Biblical Studies, History, Religion
John Beeson
The Pillaging of Hezekiah

The aged prophet Isaiah showed up at the bedside of the middle-aged king. Hezekiah was only about 39 years old and terminally ill. But the prophet was not bringing good news, “Set your house in order, for you shall die, you shall not recover” (Is. 38:1).

The weak king cried out to God, “’ Please, O LORD, remember how I have walked before you in faithfulness and with a whole heart, and have done what is good in your sight’. And Hezekiah wept bitterly.” (Is. 38:3).

The Pillaging of Hezekiah
Church, Culture, Book Reviews
John Beeson
The Long Journey of Self-Knowledge in a Culture ...

“We are currently experiencing the largest and fastest religious shift in US history. It is greater than the First and Second Great Awakening and every revival in our country combined...but in the opposite direction.” This is the conclusion of the largest and most comprehensive study of dechurching in America by sociologists Ryan Burge and Paul Djupe. In The Great DeChurching, pastors Jim Davis and Michael Graham unpack why and how over the past twenty-five years, forty million of those who formerly attended church no longer do so.

The Long Journey of Self-Knowledge in a Culture of Confusion
Christian Living, Prayer
John Beeson
The Air Raid Siren

Jerusalem, Israel

3:15 am, April 13

 

I sat up in bed to a wailing sound I had never heard before, but knew immediately: an air raid siren. Our building rattled to the booms of interceptors from Israel’s missile defense system hitting their inbound targets. I pulled back the curtains and watched as sprays of light streaked the sky.

 Iran launched 170 drones, 20 cruise missiles, and 120 ballistic missiles at Israel in retaliation for Israel’s purported attack on an Iranian embassy in Syria.

The Air Raid Siren
Christian Living, Nature
John Beeson
The Ground Where Saguaros Thrive

Nothing is more iconic to the Tucson landscape than the saguaro. The emblematic cactus is to the Sonoran Desert what the palm tree is to Miami: hard to imagine without it. Saguaros typically live between one hundred and fifty to one hundred and seventy-five years, not sprouting its trademark arms until around thirty to seventy years of its life and growing to around fifty feet tall.

For those Sonoran Desert natives, we intuitively know where saguaros thrive. They love the rocky (both granite and volcanic) soil at the foothills of the five beautiful mountain ranges that surround Tucson.

The Ground Where Saguaros Thrive
Leadership, Wisdom, Vocation
John Beeson
Anger, Retaliation, and My Scion xB

I drove a little manual 2005 Scion xB for about eight years. It finally gave out after 230,000 miles. I loved that little car. It was fuel-efficient and required minimal maintenance. But it is undeniably close to the least powerful car on the road. I’m pretty sure that on its specs, next to 0-60mph, it says, “Eventually!”

Unless I was lined up against someone from a nearby retirement community, I was the last car to reach the speed limit coming off a stoplight. Unsurprisingly, more aggressive drivers with more powerful vehicles tended to treat my little Scion like a safety cone on the road, more like an obstacle than a fellow traveler.

Anger, Retaliation, and My Scion xB

Babylon Bee

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. Preparing children to suffer well: Curtis Solomon with an excellent article. This is a must-read for any parent or grandparent. “We don’t have to wait until trauma strikes to prepare the hearts of our children to face the most intense forms of suffering. There is no way to completely protect our children from suffering in this world, and we can’t guarantee they won’t face lasting challenges from traumatic experiences, but the following measures can help our children be prepared to respond well to suffering.”

  2. Let suffering lead to gentleness, not bitterness: Lara D’Entremont in a similar vein, “Gentle people aren’t gentle because they simply bottled all their frustration and anger inside. A gentle spirit isn’t cultivated through gritted teeth, clenched fists, and a strained smile. Gentleness grows in a heart set on this truth: the Lord is near (Phil. 4:5b)”

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. May a Christian Gamble? Jim Newheiser warns, “Gambling is an attempt to circumvent God’s way of gaining wealth. Even if you do not expect to become wealthy personally through gambling, you are participating in a system that undermines the work ethic of our entire society.”

  2. Public Trust in Pastors Falls to Historic Lows: Aaron Earls reports, “Trust in pastors fell for the third straight year and reached an all-time low. Around 1 in 3 Americans (34%) rate the honesty and ethical standards of clergy as high or very high, according to the latest Gallup survey.”

  3. Not Enough of Me to Go Around: Kristen Wetherel reflects, “I want so badly to “help [everyone] when [they want me to].” I have told my daughter that I’m not an octopus—but boy, do I wish I was. (At least in the sense of having eight capacities at once. I do not wish to become a sea creature with tentacles rather than arms…).”

  4. Why Should I Forgive? Guy Richards confesses, “Deep down inside, I don’t really want to forgive my wife, my son, or my co-worker—at least not initially. I want instead to hold on to my anger and pride, knowing that I really was right all along. I want to prop up my feelings of superiority and self-respect and to feel vindicated for acting the way that I did.”

  5. Local Man Crushing Bible-in-a-Year Plan After Switching to Jesus Storybook Bible: Funny stuff from the Babylon Bee.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. FOBO: Gen Z’s FOMO: Jerry Riendeau explains, “What is FOBO? It’s the “fear of better options.” The average young person’s inner dialogue seems to have shifted from What if I don’t go and they have fun without me? to What if I commit now and regret it later?”

  2. When Were Christians First Regarded as Intolerant “Haters”: Michael Kruger explains, “this sort of accusation against Christians is, at its core, a moral objection. Rather than the standard historical or logical objections often leveled against the faith, this one is fundamentally about ethics. It is claiming that Christian behavior violates some moral standard that all should follow.”

  3. Lesson for the Church from the Barnes & Noble Turnaround: Trevin Wax begins, “Few analysts expected brick-and-mortar bookstores to survive, much less thrive, in the 2020s. If you were placing bets a few years ago, you’d think digital would be the way to go: Facebook, Netflix, Crypto, or Tesla. But… Not only is Barnes & Noble profitable and growing, but they’re also opening new stores, including in places where Amazon tried (and failed) physical bookstores.”

  4. Seeking Validation: Brianna Lambert with an excellent piece of writing, “Blocks teetered atop the carefully constructed tower. My five-year-old placed the final piece and stepped back to admire his masterpiece. “Mommy, can I show Daddy?” he begged. It’s a common question in my house. Whether my children have colored a new picture, constructed an intricate building, or built a sweeping railroad track, they inevitably seek to show it off to Daddy as soon as possible. Their sweet requests never seem fueled by pride so much as excitement and the nagging question: Have I done well? Their love and admiration for their father pushes them to seek his approval for all their hard work spent coloring, building, or cutting. Ultimately, they want to know if their time was worth something.”

  5. Man Pops Car Hood, Thus Exhausting His Knowledge of How Cars Work: Babylon Bee obviously wrote this about me: a low blow!

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. On the Changing of the Dictionaries: Tim Challies begins, “There is something morbidly fascinating about watching dictionaries slowly but surely change their definitions of common words. It raises some questions, not the least of which strike to the very purpose of a dictionary.”

  2. I Can’t Put Them Down Yet: Brianna Lambert with a sweet reflection on mothering. She concludes, “So I’m going to keep picking up my six-year-old. Together we’ll continue to sing songs to the faithful God who will never put us down.”

  3. Reconstructing Faith: Christianity in a New World: Tim Keller is nuanced as always in this piece on deconstruction, “For many the Christian faith they grew up with or held for many years no longer feels credible to them. They are rethinking the whole thing.”

  4. Deepening Your Friendship in Marriage: Sheryl Jacob with a helpful piece on the ways our focus in marriage can be easily shifted off course, “Many relationships start by knowing each other well enough to agree they can tolerate each other’s quirks and odd mannerisms. But somewhere along the line, the demands of daily life take over.”

  5. Against Autonomy: TM Suffield with strong words for the choice we often make, “We want the benefits of a marriage without the covenant. In essence we’ve swapped the grandest story ever told—the truly breath-takingly epic love story that is patterned in the atoms of the world—and swapped it for a tawdry little tale about a string of destructive and demeaning one-night stands. By replacing Jesus’ position as rightful ruler of the cosmos with ourselves as the rightful ruler of our tiny worlds—and make no mistake, friends, that’s what we’ve done—we’ve removed what made those goods good. We’ve marred what made the beauty we had beautiful. We’ve made the truth into a lie.”

  6. “Well Done,” Says God to Man Who Spent Life Arguing in YouTube Comments Section: Babylon Bee skewers the culture warrior with a wink.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1. Why Was Jesus Crucified? Have you ever wondered why God ordained that Jesus would die by means of crucifixion? Here is a thoughtful answer by JA Medders. His four answers are that it was because of the shame of crucifixion, because of the criminal and legal ramifications, because of the public nature of crucifixion and because deaths were certified by Rome in crucifixion. It’s well worth the read.

2. Scholars Now Believe Job’s Friends Were First-Year Seminary Students: This satirical piece from Babylon Bee had me laughing out loud. “Scholars analyzed the level of annoyingness of the speech patterns of Job's friends and compared it with someone who just started studying the Bible, theology, Greek, and Hebrew.”

3. Faithful in Obscurity: Barbara Lee Harper asks us to identify who Bartholomew, James the son of Alphaeus and Thaddaeus, and Simon the Zealot were (do you know?). She then makes this admonition, “Don’t fret over whether your work seems “important.” Faithfully do what God has called you to do, for His honor and glory.”

4. Cohabitation Among Evangelicals: A New Norm? A discouraging report by David Ayers at the Institute for Family Studies. He says that, “cohabitation is a “new norm among young, professing evangelicals.” It is stunning that this has quietly come to pass among adherents to a form of Christianity that emphasizes radical obedience to an inerrant Bible, forbids all sex outside marriage, and emphasizes being distinct from ‘the world.’”

5. Weird Al Yankovic’s Weirdly Enduring Appeal: This is one of my favorite podcast episodes of 2021 (you probably need to already appreciate Weird Al to truly enjoy it, though). Sam Anderson claims Weird Al Yankovic is not just a parody singer — he’s “a full-on rock star, a legitimate performance monster and a spiritual technician doing important work down in the engine room of the American soul.” I loved learning more about Weird Al’s backstory.

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