Josiah Concept Ministries

First, please help me locate the part of the New Testament that will make it clear to me that Leviticus, Numbers, and whatever other books to which this claim applies were invalidated by Jesus. I’m not saying you are wrong - I’m nowhere close to even starting the New Testament yet - I’d just like to know where I’ll find this part so I can be more careful about how I’m reading the Old Testament now. (source)

The Old Testament law is essentially divided into two basic categories.  Jewish Ceremonial Laws (which includes dietary laws) and General Moral Principles.  I would think that reading the law books, this division would be obvious to a reasonable person such as VJack.  In Romans and Galatians, Paul makes the purpose of the law clear: to teach us what sin is (Rom 3:19-31; Gal 3:10-14).  We are enslaved to sin (Eph 2:1-3).  But thanks to the grace of God that we enjoy through Christ, sin no longer has any dominion over us because Christ’s sacrifice freed us from the law (Rom 6:14).

Why do we still have the Bible?  My brother-in-law shared this in an e-mail to me, and I think it perfectly expresses what I’m trying to say:

It [the Bible] was written long ago, but it very much is valid in modern times. It is a timeless book of truths that is 100% correct. It should be our source for faith and understanding, but not the ONLY source. That is what prayer and thinking of Christ does for us. We are able to look past what the scripture says to the WHY. But without the initial scripture, we could never have anything to hold it accountable to. The Bible is the final authority. Period.

And if we are free of the letter of the law as my brother-in-law says (and Paul says in 2 Cor 3:6), then why not just live a life of sin?  We’re saved anyway, right?  We can find ways to argue that our sin is the “spirit” of the law, can’t we?  Well, the apostle Paul said it better than I could in Romans 6:1-14.  If we profess a life of righteousness by faith, we ought to live that life out rather than just talk about or think about.

I may have misjudged VJack from Atheist Revolution. I thought that his true motive behind reading the Bible from cover to cover was to poke fun at it. But it seems that the convicting power of the Holy Spirit may be at work in his heart, as he now seems to actually want to understand what he is reading with more clarity:

When confronted with scriptural evidence that there are many laws, clearly stated as such, for which the penalties are often banishment or death, which virtually no modern Christian even attempts to follow, one should expect a predictable Christian response. The wording will vary, but the response will be along the lines of how the Old Testament no longer applies because god’s covenant with Moses and his predecessors was replaced by Jesus and the New Testament.

Fair enough. I’ll ask two things of the Christian making this claim, and I’ll ask them not in a challenging manner but as a plea for assistance. (source)

I’ll answer his questions in a moment. But first, let’s understand why there are no more animal sacrifices.

First off, we have to understand that the wages of sin is death (Rom 6:23a). Calling death a “wage” implies that we earn it through our sins. All have sinned (Rom 3:23), so all have earned death by their sin. This means that every human being on this planet deserves to die because we all sin. Everyone.

With that in mind, is it so terrible that God demands the death penalty for some sins that we consider relatively minor? Of course not–it is all sin, which is paid for by death. “[W]ithout the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins” (Heb 9:22)–either our own blood or someone else’s. Up to this point, the blood of animals had been used to cleanse and purify us from our sins (Heb 9:13). Now, the precious blood of Christ purifies us (Heb 9:14).

Christ offered Himself to the Father, perfect and without blemish (Heb 9:14), as propitiation for our sins once for all (Heb 9:26b). Throughout the book of Hebrews, the author argues that the tabernacle and Tent of Meeting described in the Book of the Law is an imperfect copy of heaven (Heb 9:1-12). Jesus has entered into the real thing–heaven–and is seated at the right hand of the Father, making intersession for us in a way that no high priest ever could (Heb 1:3b, Heb 7:11-28).

The prophets predict an end to animal sacrifices. Malachi predicts that a new type of sacrifice will be offered:

For from the rising of the sun to its setting my name will be great among the nations, and in every place incense will be offered to my name, and a pure offering. For my name will be great among the nations, says the LORD of hosts. (1:11)

This is fulfilled by Christians living by the word of God, everyday and in every place:

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Rom 12:1-2)

Christ’s sacrifice perfects us. We no longer need animal blood to do so.

I will address VJack’s specific questions in my next post. Stay tuned.

TurretinFan has a great post on God’s wrath being understood side-by-side with His love rather than in opposition to it. This post fits well into my series on pain and atheists’ darkened understanding.  It lends some Reformed theology to my otherwise philosophical view.  I urge everyone to check it out if they have time. It’s short but profound.

While you’re over at TF’s site, you should read his rebuttals to objections on the limited atonement (the L in TULIP), as well as his definition here.  Nice theological reflections.  Real solid food (Heb 5:14).

My good friend Jeff Haws, as well as Rev. Dan from OutChurched and VJack from Atheist Revolution have posted on this little news item about Christians handling snakes. With this seemingly insignificant news item gathering a firestorm of attention from atheists, I thought it would be a good idea to address the issue from a Biblical perspective.

I consider myself a reasonable man of faith.  I believe in God’s Word as it espoused in the Bible.  I ascribe inerrancy only to the autographs–that is, the original manuscripts.  I believe that the Bible is written in clear, everyday language and doesn’t require a Master’s degree from seminary to interpret the myriad of passages within it.  This clear, everyday language must be considered for the use of literary devices–such as similies, metaphors, hyperbole, and others–as well as for context.

Part of context would be understanding that “you” in a direct quotation would apply in a general sense only to those people present when the quotation was uttered.

As a reasonable man of faith, I believe that if I were to handle a poisonous snake, that it would bite me, and without proper medical attention, I would die.  No big surprise there.  I believe that despite this promise in the Bible:

Go everywhere in the world, and tell the Good News to everyone. Anyone who believes and is baptized will be saved, but anyone who does not believe will be punished. And those who believe will be able to do these things as proof: They will use my name to force out demons. They will speak in new languages. They will pick up snakes and drink poison without being hurt. They will touch the sick, and the sick will be healed.  (Mk 16:15-18, emphasis added)

Earlier I spoke of context.  In context, Jesus said this to the eleven apostles (v. 14).  He did not give this statement as a general instruction to all of His followers.  That means that these are signs and wonders that accompany apostles.

Elsewhere, I’ve defended this passage by saying that promises made to the apostles are fulfilled by the church.  The church is guided by the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit disseminates spiritual gifts to people as He sees fit (1 Cor 12:11).  This means that gifts such as those are given to the church, not to individuals.  Among the gifts mentioned by the Apostle Paul in the the entire passage from Corinthians 12 (vv. 7-11), snake charming and poison drinking are conspicous by absence.

I’m not going back on that stance.  But, I am going back on one thing: Mark 16:9-20 is not found in the early Greek MSS.  That means that this promise was likely not part of the autograph–which means that I cannot wholeheartedly ascribe inerrancy to it.

All said, I too can marvel with my atheist friends at the sheer stupidity of someone who would handle a poisonous snake as part of a worship service.  Even if I believed that the signs and wonders that accompanied apostles would be apportioned by the Holy Spirit to every Christian and was able to ascribe inerrancy to Mark 16:9-20, I still wouldn’t be surprised if this happened.  Ultimately, we should follow Jesus’ example and not test God (Mat 4:1-11; cf. Deut 6:16).

The Bible says this about nonbelievers:

They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. (Eph 4:1

It is my sincere belief that this is a willful darkening of their own understanding.  This is ignorance by choice.  They aren’t trying to understand the Bible in its social context.  Instead, they are looking for reasons not to believe in it.

In this post from the Penitent Atheist, this ignorance becomes obvious:

As we all know, Jesus tells us to love our enemies and, if someone should strike us in the face, he commands that we invite that person to have a go at the other side. Now, as wonderful as this idea sounds in theory, most sane people understand that in practice this approach would be highly dubious. In fact, even committed Christians consider these commands to be so impractical that they willfully ignore and disobey them.

. . . Christians teach their children to defend themselves because they understand that a child who acted as Jesus commands would come home bloody and without lunch money, and even worse, without dignity. But let’s set aside the children and just talk about us adults. Jesus does not even allow us to hold up our hands in defense; we must open ourselves and invite second and third attacks. Who does that?

The PA isn’t the first person to have this type of an objection.  J.P. Holding had to answer a similar objection from the book Atheism: The Case Against God by George Smith.  This is what Holding has to say:

The “slap on the cheek” is a type of personal insult, so that the command to turn the other cheek is essentially a command not to start trading insults, but take the higher ground and turn away from the exchange. It is not, as many Skeptics have supposed, a license to allow yourself to get beat up. (source)

The PA is taking things to the height of illogic.  He starts with a complete misunderstanding of what the Bible is actually teaching.  My advice to him would be to try to learn what a problem teaching means before he posts something that looks completely ridiculous on his blog.

The problem of pain–existence of suffering in a world allegedly controlled by a benevolent and all-powerful God–is the number one issue that seems to drive atheists away from Christianity.  I don’t think that this is as big a problem as many make it out to be.  I think that this is as big a problem as you want it to be.

God’s love is only properly understood side-by-side with His wrath, not in opposition to it.  Like any father, He only wants what is best for His children.  This means that, unfortunately, discipline is often necessary.

God has disciplined us specifically in the Bible (Gen 3:14-19, for example).  But more often than not, I think that, like any good father, He simply allows us to stumble and fall on our own.  This means that we create many of the problems in this world ourselves.

God, benevolent though He is, should not be obligated to clean up our messes.  We create most of the problems on this little blue dot, and we should accept that responsibility and clean them up–without expecting God to snap His fingers and make it all better.

However, there must be a reason why God allows us to suffer at times.  I propose that He lets us suffer for two main reasons.  First, He does it to teach us something.  Second, He does it because that is what is best for us.

I can speak as a father now, and use my daughter Ashleigh to illustrate my point.

Ashleigh still has trouble controlling her muscles.  I’ve obviously been controlling my muscles for many, many years now; so I find it amazing that this little girl actually has to learn how to do that from scratch.  She’s not skillful in the least, yet.  Sometimes, she scratches her eyes.  She’s never put a fingernail directly into her eye, but I imagine that someday she will.

My point is that I can try to take her hand away from her eye as much as I want to.  I can warn her to be careful, but at one month old that isn’t going to make a whole lot of impact.  Nope, painful as it may be, the best way is to actually let her scratch her eye.  She will learn the lesson much faster than if I try to save her from it once too often.

Ashleigh is very squirmy.  She flails about a lot.  She hates being tied down for any length of time, and was been like this even in utero.  She was known to kick monitors away when the doctors would try to perform tests on her.

Given this, you can imagine that she hates to be swaddled.  Sometimes, however, swaddling is the only way to calm her down or even to keep her warm with this cold November weather.  As much as she struggles against it, I know what is best for her–and sometimes swaddling is just what she needs.

The second example makes a great explanation for the problem of pain.  Sometimes, we confuse our needs with our wants.  God knows exactly what we need, and I think that an honest person who looks back at a trial in his life will decide that he needed that to happen at that moment.  I know that the first year of marriage for me was rough, but I believe that it was just what Jody and I needed to become stronger as a couple.

Maybe someone who is reading this went through a trial for which there is no explanation.  He didn’t seem to need it to happen.  He didn’t learn anything.  Does this invalidate my theory?  I don’t think so.  Perhaps the reason has yet to be revealed.  I’m not taking the Christian stance that atheists hate so much here; these trials are to teach us something here.  That something may be a long way down the road.

Whatever your trial, remember the words of James, brother of our Lord: “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness” (Jms 1:2-3).

I know that I have promised this and promised this. I’m sorry it has taken so long. New parents and anyone who has suffered depression in their lives will totally understand. I’m sure that many of you have doubted that it would ever arrive. But here it is, in PDF format. I hope that it was worth the wait. Enjoy!

The Penitent Atheist has an interesting post about the watchmaker argument.  For those unfamiliar with the argument, I’ll briefly summarize it.

Imagine finding a wristwatch.  Your first thought upon picking up this wondrous timepiece is not, “Gosh, I’m so glad that all of these pieces randomly came together to form a watch!”  You know, upon finding something complex like a watch, that it must have had a designer.  So the same goes with ecology: seeing nature and how it works together so well, one should infer a designer.  Blind forces couldn’t have constructed a watch anymore than random chance could have constructed our planet and built its ecology.

The Penitent Atheist claims that he destroys the argument in his post.  But he doesn’t.

Complexity evolves, he says.  Everything starts out simple, then gradually evolves complexity.  Nature orders herself, building gradual layers of complexity.  The good changes are kept through natural selection, while bad changes eventually die off.

Our penitent friend is very correct in his assertions.  There is an intelligence behind nature, how she orders herself by selecting appropriate changes to survive and eliminating the rest.  With this line of thinking, the watchmaker argument is rather absurd.  Design is not necessary–evolution can take care of this, giving the appearance of design.

It is a gaping hole in the watchmaker argument.

However, there is a gaping hole in the Penitent Atheist’s argument, too.  Evolution cannot be disputed.  It is as much a fact of life as rain.  The problem lies with origins–a subject that evolution never purports to explain.  Evolution is a fact of life, but it requires life in the first place.

Last I knew, something cannot come from nothing.  Sorry, Penitent Atheist–try again.

DA, as he is affectionately known to my fellow “anti-Catholic” apologists James Swan and James White, has now made two posts, here and here, in reference to this one post from me.

Two posts for the price of one?  Shucks, I don’t know what to say.  This post has quelled my fears about this little item, cited on Swan’s blog:

To the extent that I deal with anti-Catholics at all, I’ll stick to at least influential ones like James White. He affects a lot of people, and so, needs to be countered and refuted. But Swan is a lightweight in the anti-Catholic apologetic world. Let him write posts like this, then. I have better things to do than to waste my time reading them, let alone responding.

I was worried that DA wouldn’t respond to me anymore, even once I post my reply to the Vicar of Christ fiasco from the previous week.  Since, after all, if James Swan is a lightweight, then I must be sub-atomic-particle-weight.

But, I see that my mini-feud with Mr. Armstrong is still alive and well.  Perhaps it is because I’m keeping it more friendly and less drenched with sarcasm than Swan is?  Friendly theological debate is far more edifying and both parties stand to benefit from the interchange.  After all, I’ve learned about perichoresis from this debate and that has placed me in greater awe of God than I already was.  Concepts like perichoresis make me all that much more devoted to Him, solidify my trust in the gospel, and make me all the more willing to proclaim my faith to others.  Perichoresis shows how infinite God really is.

The fact that He is contained by nothing, but in fact contains everything, just leaves me in perfect wonder.  And I suppose I have Mr. Armstrong to thank for starting me on this journey, because if I had never happened upon the information in his blog, I would never have researched it to provide a proper response to his other musings.

I hope that I have, or will, benefit him in some small way as well.

Although this lawsuit is filed with a specific political agenda in mind, it is interesting for its theological considerations as well.

I thought that I’d take a moment to ruminate on the possibility of actually suing God and winning. The reason is that, by necessity, I have been studying the philosophical aspects of the Trinity in order to write a much more serious article in response to Dave Armstrong than this humorous and philosophically entertaining one. The primary concept that I’ve been looking into is perichoresis–the inherent coexistence of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and their indwelling within the elect. It is this indwelling that creates God’s omnipresence. This lawsuit states that, since God is omnipresent, He is therefore present in Douglas county (which is the venue of the suit).

That is very true. God created the universe, so He is not contained by it. In fact, the universe is contained within Him, and it is in Him that the universe takes its identity and in Him that the universe finds its being. He is the only reality, our reality is only at His will and pleasure. As a result, to borrow a simpler way of putting it from my brother-in-law Nate, “God is the only reality, and we are ‘less real’ by comparison.” Truly, we can only define ourselves in relation to Him.

This is God’s Sovereignty. The Bible makes it clear that we derive everything from Him (Gen 1:26): our identity, our dominion of land and animals, our likenesses. Everything was His first, and He gifted some of it to us. As I’ve often said, “We owe Him everything; He owes us nothing.”

So, if He is the perfection that we aspire to become but cannot attain, if He is the only way by which we can define ourselves and the Ultimate Cause of Everything, how are we able to properly obtain an injunction against that which is His divine work? More importantly, how could this injunction possibly be enforced?

We are gifted with a limited sovereignty over God’s creation–He gifted that to us. He defined the relationship we have to the rest of the earth, and we use His Ultimate Sovereignty as the model for the limited sovereignty He gave us. The point is that He is the One who defines these rules–in fact, our laws are only a model of the divine laws He gave us in His word, the Bible. We don’t just exist because of Him, the way we live is defined in relation to Him.

He shouldn’t be subject to our laws or even our ideals of Him. Doing so is trying to contain Him. But we don’t contain God, He contains us while penetrating and surrounding us–that is the essence of perichoresis (which, according to Wikipedia, is Greek for “envelope”). This model of creation is derived from the Trinity itself: each member of the Trinity surrounds, penetrates, and contains each other member. All are God, and God is all. But each has a unique ministry that the others are present and take active roles in as a consequence and extension of their identity as a Trinity. This is the same way creation is expressed: God is in and through all of it as a consequence of His identity as God, the creator, container, and sustainer of this all.

It is as beautiful as it is mysterious, and it gives me a greater sense of wonder as I worship God, my Creator (Father), my Savior (Son), and my Helper and Comforter (Holy Spirit).