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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Integrity Matters, Part 1: Two Commandments

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Everybody knows about the Ten Commandments. Not everybody knows what they are, and nobody obeys them perfectly, but the term is pervasive as an expression for Doing Good.

It’s been often observed that the commandments come on two tablets—not just literally (Ex 31.18), but logically as well. Commandments 1-4 address our relationship with God, answering to the Great Commandment (“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God,” Mt 22.36-38), while commandments 5-10 address our relationship with other humans, answering to the Second Commandment (“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” Mt 22.39). And within that second table, many have noticed that the last 4 seem to be related:

14 You shall not commit adultery.
15 You shall not steal.
16 You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
17 You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor (Ex 20.14-17).

Adultery and coveting (especially coveting your neighbor’s wife) seem of a piece, bookending the prohibitions on stealing and lying, or “bearing false witness.”

I’d like to spend a post or two on these last-mentioned two as connected. Stealing, I’d suggest, is really just a form of lying—which is why the two so often travel together.

Stealing, as we all know, is taking something that doesn’t belong to you. We know instinctively that that’s wrong, but it’s worth our time to think systematically through the reasons why.

  • Like all the other sins listed in the Second Table, stealing is failing to love your neighbor, since you’re depriving him of something that he has earned:

8 Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. 9 The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” 10 Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law (Ro 13.8-10).

  • But when you do that, you’re engaging in a whole list of lies. You’re saying that
    • Your neighbor is not in fact in the image of God, deserving your respect;
    • What you’ve taken really and rightly belongs, or should belong, to you;
    • God, your abundantly generous heavenly Father, hasn’t given you everything you need;
    • You need more—and God doesn’t care enough about that need to give you what you need in a legitimate way;
    • If you’re a believer, you’re saying that you haven’t taken off the cloak of ungodliness and put on the cloak of righteousness (Ep 4.17-25). You’re saying that God hasn’t fundamentally changed you from your unbelieving days. As a believer, you’re living as though you’re still by nature a child of wrath (Ep 2.3). That’s like being a square circle—it doesn’t make any sense at all.

So when you steal, you’re lying, in multiple and obvious ways. It’s no surprise, then, that Paul mentions both together:

25 So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another. … 28 Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy (Ep 4.25-28).

Note his requirement that thieves work “honestly” with their hands, in contrast with the lying way they had “worked” before.

When you steal, you’re not telling the truth, and you’re not living the truth. And there’s nothing good down that road. Since you don’t like it when other people do that to you, how can you possibly excuse it in yourself? 

In the next post I’d like to look at an incident of lying and stealing in the Bible.

Part 2: Case Study

Photo by Sean Foster on Unsplash

How Not to Have a Civil War, Part 5: Pants on Fire

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Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Acknowledging the Divide | Part 3: “Great Is Diana!” | Part 4: Letting Hate Drive

Paul has identified 2 ways that we bring division to our societies: 1) unrestrained sexual thinking and behavior (Col 3.5), and 2) unrestrained hatred (Col 3.8). He turns now to a third way: disregard for the truth.

Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices (Col 3.9).

I’ve written on this topic before. It astonishes me—though it probably shouldn’t—how much falsehood is being circulated in our society by people who ought to know better.

The people I’m noticing ought to know better for several reasons—

  • They’re generally older and more experienced in life, and we used to think that age and experience brought wisdom.
  • They were educated in a day when the education system was less relativistic—that is, when educators generally thought that there was such a thing as “truth” and that it could be determined by careful observation and analysis. They were supposed to have learned how to do research and how to recognize unreliable sources.
  • Most important, these are people who claim—and I want to accept their claim—to have walked with Christ, who is the Truth, for many years; to have learned from his Word; and to have sought to follow it.

It’s not fair to expect such people, or any people, to be right all the time, but it is reasonable to expect them to take care to discern the truth, especially before they propagate it.

So why the misinformation?

I’d suggest several contributing factors:

  • Desperation. The loudest voices in our culture these days seem to be people who think we’re about to fall off a cliff culturally, and that it’s up to us to prevent that fall. While it’s certainly right to seek the welfare of the community where God has placed us (Jer 29.7), and to exercise our privileges when we live, by God’s kind providence, in a participatory governmental system, God’s people must do so in a way that trusts him for the outcome rather than living in fear of undesired results or in desperation to benefit at any cost. Desperation is a fundamentally unbiblical attitude.
  • Confirmation bias. We humans think we’re right—we would be acting insanely if we didn’t—and we enjoy having the rightness of our views confirmed. That’s natural. But if the Scripture tells us anything, it’s that “natural” is not a synonym for “good” (1Co 2.14). The Lord tells us to distrust our inclinations, to be suspicious of our natural ways of thinking (Jer 17.9). As we can easily discern when we consider anyone who disagrees with us, confirmation bias is just a form of pride: it’s our seeking for approval through the praise of our own thinking and conclusions. Admitting that you’re wrong is a humbling experience.
  • Tribalism. By this I don’t mean having a circle of like-minded people; we all do that, and it can be lived out in a healthy way. I mean the tendency to withdraw into such a circle and to exclude those outside. These days this problem is exacerbated by social media. The algorithms of Facebook and other social media platforms tend to shrink rather than expand the number of ideas we interact with. We get offered “friend suggestions” of people who think the same way we do. We’re channeled, like cattle, into herds that are capable only of reinforcing the ideas we express most passionately. In that situation, our ideas will likely not be challenged in any kind of thoughtful way, and the only expressions of opposing ideas will be simplistic and cartoonish, just so we can dismiss them without serious thought.

And so we express ourselves by passing on some claim that we got from someone who agrees with us, and we don’t check it because it’s obviously true. And within minutes scores of our “friends” congratulate us for being so brave and insightful and smart, and the rush of endorphins propels us like a Waikiki wave on to our next absurd oversimplification—our next lie.

Rather than sensing the quiet voice of the Spirit in conviction of our carelessness, we revel in the praise of “friends” we barely know, just because there are so many of them.

And the division spreads.

We sow, and we reap.

We have no one to blame but ourselves. 

Part 6: Turning Toward the Light | Part 7: Breaking Down the Walls | Part 8: Beyond Tolerance | Part 9: Love | Part 10: Peace | Part 11: Encouragement | Part 12: Gratitude

Photo by Jens Lelie on Unsplash

On Weather and Fables

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As I post this, Hurricane Florence is bearing down on the Carolinas, predicted to make landfall today and to reach here in the SC Upstate over the weekend. For days we’ve been hearing about how bad this storm is, with dire warnings to run for your life if you’re on the coast—and this one, they say, will have surprisingly destructive force far inland, even here above the fall line.

I believe them. But a lot of people don’t. They’re staying put. And the local first responders are collecting the names of their next of kin so they can notify them after the fools are dead.

Why don’t people listen to such grave warnings?

Well, some people are just foolish. That’s part of human nature. But I think these days there’s more involved.

In recent years journalism has become almost entirely ratings driven. Every story has to be hyped. Local news desks give you a teaser at 8 pm so you’ll tune in at 11—and when you do, the story turns out to be not as big a deal as the teaser implied. In fact, the teaser is more like a National Enquirer headline than actual journalism. And the national desks do it as well. For some time now, Fox News’s Bret Baier has been introducing his evening broadcast—“Special Report”—with an “ALERT” logo—to imply that there’s breaking news, when usually there isn’t.

Everything’s a Big Deal. Go for the adrenaline. Capture the eyeballs. Every day.

And the weather folks are doing it too. Local and national weatherpeople, even the agencies that feed them information—the National Weather Service, the National Hurricane Center, and so on. Every storm is the Storm of the Century, or the Snowpocalypse, or some other frightening neologism.

And they start saying these things 5 or 6 days out, before they can have any sort of reading of the storm with any scientific basis. At that point they can’t predict the path—but it MIGHT hit a population center!—or the intensity or the size of the storm. But they can get several days of good ratings by fearmongering.

Why do they do this? I’m sure they would say that they’re doing a public service by giving the population plenty of time to prepare for any eventuality. And they do, and for that I’m grateful.

But I think it’s demonstrable that there are other reasons as well. For the news outlets, they want the ratings, the eyeballs, because that drives the ad fees, and that means money in their pockets. For the agencies, they want the exposure, because that usually turns into stable future funding. There’s a strong element of self-interest in this.

Which is fine—capitalism and all that—except that there’s a downside.

As Aesop noted all those centuries ago, when the boy cries “Wolf!” repeatedly, eventually people stop believing him—even when he’s telling the truth.

Now, lots of people in Charleston remember Hugo, and lots of people in New Orleans remember Camille and Katrina, and they’re wise enough to get ready and get out. We’ve seen the interstates looking like parking lots the last couple of days, and I had a visitor in my class this morning who’s been evacuated from his school down on the coast.

But other people in hurricane-prone areas have heard repeated frenetic warnings about literally every storm with a snowball’s chance of reaching any point of the North American coastline. And in many cases those storms were described superlatively—this is a rare and even unique threat. And in most of those cases, the warnings haven’t panned out—usually because the hype started before there was any scientific basis for it.

When you’ve seen that happen a few times, you’re tempted to start downplaying the warnings. Significant numbers of people who live on the coast, and who can remember the last 20 years, are going to board up their windows, buy some batteries and bottled water, and settle in to watch the storm through their beach-facing picture windows.

And eventually, some of them are going to die—probably in great quantities, during the same genuinely powerful storm.

And whose fault is that? Might there be blame for more people than just the ones who died?

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

On Funerals for Politicians

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This past Saturday was the funeral for John McCain, a long-time US senator and, many years ago, a long-time prisoner of war in Vietnam. In our hotly divided political climate, even his funeral became big news and a source of political contention.

I’m not going to weigh in on the politics of it all. There’s no lack of voices doing that, and the question of whether his funeral was too political or not is none of my business and frankly none of yours either. On the matter of what’s done at his funeral, I think the decision is the family’s to make, and the family’s alone. But the controversy does bring to mind some implications that go far beyond the politics of any moment, implications that we ought to consider—“we” being not just those with an interest in the American political process, but anyone with an interest in any political process.

Most news outlets have noted the tributes given to McCain by political friend and foe alike. Perhaps the best example is a line from former President Obama, who said, “So much of our politics, our public life, our public discourse, can seem small and mean and petty, trafficking in bombast and insult, in phony controversies and manufactured outrage. … We never doubted the other man’s sincerity or the other man’s patriotism, or that when all was said and done, we were on the same team.”

Responses to Mr. Obama’s words, and to others like them, have typically been driven by political motives. Those on the political left have celebrated the fact that the former president, who ran against and defeated McCain in a presidential election, could speak so respectfully and generously of him. Those who voted against Obama in that election, however, accuse him, and all the other political liberals who are now lauding McCain’s “maverick spirit” and “honor” and “principles,” of being hypocrites, especially given the vitriolic language heaped on McCain by those same opponents and their campaign supporters in that election.

What interests me in all this is not Mr. Obama’s words or any of the other recent commendations. What interests me is what those words tell us about the earlier political campaign. All those excoriations, all those dire warnings during the campaign about how dangerous McCain was, or how hateful or personally flawed he was, were actually meaningless; by their own present words, McCain’s political foes actually respected him and saw him as virtuous—on the same team, as Mr. Obama put it. But they reviled him back then, because politics, you know. Have to win the election. Say whatever it takes.

And let’s not pretend that only the political left does that. Those on the right are just as inclined—aren’t they?—to say things that aren’t true just to get their guy elected, or to get votes for this or that piece of legislation.

John McCain died of cancer, a particular type of cancer—glioblastoma—that crouches in my mind as well. It killed my brother, and it killed my pastor, the man whose signature is on the paperwork that forms the legal basis for the decades of life my wife and I have shared. A friend of mine, a neurosurgeon, once told me that glioblastoma is a just a nasty piece of work, and he said he hopes he’s seen the last of it he’ll ever see. It’s the worst.

But I’m not sure it is. There’s another cancer, one that infests our national brain and is killing our ability to govern ourselves as surely as glioblastoma killed John McCain. With the size of our federal government, and consequently the power at stake in every national election, the desperation to win leads us to savage ourselves with lies, to say whatever it takes to get our way. And our leaders acknowledge that, whenever they say that this or that vitriolic conflict is “just politics.”

How healthy, how healthful, can a system be that is based on lies?

It’s a mark of strength when we can speak respectfully of the dead, with whom we disagreed in life. But it’s a mark of great sickness when in doing so we put the lie to how we lived.

Photo by Scott Rodgerson on Unsplash

Pants on Fire

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I guess it’s time to post here something I posted on Facebook back in 2016:

I’ve seen a trend recently that bothers me. I see my FB friends posting things that aren’t true–that are demonstrably, objectively, documented as untrue. When that is pointed out, they respond, “I don’t know whether this is true or not; but I just wanted to get it out there.”

Outspoken believers. Christian teachers. Pastors. Missionaries. People with a long record of devoted, apparently selfless service.

Where to start.

God is truth, and Satan is the father of lies. Believers, who claim to follow God, ought to be really serious about the truth. They ought to care whether something is true or not. And they ought to take 30 seconds to find out whether something is true before they post it. If you don’t,

  • how worthy is a cause that you need falsehood to support?
  • is the truth not powerful enough to get the job done?
  • how will you give account to God for your haphazard approach to things that are important to Him?
  • what kind of an ambassador for God are you being?
  • why should anyone believe anything you say?
  • why would you want to give the enemies of God reason to blaspheme?

Maybe it’s time we take a deep breath, refocus, and reprioritize. In a billion years, this stuff is going to look really foolish.

That was two years ago, just days before the last presidential election. In the meantime, the situation has only gotten worse.

And on and on it goes.

Let that sink in.

And when the lie is pointed out, you get rejoinders that just make it worse:

  • Well, it sounds like something she could have said.
  • Well, snopes.com is just 3 weird people who like Soros. What does that have to do with whether the quotation is true or not? If you don’t like Snopes as a source, how about looking at the 14.9 million—OK, several hundred—other hits on the alleged quotation?
  • Or sadly, there’s no response at all, and the post stays up. Got no evidence; just liked what it said.

And this from people who get really angry when somebody says there’s no such thing as absolute truth.

God is love, and he loves you, even when you say these things. But love for one thing engenders hate for what would destroy it, and God himself tells us that he hates some things (Prov 6.16-19).

And two of those things that he hates (out of just 7 listed here) are “a lying tongue” and “a false witness.” Two out of seven. You just managed to hit more than a quarter of what God hates. Pretty productive post, considering how little thought went into it.

And throughout our culture, as depraved and perverted as it is, most people are still sensitive enough to the image of God in them that they’re going to despise your dishonesty, and they’re not going to believe anything you say ever again.

Even if it’s John 3.16.

So you need to decide whether zinging an eccentric woman from California is more important than carrying out the Great Commission. And if it isn’t, sounds like you have some repenting to do—taking down some posts, and stating your repentance as publically as you posted the lies.

And then, by God’s grace, reveling in his forgiveness (1Jn 1.9), and living the Truth.

Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash