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 Abundance, Part 1: Needs and Wants

June 28, 2021 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

We humans need stuff. We need food, and clothing, and shelter, and we need a way to get those things. The past year has made us aware of how much we need other things, too: love, companionship, interaction, variety.

We also want stuff. We want money—always just a bit more than we have. We want better health—even if we live in ways that seem to contradict that. We want recognition, which these days comes most commonly by way of likes and shares and congratulatory comments.

In Western culture, our natural tendency to want what we don’t have is exacerbated by the advertisements that bombard us pretty much constantly, especially if we’re the kind of person who permanently stores his phone in his hand rather than his pocket. You need this app; you need these shoes; you need that car; you need a vacation in Cozumel.

We’re a needy bunch.

I’ve noticed that my students’ generation, while still inclined to neediness—or wantiness—is trending away from stuff. Minimalism is cool (see under “Marie Kondo”). Newlyweds don’t want fine china anymore.

Good for them. It’s easier to pick up and go when you don’t have to think about tons (literally) of stuff that will be worthless in the long run.

Similarly, my wife and I have reached a stage in life where we really don’t want more stuff for Christmas, or birthdays, or anniversaries. We have what we need, and, apart from the occasional jar of cashews or tub of ice cream, we have pretty much what we want in terms of physical things.

But for a great many people, the wish list on Amazon is still a Very Big Deal. I need. I want. I wish I had.

Now, you’re expecting a blog post excoriating acquisitiveness. There’s a place for that, but my thoughts are running in a different direction.

I’m thinking about wealth.

The Bible says that God is endlessly rich. The old chorus said that “he owns the cattle on a thousand hills,” a concept drawn from Psalm 50.10:

Every beast of the forest is Mine, The cattle on a thousand hills.

When the returnees from exile in Babylon are doing their best to rebuild Solomon’s Temple, and producing a recognizably inferior product (Hag 2.3), God encourages these faithful laborers by telling him that this temple isn’t going to be about the silver and gold; “If you needed silver and gold, I have plenty,” he says (Hag 2.8), but he’s going to make this temple great in other, more substantive and infinitely valuable ways (Hag 2.6-9). And indeed, it was this temple—specifically Herod’s renovation of it—that saw the baby Jesus presented for circumcision, and the boy Jesus astonish the rabbis, and the man Jesus clear out the merchants—and the veil torn open by the Father himself as his Son paid the price for the separation between God and his people.

God is rich in the earthly stuff, and he’s rich in the heavenly stuff as well.

And, as we wish for from the rich, he’s generous too. Over the years he’s blessed a lot of his people financially, starting with Job and continuing to Abraham and many, many others, down to this day. While I’m not rich in American statistical terms, I’m wildly wealthy in comparison with most of the rest of the world, and it’s pretty likely that you are too. I have all I need, as well as a lot of stuff I don’t need.

There’s a word in the Bible that embraces this concept. It’s the word abundance. I’d like to spend a few posts meditating on it—contrasting it with some of the nonsense being proposed by religious shysters these days, and laying out some specifics about the Father’s abundant blessing of his people.

Next time we’ll set out a definition.

Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash

Filed Under: Bible, Theology Tagged With: grace, word study

The Other Beatitudes, Part 4: Discipline

June 24, 2021 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Believing God | Part 3: Serving God

OK, it’s time now for the surprising part. Of the 90 or so places in the Bible that speak of someone as being “blessed” (Greek makarios), there are two that stop us in our tracks.

  • How happy is the one whom God reproves; therefore do not despise the discipline of the Almighty (Job 5.17).
  • Happy are those whom you discipline, O Lord, and whom you teach out of your law (Ps 94.12).

Wait, what? Blessed to be reproved by God? to be disciplined by him?

As always, we need to start by figuring out what these verses actually say, to ensure that we’re not getting a misimpression.

We notice immediately that the first of these verses is from Job, and if we check the context, we find that these are the words of Eliphaz the Temanite, one of Job’s friends (Jb 4.1). As I’ve noted elsewhere, we need to take these speeches with a grain of salt, because by the end of the book we find God rebuking all of Job’s friends for missing the truth (Jb 42.7-9). Indeed, even Job himself, though God calls him “right” (Jb 42.7), comes in for rebuke for missing the larger point of his experience (Jb 38.1ff).

The key word in the second passage is discipline, which in English calls to mind being taken out to the woodshed. The Hebrew word, yasar, can indeed mean to chasten or to punish, but it can also mean to admonish or warn, and even less threatening, to teach. (Teaching is, after all, the etymological root for discipline; we still use the word disciple to mean “student.”)

Now, we all know that a word doesn’t mean all of its meanings every time we use it; when I say “the sun set last night,” nobody thinks, “He’s saying that the sun is a collection of objects, like a chess set.” We decide which meaning of the word to apply by looking at the context; a “sunset” is very different from a “chess set,” which in turn is very different from “set concrete.”

So what’s the context here? This is Hebrew poetry, one key feature of which is parallelism; here, “those whom you discipline” is in parallel with “[those] whom you teach out of your law.” So I’m inclined to read this as saying simply that those whom the Lord teaches are blessed, by the simple virtue of divine instruction and care. This verse, then, should be included in Part 2 of this series, as an example of the many ways God’s people are described. And, for what it’s worth, I’m inclined to see the Job passage as truthful, based on the Psalms passage and other biblical context.

But it’s worth noting here that the Bible does speak of trials and even suffering in a positive sense. Paul compares such struggles to athletic training, noting that regular exertion builds stamina, and stamina brings the experience of success, which in turn builds confidence, which then extends our success (Ro 5.3-5). Paul even says that we “boast” in our suffering (Ro 5.3).

The author of Hebrews presents a different positive perspective on trials, noting that parental discipline is evidence that we have a Father who loves us (He 12.3-13).

When I was a boy, and inclined toward energetic distraction, my father would occasionally place his hand on the back of my head and turn it in the direction he wanted me to go.

I hated that.

I would shake my head out of his hand and seek to go my own way. But when it mattered, Dad would persist. He may have saved my life a time or two with that really irritating practice.

Our loving Heavenly Father disciplines us as well. He doesn’t “punish” us—the well-deserved punishment for our monstrous sins was inflicted not on us, the deserving, but on his blameless Son, by the Son’s own request. For the believer, hard times of testing are not punishment for anything, because all the punishment has been borne and exhausted.

But he disciplines, teaches us. He directs us through hard things to teach us the right way and to build our strength and fit us for greater victories. And he does it non-destructively, carefully, tenderly, lovingly.

It is indeed blessed to be disciplined, taught, by such a Father.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Filed Under: Bible Tagged With: bless, happiness, word study

The Other Beatitudes, Part 3: Serving God

June 21, 2021 by Dan Olinger 2 Comments

Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Believing God

The first pattern we noticed in the Bible’s statements of blessing (Greek makarios) is that God’s people, as described in any number of ways, are blessed. This is a matter of identity; whether or not you’re blessed depends on who you are. (And of course, that identity is in God, not in ourselves as deserving.)

The rest of the biblical beatitudes have to do with activity—what the person in question does.

Those who do righteousness are blessed: How blessed are those who keep justice, Who practice righteousness at all times! (Ps 106.3; cf Ps 112.1; 119.1-2; 128.1-2; Is 56.2; Jn 13.17; Rv 22.14). As in the previous section, this idea of good behavior is described in a variety of ways—

  • Those who hear and keep God’s Word (Lk 11.28; Jm 1.25; Rv 1.3; 22.7)
  • Those who delight in his commandments (Ps 112.1)
  • Those who have righteous parents—and presumably follow their upbringing  (Pr 20.7)
  • Those who consider the poor (Ps 41.1-2; Lk 14.14)
  • Those who give (Ac 20.35)

A specific type of commended behavior is perseverance or persistence. It’s not enough to be good just every so often; the key is having a pattern of good behavior.

  • Those who persevere in stewardship (Mt 24.46 // Lk 12.37-38, 43; Rv 16.15)
  • Those who are not offended in Jesus—that is, they don’t fall away from him (Mt 11.6 // Lk 7.23)
  • Those who endure trials / temptation / suffering (Jm 1.12; 1P 3.14; 4.14)

And finally, good behavior of course involves rejecting sin: How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, Nor stand in the path of sinners, Nor sit in the seat of scoffers!  (Ps 1.1; cf Ps 32.2; 40.4; Is 56.2)—and that in turn involves keeping a good conscience (Ro 14.22), stopping when and where your conscience tells you to stop.

Obviously we need to deal with the elephant in the room—do we keep our noses clean so that God will bless us? A few observations—

  • Scripture is very clear that we can’t be good enough to please God or to earn salvation (Is 64.6; Ti 3.5).
  • Similarly, God can’t be bribed, since he is no respecter of persons (Ro 2.11; Ep 6.9; Co 3.25).

So what’s going on in these verses? I’d suggest that there are two principles being asserted and illustrated here—

  • Many of these passages are from wisdom literature (Psalms, Proverbs, and James in particular). A common theme in such literature is that the world is designed so that things turn out better if you don’t do stupid things (as pretty much every teenaged boy, including yours truly back in the day, has demonstrated at one time or another). As John Wayne is reputed to have said, “Life is tough; it’s tougher if you’re stupid.” This isn’t about salvation; it’s about living in such a way that you minimize your risks in the here and now.
  • But there’s another principle here as well. Many of these passages are addressed to believers, those who have repented of their sin and placed their faith in Christ. Because such people are enlivened spiritually (Jn 3.5) and empowered by the indwelling Spirit of God (Ga 5.16; Ti 3.5), they are now capable of doing good, and in a persistent way; in fact, “good works” are a certain and unavoidable consequence of the change that God has worked in them (Ep 2.10; Ti 2.7, 3.8). So yes, people who do good works are blessed—not because God is unusually impressed with or bribed by them, but because they are living as they were designed to live, and such harmony with the will and plan of God brings blessing, the state that the Hebrew Scriptures call shalom, “peace,” when things are as they should be.

I said at the beginning of the series that there was a surprise in the biblical data. I don’t think we’ve seen anything surprising yet. That’s coming next time.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Filed Under: Bible Tagged With: bless, happiness, word study

The Other Beatitudes, Part 2: Believing God

June 17, 2021 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Introduction

Now that we’ve dealt with special uses of the Greek word for “blessed” (makarios), we can turn our attention to the passages that are true “beatitudes,” general blessings on various groups of people. There’s a fair amount of depth to the uses of the word, including a few surprises.

We should begin, I suppose, with an unsurprising group. Several passages speak of those whom God has chosen as blessed.

  • In his final blessing of the tribes of Israel just before his death, Moses sums up his prophecy with a general blessing on all Israel: Blessed are you, O Israel; Who is like you, a people saved by the Lord, Who is the shield of your help And the sword of your majesty! So your enemies will cringe before you, And you will tread upon their high places (Dt 33.29).
  • In a familiar passage the Psalmist writes, Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, The people whom He has chosen for His own inheritance (Ps 33.12; cf 144.15).
  • And in a focus on the individual, David writes, How blessed is the one whom You choose and bring near to You To dwell in Your courts. We will be satisfied with the goodness of Your house, Your holy temple (Ps 65.4).

Sometimes God’s (chosen) people are described in slightly different ways:

  • Those whose help is God: How blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, Whose hope is in the Lord his God (Ps 146.5).
  • Those who are invited to the Marriage Supper of the Lamb: Then he said to me, “Write, ‘Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.’ ” And he said to me, “These are true words of God” (Re 19.9).
  • The one who has a part in the first resurrection: Blessed and holy is the one who has a part in the first resurrection; over these the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Christ and will reign with Him for a thousand years (Re 20.6).

And often God’s people are identified in ways having to do with their trust or faith in him:

  • Those who trust in the Lord: How blessed is the man who has made the Lord his trust, And has not turned to the proud, nor to those who lapse into falsehood (Ps 40.4; cf 84.12).
  • Those who take refuge in him: Do homage to the Son, that He not become angry, and you perish in the way, For His wrath may soon be kindled. How blessed are all who take refuge in Him! (Ps 2.12).
  • Those whose hope is in God: How blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, Whose hope is in the Lord his God (Ps 146.5)
  • Those who long for God: Therefore the Lord longs to be gracious to you, And therefore He waits on high to have compassion on you. For the Lord is a God of justice; How blessed are all those who long for Him! (Is 30.18).
  • Those who dwell in God’s house: How blessed are those who dwell in Your house! They are ever praising You (Ps 84.4).
  • Those whose strength is in God: How blessed is the man whose strength is in You, In whose heart are the highways to Zion! (Ps 84.5).
  • Those who find wisdom: How blessed is the man who finds wisdom And the man who gains understanding (Pr 3.13; cf 8.34).
  • Those who fear the Lord: Praise the Lord! How blessed is the man who fears the Lord, Who greatly delights in His commandments (Ps 112.1; cf 128.1; Pr 28.14).
  • Those who know the joyful sound: How blessed are the people who know the joyful sound! O Lord, they walk in the light of Your countenance (Ps 89.15).
  • Those whose sin is forgiven: How blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, Whose sin is covered! How blessed is the man to whom the Lord does not impute iniquity, And in whose spirit there is no deceit! (Ps 32.1-2).
  • Those whom God enables to understand: But blessed are your eyes, because they see; and your ears, because they hear (Mt 13.16 // Lk 10.23).
  • Those who believe without seeing: Jesus said to him, “Because you have seen Me, have you believed? Blessed are they who did not see, and yet believed” (Jn 20.29).

Next time: there’s more!

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Filed Under: Bible Tagged With: bless, happiness, word study

The Other Beatitudes, Part 1: Introduction

June 14, 2021 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

We all know about the Beatitudes, the 9 statements at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5.3-11) in which Jesus identifies various kinds of people as “blessed.” That series of verses has inspired endless devotionals, sermons, articles, and books. It occurred to me recently that the Greek word translated blessed in the Beatitudes (makarios) is fairly common, occurring in lots of other places in the Bible—in all, 50 times in the New Testament, and 42 times in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament. Thus there must be lots of other biblical statements that are essentially “other Beatitudes.”

So why not go looking for them? Why not add to the list of attitudes and behaviors that put people into a condition of blessing?

I suppose we should start the way most of those sermons and books do, by defining the key term. What does it mean to be “blessed”?

The concept is really quite simple. The “blessed” person has received something that advantages him, and as a result, he’s happy. That’s pretty much the way we use the word today.

Now to take all these occurrences of the word, organize them, and draw some guiding principles about God’s blessing and our happiness.

To begin with, we should notice the “oddities” in a few uses.

First, there’s one “secular” use of the word: that is, it’s not speaking of spiritual blessing or God’s blessing. That’s in Acts 26.2, where Paul says that he’s “blessed” to have an opportunity to defend himself before Agrippa.

Second, there’s one instance where the word describes something impersonal. In Titus 2.13, Paul speaks of our “blessed hope,” which is Christ’s return. (There’s one other use that appears to be impersonal: “Blessed are you, O land, whose king is of nobility and whose princes eat at the appropriate time—for strength and not for drunkenness” (Ec 10.17). But as the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament notes (4.365), it’s really the people of the land, not the dirt itself, who benefit from a good ruler.)

Third, there are several uses that are limited in their application, that we shouldn’t consider as applying to us specifically—

  • Individuals: Leah, at Asher’s birth (Gn 30.13); Peter at his confession (Mt 16.17); and God (Is 31.9 LXX; 1Ti 1.11; 6.15) (who technically can’t be “advantaged” by something he receives; here the word means someone whom we praise as worthy)
  • Estimations: Solomon’s wives and servants, in the estimation of the Queen of Sheba (1K 10.8 // 2Ch 9.7); Mary, in the estimation of Elizabeth (Lk 1.45) and of “a certain woman” (Lk 11.27); he who eats bread in the kingdom of God, in the estimation of a man who was dining with Jesus (Lk 14.15)
  • Historical situations: those returning from exile in Babylon (Is 32.20); the childless during the fall of Jerusalem (Lk 23.29); those who endure (Dn 12.12) or die (Rv 14.13) during the Tribulation
  • Social situations: one who has a “quiver full” of children (Ps 127.5); those who carry out judgment on evildoers (Ps 137.8-9); people who have a good king (Ec 10.17); and, comparatively, the widow who does not remarry (1Co 7.40)

The rest of the uses of this word blessed or happy refer generally to certain kinds of people, particularly the people of God, and we can safely take them as applying to us. Since I’ve called this series “The Other Beatitudes,” I won’t be addressing the two passages in the Gospels (Mt 5.3-11; Lk 6.21-22) where the Sermon on the Mount is presented.

Next time, we’ll look at the remaining passages, telling us who is blessed, and why.

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Filed Under: Bible, Theology Tagged With: bless, happiness, word study