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The Christian’s Checkbook, Part I: A Voluntary Duty

I heard a lecturer once who made an observation along the lines that God saves our checkbooks in addition to our souls. That’s sound because the Bible does tell us to put our money where our mouth is, so to speak. It’s doubly important in the Western Church, which has more resources than any church in history.

The big question in some circles is whether Christians are obligated to tithe. That question I can’t answer definitively. Tithing (paying a tenth of one’s money and goods) was required of Old Testament Israel, but that principle is nowhere repeated in the New Testament. In fact, when Peter is asked if Jesus pays the temple tax, Jesus has him pay it for Himself and Peter as a concession, not a command. He asks Peter if “kings of the earth take custom or tribute of their own children or of strangers.” Peter answers that they tax strangers, and Jesus concludes, “Then are the children free” (Matthew 17:25-26, KJV). He pays the tax not because He has to but simply so as not to offend. This might indicate that Christians are not bound by Old Testament rules of giving.

Yet give they must. Paul instructed the Corinthians before he visited, “Upon the first day of the week, let everyone of you lay by him in store, as God hath prospered him,” collections for the Jerusalem saints in need. True, Paul wants giving to be voluntary and cheerful, but he does expect it. In Galatians 6:6, he exhorts the Galatians to share all good things with their teachers, and while he himself did not take money from the Corinthians, he adamantly informed them that ministers have a right to be supported by their congregations. As he told Timothy, “The laborer is worthy of his reward” (I Timothy 5:18, KJV). Jesus told two parables where the king gives his servants ancient units of money (a mina in one story and talents in the other) and expects them to use them towards his profit when he returns. In fact, he is furious with the servant in both stories who refuses to do anything with the money entrusted to him. After another parable, Jesus says to, “Make to yourselves friends of the Mammon of unrighteousness” (Luke 16:9, KJV). In other words, we should give voluntarily, but it is still a duty. You could say that about any duty God gives us, like love, prayer, and forgiveness. He wants it done with our whole heart willingly, but that doesn’t excuse us from not doing it just because we don’t feel like it. As in any good habit or duty we need to cultivate but don’t feel like, we have to do it until we love it. We can’t just wait for an enthusiastic impulse, which may never come with that attitude.

Christians have more reason than anybody else to be generous. They believe an all-powerful, all-wise God has promised to provide for them and reward them eternally for anything they give in His name. They believe He has called them to love others as themselves. James famously describes how charity shows forth the faith we have. And consider that God required this giving of people with much less economic stability than us. They were paid daily because they needed those wages for the very next day and had the ever-present danger of crop failures, epidemics, and raids hanging over them.

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Liberals Make a Tragedy and Call It a Right

In a famous pre-battle speech, a barbarian king is said to have told his army that the Romans “make a wilderness and call it peace.” If I may paraphrase this famous dictum, I feel that liberals “make a tragedy and call it a right.” There are many examples, but time restricts me to three.

The first right, which seems to be the most important “right” to many Liberals, namely abortion, is a real tragedy. I’m going to assume here for the sake of brevity that the unborn baby is a distinct lifeform from the mother (for a detailed discussion of this premise, see my post, “When Does Life Begin According to Science?” in the archives). If it is, never in history has the world seen mothers murder their offspring by the millions. Where did this “right” come from? Not from nature, which has designed the woman’s body to take care of the baby first and which gives the mother hormones to make her attached to her baby. Few bonds in nature are stronger than a mother and her altricial young, which is what human babies are. For Liberals to sever this bond en masse is a tragedy of the highest order.

Many of the “rights” liberals insist on are thinly disguised attacks on the traditional family of a married man and woman and their children. It’s called the “traditional” family because throughout human history it’s been the primary means of producing the next generation, nurturing it, and preparing it for adulthood. It seems Liberals can’t stand it because God designed it intending for the husband/father to lead the family and they can’t tell the difference between a difference in roles and a difference of value. To prove that those are two distinct things, consider the relationship between Jesus Christ and His Father. Christ subordinated Himself to the Father in everything He did (“Not My will, but Yours, be done”), but ever since the beginning, the Church has maintained that those who didn’t hold Christ to be of the same value as the Father are heretics. Since Liberals think subordination means lesser value and women and men are equally valuable (which they are), they therefore conclude there should be no distinction in roles between men and women. So Liberals insist on “rights” that blur the distinction between men and women. They insist that men can be just as legitimate spouses to men as women and vice versa. They want the government to take over the father’s traditional role as provider for his children. Their TV shows almost universally portray fathers as lazy, gluttonous incompetents.

Liberals have been fairly successful in removing fathers from many families, but the “men of the house” have proven far from superfluous, as Liberals supposed they would. They are there in God’s plan to provide direction, discipline, protection, provision, and a good example to their children. Children who grow up without this are much more likely to live in poverty or in prison because of crime. They drop out of high school at a higher rate than children with fathers. Even when fathers don’t leave the picture entirely, half of families break up in divorce. This means that too large of a percentage of marriages that begin in happiness with vows of love end with husband and wife going to attorneys to try to take as much of the communal property for themselves as possible. Rights sometimes mean accepting some unpleasant side-effects, as when free speech means someone can offend us, but this widespread heartache, violence, and penury seem an awfully unacceptable price to pay for these so-called “rights.”

Liberals have a term for certain rights they call “entitlement” spending. This is the Social Security, Medicare, Unemployment, and other wealth-redistributing taxes. I’ll set aside the question of the morality of what might be accurately described as using the threat of prison to force people to give you money for nothing in return and just focus on the practicality. Right now, we spend more on government programs, the majority of them entitlements, than we take in. Our maximum tax rate is set at a level just above where empirical evidence shows that increases in tax rates lead to decreases in tax revenues (37% as opposed to 33%), so increasing taxes won’t help. The best explanation of this phenomenon, referred to as the Laffer Curve, is the Prager U video, “Lower Taxes, Higher Revenue,” which actually cites one of Obama’s own economists’ study. I recommend viewing it- if Google will let you, that is…

Anyway, the point about the Laffer Curve here is that it means the only way to pay all those entitlements is to borrow and print money, like we’re doing. As history has shown repeatedly, however, when countries keep that up, eventually their creditors or potential creditors lose faith in the country’s ability to pay and stop lending it money. Germany could bail out a relatively small country like Greece, but who can possibly bail out the U.S.? The result is hyperinflation and worthless money. In other words, retirees’ savings will be wiped out, massive unemployment will result, and the U.S. (and probably the whole world) will enter another Great Depression. The entitlements will stop at that point by default, but by then the damage will have been done, and we shall have yet another massive tragedy in the name of “rights.” Incidentally, the poverty rate has barely shifted since LBJ began the War on Poverty, so the debt we’ve racked up this whole time has been for no real purpose. A tragedy masquerading as a right.

Liberal programs are so popular because they’re wrapped up in such pretty packages. Liberals use all the positive words they can think of to press them: “fairness,” “justice,” “choice,” etc. If we take an empirical look at the results, though, liberal policies are anything but pretty.

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Christians and Halloween

It’s late October, so second tax season is over, and it’s time for an annual controversy. Some Christian parents will take children dressed up as their favorite superhero or monster out to collect candy while their spouses stay home to be on the candy-distributing side. Others will decry the paganism of the festival. My Halloween post will explore which side is right here.

There’s no denying that, despite a name like All Hallow’s Eve before All Saints Day, Halloween has its origins in paganism. It was originally Samhain, the Celtic New Year, on November 1. In their reckoning, it was the start of winter, and since dark preceded light in Celtic thinking, winter started the year. Likewise, night started the day, so the night of October 31 was the beginning of that New Year. Important decisions were made on November 1, like what animals to slaughter for winter and which to keep alive for the next spring. But first, the barriers between this world and the Otherworld went down for the night, as they did at all the four festivals marking the seasons. For some reason, the Irish worshipped gods, whom they called the Tuatha de Danaan, whom they thought their mortal ancestors, the sons of Milesius, had defeated and driven into the Otherworld underground and who came out only on these days when the barriers broke down. If there’s a sillier religion than that of my ancestors, I don’t know it, but it just goes to show you how far people will go to avoid worshipping the true God.

I’ve often wondered why we celebrate Halloween the way we do. Surely that should play into our calculation of what’s right and wrong here. I mean, the candy and dressing up like superheroes has obvious appeal to the children, but for practically a month we celebrate things dark and dangerous. We’ll watch movies about gory death and all kinds of creatures whose sole purpose is to harm us. Who in their right mind would make a festival out of that?

I think the Science of Monsters by Matt Kaplan provides a reasonable answer when he talks about why we’re so fascinated with monsters. His book is a rational look at what’s been hard-wired into us to fear the kinds of creatures we make movies and campfire stories about. We’re facing our fears this way in a setting where we know we won’t get hurt and enjoying the adrenaline rush we would normally get only in dangerous situations.

Which is why I think Halloween is okay for much the same reason as Harry Potter and other books about magical characters are okay for Christians (if you haven’t, check that blog post out in the archive). Most people know the monsters aren’t real. In fact, we don’t generally dress up as the evil things we do believe in. How many Halloween stores sell costumes of Hitler or Stalin? People might dress up as grotesque zombies, but how many intentionally dress up as someone suffering from a real disease like Ebola or cancer? Since the Christians taking their kids out to get candy aren’t encouraging them to worship the creatures people are dressing up as (and certainly most of them have never even heard of the Tuatha de Danaan), most children should be perfectly fine participating.

As for Halloween being originally pagan, so was Christmas (and, yes, there are Christians who object to even Christmas on those grounds). The Bible nowhere states that December 25 was Christ’s birthday, and it gives no evidence of early Christians celebrating it. What did happen was the Church took a big pagan holiday, of which there are a lot at the time of the Winter Solstice, like Saturnalia or Yule, and converted it to Christian use to give Christians something sacred to celebrate at the same time their pagan neighbors were living it up. That’s exactly how we got All Saints Day and All Hallow’s Eve as well.

It’s true that when Paul wrote, “One man esteemeth one day above another. Another esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind” (Romans 14:5, KJV), he probably mainly had the Jewish festal calendar in mind, but notice he doesn’t say, “except for your pagan holidays.” I think worldly holidays like Halloween fall under the adiaphora category like eating meat sacrificed to idols. It doesn’t matter so much what the other guy is making of it as what you are making of it. If you want to let your kid enjoy some role-playing and candy and fellowship with the family and the neighbors, that’s perfectly fine.

But here are my caveats. A festival celebrating dark things can obviously lead to sin very easily. Paul didn’t mind the Corinthians eating meat that had been sacrificed to idols, but he didn’t want them participating in the sacrifices themselves. Anything involving genuine attempts at witchcraft, necromancy, or what-not should be avoided at all costs! As for pranking and scaring people, my advice would be to remember the Golden Rule and not do anything to anyone you wouldn’t want them doing to you. While many movies like Universal’s 1930s monster movies are classic works of art depicting the clash of good versus evil, I don’t see anything healthy, artistic, or God-glorifying in watching graphically gruesome slasher pics with senseless violence. And certainly don’t violate your conscience in anything you do. Other than that, enjoy the candy!

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Why Aren’t We Happier?

If material things were the answer to the question of happiness, we should be the most ecstatic people in history. For a novel I was writing set in the Dark Ages, I researched everyday life in the past, and I’m telling you that we in the developed world have it infinitely better than our ancestors. I’ll give you some examples and then examine the signs we’re not as happy as a materialistic formula would predict we should be.

We can start with health. Our life expectancy is more than twice what it was in the Middle Ages. There’s far too much that we still can’t do, but we can do more now than St. Luke the beloved physician could have ever dreamed of. We don’t have epidemics wiping out half the population of a continent. We have treatments that are unpleasant, but at least they’re not complete fabrications that actually make things worse like bleeding the patient. When we have surgery, we have anesthesia. When we have children, they’re far more likely to have our funeral than we are to have theirs. Our infant mortality and deaths from childbirth, while still incredibly tragic, are a fraction of what they used to be.

Or entertainment. Generally speaking, we can watch and listen to what we want when we want. It’s been within living memory that we were restricted to whatever a few channels on television were carrying that night. And yet, electronics is one of the worst industries for shoplifting. What does that say about people? They’re willing to hurt others (and risk punishment) just to get the latest thing for their own amusement.

Have you ever thought about how impatient people are? They can get downright rude over the most trivial delays, and when they drive, they are willing to break the law and endanger themselves and others just to arrive at their destination a few minutes earlier. What’s ironic is that we have more leisure time than our ancestors would have dreamed of. They used to work from sunup to sundown and then go to sleep (because they had no light bulbs) Monday through Saturday. A five-day workweek was an invention of the last century.

With regards to food, it’s the same with entertainment. What we want we eat when we want. We’re not dependent on the seasons or a good harvest. We don’t have to eat the same old salted meat all winter long. If one area has a bad crop, we get it from somewhere else. We don’t have hunger gnawing at us constantly and the threat of starvation and disease hanging over us like the peasants of medieval Europe.

Now, we have a far from perfect justice system. The rich and famous get away with stuff other people go to prison for, and flimsy excuses get some people off the hook while minor offenses see people locked away. The punishments often vary for the same crime. On the other hand, the government cannot torture us to confess and then burn or draw and quarter us. Judges don’t get to make up bizarre and hideous punishments (just read about some of the methods of execution in ancient times or 17thcentury Hungary).

As far as security, we haven’t had a war between the major powers in 73 years. I’m pretty sure that’s a record in human history. We don’t have raiding parties coming into our neighborhoods every few years to carry off our possessions or enslave our children.

We can keep ourselves comfortable and clean in ways impossible even at the beginning of last century. We can set our houses to whatever temperature we want and wear a fresh set of clothes everyday. We have any color clothes we think will look good on us as opposed to being stuck with whatever dyes the local plants produce.

To stay in touch, we don’t have to send letters that take weeks or months to arrive at their destination, if they get there at all, and then take more weeks and months to return. In a few seconds we can see someone across the world face-to-face. We also get to travel practically wherever we want in relative safety without too much risk of being robbed on the way by brigands lurking in mountains and forests. We can see the world if we like, and we have places set up to attract us with nothing but amusements.

Now, I know many of you are thinking of exceptions to everything I’ve just described. Yes, this world isn’t perfect, and I was speaking in generalizations. But, overall, no one in their right mind would deny that in material terms, we’re richer beyond compare to our forebears.

But are we happier? Well, actually, developed countries have higher rates of depression than undeveloped countries. In my psychology class, the theory they put forward is called the tyranny of choice. The way I understand the theory, developed countries give more freedom to their individuals to make their own decisions, so when their lives end up a mess, they have no one to blame but themselves. I think we could also say that this leisure time which we have and undeveloped countries don’t affords us more time to think about ourselves and our problems and brood over things that bother us.

Or consider the problem with drugs and alcohol. People are willing to risk their health, going to prison, and losing their families to take themselves out of consciousness. Why, if life is so materially good for us? I think Dr. R. C. Sproul had a great explanation for this. We’re told now from middle school up that we are here because of a cosmic game of chance and that when we die we end up as nothing but dust. In other words, nothing we do matters. We go through a lot of pain and heartache, and in the end we get no recompense for it. We do terrible things, feel guilty about it, and have no eternal judge to acquit us. Dr. Sproul thought that such thoughts of a meaningless existence drive people to extremes to be rid of them.

I’m going to work in a really obscure example that illustrates this point. The eighteenth century Prussian army was infamously brutal. The officers and sergeants were very detail-oriented and not shy about cracking down on the most trivial breaches of regulations. You could be beaten for not polishing your buttons, for instance. Naturally, many soldiers deserted, but observers noted that they often became depressed when they returned to a civilian world where people didn’t care what they did. They might not get flogged for being wrong, but they didn’t get much reward for being right either.

What about the family? A lot of people are obviously not very happy with their spouses since approximately half of marriages end in divorce. People make solemn vows to each other in an ecstasy of love, and then in a bitterness of hate they break them. If anything in this world is supposed to make us happy, it’s our family, so clearly something’s not right here.

Are people content? Obviously not, to judge by their spending habits. They can run through vast sums of money to satisfy their tastes, and they’ll even trample each other on Black Friday to get more stuff cheap. How many people wreck themselves with extravagant spending in America? We have more goodies than at any other time in history, and yet we’re willing to act like idiots to get more.

Evidently material things don’t make us happy, at least not in the long-run. We’re built to love God first and then enjoy the material things He provides. That’s the way to fulfillment and joy. In fact, Habakkuk says he for one will be joyful in God even if there are no material blessings, even ones as basic as food. How many of us can say that? But, as St. Augustine famously said, “Our hearts are restless, O Lord, until they find their rest in Thee.”

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The Gospel According to Caiaphas

Many liberal intellectuals believe that people sin out of ignorance. With enough instruction and correction (though without using any forms of discipline that might hurt any feelings), humans can be perfected and the golden age ushered in. Well, that is not how the Bible portrays it. Jesus’s opponents in the Gospels have a very clear understanding of what Jesus is saying and oppose Him anyway.

In fact, often the unbelievers in the story have a better grasp on what Jesus said than His own disciples. After the crucifixion, the disciples have lost all hope. They assume Jesus is gone forever, completely forgetting the fact that He told them three times He would rise from the dead. The chief priests, however, are well aware of this prediction. Even if they don’t believe Jesus will rise again, they fear the disciples making it look like He has (which the disciples are far too demoralized to do) because they know that if Christianity can preach the resurrection, it will be unstoppable. Or, as they put it, “The last error shall be worse than the first” (Matthew 27:64, KJV).

Jesus’s opponents realized what so many people today deny- that Jesus claimed to be divine. They just didn’t believe Him. At the beginning of His ministry, when He announces forgiveness of sins to the paralytic, they assume He’s blaspheming because they know only God can forgive sins. Several times in John’s Gospel, Jesus’s claims of His unique relationship with the Father drive the Jews to try to stone Him for making Himself equal with God. Finally, they get the chance they’ve been waiting for when Jesus affirms He is the Son of God in front of all of them at His trial when they ask Him. Critics of the Bible today try to weasel out of Jesus’s statement by missing the contextual forest for the semantic trees. Because He literally says in Matthew and Luke, “You say that I am,” they claim He was denying divinity, but the chief priest’s reaction shows that he took it as an affirmation, especially considering Jesus’s going on to affirm that they will see Him coming in the clouds with power. The critics should also note how Mark reports Jesus simply affirming that He is the Son of God, reporting the plain gist of Jesus’s words rather than His exact statement. They should also note how in Matthew a few verses before Jesus answers the high priests, “You say that I am,” He uses the same answer to unquestionably affirm that Judas is the traitor. What He means is not, “You say that I am, but I say I’m not,” but rather, “You already know the answer to what you’re asking me.” Earlier they had asked, “Are we blind also?” To which Jesus had replied, “If ye were blind, ye should have no sin. But now ye say, ‘We see,’ therefore your sin remaineth” (John 9:40-41, KJV).

They also knew what He required of them. That’s largely why they hated Him. He rejected their external traditions and demanded the much more rigorous life of self-sacrifice. They knew that if they followed him, they would have to stop doing the things that got them glory from man and do some real soul-searching and living for others. One of them, the Apostle Paul, realized when he met Christ that whatever he had thought he was gaining from being a Pharisee he would have to count as loss relative to what Jesus called him to.

All of the Gospels report rich ironies in their Passion narratives. Despite Jesus’s opponents doing all they can to obstruct Him, they wind up unwittingly affirming His truth or furthering His Kingdom by fulfilling Scripture. At Palm Sunday, the Pharisees cried out, “Perceive ye how ye prevail nothing? Behold, the world is gone after Him” (John 12:19, KJV). Though they were utterly frustrated, they knew where He was going. Ironically, the chief priests make a big deal about mocking Jesus’s being the King of the Jews and the Son of God at His crucifixion when Jesus didn’t make a big deal of those titles during His ministry. Yes, He knew He was God’s Son and the Davidic King of Israel, but He preferred to call Himself the Son of Man.

Jesus’s opponents wanted Him crucified because hanging on a tree represented God’s curse in the Old Testament Law. They felt a cursed death was fitting for one who claimed to be the Son of God, not realizing that Jesus was dying a cursed death because He was the obedient Son of God. Similarly, they scoff that, “He saved others; Himself He cannot save” (Matthew 27:42, KJV), when the reason He can’t save Himself is precisely because He’s saving others. They go on to taunt Him that God can save Him if He really wants Him, which is precisely what David predicted Jesus’s enemies would say in Psalm 22.

So, apparently, ignorance wasn’t really Jesus’s opponents’ problem. Their problem was suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. They understood what He was saying and knew that He was accomplishing signs to verify it, and they went ahead and opposed Him anyway. So much for enlightening humanity into perfection. If people understood Jesus’s teaching and it didn’t perfect them, I don’t think there’s much hope of liberal education perfecting them. Knowing what’s right is not nearly the same as doing what’s right.

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Stupid Things People Think the Bible Says, Which It Doesn’t

Despite all the good the Bible’s done in the world, people love to find fault with it. It’s easily the most criticized, most censored book of all time. While it’s true that people often hate the things the Bible really teaches, to find something manifestly ridiculous to lampoon and hate about it, people have to make it up. I’m going to give six examples of stupid things people believe the Bible says when it clearly teaches the opposite.

To start at the beginning, there seems to be a growing belief that the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in Genesis 3 had something to do with sexual knowledge. I heard a rabbi, who should have known better, propound that that’s what the original Hebrew refers to, and the Star Trek TOS episode “The Apple” used the idea as a large part of the plot. I don’t know much Hebrew, but I know that calling it the Tree of Sexual Knowledge flies in the face of common sense. At the same time that Adam and Eve are forbidden to eat of the tree, God tells them to, “Be fruitful and multiply.” Since He’s talking to the first husband and wife, there’s no reason to suppose He has anything in mind other than sexual reproduction. Besides, it’s only after they eat from the tree that Adam and Eve no longer want to be naked in front of each other.

This attempt to make the Bible more prudish than it really is is even more widespread in the Catholic religion, which teaches that its clergy has to be celibate. This is a gross distortion of Paul’s teaching in I Corinthians 7. What he actually says is that, while it would be great for every Christian to be like himself and able to devote all their time to the Lord without the distraction of a family, the normal human sex drive makes this the exception rather than the rule. In fact, he says, “Let him do what he will. He sinneth not; let them marry” (verse 36, KJV). The Bible is more than happy to have married clergy. In fact, Israelite clergy had to marry to perpetuate the priestly line, the Pastorals call for elders and deacons to be evaluated based on their relationships with their wives and children, and Peter himself is said to have a mother-in-law whom Jesus heals. To have one of those, he had to have been married. In fact, Paul says in I Timothy 4:3 that forbidding marriage is the teaching of demons.

One huge misconception is that the Bible permits the imposition of Christianity by force. Any skeptic worth his salt knows all about the Crusades, the Inquisition, Charlemagne’s slaughter of the pagan Saxons, etc. and knows they’re unethical. Well, they’re also unscriptural. What happened is that the later Roman emperors, medieval kings, and Popes realized that the Christian God is more powerful than anyone else they could pray to, so they decided to try to harness that power for their own worldly pursuits. If you read the book of Acts, you know that the Apostles did not convert by the sword.

But, wait, the skeptic says! He doubles down by pointing to the multiple commands to Israel to massacre its foes in the Old Testament. The practice of herem, or putting under the ban, is clearly an Old Testament principle no longer applicable today. It was important when God’s Kingdom was a political one. Israel was the sole nation of God, surrounded by pagans hateful to its existence, and thus had its purity as well as its security to consider. By the way, while the other nations of the Ancient Near East could be barbarously cruel in the name of their gods, there’s no Old Testament command to blind, mutilate, or torture prisoners, unlike, say, the infamous Assyrians. Under the New Testament, God’s Kingdom is not tied to any political entity and is supposed to spread its love to every nation. In fact, Jesus told Pilate, “My Kingdom is not of this world. If My Kingdom were of this world, then would My servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews” (John 18:36, KJV). While Christians are to hold their governments accountable for basic moral standards of justice, they’re not to use it to impose religion on others. (By the same token, it’s not how Progressives are to impose their secularism on others either.)

Anyone who has heard about the exclusivity of Christianity will demand, “But what about innocent people who’ve never heard of Jesus? How can God send them to Hell for rejecting Jesus when they’ve never heard of Him?” Well, He doesn’t. It’s the difference in what theologians call General versus Special Revelation. General Revelation, according to Romans 1, is what everyone instinctively knows from Creation and conscience. They know, even if they won’t admit it, that they are a created being made to conform to certain moral laws by their Creator. Everyone, Paul tells us at length, is guilty before God of rebelling against this knowledge. Special Revelation is the Gospel message telling people how they can be reconciled to God. To reject this is a serious sin, but God obviously is not going to condemn you for rejecting something you’ve never heard of. The point is that General Revelation rules out anyone being innocent; all are under sin, as Paul says.

One grievous error is the belief that the Bible teaches hatred of homosexuals. Now, the Bible makes it quite clear that this is a serious sin of which they must repent, but it nowhere says to treat them differently from any other kind of sinner. Both sides should take a lesson from Paul when he writes, “Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind (and here the KJV is trying to delicately describe passive and active homosexuals), nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners shall inherit the Kingdom of God. And such were some of you, but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the Name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God” (I Corinthians 6:9-11, KJV). From this, we can see that (1) the homosexuals could and did repent of their sin (though no one said it would be any easier than the drunkard giving up his wine) and (2) that Paul extended his ministry to them as lovingly as to anyone else.

Some people think that because the Old Testament is full of saints who practice polygamy that the Bible teaches that it’s okay. Well, anyone familiar with those stories should see that the Bible does not endorse that practice. It just reports the facts as they occurred, and universally they tell of the unhappiness and conflict that polygamy brings. In the Old Testament, in fact, the principles of the king in Deuteronomy forbid him practicing polygamy. In the New Testament, Paul explicitly says, “Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband” (I Corinthians 7:2, KJV). No one in their right mind should want to practice polygamy after they read the Bible.

The list is really endless all the stupid things people think the Bible teaches when it in fact says the opposite. It’s like they’re trying to find excuses not to believe, which is in fact what they’re trying to do.

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“Drink a Little Wine for Your Stomach”

I’m a teetotaler. Not because I think there’s anything wrong with reasonable use of alcohol to relax. I just don’t enjoy it personally. Many people do think it’s wrong, though, and judge others for it. The Bible, I believe, is all for drinking wine in moderation- if your conscience permits.

One caveat: If I don’t convince you 100% that alcohol’s okay, don’t drink it! If you think it might be wrong for you to drink liquor, then it is wrong for you to drink liquor. You are only supposed to do things God and your conscience agree are correct. However, I hope to show you that there’s no reason to condemn moderate drinkers like they were breaking a moral command. I know Paul said not to get into disputes over these things, but he did issue a definitive statement affirming the eating of meat and drinking of wine when he did.

That’s one of my proofs. Paul didn’t want people drinking wine and eating meat if they had scruples about it, but he himself didn’t. He said, “I know and am persuaded by the Lord Jesus that there is nothing unclean of itself, but to him that esteemeth anything to be unclean, to him it is unclean” (Romans 14:14, KJV). In such a context, he mentions wine as one of the adiaphora, that is, things that a Christian can take or leave as long as they do so in a spirit of honoring God and respect their fellow Christian’s conscience. “It is good neither to eat flesh nor to drink wine, nor anything whereby thy brother stumbleth or is offended or is made weak” (14:21, KJV). However, as far as adding moral restrictions other than being considerate of a brother or sister in Christ, I think wine was part of what Paul was talking about when he told the Colossians, “Let no man therefore judge you in meat or in drink…” (2:16, KJV). In other words, he was not in favor of imposing teetotalism as a moral obligation on everyone, just the ones who already considered it wrong.

In fact, the Bible speaks of wine as one of God’s blessings. It is grateful for “wine to gladden the heart of man” in Psalm 104. Vats overflowing with wine is a reward of honoring God in Proverbs 3:10 the same as grain in the barn. Ecclesiastes 10:19 and Zechariah 10:7 speak of wine as something to be enjoyed, and countless references to it in the prophetic books show that it was a part of everyday life for God’s people, albeit frequently abused. Judges 9:13 goes so far as to say that wine delights God as well as man, which doesn’t seem far-fetched when you consider how Jesus said at the Lord’s Supper He would drink it with us in His Father’s Kingdom. Jesus was willing to make very good wine to make a wedding celebration all the merrier and save a groom and his family from serious embarrassment. In fact, it was better than the wine the bridegroom had put out first to make the best impression on his guests.

And, though the Bible says not to drink wine if it violates your conscience, there are a couple of instances when God commanded it. Jesus handed wine to His apostles and told them, “Take, drink.” Paul famously told Timothy, “Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine often infirmities” (I Timothy 5:23, KJV).

Now, I live in a heavily Baptist part of the country, so I’ve heard numerous arguments against the above. I can summarize them as: the Bible refers to people drinking grape juice or a form of wine so low in alcohol content that they wouldn’t get drunk from it, and in any event they were excused because it was safer than the water. Well, I think I can answer these objections.

First of all, the Bible seems to know the difference between wine and grape juice. It distinguishes between wine, vinegar, and grape juice in the Nazirite vow (none of which a Nazirite was allowed to drink) in Numbers 6. (By the way, why would God specify that Nazirites couldn’t drink wine as part of their vow if He had already forbidden anyone to drink it at all?) If every reference above to “wine” being good is supposed to be referring to grape juice and every reference to wine being bad is supposed to be referring to fermented grape juice, I think we’d see more references to “juice of grapes” like you have in Numbers rather than the standard term for wine used again and again. In fact, I can’t think of another instance of “juice of grapes” being used in the Bible, good or bad. Would God use the exact same word for one of His gifts as for something we’re totally forbidden to partake? That would be really confusing.

As for low alcohol content, I really don’t see any evidence of that. The Bible presents wine having the same effects on people then that it has today. Belshazzar becomes merrily drunk and does something egregiously stupid. What about the wine gladdening man’s heart in Psalm 104? By the time of Jesus’s Passover, the Jews by tradition drank four cups of wine. They poured it, however, out of a mixer where they put three parts water to one part wine, an unlikely precaution if it was grape juice or 2-proof wine. Also, drinking a little grape juice or 2-proof wine in Timothy’s case makes no sense. First of all, if there was that little alcohol in it, what good would a little of it make, and why would he specify to drink only a little if it wasn’t likely to intoxicate him? It is abundantly clear that the first Christians used alcoholic wine in the Lord’s Supper because, to Paul’s horror, the privileged Corinthians were getting drunk at Communion!

As for excusing it as a safety precaution against risky water, while wine was safer than water (and in the Middle Ages a low-proof beer was used for the same purpose), that wouldn’t actually excuse people from something that would be a sin for us today. The traditional Protestant position, as found in the Heidelberg Catechism, is that we should rather die than commit a sin. If it was okay for them, it should be okay for us.

I did hear one argument along the lines of: The Bible forbids drunkenness. It’s hard to tell when precisely you have become drunk. Therefore, it’s not safe to drink anything. Well, the Bible also forbids gluttony, and it’s hard to tell when you’ve crossed the line into gluttony, but we shouldn’t stop eating because of it. There are plenty of issues the Bible puts before us where we have to decide from something on a continuum. When are you being glorious in overlooking an offense and covering a multitude of sins like Proverbs says, and when are you disgracing the Church of God in your tolerance for sin like the Corinthians? When are you answering a fool according to his folly so he won’t become wise in his own eyes, and when are you not answering a fool according to his folly so you won’t become like him? Clearly many things Scripture calls us to do require judgment to steer between two different courses of action, each of which is appropriate in its time. Just because each case is not black-and-white doesn’t mean we have to retreat from the situation entirely. I don’t think people generally get drunk with one serving of an alcoholic beverage.

I hope I’ve convinced you, but if I haven’t, go right on with your teetotaling. It won’t hurt my feelings if you don’t drink. What would hurt them is you judging those who do partake when the Bible never issues a blanket prohibition against alcohol and in fact encourages it in moderation. I think Paul’s solution to areas of Christian liberty where the strong enjoy their liberty away from the weak’s eyes and the weak don’t condemn them for it is fair enough, but we often have a hard time distinguishing between an area of Christian liberty and an area of Christian necessity. I hope I’ve switched alcohol for my Baptist readers from it being a sin to partake at all to something that may be good for some people.

Posted on by deliberationsatmimirswell

The West’s Ingratitude

Reformed theologians now speak of a post-Christian culture. Whereas European cities once spent more than a century building just one church to glorify God, now churches are closing down for lack of funds throughout Europe. Whereas almost everyone in the West once went to Church on Sundays, now some Western countries are calling Christian doctrines hate speech. Distinctly Christian values are attacked or at least mocked rather than promoted in everyday culture. This is ironic because the privileges enjoyed by the West are largely due to Christianity.

Nowhere in the world enjoys the level of freedom, stability, and prosperity that the West does, except some Asian countries that consciously adopted Western models. For the better part of 2,000 years, the West was also the only really Christianized part of the globe. Coincidence? I contend not.

One thing people don’t associate with Christianity is tolerance and intellectual humility, but compared with other religions we have a relatively good track record in that area. We’re not like the Muslim conqueror who torched the library of Alexandria with the reasoning of, “If the books don’t say what’s in the Koran, they must be wrong, and if they do say what’s in the Koran, what’s the use for them?” Yes, we believe our theology is the only sound one, but we don’t think we have a monopoly on reason and common sense. It was Churchmen like St. Thomas Aquinas who brought pagan Greek philosophy back into the West after the barbarians forgot it and cultures mingling with Muslim philosophers rediscovered it. That’s quite different from the Chinese approach of shutting the country off from all foreign influences whatsoever because they thought they had everything they needed. It’s largely due to Greek philosophy and reason that we had the scientific advancements that make our unparalleled health and comfort possible.

But the men who actually made those advancements were very frequently Christians, or at least theists. The father of modern biology (Charles Darwin) we all know was not a Christian, but the father of modern chemistry (Robert Boyle) was wholeheartedly one, and the father of modern physics (Sir Isaac Newton) at least believed the universe he was studying was a created one. And in case you think atheists have a lock on biology, the discoverer of genetics (Gregor Mendel) was an Austrian monk, and we still use the taxonomic system Carolus Linnaeus invented to classify God’s creatures. Christians believe that God created the world and upholds it with wise natural laws (without ruling out the possibility of His direct intervention in miracles), and many Christians have devoted their lives to uncovering those laws and harnessing them for the betterment of humanity. As the verse that the great physicist James Maxwell had inscribed over his laboratory says, “The works of the LORD are great, sought out of all that have pleasure therein” (Psalm 111:2, KJV).

Slavery is outlawed throughout the West, but before Christianity it was the mainstay of every economy in the West, if not the world. Yes, Peter and Paul were willing to work within the context of slavery, telling slaves to be obedient, but they also asserted their equality before God and encouraged them to gain their freedom if they could do it lawfully. Once the Church had influence, it ended slavery throughout Europe, and when slavery reared its ugly head again in the New World, it was Christians like William Wilberforce who led the fight to abolish it.

This equality before the law for everyone is a specifically Christian concept. Most people balk at the eye-for-an-eye retaliatory system in the Old Testament, but they don’t seem to appreciate that that legal system also stressed equal treatment for rich and poor and that God punished Israel severely for not following that principle. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s rallying cry of, “Let justice roll down like water,” comes from Amos 5:24. Paul stressed that everyone is equally accountable to God, and while the West certainly does not always live up to that standard, it remains our ideal.

One of the expressions of that equality is universal education and social mobility, which has meant that some poor children have grown up to be famous discoverers. The West’s emphasis on education is distinctly Christian. When the barbarians toppled Rome, most of them didn’t even have a written language, but the Church kept literacy alive in its monasteries. Later, the Puritans came up with the idea that, rather than only educating the children of the elite like most cultures did, all the citizens’ children should be taught to read. Their reasoning, of course, was so that everyone could read the Bible, but once someone can read the Bible, they can read textbooks.

If you think about it, many of the current Western ideals that put the West into such conflict with Christianity are really Christian values gone awry. I like to say that we’ve made an idol out of compassion and that an idol made out of compassion is still an idol. By that I mean, we’ve made such an emphasis on making everybody happy that we’ve stopped preaching the Gospel to them and exhorting them to forsake sin for their own good. We thus take God’s command to love our neighbor (which means we should truly want our neighbor to be happy) and twist it out of recognition. Do other parts of the world care so much what other people think like we do? Can you imagine the silly protests and lawsuits over mere off-handed comments we have in America happening in China?

By this I conclude that the West is extremely ungrateful. It enjoys a standard of comfort and ease enjoyed by no people since Adam and Eve, largely due to the influence of Christianity in its history, and yet it goes out of its way to spew mockery and hatred towards the religion that gave it its prosperity. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth, indeed!

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Why God Does Things the Hard Way

For an omnipotent deity, God does seem to like to do things the hard way. There’s a lot of pain and suffering in this world, all of which we know He could prevent with just one word. There are plenty of unbelievers who reject His existence or His goodness on that basis. Even His plan of salvation called for the murder of His Son and His taking God’s own curse upon Himself. If God’s loving, why would He do things this way?

Well, I’m going to answer with an extremely unpopular response, but I’m confident I can explain the dilemma with it since the Apostle Paul uses it too. God ordains everything to happen in the way that will most glorify Himself. I know that’s not the majority report. The majority report is a more homocentric blend of God doing the most loving thing while still respecting the free will of His creations.

Well, when Paul dealt with what to him was the most agonizing part of God’s will, he didn’t use that explanation. He spends all of Romans 9-11 rationalizing what went wrong with Israel and why God would call a people and then reject them at the moment of the promised salvation. His grief at this was so great that he took an oath that he would be willing to go to Hell if it would save the Jews. He explains that there is still a believing remnant of Israel while the rejection of the Messiah means that the Gentiles from every race are being grafted into the Church until Israel will see what a blessing the Gentiles are getting that is theirs by right and want back in the Church.

Paul doesn’t go into an accolade of God’s love in this convoluted plan but rather of “the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!” (11:33, KJV). Having reasoned out what is giving himself much personal grief and then found an explanation, Paul summarizes with, “For of Him and through Him and to Him are all things, to whom be glory forever. Amen” (11:36, KJV). So that verse is my premise. We like the “of Him” part where He sends good things to us, we like the “through Him” part where He brings us through our trials, but most Christians today balk at the “to Him” part where everything redounds back to His glory.

That’s understandable because we’re not allowed to seek our own glory. In fact, we really dislike people who do. People will do the most despicable things to win or at least be seen to win in the world’s eyes. It just seems more palatable to us to have a God who does everything out of love for us.

But how hard would it have been for God to create a multitude of Christians today who all love Him as perfectly as we will in the New Jerusalem without the need for a Hell or a murdered Messiah? And there’s something else to consider. The late R.C. Sproul was very fond of preaching Isaiah 6. He said that in Hebrew, to give something the utmost emphasis, you say it three times. There’s only one attribute of God that the Bible does this for, and it doesn’t say, “God is love. God is love. God is love.” Instead, it repeats, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts. The whole earth is full of His glory” (Isaiah 6:3, KJV). So the attribute of God the angels most want us to be aware of is His holiness, and to that they link His glory. There’s nothing about love in Isaiah 6.

We like the “of Him” part where He sends good things to us, we like the “through Him” part where He brings us through our trials, but most Christians today balk at the “to Him” part where everything redounds back to His glory.

But how does God get this glory? He displays to His creation His love, wisdom, power, and perfections, and it responds to Him with praise. God gets glory by giving good things to us all. Who can object to that? That’s not an obnoxious General Custer getting himself and his men wiped out in his quest for glory. It’s entirely different from the self-seeking glory we’re used to other humans craving and debasing themselves over.

Of course God is the most loving being of all. He shows unfathomable love in saving us. But on one occasion of His delivering Israel, He says, “I do not this for your sakes, O house of Israel, but for Mine holy Name’s sake, which ye have profaned among the heathen, whither they went” (Ezekiel 36:22, KJV). As elsewhere in the Bible, I read the “not” here not as “not at all” but rather “not so much as.” God makes it quite plain in other passages that He loves Israel deeply, but here He says His most pressing concern on His heart when He saves them is His own glory.

I’m going to work in a lesson I learned from Teutonic mythology. It’s infamous for its darkness. There are very few happy endings. With a few exceptions, the pervading ethos is that the only honorable way for a great warrior to die is in battle with insurmountable odds. Beowulf dies in a fight with a dragon that he wages alone until Wiglaf comes to aid him. Volsung falls in a trap even when he’s warned because he balks at the idea of fleeing. The Nibelungs perish to a man after holding off the entire army of Attila the Hun. At Ragnarok, the gods and the Einherjar fight the giants to the death until the giants immolate the entire earth. What’s with all the hopelessness?

The Teutons craved for glory, especially after death. To paraphrase a famous line from the Poetic Edda, all things die, but glory lives on. Obviously they’ve got the wrong priorities, but they understood that their heroes deserved more glory for doing the right thing when circumstances are against them and the right thing is the hard thing to do.

If you start with that premise, God’s will in hard things makes sense. It takes more wisdom and love to win a people for Himself who start out hating Him than just making one that already complies with His decrees, so that wins more glory for Himself. God the Father gives Christ even more glory after He submits to earthly humiliation and even delivers Himself up to death. It’s a Teutonic myth with a happy ending: the hero remains resolute to the end with the whole world against Him. Only this time He rises from the dead.

In my first post, I made reference to my experience watching Planet Earth by the BBC. Yes, the tropical biomes with the beautiful birds displaying their plumage to impress females is awe-inspiring and glorifying to their designer, but I found myself glorifying God even when the action changed to places I wouldn’t want to go in a million years. They showed animals adapted to scorching deserts and frozen wildernesses, eking out a much more difficult living than the birds who have nothing better to do all day than collect and arrange flower petals to impress females visiting their bower or mimic any sound they hear. Yes, it glorifies God when a lyre bird perfectly imitates a camera lens or a chainsaw, but if He were truly all about love and fairness, the whole world would be a tropical paradise. Instead, He shows His wisdom by setting up rugged habitats and then populating them with creatures designed to survive there in the most striking ways.

Paul invokes God’s desire for glory to answer another incredibly difficult question for Christians: Hell. Clearly, if God only wanted to show love, He didn’t have to create the Devil, and there would have been no tempter to bring sin into the world. Then there would be no eternal punishment for nonbelievers. But what does Paul say about this decision? Does he invoke free will? He says, “What if God, willing to show His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction and that He might make known the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy, which He had afore prepared unto glory?” (Romans 9:22-23, KJV). Why did God strike Pharaoh with 10 plagues? Paul cites God’s explanation as, “Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might show My power in thee, and that My Name might be declared throughout all the earth” (Romans 9:17, KJV).

Paul’s not alone. When Peter discusses unbelief, does he say, “They stumble at the word, being disobedient, because God left them to their free will”? Not at all. His exact words are, “Even to them which stumble at the word, being disobedient, whereunto also they were appointed” (I Peter 2:8, KJV). So God ordains even sin to come to pass since He therefore demonstrates His wisdom when He works good out of it, as He always does.

If you start with the premise that God does everything out of love, you might have a hard time explaining such difficult things as an untimely death or natural disaster. Doubtless you fall back on God being too loving to violate free will and then being too just to let sin go unpunished, but that’s not how Paul answered his struggles with God’s will. If you go with the premise that God is seeking His glory by how He will use His power and wisdom to turn all things to good, it’s much easier to explain (and Scripturally sound).

Posted on by deliberationsatmimirswell

All Things for Good

God works all things for the good of His people. It’s a simple enough truth, but we frequently have trouble believing it. Often the situation, from our perspective, seems irredeemable. Some people even get angry with God. I’d like to do some case studies in Scripture to show how God can redeem any circumstance with three people who surely felt their world was collapsing around them.

First, though, I’d like to set the stage by giving you a quote that could sum up the feelings of the three saints I’m going to be talking about. Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary famously lamented, “Nothing has been spared me in this life.” It’s hard not to agree with his statement. His brother Maximilian had been executed by the forces of Benito Juarez in Mexico, his own beloved army had resoundingly lost two wars, his only son and heir had shot himself and his teenage mistress, and his wife, who had not particularly returned his affection, had been stabbed to death. That last event was the occasion of his plaintive exclamation.

First in chronological order, look at Job. Here’s someone particularly singled out by Satan for suffering. He clearly endured more than Franz Joseph. In an instant, he lost all his children and his wealth. His wife was taunting him to apostatize, and his friends said he already had. At times he accused God of injustice, but he never fully gave up hope that a redeemer/mediator would intercede for him. Prayers or statements of hope frequently interrupt his proclamations of innocence and God’s injustice. God humbled him by challenging him from a whirlwind, but when Job repented, God gave him double what he had had before. He lived to see 140 years and four generations of descendants, definitely more than he would have enjoyed if God had never tested him and found him (more or less) faithful.

Next, there’s the infamous case of David and Bathsheba. In a series of crimes so heinous the prophet Nathan likened it to a rich man stealing and eating a poor man’s only pet, David first committed adultery with Bathsheba and then had her husband murdered so he could marry her. David soon had to deal with a whole mess of consequences. Besides the agonizing guilt, God promised He was going to chastise David for this. David eventually has to flee for his life when his son Absalom rebels against him and humiliates him by sleeping with his concubines in front of all Israel, and he almost sees his kingdom torn apart by another rebellion. When David declared that the rich man in Nathan’s parable would have to make fourfold restitution for the stolen lamb, God seems to have taken him at his word. First David’s son with Bathsheba dies, and then Absalom kills David’s firstborn, Amnon, for raping Amnon’s half-sister Tamar (she was Absalom’s full sister). Absalom himself dies when Joab defeats his rebel forces, much to David’s grief. Lastly, just before his death, David’s son Adonijah attempts to steal the throne and eventually winds up being executed for it- four lost sons in all.

So what possible good came of this sordid mess? Well, first and foremost, no one can say, “Look at what kind of sin God is willing to tolerate!” That’s mostly why God punished David so severely. For David, though, good came from even this. God explicitly declared his love for David’s next son with Bathsheba, Solomon. In Solomon, David had an heir he could take comfort would accomplish his great dream of building a temple for God. Countless worshipers would have a magnificent temple in which to delight in God because of David’s liaison with Bathsheba. In the grander scheme of things, how many Christians have taken comfort from the extent of the forgiveness God extended to David? If He can forgive adultery and murder, surely He can forgive you. Meanwhile, to help Christians experience that forgiveness, David wrote the definitive work on repentance because of this sin in Psalm 51.

For this last one, I hope you’ll bear with a little speculation and inference. I’m thinking of the Israelite slave girl in II Kings 5. We don’t know much about her as she plays a very small part in the story, but what we’re told about her background tells us she experienced unspeakable trauma as a child when the Arameans carried her off as a slave. From being a (presumably) free woman among the people of God, she has been reduced to the property of a pagan. She has to serve people who oppress her own people. We don’t know if the raiders raped her or killed her family in front of her eyes, but slave raids are never gentle matters. She probably spent the time following her capture among a strange people anxiously wondering what would become of her.

So how does she react to this horrifying turn of events? Well, the one thing we know she does is love her enemies. When Naaman, the commander of the forces who robbed her of her liberty, falls ill with leprosy, she doesn’t gloat secretly over the hardship of her foe. Instead she refers him to the prophet Elisha, who she claims can heal him. Well, to make a long story short, Elisha does heal him, and Naaman becomes a Christian.

So what came of the girl? We don’t know, but I expect it was rewarding enough. Naaman was overwhelmed with gratitude to Elisha and wanted to make him rich for his miracle. Surely some of that gratitude poured over to the slave girl when he returned home. One things seems likely: the little girl probably spent the rest of her life in a more devout household than she would have if she had stayed in depraved Israel.

More frequently, I expect, we don’t get to see how God is working good through things. There are case studies for this too. Heman the Ezrahite’s only Psalm, Number 88, is the only psalm that does not contain a note of hope and trust in God. He describes how miserable he’s been since he was born and believes he is close to death. Maybe God turned his fortunes around like Job, or maybe he had to wait until he got to Heaven to truly enjoy some happiness. The point is, we know Heman is happy now, and presumably God was as pleased with him as he was with Job for remaining faithful in great trial and that he’s being more blessed in Heaven because of it.

Or consider Jeremiah. Here’s someone who had one of the most difficult jobs of all time. Living among a people who outraged him with their iniquity but whom he loved nonetheless, he had the appointment to warn them of judgment when very few of them would listen. God did not allow him to marry or have a family in a culture that almost obsessively esteemed that, and frequently he was in peril for his life from his enraged hearers. He had to endure all the horrors of the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem, where food ran out and mothers were eating their children, and then he saw the city he loved burned to the ground, which prompted the Book of Lamentations. We last see him carried against his will to Egypt by people who still despise him. (Why they made him come with them I don’t know- maybe they were cynically trying to use him as a human shield in case God fulfilled His threats of judgment on those who went to Egypt against his orders).

It’s hard to see any good in this for Jeremiah. Certainly he had trouble seeing it since at one point he was calling down God’s curse on the person who didn’t abort him when he was born. You can still see some good in it, though. God gave a vivid picture through Jeremiah’s sermons of things He hates so we can avoid them, and He also gave prophecies about the Messiah that the Gospel writers use to prove He is Jesus. Like Heman, Jeremiah is blissfully happy now.

God has promised to wipe away all His people’s tears. Whatever you haven’t been spared in this life, He’ll repay double in the life to come.