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By Mark Ward, originally published under the title, “What Would the Author of ‘Amazing Grace’ Say about Social Media?”

John Newton wrote a beautiful letter to a friend which is called in _his collected works, “On Controversy”—because that friend was about to engage in public controversy over Christian doctrine; Newton wanted to give him some scriptural counsel. I have read it 20 times over nearly as many years, and thought of it countless more. In order to more fully get the principles into my own soul—because I, frankly, have not always lived up to them—I have taken the liberty of “transculturating” it for today’s Christian SMWs—Social Media Warriors. If Newton were to write the same letter today, this is my guess as to what he would write:_

Dear Christian Friend about to Post a Comment in a Social Media Battle,

I’ve always appreciated your love of truth—and I know that itch you’re feeling right now, the itch to jump into the fray.

I happen to agree with the position you’re about to defend. We’re together on this. And truth is stronger than fiction: our side cannot lose. Not even the gates of hell could prevail against it. So even a person without your skill with a keyboard could enter this particular social media mêlée with some confidence of coming out on top—in the end, at least.

But we must be more than conquerors. We need to triumph not just over error in others but over sin in ourselves. Some battle wounds may make us wish we had never won.

Let’s stop and think about our opponents, the internet bystanders, and ourselves.

Our social media opponents

I’m ashamed how often I myself have forgotten step one, step zero: have we prayed for our internet sparring partners? I mean prayed for them not only before pounding out a response but between every keystroke. Are we praying for them as our fingers hover over the return key? If we ask the Lord to teach them and bless them, that prayer will soften our hearts and our prose in profoundly healthy ways.

If our opponents are Christians, we can imagine the Lord saying to us what David said to Joab about Absalom: “Deal gently with him for my sake.” The Lord loves our opponents; his love for them was longsuffering long before we met them, ahem, fifteen seconds ago. If we wring their rhetorical necks, we’ll not only risk unforgiving servants, we’ll risk proving unforgiven ones (Matt 18:35).

Someday our Facebook pages will be memorial walls for whatever friends we have left—and so will be those of our (Christian, remember?) opponents. Think about what will happen then. All of us will be together in heaven, forever, and our love for each other then will be greater than our love for our best earthly friends now. Our opponents may be dead wrong, but after we’re all dead—they’ll be right again.

If our opponents are not Christians—and I try not to be too quick to come to that conclusion if they claim otherwise; before their own Master they stand or fall—the best emotion to feel toward them is compassion, not anger. “They know not what they do!” But we know who’s responsible for giving us new hearts dedicated to truth. It didn’t have to be this way. God was not required to save you and me from our sins. But for the grace of God, we’d have their list of Likes.

There is room for an Elijah mocking the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18), an Isaiah mocking the silliness of idols (Isa 44), and a Jesus Christ mocking the Pharisees (Matt 23). But those seem to me to be exceptions to the general rule that one ought to “correct his opponents with gentleness” so that “God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim 2:25). If we are writing for spiritually blind people, we must be careful not to put any trip hazards between them and the cross. God’s grace is necessary for salvation, but this is no reason to push people (humanly speaking) further away from him.

And there are mudslinging trolls out there—Christian and non-Christian—whom it is foolhardy to engage. They’ll only drag you down to their level (Prov 26:4Matt 7:6). My rule of thumb: I do my best to avoid debating people who can never bring themselves to acknowledge that their opponents have just made a good point. (I also, by God’s grace, do my best not to be one of those people—if I can’t see the genuine strengths of viewpoints I disagree with, it’s likely my fault.)

The internet bystanders

Among those reading and liking (and trolling) will be three groups:

1. Those who disagree with you

It’s easy to forget these people when our eyes are focused on our direct opponents. But those opponents represent many, many others who hold the same opinions. Many will watch who will not comment. Regarding these I will point again to the thoughts above.

2. Those who don’t care about your religious points

But then there are people who don’t know or care about the doctrines we defend online, because they aren’t religious at all. If these people are generally indisposed to dislodge their rather shining views of their moral rectitude, that doesn’t hinder their ability to sniff out pride in us. Even those who can’t follow our arguments can read our spirits pretty well in between the pixels. And they know that religious people—particularly Christians—are supposed to be meek, humble, and loving.

Every day online the Scripture is proved true: “The anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.” If we mix invective and scorn into our posts, we’re forgetting that the weapons of our warfare—the only weapons which, in reality, can break down strongholds of error—are “not of the flesh.” Whether we persuade anyone of anything else or not, somehow we must persuade bystanders that we wish others well. We are known by our love (John 13:35).

3. Those who agree with you

Read the Full Article Here

July 14, 2017 by Frank Viola

Countless books pass through my hands each year. Evangelical publishers send me their neaw titles routinely. Once in a while, I will interview the authors. Most of the time I don’t.

Recently, however, I came across a book where I actually found fresh content that was significantly helpful to my own thinking. Given how much I’ve read over the years, this rarely happens. Most Christian books today simply repeat what others have already written.

Here’s the story.

While doing my research on my upcoming book on the kingdom of God (due to release Summer 2018), I began reading everything I could find on the world system (which is one of the primary enemies of God’s kingdom). This led me to take a fresh look at what Scripture calls the “principalities and powers.”

In exploring the “principalities and powers” in the world of biblical scholarship, I came across Michael Heiser’s book The Unseen Realm.

While reading the book, Heiser and I began an email dialogue that delved deeper into the themes of his book and my specific area of interest. I then followed that dialogue up with the following interview for this blog. Below you can read Heiser’s answers to my interview questions regarding the content of his book The Unseen Realm. (Our own private dialogue isn’t reflected in this interview.)

The most important contribution of The Unseen Realm in my own thinking is Heiser’s treatment of cosmic geography. His work on this subject colored in many gaps that I never observed or considered before, particularly the detailed parallels between Pentecost and Babel as well as God’s relationship to the nations of the world in biblical history.

I can’t say this about most authors today, but I owe a debt to Heiser for showing me aspects of the principalities and powers that I’ve never seen before nor read in any other scholar, theologian, or commentator.

For this reason, I cite Heiser quite a bit in several chapters of my upcoming book on the kingdom.

Here’s the interview.

Enjoy!

Instead of asking, “what is your book about,” I’m going to ask the question that’s behind that question. And that unspoken question is, “how are readers going to benefit from reading your book?”

Michael S. Heiser: Several ways. First, if reviews and interactions I’ve had with readers over the last year are any indication, _Unseen Realm _trains readers to contextualize their Bible. We think “reading the Bible in context” means thinking about the handful of verses before and after the verses we’re looking at on the page. That isn’t the case. While that’s important, context is so much wider than a handful of verses.

What I mean by context is worldview—having the ancient Israelite or first-century Jew in your head as you read. How would an ancient Israelite or first-century Jew read the Bible—what would they be thinking in terms of its meaning? The truth is that if we put one of those people into a small group Bible study and asked them what they thought about a given passage meant, their answer would be quite a bit different in many cases than anything the average Christian would think. They belonged to the world that produced the Bible, which is the context the Bible needs to be understood by.

Our contexts are foreign. They derive from church tradition that is thousands of years removed from the people who wrote Scripture and the audience to whom those people wrote. _Unseen Realm _demands people read the text of Scripture—particularly in regard to supernaturalism—the way ancient people would have read it. Second, it exposes people in the church to high scholarship—peer-reviewed material produced by biblical scholars—but in readable, normal language used by non-specialists.

It’s important for people in the Church to realize that the way they talk and think about the Bible isn’t the way Bible scholars talk and think about it—and I’m including “Bible-believing” scholars there. There is a wide gap between the work of biblical scholars, whose business it is to read the text of the Bible in its own worldview context, and what you hear in church.

Scholarship aimed at truly understanding what the biblical writers meant often does not filter down into the church and through the pulpit to folks who show up on Sunday. I think that’s just wrong, but scholars rarely make any effort to decipher their own scholarly work for people outside the ivory tower. _Unseen Realm _deliberately does that. Though readers might think that things in the book are novel since they never heard them in church or read them in a creed, every paragraph is the result of peer-reviewed scholarship. People need to know what they’re missing.

Over the years, I’ve met some Christians who deny the reality of the demonic/satanic world. They believe that the cosmology of Jesus and Paul was archaic. Mental illnesses were ascribed to “demons.” And “Satan” and “principalities and powers” were metaphors for personal and structural evil, etc. What would you say to such people in order to convince them that the spiritual worldview of Jesus and Paul does in fact reflect reality, even in the 21st century?

Michael S. Heiser: Well, the first thing I’d say is that their worldview isn’t the worldview of Jesus, Paul, or any of the biblical writers and characters. And if you don’t have the worldview of the people who produced the Bible (under inspiration no less), you can’t understand what they were trying to communicate in many respects. Biblical people weren’t modern people. That’s self-evident no matter how much we try to deny it. We doubt the supernatural because we’ve either been taught to deny it (thinking—wrongly—that it’s incompatible with science) or because we just want to be comfortable.

We impose our modern worldview on the Bible to make it conform to our intellectual happy place. But we deceive ourselves into thinking this works or is legitimate. We fail to realize that the supernatural things we want to avoid are no more supernatural (or “weird”) than the things that define the Christian faith. What’s so “normal” about the virgin birth, the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the bodily resurrection of Christ, the hypostatic union of the incarnation (Jesus was 100% God and 100% man)?

Why don’t we “de-mythologize” those things in our Bible while we earnestly try to deny supernaturalist interpretations of other parts of the Bible? It’s a hopelessly inconsistent and self-focused approach to say part of what the Bible says about the supernatural spiritual world are fine but other aspects of its portrayal of that same non-human world are too strange and in need of being explained away.

What is the difference between a cherub and a seraph in Scripture? They appear to be different from their biblical descriptions (number of wings, faces, etc.).

Michael S. Heiser: There’s no difference conceptually. Both terms are job descriptions of a divine being whose role it was to protect sacred space from defilement—to guard the presence of God. The terms and the descriptions are not anatomy lessons—spirit beings are not embodied by definition. Rather, the descriptions in the visions of the prophets serve as metaphors for describing a role. They are basically job descriptions.

The terms are drawn from ancient Near Eastern iconography (Mesopotamian and Egypt, respectively). They utilize the imagery these civilizations used to describe divine beings who guarded the presence of gods or god-kings. We know that because we have the iconography (sculptures, paintings) in their appropriate context. The Babylonian context for Ezekiel’s cherubim is obvious from the first chapter. Most Bible readers don’t realize, though, why (historically) Israelites living during the eras of Ahaz, Uzziah, Hezekiah, and Isaiah would have recognized Egyptian motifs. There was a lot of royal interaction with Egypt then.

What does it mean, exactly, that Satan (the devil) is “the ruler of the dead?” And where can we find this in Scripture? Related: What does it mean that Satan once had “the power of death” — Hebrews 2:14 — implying that he doesn’t have it anymore. 

Michael S. Heiser: The idea comes from several trajectories. On one hand, you have verses like Heb 2:14 (“Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself [Jesus] likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil”).

The point isn’t that Satan pulls a lever somewhere and someone dies. The idea is that all humans will die—we are not immortal—because of the transgression of the Eden that the serpent instigated. He was cast down to the underworld, the realm of the dead (I discuss the terms and motifs behind that at length in Unseen Realm), which is where all humans are destined to go and remain because of the Eden tragedy. God’s plan of salvation was designed to remove humans from the realm of the dead. Humanity followed the serpent in rebellion, and so his domain is where humanity goes.

But our destiny can be different because of God’s plan. On the other hand, there are theological ideas running in the background that produce the same idea. In Canaanite religion, for example, Baal was lord of the Underworld. He was called baʿal zebul. Sound familiar? In Ugaritic it means “prince Baal,” but by the time of the New Testament it became a descriptive title for Satan. Baal, of course, was the major deity-rival to the God of Israel. He was the lead adversary to Yahweh in Israelite religious context. What people thought about Baal informed the way they thought about the Devil later on.

Regarding the origin of the devil (“Satan” as the NT calls him), in your view, specifically when, why, _and how _did he fall?

Michael S. Heiser: I believe that all Scripture tells us is that the being the New Testament calls Satan (and which it associates with the serpent in Eden) fell when he engaged Eve to steer her out of God’s will. Eve’s existence, purpose, and destiny were of no concern to the serpent figure (which I don’t believe was a mere animal—he was a divine being in rebellion against God). Fiddling with what God told her was above his pay grade; i.e., contrary to the supreme authority, which was God. We are not told he rebelled earlier than this. We have only this initial act of rebellion. Some folks appeal to the notion that he rebelled before the creation of humanity and took a third of God’s angels with him, but there is no passage in Scripture that teaches that. In fact the only place you find the “third of the angels” talk is in the last book of the Bible—Revelation 12.

But in that passage, the war in heaven is explicitly associated with the birth / first coming of the messiah, which is considerably after creation (and the Fall). As far as why he rebelled, we aren’t told specifically. But why would an otherwise intelligent being (like you and me) overstep authority? Several reasons come to mind, like self-interest and arrogance. Since there are a number of (Hebrew) inter-textual relationships between Genesis 3 and Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28, and since those prophetic chapters use the tale of a divine rebel filled with hubris to malign the kings of Babylon and Tyre, respectively, I’d say we’re on safe ground to presume that self-interest and hubris are at the core of the rebellion.

The divine rebel story behind Isaiah 14:12-15 has the villain wanting to be like the Most High and above the stars of God (a term drawn directly out of Canaanite material for the divine council / heavenly host), it’s clear the villain wanted to be the highest authority in the supernatural world. He was a usurper propelled by his own arrogance.

How does your view fit in with Ezekiel 28:14, which some believe is a reference to the devil before he fell. However, assuming that interpretation is correct, he is called “an anointed cherub.” How does that fit into the idea that the devil was once a member of the Divine Council, which some believe? 

Michael S. Heiser: I believe the “anointed cherub” phrase in this verse points to a divine rebel, not Adam as many biblical scholars want to suggest. There are many reasons for this, some of which are very technical. Readers of _Unseen Realm _will get the overview, but if they really want the details, they should read through the companion website to the book, moreunseenrealm.com (click the tab for Chapter 11).

Since the Old Testament doesn’t use terms like “devil” and never applies the term “satan” to the serpent (in any passage), this question requires more unpacking than an interview can provide (i.e., it’s best to just read the book where I can take two chapters to go through it). But I’ll try and compress a few thoughts.

On one level, by definition every divine being loyal to God is a member of the divine council, presuming “council” is understood as the collective body of heavenly beings who serve God. There are of course tiers of authority in the council, but the idea can be collective as well. So, prior to his rebellion, the being that came to Eve and caused her to sin and that later became the known as the devil was a member of God’s council, broadly defined, merely because he was a spirit being. But since we have no prior history of him before Genesis 3, we can’t say much beyond that. (The serpent of Genesis 3 is not the satan figure of Job 1-2 because of a certain rule of Hebrew grammar [again, you have to read the book], so Job 1-2 isn’t much help there).

Some scholars want to restrict the term “divine council” to the “sons of God” tier, presuming them to be the only decision makers, but this understanding doesn’t reflect the variability of the terms and ideas found in ancient texts parallel to the Hebrew Bible from which the council metaphor is drawn in many instances. The analogy of human government in civilizations that had a conception of a divine council makes that point clear. Not all members of a king’s “government” would be directly involved in decision making. There are layers of advisors who have input. But these governments had service staff or “lesser bureaucrats” who were nevertheless part of the king’s administration.

Perhaps a modern analogy of government in the United States will help make the point. We can speak of the federal legislature, by which we mean that branch of government responsible for passing laws. The term “Congress” is a synonym. However, our Congress has two parts: the Senate and the House. Decision-making members of these two bodies, and hence the Congress, are elected. The House and Senate both have service staff (e.g., “guardian officers” like the Sergeant at Arms). Though they have no decision-making power, they are nevertheless part of “Congress” in certain contexts where that term is used.

For example, saying “Congress was in session” does not mean that all service staff were given the day off. “Congress” can therefore refer to only those elected officials who make laws, or can refer to the entire bureaucratic apparatus of the federal legislature. As we will see in this discussion, the heavenly bureaucracy (council) is layered and its members serve God in different but related ways.

Rebellion against God results in being cast out of his service. God doesn’t run the affairs of the spiritual world or our world with rebels on his payroll. They are cast to the Underworld (in the case of the Eden rebel), or a special place in the Underworld (e.g., the offenders of Genesis 6:1-4, who are, to quote Peter and Jude, “kept in chains of gloomy darkness” or “sent to Tartarus”). There are more divine rebels than that in the Bible, but hopefully that scratches the surface enough.

In the book, you argue persuasively that Deuteronomy 32:8 and Psalm 82 are speaking about God assigning heavenly beings to oversee each nation in the world (after Babel). How do you envision an unfallen heavenly being specifically carrying out the tasks listed in Psalm 82? Namely, _defending the just, defending the weak and the fatherless; upholding the cause of the poor and the oppressed. _This was God’s role for them before they rebelled, but how do you envision them doing this work exactly?

Michael S. Heiser: He would do what God would do. God’s standards for justice are revealed in his moral laws, in how he tries to get humans (his imagers) to relate to each other, and in true worship. Biblical theologians encapsulate all that in the concept of “order” (the opposite of which is “chaos”).

Ruling the way God wants you to rule means fostering the ordered relationships he desires, not because he is a killjoy, but because that order maximizes human happiness and love for God. Part of that is worshipping only the true God and no other. Psalm 82’s diatribe against the fallen gods is directly linked to justice because, in the biblical worldview, failing at just living produces chaos on earth—and it’s the job of superior beings to make sure that doesn’t happen. Instead, the picture we get in Psalm 82 runs from neglect that causes chaos to stirring the pot of chaos, thereby making the lives of people miserable.

Satan is called “the prince of the power of the air” in Ephesians 2. What do you think that means exactly?

Michael S. Heiser: On one hand, “air” is part of the vocabulary for the spiritual world—the world which humans do not inhabit, but which divine beings do inhabit. But “air” was also a descriptor for the heavens below the firmament in Israelite cosmology—still distinguishable from God’s abode, which was above the firmament (Isa 40:22; Job 22:13; cp. Gen 1:7 to Psa 29:10). The “air” metaphor allowed people to think of the spiritual world in terms of (a) not being the realm of humans, and (b) still beneath the presence of God, or the place where God lives.

That meant Satan wasn’t in God’s presence or in control of God’s domain. Angels could be sent into the world to assist humans and would of course be opposed by those spiritual beings in control of earth’s “air space” so to speak. Ultimately, the spiritual world has no measurable parameters, or latitude and longitude (the celestial sphere is no help locating it!). Human writers have to use the language of “place” to describe something place-less (in terms of what we, as embodied beings, can understand). For that reason, it isn’t always a neat picture.

Throughout Ephesians, the phrase “heavenly places” is used in a positive sense. God’s people are seated with Christ in heavenly places (Eph. 2). All spiritual blessings reside in Christ in heavenly places (Eph. 1). However, also in Ephesians, we are told that evil principalities and powers operate in heavenly places (Eph. 6). In your view, what are the “heavenly places” in Ephesians and how can both evil spirits and Christians occupy them at the same time?

Read the Rest (~4,500 words) of the Interview of Michael Heiser by Frank Viola

In a fascinating 1942 essay, C.S. Lewis offered a “universal law” of human experience:

Every preference of a small good to a great, or partial good to a total good, involves the loss of the small or partial good for which the sacrifice is made. . . . You can’t get second things by putting them first. You get second things only by putting first things first. (“First and Second Things,” in God in the Dock)

In other words, overvaluing a lesser good results, paradoxically, in losing it. In a letter to his friend Dom Bede Griffiths, Lewis expanded on his observation, “Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first and we lose both first and second things.”

Lewis applied his law of firsts and seconds to everyday life. The woman who makes her dog the center of her life loses “not only her human usefulness and dignity but even the proper pleasure of dog-keeping.” The man who focuses solely on the woman he loves, doing nothing but contemplating her, eventually loses the pleasure of loving her, as well as all the other things that make life rich and enjoyable. On a much larger scale, Lewis believed that the civilization of his day was imperiled because it had been putting itself first, rather than second to a higher good.

Woe to Second Thing Seekers

Jesus himself taught that seeking second things first results in losing both first and second things. And not only in this life (as Lewis emphasized), but forever. In Luke 6:24–26, Jesus pronounced four woes.

“Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.

“Woe to you who are full now, for you shall be hungry.

“Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep.

“Woe to you, when all people speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets.”

These four woes match the four Beatitudes that come immediately before them, each of which describes future blessing from God in his eternal kingdom (“you shall be satisfied, you shall laugh”). Correspondingly, the woes describe an eternal state of divine judgment upon God’s enemies.

It may appear, at first sight, as though Jesus warns his hearers not to be rich, full, happy, or well-regarded. But, as J.C. Ryle pointed out long ago, Abraham and Job were rich, with plenty to eat; King David laughed and rejoiced; and Timothy had a good reputation, as did the seven men appointed to serve the church in Acts 6. So, what is Jesus actually warning against?

No Good Apart from God

The key is the last phrase of the fourth woe: “Woe to you, when all people speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets.” Jesus warns not against a good reputation per se, but specifically the sort of good reputation enjoyed by the false prophets. We’re in danger of divine judgment when we’re well-thought-of for ungodly reasons, when we say what’s not true to gain the good opinion of others, sacrificing truth for popularity.

This helps us understand Jesus’s woes. Jesus doesn’t pronounce woe upon all who are rich, but upon those who find their consolation in riches rather than in God — who treasure their wealth above God. Jesus doesn’t pronounce woe upon all who are satisfied, but upon those who place the satisfaction of their appetites above God.

Jesus doesn’t pronounce woe upon all joyful people, but upon those who seek happiness apart from God. The problem is not wealth, food, laughter, or reputation in and of themselves. It’s the idolatry of elevating such things above God. When that happens, the law of firsts and seconds applies, forever.

Do You Love It Enough to Love It Less?

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by Sean McDowell

As a parent of three kids, I am frequently trying to help them best navigate cultural voices vying for their hearts and minds. This is why I am thrilled about the new book by A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today’s World, by Brett Kunkle and John Stonestreet. They are both my good friends and ministry partners. But most importantly, they have written an excellent book.

If you work with students in any capacity—parent, youth worker, teacher, mentor—this is a book you need to get. Read it, study it, and pass it on to other youth influencers. Here’s a quick interview to give you a taste of how to help students best navigate culture:

SEAN MCDOWELL: Why did you feel the need to write a book helping the next generation navigate culture?

KUNKLE & STONESTREET: There are nine reasons we wrote this book: Alexis, Micah, Paige, Ella, Jonah, Abigail, Ann, Ali and Hunter. They are our kids, from 22 years old all the way down to 2 months old, and we’re in the middle of trying to help them navigate the challenges of this cultural moment. We speak to parents all the time who sense, like us, that the tides have shifted significantly.

We’ve watched as the culture has become saturated with explicit sexuality, omnipresent glowing screens, increasing racial tension, marketing messages promising the good life, information from a thousand different voices, and the celebration of perpetual adolescence. However, kids growing up in this culture have never known anything different. If they are going to be discipled in Christ within the context of these challenges, we must be intentional in some very specific areas and some very key ways.

Also, we wanted to provide a resource that was tremendously practical, as the title of the book says. There are many good academic and theoretical treatments of culture have been written recently, and we wanted build on that work and leverage the insights of those books to help parents, teachers, and mentors of the next generation apply these insights in ways that will equip the next generation to thrive as followers of Christ.

What is culture? And are Christians in, above, or against culture?

To answer the second question first, yes! With proper discernment and grounding in the overarching story of redemption that Scripture provides, we will find ourselves at various times in culture, while holding to truths and values and practices that are above culture, but will occasionally (and in some contexts, often) find ourselves against  culture. We see all three approaches at different times throughout the history of the Christian church. In this Practical Guide, we hope to help the next generation cultivate the wisdom to know which approach will be required in various arenas of culture today.

Defining culture, which is how we begin the book, is essential for developing that discernment. Many Christians reduce culture to all the bad stuff “out there.” On this view, our posture will constantly be against anything and everything in culture. However, this view fails to recognize that you find culture wherever you find human beings, so we cannot reduce it to the stuff “out there.” Culture is simply what humans make of the world. It includes all of our ideas, institutions, habits, and the structures we embrace to live life together.

God made us to be culture creators. Thus, culture in and of itself is not what is bad. Instead, it’s the worldview underneath our culture-building that is true or false and it’s the direction we take culture which may be good or evil, life-giving or dehumanizing.

How does the ubiquity of information shape the way kids think? And what are a couple practical ways to counter this?

Those of us living today will encounter more information daily than someone living just a few centuries ago would have encountered during the entire course of their life. Ours is the age of information and we must understand that information constantly communicates ideas about how we are to think about and live in this world. Ideas are not merely confined to the theoretical realm but ultimately, ideas have consequences for all of life. And bad ideas have victims.

In this age, access to information has replaced the pursuit of wisdom. So, without a keenly developed sense of discernment, kids may have all the information in the world at their fingertips and yet, not know how to live life well, with wisdom. Additionally, technology has “flattened” the world such that it is more difficult than ever to distinguish between what is an authoritative source and what isn’t. For our kids, this creates a major existential struggle as they ask, “Who should I trust?” In a world with so many voices, should they listen to mom and dad, their pastor, their teachers, their friends…or Wikipedia? Often, the inability to discern truth from error among all these different sources can lead to skepticism and cynicism about truth itself.

Thus, discernment is a skill we must help our kids develop. Practically, in the book we suggest that parents, mentors, and teachers should learn from the greatest educator in history, Jesus. Jesus was much more than a teacher, of course, but as He taught He harnessed the power of asking good questions. Often, His response to a question was a another question, in order to expose faulty assumptions, reveal truth and develop discernment in His listeners. In this book we offer a number of discernment-building questions to use with students to cultivate wisdom and discernment.

Perhaps the most important question students should be asked and taught to ask is, “What do you mean by that?” This important question can bring much-needed clarity amidst all the information out there. For instance, we often find ourselves using the same words as others in our culture, but not meaning the same thing. When it comes to words like love, truth, freedom, God, gender, and purpose, the Christian’s dictionary will be very different than the culture’s dictionary. When we equip students with good questions, we help them find clarity in the language and ideas of the culture. Next, we then teach them how to employ those questions when they are watching a movie on Netflix, listening to their college professor, or having a conversation with their Muslim friend.

What do you think is the most pressing issue youth influencers need to address?

Click here to read the whole article

The following post is by Dr. Dale Brueggemann, Contributing Editor at Faithlife Corporation. 

Christ in the OT

Do we know for certain that Jesus can be found in the OT? In our efforts to “read backward,” are we finding Christ where perhaps he should not be found? Or do we have license as Spirit-led interpreters of Scripture to allegorize as we see fit, and as it benefits our listeners?

In this post, I’m going to address these questions by discussing the biblical mandate for a method of interpretation called “Christotelic” hermeneutics. Look with me first at the evidence from the NT directing the church to engage in Christ-centered exegesis of the OT.

How Paul and Jesus Interpreted Scripture

Paul aimed to “preach the gospel,” to “preach Christ” (Rom 15:201 Cor 1:17232 Cor 2:12Eph 3:8Phil 1:15). But he directed Timothy to “preach the word” (2 Tim 3:164:2), which meant the OT. For the early church, that meant preaching the gospel of Christ from the OT.

On the Emmaus road, Jesus modeled an approach to expositing the OT Christologically: “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:25-27).

Jesus’ key statement was this: “everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled” (Luke 24:44, italics added).

Two questions come to mind: 1) did the church continue to follow Jesus’ example? and 2) what example did they follow, if we don’t have the actual transcript of his exposition to the unnamed disciples?

I’m going to show you how the church historically attempted to follow Jesus method of interpretation, and argue for one in particular as especially valuable today.

Christotelic Hermeneutics in the Church

Historically, the church has employed three methods to discern “everything written about [Jesus] in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms.”

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By Mark Ward, Jr

Should pastors and other Bible teachers bother to learn Greek and Hebrew? You can use Greek and Hebrew without having to memorize a single paradigm, let alone 3,000 vocab words, so why torture yourself?

I’ll give you ten reasons studying the original languages is worth the pain, five this week and five next.

1. Because they increase interpretive accuracy.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones was a medical doctor by training. He had no formal theological education. Yet he went on to become one of the twentieth century’s most influential preachers—and a proponent of studying the Greek and Hebrew. He said that the languages

. . . are of great value for the sake of accuracy; no more, that is all. They cannot guarantee accuracy but they promote it. (Preaching and Preachers, 127–128)

Lloyd-Jones knew that some preachers would be tempted to treat a sanctuary like a linguistics classroom, and he discouraged that. But he also understood the interpretive power of Greek and Hebrew study. This pulpit master, in his classic work on preaching, goes on to rigorously subsume the value of the original languages to the end goal of conveying the biblical message to people. And it’s key that, in his view, they only “promote”—not “guarantee”—hermeneutical and homiletical accuracy.

I have heard comparatively untutored preachers teach Scripture accurately to groups that included numerous biblical studies PhDs. I have also heard the opposite; I have sometimes thought to myself, “Does this guy have any idea who he’s talking to?” (Indeed, the phrase “the gall!” has only ever come to my mind while listening to preachers.) If you are a Greek/Hebrew novice, by dabbling into something you don’t know, you may very well limit the effectiveness of your ministry to the educated by unwitting inaccuracies.

2. Because they make contextual connections which are necessarily obscured by translation.

There’s an apparently awkward break in the chain of Jesus’ reasoning in English translations of John 15:1–4. See if you can catch it:

I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me.

One of these sentences doesn’t at first seem to flow very well with what comes before and after it. Why does he break out of his vine and fruit talk to mention, “Already you are clean”? That “already” implies some contrast with uncleanness—but he was just talking about pruning, not cleaning. And after his reference to cleaning, he goes back to talking about the main topic of the paragraph, namely branches and vines.

This is a perfect example of the kind of thing that knowing Greek can do for you. The word translated “clean” and the word translated “prunes” in the previous sentence are from the same Greek root (καθαρος). Jesus isn’t awkwardly lurching; he’s making a bit of a pun that’s hard to put into English. You can’t make these sorts of connections (the sorts that are necessarily obscured by translation) without knowing the original languages.

3. Because they rule out some interpretations.

Knowing original languages is more often helpful for ruling out bad interpretations than anointing true ones. Consider Psalm 14:1.

The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds, there is none who does good. (ESV)

In the English Bible translation I grew up with, the KJV, the words “There is” are italicized, meaning that they were supplied by the translators and not present in the original Hebrew. That’s true.

So I have heard numerous people say over the years that, supposedly, the italics indicate that the original Hebrew reads, “The fool hath said in his heart, ‘No, God!’” (I particularly remember hearing this from a clever roommate in college, who won the smarter-than-thou award for that day.)

But once I learned Hebrew I discovered that there’s a significant problem with this argument: the Hebrew word translated “no” doesn’t mean “no,” as in the opposite of “yes.” It means “non-existence of.” The fool described in Psalm 14:1 is denying God’s existence, not saying “No” to God.

Knowing Hebrew didn’t give me the right interpretation of this verse; that was something I already knew from my English translation(s). It just enabled me to decisively rule out the urban legend interpretation.

… For reasons 4 through 9 please follow the direct links, below.

5 Reasons Studying the Original Languages Is Worth the Pain

5 More Reasons Bible Teachers Should Learn Greek & Hebrew