Recently, during the opening prayer time, a member of my Sunday school class conveyed the sad news. “Pray for us,” he said, referring to himself and his bride sitting beside. “We just learned that a family member of ours has passed away.”

Among offered condolences and assurance of prayer, the man was asked whether they would be attending the funeral. “I don’t know just yet,” he replied. “The funeral is in another state, and we’ll have to see if we can make it work.”

Later that day another couple in the class asked about the situation. “We were just wondering,” they inquired of me in private, and in somewhat hushed tones, “whether the man who spoke this morning had a financial need in order to attend that funeral.”

I didn’t know, but promised them I would find out. I made a call to the man whose family member had died. Some financial assistance would certainly help, he told me. He was thrilled and grateful to hear that an anonymous couple wanted to help them out.

Such, I realized afresh, is the gospel.

Christians have always been encouraged to help those in need. Paul encourages the Corinthian church to give to the churches in Judea, not out of guilty compulsion but rather out of joy and gratitude.

Examples of such giving—even out of poverty—are provided in Paul’s own life, as well as in the churches of Macedonia. Ultimately, however, these do not suffice. That’s because the ultimate example of giving resides in Jesus (2 Cor 8:9). He is the motivation for everything, even the collection of money.

God always gives. He delights in being the good provider. Even when we don’t deserve it. Especially when we don’t deserve it. He replaces shame-driven fig leaves with grace-motivated garments of skins outside of Eden. He replaces guilt-infested filthy rags with blood-purchased spotless robes inside of Christ.

Jesus gave up his riches and became poor, that in his sacrifice we might inherit the entire world, with him.

Financially, these are certainly not the best of times. The temptation comes to “save up” in times of hardship, with intentions of “giving more” when one is able. What’s needed in such a situation is what’s always needed in instances of delayed obedience—that is, swift repentance.

A poor economy provides believers with the opportunity to proclaim something the church has always believed—that is, that we don’t worship the god of Mammon. We worship the God of Jesus Christ.

And in such times, Christians are able to show their love for all men, and especially to those in their own household (Gal 6:10). It’s one thing to show love for the poverty-stricken across the ocean. (And we should.) It’s another to show love for the poverty-stricken across the church foyer.

In giving sacrificially, and joyfully, we proclaim that Jesus is Lord. Economies swell and recede. The kingdom, though, will never fail. And those who have entered the kingdom will never fail to give.

For anyone who is not only into textual criticism, but who also writes or communicates, Anatomy of Criticism is a really fascinating book. The four essays attempt to build a case for a standard approach to literature.  And while they don’t really fulfill the goal on this first pass (e.g., the presentation of dianoia could use a little more fleshing out), this effort does provide a basis for further conversation on the subject.

This really is not about textual criticism as we think of it with regards to Biblical documents.  There are subject we cover that they do not, and vice-versa.  This is about the character of the literature.  And this feature makes it useful for evaluating the quality of a translation.  For instance, the analysis of the prose structure of the KJV translation adds to one’s understanding of the historic acceptance of the beauty of the language.

One shortcoming in the authors’ understanding of the Bible is their persistent discussion of apocalypse and failure to discuss eschatos — the end product, the goals of the authors.  Still, though, the authors do provide some literary comparisons that are useful.  These are seen in the analysis of Job and of Pilgrim’s Progress, along with other works that borrow from Biblical themes.  They provide some context to help enrich one’s understanding of the writer’s framing of the story.

So, while the authors clearly do not hold the Bible with the same esteem as a Christian would, they do treat it with literary respect and so provide some useful tools and perspectives to enhance one’s reading.

Muslims and non-Muslims who live in nations where Islam is not the law of the land talk a lot about how Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance. Christians who live in Islamic nations tell a different story. I picked this up from Ron Dreher’s blog, who writes: “If you want to know what it’s really like to live under persecution for your Christian faith and culture, listen to this presentation by Bishop Thomas, a Copt who serves in Assiut, an area of intense Islamic persecution of Christians. I met him once, and the man is so luminous, and peaceful. It’s almost humiliating to be an American Christian, with such an easy life despite it all, and to hear what life is like for Christians in Egypt and elsewhere. If you don’t have time to watch the whole nine minute video, start at about 2:45:

When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou visitest him?
Psalm 8:3-4

HT: Ron Dreher.

Today we commemorate and remember those first martyrs of the New Testament era, the Holy Innocents slaughtered by wicked King Herod in Bethlehem. We may wonder why, in this “season of joy and happiness” we have in the Church Year the commemoration of the murder of St. Stephen, and then, a couple days later, the murder of young children. What a gloomy note to strike during this happy time! But one thing the Christian Faith is not, it is not unrealistic. It does not “make believe” that we can simply wish away evil, or ignore it. No, we deal with it, head-on, in all its brutal tragedy. These little children were slaughtered, while the Son of God, went free. Such it always is with the ways of Satan. He wants nothing more than to destroy and mar what God has declared good. And so, even at a very young age, the agents of Satan were coming after our dear Lord, but His time had not yet come, and God provided a way of escape. His Son escaped, in high divine irony, back to the land where God’s people had been enslaved so long before, and out of Egypt, God called his Son (Hosea 11:1). He called His son forth to come back to the land where He was born, in order to continue His divine mission of the salvation of the world. The ancient hymn by Prudentius sings well what this commemoration of the Holy Innocents means for us:

Sweet flow’rets of the martyr’s band
Plucked by the tyrant’s ruthless hand
Upon the threshold of the morn,
Like rosebuds by a tempest torn;

First victims for the incarnate Lord,
A tender flock to feel the sword;
Beside the altar’s ruddy ray,
With palm and crown you seem to play.

Ah, what availed King Herod’s wrath?
He could not stop the Savior’s path.
Alone, while others murdered lay,
In safety Christ is borne away.

O Lord, the virgin-born, we sing
Eternal praise to You, our King,
Whom with the Father we adore
And Holy Spirit evermore.

Aurelius Prudentius Clemens (348-c. 413)
LSB 969

And we pray:

Almighty God, the martyred innocents of Bethlehem showed forth Your praise not by speaking but by dying. Put to death in us all that is in conflict with Your will that our lives may bear witness to the faith we profess with our lips; through Jesus Christ, our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, One God, now and forever. Amen.

Recently I opened a jury duty summons for one of our local courts. My report date hasn’t arrived quite yet, but I’m looking forward to the possibility of serving. I’ve only been empanelled once and it was a nightmare; I’m hoping for a better experience this time. The accused was clearly guilty; everyone identified him as the culprit (it was a robbery and stabbing), there were multiple witnesses, and the case was solid from start to finish. The accused even admitted that he had done it, but he claimed, with a straight face, to have stabbed the guy “accidentally” four, count ‘em, four times: once in the chest and three times in the back after he flipped the victim over. He threw the icepick (he claimed it was a meat thermometer) into a river, he said, while fleeing to another state because he was afraid that he would be charged with a crime.

Incredibly, we ended with a hung jury because one of my fellow jurors kept saying, “Who am I to judge this man?” It was a case of eleven angry men and women and one owner of a half-baked hermeneutical approach to Scripture, in this case Matthew 7:1-3, which she had denuded over and over in a refrain of its first two words: “Judge not.”

If we take that verse out of context, not only from Matthew 7 but from the broad panorama of Scripture, we then are left with a kind of soft anarchism that leaves all possibility of justice from the earth, expecting God to act as a legal deus ex machine whose failure to intervene in the smallest instances of justice leave us paralyzed to act. If there is no justice, no consistent, measured kind of justice, in this life, then how can we have any hope of knowing justice in this world? Instead of passing the buck to some sort of moral deism, the point of the passage is that justice begins in our relationship with God: we are called to judge ourselves first according to God’s standards, and to act on God’s behalf out of a sense of holy humility and righteous integrity that expresses itself in concern for the oppressed, no matter who they may be.

This is particularly important to the form of government that we enjoy in our nation. If I were on trial, I would find hope and comfort if I could be assured that the judge and jurors would base their deliberations out of a sense of prayer, fairness, and adherence to the highest standards of the law. If I were a victim, I would find the same kind of comfort in such knowledge. I hope that I can be that kind of juror when I am called upon.

I was thinking of using the title “From Providence to Eschatology” just to make things sounds more theologically rich.  Then I though, “So what?  Who cares?”

There is a step between Christmas and Pentecost, between Israel proper and the church that might be missed.  It seems to me that the OT is largely providential as the perspective is about God’s care for His people, Israel.  Of course, this comes along with his plans to redeem via the future Messiah, but Israel is the subject of the OT as the Lord protects the nation from destruction.

This is fulfilled in Christ.  He is Emannuel — God with us.  He is God present with His people, even better than the fire and cloud.  He weeps over Jerusalem.  He heals.  He does almost everything that is expected.  Almost.  And then He does the unexpected.

The unexpected is to move from with to in.  Our hope is now not national but spiritual.  While the Lord’s providential care for Israel goes on unchanged (Romans 11:29), he has added the church as the agency to carry the redemptive message of salvation.  It is now no longer just God with us, but Christ in you as your hope of glory.

Now it’s time for the big words.  God’s eschatology, God’s purpose in his caring, was to bring about this end. Eschatology is not simply about 2012, Nostradamus, Revelation, or the fascinating studies of Daniel 9 and Revelation.  It is about purpose.  The purpose is redemption.  Galatians 4 speaks this well, that Christ was born of a woman, born under the law, to bring about redemption.  Redemption is the Lord’s end game.  Christmas came as proof in advance, expressing His care and love for his lost creation.

Today is the feast of St. Stephen the Protomartyr in the eastern church. The western churches celebrated his feast day yesterday. His story is told in Acts 6-8:1. One element of this episode has always puzzled me. Verses 2-4 of Acts 7 tells us:

And the twelve summoned the full number of the disciples and said, “It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables. Therefore, brothers, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we will appoint to this duty.”

However, there is no further mention of Stephen “serving tables.” In fact, “Stephen, full of grace and power, [performed] great wonders and signs among the people” and spoke to the people with wisdom through the Holy Spirit (7:8,10). It is highly unlikely that Stephen would have been stoned to death if he had stuck to his original job description. The Spirit seems to have had other plans for him.

The following piece appeared in the 8 December 2008 issue of Christian Courier, as part of my monthly column, Principalities & Powers:

In the liturgies of some churches, the congregation stands at the reading of the gospel lesson. There may even be a gospel procession in which the celebrant walks down the aisle accompanied by two people, one bearing a candle held aloft to provide the symbolic light and another carrying the book from which the lesson will be read. This is a sign of respect for the gospels, which, uniquely in Scripture, tell the story of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection.

It is striking, however, that only two of the gospels, Matthew and Luke, contain infancy narratives. Each provides a different, albeit complementary, account of Jesus’ birth, but both agree that he was born in Bethlehem, the city of his remote ancestor David. Mark, whose gospel is much shorter than the other four and is devoted largely to Jesus’ deeds rather than his words, does not mention the birth at all, focusing instead on the beginning of his ministry and the inaugural role of John the Baptist.

The fourth gospel is different from the three synoptics. If John passes over Jesus’ infancy, he nevertheless bears clear testimony to the incarnation:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it (John 1:1-5 RSV).

God became man in Jesus Christ. This is what we confess weekly in our churches and it’s what separates Christians from the followers of the two other Abrahamic religions.

A decade ago a former moderator of the United Church of Canada revealed in an interview that he did not believe that Jesus was divine or that he had literally risen from the dead. Naturally this created controversy in his own church and elsewhere, but his doubts are shared by many. After all, if Jesus was a mere human being, even a very good one, and we nevertheless worship him, we are guilty of nothing less than idolatry. This is precisely what Jews and Muslims believe about Christians.

Yet if God did not become man, we are still in our sins and there is no salvation for us. For no mere human being could bear the weight of God’s anger at our sin and thereby release us from it, as the Heidelberg Catechism affirms (Question 14). Only the One who is true God and true Man can work our salvation from the debt of sin (Questions 15-18). This is the message of the gospels and there can be no doubt that it is a stumbling block to many, as Paul puts it (1 Corinthians 1:23), even to some who would otherwise claim the label Christian.

Nevertheless, the church has always taught that, read together, the four gospels give us a full understanding of who Christ is. John affirms that God become man in the incarnate Word, while Matthew and Luke relate that the Word-made-flesh was born of an ordinary woman in humble circumstances, far from the centres of political power yet threatening enough to be hunted by an apprehensive local ruler.

God became man in Jesus Christ, a momentous event that is still foolishness to the nations two thousand years later.