How Should I Read the Bible?

Posted on March 9, 2017 by Editor

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If we try to read the Bible in the same way that we read any other book, we will quickly become overwhelmed. After all, the Bible does not run from beginning to end. It starts, restarts, and goes sideways. Sometimes it even seems to contradict itself! Despite our confusion, many of us know that we should be reading the Bible more. Others of us are drawn to the Bible out of a genuine curiosity. This being the case, how can we read the Bible without being overwhelmed by it?

Perhaps we could try reading the Bible in the same way that the church has read it for most of church history; a way of reading the Bible that developed long before bible colleges or seminaries were ever built:

1) Pray: The Bible is the living word of God. Through the Bible, God speaks to us. If we think we can pick up the Bible, read it, and completely understand it without praying, we are being prideful. By praying, we show God that we need him to explain his word to us—and if there’s one thing the modern abundance in heresy has revealed, it’s that we are completely incapable of reading scripture without him.

2) Ask “What Does this Reveal About the Character of God?”: Do we think that the Bible primarily directs us to the actions we should take? Do we think its purpose is to warn us of the consequences of those actions? If so, we will be confused when we read the Bible.

3) Ask “What is the Context?”: While this question may intimidate any Christian who has never gone to seminary, it is actually quite simple. This question asks:

Who is speaking?

Whom are they speaking to?

Where are they speaking?

What happened before this scripture? What happened after?

Are there any other scriptures related to this scripture?

Even if we haven’t finished reading through the entire Bible—or if we don’t know our Hittites from our Hivites—we can still answer this question. The scripture passage, itself, will answer the first three questions. As we continue to read the Bible, we can build up a repertoire of scripture by which we can answer the last two questions.

4) Ask “How Does the Nicene Creed Shed Light On This Passage?”: Unfortunately, the word “creed” has been known to cause tension in the Christian community. Some of us fear that creeds and liturgies may take the life out of worship or cripple spiritual growth.

“God didn’t give people the creed; he gave them the scripture,” we may argue. “The creed was created by human beings!”

But by saying this, we overlook that every word in the creed was carefully chosen by the council of Nicaea. And the council of Nicaea were not merely respected by their own community. Almost every member of this council had been persecuted for their faith long before Christianity had been promoted by Constantine. These Christians were so invested in their faith that they had sacrificed their well-being to protect it. Therefore, every phrase—every word—in the Nicene Creed carefully correlates to dozens of scriptural sources. This is why the Nicene Creed is the profession of faith that has been believed by Christians in every country at every point in time.

If we wished to be crude, we might say that the Nicene Creed is like the SparkNotes version of the Bible.

Everything you need to know about the Bible—all the main themes, the important characters, the key facts—are included in the Nicene Creed. The creed, then, acts as a summary of the Bible. Through this summary, we are able to view the Bible as a whole—not only as a collection of small parts. This is what makes the Nicene Creed essential to reading scripture: the creed compares the narrow focus of the particular scripture passage we are reading to the overall Bible, allowing us to forgo our own biases and assumptions in favor of the Biblical truth.

In other words, the Nicene Creed allows us to see both the forest and the trees.

5) Ask “What Action Does God Take In This Passage Toward Others?”: Although this question appears to be the most self-evident, it is often actually the most difficult to answer. This is because this question doesn’t ask what we think God should have done, what we think he did, or what we assumed he did—it asks what God actually did.

We must read each passage carefully, paying special attention to the verbs. Whenever I read through the Bible, I highlight what God says and does. By doing this, I avoid accidentally conjuring up actions that God never took.

6) Ask “What Action Does God Call Me to Take Toward Others?”: It is very important to note the order of five and six. Sometimes, we think that our action is the most important action; that we act first and then God responds to our action. But the Bible teaches the reverse: God acts and we are called to respond. In fact, the Bible often argues that sin is actually a result of our acting first, rather than responding to God.

“But,” we might argue, “I’ve never seen God act. How could I possibly respond to him?”

Of course we haven’t seen God act. Sin acts as a spiritual cataract, blinding us from the obvious truths of the world. When God acts, sin blinds us from seeing his actions. Because sin keeps us from truly seeing the world, we must trust the Bible to guide us.

7) Ask “What Actions Will I Take?”: When the Bible tells us that we are expected to respond to God’s actions, it is not making a theoretical claim. We are called to mirror God’s image into the world and that means that we must take action.

After reading about what God does for us, we must then respond in our own lives. Knowing what God has done for us, what will we do unto others?

Posted in Reading the Bible, Seven Steps | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

The Time Of Preparation Is At Hand (Introduction to Preparing for the Underground Church, Part VI)

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Pastor Foley

(Part VI of VII of Pastor Foley’s introductory essay to Rev. Richard Wurmbrand’s Preparing for the Underground Church. To order a print or electronic copy of the bilingual Korean/English edition of Preparing for the Underground Church, including Pastor Foley’s introductory essay and a foreword by Voice of the Martyrs historian Merv Knight, visit Amazon or click here to visit the bookstore page on our website. For Part I of Pastor Foley’s introductory essay , click here.) 

Why must Christians today prepare to go underground?

Because we are the impediment to the sexual revolution—those who, in the words of Ephesians 4:24 “put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness,” rather than throwing that self off as so much repression. The sexual revolution is not the issue on which we choose to make our stand but rather the issue on which the governments and the people of the free world have chosen to make their stand against us.

As children of both the church and the free world, we are not accustomed to having to choose between the two. And we are certainly not accustomed to being portrayed as repressors of freedom. But Jesus does not give as the world gives, and when the world—even the free world—moves to buttress the freedom to sin by restricting the freedom not to sin, then the free world reveals itself to be simply one more guise of “the world,” which has always been hostile to the things of God.

Ultimately, traditional Christianity has become no more popular in South Korea than North Korea, because traditional Christianity challenges the foundational premises on which any society is built, including this one. The question is not where it is more pleasant for us to live (in a communist or capitalist society) but where it is more pleasant for God to live, where he finds himself welcomed. And it turns out that he is finding no more welcome in South Korea than in North Korea but is in both places equally reviled because he is no more the God of the sexual revolution than he is the God of the communist revolution. These revolutions are revealed to be two sides of the same coin, both minted by “the race of men inclined to will their absolute autonomy” in their conflict with a monotheistic God.[1] The two revolutions share an identical root. When the two sides peer at each other across the DMZ, those long deceived by the one revolution are peering over at those newly deceived by the other revolution.

The South Korean government is not only party to the sexual revolution; it is among its most ardent promoters. In 2011—long before “Gangnam Style”—the annual revenue from its so-called “cultural content exports” KPOP and Korean drama was already estimated at $4 billion USD annually. It claims an asset value for these cultural properties of $83.2 billion USD. It earmarks 1% of the national budget “to nurture popular culture” and maintains a fund in excess of $1 billion USD to further this “nurture.” This means it spends taxpayer money to translate KPOP music videos into foreign languages and to ask the television networks of other countries to air their programs.[2] It knows that when its stars get plastic surgery, or a new cell phone, or a new hairstyle, or use a particular makeup or handbag, that the Korean economy prospers from consumer emulation. Thus, the South Korean government is hardly value neutral. Compare a Korean drama or KPOP song today to ones from ten years ago. Note the growing edginess and embrace of more daring forms of sexuality. The South Korean government is acutely aware of global cultural developments. It regards reflecting these “changing values” in its cultural content as “the strongest tool to expand K-culture’s global distribution channels and the diversification of its consumers.”[3]

The South Korean government not only nurtures its cultural properties for economic purposes, it also leverages them for ideological warfare as well, especially in its engagement with North Korea. It’s not political speeches it’s blasting across the border anymore. It’s KPOP. It’s not speeches on capitalism it flies in via MP3s and balloons and drones in an effort to open up its adversary. It’s Korean dramas.

Thus, we should not expect the South Korean government to be our ally in withstanding the sexual revolution. In fact, given Korean churches’ historically strong relationship with the Korean government, we can fully anticipate that the Korean government will expect us to be its ally in this matter, supporting what it believes will best advance Korea’s national interests.

Just such a situation exists in the Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. Maarit Jänterä-Jareborg is Professor of Law at Uppsala University in Sweden. She writes not from the Christian perspective but rather from the perspective of Scandanavian law in society about what Scandanavian governments expect from the church with regard to the sexual revolution. She writes very clearly, “The state may expect the churches—or at least its national Folks’ Church—to adjust to the new developments, even if it cannot rule on this.”[4] She notes that the church has not disappointed the state on this issue:

What explains the Folks’ Churches’ adjustment to the legal formalization of same sex relationships, considering that all of them were initially opposed to registered partnerships, and later, to same sex marriage? A general explanation would appear to be these Churches’ historical role and position as national Folks’ Churches to which the great majority of each state’s population belongs. In order to be part of society at large, a national Folks’ Church cannot cherish values that deviate too much from the prevailing mainstream values in society, irrespective of weakened ties with the state. For instance, when a bishop of the Church of Finland made critical statements about same sex relationships in a published interview a few years ago, it drove thousands of members to leave the Church and made nationwide headlines in the Finnish media.[5]

She expresses the meeting point at which the church and the state have made their peace over the sexual revolution:

From the perspective of biblical theology, the love commandment is superior to all other commandments and prohibitions in the Bible. The decisive factor where forms of cohabitation are concerned is therefore not the individual Bible passages but what is to the benefit or harm of people. This means that when the Church is to form an opinion on marriage for same sex couples, the relevant question to ask is whether this harms or benefits people.[6]

This definition of “love” completely negates the one that stands at the heart of the Christian tradition: Love as God’s gracious right ordering (and, by his grace, re-ordering) of the world, freeing us from sin through the crucifixion of our flesh. Christians who refuse to take the chisel to re-sculpt our tradition’s two millennia-old definition of love are thus increasingly cast as bigots, potentially dangerous, and in need of being watched, controlled, restrained, monitored, and, of course, mocked.

As Peter Leithart notes, this was predicted more than a generation ago by Augusto del Noce. Del Noce was a Christian philosopher roughly contemporary with Rev. Wurmbrand who lived through fascism and communism in Italy. Del Noce sensed that the church in the free world would soon face far greater challenges from the sexual revolution than it ever faced under communism. Leithart summarizes what Del Noce thought would happen to Christians who refuse to compromise their faith in the face of the sexual revolution :

The remaining believers in a transcendent authority of values will be marginalized and reduced to second-class citizens. They will be imprisoned, ultimately, in “moral” concentration camps. But nobody can seriously think that moral punishments will be less severe than physical punishments. At the end of the process lies the spiritual version of genocide.[7]

It is not difficult to see why, given the events currently unfolding in the Nordic countries. As Leithart notes, “All theological opinions will be judged by whether they advance liberalism’s particular vision of freedom and fairness.”[8] The only theological opinions that will be allowed to extend beyond the church’s doorstep are those that advance, not repress, the sexual revolution.

In this way, freedom of religion becomes reduced to freedom of worship for those who dissent from the state’s sexual orthodoxy. Freedom of worship means that we may say what we wish inside of our buildings provided that it does not impact anything we do outside of our buildings. That, sadly, is a bargain that many churches have historically been willing to accept.

Perhaps that is why the underground church is more often found in homes than in church buildings: the costs of maintaining the public church are just too high, and only a few of these costs are financial. The gospel of God is too great to be confined to moral ghettos. Thus, as the governments of the free world embrace the conviction that they must set boundaries for the church based on what those governments consider the preservation of liberty for all, we embrace our own conviction that Christian liberty requires our preparation for the underground church.

 

[1] John M. Rist, 2014. Augustine Deformed: Love, Sin, and Freedom in the Western Moral Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 10.

[2] Melissa Leong, 2014. “How Korea became the world’s coolest brand.” Financial Post. http://business.financialpost.com/news/retail-marketing/how-korea-became-the-worlds-coolest-brand.

[3] Chung Joo-won and Lee Eun-jung, 2016. “(News Focus) K-pop, K-dramas to embrace universal values to increase appeal.” Yonhap News Agency. http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/focus/2016/10/31/88/1700000000AEN20161031007600315F.html.

[4] Maarit Jänterä-Jareborg, 2016. “A Scandanavian Perspective on Homosexuality, Equal Rights, and Freedom of Religion.” In Jack Friedman, Timothy Shaw, and Thomas Farr. Religious Freedom and Gay Rights: Emerging Conflicts in the United States and Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Loc. 5595.

[5] Maarit Jänterä-Jareborg, 2016, Loc. 5631.

[6] Maarit Jänterä-Jareborg, 2016, Loc. 5667.

[7] Peter Leithart, 2016. “Referees, Players, and Religious Liberty.” First Things. https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/leithart/2016/09/referees-players-and-religious-liberty

[8] Ibid.

Posted in persecution, preparing for the underground church, Rev. Richard Wurmbrand | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

What is the Purpose of the Law for Christians?

Posted on March 3, 2017 by Editor

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Matthew 5:13-20

This scripture occurs immediately after Jesus’ discussion of the tragedy of unsalty salt and obstructed light which we discussed last week. As we learned, Christ does not use the image of salt to say that Christians are to be a kind of divine seasoning to give taste to a bland world. Instead, Christ uses the image of salt to describe how the law acts as a preservative to keep the world from the decay of sin. He talks about unsalty salt to convey the grievous absurdity of the law being used in ways that do not preserve the world from decay but instead bolster our own sense of righteousness while the world continues to rot. Similarly, lighting a lamp and quickly hiding it under a basket conveys the absurdity that human beings, who were created to mirror’s God’s image into the world, hide themselves–and thus God’s image–“because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19). In other words, sin has reduced human beings and the law to the point of uselessness.

Does Christ propose to remedy the situation by doing away with the Law? No, he answers in Matthew 5:17. Does he propose to remedy the situation with either a new law or new insights into the old law? “Absolutely not!” the Apostle Paul writes in Galatians 3:21. “For if a law had been given that could impart life, then righteousness would certainly have come by the law.”

Christ does not do away with the Law or create a new Law. Instead, he fulfills the only one God ever created. He enables us to experience the Law as blessing, not curse.

To understand what this means, we must travel back in time. We must think about God before time. But how can we know what happened before time? We know because when scripture tells us (cf. John 1:1). Before all time, the Son submits to the Father (John 6:38; John 1:8) and the Father glorifies the Son (Matthew 3:17, John 13:32). This is the way it was, the way it is, and the way it always will be.

When we read scriptures like this, we might (wrongly) conclude that the Father must be greater than the Son. In our world, the weaker submits to the stronger and the lesser yields to the greater. But we think this way because our thinking has been warped by original sin. Scripture tells us that the Son is the power of the Father (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:24) and that submission in the Trinity is not based on weakness but on love.

Like Satan, fallen human beings think that the purpose of power is to control others. We think that the more power we have, the more we can get our own way and accomplish the things we want to accomplish. We think about power as something we have—or want to have. When Satan tempts Jesus in this wilderness, he does so according to this understanding of power.

“Transform these stones into loaves of bread,” he tells Christ. “Throw yourself down from this height.”

Satan even brings Christ to a great height where he can see all the kingdoms of the world. He gestures to them and tells Christ, “if you bow down and worship me, I will give you all of this.” Satan sees power—and the prizes of power—as something he has and can give. That is why Satan thinks himself to be powerful.

But Christ knows that all power comes from God. God’s power always ultimately accomplishes God’s purpose. God delegates power. He does not hoard power, nor does he use power to control others. Power radiates from him. Because this world is fallen, this power is often badly twisted by those to whom it radiates. Through Christ, we see the power of God as it is intended to be used: in submission to God, reflecting it back to him with humility. In this way, we show God that we know who he is and who we are.

Christ rejects Satan’s requests not by overpowering Satan but by submitting to the authority of his Father. He refuses to transform the stones or throw himself down because his Father has not told him to do so. Christ understands that “the Son can do nothing by himself” and so he “does only what he sees the Father doing.” Instead of using power according to his own understanding or in order to achieve his own ends, Christ uses it only as the Father directs.

With this understanding of power, we can see that Matthew 5:21-37 is not about the creation of the Law, or the destruction of the Law, or about the Law bringing us to despair. It is about freeing the Law from the control of fallen humans who use the Law for their own purpose, namely, to create a standard of righteousness that is reasonable to human beings and achievable by them.

But that is not the purpose of the Law. The purpose of the Law is to preserve the fallen world from further decay. But the fallen world cannot be preserved by lowering the standard of the Law through interpretations that make it easier to keep. That only makes us feel self-righteous while the world slips into further decay—and us, blindly, along with it.

For the Law to act as a preservative, it is necessary to submit to the Law fully. That means submitting not only to the actions prescribed by the Law (e.g., do not kill, do not commit adultery) but also to the attitudes required to keep the Law—not only in body, but in soul and spirit as well.

When we submit to the Law in body, soul, and spirit, we come to see that our thinking (which is how early church fathers understood Jesus’ reference to our “right eye”) and our will (which is how early church fathers understood Jesus’ reference to our “right hand”) do wrong even when they seem to control our body to do right. That is because we interpret the Law in a way that suits our thinking and our will. As a result, the Law cannot stop the decay of human sin. We may not kill, but our anger masters us. We may not commit adultery in a way that others can see, but we become enslaved to lust. We may feel we are righteous when we provide certificates of divorce, but we can’t escape plunging ourselves and our former spouse into adultery. Our oaths sound holy, but through them we become captive to our own lies.

So in reality, we are not submitting to the Law at all. We are seeking to control it. Just as Satan believes the kingdoms of this world are his to give, we act as if righteousness is ours to bestow: anyone who fulfills our interpretation of the Law is righteous. But our interpretations lead both the body and the soul to hell, because the decay of sin is not halted in us, nor in the world.

God designed our bodies to submit to our souls and our souls to submit to God. But we fell into sin. Sin deceives us into thinking that we are submitting to the Law, that our bodies are being reined in by our souls, and our souls are being reined in by God. But because we control the Law through our interpretations, our souls aren’t submitted to the Law, and as a result, our bodies aren’t being reined in at all.

This is why our bodies feel so much more powerful to us than our souls. They are, in our fallenness. Our bodies are inflamed with sin, which carries with it the peculiar power of death. Because our souls no longer submit to God, they are left weak and helpless—dead in sin, in fact—and they cannot rein in our bodies.

Think about the movie Ben-Hur.

At one point in the movie, Ben-Hur has escaped from slavery and is in the desert. He is taken in by a desert nomad whose camp races chariots for a living. One day in the desert when the camp is preparing for a future race, horses attached to a chariot become startled and run through the camp. The horses are out of control, and the empty chariot is being dragged behind them. The camp is destroyed by the rampaging horses and their chariot. Eventually, Ben-Hur leaps onto the chariot and subdues the horses.

Does Ben-Hur subdue the horses because he is stronger than them? By no means. Even a single horse is much stronger than him. But the horses submit to Ben-Hur because that is what chariot horses do: they submit to their driver, when the driver commands.

Our body is the horses, our soul is the chariot, and both are running wild. Christ enters into our soul at baptism, and the chariot is no longer just an empty, useless cart. Once he takes the reins and issues the command, our body knows to submit to him. Our soul does not control our body by effort; it is not strong enough. Christ does not need strength; the body knows its true master, even though it has been stirred up by sin. It submits to his command. Everything does. And he commands only and exactly what his Father gives him to command.

We are not saved by our submission to the Law. Our body is not able to keep it. Our thoughts and will can only distort it. We can only rampage around it. But neither is the Law given to drive us to despair, nor is a new Law given that can bring life.

Instead, we are saved because Christ enters us at baptism. He brings us, chariot and horses, into submission, just as he submits to the father. Our submission to him is his gracious gift to us. He fulfills the Law—not instead of us, but in us, by his very presence.

Posted in Lectionary Year A | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment