Worship Music and the Language of Romance

 The Bible nowhere describes the relationship between the individual Christian believer and Christ using romantic terminology. It does describe the Church as a collective body that way - “husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church”. But nowhere does it tell the individual person to think of his salvation in those terms. And yet that language has tended to permeate contemporary worship music since its beginning. And this is one of contemporary worship music’s biggest problems. The fact is that when you use an unbiblical terminology to refer to something as central to the Bible as salvation, wrong theology and a wrong spiritual life can’t help but be the result.

One question that is brought up in this, though, is whether or not The Song of Solomon should be taken as a metaphor for the individual believer’s relationship with God or Christ.

The Song of Solomon serves at least two purposes. The first one was, and is, to teach the people of God what a godly, natural, romantic relationship is supposed to look like. Its second purpose, in its Old Testament context, was and is to illustrate Yahweh’s love for Israel collectively. That then carries over to Christ’s love for the Church in the New Testament. The Church is the New Israel.

As a picture of Yahweh’s love for Israel, this then sets the stage for the writings of the OT prophets later, as Yahweh brings charges of adultery against Israel, and as He threatens her with divorce for her harlotry with the nations, which divorce is finalized in the Book of Revelation, manifested in real history through the Roman assault on Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD.

It is also with this divorce motif in mind that Revelation 2-3 also has to be read, alongside of the apostasy passages of the New Testament, namely John 15, Romans 9-11, and the entire Book of Hebrews. Yahweh has divorced Israel, because He requires faithfulness, as any spouse should. Individual churches then also should be diligent in their faithfulness, lest He remove their lampstands, which is just another metaphor intended to illustrate the same ending of relationship with God.

But there isn’t a verse in Scripture, in either the Old or New Testaments, that suggests we should take the Song of Solomon as an illustration of the individual believer’s relationship with God. There have been commentators over the past two thousand years who have tried that, but Scripture simply doesn’t support it. There’s nothing inside or outside of the book that says we should read it and apply it that way.

I Am Of Calvin, I Am Of Wesley

 No matter what your denomination or church tradition may be, honesty requires recognizing that God has worked throughout history in denominations and church traditions other than your own. And humility should lead all of us to listen to what the Bible teachers and theologians of other church traditions have to say. No single denomination or church tradition has ever gotten every last thing right.

The Terror of the Lord

 The presence or absence of quiet meditation in the sanctuary before a worship service goes a long way in telling you what you need to know about a church.

All the robes and candles and incense in the world won’t make up for a lack of holy fear when entering into the presence of the God of all things.

Original Sin

 There have been different views on Original Sin throughout Church history - how Adam’s sin has affected all of mankind down through the ages. Often, though, the assumption has been that infants cannot sin - that it takes some level of consciousness of themselves, of God, of right and wrong, and of the world around them, to sin, a consciousness infants do not and cannot have. But can anybody actually prove that? On the contrary, children prove from a very young age that they are sinners. They often do wrong, and that intentionally, knowing they are doing wrong. The only thing stopping infants from at least some sins often is a lack of mobility. 

John the Baptist leapt in Elizabeth’s womb when Mary, carrying Jesus in her womb, approached them. We can’t understand it, but that was already an acknowledgement on his part of who Jesus was. While this was a special case, it demonstrates that infants are capable of a greater level of consciousness than we tend to expect.

There is no verse of Scripture that says that infants are innocent, in some overarching way. Rather, while infants may not yet be guilty of most specific sins, Scripture teaches us that they are born corrupted by sin.

The majority position in my own Reformed tradition has been that Adam’s sin in the Garden has been imputed to all his progeny, and will continue to be so for all those yet to be born. We are all guilty, in some sense, of Adam’s sin. The remedy, then, is the righteousness of Christ imputed to all those who place their trust in Him. But even if one won’t go that far, one has to affirm that infants are born corrupted by Adam’s sin. When David says “In sin my mother conceived me” (Psalm 51), he clearly wasn’t saying she was in sin when or by conceiving him. It was his own sin in view, whether in terms of corruption, or guilt, or both. And where the corruption of sin is, is there any reason to assert that acts of sin are not possible? Maybe there is, if we don’t understand what sin is. But if hate is a sin - or greed, or selfishness, or even simply failing to love one’s neighbor - then infants can sin, and they probably do far more than we might expect.

Right Worship

 If all right theology, and in fact all right living, begins with the wonder of God, then the answer when a person sins isn’t the endless lamenting of one’s sin or inability, but a returning to the wonder of God.

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One reason why we Christians argue so much about which hymn to sing, which liturgy to follow, which way to worship is that the commandments teach us to believe that bad liturgy eventually leads to bad ethics. You begin by singing some sappy, sentimental hymn, then you pray some pointless prayer, and the next thing you know you have murdered your best friend. -- Stanley Hauerwas

Disposable Men

 A patriotic Christian brother who served in north Africa in the 80s said to me recently, “I don’t know that anything we did there was any good at all.”

Patriotism can be a good thing. Unthinking, uncritical, undiscerning patriotism is not. Many a person who has served in good faith has died needlessly in the service of this country. Those who served in good faith deserve honor. Those politicians and profiteers who in their greed sent men like so much cattle to be slaughtered in pointless wars will receive their just reward.

The God Who Acts

 The Psalms, making up the hymn book of the Old Testament, were written with certain assumptions in view which we tend to be missing in our singing today. 

1.) God acts in time and space according to the worship, the faith, the prayers, and the obedient faithfulness, of His people.

2.) He blesses His people when they obey Him, and disciplines them when they don’t. He also comes to their aid when they cry out for Him in humble dependence, showing Himself at work in their lives according to their needs.

3.) His acts are generally verifiable, though exceptions exist, because God is eternally uncircumscribable. Sometimes God and His acts are known only to Him, as He chooses to keep Himself hidden. And yet He often makes Himself known even to unbelievers through His acts, such that He receives glory through them knowing He is the one living and true God. When God acts, both believers and unbelievers can identify it.

4.) Victory and blessing are things that should be expected among God’s people. This does not mean sinless perfection, but a general trend in that direction. Nor does it mean that sickness, suffering, and death will never exist, or only exist as the result of some specific sin. The absence of victory and blessing among God’s people, however, often indicates unbelief and disobedience.

5.) Reflecting on God’s acts in history through corporate song should be a part of worship. The Israelites could and would sing about how they saw God acting in their own time.

Our singing, in contrast, quite often has a Gnostic tilt to it - detached from our own lives, and as if God stopped operating in the world in the first century. Or, it is individualistic, focusing strictly on the salvation of individuals. At its best it focuses on the Work of Christ. But somehow we sing as if Christ’s work has no ongoing effects beyond the salvation of individuals, pulling them out of a world that is not under His kingly authority and supervision. 

These thoughts are a work in process, and for now I offer them up as they are.

Errant Hearts

 In Reformed theology we regularly talk about the failure of much of the Church in having bad theology, or just weak or absent theology altogether. This is without a doubt a common and ongoing problem. And it always has negative effects. But the Reformed church has proven itself to be ineffectual all on its own, and that for many decades. And sometimes that has shown to be connected to outright sin. I find myself beginning to wonder more and more if the problem in the Church isn’t so much bad or weak theology, but rather a failure to love and trust God.

Now the Reformed mind will immediately start talking about how this is a false dichotomy, noting that bad doctrine hinders a person’s understanding of, his trust in, and his love for, God. And, how unbelief and a lack of love will prevent our understanding of Scripture. But let’s knock off the theological debates and our desire to rush back to intellectual categories for a second.

Are people really loving, and trusting, God? I think that is the question. And it should be addressed all on its own.

God has proven Himself quite resilient throughout the ages in being able to work around and alongside of His people’s imperfect knowledge. But Jesus Himself found at times he was unable to do miracles due to people’s unbelief. Faith and love, these are the indispensable things.

It seems to me we’ve been getting this all wrong.

Hypocritical Unbelievers

“The Church is full of hypocrites.”

You will never meet a person, Christian or otherwise, who lives fully consistent with what they say they believe. Everybody is in some part of his life a hypocrite. If you believe that isn’t the case about a person you know, either you aren’t thinking deeply enough about the matter, or he’s got you fooled.

But there are Christians who largely live consistent with what Scripture teaches, while they occasionally sin. Unbelief might want to believe otherwise, but unbelief begins from a position of falsehood, and wants to see what it wants to see, no matter the truth. A wicked person naturally wants to drag everybody else into sin and misery with him, because otherwise he has to face up to God and his sin on his own.

Beyond this, there can never be such a thing as a “consistent unbeliever”. By virtue of living in a universe created by the one true God, any position of sin and unbelief creates contradiction and conflict, which can only be reconciled by faith.

Should We Expect Christians To Doubt God?

Two quotes side by side, not merely to be controversial, but as an exercise in thinking the matter through publicly.

“Surely, while we teach that faith ought to be certain and assured, we cannot imagine any certainty that is not tinged with doubt, or any assurance that is not assailed by some anxiety.” - John Calvin

"Doubts should never be cherished, nor fears harbored. Let none cherish the delusion that he is a martyr to fear and doubt. It is no credit to any man's mental capacity to cherish doubt of God, and no comfort can possibly derive from such a thought. Our eyes should be taken off 'self', removed from our own weakness and allowed to rest implicitly upon God's strength. 'Cast not away therefore your confidence, which hath great recompence of reward.' A simple, confiding faith, living day by day, and casting its burden on the Lord, each hour of the day, will dissipate fear, drive away misgiving and deliver from doubt: 'Be careful for nothing, but in everything, by supplication and prayer, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God.'" - E. M. Bounds

Contemporary “Christian” Musicians

 Here’s the thing about Contemporary Christian Music, and along with it the Contemporary Worship scene. The safe assumption to start out with is that their theological knowledge is severely lacking. You should expect to find errors, sometimes serious, and sometimes just silly. You can also expect that at some point later in their lives some of them will admit either that they were never Christians to begin with, or that they have apostatized from the faith. If you want good theology, which you should, and if you want Biblical direction for your life, the place to start is with a solid Bible-believing church that isn’t afraid to use the word “theology”. The worship should not be dry and dull, nor should it be chaotic, but rather reverent, sincere, and passionate. And then you should start reading theological books, by good theologians, the kinds of teachers most people have never heard of, but who are solidly grounded in the historic doctrine of the Christian faith. Look to godly people in your life for recommendations, and don’t be afraid to read outside of your own church tradition.

1 Corinthians

 The big context of 1 Corinthians is that the Corinthians were dividing among themselves according to different teachers. Each one was claiming that their teacher was the best, and they were using this as a source of identity and pride. In other words, they were each replacing Christ with their chosen teacher. Paul was pointing out that this was a fleshly and worldly way of thinking - immature, and the way of thinking that existed among the Jews and the Greeks. And in this, like the Jews and the Greeks, the Corinthian Christians were seeking worldly power and worldly wisdom. But the way of Christ was different, being the way of the cross.

It’s worth noting in this that Paul was making the Jews and Greeks parallel to each other, as ways that were different from the way of Christ. In other words, Judaism was not an option, but rather on the same level in relation to God as paganism. What Paul held to be true was completely the opposite of what Dispensationalism proposes today.

The sort of fleshliness and worldliness that existed among the Corinthians in their sectarianism is always accompanied by other forms of sin. And Paul was also seeking to address that in the book. Rather than taking the approach of humility, love, and sacrifice for one another, their overall approach was one of pride, power, contention, division, and self-exaltation. This is why chapter 13 reads the way it does. It may get read at weddings, but much of what Paul says in the chapter, and the way it fits in the larger context of the book, is skated over in doing so.

Loving Correction

 1 Cor. 4:21 

Τί θέλετε; ἐν ῥάβδῳ ἔλθω πρὸς ὑμᾶς ἢ ἐν ἀγάπῃ πνεύματί τε πραΰτητος;

“What do you want? Should I come to you with a rod [literally, “in a rod” or “in a scepter”, i.e. “in my official position exercising authority over you”] or in love and a sprit of gentleness?”

The rod here is not something used to discipline a person per se, but rather a scepter symbolizing a person’s authority.

For some reason the ESV simply ignores the τε there. But if you’re going to drop a word entirely, you should have a good reason, and there isn’t one here. The τε is a conjunction connecting ἀγάπῃ and πνεύματί, both of which are functioning as objects of the preposition ἐν. 

One of the clear things about Paul in the New Testament is that he does not like exercising his authority in discipline. He will take off the belt and use it if he has to. But he would much rather ask questions and appeal affectionately as a friend and a father to the churches in order that they might correct their behavior, so that harsh discipline is unnecessary.

An Anxious Nation

 I have been thinking for sometime now...I wonder what percentage of Americans are prescribed and take anxiety medication regularly. I would expect that official statistics are unreliable, and that the number is actually much higher than what they report. And then you consider the number of people who are taking illegal drugs and/or other prescription medication to deal with their emotional and mental issues. Altogether, the number of people who are taking some sort of medication to deal with such problems has to be sky high. Now think for a moment of the widespread problems that can result from playing with one’s body chemistry like that.

So what are the causes of mental and emotional problems?

1. Not being born again
2. Being born again, but refusing to repent of or deal with some sin in our lives
3. Not being reconciled or at peace with a person in our life
4. Not understanding Scripture in a key area, i.e. bad theology
5. Being subject to abuse, either in the present or the past
6. There can be environmental causes as well, which mess with one’s body chemistry
7. An unhealthy diet

I’m sure there’s something I’ve missed. But in each of these cases, prescription medication is simply a patch job. It does nothing to solve the actual problem, and in the long run can do more harm than good.

That Nation We Call Israel

 In the Old Testament, whenever Israel supported the wickedness of the nations, God brought them into a time of severe discipline. The nation that today calls itself Israel also supports all manner of wickedness, the kinds of things that Christians would generally recognize as being evil. On top of that, according to Dispensationalism God has not yet brought Israel together as a nation, as that is something that cannot happen until the Church is raptured from the earth. Why then do Dispensationalists so thoughtlessly support this nation that calls itself Israel, in spite of its wickedness, and purportedly on Biblical grounds?

What is needed of the Church in America today, among other things, is for Christians to know basic theology. And with the events this week, we’re seeing how much that is lacking.

The Peace of the Lord

 “All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all; yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.” (Westminster Confession of Faith 1.7)

Trying to push the requirements for salvation beyond what Scripture says is a mark of spiritual immaturity, or as Paul puts it, being carnal or fleshly. It is the partisan spirit he talks about in 1 Corinthians. Arminians can be saved, and so can Calvinists. Or, for that matter, a person may call himself either one and not be regenerate.

The number of things a person has to know and believe in order to be saved is really quite small. And that leaves a world of things both in and out of Scripture to seek out with joy - in fact, to find enjoyment in. When we are always seeking to turn those things into grounds on which to battle or exclude fellow believers we surrender the peace and joy Christ purchased for us by His work. And that is the point at which we, following Paul, may reasonably begin questioning our salvation. The fruit of the Spirit, he tells us, is peace.

Captain Marxism

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier ended up being nothing more than Marxist, racist tripe. It was fairly obvious at the outset that that was the direction it was going. But it was a question of just how bad it would be. The answer turned out to be “pretty bad”. When you’re making your Antifa analogs the real heroes and handling them with a Christ-like reverence, then you’ve basically sold the boat when it comes to any amount of logic or truth. And it looks like we can largely expect the same from Disney in the future. 

No country, no people, no culture, can bear the weight of this false narrative, this dishonest mythology, for long. But we have already been bending under it for some time now. It will take a miracle at this point to prevent the seemingly inevitable collapse.

Find the Sin

 Isn’t the constant game of “find the sin”, which happens on social media, and which is prevalent among the Reformed brethren, exhausting? And it doesn’t seem at all to follow the pattern we see in Scripture, with regard to the presentation of truth and our interactions with each other. The writers of the Bible themselves, as spokespersons of God, were far more poetic and seductive than we tend to be, as was our Lord himself. Beyond that, God thankfully is far more patient with us than we tend to be with each other. He gives us a lifetime in which to become sanctified, while we tend to expect it of each other instantly in any given moment. We are all partly unbelievers until we die, Calvin said, and this should result in large amounts of patience, compassion, and understanding.

Gratitude, quiet kindness, and the pursuit of beauty should probably characterize our lives more than they actually do. And if they did, it would probably bring more health to the church, and more real change in the world around us. 

At what point are we giving godly, loving counsel and rebukes, and at what point are we simply laying upon each other burdens too heavy to bear?

Relativism is a Wanderer

 If you insist on being a relativist in one area of life, that denial of absolute transcendent truth will inevitably show up in other areas of your life and thinking. Are you trying to pretend that sexuality is a fluid and unfixed thing? Then don’t be surprised if one day you find yourself defending racism. There’s a reason why American Leftists who cry out against American racism but support an individualistically determined notion of sexuality will then turn around and say that the treatment of women or minorities in Muslim countries is just “their culture”, or will turn a blind eye toward China’s treatment of Christians and the Uighurs. Once you’ve thrown out the Law of God and His perfect character as the standard, you no longer have a way of defining right and wrong, or, for that matter, anything.

Slaves No More

For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace. (Romans 6:14)

But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. (Romans 6:17-18)

Those who are not saved are enslaved to their sins. They cannot help but sin. But Paul here is saying that those who are born again are no longer enslaved to sin. Though the choice to sin is in one sense always there, sin will not characterize the Christian’s life.

But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. (Romans 6:22)

Where there is no holiness of life, salvation does not exist. The person who is not pursuing holiness is not saved. Sanctification is absolutely necessary in order for a person to receive eternal life. There are no “Carnal Christians”.

We then have to apply this back to Romans 2:6-11, “He will render to each one according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; but for those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury. There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek, but glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek. For God shows no partiality.”