Church Voices

I’m working my way through Jeremiah (referred to around my house as the emo prophet) and came across chapter 33. In this chapter God relates how he’s going to lay the smack down on Israel. Check this out:

For this is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says about the houses in this city and the royal palaces of Judah that have been torn down to be used against the siege ramps and the sword 5 in the fight with the Babylonians [a] : ‘They will be filled with the dead bodies of the men I will slay in my anger and wrath. I will hide my face from this city because of all its wickedness.

Ouch. But don’t worry it all works out in the end:

” ‘Nevertheless, I will bring health and healing to it; I will heal my people and will let them enjoy abundant peace and security. 7 I will bring Judah and Israel back from captivity and will rebuild them as they were before. 8 I will cleanse them from all the sin they have committed against me and will forgive all their sins of rebellion against me. 9 Then this city will bring me renown, joy, praise and honor before all nations on earth that hear of all the good things I do for it; and they will be in awe and will tremble at the abundant prosperity and peace I provide for it.’

But the key to this passage is found a bit later on:

14 ” ‘The days are coming,’ declares the LORD, ‘when I will fulfill the gracious promise I made to the house of Israel and to the house of Judah.

15 ” ‘In those days and at that time
I will make a righteous Branch sprout from David’s line;
he will do what is just and right in the land.

This is messianic prophecy. The messiah is how God’s promises will be fulfilled. Unfortunately, all too often, we can get caught up in the details and forget that this entire thing we call Christianity is focused on Christ. Arguments about the reformation, baptism, free will, or any other issue need to always keep in mind that center is Christ. If our theology becomes anything other than either an expression of Christ, or looking to Christ then its as empty as Jeremiah 33 without the restoration.

Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, If ye continue in My Word, then are ye My disciples indeed; And ye shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall make you free. - John 8:31-32 (KJV)

Reading the King James Version of the Bible is akin to reading/hearing pirate speech.  Fun and humorous at times, but doesn’t help communicate so well anymore.

Why do we insist on making people learn a new language to know Christ?  Now, I’m fine with learning a new language because we know Christ, such as the desire to learn Greek and Hebrew, or simply the process of learning how to speak in a way that glorifies God, but otherwise we are putting up an unnecessary barrier.  I don’t care what you use for your own devotions (although there will be plenty of words in the KJV that will mislead you if you don’t know better), but to insist that everybody uses that version because it’s the one God ordained is rediculous.

O God, whom I praise,
do not remain silent,

for wicked and deceitful men
have opened their mouths against me;
they have spoken against me with lying tongues.
Psalm 109.1-2

I preached on Jonah today. I love the book of Jonah, there’s so much in it that’s just totally sweet. The high points of each chapter:

1. Jonah tries to literally run away from God. This may not seem like a huge revelation to us, but in the OT people who were not Jewish believed each god (or set of gods) had a zip code they controlled, Jonah finds out the hard way that God is everywhere. So remember, not matter where you are, there God is.

2. Chapter two is pretty sweet with Jonah in the belly of the fish at the bottom of the ocean he has only the God he ran away from to turn towards. After Jonah’s prayer God commands the fish to vomit him up on shore so he can complete God’s command. The take away from this is that no matter how far you run from God there’s always the opportunity to begin obeying God’s commands. Even if that means being vomited up by a whale.

3. In Chapter 3 Jonah calls Nineveh to repentance, they respond (I suppose proving when someone looks like they’ve been swallowed by a whale for three days and vomited onto a beach and calls you to repentance, then you repent), and God is compassionate and calls off the dogs. Keep in mind no matter how long, or how extreme your sin is, God is compassionate when we repent.

4. Chapter 4 is the big reveal. Jonah’s lets us in on why he ran. He ran because he wanted Nineveh destroyed and knew God would be compassionate towards them if they repented. Moral of the story: that guy or those people you hate, well God loves them, and wants them in the kingdom of God. So quit being a jerkhole towards them and let them in on the gospel.

Jeremiah 4.9

9 “In that day,” declares the LORD,
“the king and the officials will lose heart,
the priests will be horrified,
and the prophets will be appalled.”[emphasis mine]

What’s interesting about this is that the priests and prophets are supposed to be the guys on God’s side, the guys who know God, and in the case of the prophets, the guys that God speaks directly to, and yet they are going to be horrified and appalled by what God is going to do.

The biggest danger when reading these verses is to take the warnings of Jeremiah to a faithless Israel and apply them to a country today. God had a covenant with Israel, he called Israel His people. He does not have a covenant with a nation any longer. His covenant is with the church. Faithless Israel of Jeremiah’s time can’t be compared with a nation who’s politics we may think are anti-God, or anti-scripture, Jeremiah’s faithless Israel can only be compared to a church that has abandoned the gospel.

Not too long ago World Magazine ran an article on the massive closings of churches that are just ahead for the US. Many of the old line, denominations that have dominated the landscape in the past are very long in the tooth (and I will also toss in the more conservative congregations that have failed to take the gospel to their communities and even their own children), and as these congregations literally die off their churches will follow them into the grave. Western Europe, once the very definition of Christianity, has long ago found her churches dropping like flies.

I’m sure what priests and prophets were left were horrified.

Jeremiah predicts that God’s wrath on Jerusalem will take the form of a nation coming out of the north. I myself kind of doubt a Canadian army of holy avengers is going to descend on churches across the US. Instead churches that have abandoned the gospel will simply die on the vine, whimpering into obscurity.

In 2 Kings 5 we have the story of Naaman. He was an extremely successful general in the service of his country which happened to be Aram (modern day Syria). Life is good for Naaman, except for the fact that he has leprosy. Long story short he ends up becoming penpals with Elisha who tells him to dunk himself in the Jordan 7 times.

Naaman gets a little bit upset at this, because, apparently he’s got some perfectly good rivers in Aram that should do the job just fine.

The lack of explanation for why Naaman gets all hot and bothered about which river will cure his leprosy always bothered me. I mean, the dude has his skin rotting and falling off of him, and he’s flying off into a rage about which river he’s going to bathe in (alright, true, it could have been a less severe form of leprosy, or some other skin disease, but whatever it was it was a big enough of a problem he was willing to travel a pretty good distance and bring lots of cool stuff with him to give to whoever it is that cures him).

Some have suggested that Naaman simply wanted the clearer streams of his native land rather than the muddy waters of the Jordan. Could be I suppose.

One commentary puts it down to patriotism. Another possiblity.

Or it could be a matter of religious ideology. Pagan gods in that area of the world at that time were believed to have rule over particular geographic areas. You can see this with Baalam. After he tries to curse Israel, but instead blesses them he moves to a different place thinking he can get away from whichever god is protecting the Israelites by traveling. Of course that doesn’t work out.

It could be that by using the Jordan Naaman would be ruling out completely the possiblity of his own gods being worthy of woship. After all, it seems he wouldn’t have had a problem if Elisha had waved his hand over him and prayed for a cure (maybe that would have signified the importance of the man rather than of God). Perhaps by tying the healing with a geographic feature strongly tied to Israel God was making a religious point. Because it seems like Naaman got the point pretty strongly towards the end of the story when he confesses God as the only God.

I don’t know if that’s it, a lot of really smart people publishing books and articles don’t seem to see that as a possiblity, or at least they didn’t write about it if they did. But it still bothers me why Naaman “went off in a rage” about dipping himself in the Jordan.

As the title suggests, I want to briefly explore the idea of whether or not one can still be a Christian and at the same time reject the Bible. I would answer that question in the positive. But to go any further, I’ll have to unpack what I mean by “reject.”

Reject the Bible as what? Obviously, if one rejects the Bible’s central assumptions as true, such as the existence of God or the deity of Christ, one cannot be a Christian in the Orthodox sense. So I do not think it possible to remain Christian while simultaneously denying such things (despite what the Jesus Seminar, Crossan in particular, will have you believe). I mean to ask whether it is still possible to be a Christian and hold that the Bible isn’t a reliable set of documents or is in some way historically unreliable or untrustworthy.

The question of whether the Bible is historically reliable has been a subject of much research and debate. Here I use the term “historically reliable” to refer to a document which by historical reason can be shown to host information of events that most probably happened at some point in that past. But how much does it really even matter if the Bible is historically reliable on these grounds? It seems to me not much at all, for the central truths of Christianity aren’t contingent on the reliability of scripture. This is why I think one can still be a Christian and reject the Bible as historically reliable—for even if the information in the New Testament, for instance, isn’t or can’t be shown historically reliable, it doesn’t follow that the information therein is not true.

Of course I believe the Bible is and can be shown historically reliable in this sense, but the point is this: the Bible itself is not what warrants Christian belief—rather, the source which warrants Christian belief is the Holy Spirit, who conveys the necessary truths of Christian belief to the subject (the existence of God, the gospel message, the inspiration or even the reliability of the Bible). That’s why I’m not impressed by people like Ken Ham, the die-hard King James users, or anyone else who seemingly condition Christian belief on the basis of one’s particular views on the Bible, who aren’t so much worried about concept as they are construct. That’s also why I find arguing against the reliability of scripture as evidence against Christianity to be moot.

How many times have you heard someone cast skepticism on the Bible as reason not be a Christian? This, if nothing else, would be one way to show how that excuse rings hollow.

From Josh:

Yes, drinking wine is required. He said “Do this in remembrance of me,” not “substitute something else for the wine if you like, and do that in remembrance of me.” Drinking wine, eating bread, and getting wet are three things commanded by God. Or can we go about substituting cheese sticks for the bread and baptizing with sand now?

The Restoration Movement has in its history phrases like “where the Bible speaks I speak, and where the Bible is silent I am silent” and has at its basis for existence a unifying principle of trying to make the current church look like the early church. So why has our un-denomination insisted on strict adherence to the example of the early church when it comes to baptism (immersion anyone?) but has felt free to substitute grape juice for wine when it comes to the elements of communion? And, this just gets even weirder, our un-denomination has also insisted on practicing communion every week because it seems that’s what the early church did. So why do we see an exception made when it comes to the use of wine?

Well the easy answer is that in the culture of the middle 1800s (the era when the Restoration Movement got rolling) alcohol was a no-no. And so in an area where the early church clearly had a practice of using an alcoholic drink we decided to substitute grape juice, despite our uniting principle of doing what the early church did.

A lot of Restorationists have accused members of European denominations of placing tradition on the same level as scripture, but we’ve done the exact same thing in this case. I’m not suggesting that our founding, guiding principle is wrong, but I am suggesting that there are cases where we rely on tradition in leiu of, and sometimes instead of scripture. Something about a splinter, a log and eyes is coming to mind right about now.

Note:
For those of you just itching to type up a big rejoinder about how it was unfermented wine and the feast of unleavened bread and you even want to break out your Greek lexicon just save it. Because if you’re right somehow people were getting all loopy on grape juice and Paul had to let ‘em know that’s not real cool in the 11th chapter of 1st Corinthians (and notice he didn’t tell them to start using grape juice, he said stop with the drunkeness). It was alcoholic and if you’re going to use scripture as a source of authority then you need to deal with it sincerely.

I’ve stayed out of the Iraq War conversation in regards to scripture pretty well. But now I’ve just about had enough.

If you’re going to talk about what the Biblical position is on the Iraq War the only proper thing to be talking about is the role government has been given by God. You can find this in Romans 13:1ff, as well as 1 Peter 2:13-15 as well as a (very) few other places. Unless you’re pulling from these scriptures, shut up. Cause you’re wrong.

Peter Bogert has a great point.