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On February 9, 2023 By In Culture, Discipleship, Theology, Wisdom

Collateral Damage

Debt makes the world go ‘round. At least it does now. Somewhere along the way in American and global history, our economic systems have moved from debt being a part of the system to debt being their foundation. If all the debt was paid off tomorrow, our system would collapse. (For a simple explanation of this, read this article.) In the spirit of keeping things moving, our government is accumulating debt at a record pace. As of February 2023, we are $31.5 trillion in debt, most held by the American government along with Japan and China holding significant amounts of our debt to prop up their currency. American citizens have joined the spending spree. Credit card debt has soared to almost $1 trillion. With citizens unwillingly (for the most part) being guarantors for the government and credit card companies encouraging borrowing while only paying the interest, borrowers feel free to spend prodigally. This is not sustainable forever, and those who back these loans willingly or unwillingly will feel the effects eventually.

On several occasions in Proverbs, Solomon warns his son, the king-in-waiting, about the foolishness of becoming surety for someone else’s debts (Pr 6.1-5; 11.15; 17.18; 20.16; 22.26-27; 27.13). Becoming surety is not loaning, borrowing, or investing money. In each of those cases, there is a possibility of a return on investment. Surety is securing someone else’s debt in a way that you take all the risk with no possibility of financial reward. Your friend wants to borrow money, doesn’t have the collateral to back up the loan, and you and your assets become collateral for the loan, the guarantee to the creditor that he will receive his money. If the friend falls on hard times or bails on his responsibility, you are left holding the bag … an empty bag.

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On February 8, 2023 By In Church, Theology

Theology as Application to All of Life

One of my most cherished moments in seminary was being exposed to John Frame’s definition of theology. For Frame, theology was defined as “the application of the Word of God by persons to all areas of life.”a

There were always academic dimensions to theology, but theology was something immensely practical. It brought people to a “state of spiritual health.” This definition is helpful because,

“Theology is thus freed from any false intellectualism or academicism. It is able to use scientific methods and academic knowledge where they are helpful, but it can also speak in nonacademic ways, as Scripture itself does – exhorting, questioning, telling parables, fashioning allegories and poems and proverbs and songs, expressing love, joy, patience . . . the list is without limit.”b

I have since used this definition repeatedly and have learned to appreciate it even more as a pastor. The Spirit does not implant in us an application ex nihilo. Instead, theology is applicable and needs to be made applicable by pastors to parishioners and from parishioners to parishioners.

It is also freeing to consider this definition in light of the theological illiteracy in our day. Certainly, we wish to see the church grow in biblical knowledge, but this definition means that a pastor can instruct even the newest convert on how he ought to live. He can take the measuring of the temple in Revelation 11 and find clear applications for God’s people.

Frame’s definition accentuates the pastoral task in that it calls pastors to ask consistently “How Now Shall We Then Live?” In this sense, as Frame has argued elsewhere, unless theology is practically applied, it has not become true theology.

On the other hand, the one doing theology must first understand it before applying it. We have seen our share of faulty applications in the realm of the home and the church. Therefore, to properly grasp this definition of theology, one needs to be familiar with theology.

David’s battle with Goliath was more than a remarkable example of how we can overcome difficulties in our lives, but also how God can use the weak to defeat the strong and how a nation needs to put its trust in God rather than chariots and how the Church needs smooth stones of faithfulness to destroy the wicked. There are individual and corporate obligations involved in that straightforward narrative.

Theology prepares us to ascend with our Lord; in that reign, we can learn to apply this rulership in all areas of life. In applying our theology, we become ambassadors for our theology. Theology is life, and life is theological.

  1. Systematic Theology, pgs. 8-9  (back)
  2. The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, p. 81.  (back)

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On February 2, 2023 By In Theology, Wisdom

Potential

“An abundance of food is in the fallow ground of the poor, but it is swept away through injustice.”

~Proverbs 13.23

When God created the world, he filled it with potential. The earth was given to man as God’s viceregent to unleash this potential (Gen 1.28; Ps 115.16). God showed Adam in the planting of the Garden how the ground had food and beauty locked away in it. God gave Adam the keys to unlock it, making the earth fruitful. Down from the Garden following the River Pishon to Havilah, there were gold, bdellium, and onyx stones to be mined and shaped to glorify God’s sanctuary (Gen 2.11-12; cf. also Ex 25—40; 1Kg 6). Adam’s responsibility as king was to see potential, unlock it, and develop it.

Solomon is training his son to be a king. As a king, he must learn how to use his authority to unlock potential in his realm. If he uses his authority poorly or in overt rebellion, the potential that God has treasured up in the earth will not be realized. This is what Proverbs 13.23 instructs when it says, “An abundance of food is in the fallow ground of the poor, but it is swept away through injustice.” The wrong use of authority keeps the riches of God’s earth locked away, never to be enjoyed. This is not a matter of mere inconvenience for the poor or a peccadillo for the king. When authority is exercised in this manner, it is a dereliction of the duty of kings to obey the mandate God gave him and fulfill his purpose.

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On January 19, 2023 By In Culture, Discipleship, Theology, Wisdom

Authority & Authorities

“Divination is upon the lips of the king; in his judgment he does not act unfaithfully with his mouth.”

~Proverb 16.10

When I say “authority,” what images come to your mind? Those images have a great deal to do with how you have related to authorities throughout your life. If authorities in your life abused their authority, your reaction will be negative. Any time someone exercises authority, you will connect that with the abuses of the past.  If your authorities were negligent, you will believe that authorities can’t be trusted. If you have had good relationships with authorities, you will tend to trust people … maybe even too much.

Though our thinking is inevitably and understandably shaped by our experiences, all of our thinking about authority and authorities must be shaped by the Scriptures.

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On January 19, 2023 By In Church, Theology

The Cut and Paste Bible

Christians are people of the book. We are a people of the corporate book called the Bible. The Bible was composed by Spirit-led men in all they wrote (II Pet. 1:20-21). But when we read the Bible, we tend to make it an encyclopedia of our favorite life verses. “You like your verses, but I have mine,” we say as if we were playing poker. You can have your own favorite theology, but that’s because you are overlooking my favorite texts. It is easier to function this way than to search for patterns and types and covenantal structures.

This is one of the greatest tragedies of our day. We have created a cut/paste hermeneutic. We have seen the Scriptures as a collection or an appendix of isolated texts. We have accepted the plague of individualism under the guise of special hallmark cards. As a result, we forget that when we read in John 3:16 that God so loved the world, that statement is only an inspired reality in the context of John’s judgment-filled theology of Jesus’ coming. God loves the world, but he does this by condemning and judging people to eternal destruction. In our day, we have decided that if John 3:16 is good enough for Tim Tebow, it’s good enough for me. We can preserve it in its own separate corpus to be pulled out for any ordinary evangelistic enterprise. The result is a Bible that is chopped, red-lettered, and mutilated by our preferences.

But the Bible is a corporate and contextual text. It is vastly different than the individualized approach many take to it. My own assertion is that the individualization of the Bible—the read-one-verse-a-day Bible programs– has created a culture that views the corporate gathering as secondary in importance. Therefore, to quote James B. Jordan, “individualism means that the Bible history is reduced to moralistic stories.” But Samson, Jacob, and Ruth only make sense in union with the rest of the Bible.

When we gather for the Lord’s Day worship, we are worshiping with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven and all the Christians on earth; true enough. But when we worship, we also worship in the context of the entire biblical story. We are participants in the corporate nature of the text. We are people of the book and, therefore, oppose the plague of individualism.

We come to worship not as atomized creatures but as restored humanity put together in a corporate body of worshipers. When we worship, we join the story of the Scriptures in all its fulness and unity.

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On December 29, 2022 By In Culture, Music, Theology, Worship

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 In Culture, Music, Theology, Worship

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.

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yellow cube on brown pavement

On December 20, 2022 By In Theology, Worship

The Biblical Case for Emotions

Guest Post by Charles Jacobi

“We Protestants get nervous when talking about water and works,” penned Pastor Bill Smith in a piece for Kuyperian Commentary months back. We, Protestants of the Reformed tradition, have a robust history of rich systematization of the scriptures. But in our systematizing, we can lose the granular resolution and diversity of the holy text, resulting in our quease when someone quotes a verse seemingly contrary to our system. This isn’t to say our doctrinal formulations are incorrect—essential doctrine has been abstracted in the history of systematic theology—or that systematics is inappropriate. However, our posture must point to a need for semper reformanda.

We’ve done this with water and works like Pastor Smith points out. Also, with the rise of the modern New Apostolic Reformation types and Postmodernists, we’ve done the same with emotions. Surely much of the Reformed response to the growing hyper-charismatic movement(s) and subjectivists of the early 2010s was right and good as one need deny that experientialism and emotionalism are the standards of truth in themselves—or knowing biblical truths—but we’ve overcompensated. We’re hesitant to talk about emotion like the scriptures do for fear of coming off as experiential.

Take the emotion of joy, for example. Joy is one of the most mentioned emotions in all of scripture. The Psalmist is fond of using the term to express himself and describes a deep emotion-God relationship. He calls on Yahweh to “Make me to hear joy and gladness, Let the bones which you have crushed rejoice” (Ps. 51:8) and “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and sustain me with a willing spirit.” (51:12) According to these words, the psalmist seems to think God can generate the feeling of joy within his heart; that the nature of the joy-God relationship can be causal. He claims God can do this to inanimate objects even, “They who inhabit the ends of the earth are in fear on account of Your signs; You make the dawn and the sunset shout for joy” (65:8). Paul, too, pleads with God to “fill” the Christians in Rome with joy (Rm. 15:13) and reminds the Galatians that joy is a fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22). Moses says Yahweh will “cause His people to shout for joy;” (Deut 32:43). There are other references in scripture that describe this emotion-God relationship as causal, but rarely do Reformed protestants speak about their emotion in such a way.

Cessationists, like myself, have created a boogeyman about subjective states. When a friend says something about their emotions contrary to the cessationist air, like, “I felt the joy of The Lord at worship today” or, “I was anxious, but The Spirit made me feel joy at that moment. Praise God!” our charismatic antenna perks up. We caution our brother his emotions are leading him and that he should steer clear from emotionalism and experientialism, yet this is all the while he’s nearly quoting David, “When my anxious thoughts multiply within me, Your comfort delights my soul” (Ps. 94:19). Moreover, we do this while enjoying our own feelings of joy, awe, and reverence in our immediate experience while critiquing another’s. We likely perceive the same subjective phenomena. Yet, we speak and interpret those phenomena in different ways. Feelings of joy are described as both reactionary and Spirit-caused in scripture. So coupled with a rational temperament, what’s the issue with speaking about our joy as Spirit caused if one faithfully deduces that during worship? If we’re consistent, we ought not to let our emotions determine how we deduce the nature of emotion from scripture.

“Veering off into making the subjective-objective” is a likely response to my inquiry. But scripture describes a God that does generate emotion within us; when we’re downtrodden, fearful, or burdened. This is described objectively in scripture, speaking to something subjectively real: like the assurance of salvation, binding of the conscience, or holy guilt of sin. We’re open to voicing those subjective states as Spirit-caused, but we’re fast to skip over joy and other emotional states like comfort (Ps 71:21), peace (Rm. 15:13), satisfaction (Jer. 31:14), spiritual stirring (Haggai 1:14) and other good things (Ps. 107). If Yahweh gave (and gives) unbelievers a spirit of stupor (Rm 11:8) or drunkenness (Jer 14:14) as he pleased, and we’re fine with using causal language accordingly for those parties, it’s tenable to use language about our own subjective state when it’s warranted as well. It’s not experiential or mystical to speak like scripture does.

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On December 15, 2022 By In Culture, Music, Theology, Worship

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 In Music, Theology, Worship

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!

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