Happy Thanksgiving!

November 21, 2011 at 4:59 pm · Filed under funny ·Tagged , , ,

Do not worry about anything, but in everything
by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving
let your requests be made known to God.
—Philippians 4:6

In November, we make a point to do what Paul tells us in Philippians we should all the time: be thankful. Some of us are thankful all month, but almost everyone can be thankful for an hour or two on Thanksgiving Day.

I’ve written before how we are so blessed as a society and (almost all of us) as individuals that thankfulness is typically as easy as paying attention. So for example, the week I write this, I’m getting over a nasty cold. That hasn’t been a lot of fun, but I can be thankful it’s just a cold. I’m thankful my job lets me adjust my schedule and work from home. I have access to medicine, and, if I need one, a doctor.

Another example: someone cut Margo off in traffic, causing a lot of damage to both her car and Margo’s. But nobody was hurt! There are accidents on Highway 62 all the time, and a lot of them involve injury or even death. We can be thankful this wasn’t one of them. There were several witnesses who waited nearly an hour so they could make a statement to the police. A Southern California Edison crew was working nearby, and they moved a vehicle in front of the accident scene, so its blinking yellow light would alert oncoming traffic to watch out. And we have insurance. Even when things go badly, there are usually things you can be thankful for.

But not always. There are some things, and some circumstances, where even Pollyanna herself would find it hard to be thankful.

Psalm 105 and 106 are very instructive for times like that, when your circumstances are so bad that, try as you might, you simply can’t find anything to be thankful about. They begin, like Paul, exhorting us to thanksgiving.

O give thanks to the Lord, call on his name.
 make known his deeds among the peoples
Sing to him, sing praises to him;
 tell of all his wonderful works.

In those psalms, the Psalmist turns his attention from his circumstances to the history of Israel. He focuses on the grace and mercy that God has historically shown to his people, when they were delivered from captivity in Egypt:

… Then Israel came to Egypt;
Jacob lived as an alien in the land of Ham.
And the Lord made his people very fruitful
 and made them stronger than their foes …
He sent his servant Moses, and Aaron, whom he had chosen
They performed his signs among them,
 and miracles in the land of Ham…

Psalm 106 is similar, describing God’s subsequent faithfulness to Israel during the 40 years they were in the wilderness.

The story of deliverance from bondage in Egypt and God’s provision in the wilderness was something every child would have learned at a young age. When they’d tried, and there was nothing about their circumstances to be thankful for, they could think instead about God: how God loved them and intervened to liberate them and meet their needs.

What’s your favorite Bible story? For example, mine is the story of the Prodigal Son. It reminds me that no matter how horribly I have rebelled against God, he still loves me, and still runs to welcome me when I am still far off. If my circumstances are so bad I can be thankful for nothing else, I can be thankful for that much.

What can you be thankful for this year? I hope you are able to tick off things to be thankful for as quickly as you can think of your circumstances. But if not, think about your favorite Bible story, like the Israelites did when they sang Psalm 105 and 106. Those Bible stories remind us what God is like, and if there’s nothing else to be thankful for, at
least we have that much.

Happy thanksgiving!

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Kristof on Human Trafficking

November 17, 2011 at 10:25 am · Filed under church, jargon, sermons ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

Nicholas Kristof has another column about the awful reality of human trafficking. (Reader discretion advised.)

So for those of you doubtful that “modern slavery” really is an issue for the new international agenda, think of Srey Pov—and multiply her by millions. If what such girls experience isn’t slavery, that word has no meaning. It’s time for a 21st-century abolitionist movement in the U.S. and around the world.

I agree. I don’t know how to solve that problem, but I like the work that Gary Haugen is doing at International Justice Mission. If you’re looking for an unconventional Christmas present, or a charity to support before the year-end, consider them.

(Via Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution, who sadly concurs with that “millions” factor in Kristof’s article.)

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Chi Rho

November 16, 2011 at 3:23 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , ,

Here’s a symbol you often see in churches:

Santa Maria in Trastevere

and in cemeteries:

Chi Rho alpha omega

The symbol is a sort of monogram or shorthand meaning “Christ,” and is formed from the first two letters of that word in Greek (“ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ″). Those first two letters are, respectively, Chi (Χ) and Rho (Ρ).

The letter Chi is pronounced “key” or “khee.” It is a “ch” sound, as in chorus or charisma or the Scottish loch. Rho normally represents an “r” sound, except at the beginning of a word. There, Greek expects a breathy sort of sound, which is indicated with an “h” and is why English has hard-to-spell words like “rhythm” and “rhapsody” and “rhinoceros.”

This symbol is (very imaginatively) called the “Chi Rho,” from the two Greek letters from which it is formed. As the 2nd picture shows, the “Chi Rho” symbol often appears with two other Greek letters, the “Alpha” (Α) and the “Omega” (Ω) used to describe Jesus in Revelation 1:8. Although it’s made of two disctinct letters, the “Chi Rho” is a symbol in its own right, and has its own Unicode value and everything! (U+2627, ☧)

Anyway, I mention it because we’re headed into what is now often called the “Holiday Season.” On the increasingly rare occasions when the name of the holiday appears, it is written as “X-mas” rather than “Christmas.”

I’ve known people who got all bent out of shape over the “X” in “X-mas” as if it were somehow demeaning to Christ to use an abbreviation. But as these ancient monograms show, the “Chi” (along with the “Rho”) is actually an perfectly legitimate symbol for Christ. There’s nothing demeaning about it. But call it “Khee-mas” instead of “eks-mas” if you want to be an egghead about it!

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What’s Wrong with Some People?

October 28, 2011 at 2:40 pm · Filed under children ·Tagged , ,

I read something today that made me stop and puzzle over it:

Evildoers do not understand what is right,
but those who seek the LORD understand it fully.
—Proverbs 28:5

I’d seen that verse many times before, but I never really saw it.

Getting several bites at the apple is one of the advantages of my reading plan, which includes a chapter of Proverbs as a morning devotional. This advantage comes from its other advantage, which is that you can easily keep track of where you’re at. Since the book of Proverbs has 31 chapters, you can read a chapter a day, and when the next month begins, you just start over again, instead of trying to keep track what chapter you’re reading.

Anyway, I started to think about this line: “Evildoers do not understand what is right.”

What does that even mean?

Is the problem that they can’t understand what’s right, or just that they don’t?

Is that why some people do evil: because they can’t understand what is right? That evildoers are morally warped so they can’t distinguish right and wrong? (I think of the assassin played by Tom Cruise in the movie Collateral, and Jamie Foxx’s question, “Are you one of those institutionalized-raised guys? Anybody home? The standard parts that are supposed to be there in people, aren’t.”)

Or does it mean that if they did understand what is right, they wouldn’t do evil? In other words, the evil they do is proof that they lack understanding about what is right.

What is it they fail to understand? Is it the bare facts of right and wrong (“don’t be mean”), or is it the way they work over time? (“Don’t be mean because people won’t like you, they’ll be mean back, and what goes around comes around.”) The long-term consequences are certain, but people who cannot perceive them do evil for lack of understanding.

How does it relate to the rest of the verse: is seeking the Lord the means of attaining understanding? Or are people who understand the right attracted to God, as the perfect example and source?

Whenever I start to puzzle over a verse like this, one of the first things I do is compare translations. (Which is easier than ever before, because of the Internet. I talk more about how to do that here.)

A quick comparison showed that where my translation (the TNIV) says “what is right,” others say “justice.” I sort of like “what is right” better, because it seems to me that English-speakers tend to reduce justice to criminal justice. It’s interesting that while the 1984 NIV used “justice,” the 2011 NIV, like my TNIV, says “what is right.”

It turns out that this word is flexible enough to cover both criminal justice (“what is legal”) and ethics (“what is right”). Or, more accurately, I should say that the ancients didn’t distinguish “wrong” and “illegal” the way we do today.

Ultimately, though, my exploration of the word (“justice” or “what is right”) never did answer my questions. Is evil a cause or an effect? Is the problem a failure to understand, or a failure to try? Is the second half of the verse a promise or an observed fact? It beats me.

But just because I didn’t find an easy answer doesn’t mean my effort was wasted. See, it got me engaged enough to start really thinking what the writer meant. And eventually, I realized I was looking at the wrong end of the verse.

Look at the contrast in the first and second half of the verse. The parallel doesn’t make sense; it’s not symmetric. If I was writing that proverb, I’d contrast evildoers with people who do good. “Wicked people don’t, but virtuous people do.” But instead, the proverb contrasts evildoers with people who seek the Lord.

And that’s the key to understanding the verse. It’s not a contrast between good people people who do good versus bad people who do evil. Which is a good thing, because it’s really hard not to do evil. (If you doubt me, read what Jesus says about it in Matthew 5.)

Let me illustrate it this way. Not doing evil is like not speeding in your car. If the speed limit is 65 m.p.h., how fast should you drive? If you drive 65, everybody will pass you, and besides, I heard they overengineer the roads so they’re safe at higher speeds. Also they won’t write a ticket unless you’re 8 miles/hour over the limit. We can all agree that you shouldn’t speed, fine, but how fast should I drive? Not dong evil is the same way. But what if the cop needs to meet their quota? Maybe you better drive 55 m.p.h. so you have some leeway. Or at least 60.

This verse isn’t about not-doing evil. It’s about seeking the Lord.

It changes the question from “how bad can I be without adverse consequence” to “how near can I get to God?” It invites finding out how much is me moving toward God, and how much is God moving toward me?

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Tools for Bible study

October 28, 2011 at 2:00 pm · Filed under Bible ·Tagged , , ,

I was puzzled about a verse I read this morning, and decided to write about it. I also thought it might be useful to share here some of the tools that are available for doing Bible study.

We live in the golden age of amateur Bible scholarship. Thanks to sites like Bible Gateway and Bible.CC, if you have an internet connection, you can compare dozens of translations with the click of a mouse. My church uses the NRSV, which is available online, but not in as many places as the ESV, which I find is a pretty reasonable substitute.

Sometimes, a quick comparison only leads to more questions about which translation “got it right.” There are two ways to answer that kind of question. First, you could ask an expert. If you don’t know any experts personally, you could go read one of their books instead. Those are called commentaries.

The problem with commentaries is that there’s almost always another scholar who takes a contrary position, and the ones who get their commentaries published are usually able to construct a pretty compelling argument. (Stop and consider: the people who make these competing translations are all experts, and the whole problem is that they don’t agree on how to translate something.) So, of the reading of commentaries there is no end: you have to keep reading until you find one that supports your presuppositions. (I kid.)

If the topic is about something important — grace vs. works, for example — you really do need to ask an expert. But a lot of the time, you just want make sure you’re not leaning too hard on what might be an idiosyncratic translation, or — especially with older translations like KJV — a word whose meaning has evolved over the years.

In those situations you can do a word search to see what the word appears to mean in other places where it appears. It’s best to search by the word used in the original biblical language, because translations don’t always translate one word uniformly, because it’s a poor word that has only one shade of meaning. (The word for “angel” is also the word for “messenger,” but not every messenger has wings and a halo. The word for “heaven” can be translated as “sky” and “air,” depending on the context. And so forth.)

Fortunately, you don’t have to know the biblical languages to do this kind of “casual” search. You can look the underlying words in Strong’s Concordance, which assigns each one a unique number.

I was looking for a word (sometimes translated “justice” or “what is right”) in Proverbs 28:5. The Blue Letter Bible has tagged Bibles that let you see the Strong’s number for each word. (It offers both the KJV and NASB, and, while I’m not a fan of either, the NASB at least offers somewhat more modern English usage.)

With the tagged verse in front of me, it was easy enough to pick my word. As it happens, what I wanted was a Hebrew word numbered 4941.

Clicking on 4941 brought me not only a definition but a list of search results showing me all the places the word appeared. There were 421 appearances all through the Hebrew scriptures, so I concentrated my search in the wisdom literature (Proverbs, Psalms, and Ecclesiastes).

My purpose in this article is to describe how I did my Bible study, rather than to tell you what it taught me. That’s for another article.

When I first began to read the Bible 20 years ago, I was frustrated by all the page-flipping. Today, you can flip through not just one translation but any number of them, as easily as clicking a mouse.

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What’s the Church For?

October 22, 2011 at 8:35 am · Filed under children, money ·Tagged , , , , ,

If a curious stranger asked one of us what it was that Christians believed, some of us would stumble our way through the Apostles’ Creed (“I believe in one God, Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth…”). Others might think of John 3:16 (“God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life”). Those are great answers: the Creed lists the major points of belief Christians have affirmed down through the centuries. John 3:16 isn’t as detailed, but it captures the essence of our faith better than perhaps any other Scripture.

But suppose that instead of asking about Christianity, the stranger asked you about church. How would you answer that? John 3:16′s no help: it doesn’t even mention the church. The Apostles’ Creed affirms a belief in the “holy catholic church” it doesn’t explain what that is, or the role it plays in a believer’s life.

In the gospels, Jesus himself barely mentions the church, although the two places he does are pretty important. In Matthew 16:18 he says that not even the gates of Hell will prevail against the church. In Matthew 18:17 he explains how to handle conflict in the church. (According to his command, it’s the only way to deal with conflict, so you might want to check if you’ve been doing it right.)

Jesus says a lot more to the churches in Revelation 2 and 3, but the best place to get an understanding of the church is from the early church itself: from its history in Acts, and from the Epistles that Paul and other leaders wrote to the those early churches.

That’s still a lot of reading, though. Suppose your stranger was impatient, and you didn’t have a copy of the New Testament handy. What could you tell them?

When I think what Scripture might serve the same “quick explanation” function for the Church that John 3:16 does for Christianity, what comes to mind for me is this:

All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.—Acts 2:44-47

That’s a wonderful picture of the church. Theologians sometimes call it “the provisional demonstration of the Kingdom of God.” In other words, it’s not exactly what things will be like in the Resurrection, but it’s as close as anybody will get until then.

Now, we may raise our eyebrows at “having things in common” and “selling possessions” and “distributing to all.” I think most of us tend to read it as “you have to give up your stuff.” But that’s not what it says. It says when there was a need, people were quick to help each other. Don’t confuse the church with redistributionist political schemes.

Have you ever had a “refrigerator friend?” That’s the name Craig Groeschel gives to the kind of friend who can get things out of your refrigerator without asking. You don’t want friends asking, “Is it okay with you if I get some cream to put in my coffee?” If they’re still asking permission, they aren’t refrigerator friends, just acquaintances.

The picture in Acts is a community of refrigerator friends. They worship together (“they spent much time together in the temple”) but they did other things together too (“they broke bread at home”).

Of course, not every church does things as well as they did in Acts 2. In fact, even the early church wasn’t always that kind of church: just a couple of chapters later, we find out the church had to deal with greedy people and squabbling. But the picture in Acts 2 is the ideal. It’s what God wants the church to be like.

How do we compare to that ideal? Has the church helped you find some “refrigerator friends?” What could we do to help people build those kind of relationships? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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Fascinating Data in the Bible, Yahoo Listings, Etc.

October 14, 2011 at 1:40 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , ,

I just stumbled upon a site called OpenBible that has the most fascinating blog. I just spent about half an hour reading one article after another, and finally decided I needed to share something. Fascinating place. Give it a look. I just added its RSS feed to my Google Reader.

So what am I sharing? How about an analysis of church names in the United States?

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Yousef Nadarkhani update – keep praying

October 1, 2011 at 2:18 pm · Filed under prayer ·Tagged , , ,

The pressure is getting to Iran’s clerics, so they’ve started lying about what they’re doing:

“His crime is not, as some claim, converting others to Christianity,” said Gholomali Rezvani, deputy governor of Iran’s Gilan province, where the persecuted pastor was sentenced to death by hanging. “He is guilty of security-related crimes.”

Those crimes, claimed Rezvani, in remarks reported by Fars news agency (the Iranian government’s unofficial mouthpiece), include rape and extortion. “No one is executed in Iran for their choice of religion,” he insisted.

The Iranian provincial governor’s explanation of Pastor Nadarkhani’s death sentence does not square with court records of the trial, conviction and appeal of the leader of 400 Christian house churches – whom Rezvani disparagingly described as a “Zionist” criminal.

“Does not square” is a very mild way of stating the obvious: the provincial governor is lying. What a great political system they have there, that the governor has no compunctions about lying in describing the charges against someone.

The clerics may yet kill Pastor Nadarkhani, but the fact that they’vee changing their stories, and are now providing a different rationale is a sign that the pressure is getting to them. Remember what Jesus said: all that do evil hate the light (John 3:20).

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Bible Translation

September 30, 2011 at 10:54 am · Filed under archaeology, prayer ·Tagged , ,

Joel Hoffman has posted a series of articles about Bible translation at his “God Didn’t Say That” blog. A good place to get started is with this one about the false dichotomy between accuracy and readability.

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Pray for Yousef Nadarkhani

September 30, 2011 at 8:31 am · Filed under church, education, time ·Tagged , , , ,

Have you heard about Yousef Nadarkhani? He’s a Christian pastor in Iran who is facing state-approved murder for the “crime” of apostasy.

Apostasy is turning away from a belief, either to another faith or to atheism. It’s a crime punishable by death in some (all?) countries with Islamic legal systems. In civilized places, it’s a free choice people exercise daily.

As it happens, Yousef Nadarkhani isn’t even an apostate. He never was a Muslim. But Iran set its barbarism knob to “11″ back in 1979. Their so-called judges say, that’s okay, because Nadarkhani is of Muslim ancestry. Even though he never was a Muslim, some of his ancestors were, and his “apostasy” consists of turning away from the faith of his ancestors. (Seems to me there was a fellow in Mecca in the 600′s who did that, PBUH.)

What can be done now? First, we can pray for Nadarkhani and his congregation. Pray for all Christians suffering under the heels of repressive governments, and pray that their oppressors develop a conscience.

Second, we can publicize his case. Jesus said “All who do evil hate the light” (John 3:20). The Iranian clerics judging Nadarkhani think they can perpetrate this evil in the dark, with nobody seeing. They’re wrong.

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