On ignorance

Hodge's word's struck me.
There are different kinds of ignorance. 

1. There is the ignorance of the idiot, which is blank vacuity.  In him the statement of a proposition awakens no mental action whatsoever.
2. There is the ignorance of a blind man, of color.  He does not know what color is; but he knows there is something which answers to that word and which produces a certain effect on the eyes of those who see.
3. There is the ignorance under which the mind labors when it can prove contradictory propositions concerning the same object, as that the same figure is both square and round.
4. There is the ignorance of the imperfect knowledge.

Animals possess the first. To them the concept of God is beyond understanding. The atheist holds the third type, God is like a square circle to them, they are first unwilling, then unable to grasp His nature.
The Christian as a fallen creature moves us into state two, being that we are a ruin but we have within us the inherent knowledge of God, because we have a knowledge of ourselves. We can draw a straight line out and see that if we are moral, personal, intelligent, then God must be all those things to a greater degree. It's imperfect, but it's not wrong.

Four however is the interesting one, because that is in essence the definition of a human- a finite, limited, dependent creature, because if we were not ignorant, and we did have perfect knowledge then we would be God.
Derek over at Theoparadox has made this his theme, his lens that he celebrates as the foundation of his knowledge.  For myself, I wouldn't pick it (well obviously), but reading Hodge I think I understand now what he meant with it. He didn't mean that difficult things resolve as a paradox to us, he meant that as Christians we live in type four knowledge, and to deny that there is a limit to our knowledge is to demand that we are God.  It's not a denial of knowledge, it's a confession of reality, it's like saying water is wet or plants need sunlight to grow.
But when the perfect comes, then we shall know Him as He is.

Proverbs always has the response

Today I see this in my inbox:
From: Tonya
Subject: My husband just left.
I didn't bother opening it up, it's obviously a SPAM advertisement for some site I don't want to visit from someone I don't know. What struck me upon reading it is how this is temptation is so clearly an invitation to hell. Behold the identical temptation:
 Proverbs 7:19-20,18- "For my husband is not at home; he has gone on a long journey; he took a bag of money with him; at full moon he will come home." "Come, let us take our fill of love till morning; let us delight ourselves with love."

Solomon's answer to it is thus: "And now, O sons, listen to me,and be attentive to the words of my mouth. Let not your heart turn aside to her ways; do not stray into her paths, for many a victim has she laid low, and all her slain are a mighty throng. Her house is the way to Sheol, going down to the chambers of death"

Proverbs is sobering medicine for the believer to keep them from the paths of sin. And it's remarkable how exactly relevant it is in the small things of life.

Israel, churches, during the judges

There is a tremendously sad statement that happens in the judges and really in nowhere else, "In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes." Judges 17:26, 21:25

As I thought about this it became clear to me that because there was no king everyone decided what was best for themselves. There was no standard, no meaningful enforcement or national standard, so as a consequence everyone was their own king. Now, it wasn't really that there was no ruler, it was just that the mob ruled, or the local strong man ruled, typically by oppression and cruelty.

This is life in the Church of Christ. Everyone believes what is right in their own eyes.

When Campbell and Stone picked up anchor and launched away from the traditional creed based denominations they intended to forge the bonds of unity between presbyterians and baptists, "let's just focus on what we have in common." But pretty soon, with no guardrails or moor to tether their theology to, they began to drift, with the final result being that creeds and confessions became their enemy.
Everyone believes what is right in their own eyes. Some are open theists, others Pelagian, Liberal, or outright heretical as it strikes their fancy. Most speak nothing of the Spirit and few understand the cross other than it has the power to save those who believe. They speak of the Bible as fascinating stories with important moral lessons, but rarely of the inerrant word of God breathed out and handed down without error by the Apostles.

And so, because there is no standard of confession to train young minds to, they learn that everyone is for himself. The story will end the same way it did with Israel.  In the beginning they did what was right in their own eyes and in the end the best were deported to safety while the rest were obliterated. The Lord will save the Lots among His faithful and take away His lamp-stand from among the rest. Without them even being aware of it. This is a call to prayer.

Explination, or Reference?

Matthew 13:32- "Another parable put He forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof."

I've heard a number of commentaries saying that the birds of the air are emissaries of Satan because in the parable of the sower they come and take away the seed of the gospel. Therefore in this parable the meaning is that the birds are the invaders from Satan, making their home in the visible church.
I think this is a terrible interpretation.

It seems to me that Jesus is giving a reference to Ezekiel 17:22-24- "Thus says the Lord GOD: "I myself will take a sprig from the lofty top of the cedar and will set it out. I will break off from the topmost of its young twigs a tender one, and I myself will plant it on a high and lofty mountain.On the mountain height of Israel will I plant it, that it may bear branches and produce fruit and become a noble cedar. And under it will dwell every kind of bird; in the shade of its branches birds of every sort will nest. And all the trees of the field shall know that I am the LORD; I bring low the high tree, and make high the low tree, dry up the green tree, and make the dry tree flourish. I am the LORD; I have spoken, and I will do it." 

The question then, is Jesus making a reference to the OT passage which would then flesh out His idea more fully, namely that He has taken the weak and smallest thing and made it to grow and thrive, or is His point to explain this tender gardening reference as a message of the power of the Gospel?
I don't know, but it seems that these are two verses that are very very similar and belong together.

Calvinism vs Arminianism teaching

This Sunday I went to a teacher training event at our church (it's required if you want to teach class, or continue teaching classes) and it was taught by a local high school chemistry teacher, who is some high up guy in the Elk Grove unified School District teacher training program.
He taught us the importance of learning by groups, stressed how needless and harmful lecturing is to students, and emphasized how the best thing is to empower your hearers to become 'self-feeders.' 

The problem I quickly ran into is that last time I taught the whole class to a man demanded that I cast down group work and continue to lecture them. They wanted to know who Christ was, and what He has done, and they wanted me to show Him to them in the pages of Scripture where they may have missed it themselves.

I talked with our pastor who is over teaching about how this, how they wanted me to lecture, that they wanted to know about Christ, and he responded by telling me that because they are Calvinists they are closed minded and want their egos stroked. The reason they want lectures is because they want me to tell them what they want to hear, but for their own good I should ignore them and make them do group work.

It became clear to  me then that this is a nearly universal rule that in teaching Calvinists lecture, and Arminians empower.  A Calvinist naturally begins from the lowest point, not too proud to beg for help like the Ethiopian eunuch, while the Arminian starts from the high point, already knowing and having everything they need, so no lecture is required. And if it be admitted that this viewpoint is right then its consequences are devastating, for there is really no point to preaching is there? The congregation needs to break into small group and go through the material in order to learn, the last thing they want is a Biblical exposition. Or they may be better served with a play, or a funny skit, a coloring book, or maybe, well, anything, because people don't learn from lecturing. They learn from doing.
Why not close the doors and just to mission work?

My conscience won't let me give them group work and give up exposition. My conscious prompts me to feed them when they ask me- woe to me if I don't! I must raise up Christ, I must show Him in His book and make much of Him and His work. I suspect that they are going to take away my teaching position for ignoring their mandate to give up lectures and only do group work.
Let Christ do what seems best to Him. He has made me a Calvinist.

Joab, man of blood

At 2 Samuel 19 Joab had already murdered Abner, an honorable and decent man during peacetime, 2 Samuel 3:26-27, so we know that he wasn't a very nice man. David then had to navigate the real world politics of having an evil man of blood who was interested in his own personal position of power working for him, and someone he couldn't depose. Knowing his bloodthirsty character David even used him to kill the twice honorable Uriah the Hittite.
Joab then beings to plot against David through his son Absalom, hedging his bets as it were since Absalom was his kind of king (2 Samuel 14) but Absalom decided against him (2 Samuel 17:25), forcing Joab to support David in order to keep his position during the rebellion which he helped stir up.
It is not surprising then to read the following:
2 Samuel 19:5,7- "Then Joab came into the house to the king and said, "You have today covered with shame the faces of all your servants, who have this day saved your life and the lives of your sons and your daughters and the lives of your wives and your concubines...Now therefore arise, go out and speak kindly to your servants, for I swear by the LORD, if you do not go, not a man will stay with you this night, and this will be worse for you than all the evil that has come upon you from your youth until now."
This isn't a prophecy of what may happen, this is a statement of borderline insurrection. Translation: "If you don't celebrate the death of that rebellious son if yours I'm going to take the army from you, leaving you without a kingdom. Absalom rebelled against you and had some success, I guarantee that if you don't obey me I will succeed in overthrowing your life."

In light of this David has had enough, Joab has to go. He appoints Amasa, Absaloms general to lead his forces from now on (2 Samuel 20:4) to show those who followed his son he didn't hold a grudge against them, and to remove the threat to his person.
Predictably Joab kills Amasa in cold blood, (2 Samuel 20:9-10) usurps his title back (2 Samuel 20:11).
In fact, his conscious was so seared, that he thought nothing of Amasa laying on the road in a pool of his own blood dying, but his own soldiers were not happy about this (2 Samuel 20:12).

Even with all this, Joab may have had a decent remainder of his life, but he chose to defy David and support the rebellion of Adonijah against Solomon, for which Solomon finally put him to death for treason. (1 Kings 2:28).
And the record of the man of blood came to an end, as do all men who love evil and defy goodness.

Arminians respond to Calvinism

Just yesterday at work I came upon this site, which is apparently set up by an Arminian SBC church member. 
The short question he has taken up to answer is this: God could have created all men with free moral agency and ordained it that they never have sinned because He is sovereign? (Think men being like the elect angels.) Therefore God wanted men to be sinners. As I see it, there are only three ways to answer the mail on this question:
1. God wants to save but can't.
2. God doesn't want to save everyone for another reason
3. God in reality saves everyone and nobody perishes - love wins.

Take a look at this wonderful Arminian response:

God is not an unwilling observer but a willing participant. God, according to Arminianism, doesn’t just stand there and watch, with the casual indifference of the priest and Levite according to Luke 10:30-37... God is willing to rescue. But if someone should be unwilling to call upon Him, and perish, then that is their own fault, and something for which they may have increased condemnation. So how does God escape responsibility in this scenario? Because God is willing to intervene. But in Shelton’s analogy, the person outside the burning building is unwilling.

Ah, the light breaks through the clouds! God desperately wants to save, but is really only powerless. He stands on the corner watching the house burn down, wanting to save, but being totally unable to.
It's nice to have a god who in every sense of the word wills the salvation of all men, until you need to pray to that god to save you and find out he can't. Either God is sovereign, in which case all that to say is He's God, or He is not and is a nice safe idol we can prostrate ourselves before.
And that response breaks the first commandment.

Evil is.... figs

You often hear that evil is missing the mark, like an arrow off the bulls-eye, or a kind of rebellious lawlessness, but I perfer the concept given to me by C.S. Lewis from his book Out of the Silent Plant. The protagonist Ransom attempts to learn the language of Old Solar and inquire about the Martian culture, but one of the things he can't get out of them is the word for evil, for it simply has not entered into their mind; the nearest thing he can do is the word bent to describe our world.
I've always liked that, because it speaks to the wrongness of evil, the unnaturalness of it. It paints a rather vivid word picture of a lead pipe turned into an unusable shape- something that is no longer what it was meant to be.

But better than this, I found I like the word-picture of evil given to me in the King James translation of Jeremiah 24:1-3. 
First, the English Standard- "After Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon had carried away captive Jeconiah the son of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, and the officials of Judah with the craftsmen and smiths from Jerusalem and had brought them to Babylon, the LORD showed me: behold, two baskets of figs set before the temple of the LORD! One basket had very good figs, like first-ripe figs, and the other basket had very bad figs which could not be eaten due to rottenness. Then the LORD said to me, "What do you see, Jeremiah?" And I said, "Figs, the good figs, very good; and the bad figs, very bad, which cannot be eaten due to rottenness."

Now, the King James (starting at verse two) which gives a fresh perspective (becomes it comes at us from an older, more unfamiliar culture) "One basket [had] very good figs, [even] like the figs [that are] first ripe: and the other basket [had] very naughty figs, which could not be eaten, they were so bad. Then said the LORD unto me, What seest thou, Jeremiah? And I said, Figs; the good figs, very good; and the evil, very evil, that cannot be eaten, they are so evil."

Rottenness is such a perfect synonym for evil.  It's an added quality, rottenness, polluting everything, destroying what was once wholesome and good, fit for consumption and health. It causes sickness to ingest and is good for nothing but to be thrown away.  It's contagious as well, put some rotten fruit next to some good fruit and wait, only a short time later both are ruined. And best of all, there is no better word for a criminal teenager than rotten. 

Matthew 13:10-15 and Calvinism

While on a facebook forum I responded to a hyper-Calvinist who asserted that God works to actively harden men's hearts with an offhand, almost throw-away comment that seemed to surprise David "The Darth Vader of Theology" Ponter, and I thought, if he hasn't considered it, perhaps I had better write it down. 
The verse in question is as follows:

Matthew 13:10-15- "Then the disciples came and said to him, "Why do you speak to them in parables?"And he answered them, "To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to the one who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance, but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. Indeed, in their case the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled that says: "'You will indeed hear but never understand, and you will indeed see but never perceive. For this people's heart has grown dull, and with their ears they can barely hear, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and turn, and I would heal them.'

The typical Calvinist reading here is that in an effort to keep them from salvation Jesus conceals His meaning in parables, for were He to make His meaning plain to them they would understand and then be saved, and of course Jesus doesn't want to save the reprobate. This I submit, is a terrible reading, does not fit with everything else about the nature of Jesus' earthly ministry, and is only mentioned because the reader has a prior commitment to supralapsarianism. Rather, I think the thrust of the text is on the hardness of their hearts.

His listeners have dull ears and don't desire salvation, therefore He speaks to them in parables so that they may go on deluding themselves. It's explicit: "This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand."
Matthew then records that this is the fulfillment spoken of from old: "You will indeed hear but never understand, and you will indeed see but never perceive." This isn't an act of condemnation ahead of time, it's a description of what will happen, of what they will choose to do when confronted with the Christ. It's not a curse, it's a foreseen choice of theirs.
How do we know that? The proof is in what comes next: "For this people's heart has grown dull, and with their ears they can barely hear, and their eyes they have closed." They have willfully closed their eyes, they have chosen to turn their back on Him.
So why then do they close their eyes and harden their hearts, and throw their wills against Gods? "Lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and turn, and I would heal them." For were they to see Him, they would have to submit to Him, accept His truth claims, admit they are not God, admit they are depraved creatures who have no righteousness to bring to the equation.  In short they must in humility crawl to Him for His imputed righteousness. This they can not stomach, so instead they close their eyes and make themselves willfully stupid.  Therefore He speaks to them in parables, because the last thing they want is to have Him show them kindness and save them, so He obliges them.

This is the same thing seen in John 12:37 - Though He had done so many signs before them, they still did not believe in Him" No matter how much Christ showed His goodness to them, they chose to hate Him, and they did not believe in Him.
38 "so that the word spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled: "Lord, who has believed what he heard from us, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?" 
In other words, by giving them every opportunity to accept Him, He proved that unless He regenerates hearts (the arm of the Lord being revealed) they will never accept Him.

John 12:39- "Therefore they could not believe. For again Isaiah said,"He has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart, lest they see with their eyes, and understand with their heart, and turn, and I would heal them." 
This is substantially similar to the Matthew account, except that the blinding is attributed now to God rather than them, but because the Matthew account says they have asked for this course of action we can no longer see this as a divine exercise of sovereignty apart from their consideration.  It is both God and men agreeing on a course of action, namely that He will give them the desires of their heart. All who ask, receive- they have asked for blindness, they will receive it.
The thrust of both of these passages are on the hardness of their hearts, rather than on the mission of Christ to destroy them. They, not He, are to blame.

Traffic lights and theology

Lately my daughter has become very interested in traffic lights, calling out the rules based on their color (Daddy it's red, stop!) but yellow always confuses her. "Daddy, it's yellow, stop." "Yellow can also mean speed up."
I can see the wheels turning in her mind while she is processing how it is that the yellow light can mean one thing and it's opposite at the same time, and it amuses me. But her work is instructive to me for what she doesn't do- she doesn't write a book about how the things are parallel lines that only meet in eternity, she doesn't declare it to be impossible to understand, she doesn't just quit. She thinks it out.
And I tell her that the rule is actually stop if you can, or hurry and get through the intersection, which means that when you are going fast or the road is wet you keep going as fast as you can, and if you are far from the light and you have breaking distance you come to a stop, even when it's yellow.
And maybe, just maybe, her thinking patterns are what we need a reminder of as adult theologians. The idea is not to compare and contrast two things we know to be true, the key thing to consider is how they can fit together.

Paul as the writer of the Bible

Matthew 23:13,15,23,25 "But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people's faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in...Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves... Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others...Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence."

So remember that when reading Acts 23:6 "Brothers, I am a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees"
 
Paul wrote 13 books of the New Testament: Romans, 1,2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1,2 Thessalonians, 1,2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon, and if you are of the old guard, Hebrews for 14,
because it's not enough that God choose the least and lowly, He also chooses the cursed and the self righteous. It's too light a thing to bring to Himself the socially downcast, He also brings to Himself the cursed Scribe and Pharisee as well.  And He uses them for great things too. If He was just the God who saves the homeless and the needy then He wouldn't be the God who saves the responsible and well off, and we could pigeonhole Him into a  small area, and relegate that away. But He's not. He loves the elder brother and the younger brother, He saves the people with great mental processing power and those who have little. He's God.