Bill Smith, Author at Kuyperian Commentary

On January 5, 2023 By Bill Smith In Culture, Family and Children, Politics, Wisdom Like

Tyranny

“Tyranny” is thrown around in our culture much like the word “abuse.” Every time you make me feel uncomfortable, it is “abuse.” Every exercise of authority is “tyranny.” Because words are misused doesn’t mean that genuine abuses and tyrants don’t exist. They do. But we need to know where God draws these lines.

Solomon’s concern in Proverbs is to train his son to be a wise king and, therefore, to exercise authority properly, whether that authority is over his own appetites or the entirety of Israel. Authority is a right and responsibility granted by God to govern. Wherever God grants authority, that authority is real. When that authority is exercised in harmony with God’s authority, it must be obeyed. To disobey legitimate authority is to disobey God himself.

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On December 29, 2022 By Bill Smith In Culture, Music, Theology, Worship 2

Christmas Carols: Simeon’s Song

Death is not a subject we normally think about this time of year. We are in the Christmas season in which the new life of the infant, Jesus, is celebrated. The New Year is a few days away, and it is a time of new beginnings. The promise of new life in the birth of Jesus and that sense of a fresh start in the new year focuses our attention on life. But just as the shadow of the cross hung over the manger and the infant, so our own mortality casts a shadow on all of these new beginnings. Death is inevitable no matter how many new beginnings we have in this life.

I’m not trying to dampen your spirits and dull your celebrations, but death plays its role in our Christmas celebration. What I call the final Christmas Carol in Luke’s Gospel, the Song of Simeon, is surrounded by and shot through with the realities of death; Simeon’s death, the death of Jesus, and even a form of death for Mary.

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On December 21, 2022 By Bill Smith In Culture, Music, Theology, Worship 2

Christmas Carols: Gloria in Excelsis Deo

The soprano solo begins with an unadorned recitative (that is, a melodic speaking that is essentially rhythmically free): “There were shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.” As the narrative moves forward, the accompaniment increases with a sweet but driving rhythm, building to the place where “suddenly, there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying.” Then, majestically, the chorus joins in singing, “Glory to God, glory to God in the highest!” From that point on, voices sing in harmony and answer one another with the Gloria in Excelsis Deo, the song of the angels when they announce the birth of Jesus. In his Messiah, Handel captures well the mood and glory of the scene. When performed well, the sound that surrounds you and strikes your body with its power, tuning your whole being to its message, is rapturous.

As glorious as a well-performed Messiah is, it must be a dim reflection of what the shepherds heard that night when the angelic armies, the throne-chariot of God, sang the Gloria for the first time. Nevertheless, as dim as the earthly reflection might be, the angelic warriors were drafting earthly warriors to take up this song with them. The church has done so by including the Gloria in Excelsis in its historic liturgies for many occasions. We continue to sing the angelic war song because we continue to fight for that peace which is the aim of the song.

The song is brief, but it is pregnant with meaning. The song is composed with parallels that help us to understand its message. “Glory” is parallelled with “peace,” “highest” is paralleled with “earth,” and “God” is paralleled with “favored men” or “men with whom he is well pleased.”

“Glory to God” is not synonymous with “praise God,” though it certainly includes that. The angels are proclaiming the glory of God, and the glory of God is the manifestation of his life; it is the radiance of his character; it is the expressed fullness of all that he is and does. When paralleled with “peace,” the angelic choir is proclaiming the way God himself lives. God’s glory is manifested in peace. This peace is the full, joyful, healthy life that is shared among the members of the Godhead and those in heaven. God lives eternally at peace as Father, Son, and Spirit, and the aim of the creation project is to bring the earth to enjoy the fullness of this peace. The angels are prayerfully singing that God’s peace will be realized on earth as it is in heaven.

This peace of God will come to those whom God favors or those with whom he is well-pleased. These favored ones, the shepherds, Mary, Elizabeth, Zechariah, and others like them who hunger and thirst after righteousness–for God to set things right in the world–will be the recipients of this peace.

This peace will only come at the end of conflict because the present evil powers who despise God’s peace will not go down without a fight. With our King, we, the armies of God, will fight. The fight is not conventional fleshly warfare. “For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not fleshly but are powerful in God to the pulling down of strongholds” (2Cor 10.3-4). One of our weapons is to join the song of the heavenly armies. As David drove away the evil spirits through music (1Sm 16.23), so we, through singing with the angelic armies, “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace with favored men,” will advance the line against our enemy to eventually bring about the peace of which we sing.

On December 15, 2022 By Bill Smith In Culture, Music, Theology, Worship 2

Christmas Carols: The Benedictus

Is Zechariah confused? What is singing about in Luke 1: a political, sociological, national deliverance, or a spiritual deliverance? On the one hand, he prophesies about “being saved from our enemies and all who hate us,” and on the other hand he speaks about John giving the “knowledge of salvation in the forgiveness of sins.” Maybe Zechariah is still trapped in the thinking that the Messiah would come as a military leader to deliver Israel. But wait, he also speaks about the forgiveness of sins. Can it be both?

Zechariah’s song resonates with the song of Moses after Israel’s exodus from Egypt. Words such as “visited,” “redeemed,” and “remember” all have echoes of the Exodus. Phrases such as being “saved from our enemies” and being “delivered from the hand of our enemies that we might serve him without fear” all point to Zechariah understanding what is happening with the birth of his son and of Jesus as being a new exodus.

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On December 8, 2022 By Bill Smith In Music, Theology, Worship 1

Christmas Carols: The Magnificat

In the beginning there was God and nothing else. Then Word carried by Spirit begins to pulse in harmonious tones into the nothingness. A world outside of God himself begins to appear. The song sung by the Triune God creates and begins to shape the world. As each element in the cosmos comes into being through this song, the song continues to reverberate in each created thing’s existence. The morning stars created by the song echo back and enhance the song as they become millions of voices (cf. Job 38.7). Mountains and hills, raised from their watery darkness, break forth into singing as they emerge. The trees that spring from the earth clap their hands (cf. Isa 55.12). Sea creatures, birds, and land animals all take up the song and sing the song of their Creator. Then the song shapes the dust of the earth into the form of a man and breathes the song into him. And when the woman is created from the man, the song is then sung in praise to God for the woman.

God is musical. God is a singer. His speech is glorified, and his glory cloud is made up of angelic hosts who surround him with music. The prophet Zephaniah says that he exults over us with loud singing (Zeph 3.17). Is it any wonder why, then, from the beginning of our existence, music and singing have been so prevalent? We are images of the Great Musician. His song, his image, vibrates through every fiber of our being. We are intended to continue this song, continuing to shape and create the world in harmony with God.

But the music in us has become discordant and distorted. Sin has intoned its own tune that is completely out of harmony with the song that is still in the creation. Those who love the old song, the original song, lament the dissonance and long for a new song that will bring in a new creation. That new song begins to be heard in the opening chapters of the Gospel of Luke. First Elizabeth. Then Mary. Then Zechariah. Then the angels. Then Simeon.

The presence of singing is not merely the exuberance of a few individuals (though they are rightfully exuberant). The songs indicate that the old discordant creation is not only getting its song back, but it is getting a new and greater song that will resound throughout the rest of time until the song of earth and heaven become one song.

Mary’s song contains some of the first notes of the new creation. The song is being sung into a world that is upside down. The wrong people are on the thrones of the earth ruling in unrighteousness. The wicked are exalted while the righteous are lowly. The wicked are rich and full, prospering from sinful structures, while the righteous are poor in spirit and hungering and thirsting after righteousness.

But as the song begins to be sung by a young, Jewish, virgin lady, echoing the brooding song of the Spirit that hovered over her to create Salvation in her womb, things are changing. The long-awaited promises given to Abraham that his seed would inherit the world (cf. Rom 4.13) are present, even though immature.

The song will grow louder as the Spirit gathers more singers. The new creation will emerge. Where there are thorns the cypress tree will grow. The myrtle shall grow and overtake the briers. The mountains and the hills will once again sing with joy and the trees of the woods will clap their hands (cf. Isa 55.12-13).

As the darkness continues to be pushed back by the light in this Advent season and throughout the course of history, continue to sing the songs of the Lamb, empowered by and in harmony with the Spirit. New creation is growing by the Spirit who empowers our song. Sing on!

On November 30, 2022 By Bill Smith In Culture, Music, Politics, Theology 1

Christmas Carols: Hannah’s Song

You might think that a previously barren woman who was giving up her three-year-old son to the service of the Tabernacle, only to see him once a year from this time forward, would be mourning her loss and maybe even trying to renege on her vow. But that is not what we see with Hannah. Her heart, bursting with joy, sings a song that picks up melodies from the past and will echo one thousand years into the future as it is taken up by Mary, the mother of our Lord. Hannah is in the Spirit of Christmas a millennium before the birth of Christ Jesus.

Hannah’s exuberance is not grounded in what we find in many popular or even Christian Christmas songs. Her joy is not in the sentiment of memories of family, friends, and romantic interests of the past or present. She is not gushing over being with family at this special time of year. Indeed, she is leaving her son, the son that was the answer to her prayer, because this is her part in God’s grand mission. She is exulting in the true Spirit of Christmas: the fact that God is exalting his faithful people through the crushing of our enemies. The world is upside down because it is being ruled by the serpent and his seed is being set right through the fruit of the resurrected womb of a woman. There is no hint of calling a “Christmas truce” with God’s enemies. This is war, and the birth of this miracle child means that God is fully engaged. Hannah, for one, is quite excited about it. She’s all in with God’s mission for the world.

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On November 17, 2022 By Bill Smith In Culture, Politics, Theology, Wisdom 1

Christ the King

Proverbs is a training manual for David’s son to learn how to exercise authority wisely. Yahweh promised him the nations as an inheritance (Ps 2); that he would rule over the world (Ps 72). Consequently, he must grow in wisdom to match the responsibility that the Father planned for him.

Standing on a mountain in Galilee, having been recently declared David’s true son through his resurrection from the dead (Rom 1.3-4), Jesus proclaims, “All authority in heaven and upon earth has been given to me” (Mt 28.18). Unlike the first son, Adam, who grasped for authority prematurely, seizing the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which had the power to make one wise (Gen 3.6), Jesus was patient, waiting until the Father gave him the authority. He resisted, what James Jordan calls, “the dominion trap,” on several occasions. During his temptation in the wilderness, the devil tempted him by promising him authority over all the kingdoms of the world if he would pledge his fealty to him. “You don’t need to wait. The world is a mess. You need to be a man of action. Jump out there and do something about it. You have power. You could change the world.” Jesus knew that it wasn’t time. Going about taking dominion without first being established in the fear of the Lord and maturing to the point that he could handle the responsibility was a fool’s errand. No matter how good his intentions might be, without the wisdom to handle the responsibility, the mess made in the end would be worse than the beginning.

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On November 10, 2022 By Bill Smith In Culture, Wisdom Like

Thick-skinned Wisdom

A fool’s vexation is known at once, but the shrewd covers shame
Proverbs 12.16

Western culture, particularly Americans, has become emotionally fragile. We are thin-skinned. Overprotection from parents who have coddled their children, shielding them from all physical and emotional discomfort, not allowing them to fail, always defending their actions whether justifiable or not, and safety-netting them created this problem. Is it any wonder that governments have seized upon this to empower themselves, promising complete safety from disease to poverty without any discomfort for their children? While seeking protection of self-esteem and the like, our helicopter parents have made us so fragile, that the least bit of force on our emotional state shatters us.

This safetyism, as Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt name it in their book The Coddling of the American Mind, has become a moral code. Anything that is mentally stressful–a criticism, joke, disagreement–is morally wrong. These relativists in sexual and economic morality become fundamentalist preachers when it comes to the moral code of their feelings. Combine that moral code with a weak mental constitution and you have people who are triggered and fall to pieces when the supreme judge, feelings, is challenged. There are no appeals in this court. If you violate this morality, it is the death penalty. Your reputation, livelihood, or even your physical existence is forfeit. There is no genuine forgiveness and, therefore, no justification no matter how you may grovel. Words such as “transphobic,” “homophobic,” and “racist” are not mere adjectives. They are judicial sentences that condemn.

This thin-skinned-ness is not an incidental cultural irritation. It is morally culpable foolishness. Solomon describes one of the fool’s actions as allowing his emotions and impulses to control him in the face of being put to shame or insulted; his “vexation is known at once” (Pr 12.16). Vexation is an inner agitation or anger. Others control his actions through insults. He is a slave to what everyone thinks of him. Negative comments to him or about him on social media or other outlets must always be answered. He is irritated, and everyone must know it so that he can engender sympathy for himself and against his opponents to regain his status of “justified.” Nothing rolls off his back because it penetrates his skin too easily. This man is a fool who will destroy anything and everyone around him because his feelings were hurt. He is a slave to his impulses, and his masters–everyone around him–will use his own impulses to manipulate him.

The wise, on the other hand, are thick-skinned. They “cover shame.” They either couldn’t care less about unjustifiable insults or, if they are agitated, they don’t allow it to enslave them to irrational or time-consuming responses to seek to justify themselves. Those insulting them lose their power over them when the insulted ignores, laughs at, or even embraces the insult.

Being thick-skinned is important to wisdom’s mission. One of wisdom’s goals is to create an environment of peace, where relationships are whole, healthy, and joyful. This can never happen in relationships with thin-skinned people. They are always getting offended by real or perceived insults. Everyone has to walk on eggshells around them. Their presence is like a flammable fume that fills the air, creating anxiety in the relationships because the slightest word could be an ignition that blows everything up. Marriages, businesses, friendships, churches, and even society as a whole can’t be healthy with these thin-skinned people. People must be able to handle criticism and disagreement, justified or unjustified, if they are going to build healthy relationships.

So, how do you do it? An entire book can be written on this, but here are a few basics for becoming thick-skinned or tough-minded.

First, develop confidence in who you are and what you are doing. I’m not talking about some prideful self-reliance. Learn and accept what your heavenly Father says about you in Christ. Be confident in how he defines you and your purpose. That is foundational. But then, as Proverbs counsels in other places, develop and become competent in skills. You are always open to critiques from those people who have proven themselves to you, but the insults of others don’t matter.

Second, discipline yourself not to respond to insults. There is no hack to this. It will come down to you keeping your mouth shut or not typing that response, but you can put some things in place to help you. Count to one hundred, sleep on it, breathe deeply, quote Scripture, or do something else that makes you pause before you react. Think about the source of the insult. Is he a jerk whose opinion doesn’t matter? Is he having a bad day? Was he innocently joking? Also, think about the consequences of your response. Will this escalate the situation and get me embroiled in something that will be at least a distraction or, at worst, knock me off course?

Third, stress yourself. To discipline yourself in any area requires that you accept stress as a friend, many times bringing it on yourself in smaller doses so that you can handle the larger stressors later. You need to be brutally honest with yourself. You need friends who will be brutally honest with you and whom you will not fight when they tell you the truth. Put yourself in situations in which you can and will be criticized. Ask for critiques. If you can’t handle criticism, you will never get better, and you will always be able to be manipulated by others.

Thick skin is not a luxury in our mission. It is integral to the way of wisdom.

On October 27, 2022 By Bill Smith In Culture, Theology, Wisdom 1

A Beautiful Gray Crown

A crown of beauty is the gray head found in the way of righteousness.
Proverbs 16.31

We are a culture obsessed with the appearance of youth. When a middle-aged or older man or woman is told, “You look so young,” it is taken as a compliment. To keep those compliments coming, we will do everything from taking supplements to having surgeries; we dress young, nip and tuck everything we can, color our hair, and apply stuff with hyaluronic acid to our faces because it sounds like the model knows what she’s talking about. Forever young is our aim.

There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to maintain as much youthful vitality as possible. The curse that works through our bodies should be fought just as we fight the thorns and thistles of the ground. But there are certain aspects of aging that we should joyfully accept. Solomon tells his son that gray hair is one of those glories.

One theme that runs through Proverbs is that of exaltation and its means. Our all-glorious God created us with an appetite for glory or exaltation. That appetite drives us in our dominion project just as our appetite for food drives us to find ways to be fed. We want to be more and have more. Sometimes we want the wrong kind of glory and/or we pursue glory in a sinful way, but the fundamental appetite for glory is God-given. It is, after all, the promised end of our salvation (cf. e.g., Rom 8.18-30).

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On October 20, 2022 By Bill Smith In Theology, Wisdom 2

Judgment According To Works

We Protestants get nervous when talking about water and works. Let someone quote the Apostle Peter, “baptism now saves you” (1Pt 3.21) and you might be accused of being Roman Catholic or told why baptism in that passage is not baptism and how it doesn’t save you. We get a little nervous around water.

We become equally antsy when someone brings up those pesky passages in the Bible about a final judgment according to works. James has that irritating sentence, “You see that a person is justified¬ [judged to be righteous] by works and not by faith alone” (Jms 2.24). Solomon says that God will bring every deed into judgment, every secret thing, whether good or evil (Eccl 12.14). Jesus joins this party by saying that those who have done good will participate in the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil in the resurrection of judgment (Jn 5.29). He also speaks about how he will separate his sheep from the goats based on the deeds of mercy (Mt 25.31-46). Paul jumps in here by saying that the doers of the Law will be justified (Rom 2.13) and that we will all appear before the judgment seat of Christ to receive what is due for what we have done in our bodies, whether good or evil (2Cor 5.10). Finally, the judgment scene in Revelation 20.11-15 describes judgment based on what the person has done. And this is only a smattering of passages that speak of this reality. Is it just me, or is it getting difficult to breathe in here?

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