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On June 2, 2022 By In Culture, Theology, Worship

Holy Priest, Holy Warrior: Reflections on Psalm 110

Reading through Psalm 110, one cannot but help notice that by the end of the psalm, the dead bodies are piling up. In verse 1, Christ’s enemies are made into a footstool for his feet. In verse 2, he rules in the midst of his enemies — and has a scepter to smite them. In verse 5, he shatters kings on the day of his wrath. In verse 6, he executes nations and fills them with corpses. 

And yet right in the middle of this “messiah on the warpath” imagery, we have a reference to Christ being an eternal priest after the order of Melchizedek. It is perhaps easier for us to see how the battle imagery of the psalm fits with Jesus’ kingship. After all, we expect kings — especially Davidic kings — to be battlefield heroes. Jesus does not disappoint in that way. He strikes and smashes his enemies from the beginning to the end of this psalm. The psalm paints the portrait of an utterly victorious king.

But since the psalm also pays homage to Jesus’ priesthood, an astute reader might wonder where priestly imagery shows up in the psalm. I would contend that the battlefield imagery fits not only with the motif of Jesus as reigning king but also with him as everlasting priest. In the Bible, priests are warriors just as much as kings. Waging holy war has been a priestly calling from the beginning.

There is a lot of biblical evidence for this truth, and we will only survey a fraction of it here. Start with Adam. Adam was a priest, serving in the sanctuary of Eden. We know this because the verbs used to describe Adam’s task in Eden, “tend and keep,” or “serve and guard” (Gen. 2:15), are used later to describe the tasks of the priests at the tabernacle, e.g., Num. 3:7-8. A priestly vocabulary is used for Adam’s task from the very beginning; he is to guard and keep Eden, just as the later priests would guard and keep the tabernacle. Of course, this also came to mean that he was to guard and keep the woman (the embodiment of Eden) after she was created, just as the priests were to guard and keep the people of Israel (the living tabernacle).

When Adam was told to guard the Garden, he should have deduced that there would be an invader. And sure enough, an intruder shows up. As soon as the serpent started questioning God’s Word to the woman, Adam should have stepped between the serpent and the woman to protect her. He should have silenced the lying serpent by crushing its head. That was his priestly task, and because he failed at that priestly task, he lost both his priesthood and his sanctuary. Adam should have piled up at least one corpse in Eden; he should have made the serpent a footstool for his feet. He should have ruled in the midst of his enemy (the serpent) by shattering and executing the serpent in a show of righteous wrath. Unfortunately, he did none of those things. What should have been the day of his power became a day of weakness and failure. He failed as a priest because he failed to fight. He refused to exercise holy violence and so he lost his holy status and access to the holy place.

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On May 25, 2022 By In Church

Tragedies: The Southern Baptist Convention Sex Abuse Problem and The Texas School Shooting

by Rev. Rich Lusk

You may have seen the absolutely horrific report on sexual sin and sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention that was released earlier this week. The report is the fruit of an extended independent investigation into claims made against various Southern Baptist leadership and congregations. I have not looked into the report in any detail but it is an absolute travesty. The report documents cases of adultery, fornication, and child molestation. In some cases, offenders were able to move from church to church, multiplying their victims. Those who tried to sound the alarm were silenced. Far too many in the Southern Baptists denomination were obviously more concerned with protecting their “brand” than doing what is best for victims. They used their polity (a commitment to the autonomy of each local church) as an excuse for not warning churches about predators hopping from one congregation to the next. Some leading pastors in the Southern Baptist Convention, including former president J. D. Grear, have argued that the Bible only “whispers about sexual sin” — a claim that was incredibly foolish when it was made and now sounds like complicity in the cover up. The entire sordid ordeal is a massive black eye for all Christians, even those of us who are not Southern Baptist. 

What makes it even more unfortunate is that we live in a time when there are all kinds of excellent resources available to churches and pastors to aid in detecting and dealing with abuse. There is really no excuse for church leaders to not have well established protocols for addressing abuse claims. 

There are many lessons the broader church can take away from this mess. Obviously, making sure that you only have qualified leaders is a must. Do not confuse giftedness and personal charisma with holiness. Making sure abuse claims are taken seriously and the proper authorities inside and outside the church are involved is also a must. At TPC, we partner with MinistrySafe to help us in this area  MinistrySafe provides an online training course for everyone who works with children. They are also able to provide highly competent guidance and counsel if and when an issue arises. We had the entire leadership of the CREC go through MinistrySafe pastors training at our General Council meeting several years ago. To my knowledge, the CREC is the only denomination that has done something like this, but it is highly necessary; church leaders simply must be informed about abuse, how to handle abuse claims, and how to get the best care for abuse victims. 

One other note: As so often happens in our culture, tragedies are immediately politicized and weaponized to further an unrelated agenda.  I’ve already seen people arguing that the Southern Baptist scandal happened because the denomination is committed to a male-only pastorate, or that this case proves that all churches are full of sexual hypocrites and therefore the church should not be listened to when it speaks about homosexuality, transgenderism, etc. While any scandal like this should drive a church to humbly repent, we should also recognize that Satan uses things like to seek to silence faithful churches from teaching the truth about men, women, marriage, and sex. As tragic as the Southern Baptist sex abuse problem is, it will also be tragic if that scandal is used to steer the entire denomination in a progressive direction, which is clearly what some are going to try to do with it.

The school shooting in Texas yesterday was yet another tragedy of senseless evil at work in our world. We can grieve with those who grieve, even at a distance, and we can certainly pray for the community in Uvalde. Sadly, as with abuse scandals, mass shootings tend to be quickly transformed into political talking points about race, gun control, mental health, or some other agenda. This a ridiculous response: We are not going to stop horrific acts of violence like this with one more gun control law, and everyone in their right mind knows that. Knee-jerk emotional responses do not change the world in a positive way. But there was one thoughtful thread on Twitter that someone alerted me to yesterday. Ali Beth Stuckey asks the question: If the one commonality among all of these shooters is that they are young males, does that indicate something significant? Her response does not say everything that probably needs to be said about the issue, but she raises some good questions. The young men perpetrating these wicked acts are certainly not victims, but their actions do point to a much wider social sickness and spiritual rot that surrounds us. 

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On May 19, 2022 By In Family and Children

A Review of the Documentary, “Eve in Exile” from Canon+

Guest Post by Melinda Brito

Rebekah Merkle’s documentary, Eve in Exile, begins where all good theology does: in Genesis. It reminds us that in God’s creative order, work and specific mandates were given to man and woman. Man was created first, and then the woman was created to be a fit helper for man. They were designed to accomplish these God-given tasks together. 

The documentary continues by presenting a historical overview of the rise of feminism. Merkle identifies three “waves” in the feminist movement. The second wave is probably most relevant for us to consider because it came after the rise of technological inventions and innovations. The result was that the fixed and fulfilling work that women had been doing, the arduous yet rewarding work of producing and preparing food, making and repairing clothing, and educating the children, necessary tasks for the survival and well-being of the family, began to change. With the advent of easy-to-use domestic inventions, these tasks that were the worthy work of women became less time-consuming. As a result, women could shop for their food and clothes, cook meals, keep a clean house, and still have time to spare.

In 1963, The Feminine Mystique, authored by Betty Friedan, found a sympathetic audience by a generation of women who felt isolated, bored, and discontent with merely being ornamental in their homes. Friedan’s answer to the problem was that women should find work and the fulfillment of a full day of labor outside the home. This effectively began “the tearing down of the house” by women’s own hands.

While Rebekah does a more than adequate job of demonstrating the shift of women from inside to outside the home, she also takes the opportunity to critique the Christian woman’s lack of thoughtful or biblical consideration and wholesale acceptance of the secular community’s answer to the problem. While we may find commonality in identifying a problem, the generation that opened their arms and embraced feminist ideals as their messiah did not consider the end of the matter. Even today, Christians fail to grasp that the “how” and “why” of how someone comes to a conclusion is just as important as the conclusion itself because the how/why will determine the path we take as we seek to deal with the problem. In this case, Christians blindly followed the path set out by unbelievers on how to deal with the issues of boredom, feelings of unfulfillment, and loneliness simply because they agreed that a problem existed. But Christians must contemplate a truly biblical response to the problem, rather than adopting unbelieving presuppositions. 

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On May 18, 2022 By In Church

Temptations for Christians Who Want to Change the World, Part 2

See Part 1

Guest post by Rev. Jeff Meyers

This is the second installment of a condensed version of the “Final Reflections & Summary” from my book Wisdom for Dissidents (full title: Ancient Wisdom for Today’s Christian Dissidents).

The third temptation is to cozy up to our enemies, thinking that we can win their favor. If we can get them to like us, maybe they will leave us alone. This is the “partiality” problem James criticizes in 2:1-13. It is not simply that they are favoring the rich over the poor. That would be bad enough. But the man who is being catered to in their assembly is the one who wears the ring of authority and the robe of office (2:20). He is explicitly identified as an oppressor, someone who drags them into court, and a blasphemer against the name of Jesus (2:6-7). To “judge” the rich oppressor as someone more deserving of special care than the poor believer is “to become judges engaging in an evil conspiracy” (2:4). That evaluation from James is not just about individual “evil thoughts” but about how the brothers have conspired together to appease their rich enemies. They have thereby dishonored those poorer disciples whom “God has chosen . . . to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom” (2:5).

The appeasement option ought not to be on the table for conscientious Christian leaders. To turn a blind eye to immorality and abuse with the hope of getting a hearing from some powerful government or academic figure would be to betray our allegiance to the Lord. Not only is such schmoozing mostly ineffective—the more you give, the more they will take—but such behavior runs counter to the examples of the prophets and of Jesus himself. The prophets denounced the rich and powerful, even, maybe especially, when they were in positions of authority in Israel. Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others did not cozy up to corrupt, immoral leaders. Neither did Jesus. 

Fourth, the most insidious temptation, according to James, is to use the power of our words to guide the church toward aggressive and violent action thinking we are acting thereby as agents of God’s justice. As we have argued, James 3:1-12 is at the heart of the letter. And the key passage that unlocks the entire letter is James 1:19-20, “Know this, my beloved brothers: let every man be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.”  Anger against their oppressors has fueled impetuous speeches with the intent to rally the disciples to make things right by means of aggressive, retributive action (3:13-16; 4:1-12). This kind of Christian “zealotry” will not make things right. Instead, such speech and behavior are not of the Spirit but demonic (3:15). These angry and violent responses have been fueled by the immature rhetoric of their teachers, the brothers responsible for leading their communities. They want freedom, but they are going about achieving liberty in the wrong ways.

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On October 29, 2021 By In Culture

A Novel Conversion

I recently read Charlotte Mary Yonge’s 1853 novel, The Heir of Redclyffe, which tells the story of the relationship between two principal characters, the youthful heir to the Redclyffe estate, Sir Guy Morville, and his rather impulsive and slightly older cousin, Captain Philip Morville, who stands to inherit the estate in the event of Guy’s death. It is not great literature. Yonge’s work has not stood the test of time and has been overshadowed by the likes of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Charles Dickens. Yet in her day, Yonge’s books were tremendously popular, bearing the marks of early Victorian romanticism and sentimental piety.

From a literary standpoint, we can see that Yonge writes as an all-knowing narrator, inhabiting the thoughts of the principal characters in quick succession, constantly shifting vantage points–sometimes within a single paragraph–thereby making the story difficult at times to follow. The book is overly long, although I can’t say how many pages it has. The copy I purchased from Amazon was obviously downloaded and printed from an online source without title page or page numbers! It starts slowly and takes too long to build to its denouement, although at that point it nearly becomes a page turner, only to be followed by the final chapters once more taking their time to wrap things up.

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Council of Nicaea

On March 25, 2021 By In Culture

Our Need for a Creed

In a recent Sunday service, our church sang a rather uncharacteristic hymn not found in the denominational hymnal: My Faith Has Found a Resting Place. I associate this hymn with chapel services at the Baptist university I attended in Minnesota in my youth, as well as in the affiliated church of which our family was part around the same time. In many respects it’s a great hymn, nicely communicating the message of the gospel and the assurance of salvation.

My faith has found a resting place,
Not in device nor creed;
I trust the Ever-living One,
His wounds for me shall plead.
I need no other argument,
I need no other plea;
It is enough that Jesus died,
And that He died for me.

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On April 5, 2020 By In Podcast

Episode 73, Ministering to Saints During Separation, Conversation with Rev. Justin Borger

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:41 — 20.1MB)

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In these difficult days, many are in need. The elderly community has suffered the most with the isolation. But we also remember the single mother and individuals whose families are not close at this time. How does the church move towards faithful ministry in these times?

On this episode, Pastor Brito interviews Pastor Justin Borger from St. Paul’s Presbyterian in Orlando, Fl. to discuss pastoral ministry in this Corona Virus times. We hope this is encouraging to some and motivates others to join in this needed ministry of mercy.

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On November 26, 2019 By In Politics

God’s Divided People: Biblical Lessons for the Church

The recent observance of the 502nd anniversary of the Protestant Reformation should once again prompt us to reflect on the unity of God’s church amidst so many divisions. Christians everywhere can point to Jesus’ high priestly prayer recorded in John’s gospel: “that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you” (John 17:21), yet wonder why this cannot be a present reality. It’s not just that churches are organizationally distinct but that they do not enjoy full communion with each other, erecting barriers preventing their members from recognizing outsiders as brothers and sisters in Christ.

Of course, some church bodies deny that God’s church is divided at all. The Roman Catholic Church claims to be the one holy catholic and apostolic church founded by Jesus nearly 2,000 years ago. Other communions are officially in schism from this one true church, and their members constitute at most separated brethren in imperfect communion with Rome. The Orthodox Churches, while organizationally more pluriform, return the favour, claiming that Rome, along with every other ecclesiastical body, is outside the one true church, embodied in global Orthodoxy.

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On March 25, 2019 By In Politics

Sunday School and Secularization

Since the late 18th century, when the first Sunday schools appeared in Great Britain, a particular type of church education has been considered essential in many quarters for passing the faith to the next generation. Could it be that inattention to the Sunday school is a contributor to declining attendance in worship services, leading in turn to a general secularization of the larger culture? Experience living and working in two countries suggests to me the possibility of such a connection.

I grew up in Wheaton, Illinois, USA, located some 40 kilometres west of Chicago. During my childhood and youth, our family was part of two successive congregations in two different denominations. Both put great emphasis on Sunday school classes for the entire family. Due primarily to the presence of Wheaton College, one of the premier Christian universities in North America, the city of Wheaton became known as the centre of scores of conservative protestant enterprises. Few actual denominations were headquartered there, but a variety of parachurch organizations, such as foreign mission societies and publishing houses, called Wheaton home. The Scripture Press headquarters at the city’s eastern edge supplied Sunday school material for generations of children and youth in area churches.

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On March 14, 2019 By In Culture, Family and Children, Theology, Wisdom, Worship

Lent as Subtraction by Addition

Guest post by Rev Sam Murrell 

The liturgical season of Lent begins on Ash Wednesday and continues for forty days (not counting Sundays) up until Easter. It has traditionally been regarded as a time of reflection, introspection and personal renewal culminating in the celebration of the resurrection at Easter. By observing the forty days of Lent, Christians (in some sense) replicate Jesus’ time in the desert for forty days before He began His ministry. The Lenten season is a time to open our hearts to God’s sanctifying grace through the use of prayer, confession of sin, fasting, and alms-giving (Matthew 6:1-10).

Lent is one of my favorite times of the year because it forces me to take a close look at myself and my relationship with Jesus Christ. Lent reminds me of my need to rely on Christ’s grace and that I shouldn’t think too highly of myself.

When I first began to follow the Church calendar I simply mimicked what was modeled for me by my church. Over the years, however, I have come to realize that the Lenten season has the potential to be a season of great spiritual impact in my life and in the life of a congregation. Unfortunately, we have trivialized Lent by the way we choose to celebrate it.

In preparation for Lent, worshipers are exhorted to fast and abstain from things that hinder their walk with the Lord. It should be a season in which we attempt to lay aside every weight and the sin that too easily captivates our hearts and distracts us from running the race set before us (Hebrews 12:1). Hence, we are encouraged to die to self and symbolically ‘give up something for Lent’.  Most Christians who acknowledge the season of Lent make vows that ultimately have little to no impact on their spiritual growth. They vow to give up such trivial things as chocolate, caffeine, a favorite show or some other soft habit. All the while, looking forward to the next Sunday when they will be able to suspend or take a sabbatical from their vow for the day (Sundays are feast days, therefore one should not fast or abstain from God’s good gifts on the Lord’s Day). This approach to Lent is not spiritually healthy, nor is it beneficial. It is my contention that we should reevaluate the way we celebrate Lent in order to better align our focus with Scripture. And how do I propose we do that?

I propose that instead of subtracting something trivial from your life like caffeine or candy, consider subtraction by addition. What do I mean? Consider temporarily adding something to life that requires you to give up some of your time in order to pursue it. For example, this year try to do something that will bring glory to Christ for the full forty days. Something with a kingdom focus. Specifically, I recommend you consider adding a daily, structured time of prayer to your schedule for Lent.  I have decided that I will pray the office of Evening Prayer with my family as much as possible with my family this Lenten season.

I suspect I will miss a few nights, but I suspect I will pray more consistently with my wife during these days, as well. Lent allows us to start simple. We all can make one adjustment for forty days. You too may want to try to pray one portion of the Daily Office (found in the Book of Common Prayer) every day (Morning Prayer, Noon Prayer, Evening Prayer or Compline), except Sunday for the duration of Lent. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Noon Prayer can be done in as little as five to ten minutes. While that may not sound like much, the discipline of regularly praying the office will function as a daily “re-set” or reminder that God is an ever-present help throughout the day.

Lent is a great time to intentionally draw near to the Lord, using the ordinary means of grace (prayer, sacraments and the Word). Think about how you can add a more biblical focus to your life during Lent this year. Commit to reading the Gospels during Lent; if the Lord’s Day attendance has been an issue, commit to attending corporate worship all during Lent. If your church has an evening service that you rarely attend decide to attend every evening service during Lent. Make choices that will have a lasting effect on your life. Stop making trivial vows to the Lord. Eat your candy bar, after all, you’re going to go back to eating it on Easter.

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