truth” (2Th 2.13; 1Ti 4.6; 2P 1.12; 2J 4; 3J 1-4)—and it’s worth noting that Christ called himself “the truth” (Jn 14.6).

When division comes to the body—something that is deeply unnatural, though not unforeseen—it is generated by falsehood:

  • False teaching (2J 9-11; Re 2.14-16)
  • False living (Mt 18.15-17; 1Co 5.1ff; 2Th 3.6, 14-15)

In those cases the church is called to isolate those introducing falsehood, thereby protecting the unity and purity of the Body of Christ (1Co 5.1ff).

So.

Being one is part of the essence of who we are as God’s people. Though falsehood can drive us apart, it should be dealt with biblically so that unity—in the truth—can be restored. And that unity, in spite of physical and cultural divisions that ordinarily drive people apart, is designed to demonstrate to others, both earthly and heavenly, that there’s something supernaturally unique in the power that keeps us together (Ep 3.1-10).

That’s a lot to chew on.

These days we ought to be chewing more thoughtfully.

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Believing Prayer

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The prophet Isaiah is receiving visions from God that open to him the long corridor of future time.

The message is mixed.

The first 39 chapters of the book contain a lot of really bad news. The current bogeyman on the world stage, Assyria, is going to be replaced by another equally bad one, Babylon. And Babylon is going to be the hammer that brings judgment to Judah for its persistence in the very sins that have already brought God’s judgment on Israel through Assyria—

  • idolatry
  • mindless ritualism in worship
  • social injustice

And there’s no doubt that this judgment will come.

But starting with chapter 40, the tone and message change dramatically. Words of comfort. Promises of restoration and blessing. A Messiah. A Servant of Yahweh.

Near the end of the book there’s a passage that seems to get odder the longer you think about it.

1 For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent,
And for Jerusalem’s sake I will not keep quiet,
Until her righteousness goes forth like brightness,
And her salvation like a torch that is burning.
2 The nations will see your righteousness,
And all kings your glory;
And you will be called by a new name
Which the mouth of the Lord will designate.
3 You will also be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord,
And a royal diadem in the hand of your God (Is 62.1-3).

There’s the promise of blessing, which will surely come to undeserving Jerusalem. But the part that really catches my eye is the first verse. This blessing, this restoration is so critically important to God that he will not stop talking about it. He will not rest until he brings it to pass.

That sets us up for an even more remarkable statement a bit farther down the passage:

6 On your walls, O Jerusalem, I have appointed watchmen;
All day and all night they will never keep silent.
You who remind the Lord, take no rest for yourselves;
7 And give Him no rest until He establishes
And makes Jerusalem a praise in the earth.

God orders his people to hold him to his promise—to badger him, to nag him, to hector him—to “give him no rest” until the promise is fulfilled. And the exclamation point on all this is that he himself has appointed those “watchmen” with the specific task of hectoring him.

God’s really, really serious about keeping his promises.

You’re probably thinking about the implications of this principle for our prayer life, and you’re right to do so; Jesus himself endorses that application.

In Luke 18 Jesus tells a parable about an unjust judge who doesn’t care about the people or the cases they bring before him. But there’s this woman who just won’t quit bothering him about her case. Eventually he rules justly, not because he cares for justice, but because he’s sick and tired of the woman’s hectoring. As he puts it, “by continually coming she will wear me out” (Lk 18.5)—literally, “give me a black eye.” No mas, he says.

Unfortunately, some Christians have assumed from this parable that God is like the unjust judge—that he needs to be convinced to help us, that we have to beat him down and wear him out to extract his begrudging grace. But as my colleague Layton Talbert has wisely and reverently noted, this kind of thinking misses the whole point of the passage.

Jesus is not saying that the Father is like the unjust judge; to the contrary, his point is that the Father is not like the judge. This is an a fortiori argument, one from the weaker to the stronger: if even an unjust judge will do the right thing when asked—enough, and with enough force—how much more will your heavenly Father do the right thing when we ask him? If a judge will do this for someone he doesn’t even know or care about, how much more will our Father, who cares for us as his own children, do for us when we ask? (Lk 18.6-7).

God is the kind of person who listens to his children and responds to them generously. He even appoints people to nag him until he keeps his promises (Is 62.6-7), even though he’s completely focused on their good and doesn’t need to be reminded (Is 62.1).

Go ahead and ask.

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When You’re Tempted to Hate People, Part 10: Relenting

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Part 1: Introduction |  Part 2: Description | Part 3: Compassion | Part 4: Grace | Part 5: Patience | Part 6: Loyal Love | Part 7: Faithfulness | Part 8: Forgiveness | Part 9: Justice & Mercy

As we’ve noted earlier, this list of God’s core attributes is repeated throughout the Old Testament, all the way through the age of the prophets and to the return from Babylon. Interestingly, the prophets add a line to the description: “relenting of evil” (Joel 2.13) or “one who relents concerning calamity” (Jonah 4.2).

As the NASB makes clear in the Jonah passage, the word translated “evil” refers here not to moral evil, but to calamity or disaster. God had warned Israel that if they departed from him, he would send calamity their way (Dt 30.15-20). He warned of specific calamities: drought, famine, war, disease (Dt 28.15ff). And Israel played that script out multiple times.

But when his people repent, God relents. He restores the relationship, despite the offense.

Now, when we talk about God relenting, or repenting, or changing his mind, that raises all kinds of logical and theological questions. I plan to deal with that issue in a future post. For now, let’s just grant that the Scripture uses that kind of language about God, as astonishing as it is.

I’ve heard it said that you shouldn’t forgive people until they repent, because God doesn’t. Fair enough. But there are some further considerations to the point.

Since God is omniscient, he knows whether our repentance is sincere. Can we know that for certain?

No, we can’t. And interestingly, Jesus tells us to forgive people whenever they ask, with no reference to “sincerity” (Mt 18.22)—and frankly, if my brother asked me to forgive him 490 times for the same thing, I’d start to wonder whether he meant it. But Jesus says to forgive him anyway.

And, come to think of it, when we repent, God knows whether we’re going to fail again (and usually, the answer is yes). And he forgives us anyway.

If God, whose plans are perfect, who is never surprised, can forgive and relent of planned disaster, what about us? We’re not omniscient, and our plans aren’t perfect, and we are often surprised. If God can relent, shouldn’t we?

Why not go to your enemy, and offer him your hand, your arms, your friendship? Why not take back the things you said, the threats you made?

Why not make the first move?

__________

The premise of this series is that we ought to treat others—all others—as God has treated us. Mockery, disdain, sarcasm, dismissal, ranting, vilification—God has never done that to us, although we have repeatedly deserved it for the way we’ve treated him.

No, God’s character won’t allow that. Just as he can’t lie, so also he can’t treat us in the ways we so naturally treat people we disagree with, or people we dislike, or people who lie about us or trivialize our concerns.

We need to be like him.

Pick somebody you really dislike—maybe a public figure, maybe a personal acquaintance.

And then think about how God would treat—indeed, has treated—him:

  • Compassion
  • Grace
  • Patience
  • Loyal love
  • Faithfulness
  • Forgiveness
  • Justice with mercy
  • Relenting of calamity

And do those things.

And to get really serious, pray that God would do those things for him too.

Maybe, one relationship at a time, we can be agents of peace rather than strife—lights in the world, instead of darkness.

If your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness.
If then the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! (Mt 6.23).

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When You’re Tempted to Hate People, Part 9: Justice and Mercy

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Part 1: Introduction |  Part 2: Description | Part 3: Compassion | Part 4: Grace | Part 5: Patience | Part 6: Loyal Love | Part 7: Faithfulness | Part 8: Forgiveness

We’re exploring God’s foundational description of himself, on the assumption—well founded in Scripture—that we ought to treat others the way he does. We’re getting to the end of the list, where there’s a cluster of attributes that we really need to discuss together.

Exodus 34.7 puts it this way:

yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations.

We’re tempted to find this troubling. God’s a hard master, demanding perfection and beating us when we fall short, and even bringing our grandkids into it.

Oh, that’s not what this passage is saying at all. Like all of God’s other attributes, this is a good one, one to delight in.

To begin with, let’s observe that he brings justice to the guilty. There’s no reason we ought to look askance on that. In fact, if you’ll think about it, we all want justice, when people have wronged us. The only situation in which we don’t want justice is when we’re the guilty one—or when of one our friends is.

Test yourself. Suppose someone committed a heinous crime against your family, and at his trial the judge said, “Look, I know you’re basically a good person. If you’ll promise not to do anything like this again, we’ll just forget it ever happened.”

How happy would you be?

Not at all. We want justice.

The world’s an unjust place. There’s abuse, and fraud, and falsehood, and violence, and murder. We have justice systems, but we often don’t get it right. We ought to do better. And it’s good—a delight—to know that there’s someone keeping records, who has the power to right all these wrongs, and who will certainly do so.

So the first clause is a good thing. God will right all the wrongs.

But what about the rest of it? What about visiting the sins of the fathers on the children? How is that just?

Well, God has designed the universe so that if you do right, things generally turn out better than if you don’t. (Yes, in a sin-broken universe it doesn’t always turn out that way, but that’s still very much the pattern.)

Now, suppose I kill somebody. I’m not the only one in my family who’s going to be affected by that. I’ll go to prison or even be executed, sure. But my wife will have to carry on without my help, and my children won’t have a Dad—and if they’re school age, they’ll face the reproach of classmates, and on it will go. Because of that trauma, there may well be ongoing effects in their children, and even in their grandchildren. Three or four generations.

God has designed the system that way, and the design encourages us to do the right thing. That’s a good thing.

But maybe there’s still a little itch inside you that wonders if he couldn’t have designed things better than this.

OK, it’s time to broaden the context.

The first time this principle is stated in the Bible is just a few chapters earlier, in the Ten Commandments. Here’s the specific wording:

I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me, 6 but showing lovingkindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments (Ex 20.5b-6).

“To thousands” of what? The context is clear: to thousands of generations.

How long is a thousand generations? 20,000 years? 25,000 years?

I’m a young-earth creationist. I don’t think the earth has even been here that long.

Yes, sin carries consequences that involve more than the sinner himself. But grace—that goes on forever. Where sin abounds, grace superabounds (Rom 5.20).

So here in Exodus 34, I think we can tie several clauses together—

  • who keeps lovingkindness for thousands [of generations], …
  • yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished,
  • visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations.

This is all one attribute: he maintains justice while extending mercy far beyond the reach of the most heinous sin. He does all things well.

And what of us, and the way we treat our enemies?

Justice. But superabounding mercy.

Part 10: Relenting

Photo by Uriel Soberanes on Unsplash

When You’re Tempted to Hate People, Part 8: Forgiveness

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Part 1: Introduction |  Part 2: Description | Part 3: Compassion | Part 4: Grace | Part 5: Patience | Part 6: Loyal Love | Part 7: Faithfulness

So far we’ve seen that God is compassionate, and gracious, and slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness, and abounding in truth. The next item in our list in Exodus 34.6-7 is “keeping lovingkindness for thousands,” but with your kind permission I’m going to skip that one and come back to it later, when we look into “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children.”

So we’ll move to the next clause, which states that God “forgives iniquity, transgression, and sin.” The statement seems clear enough, but there are things to note here that will enrich our understanding of its meaning.

I’d like to start with the end. Why doesn’t God just say that he “forgives sin”? Why does he pile on the synonyms? I think he does this for at least two reasons.

  • First, repetition in most languages is a means
    of emphasis, and in Hebrew particularly. A common Hebraism is to repeat a word
    so as to say simply “very” or “surely.” There’s an example of this right at the
    beginning of Scripture, where God tells Adam that if he eats of the fruit from
    the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, ”dying you shall die” (Gen 2.17).
    Most English translations render that construction “You shall surely die” (KJV
    NKJV NASB ESV) or “You will certainly die” (NIV GW CSB). So perhaps here God is
    emphasizing the sinfulness of sin and the certainty of his willingness to
    forgive.
  • But further, I think God is making the point
    that his forgiveness is as broad and deep and extensive as the very nature of
    sin itself. Cultures have lots of synonyms for words referring to concepts that
    they encounter a lot. There’s an old observation that
    Eskimos (Inuit) have lots of words for snow. As Nahum demonstrates, ancient
    Near Eastern languages had lots of words for locusts (Nah 3.15-17). And in both
    Hebrew and Greek, there are lots of words for
    sin. We humans have found that sin manifests itself in multiple forms and works
    with multiple methods and appeals to multiple human weaknesses. It’s a
    deep-seated, complex, exceedingly difficult problem.

The words God lists here are just 3 of many Hebrew words for sin. Each of these tells us a little more about the problem.

  • “Iniquity” is ‘awon, used 232 times in
    the OT. It speaks specifically of being twisted, bent, or perverse, and it
    includes the guilt that comes from such perversity. Sin is brokenness, the kind
    that should be disgusting to us but sadly isn’t. It interferes with our
    designed function, much as a broken arm keeps the patient from writing or
    throwing or hugging in the way he was designed to.
  • “Transgression” is pesha`. It speaks of
    crossing a line that shouldn’t be crossed, of transgressing a boundary, and
    thus of rebellion, acting willfully, brazenly, and obstinately against the
    rules (Is 57.4). This is the kind of behavior in children that makes the
    grownups really angry.
  • “Sin” is chatta’, a word that emphasizes
    that the act is an offense, a violation, and deserves to be punished.

Working backwards through the phrase, we come to the verb. God “forgives” all these things. The root means to lift (2K 4.36) or to carry (Josh 3.6), and thus to carry away (Gen 27.3), to dispose of (Ex 28.38)—of sin, to forgive (Gen 50.17; 1S 25.28). This is a burden the forgiver bears; he is the one who takes action to remove the offense.

God forgives—carries away—our sins, in all their complexity and multiplicity and pervasive rottenness. He throws them behind his back (Is 38.17), to the bottom of the sea (Mic 7.19), as far as the east is from the west (Ps 103.12). He knows all about them, and he can remember them, but he will not (Jer 31.34). “Omniscient, all-knowing, he counts not their sum.”

We should do that too. We should move toward those who disgust us, who revulse us, inexorably drawn to the image of God in them—as God himself is—and act for their benefit in seeking to liberate them from the overwhelming burden of the complex sinful condition they bear.

Doing that is an act of worship.

Hating them isn’t.

Part 9: Justice & Mercy | Part 10: Relenting

Photo by Uriel Soberanes on Unsplash

When You’re Tempted to Hate People, Part 7: Faithfulness

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Part 1: Introduction |  Part 2: Description | Part 3: Compassion | Part 4: Grace | Part 5: Patience | Part 6: Loyal Love

So far we’ve seen that God is compassionate, and gracious, and slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness. Now we find that God is “abounding in truth” (KJV NASB) or “abounding in faithfulness” (ESV NIV).

Let me insert a little sidebar observation on what we’ve stumbled into.

The English versions differ substantively in what they say here. Truth and faithfulness are related in meaning, but they can be distinguished: truth is a state, and faithfulness is a character quality. Usually when translations have differences like this, there is one of two things going on—

  • The Hebrew or Greek word, like pretty much all words, has multiple meanings, or nuances, or dictionary definitions, and in this context more than one of them would make sense—so the translators chose the one they thought was more likely. In other words, the meaning is ambiguous in the original language. This is a translation issue.
  • There are two or more different Hebrew or Greek words in the manuscript copies we have, and the textual critics whom the translators are consulting disagree on which reading is more likely. This is a technical matter of textual criticism.

Now, most people don’t know the original languages and don’t have the expertise to make a judgment about translating a given word or choosing a given textual reading. But you’ve just seen that by comparing several English translations, we did notice that something was up—that there’s a question about the meaning of the phrase. (In this case it’s the former option—a translation issue—which we’ll get to in a minute.) And we didn’t need to know any Hebrew or Greek to recognize that there’s a question. Now we know to consult a commentary to find more information.

Do you see the value of using multiple translations? You get access to training and technical expertise that you yourself don’t have. So don’t ask which is the “best” translation. Use them all. (Yeah, except the heretical ones like that Jehovah’s Witness monstrosity.) Compare them. Think.

End of sidebar.

As I’ve implied already, the word truth here has a broad range of meaning. At its most literal, it speaks of firmness and consequently permanence, what we might call “long-lastingness” (e.g. Jer 14.13). More abstractly, it speaks of faithfulness—of sticking to a task or a promise or a commitment (Gen 47.29; Neh 7.2; Is 16.5), or of being genuine (Is 10.20; Jer 2.21; 28.9). And since a person’s promises are true if he keeps them, it means “correctness” (Gen 24.48; Pr 22.21) or more commonly “truth” (Gen 42.16; Dt 13.14; Pr 29.14; Is 43.9).

God abounds in this. Most simply, he speaks the truth; he cannot lie (Ti 1.2), and so his Word—the incarnate Christ (Jn 1.1) and the resulting inerrant record about him (Jn 16.13)—cannot be broken (Jn 10.35). Any statement you find in the Word—assuming you’re reading it as the Spirit intended*—you can take to the bank.

But God’s character, and the words describing it, are deeper and richer than that. He speaks the truth, yes, but more to the point here, he keeps his promises. He persists in the loyalties that he has established. We’ve developed that concept already in the previous phrase.

God has a relationship with you. And he will persist in that relationship to the end of time and eternally beyond, because that’s the kind of person he is.

And that means that to be like him, we’re going to have to tell the truth too. We’re going to have to regard our word as our bond, to keep our promises. When we sing of the grace “that saved a wretch like me,” we’re going to have to mean it, and we’re going to have to be gracious to other wretches, even when they’re still deep in their wretchedness, as we were when God found us.

I haven’t said yet what the actual Hebrew word is. It’s ‘emeth, which is related to the word ‘emunah, “faithfulness,” which is where we get our word “Amen”—“May it be so.”

Amen.

* I suppose that calls for a series here on hermeneutics, doesn’t it?

Part 8: Forgiveness | Part 9: Justice & Mercy | Part 10: Relenting

Photo by Uriel Soberanes on Unsplash