The Woking Dead

 On a bright sunny day, a shadowy creature named "Decoy," clothed in daylight enters a church building to meet his fellow damned spirits to discuss the best means of keeping as many people among the condemned as possible. He approaches a stunningly beautiful creature of light sitting upon a throne at the head of the sanctuary. 

Satan: Welcome, Decoy. I have summoned you here because I have devised a plan to make the Western church my servant.

Decoy: How so, my lord? Will you convince them of another Christ?

Satan: Some, yes but many will not be so convinced.

Decoy: Will you convince them of another gospel then?

Satan: Certainly some but the many will not buy that either.

Decoy: Will you tell them the Bible is unreliable?

Satan: Absolutely but the many will still trust in it.

Decoy: Then how will you subject the majority of the Western Church to your will and keep so many of the souls bound for hell? 

Satan: I will drown out the gospel as one dilutes a glass of wine with a keg of water so that the gospel is a mere echo heard faintly only by those who already know it. 

Decoy: How will you do this, my lord?

Satan: I will send you to convince the church, not that another Christ is true or another gospel is the right one or that the Bible is not trustworthy (I have others for that job) but that other concerns are so important that they should take up the majority of the messages spoken by Christians in the pulpit, in their books, their blogs, their social media posts, their conversations. 

Decoy: But, my lord, surely they will not replace the gospel with these.

Satan: You must convince them that they are "gospel issues" so that they make little distinction between the gospel and social justice, political campaigns, and all of the other culture wars with which I have stirred up the pagans who belong to me. In this way, they will be convinced that they are preaching the gospel even while it is barely heard in a sea of temporal concerns that are being linked in some way to Christ, the gospel, and biblical teaching.

Decoy: But what if they make a utopia upon the earth by achieving the purest form of equality with their perfect candidates? Can we tolerate such an ordering of the world when we desire chaos instead?

Satan: We are no fools if we trade the salvation of minutes for the damnation of eternity. Let men have the peace and order for a moment as long as they remain sons of hell forever. Only the gospel could foil us and we will have made it unnoticed in the shade of the mighty oak of our "gospel issues." Now go and convince the church to preach the good that damns.

Decoy: Aye, my lord, it will be done. With it, I will give the dead a false resurrection.

Eternal Punishment in the LXX and NT

https://semitica.wordpress.com/2020/01/20/eternal-punishment-in-the-septuagint-and-new-testament-a-response-to-ilaria-ramelli-and-david-bentley-hart/ 

Posts on the Image of God

I was asked to make some of my posts on the image more accessible. Here they are below.

PART I 

PART II 

PART III

PART IV

Also see:

https://theologicalsushi.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-two-seeds-literary-connectivity-in.html 

https://theologicalsushi.blogspot.com/2020/01/are-image-and-likeness-of-god-two.html

https://theologicalsushi.blogspot.com/2019/10/why-imago-dei-is-not-characteristic-of.html 

https://theologicalsushi.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-imago-dei-in-reformed-confessions.html 

https://theologicalsushi.blogspot.com/2019/10/does-bible-consider-all-humanity.html

 

What Is a Bible?

What is a Bible? That may sound like strange question to you but the answer to that question is much more important than you might first realize. In fact, how you answer the question is a good predictor of whether you will be influenced by secular arguments against the inerrancy of the Bible.

To many people, a Bible is an object, a volume of multiple books with words that cannot be altered. Yet, it is clear that this is not what a Bible is. The people of Israel had a Bible when all they had was the Law of Moses. Likewise, we see that the words of various books can change. There is a longer and shorter form of Jeremiah. Then there is the question of what manuscript tradition of both the Old and New Testament we are talking about. Does the text of 1QIsa or 1QIsab contain the accurate version of Isaiah? Is it the longer or shorter ending of Mark that transmits the original autograph correctly? Are any of the translations Bibles? The Samaritan Pentateuch? The LXX? The Syriac? The Vulgate? The KJV? The NASB?

All of these concerns are irrelevant, however, if we understand that a Bible is any document, written or digital, that inerrantly relates the divinely revealed religion of God. By “inerrantly” I mean that it does not teach any error in what it seeks to convey. Hence, it really does not matter whether one has the LXX and does not know of the various Hebrew traditions. It really does not matter whether one believes the shorter ending of Mark versus the longer ending. It does not matter whether one has the shorter version of Jeremiah versus the longer version. What variation of words, word order, length of text, etc. has no bearing upon whether one has an inerrant Bible. Likewise, since word variation is irrelevant, any translation that inerrantly teaches the divinely revealed religion of God is a Bible. The LXX, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Qumran manuscripts, the Leningrad Codex, the “Alexandrian” traditions, the Byzantine traditions, the eclectic texts of Stephanus or Erasmus or Wescott and Hort or UBS or NA, electronic Bibles are all Bibles because they all inerrantly teach the same divinely revealed religion of God.

None of them teach a different religion. By “religion” I mean a different theology and ethics or a different history of redemption. They all teach the same religion. It may be taught in a different order or with different words or in different places but they all teach the same religion nonetheless.

I think this is important to understand when people hear the apologists of the Enlightenment like Bart Ehrman. God has preserved the religion that He wanted humans to understand in order to believe and follow Him; and the amazing thing is that he has done it, not by preserving some single golden tablet that can have no variation in it, but rather by multiplying its diversity in numerous textual traditions, canons, and translations, all of which agree with one another about the central message of what God has done to save humanity, the theology the people of God need to believe, and the ethics they need to follow.

So what is a Bible? It is the Word of God to man, testifying to him of what God has done for him and how he must respond to God in light of it. In that regard, all of these quibbles over who has the correct Bible are nonsensical.

Tim Keller's Abortion Theory Applied to Jews in Nazi Germany

Let's imagine that the arguments often made by left-leaning evangelicals who want to vote for pro-abortion candidates was applied to something other than the killing of babies. Instead, let's imagine it was applied to Jews in Nazi Germany. Let's say you have the option to vote for Nazis who want to push the killing of Jews forward or German candidates who are a mixed bag of apathetic to anti-Final Solution policy makers. 

In comes a pastor arguing that maybe the best way to cut down on the killing of Jews is actually by voting for the Nazis. After all, the Nazis have a plan to get people out of poverty, and poverty is the number 1 reason so many people are against the Jews. The Jews were blamed by many Germans for the economic depression of Germany. Maybe, as time goes on, and the Nazi economic policies lift the average German out of poverty, less and less Jews will be executed because hostilities will decrease. Maybe the road to what the Christians want, i.e., less unjust killing of the innocent, is the one that votes for Nazis instead of against them.

Now, let me say that this type of argument can only be made by someone who thinks manipulation via appeasement of the depraved is the means through which justice must be established. The question becomes whether the Bible supports this pastor's methods. In fact, it does not.

The Bible supports the absolute opposition of any unjust position. It explicitly decries any spilling of innocent blood as murder. It does not bargain with murderers. It does not appease people so that they are less murderous. It does not install them in office because they pass out free candy to the people who would otherwise murder the innocent. That is because the goal is not to have less murders. The goal is to exalt God in the midst of murderers, call them to repentance and punish them. 

The real problem with these types of arguments is that they would never be made about Nazis and Jews. That's because Jews are considered real people. The reason why Keller can argue that candidates who are going to fund and push for the availability of killing babies are viable candidates Christians can vote for is because, despite what leftist evangelicals often claim, they don't really see babies as people. 

This is why they get really upset when children are separated from their parents at the border but wouldn't frankly bat an eye if those same children had been executed in an abortion clinic a few years before. How about making an argument that we should vote for the Klan in order to cause these racists to feel less disenfranchised and maybe we'll get rid of their racism that way? How about arguing that we should install more pedophile priests into ministry because it's better to have them there distracted by ministry than out on the street picking up many more children if they had nothing better to do?

This is not how the Bible has us deal with evil. Evil is denounced by God's people. The evil men are removed from among us. Repentance and the gospel are preached to remove it permanently. 

So how does this relate to an election when you have two parties that are not necessarily Christian? You would vote for the party that will do less evil and allow more good to be done by the Church. You would vote against whatever party was killing less of the innocent and might even seek to eventually abolish the practice. Most of all, you would preach the gospel and call all to repentance and faith in Jesus Christ, the One true King, since evil can only be permanently removed by Him.

In essence, this is an argument that I addressed with my very first post on this blog. The appeasement of evil in order to suppress evil only increases it. https://theologicalsushi.blogspot.com/2011/08/tale-of-two-arguments.html

Divorce and Remarriage Series

 Divorce and Remarriage: History and Methodology

Divorce and Remarriage, Part 2: Overview of the NT Teaching

Divorce and Remarriage, Part 3: The Meaning of Porneia

Divorce and Remarriage, Part 4: 1 Corinthians 7

Divorce and Remarriage, Part 5: The OT Texts

Divorce and Remarriage, Part 6: Where to Go from Here