An Evening at Southern

Things are back to their usual full pace. As I spend the evening studying Hebrew and Church History while Ariana sleeps, Kim is out with the seminary wives having dessert at the home of Albert and Mary Mohler!

Post-modernism

“Has anyone told drug-resistant bacteria and viruses that they are simply engaged in a language game or in a manipulative bid for power?” (Robert Letham, The Holy Trinity, pg. 10)

It is a great question. And that’s what we’re about – questions. Perhaps with a little contextualization, epistemic humility, and dialog, those foundationalist microbes would see that their power-mongering language games have no place in the post-modern world. The post-modern man err... individual sees right through their quest for dominance! I would suggest that we, together with the bacteria, adopt a five year moratorium on whether they should infect us. We now live in a culture where we need to contextualize infection; it is just not understood it in its depiction as a primitive virulent person-killer.

Beautiful Easter Hymn

Χριστὸς ἀνέστη ἐκ νεκρῶν,

θανάτῳ θάνατον πατήσας,

καὶ τοῖς ἐν τοῖς μνήμασι,

ζωὴν χαρισάμενος!

My brother Brad’s translation:

Christ has risen from the dead

By death, death is trampled

And to those in the tombs

He gave life!

Christian Obedience

You are, so become, or you’re not.

Thou art the man!

"I must begin with myself and my own guilt whenever there is anything to be said about the world’s guilt. I cannot simply look out the window and be morally indignant over the great Babylon that lies spread out before me in all its godless darkness. No, what I see out there in global proportions must only remind me of my own “Babylonian heart” (Francis Thompson). And quite involuntarily I will be reminded of the prophet Nathan’s hard rebuke to David: “Thou art the man!” I am the one who needs forgiveness, and the sanitation of the world must begin with me."

Helmut Thielicke

The terror of God’s love

Psalm 143:11-12
11 For your name's sake, O LORD, preserve my life! In your righteousness bring my soul out of trouble! 12 And in your steadfast love you will cut off my enemies, and you will destroy all the adversaries of my soul, for I am your servant.

It seems that many people simply assume that because “God is love” (so He is; e.g. 1 John 4:16), God will surely extend graciousness and kindness to them. Indeed, they feel that God’s love practically obligates Him to do so, for if He did not, He would be unloving. And since “God is love” is read as if it said, “love is God” (which it does not say), the only God there is overflows with unchecked, unqualified, universal, and endless love.

The monkey wrench in this conception can be illustrated from Psalm 143. Notice what the text says, paying attention to the words “in” and “for”. We read, “In your steadfast love you will cut off my enemies, and you will destroy all the adversaries of my soul, for I am your servant.”

In His love God will utterly obliterate the enemies of His people. In other words, God’s love can be terrifying. Salvation always comes through judgment; salvation always entails the vindication of God’s name and people.

However, there is a way to be found secure in the love of God. The Psalmist gives us a hint:

Psalm 18:50
Great salvation he brings to his king, and shows steadfast love to his anointed [LXX: χριστω, Christ], to David and his offspring forever.

The point of the genealogy at the beginning of Matthew is to point to Jesus as the anointed one, the Christ, the King of David’s line who could finally fulfill the promise (2 Sam. 7:13).

So if you want to be in the love of God, be found in Christ. Because if you’re not, the love of God for Jesus will be terror and destruction for you.

Psalm 18:26-27
… with the purified you show yourself pure; and with the crooked you make yourself seem tortuous. For you save a humble people, but the haughty eyes you bring down.

Behold the Severity of God

[Hell] is a profound and dreadful reality. To speak of it lightly, or not to speak of it at all, or to speak of it in a way that changes suffering into feeling nothing, simply proves that we do not grasp its horror. I know of no one who has overstated the terrors of hell. We can scarcely surpass the horrid images Jesus used. "Weeping and gnashing of teeth,"⁴ "their worm shall not die" (Mark 9:48); "unquenchable fire" (Matthew 3:12; Mark 9:43); "eternal fire" (Matthew 25:41); "the hell of fire" (Matthew 18:9); "eternal punishment" (Matthew 25:46); "anguish in the flame" (Luke 16:24). The point of all these is that we are meant to shudder. We are meant to tremble and feel dread. We are meant to recoil from the reality. Not by denying it but by fleeing from it into the arms of Jesus, who died to save us from it.

Revelation 14:11 is probably the most graphic New Testament statement of the eternal suffering of the unrepentant. "The smoke of their torment goes up for ever and ever; and they have no rest day or night." Torment forever and ever. The endless suffering of unrepentant sinners is a reality taught in Scripture and therefore good for us to know about.

John Piper, The Echo and the Insufficiency of Hell

Liberal Christianity

A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of Christ without a cross (H. Richard Niebuhr).

Goo-goo for Gaga - in lieu of reasoned discourse

Trueman writes here: Goo Goo for Gaga- I Blame Bono (and Bush) (Carl Trueman). The whole post is worth a read. Here’s some excerpts:

“If the fact that the Senate did not repeal `Don't ask, don't tell' was a pleasant surprise, the tiresome role of celebrities (or, `slebs' as British journalist, Rod Liddle, calls them) in weighing in to campaign for such a repeal was not.    This time it was `Lady Gaga,' who comes across as a cut-price knock-off of Madonna (as Camille Paglia has noted), speaking at a rally in Maine.  Members of the crowd variously described her speech as "brave," "moving," and "touching;" I found it cliched, lacking in argument, and utterly lightweight.  How a pampered celebrity, with a veritable army of bodyguards, playing to the gallery and going with the cultural flow is `brave' is somewhat unclear to me.  Crossing a moderately busy road to buy a packet of cigarettes would seem in today's world to be a more physically, culturally, and professionally dangerous undertaking.

Listening to her on Monday, I was reminded of a comment made to me in the 80s about the student activism of that time: student politics is all about sincere people getting superficially involved in very deep issues.  If that applied to relatively articulate and intelligent students at Cambridge in 1985, it would seem to apply in spades to the barely articulate synthetic celebrities who now consider themselves to have the right to lecture the rest of us (via ghost written speeches made up of emotive blather) on how society should be organised.

… Such celebrity authority brings to the fore a number of unfortunate aspects of the contemporary world.  First, there is the assumption that what young people have to say is actually something to which it is worthwhile paying attention.   Wrong, wrong, wrong.  These are the same young people who think that the Twilight movies are actually watchable and that no English sentence is complete unless it contains the word `like' at least three times.

… The unspoken wisdom of the day seems to be that those with less experience of the world, and thus presumably less `baggage,' are better equipped to solve its problems.  That's theologically Pelagian and technically nonsense. ”

Trueman also observes the apparent hypocrisy which is so often reinforced by the tragic vacuity of thinking endemic in our day.

“This aesthetic power is, interestingly enough, of a piece with the type of argument she, and other celebrity sources of wisdom, use, where the language of right and wrong is, by and large, subsumed by the language of taste and tastefulness.  To be specific on the issue Lady G was addressing, those who disagree with her position were labeled `bigots,' and  the idea that someone may have reasons for disagreeing with her that were rooted in anything other than mindless prejudice is not even an option.    While I regard her arguments as stated on Monday as vacuous and emotive, I would at least like to give her credit for possibly holding her position for reasons other than mindless bigotry against social conservatives.”

That would, of course, require the rarity wherein the so-called ‘tolerant’ actually tolerate someone who absolutely and morally disagrees with them.

A reminder not to take the Bible for granted

The man after whom this blog is named was executed for his efforts to translate the Bible into the language of the average commoner. We do not (yet) live in a day when we are executed for possessing a Bible, but this picture is a stark reminder that not all have the privilege of simply being able to read the Scriptures, a privilege we have at the cost of the lives of men and women, who were literally burned alive striving for it.

 

 

“… one of the primary signs of regeneration is found in a person's obedience to, love for, and respect of, the Word of God. Christians long for Scripture. They long to read Scripture, possess Scripture, meditate upon Scripture… God's enemies have tried to destroy it, but it is still the Word of Life to her. Oh, may God grant to His people a renewed love for His Word in the face of the hatred of the world!” An Image That Touches My Heart