1-3 John (The IVP New Testament Commentary Series), by Marianne Meye Thompson

This weekend, I finished reading Marianne Meye Thompson's commentary on the Epistles of  John for The IVP New Testament Series. Thompson is probably one of the best female Biblical scholars in the world today and certainly one of the best when it comes to the Johannine works. I've read many of her works and conversed with her through email in my early days of seminary when I was leaning towards Johannine studies. I subsequently followed Lucan studies.

I think it is really necessary for the Christian interested in 1-3 John to read good commentaries upon the subject. John frequently writes in general, universal, absolutist, and dichotomous manner which can cause the faithful reader to make thought applications not intended by the author.

A good commentary will help the reader put some of the more stringent statements of John in context, both the context of the letters, the situation in which the letters were written, and within the overall Johnannine corpus. This is what Thompson does in her book.

1-3 John continues to be even more relevant today with its focus on love, truth, fellowship, division, and discipleship. With so much of the North American church adopting new, pseudo-definitions of what it means to love, hate, and pursue the truth, it's important for those followers of Jesus who still have their feet planted in the mission of the church to adequately relate to those other members of the church.

Here is one of my two favorite quotes from the commentary:

"Sacrificial love that models itself after Jesus' example does not enable the destructive behavior of others, but encourages them in actions that lead to love and life, and to healing and wholeness."

Telling the Grand Story to Our Children

We all love good stories. From the earliest cave sketchings to the latest award winning movie and TV show, there seems to be something intrinsic that God put into human nature to want to tell and hear great stories about life and learning. From an early age we are told nursery rhymes and fairy tales and learn all about the adventures of great heroes and heroines. When we go to school we hear the stories of great kings and queens and about the Founding Fathers of our country and the great men and women who shaped American history. These stories are important to tell as they ground children in the American experience and provide points of reference and context for how students are to interpret the contemporary world. All nations, all movements, all people groups have grand stories about themselves and their history that are used to orientate and educate their children and explain to them their culture's identity and worldview.

One of the chief characteristics of our contemporary world and its currently fashionable philosophies is an incredulity towards such grand stories, based upon the belief that they are created and reinforced by power structures seeking self-validation and are therefore untrustworthy. Personally, I am not necessarily adverse to this critique of grand cultural stories insofar as it rightly addresses the issue of stories told by a group of people in order to legitimize a particular worldview or privilege. Our world is full of people and cultures attempting to justify worldviews and ways of life contrary to God's expectations. However, I do believe that grand stories are fundamentally useful and should not be dismissed offhand but rather critiqued on the basis of how close they correspond to God's revealed Word. Nevertheless, grand stories are too often used for social and epistemic validation and are the driving force buttressing a particularly cherished worldview.

Christianity, of course, has its own grand story told through the Bible, the person of Jesus, and the Gospel message. However, the important difference between the Christian story and most others is that instead of a grand story propping up a worldview, Christianity is a story in search of a worldview. It's a complete reversal of the way much of the world acts. Christianity already has a definitive, over-arching story to be told and understood; it's not telling new stories in order to validate a pre-existing social order or conception. At most, Christians are continually re-examining the established story in hopes of creating a worldview and social order that corresponds with the narrative.

This is why telling the grand story of God's redeeming work to our children is so central to establishing  a proper worldview for Kingdom work. Without a proper foundation in a proper, grand story, children will develop other worldviews (usually unauthentic, self-serving worldviews) and then seek the stories, the narratives, and the "truths" that seem to best validate that worldview. The worldview is now buttressing one's sinful, self-serving nature. Ultimately, all false stories crack and eventually crumble when unavoidably confronted with reality, casting doubt upon the worldview and threatening an individual's self-validating conception. This is why the book of Proverbs teaches parents to train children in the way they should so they will not depart from it when they are older (22:6). This is why the Israelites continually told the story of God redeeming them from slavery. We must firmly immerse our children in the Biblical narrative to prepare them for effective, God-honoring lives when they grow older - lives that develop a Christian worldview of authentic, self-giving values.

Here are some important ways we as parents can do so:

·         Get your child an age-appropriate Bible. There are great children's and learner's Bibles available that focus on the stories of the Bible and teach fundamental principles of the Faith.

·         Read these stories to your children every night. Most good early learning Bibles offer brief synopsis of the stories that can be read in a matter of minutes and can supplement what other stories you read to your child.

·         Find your children videos that tell Bible stories. I'm a huge fan of Veggie Tales. I don't think anyone does Children's Ministry better than Bob and Larry. Those videos teach great Bible stories and other Scriptural lessons in fun, inventive ways that appeal to both children and parents.

·         Get your child involved in a Preschool and Elementary program that . Bethany's Children's Ministry offers a great curriculum that is narrative based. Over the course of your child's involvement in our weekend services, he or she will learn all the major stories of the Bible in order from Genesis to Revelation. Our curriculum, The Gospel Project, is the perfect way of enriching a child's understanding of the story of God's redemptive work in history through Israel and Jesus.

·         Get your child involved in an AWANA program. This is a wonderful program that teaches Bible stories and Scripture memorization in a fun and entertaining way.

 

Children must be fully inculcated with the story of God's saving work through Christ in history, both in the individual stories of the Bible and the sweeping narrative of the Gospel message.

Without it, our children become divorced from the foundation of life, unable to comprehend a worldview that grows effective, God-honoring lifestyles. Without it, as adults, they are tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching that comes from deceitful people. With it, our children grow into authentic, realized human beings, firmly established in reality and prepared for lives of moral and mental exceptionalism.

 

Resurrection, Religion, and the Fear of Death

I've often hear people espouse the theory that humanity created religion in order to deal with the concept of death. This theory goes that people feared the finality of death and conjured up the idea of an afterlife in order to avoid confronting reality. This theory is probably not without some merit. I am sure there are plenty of people in this world who embrace religion merely to escape this fear.

Based upon their burial practices, there is some evidence that the Neanderthals may have believed in an afterlife. Certainly, the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Canaanite religions believed in a spiritual place after death.

Interestingly enough, the Hebrews and ancient Israelites actually did not believe in an afterlife until after the time of the Babylonian Exile (539 BCE). Up until this later era, general Israelite conceptions of death held that the body was created from dust and naturally returned to dust. The body was considered holistic, not being divided into body and spirit but as a unified materialistic substance. A body didn't have a soul (nephesh); a body was a soul. Therefore, the body, created by God originally from nothing, returned to nothing at death. There was no spirit world to which the immortal body was delivered. Sheol was the representation of the grave, a final resting place for all people in dust.

It is not until after the Exile that a resurrection from the dead began to appear in common Jewish religion. It seems that the Jews began to read Exilic Bible passages about Yahweh's promise to reform the nation of Israel from exile (Isaiah 26:19; Ezekiel 37) as a promise of resurrection of the body from death. This was later picked up by Daniel and 2 Maccabees. By the time of Jesus, the vast majority of Jews believed in a resurrection of the dead.

Resurrection of the dead, of course, is vastly different from other religious ideas of an afterlife. Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans believed that the body died and the spirit continued on in some immaterial, spiritual plane of existence. The Greeks in particular believed that the spirit was an immortal form that existed prior to bodily life and continued after bodily death. The spirit was said to be indestructible and thus continued on. This is a far cry from the idea of the creator god, Yahweh, who brings everything into existence out of nothing. The Jews believed that Yahweh would one day bring back to life all of the materials that made up a person, recreating out of dust the body and spirit of man. This seems to have been a unique view among the ancient world. The Greco-Roman worldview found the idea of a resurrection of the body to be foolish, both religiously and philosophically.

Naturally, the concept of the resurrection of the dead remained a matter of faith and theory for the first several centuries of its existence. It wasn't until around the year 30 CE with the resurrection of Jesus that it was proved that, yes, resurrection of the dead was the creator god's intended purpose for humanity.

So the ancient worshippers of Yahweh (the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) did not embrace religion in order to deal with any fear of death in hopes of an afterlife. In terms of mortality, their adherence to a monotheistic, creator god, one who creates out of nothing, was of almost stoic acceptance to a supreme being whose authority to create and utterly destroy was strictly a divine prerogative.

Thankfully, that prerogative is to recreate and offer the resurrection of the body to those willing to accept it.

Anxiety and the Purposes of the Kingdom

I was reading some of the spiritual writings of Soren Kierkegaard the other day. Among the myriad of subjects upon which he is a prophetic authority, Kierkegaard also understands the spiritual dimensions of fear, despair, and the concept of anxiety. It's the concept of anxiety that most interests me. In his Christian Discourses, Kierkegaard writes that anxiety is a grappling hook by which the prodigious hulk of fear gets a hold of the individual to dominate it under its power. He further deems anxiety a distraction.

Jesus talks about anxiety in his famous Parable of the Sower (Matthew 13:18-22; Mark 4:14-20; Luke 8:11-15). In this parable, Jesus is teaching his disciples about the different reactions people have from hearing about the good news of the Kingdom of God. Some people ignore the good news, others hear the news and, after and initial burst of enthusiasm, fall away because they never had a proper foundation for their faith. Then there are those who hear the good news, have the foundation, but do not bear the true results of their faith because they are choked by the world. Jesus used the analogy of thorns that choke a plant, preventing it from bearing fruit. This immediately reminds me of one of the results of the Fall of Man where authentic work of tending to the earth is now frustrated by the growth of thorns (Genesis 3:17-19). In the same way, the world is constantly producing frustrations and distractions that inauthenticate our lives prevent us from living out our faith fully.

Jesus lists a few of these distractions in generalities: wealth, abundance of possessions, food, and pleasures of the world. It's important to note that these things are not necessarily bad in of themselves. They become bad when they distract you from growing in your faith and doing God's work.

But Jesus also mentions one other distraction and frustration that can prevent full growth in the faith: the cares of this world. Now the word used in the New Testament in these parables is merimna and is best translated as "anxiety". This is the anxiety and fear that strangles and cripples the individual and distracts him from accomplishing the personal growth and service necessary to achieve the goals of the Kingdom of God.

There are endless examples of such anxiety and fear. A few that pop to mind are concern for finances, fear of people's perceptions of one's self, fear of achieving or maintaining status and possessions, concern for health, and fear of the unknown. These anxieties hinder you from making the right decisions, silence you from speaking truth, and focus your attention on the peripheral fluff while avoiding central issues.

Merimna is used a few more times in the New Testament. It is used in Luke 21:34 when Jesus warned the people not to be distracted from the coming destruction of Jerusalem by Rome. Paul uses the term in 2 Corinthians 11:28 when describing the troubles and burdens he faced as an apostle. Along with the beatings, shipwrecks, pains, hunger, thirst, and other sufferings he experienced that sought to prevent him from preaching the gospel, Paul adds the anxiety that comes upon him ministering to the churches. Like his other sufferings, this anxiety sought to distract and prevent his Kingdom work.

Finally, Peter uses merimna in his first letter when talking about suffering and submission (5:7). He quotes Psalm 55:22, saying, "Give all your anxiety to [God] for he looks after you." Essentially, this is the same teaching of Jesus when he tells his disciples to avoid fear but have faith in God who looks after you (Matthew 10:28-31).

Throughout this letter, Peter is delving into some of the more scandalous aspects of Christian ethics with regards to defeating evil through submission and suffering. Much of this is counter-intuitive to the way in which we generally understand the world to work. However, there are ways in which we can go about giving our anxieties to God. My personal experience has shown me that some individuals - because of personality or life experience - have a more difficulty not worrying than others.

So how do we do so? How do we give our anxieties to God?

1) Tell God your troubles, sufferings, and concerns. This is an engagement with God, opening our hearts and minds to receive the message and instruction we need at this particular time.

2) Trust that God is who he says he is and that he will do what he says he will do. This means that whatever God tells us through Scripture or authentic, subjective experiences is what he will do. A significant part of this is to realize and immerse yourself in the Gospel message that God is defeating evil and has the final victory. The more we inculcate ourselves in this reality, the fewer anxieties we will have.

3) Do exactly what God says. Neither of these previous two points means doing nothing. Of course, telling the Creator of the Universe your problems and believing that he'll act in accordance is definitely something we do. But even after that, giving God your anxieties is then about proceeding in accordance with God's instructions and not going beyond that. The innate human tendency is act out upon our own devices. We sometimes want to do more than God wants us to do or to take actions that are counter-productive to the best solution.

4) Limit the distractions in your life. Cut back on possessions, activities, and the peripheral aspects of life towards a more simplistic , less chaotic existence. Our modern, consumeristic society has the potential of choking us and distracting us from the our proper purposes. If we can simplify our lives, we lessen the potential for the anxieties that come from such things.

In the end, anxiety is a force seeking to inauthenticate our lives by separating us from our purpose in God. It is a force to be overcome, and we can do so by fully embracing God and his purposes.

Job and the Crisis of Theology

My pastor gave a good sermon on the book of Job this weekend - one of my favorite books. The Book of Job is set during the time of the Patriarchs but was written after the time of the exile.

In a sense, the book (like Ecclesiastes) is a response to the theology taught in the books of Deuteronomy and Proverbs. These latter two books offer a fairly clean cut approach to life in that it plainly states the general cause and effect truth that good begets good and evil begets evil. If we lead moral, righteous lives, we will be blessed by God and his ordained will. If we act immorally and lead unrighteous lives, we will reap bad consequences. This theology is generally true and real life experience bears it out. However, this theological framework does not tell the whole truth. There are times when  evil flourishes and the good unjustly suffers. Real life experience bears this out.

The book of Job's purpose is to deal with the theological particular of the righteous person suffering. Job is a righteous individual with strong faith in God. When he suffers blamelessly, his whole theology is shook to the ground. He wonders why God would allow such evil to befall him. His three friends are disturbed by the questions he is raising about how God relates to man and begin to argue with Job, trying to defend God and attempting to correct Job's theology. Much of what Job's three friends espouse is the theology of Proverbs and Deuteronomy. The most interesting part of this book is that Job listens to the theologizing of his three friends and agrees with them. His response is that he agrees with all their theology - it's his theology! - but it just does not fit his circumstance. Throughout his ordeal, Job never loses his faith/trust in God, but wrestles with the theology. From this perspective, the book of Job is about a crisis of theology, rather than specifically a crisis of faith.

Yet, Job remains unshakeable in both his belief in God and in the belief of his innocence.