Biblical Studies

Shining Idols: Uncovering Them

Shining Idols: Uncovering Them

What are the idols of your heart? What are the ways in which you have allowed your heart which is intended to worship God, to worship the golden calves that surround us? Where else have you placed your hope?

If you’re unsure of the answer to that question, perhaps one of these questions might help diagnose your heart. What keeps me up when I’m trying to sleep? What do I fear? What do I think about? What do I daydream about? What gets me most excited in life? What do I give myself to? What do I use my time for?

Shining Idols: A Rejected Covenant

Shining Idols: A Rejected Covenant

Is it possible idolatry might still be alive and well in us today?

I am currently in India, a land of a million gods. The first time I traveled to India, I was startled by how many altars and temples filled the land. Gods are layered upon gods: family gods, regional gods, and gods of healing and fertility. Devout Hindus, in search of hope, pour out their time and resources to god after god in hoping that one of these gods might be able to solve their health problems or financial woes.

This is the human condition, not a quirk of Indian culture. We want something tangible to place our hope in, and we want objects to worship.

Shining Idols: What They Demand

Shining Idols: What They Demand

Are you an idolater? I already lost you, didn’t I? Most wouldn’t raise their hand to affirm their idolatry.  

Idolatry doesn’t preach well to us 21st-century Westerners. A couple of years ago, I had someone leave the church after I preached on idolatry. “You preached for most of your sermon on the Old Testament, the law against Idolatry, and how might we be guilty of idolatry today,” she reflected. She said that the sermon didn’t connect with her and didn’t offer “spiritual encouragement.”

Oh, friends, the dangers we face when we think that biblical passages on idolatry don’t apply to us!

This Week's Recommendations

This Week's Recommendations
  1. The Worshipper: Jeremy Walker begins a post that comes with a twist, “He is a worshipper. His life revolves around his worship. Nothing stops him.”

  2. The Serious Business of Laughing at Myself: Seth Lewis tells a very funny story about himself and concludes, “If I can’t embrace my own smallness, my own humiliations, and my total dependence on the God who made me, then my pride has grown out of control. That’s a serious problem.”

  3. Unborn Images Matter: Alan Shlemon begins, “Abortionist Dr. Joan Fleischman says she sometimes shows her patients the pregnancy tissue she removes after an abortion. She says that post-abortive women are “stunned by what it actually looks like,” and the women “feel they’ve been deceived.””

  4. 16 Passages to Read to Fight Lust: These are worth memorizing.

  5. A Spiritual MRI of the Heart: Warren Peel explains, “In Scripture, the word ‘heart’ is used more than 1000 times, but it almost never refers to the physical organ inside our chests. The Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament sums up all the usages of the term in this way: it is ‘the richest, most all-encompassing biblical term for the totality of a man’s inner nature.’ The heart is said to do a wide range of things in the Bible, but all its many activities fall into one of the three main faculties of the soul: the mind, the affections and the will. It includes the mind—our thoughts, imagination, fantasies, judgments and attitudes. It encompasses the affections—our emotions, our desires and longings, our revulsions. And it describes the will—our choices, decisions and motivations.”

Isn’t the Bible out of date?

Isn’t the Bible out of date?

How can we still believe the Bible when it has such antiquated views of sex and sexuality? How can we still believe the Bible when it is so out of touch with the impact of globalization?

How can a book written on vellum and papyrus speak to the internet age?

How can we believe the Bible is God’s word to us when it is so clearly out of step with cultural norms regarding what is good and just? To put it another way, how can we possibly trust the Bible to be God’s timeless word when it is so clearly backward ethically? Don’t we want to be on the right side of history? Barry Cooper thoughtfully examines these questions in an excurses found in his book Can I Really Trust the Bible? Cooper’s response is worth quoting in its entirety:

The past often embarrasses us. Looking at photos of myself growing up in the 1980s, it’s one fashion car-crash after another. It’s impossible to look away. Why didn’t people spend the entire decade pointing at each other and laughing? The reason, I suppose, is that more or less everyone was dressed the same. It seemed normal to us. We’d built up a plausibility structure of pastel t-shirts, neon socks and snow-washed jeans.

The Worst Hall of Fame Ever

The Worst Hall of Fame Ever

Hardcore fans of sports and music argue about whether or not individuals deserve to be in the Hall of Fame or not. Baseball fans will throw down over whether or not Pete Rose and Barry Bonds ought to be in the Hall of Fame. Some Rock and Roll fans are outraged that Stevie Nicks and Percy Sledge are in the Hall of Fame while Tina Turner and Lionel Ritchie are not. Football fans clash over whether Ray Lewis and OJ Simpson ought to be in the Hall of Fame and whether it’s fair Reggie Wayne and Roger Craig aren’t.

You might know that the Bible has a Hall of Fame as well. Tucked away at the end of Hebrews, it contains a list far more controversial than any list in Canton, Cleveland, or Cooperstown.

That Isn’t a Toy!

That Isn’t a Toy!

“That isn’t a toy!” parents warn a child playing with a knife or a hammer.

Pharaoh thought he could play a game with God and win. He lost.

Your heart is not a toy.

The story of God’s battle with Pharaoh in the book of Exodus is the story of the consequences of a hardened heart. It’s the story of someone who thought they could toy with God and with their heart. We cannot.

What is Heaven? Welcome to the Feast

What is Heaven? Welcome to the Feast

Some of the most surprising and revealing passages in scripture are the glimpses we have of the resurrected Christ. In these snapshots, we have brief previews of what our bodily resurrection will look like. In two of these snapshots we see Jesus eating fish with his disciples.[i] What? The resurrected Jesus is eating? He sure is.

And with our resurrected bodies, we will eat too! One of the most powerful images in scripture of heaven is tucked away in Isaiah 25:6

On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine – the best of meats and the finest of wines.

That, friends, is a party! I don’t know about you, but the idea that we get to eat for eternity is very attractive to me. Can you imagine all the new types of food we will taste? Exotic dishes we will experience?

I can smell the steak grilling and the bacon sizzling now.

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What is Heaven? It is also a New Earth

What is Heaven? It is also a New Earth

When I trusted Christ as a young boy, I remember thinking that the one downside of being a Christian was the boring afterlife that now awaited me. “I hope Jesus doesn’t return before I go to high school… before I get married… before I have kids,” I thought. There is a classic Gary Larson cartoon that captures my worst fears about heaven: “Wish I’d brought a magazine," the bored saint reflects.

I recently asked a group of sixth grade boys what they thought heaven would be like, and their picture of heaven mirrored what mine was at their age: a worship service that never ended, standing around the throne of God and singing song after song after song after song.

I mean, I liked church more than the average kid. I even sat through “big church” with my parents and liked the singing and preaching. But doing that forever? In the words of the old hip hop group OutKast, “Foreva eva?”[i]

Good news, friends. This won’t be the sum of heaven.

The Bible's Strange Instructions for Opening the Giving Lock

The Bible's Strange Instructions for Opening the Giving Lock

I worked for a few years in development and was trained in best practices for raising money. I was blessed to work for a Christian organization that was committed to raising money in a godly way, but the broader development industry doesn’t have many scruples in doing what they do best: separating people from their money. And they are clever! How does a development professional unlock the giving vault?

Secular Generosity

The secular handbook on getting people to give reveals a lot. There are three universal rules in development:[i]

1) Appeal to donors’ emotions, not their minds: tell a story that will move them;

2) Inflate a donor’s sense of importance and appeal to their interests;

3) Create urgency: donors need to feel as though the need is immediate and significant.

Christian Generosity

The Christian generosity handbook is very different. Having delivered his four strange reasons for giving. Paul is now going to five equally strange instructions for giving in his letter to the Corinthian church. Paul’s instructions contradict the development professional’s handbook at almost every turn. Paul tells us we should give this way: