We’ve all read them, and some of us have written them- those catchy little blog pieces that promise sometimes to give us 5 of this, or more boldly THE 7 of that. Perhaps like me you have puzzled over this numeric pandemic. So this morning I’ve been thinking it through, the whys and the wherefores, and thought my answer would make a nice blog post. Here then, they are:
5. To get you to read the piece. Bloggers write to be read, and when we see a pattern emerge chances are the bloggers will at least believe that following the pattern will help draw you in. I know that my pieces 5 Reasons You Should Go to Your Local Abortion Mill and 5 Things I’m Surprised I Don’t Find in the Bible did, for me, well in terms of viral-ity. Not virility mind you, viral-ity.
4. So you will know what to expect. Strictly speaking this isn’t a new reason, but is only further exposition of the previous reason. That hasn’t stopped other bloggers, and it won’t stop me. Those numbers tell you, by the title alone, that what you will get is bigger than just a one-off idea, but smaller than a chapter in a book. That is, it tells you the blog piece is blog piece sized. Blog readers tend to like that, and so dive right in.
3. So you will think you are reading an expert. This is especially true for those brave souls who insist their list is complete, the “THE 7 of that” people. This suggests that your author has scoured the known world, rejected all pretenders to the list, and winnowed it down to all that properly belong on the list, and no more. If you think there are 8, or 9, or 10, you’re just wrong. There are seven, unless of course the piece is THE 5 Reasons Bloggers Put Numbers in Their Titles, in which case, there are 5.
2. Next, it’s a handy little framework for the piece. Form and function come together here as the blogger puts together six or seven paragraphs, complete with transitions between them such as, “Secondly” or “Next” or “Finally.” Add an intro paragraph, an outro paragraph and you got yourself a nice blog-licious stew.
1. Because writing five short pieces is easier than writing one long one. Bloggers, as a rule, are passionate about brevity, pursuers of concision. That’s why we write blog pieces more than we write books. That’s why we are likely, if a blogger, to also be a twit. Five pieces, 280 words each is a snap, even easier than 5 tweets, 280 characters each. These things practically write themselves.
There may, of course, be more reasons. I’m not one of those THE guys. Rather your humble blogger is well, a humble blogger. If I come up with more, I can always write another piece, complete with a link back to this one, “Five More Reasons Bloggers Use Numbered Lists.” We’ll have to wait and see. Shoo now. That’s enough time behind the curtain. Back where you belong. But do tell your friends.
Thesis 49- We must remember that we have been bought with a price, that we are not our own.
There has been a great deal of talk lately about freedoms won and freedoms lost. On the one hand we have people marching in the street, demanding this and demanding that. On the other we have people cowering in their homes, because they were told to do so. Freedom, it seems, isn’t what it used to be. Various governments, for various reasons chip away at our liberties. Our forefathers must be spinning in their graves.
We live in a world where roughly half of our income is taken by sundry governments. I must ask the state permission to build a shed in my back yard. I must, at the moment, if I wish to host an event at my home for over 25 people, get permission from the state. I must, if I want to keep a higher percentage of my income, tell the government what I spent my income on. But I am a free man. I am free, ironically enough, precisely because I know that I am a slave.
My master, however, isn’t the state. My master is the state’s master. The very freedom Jesus came to gave us is built upon the truth that He is the one who bought us. His blood has paid for me, body and soul, and so I am not my own. Those of us who can remember our conversion typically remember when we remembered this truth. When we were first confronted with our sin, when we first embraced God’s grace, we cried out words to this effect, “O Lord, I will go where you send me. I will do what you tell me. Here I am. I am yours.” But then most of us forget.
We move through our lives believing our Master owes us, that indeed He works for us. We look upon hardship as a mysterious, unfair intrusion as we are seeking to go about our business. But we are to be about our Master’s business, which is, in His grace, His glory and our good. Hardship is our business, for we are not greater than our Master.
A wise man once sang that we will all have to serve somebody. A wiser Man still told us that no man can serve two masters. I am free not because I am my own, but because I am His. I cannot be enslaved by the state, even if it has me in chains, because I already belong to Him. I cannot be enslaved by my desires, because He desires to purify me. I cannot be enslaved by the culture, because He has made me not just a citizen of that city whose builder and maker is God, but has made me there a king with Him. I am free precisely because I belong to Jesus. His burden is easy. His yoke is light. As I remember my enslavement to Him, I enter more fully into my liberty. I become more and more each day a free man.
A far better place than a blog to read up on this issue would be to pick up Samuel Rutherford’s classic work, Lex Rex. I am currently hard at work writing a children’s American history text and am right now writing on the American Revolution. It is an event that defines us, that we celebrate, but, truth be told, I’m not so sure it was right. That said, on the other side stands not only generations of flag waving Americans but at the time of the Revolution the most robust defenses of the war flowed from the pens of Presbyterian pastors.
The church has long held, on the basis of the fifth commandment and Romans 13, that Christians have an obligation to obey those who are in authority over them, whether it is citizens under a government, laity under elders, children under parents, unless or until the authority commands those under that authority to do what God clearly forbids or they forbid those under authority to do what God clearly commands. This is why Peter told the authorities that he had to obey God’s command to preach Jesus, and defy their command to cease (Acts 5).
There is, however, a great chasm that separates a commitment to disobey someone in authority over me and seeking to seize that authority for myself. My own reading of Romans 13 leaves little room for the latter, no matter how robust an understanding we give to Acts 5. Even so, I’m sympathetic to one argument in favor of the American Revolution.
There were some in the time of the Revolution, and some in our day, who argued that while the war was just, it could not justly be called a revolution. These scholars would argue that our founding fathers were fighting not for revolution, but against it. The colonies were chartered institutions under the authority of King George III. When he sought to put them under the authority of the British Parliament, he became the revolutionary. Parliament was all too willing to claim authority they did not have, and our fathers boldly objected.
The greater issue, however, than whether our fathers were in the right more than 200 years ago, but if we are ever called to follow in their footsteps. We are in the midst of steep cultural decline. Our lawmakers are behaving with increasing lawlessness. They are likewise increasingly aggressive in their claims to be able to override our own consciences. Could it happen again? Should it happen again?
Here is one more place that it is critical that we would be more focused on our own sins than on the sins of others. The overwhelming message of the Bible is submission, peace, obedience. And it in turn tells us that all of us, not just those tyrants who rule over us, are prone to abusing power, and are wont to rebel when we should not. Complacency in the church, a contented spirit watching our culture circle the drain is a genuine and widespread problem. Most of you reading this, and the one writing it however, fall off the other side of the horse. We tend to be impatient, hot-headed, cock-sure, pseudo-Jacobins. We would do well to get a firm grip on our call to submit to the Word of God, and its call to submit to the governing authorities. And to avail ourselves of all biblical means in the pursuit of justice.
We live in strange times. It used to be said that the only two things we could be certain of were death and taxes. Taxes you can still be pretty sure of, but death has recently become rather more cloudy. With the advent of assorted technological wonders in the field of medicine we can watch as a patient’s heart continues to beat, but whose brain shows no activity. With the advent of widespread organ transplants we are all the more eager to say of the donee that he or she is dead in one sense, while keeping him or her “alive” in another for as long as we can. Add to this the strange reports we read from those who say they’ve “died” but who have “returned.” They claim to have been dead enough to have been enbraced by the light, but nevertheless they walk among us. Death has become for us more like dusk than that dark night.
There are, however, limits to this lack of clarity. While dusk seeks to evade the question, is it night or is it day, we do know that midnight is night, and noon is day. And while the comatose, brainwaveless, but still breathing patient may confuse us, we know that the nurses who tend to the patient are alive, and the bodies that have been in cold storage for days down in the morgue are dead. That the bridge across the chasm is shrouded in fog doesn’t change the reality that there are two distinct mountains.
It’s important for us to understand this truth, to not be drawn into the beard fallacy (where one argues that the removal of one, then another, then another whisker will provide no definitive moment from beard to non-beard.) It’s important because central to our faith is this conviction, Jesus died. We are not affirming that the brain wave monitor went blank for a while. We’re not arguing that the Roman medical authorities broke their own rules and continued administering CPR for over half an hour. Jesus was all the way dead, midnight dead.
God ordained, before anyone had ever heard of crucifixion, that the Messiah should hang from a tree. We now know what crucifixion does to a person, the slow suffocation that makes the nails seem like kid’s play. God ordained that Jesus would be pierced on His side. We see there the water and the blood flowing out, a sign of a burst heart, both literally and figuratively. And then three days in the ground. That is the one that has always puzzled me. God didn’t need three days to put Jesus back together again, any more than He needed six days to make the universe and all that is in it. It doesn’t take three days for God to muster the strength for such a miracle. But it might take three days to prove that the resurrection was a miracle, to make us see that this death was not just dusk, but midnight dark.
Paul tells us in “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins” (I Corinthians 15: 17). If there is no resurrection, our faith is vanity. And if there is no death, there can be no resurrection. The death of Christ, and the resurrection of Christ are inescapably bound together. You cannot have one without the other, and you have no Christianity without both. Our faith is a historical faith, grounded not in our own efforts, not in the mystical powers of an object-less faith, but in historical events. We have peace with God because of what we believe about events that happened on a particular hill, and in a particular tomb outside Jerusalem two thousand years ago.
We affirm first, contra the ancient docetists and their modern heirs, that Jesus was born a man. To die one must first be alive. Jesus was no ghost, no phantom who only appeared as a man. Second we affirm that this Jesus lived not only in complete obedience to the law of God, but that He did so in history and in full view of His enemies who could lay no charge against Him. Next we affirm that this Jesus wrought miracles in particular places, and for historical people. The water was truly water, and it became truly wine. Jesus even brought life from death, most dramatically in the life of Lazarus, dead four days, decomposing, and not merely flatlined for a moment. And then He, who had the power of life in Him, died, laying down His life for the sheep. He did not swoon. He did not fall into a coma. He died. There was only darkness.
He did not, however, stay dead. Three days later this same Jesus, to be sure with His body now glorified, one that was in one sense continuous with His old body, but in another very different, threw off the bonds of death, and emerged as the first fruit of the new creation. It was not that hope was raised, as too many unbelieving liberal wolves will proclaim on Resurrection Sunday. It was not some sort of spirit body as gnostics both ancient and modern have claimed. As Thomas discovered, it was an altogether human body, once dead, but now alive.
These historical truths also have theological meaning. The life He lived He lived vicariously for His elect. He obeyed so that we might have His righteousness. And He died for our sins, taking upon Himself the wrath of the Father for us. He was raised in vindication, to prove His own innocence, and to begin the new creation, to ascend on high to put everything under His feet. When that work is complete, this same Jesus, with this same glorified body, will return to consummate His kingdom. The theological meaning not only does not undo the historical reality, but requires the historical reality to even have meaning. This is the light of resurrection morning, a light so brilliant as to be unmistakable.
A Jesus who did not die, a Jesus who was not raised, such is a Jesus that cannot save. Such is a Jesus that is foreign to the inerrant Word of God. To negotiate with these truths is to negotiate with our own souls, with our own eternity. And such is neither right, nor safe. Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. Here we stand. We can do no other.
There is a rather radical gap between the two things that hold my attention most Sunday afternoons in the Fall. On the one hand my eyes are glued to the television as I watch the Pittsburgh Steelers go to battle. These men are virtual giants. Our quarterback is bigger than our Hall of Fame middle linebacker was back in the 70s. Our offensive lineman average over 300 pounds. This year’s first pick in our draft is a wide receiver who is 6’4” 240 pounds. These men are behemoths, (and, you might be interested to know, they are also, as I type, undefeated).
The other thing that holds my attention is little, demure, gentle and fierce. For, sitting right beside me watching the game is my beloved wife, Lisa. She is my partner, my best friend. And she is faithful to her pre-marital vows. Her vow to me was that she would cheer for the Steelers. My wedding gift to her was citizenship in Steeler Nation. Better still, however, she is faithful to our Lord, and that is where the fierceness comes in.
As big and powerful as the Steeler players are, the God who made them is bigger still. And He is the Maker, Father, Protector, Teacher, Guarder of my wife. He hears her prayers. Which is just how she can be both gentle and fierce.
It is our habit, morning and evening, to read a portion of Scripture (we follow Nicky Gumble’s Through the Bible in a Year plan on youversion). It is our habit to pray together next. This morning, the morning after we watched the Steelers secure their 8th victory of the year so far, she knocked me over, sacked me, de-cleated me, pancaked me, gave me a slobber-knocker when she asked our Father to bless us both with a “mighty tenderness.”
A mighty tenderness. It is one thing to know and affirm the might of tenderness. It is still another to know and affirm the tenderness of might. She was asking that we would both know the great power He has bestowed on us as joint heirs in Christ, that we are more than conquerors. And she was asking that we would both know that the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but gentle, not destructive but life giving, not harsh, but tender. This gentle and soft gift to me from our Lord was roaring like a lion and purring like a kitten, because she knows the two are one. Just as we are.
We ought all to ask our Father, the Almighty, He who makes the mountains to shake, to bless us with power and might. We ought all ask the Son, our Lord, the lover of our souls, He who would not extinguish a smoldering wick, to bless us with His own tenderness. We ought all to ask the Spirit, the font of wisdom, to grant us the wisdom to know that might ought always be tender and that tenderness will always have might.
Lisa and I on The Trial of the Chicago 7; Modern Superstitions; God Repents?
