Ethan R. Longhenry's Blog, page 15

Futile Frustrations

Not only that, but I have seen the wicked approaching and entering the temple, and as they left the holy temple, they boasted in the city that they had done so. This also is an enigma.
When a sentence is not executed at once against a crime, the human heart is encouraged to do evil.
Even though a sinner might commit a hundred crimes and still live a long time, yet I know that it will go well with God-fearing people – for they stand in fear before him. But it will not go well with the wicked, nor will they prolong their days like a shadow, because they do not stand in fear before God.
Here is another enigma that occurs on earth: Sometimes there are righteous people who get what the wicked deserve, and sometimes there are wicked people who get what the righteous deserve. I said, “This also is an enigma.”
So I recommend the enjoyment of life, for there is nothing better on earth for a person to do except to eat, drink, and enjoy life. So joy will accompany him in his toil during the days of his life which God gives him on earth.
When I tried to gain wisdom and to observe the activity on earth – even though it prevents anyone from sleeping day or night – then I discerned all that God has done: No one really comprehends what happens on earth. Despite all human efforts to discover it, no one can ever grasp it. Even if a wise person claimed that he understood, he would not really comprehend it (Ecclesiastes 8:10-17).

We have some unanswerable questions about the way things seem to work in the world. These questions display our frustrations with the capriciousness and unfairness we see in the world. The Preacher addresses them, but few will appreciate his “answer.”

Throughout Ecclesiastes 1:1-6:12 the Preacher meditated upon the hevel of life under the sun: all is vain, futile – truly absurd. He compares most human endeavors toward meaning as “chasing after wind”: people pursue pleasure, wealth, wisdom, or other things looking for ultimate purpose and satisfaction and will be disappointed and frustrated by all of them. To rage against such truths is itself futile and striving after wind. God understands better than we do. In Ecclesiastes 7:1-8:9 the Preacher seemed to have set forth a series of aphoristic exhortations not unlike the proverbs for which he is well known loosely organized around the theme of wisdom. In Ecclesiastes 8:1-9 the Preacher would continue in the same aphoristic vein and loosely organized his exhortations around wisdom in terms of the exercise of and submission to power.

The Preacher made a series of “observations” regarding life “under the sun” and drew some conclusions about it all in Ecclesiastes 8:10-17. Our understanding of the first observation is complicated by textual ambiguity in Ecclesiastes 8:10. A good number of translations try to make sense of the Masoretic Text as is, reflected in the ASV: “so I saw the wicked buried, and they came to the grave; and they that had done right went away from the holy place, and were forgotten in the city: this also is vanity.” The NET follows a slight emendation of the Masoretic Text, as above. Thus the Preacher has either observed how wicked people were buried while righteous people would go to the temple and enjoyed no regard; or he has observed how the wicked enter the temple and would then boast in the town, ostensibly justifying themselves in their wickedness by claiming God’s provision, protection, and thus justification. Either way the Preacher observed how the wicked could justify themselves and rationalize their behavior and the righteous would receive no such benefit. People then and now have become quite frustrated with such a miscarriage of justice and perpetuation of oppression. The Preacher considered it hevel, futility or absurdity, here well understood as an enigma, something which we cannot and will not be able to understand.

The Preacher followed up with an apt observation in Ecclesiastes 8:11: when justice is not meted out quickly, the human heart can easily rationalize evil behaviors. This is a premise few would dispute; people everywhere can point to examples of people behaving badly in flagrant ways, and the lack of punishment emboldened them, and perhaps others, to continue in such behaviors. There will always be people who will push the envelope regarding the kinds of behaviors with which they can get away; if such people receive no consequences for what they do, they will keep doing it until consequences are thus meted out.

Ecclesiastes 8:10-11 would be enough to leave almost everyone in despair regarding righteousness and wickedness. The Preacher might have sensed as much and would not allow this to be the last word. In Ecclesiastes 8:12-13 the Preacher conceded the strong likelihood of some among the wicked living long and peaceful lives despite their flagrant sinfulness yet still maintained greater confidence in the righteous who stand in fear before God. We do well to hold firmly to all dimensions of the Preacher’s words here. There will be some people who flagrantly sin and disregard God and who do not get struck down immediately. But those who fear God will be vindicated at some point or another; the lack of a fear of God will eventually cause great pain, distress, and downfall for the wicked, whether in this life or in the hereafter.

The Preacher then set forth his second “observation”: he has seen how some people suffer despite or even for being and doing good, while others live in wicked and sinful ways yet seem to prosper and succeed as God had promised for the righteous, or, as we would put it, good things happened to bad people while bad things happened to good people (Ecclesiastes 8:14).

Such is one of the most pressing questions for many modern people, part and parcel of the challenge of theodicy: how can a good God allow such evil to take place? Many might imagine such a question and challenge would be thoroughly examined and explained in Scripture, but the matter is only addressed in such terms in Ecclesiastes 8:14 and in the book of Job.

And modern man, in his quest for knowledge unto mastery, cannot help but be all the more frustrated with the Preacher’s “answer”: yes, good things happen to bad people, and bad things happen to good people, and it also is hevel; futile, absurd, an enigma. It seems to be the “non-answer answer,” yet there is great and profound wisdom in it. The Preacher understood two important premises: there is a Creator God who shows covenant loyalty to His people, and bad things happen to good people while good things happen to bad people. How the former could allow for the latter is beyond our understanding. Why it all is the way it is remains well beyond our pay grade. In no way, shape, or form is the Preacher justifying or commending wickedness; he pointed out how we cannot get any of the answers we seek.

As a result, the Preacher commended enjoying life: under the sun we do well if we can eat, drink, and to enjoy life and the work we do (Ecclesiastes 8:15). We will easily drive ourselves to despair and defeat if we obsess over the questions we cannot know and understand. A better life can be enjoyed by coming to grips with our finite, limited understanding and ways and to find enjoyment in what we can in life. Such is not a call for epicurean hedonism; remember well how the Preacher has commended righteousness in the fear of God. But it is a reminder we can drive ourselves to despair by trying to figure out the things we were never meant to understand.

And such ultimately represents the conclusion from the Preacher’s “observations”: in trying to obtain wisdom and to understand the way of all activity on earth, even though to do so would mean to never sleep, he could see the hand of God since there was no way he or any other human being could understand it all (Ecclesiastes 8:16-17). The “wise” person who claims to understand it all must be deluded, for it is beyond him.

If there has been anything our modern scientific and technological advancements have demonstrated regarding the wisdom of the Preacher, this is it. Yes, indeed; we have a far better and greater understanding of the way things work than the Preacher could ever imagine. And yet every time we learn more about how something works, we open up new questions and horizons for consideration. Our scientific and technological advancements are like climbing the foothills of a mountain range: every time we reach a new height, an even greater mountain will appear before us. We keep reinforcing Socrates’ maxim, which is very consistent with the Preacher’s wisdom: the more we learn, the more we recognize we know nothing.

If such is the case in terms of how the material universe operates, how much more then in terms of the ways of cosmic justice and morality? Our frustrations regarding matters of theodicy and injustice are understandable, and we are not the first to express them. We do well to cry out to God in lament regarding the injustice of the prosperity of the wicked and the suffering of the righteous. Yet in the end, as in the Psalms, we do well to confess God is our Creator and is faithful, and to humbly submit to Him, recognizing we do not and cannot understand how everything works, but remain confident that He does, and that He will strengthen and sustain us until we can share in the resurrection of life.

Ethan R. Longhenry

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Categorization

In the Western world we have inherited a significant predilection for categorization.

This impulse likely derives all the way from our Greek philosophical progenitors who attempted to ascertain how things work and why things are the way they are in a systematic way. Any kind of attempt toward a systemization will almost invariably lead to the impulse to categorize; otherwise, how can one make sense of the data one is systematizing?

And yet the Greek philosophers still sought to understand their environment in more cohesive and coherent terms. As we have expanded our understanding and insights into the world we have encouraged the move toward specialization. Specialization can only really exist when people have strictly circumscribed various disciplines, and this is being done to ever narrower degrees as our knowledge and understanding expands.

Yet this impulse toward categorization in the Western mindset goes well beyond knowledge and its disciplines. Modern Westerners have established categories for seemingly everything. We categorize different groups of people based on our experiences and prejudices. We categorize our lives based on various events, milestones, or experiences. We even categorize ourselves, looking at ourselves and conducting ourselves differently in various environments and contexts.

This Western impulse to categorize has become so thoroughly enmeshed in our understanding that we cannot imagine the world otherwise. We assume everyone everywhere has participated in such categorizations. The way we lump ourselves, others, and all things into various categories is so normal for us we assume it must be the case for others as well.

It is not as if categorization is inherently a bad thing. We have been able to advance human knowledge and understanding in significant ways on account of establishing and maintaining categories and standards for exploring and learning in those categories. We all very much want specialists to be very well versed in their specialties. Many insights and connections can be made within the disciplines of various categories which may not have been as evident or perceptible otherwise.

Nevertheless, despite Western conceit, such levels of categorization are not inherent or intrinsic to all humanity. Many other cultures have envisioned their world in different ways and did not feel the impulse to categorize to the extent manifest in modern Western thinking. And from those cultures we can obtain and appreciate some critique of our impulse toward categorization.

We are only beginning to grapple with the ugly, sinful, and abhorrent heritage inherent in the Western categorizations of various people. From the beginning the Scriptures indicate all humans derive from Adam and are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:1-2:3, Acts 17:26); people may be part of different nations, but none are intrinsically better or worse than any other. Those in the West saw themselves as the “superior” and “master” race and opined on the “subhuman” origins of other races; within living memory the superiority and supremacy of the white race was still held as “common sense” which “everyone understood.” Plenty of people today presume themselves superior to others on account of the category of people in which they have placed themselves and look down on those whom they have placed in other, “lesser” categories.

Categorization breeds such dehumanization and depersonalization. Much has been built regarding various forms of stereotyping masquerading as categorizations. People are defined by their generation, their place of ancestry, their current geographic location, their political proclivities, their income level, their education level, their religious affiliations, and such like. People then assume they know all about others based on the alignment of these various categorical boxes. While it is likely many people in a similar stage of life or framework may have many beliefs and feelings in common, few people fit entirely neatly in any individual box or category. Have you ever felt alienated or dismissed because someone identified you as fitting into a given category and thus assumed you thus must affirm or believe a given set of ideas or perform a given set of practices? Furthermore, how many people shift their views in order to fit within these categories because they have been pigeonholed into such categories? How much better might our discourse and interpersonal relations be if we did not assume we understood what people believed or practiced merely based on certain demographic categories?

Our impulse to categorize often leads to a failure of imagination in an inability to perceive a greater whole. While Western categorical and specialist approaches in medicine have led to significant advancements in understanding, the “silo effect” is very real, and many people have endured great suffering because their difficulties cross different specialties and their medical practitioners seem incapable of seeing the whole picture. Many times, great advancements and developments in one specialized field could well illuminate others, yet there is no generalist who can be found to make such connections. Advancements in specialties generally outpace ethical and moral considerations. Such is how we now have many technological advancements which involve a nontrivial chance of the devastation of human life on the planet that seem to continue to advance without any sort of check or restriction.

Personal categorization remains the breeding ground of hypocrisy. We can easily fall prey to the temptation to separate out our “work lives” from our “personal lives,” and especially our “Christian” lives from either or both, despite the exhortation to bring the Reign of God in Christ to bear in every aspect of our lives (cf. Ephesians 5:21-6:9, etc.). The impulse to specialize has also led many Christians to justify themselves in their lack of experience and effort in many aspects of the faith: they have become used to leaving various specialties to “the professionals,” and thus imagine they can leave the work of the faith to the “religious professionals” and just keep paying them and all will be well, even though the work of the “religious professionals” is really to equip said Christians so they can also jointly participate in the work of faith (Ephesians 4:11-16)!

Obsessions with categorizations have often led many to fall prey to category errors in the interpretation of Scripture. Far too often we are tempted to invent categories, impose them on the Scriptures, and then come to conclusions quite foreign and strange to the Biblical text on account of them. This temptation exists across all the various spectra of belief and faith. The premise of same-sex sexual relationship affirmation can only be sustained by imposing on the Scriptures the Victorian-era categorizations of sexuality in terms of “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality” and then presuming since Paul could not have conceived of a “loving same sex sexual relationship,” such are not condemned. At no point in these conversations is the conceit of the legitimacy of the new categorizations ever questioned despite the fact queer theory would completely undermine the Victorian framework, and this remains true even of those who are on the other side of the spectrum, who have normalized the same framework and thus find ways to commend “heterosexuality” over “homosexuality.” It is worth noting how the Roman framework of understanding the honor/shame of sexual behavior in terms of penetrator/penetrated is also not assumed, commended, or justified in Scripture. Instead, Scripture speaks regarding sexual conduct, not exhorting anyone to “heterosexuality” or any specific kind of “-sexuality” but chastity (1 Corinthians 6:12-20, 1 Thessalonians 4:3-8).

Sometimes these categorizations may even be based on distinctions witnessed in Scripture and yet too much can be made of them. A notable example of this regards the nature of the church. In Scripture we can discern uses of ekklesia which speak of what we call the “church universal,” the one body of all believers (e.g. Romans 12:3-8), and other uses of ekklesia which speak of what we call the “local church,” an individual congregation or a group of individual congregations (e.g. Romans 16:16). Much effort is then expended regarding the attempt to distinguish between these two categories and to systematize the portrayal of each. And yet the Apostles throughout use ekklesia for both and do not make explicit distinctions, most likely because individual congregations of the Lord’s people should reflect the universal body at a given place and time. Thus, even when our categorizations retain some merit, we must be careful lest we make much more of those categorizations than the inspired authors ever intended.

Considering things in terms of categories is not merely a Western phenomenon, and it is not inherently or intrinsically bad. Yet as with all things involving humanity, we can easily make categories absolute or view or use categories in corrupt ways. Such abuses and corruption in categorization have led to many disastrous results in human history and have been part of how horrible atrocities have been rationalized and executed. We do best to hold to categories lightly, recognizing their utility while cognizant of their limitations. We must resist the failure of imagination which comes from uncritical acceptance and clinging to categories and categorization. We do best when we subject all things to God in Christ and seek to bring His reign to bear in all things so we can obtain the resurrection of life!

Ethan R. Longhenry

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Wisdom and Power

Who is a wise person? Who knows the solution to a problem? A person’s wisdom brightens his appearance, and softens his harsh countenance.
Obey the king’s command, because you took an oath before God to be loyal to him. Do not rush out of the king’s presence in haste – do not delay when the matter is unpleasant, for he can do whatever he pleases. Surely the king’s authority is absolute; no one can say to him, “What are you doing?” Whoever obeys his command will not experience harm, and a wise person knows the proper time and procedure. For there is a proper time and procedure for every matter, for the oppression of the king is severe upon his victim.
Surely no one knows the future, and no one can tell another person what will happen. Just as no one has power over the wind to restrain it, so no one has power over the day of his death. Just as no one can be discharged during the battle, so wickedness cannot rescue the wicked.
While applying my mind to everything that happens in this world, I have seen all this: Sometimes one person dominates other people to their harm (Ecclesiastes 8:1-9).

It is wise to obey the king. But the king must remember why it is important to exercise power well.

Throughout Ecclesiastes 1:1-6:12 the Preacher meditated upon the hevel of life under the sun: all is vain, futile – truly absurd. He compares most human endeavors toward meaning as “chasing after wind”: people pursue pleasure, wealth, wisdom, or other things looking for ultimate purpose and satisfaction and will be disappointed and frustrated by all of them. To rage against such truths is itself futile and striving after wind. God understands better than we do. In Ecclesiastes 7:1-29 the Preacher seemed to have set forth a series of aphoristic exhortations not unlike the proverbs for which he is well known loosely organized around the theme of wisdom. In Ecclesiastes 8:1-9 the Preacher would continue in the same aphoristic vein and loosely organized his exhortations around wisdom in terms of the exercise of and submission to power.

Yet the Preacher introduced this portion of his exhortation by speaking of how a person’s wisdom can brighten and soften their appearance (Ecclesiastes 8:1). Perhaps the Preacher considered this a matter of fact; or perhaps it is an aspiration, an exhortation to those with wisdom to loosen up a little bit and not look so harsh once in a while. When we feel we have come to an understanding of something, a “eureka” moment, we do generally exult in it and such can be seen on our faces. So there is likely something to what the Preacher has declared here.

Then the Preacher considered how a person should conduct himself around a king in Ecclesiastes 8:2-6. A subject should obey the king’s command because he swore an oath of loyalty before God to do so. A subject should not leave the presence of the king quickly nor should he delay to come when he knows it will not be a fun time, since the king has great power. Who has the power to ask the king about what he is doing? Those who obey the king will not be harmed by him, and a wise person knows the appropriate time and protocol for matters. It is good to know as much since the oppression of the king is strong against anyone to whom it is directed.

Such insight, knowledge, and wisdom would prove most apt for the king’s advisers, counselors, officers, and staff; the average subject would rarely, if ever, receive an audience with a king. It might seem somewhat self-serving for Solomon the Preacher, as king of Israel, to encourage such deference; nevertheless, as a king with such power, his exhortation comes somewhat from experience, and yet also somewhat from aspiration. Ancient kings did tend to rule with absolute authority over their subjects, but plenty of intrigue was generally afoot in the court, and just as familiarity breeds contempt, so too the intimates of the king could easily fall prey to not providing him with due deference and honor.

As Christians we do well to appreciate the Preacher’s wisdom about honoring the king in terms of the ways of the world. Christians have been called upon to provide appropriate honor and subjection to the earthly authorities (Romans 13:1-7, 1 Peter 2:11-25), and they recognize their power over earthly life and death. No Christian should find him or herself providing undue offense to the dignity of governmental authorities. At the same time our primary loyalty is to the ways of God in Christ; and we might well be called upon to prioritize our higher loyalty (Acts 5:28-29). No one will be justified before God in Christ in doing heinous evil in the name of “just following orders.” Christians will generally find it difficult to navigate the tension between honoring God as God and proving subject to earthly authorities who tend to arrogate for themselves the prerogatives of God.

The Preacher then meditated some on the future. No one knows what will happen (Ecclesiastes 8:7). We do not have power over the wind, and likewise we do not have control over the day upon which we die (Ecclesiastes 8:8). As no soldier is dismissed in the heat of battle, so wickedness cannot rescue the wicked (Ecclesiastes 8:8).

Few things cause modern humans as much distress as their inability to know the future, especially since modern life is very future oriented. How much of our entertainment imagines what our lives would be like if we had insight into our future? How often have we lived more for the hope of a better future so we can endure the trials of the present? And yet we do not really know what will happen. We hope tomorrow will be better than today; perhaps today will prove better than tomorrow.

The Preacher has hit modern humanity right where it hurts: we do not have control over the day of our death. Modern life is all about mastery and control; we constantly strive to gain greater mastery over the forces of this creation which beset us. But our control will always be limited, and we rail against anything over which we cannot maintain control. We do better to heed the Preacher’s wisdom and accept our finite, created nature, and to live well as opposed to railing against the coming darkness.

The Preacher rounded out this section of his exhortation by an observation he has made in the world: people can dominate others to their own harm (Ecclesiastes 8:9). Certainly oppressed people primarily suffer from the oppression of those with power over them, but the Preacher here has the harm of the person with the power in view. This observation is an important counterweight to Ecclesiastes 8:2-6: a king has great power, and kings have been known to abuse their power, and in the process, the person most degraded and dehumanized is the king himself. Thus it goes with all who abuse their power; they are made less human as a result.

Few of us think about the amount of power we exercise in our lives; we tend to take it for granted until our power is threatened or we are deprived of it. We should all seek in wisdom to glorify God in Christ in all of our relationships, to subject our influence and power to His will and purposes, and in Christ seek to obtain the resurrection of life!

Ethan R. Longhenry

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Conclusion | 1 John 5:18-21

We know that whosoever is begotten of God sinneth not; but he that was begotten of God keepeth himself, and the evil one toucheth him not. We know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in the evil one. And we know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we know him that is true, and we are in him that is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life. My little children, guard yourselves from idols (1 John 5:18-21).

Thus John concludes his first letter: perhaps not in a way we would expect, and certainly not according to conventions of the day. Yet the letter began in unconventional ways, and it should not surprise us that it would end in a similar way.

John continues to discuss matters of sin as he began in 1 John 5:16-17. Those who are born of God do “not sin,” are kept by God, and the Evil One does not touch him (1 John 5:18). But did not John say in 1 John 1:8 that we all continually sin? Are we not to be wary of the Evil One (1 Peter 5:8)?

We must not create contradiction in Scripture by making false inferences based on 1 John 5:18. Christians are not to be in the habit of sinning; thus, “does not keep on sinning,” as in the ESV.

The Scriptures make a distinction between the believer who seeks to follow God and stumbles occasionally and those who sin without any inclination toward true repentance or change (1 John 1:7-9 vs. Hebrews 10:26-31, etc.). We saw such a contrast in 1 John 5:16-17: the “sin leading to death” and the “sin not leading to death.” Christians may be guilty of the latter; if they are guilty of the former, they demonstrate that they are not truly “born of God.” Furthermore, Christians who are God’s obedient servants are justified in Christ and there is none to condemn (Romans 8:31-34), yet the danger of being tempted and to fall into sin remains (James 1:14-15, 1 Peter 5:8).

We must remember that John is attempting to encourage his fellow Christians. As part of God’s redeemed new creation, they are distinct from the world, for they know that the world is entirely in the hands of the Evil One (1 John 5:18-19; cf. 2 Corinthians 5:17, 1 John 2:15-17). They have been transformed by the renewal of their minds, and are born of God, kept by God, and from God (Romans 12:2). Thus John summarizes a main theme in his letter: believers are born of God, should cease from sin, and are not of the sinful world (1 John 1:5-2:6, 2:12-17, 2:28-3:10, 3:19-24, 4:4-6, 5:1-5, 16-18).

John continues by summarizing what has been said about Jesus the Son of God: He has come and given us understanding so we may know the One True and Eternal God, and we who believe in Him are in Him (1 John 5:20). John has spent much time making known how Jesus is God’s Son in the flesh, opposing the Gnostic teachings advancing in those days, and how believers abide in the Son (1 John 1:1-4, 2:16-25, 4:1-6, 5:1-15).

John concludes his letter with what, on the surface, seems to be a puzzling exhortation: “little children, keep yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:21). “Little children” has been one of John’s favorite expressions for believers (1 John 2:1, 12, 28, 3:7, 3:18, 4:4).

But why warn them to stay away from idols? There has been no previous discussion of idolatry per se in 1 John. Is John really concerned that believers are going to start straying from the One True God and go serve idols in the pagan temples in their midst?

While such might be a concern for a few it is not John’s primary meaning. Throughout the New Testament the concept of idolatry is expanded beyond prostration and service done before an image. Jesus speaks of “mammon,” or money, in “god-like” terms, declaring that man cannot serve both it and God (cf. Matthew 6:24). Paul twice equates covetousness with idolatry (Ephesians 5:5, Colossians 3:5). The idol that one serves, therefore, may not be an image of gold or silver. It may be an abstract concept, a lust of the flesh, or any number of things.

This is John’s final concern for his fellow Christians. They must place their emphasis in life on doing God’s commandments and abiding in Him. They must not be distracted by the world and its idols: false teachings, the lusts of the eyes and flesh, the pride of life, and so on. We have received life through the love of God manifest in Jesus Christ His Son, and the world cannot provide anything of such quality and duration. Let us be strengthened and encouraged by John’s first letter, abide in God, and keep ourselves from idols!

Ethan R. Longhenry

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1 John 5:18-21: Conclusion

We know that whosoever is begotten of God sinneth not; but he that was begotten of God keepeth himself, and the evil one toucheth him not. We know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in the evil one. And we know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we know him that is true, and we are in him that is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life. My little children, guard yourselves from idols (1 John 5:18-21).

Thus John concludes his first letter: perhaps not in a way we would expect, and certainly not according to conventions of the day. Yet the letter began in unconventional ways, and it should not surprise us that it would end in a similar way.

John continues to discuss matters of sin as he began in 1 John 5:16-17. Those who are born of God do “not sin,” are kept by God, and the Evil One does not touch him (1 John 5:18). But did not John say in 1 John 1:8 that we all continually sin? Are we not to be wary of the Evil One (1 Peter 5:8)?

We must not create contradiction in Scripture by making false inferences based on 1 John 5:18. Christians are not to be in the habit of sinning; thus, “does not keep on sinning,” as in the ESV.

The Scriptures make a distinction between the believer who seeks to follow God and stumbles occasionally and those who sin without any inclination toward true repentance or change (1 John 1:7-9 vs. Hebrews 10:26-31, etc.). We saw such a contrast in 1 John 5:16-17: the “sin leading to death” and the “sin not leading to death.” Christians may be guilty of the latter; if they are guilty of the former, they demonstrate that they are not truly “born of God.” Furthermore, Christians who are God’s obedient servants are justified in Christ and there is none to condemn (Romans 8:31-34), yet the danger of being tempted and to fall into sin remains (James 1:14-15, 1 Peter 5:8).

We must remember that John is attempting to encourage his fellow Christians. As part of God’s redeemed new creation, they are distinct from the world, for they know that the world is entirely in the hands of the Evil One (1 John 5:18-19; cf. 2 Corinthians 5:17, 1 John 2:15-17). They have been transformed by the renewal of their minds, and are born of God, kept by God, and from God (Romans 12:2). Thus John summarizes a main theme in his letter: believers are born of God, should cease from sin, and are not of the sinful world (1 John 1:5-2:6, 2:12-17, 2:28-3:10, 3:19-24, 4:4-6, 5:1-5, 16-18).

John continues by summarizing what has been said about Jesus the Son of God: He has come and given us understanding so we may know the One True and Eternal God, and we who believe in Him are in Him (1 John 5:20). John has spent much time making known how Jesus is God’s Son in the flesh, opposing the Gnostic teachings advancing in those days, and how believers abide in the Son (1 John 1:1-4, 2:16-25, 4:1-6, 5:1-15).

John concludes his letter with what, on the surface, seems to be a puzzling exhortation: “little children, keep yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:21). “Little children” has been one of John’s favorite expressions for believers (1 John 2:1, 12, 28, 3:7, 3:18, 4:4).

But why warn them to stay away from idols? There has been no previous discussion of idolatry per se in 1 John. Is John really concerned that believers are going to start straying from the One True God and go serve idols in the pagan temples in their midst?

While such might be a concern for a few it is not John’s primary meaning. Throughout the New Testament the concept of idolatry is expanded beyond prostration and service done before an image. Jesus speaks of “mammon,” or money, in “god-like” terms, declaring that man cannot serve both it and God (cf. Matthew 6:24). Paul twice equates covetousness with idolatry (Ephesians 5:5, Colossians 3:5). The idol that one serves, therefore, may not be an image of gold or silver. It may be an abstract concept, a lust of the flesh, or any number of things.

This is John’s final concern for his fellow Christians. They must place their emphasis in life on doing God’s commandments and abiding in Him. They must not be distracted by the world and its idols: false teachings, the lusts of the eyes and flesh, the pride of life, and so on. We have received life through the love of God manifest in Jesus Christ His Son, and the world cannot provide anything of such quality and duration. Let us be strengthened and encouraged by John’s first letter, abide in God, and keep ourselves from idols!

Ethan R. Longhenry

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Challenges With Oral, Written, and Digital Knowledge

Humans, especially in the Western world, very much prize knowledge: its acquisition, its exercise, and its advancement and development.

Our relationship with knowledge, however, is fraught with many problems. We are finite, created beings; thus, there is only so much we can know and understand (cf. Isaiah 55:8-9). We have all sinned and fallen short of God’s glory (Romans 3:23): our faculties for knowledge have been thus corrupted. Such corruption is manifest in the reasoning and exercise of knowledge as well as in our ability to retain knowledge. In our corruption we are prone to misremember, consciously and unconsciously, promoting and advancing what is truly error in our limitations or with nefarious motivations.

We would like to imagine our brains as supercomputers, able to process memories and knowledge and to retain them for instantaneous recall when needed. Yet such is not how God has designed the human brain, nor is it how the human brain, in its current corruption, functions. Various aspects of memories are stored in different parts of the brain; it would seem every recall of our memory is in its own way a refabrication of what we are remembering. This function is by necessity, and in many ways, preservation: if we could remember every sense impression we ever received, we would get lost in details and not remember anything substantive; furthermore, we have plenty of memories we do best to forget or remember in a different light on account of the trauma we have experienced.

And yet all these factors mean our memory is not as reliable as we imagine it to be. The way we understand what has happened in our lives is not infallible, let alone the way we understand what has happened to others or the state of the knowledge we have thought we have obtained.

All such things reflect the challenges of life in a society in which knowledge is primarily maintained in oral transmission. It is not as if information cannot be transmitted throughout generations by means of oral transmission; but the information communicated by oral transmission will often go through various changes, often unintentionally and unconsciously, and all while the transmitters of oral knowledge insist they tell the same story. Furthermore, oral knowledge endures only as long as the information is transmitted: plague, pestilence, and/or violence can easily lead to the extinguishing of information about a given people or culture. Such is why we continue to categorize the past in terms of “historical” and “pre-historical” periods: there is only so much we can know about a culture or a people who have not preserved written records or have not communicated to others who have written it down.

For various reasons people began to develop systems by which thoughts and words could be recorded through signs on various media and could be preserved for later retrieval by the writers themselves or by those of a later time. The first of these seem to originate 6000 or so years ago in Mesopotamia and Egypt and endure to this day.

The strength of written knowledge is the creation of a fixed standard which can be maintained and referred to over time. Humans can memorize information and retain it well as long as they have a written standard to which they can make reference. Today we have far greater understanding about many aspects of ancient life in cultures which wrote down such information.

Yet written knowledge comes with its own set of challenges as recognized even in antiquity. In many respects the whole point of written knowledge is to replace “knowing something” with “knowing where to learn about something”: it fosters a “card catalog” approach to knowledge, in which the thing itself is less known but we know where to go to learn about it. Such a challenge was not entirely foreign to primarily oral cultures; we can consider how many Israelites would have made an appeal to a prophet or one trained in the Torah to figure out information about how to serve God as opposed to themselves knowing how to thus serve. But it is a challenge exacerbated by written knowledge. In terms of the Christian faith we must always insist on not just knowing about Scripture, or knowing where to find things in Scripture, but the actual knowing of Scripture, to allow the Word of God to be within a person (e.g. 2 Peter 3:18). No one has ever been transformed by God in Christ through the Spirit merely by knowing where to learn; they must actually learn the thing itself and be transformed by it.

Written knowledge is also only as good as the writings are preserved, and such was a major difficulty in the world before the printing press. Wet clay can be re-formed and thus writing on it can be erased; papyrus and paper easily decay or fall apart. We are aware of all kinds of written works which are no longer extant, most likely lost in the ravages of time; we are probably ignorant of far more. Just because something is written down does not make it true: plenty of people have written things to distort or manipulate intentionally, and far more have written with the best of intentions but ultimately in ways which did not maintain full integrity. Many arguments and disputes about doctrines in Christianity were generated or made worse by the existence of “pseudepigraphal” works, in which someone later wrote in the name of a famous ancestor, and people in later generations accepted the “pseudepigraphal” works as authentic, and drew conclusions. And even if something is written and true, errors intentional and unintentional can creep in through the copying process. Furthermore, all written language, by necessity, is interpretive: we all have to interpret what the signs written actually mean. We have some written documents from the past which we cannot read because we have not deciphered the writing system. Many English Bible translations will frequently note how “the Hebrew is uncertain” in many passages: many words in the Hebrew Bible show up once or only a few times and we do not have strong confidence in their specific likeness in English because what those terms originally meant have not been handed down. Even when we have written words well preserved through the copying process and a decent understanding of the original language, no two languages have exact equivalence in terms and thoughts; the multiplicity of Bible translations testify to the various layers of understanding which we can obtain from the text. Interpretation and application of texts also are places in which we can easily distort the original purpose of the author.

From the beginning of writing until the modern age the great barrier for people has been one of access. Written knowledge is only valuable if you know how to read and write and you have access to sources of written knowledge. Such access was often jealously guarded as the prerogative of the literate elite. As Christians we do well to remember how challenging access to the knowledge of the Scriptures proved for the first 1500 years of Christianity: only a few could read, and even then, to read would require texts available to read. Therefore, most Christians who have ever lived most likely did not read much or any of the Scriptures. Their experience with the Scriptures was mediated by those who read it and explained it to them (cf. 1 Timothy 4:13). We can find many benefits to our personal study of Scripture, and we do well to come to understand God’s purposes in Christ better through our study of Scripture; nevertheless, we never have a right to assume the only way a person can be a Christian is by means of studying the Scriptures, and should be on the lookout for how the reading and studying of Scripture can itself prove idolatrous. Far too many have confused the Author of Scripture with the Scriptures themselves; far too many have confused learning about God in Christ with the actual practices of following God in Christ.

Current generations are living through the third great revolution in knowledge: the prevalence of digital knowledge. By means of computers and the Internet the challenge of access is significantly reduced. We have instant access to a wealth of knowledge beyond anything any individual can well understand. Information is now everywhere.

The great challenge of digital knowledge involves trust. We can all easily and quickly search for information: but how can we know the information is any good? Search engines are monetized to direct you to the sources of information which pay the search engines money to that end. On almost every issue and matter we will easily find highly contradictory explanations and understandings of almost anything and everything. “I found it on the Internet” as a source is now a running joke.

Digital knowledge, therefore, is only as good as the integrity of those who post it; and our understanding of digital knowledge must be well informed with critical perspectives watching out for confirmation bias. Digital knowledge is simultaneously expansive and siloed: you can learn just about anything on the Internet, but you can also find specific and epistemically closed communities on the Internet. Such is how many people have “done their research” and believe certain things very strongly, even though others have also “done their research,” believe in certain things very strongly, and have come to radically different conclusions. With digital knowledge we must cultivate healthy self-skepticism in our critical thinking, subjecting what we want to believe and the claims of those who we deem are like us to the same critical standard to which we subject that which we do not want to believe and the claims of those we deem are not like us.

Thus no form of knowledge is a panacea; challenges persist regardless of how we know things and seek to retain knowledge. We cannot dismiss the existence of the challenges, nor can we despair of knowing anything because of the challenges. Instead we do well to navigate the challenges with the wisdom expressed by God in Christ through the Spirit and focus primarily on that which leads to greater trust in God in Christ so we are living more consistently with the witness of what God has accomplished in Christ through His Spirit!

Ethan R. Longhenry

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Seekers of Evil Schemes

Wisdom gives a wise person more protection than ten rulers in a city. For there is not one truly righteous person on the earth who continually does good and never sins.
Also, do not pay attention to everything that people say; otherwise, you might even hear your servant cursing you. For you know in your own heart that you also have cursed others many times.
I have examined all this by wisdom; I said, “I am determined to comprehend this” – but it was beyond my grasp. Whatever has happened is beyond human understanding; it is far deeper than anyone can fathom.
I tried to understand, examine, and comprehend the role of wisdom in the scheme of things, and to understand the stupidity of wickedness and the insanity of folly.
I discovered this: More bitter than death is the kind of woman who is like a hunter’s snare; her heart is like a hunter’s net and her hands are like prison chains. The man who pleases God escapes her, but the sinner is captured by her.
The Teacher says: I discovered this while trying to discover the scheme of things, item by item. What I have continually sought, I have not found; I have found only one upright man among a thousand, but I have not found one upright woman among all of them. This alone have I discovered: God made humankind upright, but they have sought many evil schemes (Ecclesiastes 7:19-29).

All explorations of wisdom and folly must grapple with the depth of human depravity.

Throughout Ecclesiastes 1:1-6:12 the Preacher meditates upon the hevel of life under the sun: all is vain, futile – truly absurd. He compares most human endeavors toward meaning as “chasing after wind”: people pursue pleasure, wealth, wisdom, or other things looking for ultimate purpose and satisfaction and will be disappointed and frustrated by all of them. To rage against such truths is itself futile and striving after wind. God understands better than we do.

In Ecclesiastes 7:1-10 the Preacher seemed to have set forth a series of aphoristic exhortations not unlike the proverbs for which he is well known. Ecclesiastes 7:11-18 presented a series of pericopes a bit more focused on wisdom and life principles. In Ecclesiastes 7:19-29 he persisted in the same theme.

In Ecclesiastes 7:19-20 the Preacher transitioned effectively by means of his two declarations: wisdom providing protection hearkens back to Ecclesiastes 7:11-12 and well ties together the pericopes of Ecclesiastes 7:11-19, and the confession of the sinfulness of everyone anticipates the rest of his theme in Ecclesiastes 7:20-29. The Preacher connected these two themes together in Ecclesiastes 7:19-20: wisdom provides protection for the wise person because everyone, even the wise person, commits sin. The wise man has been corrupted by sin and is fallible. He does well when he relies on wisdom; yet no one always behaves according to wisdom. The Preacher would know: he is honored as the wisest among men, and yet his follies regarding women and idolatry remain exposed for all to see in 1 Kings 11:1-43.

Yet even on its own Ecclesiastes 7:20 remains salient, reinforced by Paul in Romans 3:23 and John in 1 John 1:8. No one is fully and truly righteous; all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Nothing good has ever come from any attempt to presume we have transcended sin. For good reason Paul wanted Christians to be continually reminded of their past sinfulness (Ephesians 2:1-11, Titus 3:3-8): such remains the necessary ground in humility to relate properly to God and to fellow human beings.

The Preacher then provided a bit of practical wisdom: do not give heed to everything people say, or you might even hear someone you think is socially inferior to you or who is very close to you cursing you. If you would find this terribly offensive, you do well to remember how you have cursed others in your heart many times (Ecclesiastes 7:21-22). This pericope has a light connection with how everyone commits sin in Ecclesiastes 7:20 and almost no connection with what will follow. Nevertheless, the Preacher’s advice is good; we are tempted to get very incensed or offended if we happen to hear the way others negatively feel about us, but has that ever stopped us from having negative feelings about others? We do well to lightly hold onto offense because of such things; while we might do well to reflect on how we have related and treated people who would curse us, we must also remember their cursing might well tell us more about them than it does about us.

The Preacher has considered all the things he has thus mentioned according to wisdom, yet in the attempt has perceived how all such things are beyond his understanding and remained far beyond what any human being could imagine (Ecclesiastes 7:23-24). As in Eccclesiastes 6:10-12, so again the Preacher grappled with the limitations of human capacity. Such is why wisdom cannot be the ultimate good; even at our best, humans remain finite created beings, and thus cannot fully understand anything and everything. The Preacher consistently returns to this humble recognition which has become quite lost on people today across the socio-political spectrum. We remain finite creatures; we cannot understand anything to its fullest extent. Such remains true about how we view the creation; yet such is also true about inquiry and investigation regarding spiritual matters. We have good reason to maintain strong confidence in God as our Creator and His covenant loyalty, but must be careful about how dogmatically we hold onto any specific belief or idea, for whatever we think we know is only a shadow of a much more profound reality beyond our capability to understand. Whenever we want to make any thing God has made absolute, whether a substance or our understanding or even ourselves, we commit idolatry.

In Ecclesiastes 7:25-27 the Preacher developed serious rhetorical scaffolding around the danger of the temptress or covetous woman. He investigated wisdom in the grand scheme of things as well as the mad folly of wickedness; in so doing he came upon the woman “like a hunter’s snare,” whose heart is as the “hunter’s net” and hands as prison chains; she is more bitter than death. The man who pleases God would escape such a woman, but sinners are captured by her.

The Israelite wisdom tradition personified Wisdom and Folly as contrasting women. Wisdom cries out, inviting everyone to learn humility and wisdom from God (Proverbs 1:20-33, 8:1-26). Folly, on the other hand, is described as the seductive adulteress, leading naïve men to their doom (Proverbs 2:11-18, 5:3-15, 7:6-27). We should understand the Preacher’s exhortation in Ecclesiastes 7:26 according to this paradigm. Today we would speak of such women as “gold diggers”, those seeking significant material wealth from their romantic relationship without much regard to the well-being of their partner. Any woman who would prove emotionally or otherwise abusive would also fit the paradigm.

While the Preacher’s exhortation is gendered, we would be remiss and naïve to assume such gendering is entirely prescriptive as well as descriptive. Men can also prove abusive in relationships, and we can imagine many situations in which men who display certain behaviors would be more bitter than death for women.

We do well to similarly understand how the Preacher concludes his pericopes related to wisdom: he has not found what he sought, for he found only one upright man among a thousand, and no upright woman among any of them. If he discovered anything, it is this: God made humans upright, but they have sought many evil schemes (Ecclesiastes 7:28-29).

We understand the general nature of the Preacher’s observation: humans are depraved. We do well to understand this observation as returning full circle to Ecclesiastes 7:20 and it provides a nice rhetorical finish. And yet he has communicated this observation in a misogynistic way. It is not as if the Preacher is really commending men or masculinity here; finding only one upright man out of a thousand is not a good testimony for men. But what do we make of him not finding any upright women? Is it the misogynistic perspective of the Preacher himself? Or does it testify more to the kind of women with whom he has surrounded himself, or, perhaps, the kind of women who would be around a wealthy king like the Preacher?

Any attempt to use Ecclesiastes 7:28 as some kind of cudgel to degrade women is itself depraved; men and women have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory; men and women can equally find salvation in Jesus and equally share as joint-heirs of the grace of life (Romans 3:23, Galatians 3:28, 1 Peter 3:7).

In this way we do better to focus on the Preacher’s general observation than his specific explication: people sin. The Preacher well observed how humanity’s propensity to sin is not God’s fault because of how God made humanity, for God made humans and they were very good (Genesis 1:1-31). Instead, in their corruption, humans have sought evil schemes. They fall prey to their anxieties and fears and act in ways which harm others in a misguided attempt to establish benefits for themselves and those they deem their associates. The Israelites well perceived this tendency among the nations; God, and the Preacher, could also see this tendency among the people of God as well.

To this day people have sought evil schemes. We all remain very attuned to the evil schemes which “they,” whomever we define as not “us”, have propagated and perpetuated; yet we do well to explore, like in the wisdom of the Preacher, how we ourselves, and those we associate as among or allied with us, have sought out evil schemes as well. We are not intrinsically upright; we have been corrupted by sin and our anxieties and fears which attend to our decay and death. Our only hope has been salvation from our condition and plight from God who has richly bestowed His love, grace, and mercy in Jesus Christ His Son and our Lord. May we in wisdom recognize our limitations and our depravity in our corruption, and in humility trust and depend on God in Christ through the Spirit to overcome sin and death!

Ethan R. Longhenry

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Knowledge: To What End?

To what end do we seek to acquire knowledge?

If we have been raised in and/or live in the modern Western world, we have tended to maintain a more utilitarian posture toward knowledge: if we have thought about the reasons why we have labored to acquire knowledge at all, the answers have most likely involved the quest for some sort of goal. We were compelled to acquire knowledge in school during childhood in order to make a living in a given profession as adults. We often seek to acquire knowledge so we can accomplish something: to build and finish a project, to achieve some feat, etc.

What reasons lie behind our investigations into our environment, past and present? We want to understand what has happened in the past and what is happening in the present so we can better manipulate our environment to achieve our desired outcomes. Such may seem harsh, but ultimately it is the utilitarian conclusion to our endeavors. We learn about past cultures to understand present cultural dynamics, recognizing if the present does not exactly imitate the past, it at least rhymes. We explore the natural world at both the most miniscule and highest levels to understand how things work with the ultimate view of manipulating them to our own comfort. We want to understand how severe weather works to better forecast it and perhaps even manipulate it so as to be less severe; we explore deep space to understand what dangers it might maintain and to advance our study of physics to allow us ever more powerful technological breakthroughs. Why do various stripes of biologists deeply penetrate what profoundly wild places yet remain? To learn about new species with a view of protecting biodiversity, since perhaps in that biodiversity we will eventually discover chemicals and compounds which may prove beneficial to human health. And much of this provides humanity with the benefit of the doubt, for a lot of investigation, research, and technological development is fueled primarily to make money and gain standing.

We have thus inherited a framework in which knowledge is pursued for our benefit and gain and thus prove useful for humanity. We have seen significant critiques of the discipline of the humanities, with many wondering how such a field of study proves useful in the modern world. Its justification proves just as much a testimony to the power of utilitarianism in the modern world: an appeal to how the humanities can produce a more well-rounded citizen and worker whose creativity can provide material benefit to herself, her employer, and her country.

This utilitarian framework is part of the inheritance we have received from the Enlightenment and its transformation of Western society. The general spirit of the Enlightenment, manifest in the conceit of its name, is the spread of the “light of knowledge” to dispel the “darkness of superstition.” Knowledge deduced from observation and reason provides power in the Enlightenment: the power to overcome superstition, the power to manipulate the environment, the power to maintain influence and standing in society.

While Paul predated the Enlightenment by 1750 years, his observation regarding “knowledge makes arrogant” proves apt (1 Corinthians 8:1). Knowledge has made modern man almost insufferably arrogant. He has convinced himself he is vastly superior to his ancestors because he understands things they do not. He is confident he is better able to stand against the forces of nature and evil because of what his scientific and technological advancements provide him. He is willfully blind to how his attempts at mastery have led to significant exploitation and oppression of the creation and its creatures, and such exploitation and oppression do not take place without consequences and judgment. He remains convinced the solutions to his problems can all be discovered through greater scientific and technological advancement and development. Does this sound completely ridiculous to you? Consider the thoughts and behaviors of the titans of Silicon Valley and how convinced they are of their superiority to the rest of us and their confidence in how technology can solve any and every problem.

Such knowledge has made arrogant because it is all directed to the purpose of mastery. Knowledge gained unto mastery is worldly and demonic in its wisdom (cf. James 3:13-18). Things rarely end well when we seek to gain knowledge in order to control, manipulate, or master the object of our knowledge. In relationships between humans, we consider such abusive; we prove more reticent to recognize how abusive such a purpose is when used in regard to the creation, our condition, and how completely delusional it proves in terms of knowledge of God.

For some indeed seek knowledge of God unto mastery. Some of the ancients were convinced they could compel or coerce a god into doing their will if they knew the god’s secret name. To this day many seek knowledge of God or His will, however consciously or unconsciously, with a view to figuring out how to cajole, manipulate, or otherwise exploit God into accomplishing what they want. Plenty of others, perceiving an opportunity for great gain, seek knowledge in the name of religion to manipulate, control, and coerce people into giving them standing, power, money, and other such worldly benefit.

Yet, in truth, the attempt to learn about God or about His creation unto mastery proves delusional before God’s glorious greatness and majesty. Isaiah wisely made known to Israel how God’s ways and thoughts are higher than our ways and thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9); Paul confessed how God’s weakness remains stronger than man’s strength, and God’s foolishness remains wiser than man’s wisdom in 1 Corinthians 1:18-31. He is the Creator; we are the creation. No matter how much we think we can try, we will never be able to cajole, manipulate, or coerce God into doing anything for us.

We should be able to understand this by considering in what ways our quest to know in order to master flounder. When we are confronted with great tragedy or the evil powers over this present darkness, many are tempted to wonder why this might happen to them, but we all know, deep down, no answer really satisfies. Knowing why a loved one died a horrific death will not bring them back. Understanding the dynamics of a powerful storm will not restore what was devastated. The Preacher wisely understood such questions to be futile, a striving after wind (Ecclesiastes 8:14); when Job pressed such questions before God, he was quickly reminded how he did not understand the ways of the creation. All of our acquired knowledge and technology has not been able to overcome such ancient wisdom.

Knowledge unto mastery does not glorify God. Yet knowledge unto glorifying God can come with great profit.

Consider a romantic relationship: the lover desires to know his or her beloved. We find it abominable for a lover to seek information about the beloved in order to master, control, or manipulate him or her; yet we all have sought, or greatly desire, to know and become known by a lover in order to be more cherished, valued, and honored. Such knowledge is sought by a lover to more greatly honor and glorify the beloved. The Song of Solomon testifies how God finds such good and honorable.

The same ought to be true for our purpose in seeking knowledge about God and His creation. When we seek to master, manipulate, and control on the basis of our knowledge, we presume to be as God and such an impulse for control is the basis of a culture of death and leads to death. Instead we do well to love God and love what God has made as God loves it. When we truly love God, we want to know more about Him, not in order to manipulate or control Him (as if we even could!), but instead to better glorify, honor, and praise Him. When we thus love God, we can look at His creation and learn about it so that we can better see His hand in its operation and glorify, honor, and praise Him.

Note well how the knowledge itself acquired might be quite similar, or even the same; yet the purpose of seeking such knowledge might prove very different, and thus the quest for said knowledge will lead to very different ends. Theology is rightly the queen of all sciences when we pursue it to better honor and glorify God, and all else can rightfully flow from it. We can learn about God’s creation in humility in order to glorify and honor God and be found more effective stewards of the creation by God when He holds us all accountable for how we have used all the gifts He has given us, and to what end.

Knowledge unto mastery is demonic and leads to death; knowledge unto glorifying God in Christ through the Spirit reminds us of our humble station as God’s creation and inspires us to glorify, honor, and praise our Creator. Knowledge of the creation to glorify its Creator provides opportunities to better embody the ways of Jesus, to faithfully serve our fellow man and maintain good stewardship of the creation with which God has entrusted us; knowledge of the creation unto mastery has led to no end of exploitation, oppression, and death. Let us all, therefore, seek knowledge to glorify God in Christ through the Spirit, and not unto mastery, so we might obtain the resurrection of life and be saved!

Ethan R. Longhenry

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Confidence Toward God | 1 John 5:12-17

He that hath the Son hath the life; he that hath not the Son of God hath not the life. These things have I written unto you, that ye may know that ye have eternal life, even unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God. And this is the boldness which we have toward him, that, if we ask anything according to his will, he heareth us: and if we know that he heareth us whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions which we have asked of him. If any man see his brother sinning a sin not unto death, he shall ask, and God will give him life for them that sin not unto death. There is a sin unto death: not concerning this do I say that he should make request. All unrighteousness is sin: and there is a sin not unto death (1 John 5:12-17).

John is beginning to conclude his first letter, a treatise designed to encourage Christians in their faith and standing before God while warning them regarding false teachers.

Previously John has emphasized how believers are born of God, keep His commandments, overcome the world through Christ, and that believers have the witness of God regarding Jesus His Son in them (1 John 5:1-11). This witness includes the fact that believers have been given eternal life through the Son (1 John 5:11).

The theme of having eternal life continues throughout the rest of the letter. It features prominently in 1 John 5:12-13: the one who has the Son has “the life,” and those believing in the name of the Son of God can know that they have eternal life. Likewise, the one who does not have the Son does not have “the life.”

Focus on “the life” evokes John 11:25 and 14:6: Jesus is the resurrection, the way, the truth and the life. Since Jesus is the Word (John 1:14), and the Word is the agent of creation (John 1:3, Hebrews 11:3), all life truly is in the Son. Yes, those who believe in Jesus in obedient faith have spiritual life; but there is also a sense in which those who trust in Jesus are those who can truly live as human today, seeking to accomplish the will of their Creator (cf. Galatians 5:17-24). We truly can have life in the Son, but only if we are doing the commandments (1 John 5:2-3).

Yet there is more for believers. They have life in the Son, indeed, but John goes on to show that believers can boldly make requests to God according to His will and be guaranteed a hearing and our needs fulfilled (1 John 5:14-15). This is similar to what is seen in Hebrews 4:14-16. Considering how so many have been fearful when approaching the throne of God (cf. Isaiah 6:1-5, Ezekiel 1:4-28), the opportunity to approach Him with boldness is astounding indeed!

This is not a carte blanche for anything the believer may want; as John says, we can have confidence regarding the requests we make that are in accordance with God’s will (1 John 5:14), not just any request. The warning of James 4:3 applies: if we ask to spend in pleasure, we will be frustrated!

John goes on to speak regarding prayer for others caught in trespasses; a noble thing for sure (cf. Galatians 6:1, James 5:19-20). In this discussion John makes a contrast between the “sin leading to death” and the “sin not leading to death,” and exhorts Christians to pray for their fellow Christians in terms of the latter and not the former (1 John 5:16). John maintains that “all unrighteousness is sin,” but there is a “sin not unto death” (1 John 5:17).

These two verses have been abused and misused for centuries in order to prop up a hierarchy of sins: “mortal sins” versus “venial sins” or some permutation of the sort. Such a view assumes that John’s delineation between sins leading to death or not leading to death involves particular sins and their severity. Such a perspective, however, is foreign to the New Testament. In no other passage do we see that certain sins are more or less severe than other sins. In fact, sin lists tend to feature all kinds of sin: sexual sins and sins of the tongue, sins of thought and even sins of omission (cf. Galatians 5:19-21, 1 Peter 4:15, James 4:17).

The New Testament does make a distinction, however, between repentant sin and unrepentant sin; there is no sin so terrible that cannot be forgiven (1 Timothy 1:12-15), and yet no sin so slight that it cannot condemn (1 John 5:17). This is how we can understand what John is saying: the “sin to death” is the sin of a hardened, unrepentant person; the “sin not to death” is the sin of a tenderhearted, repentant disciple. Let us serve God in Christ and have life!

Ethan R. Longhenry

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Hatti

In the middle of the Bronze Age a most extraordinary empire developed and faded. Its capital was nowhere near a major river, sea, or trade route and was barely accessible during the winter months; its people were not speakers of a Semitic language, but instead an Indo-European one. It left a momentous legacy which would be carried on by Assyria and every successive empire yet was almost entirely forgotten for two millennia. Thus we speak of Hatti and the Hittite Empire.

“Hatti” was the name given to an area in the central part of Anatolia, in modern-day Turkey, originally by people identified as the “Hattians.” The Hattians inhabited the land in the early Bronze Age; they and their language were distinctive, neither Indo-European nor Semitic. Their land centered on a city they named Hattush (otherwise known as Hattusa/Hattusha/Hattusas). By the beginning of the second millennium BCE, however, the Hattians had been conquered, overrun, or assimilated into a new and different people who spoke the “language of Nesha,” an Indo-European language. The newcomers adopted the nomenclature of the Hattians, and cultivated what they called the “Kingdom of Hattusha.” They were known as the Hatti to the Assyrians and Kheta to the Egyptians; we know them as the Hittites for reasons we will address below.

The land of Hatti did not seem like it would be conducive to the development of a great empire. The north central region of Anatolia is highly mountainous, often covered with snow, and nowhere near major trading routes, rivers, or lakes. Nevertheless, from around 1600 to 1200 BCE, the Kingdom of Hattusha would become a significant player in the ancient Near Eastern world, and its king recognized as a fellow brother to the Great Kings of Egypt and Babylon.

As with Egypt, the history of the Kingdom of Hattusha is delineated among three periods: the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, and New Kingdom. The Hittite Old Kingdom saw the establishment of the Kingdom of Hattusha and repeated victories over the Amorites, even destroying Amorite Babylon in 1595 BCE and giving it over to the Kassites. Yet soon after the Hittites suffered major setbacks closer to home; this would lead into the period of weak kingship known as the Hittite Middle Kingdom. Around 1400 BCE the period of the Hittite New Kingdom began, contemporaneous with the Hittite Empire. The Hittite Empire would endure for two hundred years. It was the Hittites who smashed and destroyed the Kingdom of Mitanni in the center of Mesopotamia; the Hittites also conquered Aleppo and Carchemish. Their direct rule or rule by kings under treaty extended from the Aegean Sea to the Euphrates River and from the Black Sea coast to the Mediterranean, and even over parts of Cyprus.

The Kingdom of Hattusha thus represented a major force and power in the Late Bronze Age world of the ancient Near East. It was the Hittite king Muwatalli II who infamously fought against Ramses II of Egypt at Kadesh, and despite Ramses’ claims of victory, it was the Hittite forces who controlled the area around Kadesh when all was said and done. Hittite diplomatic records describe their interactions with the king of “Ahhiyawa,” which most scholars now agree has some association with Mycenaean Greece (called the Achaeans by Homer); likewise, one of the cities the Hittites describe in “Arzawa land” to their west was “Wilusa,” which most scholars agree represents the Troy of Iliad fame (called Ilios by Homer).

Many of the tendencies we find in later empires can be traced to practices of the Hittites. The Hittites fought only when necessary; they preferred cultivating treaty relationships with local kingdoms and alliances with those at some distance. In the ruins of Hattusha archaeologists have discovered a treasure trove of such diplomatic documents which have helped us immeasurably in understanding the dynamics of the foreign policy in the ancient Near East. But when many groups proved frequently restive, the Hittites would exile them to other lands elsewhere in their domains and re-populate the land with others; furthermore, it would seem the land of Hatti frequently suffered from depopulation, and the trains of slaves and captives in war brought back to Hatti helped the Hittites maintain their strength for many generations.

The land of Hatti, however, was not the greatest for the center of a powerful empire. Enemies to the northeast, the Kaska people, had often invaded and even destroyed Hattusha during the age of its kings. From what we can tell from historical records and scientific investigation, the land of Hatti suffered prolonged periods of drought in the thirteenth century BCE. The Assyrians gained strength, overran what was left of Mitanni, and defeated the Hittites at the Battle of Nihiriya around 1237 BCE. The Kingdom of Hattusha also suffered from some bouts of civil war. Its last king, Suppiluliuma II, had won some important battles and seemed to be a great king; nevertheless, he seems to have abandoned Hattusha some time around 1200 BCE, likely to establish his capital further south in a place closer to receiving the necessary aid from other parts of his kingdom.

At this point the Hittite records give out since Suppiluliuma II had the records of his reign taken with him. Yet the end of the Kingdom of Hattusha had come: within fifty years Hattusha was overrun and destroyed; Phrygian people from the Balkan Peninsula invaded and overran most of the center of Anatolia; the Assyrians attempted to conquer the rest. The Kingdom of Hattusha and Hatti would fade from the historical record and become almost entirely forgotten until rediscovered in the 19th century of our era.

The Old Testament never speaks of the Kingdom of Hattusha as such; we call it the Hittite Empire because soon after evidence of Hatti was discovered in the 19th century, its European discoverers immediately associated them with the “Hittites” described in the Hebrew Bible.

The “Hittites” described in the earliest part of the Old Testament, from Genesis through Judges, and even in 1 Kings 9:20/2 Chronicles 8:7, Ezra 9:1, and Nehemiah 9:8, most likely have nothing to do with Hatti or the Kingdom of Hattusha in Anatolia. Such people, like Ephron, seem to be the “Hethites,” the sons of Heth, a son of Canaan according to Genesis 10:15. They would be another band of Canaanites. Many such Canaanites would certainly have known about the Kingdom of Hattusha, since it would have ruled over the lands not far to their north; Ugarit, a Canaanite city in northern Syria, was allied with Hattusha and may have met its demise because its military forces were away on campaign with the Hatti king when invaders arrived. Depending on how one dates the Exodus, the glory days of the Kingdom of Hattusha took place during the Wilderness wanderings, conquest of Canaan, and in the days of the early judges, or during the time of the Egyptian sojourn and Wilderness wanderings. We can understand why we do not hear much about them within these texts.

Yet there are three Old Testament passages which refer to Hittites who do not seem to be the “sons of Heth”: 1 Kings 10:29, 11:1, and 2 Kings 7:6, in which we learn Solomon’s traders sold horses and chariots to the Aramean and Hittite kings, Solomon loved Hittite women, and a besieging Aramean army became afraid the king of Israel had hired the kings of Egypt and the Hittites to attack them. Yet, as we have indicated, the Kingdom of Hattusha had fallen around 1200 BCE, and Solomon and Elisha lived after 1000 BCE. How can this be?

While it is true the Kingdom of Hattusha collapsed around 1200 BCE, and its homeland was overrun by the Kaska and the Phrygians, such does not mean all Hittite influence and rule collapsed. The kings of Hattusha had long appointed their brothers and their sons as lesser kings over Carchemish and Aleppo, and we have evidence Hittite rule over Carchemish continued for many generations after Hattusha had been destroyed. Around 1000 BCE bands of Arameans invaded or overran much of Syria; we are most familiar with the Aramean Kingdom of Aram centered in Damascus, but many other Syrian city-states with Aramean kings developed during the Early Iron Age. Yet the Arameans were not able to overcome the remnants of the Kingdom of Hattusha which was by then ruled over by Luwian speaking kings in southeastern Turkey. Scholars used to speak of these as “Neo-Hittite” kingdoms; today they are better known as either “Syro-Hittite” or “Luwian-Aramean” kingdoms.

Thus the kings of Israel and Judah traded with, and perhaps even allied with, “Hittite” kings, speaking a similar but different language than Hatti, yet still attempting to maintain the glory of the Kingdom of Hattusha of old. Yet even these kings and kingdoms lasted for only a brief time; they were overrun by the Assyrians and made part of the Neo-Assyrian Empire by 825 BCE, and fully assimilated into Assyria by 700 BCE. As the Hittites had previously exiled people and forced many into their homelands, thus their descendants were most likely exiled and forced into Assyria in turn.

We can now understand why Hatti was entirely forgotten: its original homeland was overrun by invaders and those who wished to maintain their legacy were forcibly assimilated into Assyria. The presence of their name in the Old Testament was even used for a time as a means to discredit its integrity; after all, who had ever heard of the Hittites, and what evidence would demonstrate their existence? The answer would be provided definitively through archaeological excavations and the decipherment of Hittite in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Thus the Kingdom of Hattusha in many respects paved the way for the kinds of behaviors we find manifest in the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Empires a few centuries later. Hatti is a good reminder for us of how ephemeral human power and glory can prove: a mighty power in the Late Bronze Age world of the ancient Near East which would be so completely forgotten as to become a source of mockery and derision centuries afterward. Thus we do well not to put our trust in princes but in the Lord God and to seek His purposes in Jesus!

Ethan R. Longhenry

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