In Exodus 23:20-21 God says to Moses and the Israelites:
Behold, I am going to send an angel before you to guard you along the way and to bring you into the place which I have prepared. Be on your guard before him and obey his voice; do not be rebellious toward him, for he will not pardon your transgression, since My name is in him.
??
When did this happen?
Abraham had two children, Isaac and Ishmael. Ishmael was first-born, but the line of Israel came through Isaac. Then Isaac had Esau and Jacob. Esau was first-born, but gave away his birthright and the line came through Jacob. The Jacob had a whole bunch of sons, but the one God used for his purposes was Joseph, nearly the last of the twelve.
Why this emphasis on the first-born not being the important one?
I don’t think it will do to say, “There is no significance. It just happened that way historically.” Old Testament Jewish readers, at least, would have expected the pattern to mean something important to their identity as a nation chosen by God.
Does it emphasize that being the chosen people is up to God rather than man? (Compare Romans 9:11). Or that God is more concerned with a person’s heart than his position? (Compare 1 Samuel 16:7). It can’t be straightforwardly Messianic: Jesus is definitely pictured by a first-born, not a second-born, son. (John 3:16, Colossians 1:15).
Hmmm …
Any suggestions?
In 1 Corinthians 2, Paul says this:
And when I came to you, brethren, … my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith would not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God. (1 Cor 1:1-5)
I’ve been thinking about what it means to persuade people of the truth. From my point of view, you persuade someone by a) understanding the truth, b) understanding their point of view, and c) building a bridge that will get them from where they are to where they need to be.
But is building a bridge that will get them from where they are to where they need to be the same as getting them to rest their faith on their own wisdom? Perhaps you need to just skip the bridge and say, “This is the truth!” even though you know they’ll never buy it because, from their point of view, there isn’t any reason to.
Proverbs speaks favorably of persuading people:
The wise in heart will be called understanding, And sweetness of speech increases persuasiveness. (Prov 16:21)
The heart of the wise instructs his mouth And adds persuasiveness to his lips.(Prov 16:23)
By forbearance a ruler may be persuaded, And a soft tongue breaks the bone. (Prov 25:15)
The tongue of the wise makes knowledge acceptable (Prov 15:2a)
Paul certainly persuaded people, too:
And some of them were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, along with a large number of the God-fearing Greeks and a number of the leading women. (Acts 17:4)
And he was reasoning in the synagogue every Sabbath and trying to persuade Jews and Greeks. (Acts 18:4)
And he entered the synagogue and continued speaking out boldly for three months, reasoning and persuading them about the kingdom of God. (Acts 19:8)
Agrippa replied to Paul, “ In a short time you will persuade me to become a Christian.” And Paul said, ”I would wish to God, that whether in a short or long time, not only you, but also all who hear me this day, might become such as I am, except for these chains.” (Acts 26:28-29)
Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade men, but we are made manifest to God; and I hope that we are made manifest also in your consciences. (2 Cor 5:11)
How does all this work out? I’m still not sure.
I love prayer meetings, sometimes. Other times I am bored and discouraged by them.
Recently I’ve had the chance to be a part of the first kind. It’s been refreshing spiritually. It’s hard to describe how greatly refreshing it’s been.
It’s hard for me to say what the difference is. I’ve tried to capture it in different ways at different times. Here are some of the things I’ve pointed to in the past as characteristic of a rich time of prayer:
These days, I’d characterize it as being a time
Whatever it is, I don’t do it well on my own; I really depend on other people being there with me, their faith encouraging and stimulating mine.
Regardless, I’m really enjoying this season in my prayer life. I’m treating it as a gift from God and not trying too much to find ways to make it happen.
Thoughts? What factors make corporate prayer times really good for you?
Quick question about Romans 8:31-37.
It says:
What then shall we say to these things?
If God is for us, who is against us?
He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?
Who will bring a charge against God’s elect?
God is the one who justifies; who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is He who died, yes, rather who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us.
Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
Just as it is written,
“FOR YOUR SAKE WE ARE BEING PUT TO DEATH ALL DAY LONG;
WE WERE CONSIDERED AS SHEEP TO BE SLAUGHTERED.”But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us.
Why is verse 37 in the past tense?
And how does it affect the meaning of the verse?
In a previous post I discussed this verse:
And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Philippians 4:7
I suggested that when Paul said the peace of God “surpasses all comprehension” (or “passeth understanding”, in KJV), he meant that it surpasses any peace we could attain by understanding.
The more I think about that, the more uneasy I am with it. The more natural interpretation is that there is more of the peace of God than we can understand.
So, suppose the phrase means that the amount of peace surpasses what we can comprehend. How can we understand the verse in that case?
How much peace?
At first glance, I don’t understand how there could be so much of something that I don’t understand how much there is. As a mathematician, I work a lot with the concept of infinity. I understand infinity. So even if God has infinite peace, I can still understand that he has infinite peace. How can God’s peace surpass infinity? How can it surpass understanding?
Maybe Paul means that God’s peace has no conceivable limit. Any limit I can think of, God’s peace exceeds (because infinite peace has no limit).
In fact, it occurs to me that perhaps Paul didn’t have the concept of infinity that we do. We’ve been influenced by the mathematics of infinity, which was developed just a couple of centuries ago. I don’t know if the cultures of Paul’s time even had our concept of infinity. For example, one of the Greek philosophers used the word apeiron, which may mean something like unbounded, but some translators think it means without definition instead. It seems there wasn’t a clear linguistic distinction between infinite and indefinite.
Even the New Testament phrase “forever and ever” doesn’t use a word for infinite: the literal rendering is “to the age of the ages”.
If Paul didn’t have the words or concepts for “infinite” he might have been trying to express what we mean by infinity by saying that the peace of God was without conceivable limits. The “beyond comprehension” may simply be a way of saying “infinite”.
(I can’t even say for sure that the peace of God is infinite. It seems philosophically right to assume that an infinite God would supply infinite peace, but there could be something technically incoherent about peace being infinite.)
A related possibility: maybe Paul means that even if we can understand how much there is of the peace of God in the abstract, we cannot really grasp the enormity of it. Thus the translation in the New American Standard: comprehension rather than mere understanding. We can know that there is an infinite amount of peace, but we cannot really comprehend it. I know what infinity is, but I can’t say I totally get it.
Maybe Paul means we don’t comprehend the peace of God in that we can’t grasp its full relevance for us. The peace of God is more than we can possibly know in experience. Even if the peace of God is supernatural as to its source, it manifests itself to us through our human emotions. (That means that the peace of God as we experience it is not infinite, because we aren’t capable of having infinite peace.)
In this case, Paul could mean that even what we can experience is beyond what we could ever have imagined ourselves experiencing, or he could mean that the actual peace of God, out there, available to us, is so abundant that no matter how much we need there is always enough. The peace of God that I feel is within my comprehension, but the peace of God that is available to me is beyond my comprehension.
Hyperbole?
Of course, another possibility is that the phrase is an example of hyperbole; that is, Paul is exaggerating to make a point. As a young man I rejected the idea that Scripture could have hyperbole in it, because it seemed to me that hyperbole was a kind of falsehood, and an inerrant Bible could not teach something false. But if hyperbole is a figure of speech then it is not intended to be taken literally and so when it is interpreted correctly, it doesn’t teach something false. When I realized that, I started keeping an eye out for legitimate examples of hyperbole in Scripture. I remember finding a fairly definite example in Song of Solomon somewhere (I forget which verse now). That settled it for me: the Bible can contain hyperbole.
The reason it took me a few years to figure that out, though, is because people around me kept taking verses that seemed to them unlikely to be true and calling them hyperbole to avoid having to take them seriously. That was bad interpretation. Good interpretation would ask whether the original writer / speaker meant it to be taken literally or not.
In that light, is Paul using hyperbole here? Does he mean us to understand that the peace of God is not really beyond comprehension, that there’s a just a lot of it? His statement here reminds me of the passage in Ephesians 3:20 where he says that God can do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think. Did he intend us not to take that one literally either? I can’t prove it, but it seems to me likely that Paul really meant what he said in these phrases. He was trying to make his claims as bold as possible because he meant them, not because he didn’t. He didn’t want his readers to water the phrases down. Doing so would be misinterpreting him.
So, personally, I doubt the verse is hyperbole. I’d be willing to change my mind if I learned that the phrase “surpasses all comprehension” was a common idiom in those days with a standard non-literal meaning.
Given all these possibilities, my current tentative interpretation is that Paul means that the peace of God is infinitely abundant so that there is always as much as we need, that this infinite abundance surpasses comprehension in the sense that we can conceive of no limit to it, and that our experience of that peace is finite because all our experiences are finite.
What do y’all think?
After I wrote this, one of the commenters (Bekah) reminded me of Philippians 4:7. In the King James, this verse refers to the “peace that passeth … understanding”, which sticks in my mind because of the old song, “I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart”. In the New American Standard version it says this:
And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:7)
The phrase “surpasses all comprehension” could simply be a way of saying “Wow! That’s a lot of peace!” It surpasses comprehension in that we can’t even understand how much there is.
There’s another possible meaning though, and that is that the peace of God goes beyond what mere comprehension can attain for us.
In other words, there are two ways to try to find peace. The first is to worry at my problems, to keep mulling them over until I see a clear solution. This is the attempt to get peace by comprehension. “If I can just figure everything out,” we think to ourselves, “then I can stop worrying about it.”
The second path is to bring things to God in prayer, and leave them there without necessarily seeing how the answers will come or even if they will come. Then God gives us peace anyway. It doesn’t have its source in how much we understand, but in how much we trust. We can’t figure our way into that kind of peace. It’s only possible by the gift of God.
Because this peace is something we cannot calculate our way into, it may seem to go beyond what is rational. The peace God gives us just doesn’t make sense to us. We can’t see why, given the current situation, we shouldn’t be more worried than we are. And so, in the circumstances, the peace of God really does surpass comprehension even in something like the original sense.
If this is true, then Philippians 4:6-7 implies there is more to dealing with worry than simply trusting God’s promises. It means that, although rehearsing the promises of God and being thankful for what He has done in the past may strengthen our faith and may give us some rational level of peace, there is also something else that happens when we pray. When we come into contact with God relationally, His Spirit strengthens our hearts and gives us a peace that goes beyond the practical comfort we get from believing He will keep His promises.
What distinguishes it from sorrow? From despair? From sulkiness? From resentment at life?
Is it spoken of in Scripture anywhere (maybe using another word)?
I mean, of course, faith in a trustworthy God, not just faith as a quality in itself.
1. On the one hand, we have Romans 4:2-8.
For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. For what does the Scripture say? “ABRAHAM BELIEVED GOD, AND IT WAS CREDITED TO HIM AS RIGHTEOUSNESS.” Now to the one who works, his wage is not credited as a favor, but as what is due. But to the one who does not work, but believes in Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is credited as righteousness, just as David also speaks of the blessing on the man to whom God credits righteousness apart from works: “BLESSED ARE THOSE WHOSE LAWLESS DEEDS HAVE BEEN FORGIVEN, AND WHOSE SINS HAVE BEEN COVERED. BLESSED IS THE MAN WHOSE SIN THE LORD WILL NOT TAKE INTO ACCOUNT.” (Rom 4:2-8)
Paul’s point is that if Abraham had been made right with God by his good works, it would have been something that was due him as a reward for having done the good works. Since it was by faith, which is not something we can gain any credit for, his being made right with God was simply favor, or a gift.
What keeps faith from being a work, in other words, is that it is not something we would expect any reward for.
2. On the other hand, we have Hebrews 11, in which faith is treated as a virtue that God rewards. It starts out by saying:
And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him. (Heb 11:6)
Here, faith is rewarded by God because He is pleased by it. The chapter continues with description after glowing description of the wonderful way in which various men and women in the Old Testament had faith in God.
All these died in faith, without receiving the promises, but having seen them and having welcomed them from a distance, and having confessed that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For those who say such things make it clear that they are seeking a country of their own … Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; for He has prepared a city for them. (Heb 11:13-16)
Here, God is not ashamed to be called their God because, apparently, they deserve it. They’ve proven their worth by their faith. At the end of the chapter, we see this:
And what more shall I say? For time will fail me if I tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets, who by faith conquered kingdoms, performed acts of righteousness, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions,quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, from weakness were made strong, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight. Women received back their dead by resurrection; and others were tortured, not accepting their release, so that they might obtain a better resurrection; and others experienced mockings and scourgings, yes, also chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were tempted, they were put to death with the sword; they went about in sheepskins, in goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, ill-treated (men of whom the world was not worthy), wandering in deserts and mountains and caves and holes in the groun And all these, having gained approval through their faith …
Again, Hebrews 11 seems to portray God’s approval of believers as a reward for the worthiness of their faith.
Note that in this chapter, faith seems to be something akin to courage; it seems to mean standing by what you believe to be true and acting consistently with it even when the circumstances or popular opinion make it more convenient to doubt it.
Now, you may say that Romans 4 and Hebrews 11 simply disagree, in that they mean different things by faith, or are making different points in different contexts to different audiences. If so, we still have to decide what we should mean by faith as Christians when we speak of it in general. Is there a way to synthesize the two passages? Practically speaking, should I think of faith as a Christian virtue that God approves of, or as a way of approaching God without relying on any virtue of my own? Should I distinguish two different kinds of faith, the Romans kind and the Hebrews kind?
The other odd thing about all this is that so far I can’t get anyone to understand the question. I’ve asked my wife, had this discussion (I think) with a couple of friends, and raised it in my Sunday school class. Rather than answering me or correcting me or wondering aloud with me, people just looked baffled and said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” The puzzle seems really clear to me. I can’t figure out why no one else gets it. Hopefully writing it up will clarify it.
Just a quick thought about something I will write up in a lot more detail later.
I’ve been reading lots of philosophical arguments about the existence of God this past year — some arguing that God does exist, others arguing that God does not exist.
All of them start from the assumption that we are unbiased, rational observers able to decide on the basis of the evidence we find whether or not God exists. But if Christianity is true, that isn’t really the case.
We have the God-given ability to reason logically (usually), but logical arguments are only as strong as their premises, and premises are only as reliable as the conceptual framework within which they are articulated, and those frameworks are anything but unbiased.
In 1 Cor 2 Paul said:
But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised. (1 Cor 2:14).
I think the word “appraised” there refers to the fact that our intuition about what is good and bad and right and wrong and real and fake and true and false is gravely distorted by the fall. We have an anti-God bias built into us. We can reason about things, but we can’t properly judge the likelihood of the premises or the significance and relevance of our conclusions.
Earlier, Paul said:
For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, “I WILL DESTROY THE WISDOM OF THE WISE, AND THE CLEVERNESS OF THE CLEVER I WILL SET ASIDE.” Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. (1 Cor 1:18-21.)
Our unbelief is a moral problem, not an intellectual one. I’m not sure how to reconcile this with the philosophical practice of looking for good arguments for or against the existence of God.
I’ve heard that a fideist is someone who believes there is no rational proof of God’s existence; that we just have to take it on faith. I’m not sure I’m a fideist. I think there are good reasons to believe in God, but I believe we are incapable of seeing them without the grace of God to open our hearts to them. Is that fideism? I’m not sure.
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