Toby J. Sumpter's Blog, page 72

Leaven as Culture

Jesus says, “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy.”

Leaven is fermented bread dough that causes bread to rise. Leaven spreads. Leaven is an agent of growth. But there are different kinds of leaven. Bread bakers say that leaven actually takes on various characteristics of the climate and environment it is in. In this way, breads from different places in the world have slightly different characteristics and flavors based on the environment, altitude, temperature, and humidity.

In other words, leaven is basically a biblical way of talking about culture, or way of life, your environment, your greenhouse – what makes you grow. And therefore, there can be good leaven and bad leaven. When Israel left Egypt, God commanded them to get rid of their leaven because they were to leave the leaven of Egypt behind and start new loaves. The leaven of Egypt represented Egyptian culture, Egyptian gods, Egyptian ways of life. But this didn’t mean that Israel would not leaven their bread anymore, it meant that God was giving them a new start. God would bring them to Mt. Sinai and renew covenant with Israel and give them His law and instructions for worship and life in community, and this would become the new leaven of Israel, the new culture of Israel.

So here, Jesus warns His disciples and all of us to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. Paul applies this principle as well: “Therefore, let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Cor. 5:8). In other words, unleavened bread is another way of saying new leavened bread. We have a new leaven – it is the leaven of sincerity and truth. This is why it is perfectly fitting for our bread at the Lord’s Supper to be leavened or risen – this is the bread of the Kingdom that has been growing and leavening this world for 2000 years. But you must not come to this table with any of the old leaven. Leave malice and sin behind. This is the new leaven of sincerity and truth. Here, God tells the truth about your sin, He tells the truth about Jesus dying for it, and He calls you to leave it behind.

So come and keep the feast. Come and welcome to Jesus Christ.

 

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The Soil God Grows Glory In

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cleanse the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of extortion and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee, first cleanse the inside of the cup and dish, that the outside of them may be clean also” (Mt. 23:25-26).

Jesus is saying that truth goes with goodness and beauty. In fact, in a fallen world, He is teaching us to build our lives with these virtues in this order. In God, all the virtues hold together perfectly, but in a fallen world, we have to build from the ground up, from the inside out, beginning with truth, adding goodness, all while pursuing beauty.

But we have a tendency to want to rush to the end, we want the fruit of all the labor without the sweat. We want happy kids without the spanking and teaching and loving. We want easy marriages without the hard work of actually leading or submitting or confessing of sin or forgiving. We want respect and leadership without the humility of service.

So one of the ways we do that is by latching on to forms without really cultivating the substance. We latch on to slogans and buzzwords. We watch carefully how other people who seem to know what they are doing seem to be doing it or saying it and start copy furiously.

But the Christian life is like a garden. The Christian life is like building a house. The Christian life is like baking bread or making wine. You can’t really fake it. You can try, but beauty only flows from truth and goodness. It takes the right ingredients and time. You can only get beauty, order, joy, cleanliness from truth and goodness in the inward parts. If you aim for the appearance, you will end up with an empty shell. But if you cultivate a true heart, a clean heart, a good heart, it will be a lot harder and take a lot longer, but that’s the soil that God grows glory in.

There’s a little Pharisee lurking in every human heart – the temptation to just keep cleansing the outside of the cup and hoping that will be good enough. But this really is evil because it lies about God and what it means to be a Christian. Being Christian means that God has made your heart clean by the blood of Jesus and miraculously something good has begun to grow inside of you. First cleanse the inside, so that the outside will be clean also.

 

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You Feed Them

Believe it or not, we are down to 3 or 4 weeks until students begin returning. And I want to take this opportunity to encourage you to be praying and thinking about this. It really is a unique blessing to live in a college town. This includes the quieter downtown during the summer, but it also includes the life and energy and opportunities that students bring with them. In many ways, a college town is a unique mission field because the mission is constantly coming to us. You don’t have to go across the world; the world is coming to you. You don’t have to look for young people trying to figure out the meaning of life; they are right ahead of you in line at Winco and in the coffee shop and at the gas station. Many of these students are at a supremely formative moment in their lives, making decisions about what they believe and who they will be. Remember that some of these students come from very broken and hurting backgrounds. Many students are very lost, very lonely, very confused, and there are thousands preparing right now to come here in a few weeks.

In the gospel, a multitude came out into the desert to hear Jesus, and when the day was coming to an end, the disciples suggested sending them away to find food. But the text says that Jesus had compassion on the crowds as sheep without a shepherd and then he told the disciples, “You give them something to eat.” Of course the disciples didn’t think they had enough, but Jesus takes what they have and multiplies it far beyond what they actually need.

This is the Table of the Lord, and here the Lord has compassion on you. Here, He fills the hungry with good things. Here, the Lord shows you hospitality and welcomes you and feeds you. At this table, there are no strangers. There is only family in Jesus. And so because you have this table, I want to encourage you to be praying for the students who are coming, and in particular I want to encourage you to be praying about how the Lord would have you welcome them. Will you be looking for them as they arrive? Will you greet them, meet them, and invite them into your home? Have compassion on them. Look for the bread that God has given you and trust that it will be enough, and then you give them something to eat.

So come and welcome to Jesus Christ.

 

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Pure Words (& Sometimes Tart)

So my Abercrombie & Beeotch post has received some pushback, but mostly from folks wondering why a Christian pastor is using such off-color, edgy, even what might be called worldly language.

What’s a Christian pastor doing, using that kind of language? Am I doing with my language exactly what I urged others not to do with their clothing, hair, or jewelry? Was that really necessary? Couldn’t I have made the same point without the sharp language? Well, actually no. I don’t think I could have made the same point in quite the same way using different language — at least not with the same sort of precision and clarity. But let me explain.

First, I want to note that there are many Christians whose boots I am not worthy to polish, with whom I want no quarrel. While I believe the following defense is important and true, I believe there are many things more important that we likely agree on, and if my defense of occasional godly obscenity would cause you to stumble or be less than cheerful for a few minutes of your day, I’d really rather you spent a few more minutes reading your Bible and in prayer and fighting the good fight of faith wherever God has called you. But if you think it would be edifying to be challenged on this topic, please read on.

The fact of the matter is that it certainly is possible that a post like the one I wrote could have been written to score worldly edgy points. I don’t deny that coarse language could be used for trying to fly one’s cool and hip flag. He condemns pink hair but he doesn’t mind cussing sometimes because everything depends on what he likes, what he prefers. Sure, in the realm of possible scenarios, I grant the existence of that possibility, but that would be, as they say in Sunday School, wrong. It’s what Jesus calls hypocrisy in the Greek. Jesus makes it clear that the measure we use to measure others will be used to measure us. If we are stringent, exacting, and capricious with others, then we are asking God to judge us that way. So let me be clear that a pastor using coarse language in order to be edgy, cool, hip, or trying to elicit street cred is an abomination. It’s wicked. The only good reason for a Christian to use sharp, spicy, or obscene language is because it is required by God, because it is consistent with the standards that God requires for all of our language.

That being case, let’s review the clear standards of Scripture for our language:

“Let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth, but what is good for necessary edification, that it may impart grace to the hearers. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you, with all malice. And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, just as God in Christ forgave you” (Eph. 4:29-34).

“Out of the same mouth proceed blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not to be so. Does a spring send forth fresh water and bitter from the same opening? Can a fig tree, my brethren, bear olives, or a grapevine bear figs? Thus no spring yields both salt water and fresh. Who is wise and understanding among you? Let him show by good conduct that his works are done in the meekness of wisdom” (Js. 3:10-13).

“And a servant of the Lord must not quarrel but be gentle to all, able to teach, patient, in humility correcting those who are in opposition, if God perhaps will grant them repentance, so that they may know the truth…” (2 Tim. 2:24-25).

Finally, if all that were not enough: “But I say to you that for every idle word men may speak, they will give account of it in the day of judgment” (Mt. 12:36).

So the stakes are high, and God’s standard is high. Words are powerful, and as James says prior to the passage I’ve just quoted, the tongue is a flamethrower that can burn down whole forests. Words can be cutting, biting, violent, malicious, and cruel. But our mouth is to be filled with clean words, healthy words, life-giving words, true, gracious, and kind words that are necessary for the building up of the body of Christ.

But you cannot say all of this and then import into the Bible what you think those standards mean. You are not the standard. Modern 21st century evangelical sentiments are not the standard. Your feelings are not the standard. God’s word is the standard. So you cannot say: I cannot imagine X being used to edify or build up or encourage or strengthen the Church, therefore it cannot. It must be God’s word that populates our definitions not our imaginations or feelings or customs. In other words, prudish, proper, and polite Victorians can be just as worldly as pierced and tatted street rats. Victorian worldliness may be cultivated, sophisticated, and covered in drapes and dresses and flowery perfume, but if you get your standards from somewhere other than Scripture, you are getting your standard from somewhere other than God, and that means you are getting your standards from somewhere in this world. That’s what we call worldliness.

God’s words are pure: “The words of the LORD are pure words, Like silver tried in a furnace of earth, Purified seven times” (Ps. 12:6). And “Your word is very pure; Therefore Your servant loves it.” (Ps. 119:140). And again: “Every word of God is pure; He is a shield to those who put their trust in Him” (Prov. 30:5). And of course: “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness,that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16-17).

But this means that when John calls the Pharisees a “brood of vipers” this is pure. When Jesus mocks the long robes of the scribes, these are “pure words, purified seven times.” And when Paul says he wishes the Judaizers would go all the way and cut off their genitals, those are profitable words that Christians should love. When Jesus calls a gentile woman a racial slur, He is speaking a pure word. When John says that sexual dogs (i.e. sodomites) will be left outside the New Jerusalem (Rev. 23:18), he is speaking a pure word. When Jeremiah mocks Israel calling her a horny she-ass looking for an easy lay (Jer. 2:24) or when Ezekiel does the same, saying that Israel loves Egypt’s big penis and prolific semen, and the way they squeezed her nipples when she was young (Ez. 23:20-21), these obscenities are part of the word of God, which is pure, holy, edifying, and profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, and for instruction in righteousness.

Was it necessary or edifying for Ezekiel or Jeremiah or Jesus or Paul to talk the way they did? The answer must be an unqualified yes. Was it worldly, edgy, trying to get street cred for them to use the language they used? No, absolutely not. Are these words found in our Bibles pure, holy, edifying, kind, gracious, and clean? Yes, they are. They are God’s words. They are purified seven times.

So this is the deal: there is one form of worldliness that wants to be edgy in clothing, jewelry, hair dye, tattoos, and language, talking like rappers and pornographers and Planned Parenthood butchers, dropping F-bombs around like verbal terrorists. And all of that is a toilet bowl with one sort of whirling vortex taking you to Hell. But there is another form of worldliness that is dressed up like a Sunday school teacher, a Boy Scout, a grandmother, a pastor — a form of worldliness that appeals to verses in the Bible but allows the world, tradition, custom, sentiment, and Hallmark movies to define what the Bible means rather than allowing the Bible to define what the Bible means. But the point is that this is just another toilet bowl one stall over. It may be covered in pink flowers and precious moments figurines but it’s still worldliness and it’s rushing you to the same septic tank. And this is why many IRS officials and Victoria Secret models will enter the kingdom ahead of many deacons and choir directors. Judas ran the disciples’ mercy ministry and he was offended because Jesus allowed an insanely valuable ointment to be “wasted” on Him instead of using it to care for the poor, and so Judas betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. But that was because Judas had ideas about what prudence and propriety and stewardship were that he had gotten from somewhere other than Jesus. He could quote Bible verses all day long, and he was still wrong. He was still worldly.

God is perfect. God is holy. God is pure. He is not flippant. He is not frivolous. He is not capricious. He is not making it up as He goes along. He is just. He is good. There is no variation or shadow of turning with Him. So He must be our standard. We must love His Word, and His Word must be our light. His words are pure words, even if they are sometimes a little tart.

“How can a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed according to Your word. With my whole heart I have sought You; Oh, let me not wander from Your commandments! Your word I have hidden in my heart, That I might not sin against You!” (Ps. 119:9-11)

“Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart Be acceptable in Your sight, O LORD, my strength and my Redeemer” (Ps. 19:14).

 

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Forgiveness in the Oven

“And when you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.” (Mk. 11:25)

Here Jesus says that one of the things we should double check when we gather for formal worship is whether we have forgiven those who have wronged us. We are about to ask God to forgive us, and Jesus teaches us that we ought to be practicing the kind of forgiveness we want from God. How do you want God to forgive you?

Do you have grievances against anyone? Do you have any grudges? Have you been truly wronged? Is there anyone past or present that you resent? Did they say or do something to you that still stings? That still eats at you? That you still carry around with you, that weighs on you?

In another place, Jesus says that if you come to worship and remember that a brother has something against you, leave your gift at the altar and go be reconciled to your brother before offering your worship. And you may need to do that now. Maybe you need to lean over to your wife or husband or daughter and seek their forgiveness and be reconciled. Maybe you need to walk across the room to someone you wronged in a business deal and make it right. Go ahead and do that.

But in this verse, Jesus says that when you come to worship, you may have something against someone else, they may have done something to you. And here Jesus simply says forgive them. Obviously, in order to be fully reconciled, they need to agree that a wrong has occurred and ask your forgiveness, and sometimes that isn’t the case. But Jesus still says to forgive. Forgiveness is the promise that you will not hold someone’s sin against them. If they haven’t asked for it, you can’t extend the forgiveness, but you can set your heart in order. You cannot make the other person want forgiveness or ask forgiveness, but you can get your forgiveness all ready. You can have forgiveness baking in your oven for when they arrive. You can have forgiveness laid up in your wine cellar and ready to open if they come. You can have forgiveness prepared like that Father in the parable who was looking down the road for his lost son.

So if you have anything against anyone, forgive.

 

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Abercrombie & Bitch

Ok, so I want to talk about your style, your swag, your what shall we call it… your accoutrements. I want to talk about what you’re wearing and how you wear yourself. I want to talk about your glory.

Now, when I do this from time to time, I’ve found that people get a little prickly. When I’m slamming the feminists, the shouts go up: hurrah! When I’m mocking the sodomites and transgenders, the shouts go up: hurrah! When I’m calling for the end of abortion and defying the statist demigogues, the shouts go up: hurrah! And then when I say that’s why you should stop putting holes in your face and dying your hair teal, you should stop dressing like our enemies, stop wearing the uniform of the other team, the cry goes up: huh?? Hey, that hurt my feelings. I am deeply, deeply wounded deep down in my heart of hearts. My second cousin’s cat had a former owner who once delivered milk to some old godly saint of a woman with that exact Hebrew tramp stamp that you’re mocking and so I’m offended for my cat who is no doubt offended by your remarks on behalf of the whole human race. Everyone is offended. Everyone.

Or, often as not, the response is a little less fuming, and a little more faux-philosophical. You just don’t make sense, Mr. Toby. I see the arguments you’re making but I’m just confused by them. I read your post very carefully three times, looked up several words in my dictionary, and somewhere in there you took several logical leaps and bounds and I’m just flummoxed and confused by what it all means. And don’t you think you should be more careful?

But I’m one of those people who is not very put off by these responses. I do receive all honest input, and I do happily take it on board. But on the whole, taking one thing with another, I take both sorts of responses as a fair indication that I need to keep talking about it, probably even more than I really want to.

So, you want to end abortion in America. You want to see every knee bow to King Jesus. You want to see sexual confusion and perversion and abuse repented of. You want to see godly men leading godly women in married holiness raising piles of joyful children to love and fear the Lord all their days. You want to see faithfulness to a thousand generations. You want to see the laws of our land reflect the character of our God. You want worldliness and mammon crushed beneath our feet. In short, you want to see reformation and revival in our land.

Ok, great. But that means you need to stop shopping at Abercrombie and Bitch. Yes, I’m talking to you. You need to stop binge watching crap on Netflix. You need to stop studying Glamour for your fashion tips. You need to stop caring what Hot Topic, Gucci, the Gap, Old Navy, Macy’s, Tommy Hilfiger, Taylor Swift, Jay-Z, Imagine Dragons, or whatever your I’m-way-too-cool-for-you-indie-band is called — you need to stop caring what they tell you are the cool looks, the sexy looks, the manly looks, the ruggedly disheveled looks, the retro gay looks, the woker-than-thou-virtue-signalling looks, the I-get-laid-by-different-jerks-every-night-I-don’t-know-why looks. In short, you need to stop looking to the enemies of God for your beauty and style standards. Why in the world would you go to Baal for your haircut? Why would you go to Molech for your piercing, your tattoo, your wardrobe? And even if you wouldn’t go there, why would you look at their catalogues, emulate their models, or even give their version of glory the slightest time of day?

Christians have the bad habit of adopting the world’s uniform about 10 minutes after the first explosion of rebellion but while it’s still hot in their hand. Christians don’t usually want to openly rebel. They just want the smell of rebellion in their hair, the marks of rebellion on their skin. They didn’t really want to rebel (most of the time), they just want the look of rebellion, the tint of rebellion, the swagger of rebellion. It’s something along the lines of: I’m pretty awesome and I don’t give a damn. Or at least, something like Can’t you tell I’m trying really hard to be awesome, and I’m pretty sure, any moment now, I will begin not giving a damn. Much.

Ok, but newsflash for you: wanting to look rebellious, wanting to look like a rebel, a slut, or a lustful pirate is rebellion. It is sin. Do not desire their way of life. Do not desire their lostness. Do not desire to look perverse. Do not get your fashion sense from people who murder their babies, are unfaithful to their spouses, are sexually perverse, and think this world is a warm accident running down a cosmic toddler’s pant leg.

Now let me lay out some qualifiers for all you perfectionist piranhas out there. Look, nothing in this world is unclean in itself. There’s nothing evil or wicked in the material nature of piercings, bikinis, purple hair, or tramp stamps. And when the gospel is preached, people from every walk of life will come to Christ, and they will come to Christ wearing whatever it was that they were wearing. And in the nature of the case, pagans will often look like pagans. Rebels will look like rebels. It’s what they do. So I’m not talking about the inherent immorality of arranging matter in a particular order. And I’m also not talking about chasing people down who showed up at church last week who still look like Hell. Dude, that’s where they came from. Let’s get them baptized and reading their Bibles and holding a job down first.

But we are Christians, and we have been sent out into the world to build a new world, to build the Kingdom of God, to build communities that reflect Heaven. This is what it means for our citizenship to be in Heaven. This doesn’t mean we are just tourists in this world. No, it means we are colonists in this world. Philippi was an Imperial Colony of Rome. The citizens of Philippi were all Roman citizens, sent to Philippi to build a Roman city, with Roman customs, and to inculcate Roman culture in Asia Minor. When Paul urged the Philippians to think of their citizenship as being in Heaven, he was saying that they ought to recognize that their mission in this world was no longer to bring the culture of Rome to Asia Minor; now in Christ, their mission was to bring the culture of Heaven to Asia Minor. The Great Commission is the claim of Jesus that He has all authority in Heaven and on Earth and that the Church is to therefore go into all the world proclaiming this authority, baptizing those who submit to it, and teaching all men everywhere to obey all that Jesus has commanded. In short, our job is to bring the culture of heaven to earth, which is why we pray, Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Which brings me back to Abercrombie and Bitch. And I do not use that play on words lightly. I mean it. The American Church will continue to be the world’s bitch as long as the Church continues to allow the world to tell her what is cool, what is sexy, what is attractive, what is beautiful, what is glorious. Now I know that every Christian has to wake up in the morning and put clothes on and comb their hair. And nobody can start from nothing. No one gets a blank slate. You have what your mother gave you. You have what your dad gave you.You have whatever is in the closet, whatever ink is already in your skin. And we really are in a place where there’s hardly any way to put all the toothpaste back in the tube. I mean, some of you were literally imitating your pastor and got tattoos with him. Some of you were imitating your pastor’s wife and went and got that body piercing with her. And maybe you were discussing last Sunday’s sermon in all earnestness all the way there. I get that, and this is not me trying to diss every last element in the story. God is good, and He always meets us where we are. His grace fills up everything that is lacking in our pitiful attempts at obedience. And I would rather a tatted, pierced, pink haired, punk rocker who is actually trying to obey Jesus in humility every single day of the week than a kid with his shirt tucked in harboring a porn habit while carrying on like he’s the paragon of holiness. Remember, many tax collectors and prostitutes will be in heaven ahead of all the boy scouts and choir boys. And amen to that.

But we can’t stop there. Jesus doesn’t stop there. Jesus cares about culture. He cares about what we wear, what we eat, and how we present ourselves. It’s not the most important thing, but it is still important. He doesn’t give us a dress code or a long list of dos and don’ts, but we do have enough to go on in His word. And the big E on the eye chart is: Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind (Rom. 12:1). Also: Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world – the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life – is not of the Father but is of the world (1 Jn. 2:15-16). And we have honor your father and your mother, and love your neighbor as yourself, and whatever you do, whether you eat or drink or shop or comb or wear or pierce, do it all to the glory of God.

But we need to be students of the glory of God. If you’ve been born and raised in the glory of man, the glory of lust, the glory of pride, then you cannot get saved and magically assume you know what the glory of God is. The glory of God is not a little sticker you put on everything you were already planning to do anyway. The glory of God takes on a shape in this world. It takes everything in this world, nails it to the cross, and then waits to see what comes out of the grave. Sometimes nothing comes out of the grave. It needed to die and stay dead. Sometimes what comes out of the grave has a great deal of resemblance to what we nailed to the cross but now it’s handed back to us reoriented rightly to Christ. And sometimes what comes out of the grave is really different than anything we expected. But a great deal of modern culture is the attempt to glorify selfishness, lust, pride, to glorify me and my appetites. It says: look at me, look at my arms, look at my face, look at my breasts, hey! look at me! But trying to find your life like that is the surest way to lose it. Jesus says that the only way to find your life is to lose it for His sake. Take up your cross and follow Him. Lay all of that old, false glory down, nail it to the cross, and wait patiently for the Lord of glory to give you His real glory.

It turns out that this life in Christ really is full of joy and glory. There is a feast at the center, and we are going to the best party in the history of the world, the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. There will be the loudest singing, the best steak, the finest wine, and some pretty raucous music and dancing. And there really is a holy swagger that goes with all of this glory — it’s a boasting in the cross, but it’s a boasting all the same. So this isn’t me just getting old and cranky and yelling at the kids to get off the lawn. This is me trying to get the kids out of the highway where they keep getting clipped by worldly semi-trailers. Huh, everyone says, we just don’t get it. He went to church and Bible studies and even held up a big sign at our Planned Parenthood protest and now his kids are little demons and his marriage is on the rocks. Right, but you have to understand the power of glory. Where was the glory? Glory is what makes you shine. Glory is what makes you laugh out loud. Glory is what makes a man stand up straight and tall. Glory is what makes a woman altogether lovely. God wired us for glory. We are naturally hungry for glory. And glory drives us. Glory is taking us somewhere. And this is why the presentation matters. The presentation is aimed at glory. So whose glory is that and where is it taking you?

This is why we will happily serve a thousand cakes to homosexuals, but we will not make a cake for their wedding. We will not glorify their sin. We will not present their sin as good or glorious. This is why the Christian Church absolutely must minister to those who have been caught up in homosexual sin and lust, but this is why we must not celebrate those vile affections or unclean lusts as some kind of special identity. This is to glorify that sin as some kind of identity marker. But that is not who we are in Christ. He took our sin, and we have received His righteousness and perfection. This is our glory. So why would a Christian, washed in the redeemer’s blood, take fashion tips from homosexuals? Why would Christians dye their hair the colors of the Homo-PRIDE rainbow? Why would Christians put pieces of metal in their faces as if they hated themselves like sinners lost in sin, as those who glory in their shame?

Well, hold it now, Pastor: I read Genesis one time and Rebecca was a godly woman and Abraham’s servant gave her a nose ring. Right. And if you live in a conservative Christian Indian culture, be my guest. But my point is that context matters. We are living in times where the whole point is to confuse and mess with the categories. Who’s to say what a man is? What exactly is a woman? What is a family? What is a marriage? What is a baby? What is a mom or a dad? A man can have long hair. A woman can have short hair. A man can wear tight pants. A woman can wear a suit and tie. There’s not really a huge difference between men and women’s underwear. It’s just a clump of tissue. Hey, whatever floats your boat, pal. Right, and so that’s why Christians who care about the current demolition job being done on the remnants of Western Culture around us, should not help the arsonists and terrorists with their work by proliferating their glory, by dressing up in the rags of their confusion. You can quote Bible verses all day long, but if you are still mesmerized by their glory, if you still love their bling, you are still their bitch.

So it really comes down to what you are attracted to, what is glorious in your eyes. If Christ is your glory, your joy, then His ways, His customs, His style should over time inform how you glorify your life. And if Christ is your glory, everyone who hates Christ should get the squinty-eyed suspicious look when they are trying to sell you something to make you look good. Why should you trust the baby-killers? Why would you get glory tips from people who support genital mutilation in the name of finding your true sexual identity? They don’t know what glory is.

So here’s my point: the western Christian Church will not actually begin to take back leadership of culture until we entirely reject the world’s offer to be our stylists and wardrobe managers. If you don’t want them running the show, do not let them back stage.

All That Is In God

Just finished All That Is In God by James Dolezal, and it’s one of those books that makes things in your head creak (in good ways). It’s heavy and thick in certain respects, and yet at the same time, given the material, it’s relatively accessible and clearly the sort of topic someone could spend a few Saturdays on. So given that, I found it to be a bracing shot of theological whisky.

First off, I’m grateful for the book because it convinced me of the goodness and necessity of the doctrine of God’s simplicity. I also came away convinced that a great deal of modern theologizing, particularly on the doctrines of covenant and Trinity, has not been nearly as careful as it should have been. Clearly the Bible puts an enormous emphasis on monotheism: the oneness, the simplicity of God’s Godness. The basic point to grasp here is the idea that perfection implies simplicity. There are no parts or passions or changes in God. There is no progression of any sort in God whether spatially or temporally or emotionally or in any other way of being. God’s being is absolute perfection in every way, leaving no room for improvement. Any change or progression or movement would imply previous imperfection, previous lack, previous potential. Perfection simply means absolute best possible version in every possible way. Any sort of composition of parts in God would imply imperfection since it renders a part of God dependent on another part or parts. Lots more to say, but that’s the basic idea.

The Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner famously complained that you’d scarcely know there was a Trinity from many classical Christian theologians until you’d gotten to the second or third volume of their text, but we should not be so easily dismayed when God Himself barely let on to the Trinity for four thousand years and 39 books of inspired Scripture. The most important thing for Israel to know was Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is One. This is the starting point for sound theology. And Dolezal does us a favor to remind us not only to begin there, but to continually circle back, double-checking that our theologizing does not leave those first principles behind.

Second, Dolezal convinced me that a warning is warranted for the way modern Reformed theologians have sometimes played with divine simplicity (sometimes consciously, perhaps sometimes unintentionally) when it comes to speaking about how God relates to His creation. He raises this warning with regard to how some describe God’s relationship to time and events in time, as well as those seeking to describe God’s “interactions” with men as real or genuine. If God does not change in any way, some wonder, how can it be genuine to describe God interacting with creation, or speaking with someone, or responding to some state or event? Does God enter into time in some way? Does He have a timeless being but a temporal way of interacting with time? Well, since God is not composed of parts, Dolezal explains that we don’t want to end up with part of God being eternal and some other part of Him being temporal. Would God be less than God apart from His temporal acts? It would seem so, implying God is in some way dependent on His creation for complete perfection, rendering God imperfect since He needs something outside Himself to be fully God. Likewise, since God’s perfection implies that He does not change, it would not be proper to speak of any sort of sequencing in God. So, even if there was some way of positing God “in time” to then speak of God doing one thing and then the other is once again to imply imperfection since complete perfection would mean eternality and omnipresence. All that is in God is always, eternally present. He fills all in all.

But the obvious challenges this presents are how to speak about God being Creator or Redeemer. How can we speak of God being Creator or Redeemer and not speak of historic acts or sequential acts in some sense? Did God begin to be a Creator at the beginning of creation? The answer must be no — God did not begin to be a Creator because God is eternal, without any beginning or end. The word “begin” implies a sequence, a before and after, but God’s eternity means that His will to create is actually simultaneous in eternity with the decision to create, which in turn is simultaneous and essentially the same as His act of creation. God was not thinking about creating for a long time and then decided to execute the plan one sunny Sunday morning. No, all of God’s plans are always in full execution. God’s fullness fills all that He is, and all that He is, He does. There is no potential in God, only fullness of being, absolute, infinite abundance, in every way, which incidentally, is a profoundly doxological point.

If you read something like this and don’t pause every few pages for what my friend Chocolate Knox calls a “praise break,” you’re doing theology all wrong. It’s thick and profound, but it’s also glorious to make a big deal about God’s transcendence, His otherness, His infinity, which is the very ground of His salvation, His nearness, His love. To gesture wildly in the direction of God’s infinite existence is to highlight our very small finite existence. And this is to make the jaw of your heart drop wide open. What is man that you are mindful of him? The son of man that you care for him? O Lord our Lord, how excellent is your name in all the earth.

Ok, back from the praise break:

So what we ought to say is that God is eternally the Creator, but what He created was a temporal universe which of necessity had a beginning. Thus, somewhat paradoxically, the Eternal Creator God did not begin to create the world, but the world He created had a very discreet beginning. This gives a whole new momentous significance to “In the beginning…” Though Dolezal does not go into it, the very same language would presumably properly apply to the Incarnation. God did not begin to be incarnate. Properly speaking He is eternally the Redeemer and Incarnate One, but the Incarnation, from an historical point of view most certainly did begin at a very discrete moment in time in the womb of a virgin.

Dolezel helpfully cites various attempts of trying to connect God with time in ways that may seem on the surface to sound a bit more personal or historical or natural at first, but which he argues persuasively actually leave us with more questions about God’s simplicity and/or immutability. The glory of God is magnified by the preservation of the distance between God and man, Creator and creature — the distance that only God can overcome by virtue of being God. At the same time, one may be tempted at points to worry that Dolezel is allowing philosophy or dogmatic theology to trump Scriptural language. Doesn’t the Bible speak of God acting in creation, making covenant, bringing judgment, speaking to men, etc? But there are at least two mitigating factors for this concern: first, the Bible itself speaks this way and at other times speaks very differently, and we should not pit the Bible against itself. The Bible speaks of God having no shadow of turning. God does not change. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And so this language must be held together with language of interaction, response, or conversation. It won’t do to have a predisposition to say one set of language is metaphorical or anthropomorphic but the other set of language is literal. No, we must be content with the truth and humility of Scripture. It is absolutely true, and it is not misleading us, but we are talking about the infinite God who is not completely like anything we know. He is like and unlike everything we know such that what we see now is in a glass darkly.

Dolezal’s case against theistic mutualism — a spectrum of attempts to bridge this distance, allowing for some measure of mutuality, or real change or temporality or sequencing in God, thus muddying His absolute simplicity — is convincing to me. I see what he’s getting at, and I’m strongly inclined to follow his exhortations. My only lingering question or perhaps slight pushback came as I finished out the book on the chapter on the Trinity. And my pushback or question isn’t so much in his articulation of the Trinity and the simplicity of God. That was all quite helpful. But my question basically comes down to whether Dolezal (and/or others working to recover the centrality of divine simplicity) sees a way forward based on the very articulation that Dolezal gives of classic trinitarianism — do you see a way forward for articulating a doctrine of the covenant and divine/human interaction based on the classical articulation of the Trinity? What I mean is this: Dolezal rejects various attempts of some prominent Reformed theologians to preserve God’s simplicity while trying to carve out a way of speaking of God’s true “interactions” with men in history and seems to relegate all of that way of speaking to revelation. But when it comes to the doctrines of creation and the Trinity, Dolezal traces an historic consensus that actually leans into an even more complex answer while avoiding the various heretical ditches. So for example, when it comes to the Trinity, Dolezal had done such a grand job rejecting any idea of composition or parts in God that one might have wondered how in the world he would pull Trinity out of his magician’s hat, but he does it. He cites Augustine and Owen and Bavinck, and traces the way the Trinity has been carefully articulated in terms of “relations” in God. What we call “persons” in the Godhead are not persons in the sense we use the word to describe people at all, but the simplicity and fullness of God’s being is so related and harmonious that it is rightly spoken of as three ways of relating or “persons,” Father, Son, and Spirit. The persons of the Trinity do not compose the oneness or unity of God, but rather, the oneness and unity of God is revealed or communicated in the relations of the Father, Son, and Spirit. Through a glass darkly!

But here’s my question again: it seems to me that Dolezal largely dismisses the attempts of John Frame or others trying to do justice to the covenantal language of scripture while preserving God’s simplicity. Yet, might not the very same template used historically with the persons of the Trinity be applied to our language of covenantal relationship? In other words, Dolezal has argued for a non-composite way of describing distinction and relation in the unchanging, simple being of God. Why couldn’t similar language be used for God’s relational presence toward man? On the one hand, Dolezal is quite right to push back against the implicit suggestion of some that for God’s interaction with man to be authentic and genuine it must in some measure mimic human interaction. But we are talking about the infinite and eternal God. Our interaction with this God would suggest vast divergences and any similarities would come as pleasant surprises. And yet, I still wonder if there is room for filling the picture out a bit more than simply dismissing sloppy or insufficient attempts.

I’m thinking of something like: God does not change. He is all that He is in all that He is. And this absolute simplicity includes the fact that He is the God of Covenant, the Covenant-making, Covenant-keeping God. He does not begin to make covenant or renew covenant, but in His infinite plenitude of being, He has created the universe in time. This infinite and eternal God is eternally and properly present and therefore necessarily active to every moment in time. He does not change, but in the sequence of created time, God’s changeless being can truly be said to act — not in the sense that He begins to do something He was not doing before, but rather in the sense that His absolute being is present and thereby perfectly active — exhaustively performing all that absolute perfection requires, since there is no distance between who God is and what He does. I wonder if something like this offers us a way to speak of the true activity of God in history while carefully guarding God’s glorious simplicity.

In other words, I would plead for a more conciliatory approach to those theologians who are endeavoring to preserve divine simplicity in good faith while trying (if haltingly) to articulate temporal or covenantal realities. To be clear, Dolezal is cordial throughout his work, but what I mean by conciliatory is an eagerness to offer theological language that might fill out what these theologians are trying to say. Dolezal does this with creation and Trinity, and I don’t see why it can’t be done with covenantal or temporal language. Can we not take the same template used to describe God as Creator and Trinity and apply it to God’s covenant action?

Finally, and related to this last point, I would suggest that something like this be made serviceable to those who (rightly in my view) see the necessity of grounding human relations in some sort of accounting of God’s being. Dolezal’s brief dismissal of univocalists who desire to ground human relations in the Trinity or else the Trinity is of no use at all was a momentary lapse in an otherwise thoughtful treatise. If we can speak of “distinction” in a non-composite way, and if we can speak of the “relations” as speaking of the oneness and unity of being, then surely we can speak of those relations having something to do with human relations. While I certainly agree with Dolezal that a certain sort of simplistic univocalism really isn’t very helpful, might one come back with a robust analogical accounting of human relations that harmonizes with the clear biblical invitation to look for and indeed find useful grounding of human relations in the nature and being of God? Eternal functional subordinationism does seem clunky, but Dolezal’s brief treatment did not convince me that there is nothing there to be discussed.

Spying Out Immanuel’s Land

“No man shall be able to stand before you all the days of your life; as I was with Moses, so I will be with you. I will not leave you nor forsake you.” (Josh. 1:5). Of course, God goes on to rally Joshua to be very strong and courageous to take the land that the Lord is giving to Israel.

What’s striking is that Hebrews actually quotes that verse from Joshua and applies it to Christians: “Let your conduct be without covetousness; be content with such things as you have. For He Himself has said, ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you.’ So we may boldly say: ‘The LORD is my helper; I will not fear. What can man do to me?’” (Heb. 13:5-6)

But this seems a little strange since Hebrews seems to quote Joshua for an almost opposite sounding reason. In Joshua, God is telling Joshua to be courageous and go take the land, I will never leave you or forsake you, but here in Hebrews it sounds like it’s saying be content, don’t take anything, I will never leave you or forsake you. So which is it?

The answer is both actually. The reason Hebrews can apply Joshua’s commission to Christians is because we have a new Joshua, Yeshua, Jesus. And He has inherited all of the nations: All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Him. So for Christians, we are not trying to take the land for Jesus. We are simply telling the lands it’s already His. This is why we covet nothing and are content with what we have – which incidentally is everything in Christ. And at the same time, because it belongs to Christ and to us in Him, we are jealous for His glory and eager to see every knee bow and every tongue confess Him Lord. And since we do not yet see that, we labor for that. But He is with us like He was with Moses, like He was with Joshua, and no man can stand before us.

This is what this bread and wine means. They mean this land belongs to our King. We are eating wheat and grapes, produce of the land that belongs to King Jesus. It’s a little like when the spies brought back enormous clusters of grapes from the Promised Land. But we are spying out Immanuel’s land. And we do it every week.

So come and welcome to Jesus Christ.

 

Photo by Jodie Morgan on Unsplash

Do You Fear God?

Do you fear God?

One of our favorite psalms says, “Blessed the man that fears Jehovah… Lo on him that fears Jehovah…” All of those blessings of eating the fruit of your labors, your wife being a fruitful vine and your children like olive shoots around your table, and seeing your children’s children – all of those blessings are predicated on the fear of the Lord.

What does it mean to fear the Lord? It means to be afraid of God. It means to tremble at the thought of God. Christians are often quick to explain this away. It means respect or reverence, we might say. But that really is not sufficient. The fear of the Lord really is a holy dread, a holy trembling. There is a sinful, fleshly fear that is unholy and ungodly, and perfect love casts out that kind of fear. But if you read your Bible and you want to know the God of the Bible, you must come to embrace the fact that there is a knowledge of God’s holiness and glory and justice and power that makes you feel like you’re standing on the very edge of a cliff looking down into thin air.

God is not a cosmic teddy bear. He is fierce and terrible. When people come into His presence they fall down, they tremble. It’s the fear of knowing His complete perfection and holiness and knowing we are not. He is a hurricane of glory, the sun of righteousness, the lion of the tribe of Judah, thunder and lightning goes out from His throne, and He sees all things, knows all things, and He will judge the world in absolute justice.

Do you fear the Lord?

This godly, holy fear is necessary for a godly and holy life. God spoke to the people of Israel and gave them His covenant so that they would learn to fear Him all the days of their life and teach their children to do the same. The fear of the Lord teaches men wisdom; it teaches us to obey God’s commands. The fear of the Lord hates all evil. The fear of the Lord is clean and endures forever. The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life. The fear of the Lord is better than great treasure. Hebrews says that in the New Covenant, we have come to Mt. Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and God speaks to us directly from heaven, and therefore we must serve God with reverence and godly fear, because our God is a consuming fire.

Our God is not at all safe, but He is good.

 

Photo by Nathan Shipps on Unsplash

Reimagining Revoice In Their Own Revoice

“What if we could imagine a world where a man hears a sermon on the Song of Songs and decides that his conscience will allow him to look at pornography? But what if he did so through the lens of Scripture and the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit? Imagine what those sanctified desires and pleasures might inspire. Just think about how a deeper contemplation of this ancient art form might encourage the Christian church to grow in its appreciation of the innate goodness of those writhing, naked bodies, or the artistic rendering of the cameras or the energy put into post-production, even the glorious technology that delivers those pixels right to a smart phone. This wouldn’t solve every problem facing Christians today, but urging Christians to embrace new ways of viewing explicit pictures and films that actually led to greater purity and fidelity can be a legitimate way of alleviating tensions that sometimes arise in these situations.”

-Revoicing Pornography: Revoice 2019

“What if we could imagine a world where a man lies almost constantly. He lies about what he watched on television. He lies about where he went. He constantly embellishes stories with details and events that never occurred and makes promises he has no intention of keeping. But what if all of it was driven by love? Imagine his falsehoods driven by the deepest pool of compassion and grace you can imagine (but only deeper, of course). Imagine the love of Christ as an ocean you can never reach the bottom of – it’s infinite. This infinite, Trinitarian, perichoretic love doesn’t have just one particular shape or size and can hardly be bound by finite language or discrete facts. What if this man realizes that story and poetry are more fundamental, more Christ-like than the so-called “truth”? What if Christian communities could be places where untruths and nontruths and semitruths and softtruths were actually received as being far closer to the truth? This wouldn’t solve all the problems facing Christians today, but it could be a legitimate means to alleviating those tensions that inevitably emerge in these kinds of situations.”

-Revoicing Falsehood: Revoice 2020

“Imagine a world where a Christian woman decides that her conscience permits her to leave her bathroom window open while she showers – not because she wants to lead men into sin or even temptation, but what if it was a Psalm 8 sort of revelry in the glory of God? Imagine her spiritual ecstasy, being completely transparent, an Edenic triumph, like the New Jerusalem coming down out of Heaven. Now imagine if the men who gathered every morning to watch her bathe began to participate in that celestial revelry. What if they actually came to a deeper and truer understanding of what it means to be human beings together on this lonely, Christian pilgrimage? What new kinds of community might be formed if we could only think beyond the old-fashioned binary morality.”

-Revoicing Voyerism: Revoice 2021

“What if we could imagine a scenario in which a Christian businessman, after hearing his pastor preach a sermon on the superiority of the white race and the complicated nature of dealing with inferior races, decides that his conscience would allow him to refuse his products and services to all non-white customers? Obviously, some people would take offense at this, but what if urging Christians to at least consider the claims of white-supremacists opened new avenues of dialogue that might actually lead to a stronger, more united Christian Church? What if those offended chose to listen carefully to that businessman’s testimony rather than rushing to judgment? And what if they could hear in that man’s voice not hatred but a new kind of love and friendship? This would obviously not solve all the problems with racial animosity in our society, but it might lead to a legitimate means of easing tensions that often arise in these situations.”

-Revoicing Racism: Revoice 2022

“What if we could imagine a scenario in which a Christian businesswoman, after hearing her pastor preach a sermon about these issues, decided that her conscience would allow her to sell products to a gay couple to use in a wedding ceremony? Obviously this wouldn’t solve every problem facing Christians in society today, but urging Christians to consider new ways of thinking about a complicated issue that might lead to a stronger conscience can be a legitimate means (among many, of course) of easing the tensions that sometimes erupt in these kinds of situations.”

–Nate Collins, President and Founder of Revoice 2018