Why the Bible isn’t a power document

Liberal strains of textual criticism of the Bible question whether it was really written (as we have it today) by the apostles. Some people think that early church leaders, hungry for the control that comes from “having the keys to heaven,” tampered with the words of Jesus, and the whole Bible in general, in order to get Jesus to say and be what they needed him to be to get power in his name. In reality, some people think, Jesus was just a teacher of love and peace, who never claimed to be God; but disciples-turned-propagandists put words in his mouth so that they could use his teachings and life as the basis for theocracy.

The problem is, what is contained in the Bible is destructive to any attempt at theocracy. Jesus destroys the concepts of centralized access to God and religious hierarchy. If there was tampering going on, the perpetrators did a terrible job of securing their own authority.

Jesus refused to set up an “establishment”
For example, Jesus reproves the apostle Peter for acting satanic, probably moments after he was told he would be the rock on which Jesus would build his church. I.e. Peter was the first pope. If you are trying to establish clean roots as a church politician, you might want to omit that one. What is most striking is why Jesus calls Peter Satan: simply because he said Jesus wouldn’t die. Peter wanted Jesus to use his power and destroy his enemies.

Jesus says that his kingdom is not of this world. (John 18:36)

He models service for the apostles of washing their feet- a job reserved for lowly servants. Peter doesn’t like the idea.

Peter was eager to establish a theocracy, but Jesus shot him down. Eventually, Peter himself wrote
1 Peter 2:13-17

at a time when Rome still ruled.

Jesus decried the religious establishment of his day.
Matthew 234:1-12

So if you’re trying to make people think that you’re God’s emissary, in charge of mediating between God and man as the vicar and successor of his incarnated self, you probably want to write a different scripture.

But, if you’re a real eye-witness who is telling the truth, you might say exactly what we find….

Holy texts as unholy weapons: rephrasing the question

October 10’s USA Today featured an article by Tom Krattenmaker in the “On Religion” column that was quite an interesting read. The title: “Holy texts as unholy wapons”; the main idea: “The Bible, as well as the Quran, has some accounts of God commissioning barbaric violence.” Krattenmaker illumines the discussion between Biblical scholars such as Lucado, Frazee, and Jenkins on passages of the Old Testament. For example, when God tells the Israelites to destroy all of the Amalekites – every man, woman, boy and girl. Even every animal.

Krattenmaker conveys the flavor that this God is arcane and embarrassing to Christians. Not only that, but belief in such a God could open the door to modern-day violence. The prescription? Krattenmaker cites Jenkins:

Situate the bloody passages in their place and time – a place and time with a vastly different moral understanding of violence and its justifications. A useful takeaway for Christians today is the imperative to spiritually smite…anything that corrupts one’s faith or devotion to God.

For the most part, I agree. The way that God dealt with the nations surrounding the Israelites cannot be imported wholesale today. We must understand the cultural filtering that hermeneutics and Biblical history require. “What would my ‘Amalek’ be today?” Some abstraction and internalization of the meaning of these stories is necessary, if only for the reason that the New Covenant moved God’s presence from the outside of His people to the inside.

I would ask, though: does Jenkins’ reponse carry some subtext? His answer sounds like one made by a person who believes that the commands of annihilation were contrived, and the holy books compiled, by men who only thought they were hearing from God. Is there a whispered message? “That’s what was right for them, in that time, with their slightly archaic understanding of the divine. The question is, which parts do you feel comfortable garnishing your own spirituality with?” What’s the problem with that? It assumes that God was merely a cultural imagination. If those commands really were delivered by an unchanging God, we cannot just relegate our explanation to culture.

Understanding why some misguided, devout people thought that their God wanted them to murder a nation would be rather easy. Delusion. Inferior evolution. Does Jenkins really believe that God exists as he is discretely described in the Bible, and that he was saying what the Bible says he was saying? I wonder whether he would give a straight answer to this question. (It feels to me that Krattenmaker is perhaps insidiously indicting the moral consistency of the Bible, and to the extent that this is the motivation behind his article, we should get a coffee and talk about his objections to the existence of an objectively real God and whether God can actually reveal himself in the world.)

For those (and only those) who accept the Bible as the actual penetration of the revelation of YHWH into a race of doomed souls, the question of what to do with these Biblical passages gets a little harder. We believe in an all-powerful, all-righteous, all-loving God. How God might be exercising fierce wrath as well as unrelenting mercy boggles the mind. Especially for the modern man. Did God really say that the Amalekites were a stench in his nostrils, and did he really command the Israelites to commit a genocide? Our global culture (and many of Jesus’ teachings) champions acceptance, tolerance, and peace. How do we explain actions which at first seem like they come from a being with a radically different disposition than the God of the New Testament? That’s the real question that emerges from this USA Today article. It’s not a question I have satisfactorily answered. But I’m committed to finding an answer that works. So…onward in my quest toward Immanuel.

Sayings NOT found in scripture

From the Blue Letter Bible (awesome resource!)

Moderation in all things.
Once saved, always saved.
Better to cast your seed….
Spare the rod, spoil the child.
To thine ownself be true.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
God helps those who help themselves.
Money is the root of all evil.
Cleanliness is next to godliness.
This too shall pass.
God works in mysterious ways.
The eye is the window to the soul.
The lion shall lay down with the lamb.
Pride comes before the fall.

A potential origin of the Magi’s information

“I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not near; A star shall come forth from Jacob, A scepter shall rise from Israel, And shall crush through the forehead of Moab, And tear down all the sons of Sheth.” – Numbers 24:17

This blessing was uttered by the prophet Balaam (the one with the talking donkey) about Israel when he was asked to curse Israel. Balaam was not an Israelite; he was a pagan sage who lived to the east, along the Euphrates river.

Babylon is also next to the Euphrates. When Daniel and the Israelites were captive in Babylon, we know there were “magicians” who served the Babylonian kings. The term used for the magicians has the same root as the term that refers to the “Magi from the East” who followed the star to Jesus.

According to Larry Jaffery of Middle East Ministries, Balaam, the Babylonian wise men, and the Christmas wise men, could have all been part of the same strain of philosophy, connected through a line of “eastern” intelligentsia and academics who would have had access to the same body of collected knowledge.

If it is true that this Babylonian thought was connected, even as it is true that “western thought” is built upon reference to a collection of ancient writings such as Aristotle, Rousseau, and Dickens, then what if the Magi knew about Balaam’s prophecy? Could it be that his prophecy was part of how they associated the coming of the Jewish King with the appearance of a star?

I’m not sure how that would affect the Magi and intriguing role in the Christmas story. In any case, the idea is fascinating and worth maintaining for further thought.

Migdal-eder

Migdal-eder, translated “tower of the flock”, was a shepherd’s watchtower near Bethlehem, between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. In the photo above, the town of Bethlehem can be seen in the background, Migdal Eder is to the left of the valley, in the center, on the high hill. Thanks Rabbi Michael Short for this source.

Jacob camped there briefly in Genesis 35:21, and the following was prophesied about it in Micah 4:8:

“As for you, tower of the flock, Hill of the daughter of Zion, To you it will come— Even the former dominion will come, The kingdom of the daughter of Jerusalem.”

Perhaps this could be a poetic metaphor for Jerusalem itself, but it could also be a reference to this more specific place. If this is true, it would be fascinating to note that the shepherds “in the same region, out in the fields” near Bethlehem (Luke 2:8) were likely in Migdal-eder. When the angels appeared to the shepherds, they were fulfilling prophecy.

Additionally, in Targum pseudo-Jonathan, an Aramaic translation of the Hebrew scriptures that served as a paraphrase or commentary to the Jews, there is a note about the verse in Micah: “It is the place where the Messiah will be manifested in the end times.”

Praise be to God for his prophecies, all fulfilled in Jesus Christ!

These scriptural observations were presented this morning by Larry Jaffery of Middle East Ministries at Centreville Baptist Church.

Pre-tribbers, a little explanation?

“But the one who endures to the end, he will be saved.” (Mark 13:13)

“Unless the Lord had shortened those days, no life would have been saved; but for the sake of the elect, whom He chose, He shortened the days.” (13:20)

“But in those days, after that tribulation…He will send forth the angels and will gather together His elect from the four winds, from the farthest end of the earth to the farthest end of heaven.” (13:27)

At the coming of the Son of Man with power, after the tribulation, that’s when he will gather his elect. How do we reconcile a pre-tribulation rapture with this? It seems quite difficult to me.