Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: Jesus

  • Joseph Husband of Mary

    Joseph Husband of Mary

    I’ve been using texts or subjects that Jody suggests to me this week, all dealing in some way with fathers. Today, again, I’m not going to provide the text here, as it’s a bit long. My suggested reading is Matthew 1:16-24 & Luke 3:21-23.

    “[T]he son, as people thought, of Joseph.” That’s the relationship note in Luke for Joseph as the earthly father of Jesus. We’re not told a great deal about Joseph, and we might take something negative from this lack of mention. But I think the clearest thing we hear is quite critical. “When he woke Joseph did as the angel of the Lord had directed him” (Matthew 1:24a). There’s your testimony about Joseph.

    Some years ago there was a big flurry of publications and teaching about a simple prayer, just one verse, in 1 Chronicles 4:10. It’s called the prayer of Jabez. It deals with widening our territory, and having God’s hand with us. It has been extremely popular.

    Now other than being promoted well out of context and out of proportion, I have nothing against the prayer of Jabez. It’s a good one for certain occasions. I don’t think this particular prayer is the solution to nearly as many things as people claimed, but it’s good. On the other hand, for many people it became the prayer of prosperity, the request for God to make the one praying important and successful. As such, one can get out of balance with it.

    But here’s another line. Joseph receives instructions in a dream, and when he wakes up, he does what he was told to do. It might be nice for that to become true of all of us. When God speaks, we listen.

    You see, this is the opposite of what we usually do. “Oh Lord,” we say, “hear our prayer.” That’s good. We want the Lord to hear our prayers, but it’s much more important for us to hear God’s message, God’s call, to us. That’s when things can really happen.

    I don’t mean that we’ll suddenly get God to love us more. God loves us. But when we can take any steps in God’s will, the results will be good. We’re regularly asking God to be with us. It would be better for us to ask God to help us be with Him! That’s the good place.

    The Power of Obedience cover image
    Want to learn more?

    After Jesus is born, Joseph has another dream telling him to go to Egypt. And what is the response? “So Joseph got up, took mother and child by night, and sought refuge with them in Egypt” (Matthew 2:14). Again, here goes Joseph, following God’s directions.

    There’s a power in this approach to life. It’s not about demanding that God make us successful, but rather about listening and doing what God tells us to do. Not so that God will accept us or love us, but because God has accepted us and already loves us. And because of that acceptance and love, God has the best plans for us.

    I wonder what would happen if we took that one line about Joseph to heart as much as, or even more than, the prayer of Jabez. Joseph did as the angel of the Lord had directed him.

    Will you?

  • Psalm 119:105 – Light

    Psalm 119:105 – Light

    A lamp for my feet is your word,
    and a light for my path.

    This text begins the next eight verse section of Psalm 119. We’ve been looking at the value of God’s Word throughout the Psalm, but especially in the last several verses. This verse is well-known and evokes many other verses from scripture.

    We can start in Genesis 1:3 – And God said, “Let there be light, and there was light.” The chaos of the deep covered by darkness is captured by the light. The light is brought when God speaks, a physical manifestation of God’s Word. God’s Word is found in the Bible, but it is much, much more than that. Psalm 104:1b-2 describes this light as covering.

    Exodus 13:21 ties these elements together as God goes before the people as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night providing guidance no matter what the state of the natural light. Light thus evokes both God’s creative and God’s guiding power.

    Jesus picks up this theme when in John 8:12 he says that he is the light of the world. Anyone who follows him will not walk in darkness. This also connects the light (light of life) back to the Word, which is the subject of our text today, as well as of the entire Psalm. God’s Word is more than words on paper, it is “alive and active” and represented in the person of Jesus and in the presence of Jesus in the world through his church.

    This takes us to Matthew 5:14: “You are the light of the world.” The light stretches from creation to divine guidance for God’s people, to God’s people providing that light. I connect this with the principle of God’s blessing, expressed in Genesis 12:2 – “I will bless you … so you will be a blessing.” We receive light to be light.

    How then are we to react to the works of darkness?

    With the proclamation of the light! By sharing the connection to the guidance God has given us. Let me translate me from my own poetic paraphrase of Isaiah 58. This selection begins in verse 11:

    God will guide you continually,
    satisfying your needs in the wilderness.
    God will strengthen your bones.
    You will be like a watered garden,
    like a water spring,
    one flowing year-round.

    You’ll rebuild old, despairing ruins;
    You’ll restore ancient, strong foundations.
    You’ll be called the one who repairs broken walls
    and restores streets lined with homes.

    Henry Neufeld, “Isaiah 58 – A Slightly Poetic Paraphrase” – The Jevlir Caravansary

    Where will you spread light in the darkness today?

    (Featured image generated in Adobe Express [which uses Adobe Firefly] according to my description.)

  • Psalm 119:44 – Keep it Forever

    Psalm 119:44 – Keep it Forever

    And I will keep your instruction (Torah) continually
    forever and ever.

    For another sense of Hebrew parallelism, note the short 2nd line here, “forever and ever.” This is parallel with “continually” and suggests a combined “all the time for all time.”

    If we hadn’t just read a number of verses in which the Psalmist expresses dependence on and trust in God, this would sound somewhat boastful. As it is, I read it as an expression of determination. Now determination is not, in itself sufficient, but there is nothing wrong with it when combined with the other expressions of the Psalm.

    Here we again encounter the Hebrew word Torah, expressing God’s instruction. Again, I’m reminded of the variety which is contained in Torah, when that is interpreted as the first five books of the Bible, a variety which is only increased if we see God’s instruction extending past those books. In just those books we encounter poetry, genealogy, stories of divine action, stories of human action, human faults and failings, divine interventions, moral laws, ritual laws, teaching about government, prophecy (in the predictive sense as well), visions, dreams, conversations with God, and case law. And I have doubtless missed something.

    I think as Christians we should think of how we should apply this. What is it that we are to do continually? I’d suggest that a great deal can be learned from Torah understood as the first five books of the Bible. But for us, the actions and words of Jesus are also instruction. Just as Torah goes way beyond a list of regulations, as important as those are, so Jesus goes for us well beyond a set of teachings.

    I think a critical question for Christians today is this: Can we live according to the teachings of Jesus? Continually? Forever?

    Perhaps we need to make a determination, as did the Psalmist. And don’t forget to put your trust in God for the fulfillment of that determination!

    (Featured image generated by Jetpack AI.)

  • By the Wife of Uriah

    By the Wife of Uriah

    Today as I walked I was listening to the Bible and starting the book of Matthew. Now Matthew, to the annoyance of many, starts with a genealogy.

    Are you one of those people who skip genealogies?

    Here’s what hit me today. In Matthew 1:6b I heard this “And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah.” Now I knew this, but it struck me, and immediately connected to “Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab” (v 5).

    What’s so important about this?

    Well, this is the genealogy of Jesus, supposed to be the Messiah, the King of Kings. And we are see these items in his ancestry detailed. The Bible writers did not tend to whitewash the difficult parts of the story. Indeed, they emphasize the many questionable moments in the story of redemption.

    It is the story of redemption, after all!

    Image by falco from Pixabay

  • Was Jesus Really a Healer?

    9781938434136sBy this question, I meant to ask whether Jesus actually cured people of illnesses, not whether he accomplished spiritual healing. I asked the question of Dr. Bruce Epperly, author of the book Healing Marks, when I interviewed him last night in an excursus to my series of studies on the gospel According to John. Here’s the video:

    I’ve found it quite interesting to discuss Bruce’s views on this with other Christians. His theology, as a process theologian, is different from what you will hear in most churches, especially those which hold healing services. Yet the actions are similar. He describes a different spiritual process (no pun intended), shunning the word “supernatural,” and yet he is describing something very similar to what I hear from charismatic believers.

    I have been called “liberal charismatic,” because I take a fairly open view of doctrine (though I don’t think it is unimportant), and also believe that all the gifts of the Holy Spirit are as available today as they were to the early church.

    So what do you think? Was Jesus a healer? Can healing take place in churches today?

     

  • Fear, Beliefs, and Questioning

    Image of "Dawn: Luther at Erfurt" wh...
    Image via Wikipedia

    I’ve often said that I think people who become angry when their beliefs questioned are actually less confident of those beliefs, rather than more so. But that’s a pretty broad and inadequate statement, I think.

    I was discussing this with my wife recently, and we were wondering why neither of us get annoyed with people who question our faith, when some folks we know do. In an extreme case, I recall talking to a young man at a book show who responded angrily to my book What’s in a Version?. For him, the KJV was the one and only word of God, and you could see the tension creep in at the very thought that anyone might question that fact. As the discussion progressed, it became clear that for him, faith would collapse should this one doctrinal position prove false.

    In our discussion, I recalled my own departure from faith after I received my MA. I claimed unbelief, but as I processed things, I eventually (nearly 12 years later) came to the realization that I did, in fact, believe. The belief wasn’t something one would call Christian faith, and it was limited, but having shed most doctrinal positions, I found myself believing still. In exploring that, I returned to some doctrinal positions I had held previously, but not to others.

    I think the question here is just what is the object of my faith. If I, like that young man, would find my world unraveling if one could prove that the KJV wasn’t the one and only true word of God, is my faith in God or in the doctrine? Now the KJV-Only position is an extreme example, and I do believe many KJV-Only advocates are guilty of bibliolatry, but it’s very easy, I think, for us to place our personal preferences, and even our correct doctrines, ahead of God.

    For example, T. C. Moore suggests that the Gospel is the Messiah and not the doctrine of justification by faith (HT: Political Jesus). While I accept the doctrine of justification by faith (though not with all the definitions some Calvinists place on it), I would agree. The doctrine tells us something about the object of faith. Thus I could be convinced that I had misunderstood something about the doctrine without it making me question my faith in Jesus.

    On the other hand, I want to avoid the idea that doctrine, or the content of our beliefs, doesn’t matter. What I believe about Jesus is important, at the same time as I place my faith in Jesus and not in what I believe about Him.

    Let me compare this to marriage. I love my wife. I could describe this as adequate. She, and not some one of her attributes, is the object of my love. I know that she is a great organizer, a great caregiver, that she loves and prays for our children and grandchildren, and that if the budget is short she’ll give up something she wants before something that the children, grandchildren, or I would like. It’s important that I know these things about here. They’re true.

    But I don’t focus on those things to the neglect of the person. I could be out every night telling people about those things, while neglecting my wife, herself. But more importantly, what happens when she displays weakness? My love doesn’t change. But if what I loved was merely a list of characteristics, it might.

    The two elements are a package, but I do believe that if the focus, the object, of our faith and trust is right, we will have much less fear of examining the various things we believe about that person. There is no single string you can pull to make my faith in God disappear.

    So pull away at those strands. I’ll enjoy the discussion! Maybe we’ll both learn.

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  • On Mythicist Views of Jesus

    For those who may not watch all these things the term “mythicists” refers to those who believe Jesus never existed, that the stories about him were made up at some point and were not even centered on a minimal historical figure. There is a near alternative which holds that there were so few valid words of actions of the historical figure that he might as well have just been some random figure. But that’s a different argument.

    James McGrath has an excellent short post on this, which will go into my library of links to use in response to such questions. I think he makes his case well and does so in easily understood language. He gets us away from “proof arguments” which dominate so much amateur discussion of history. Very little, if anything, can be absolutely proven about history even if it happened yesterday. One deals with probabilities. Sometimes these probabilities are overwhelming, but even so we should remember they are probabilities so as to deal reasonably with the less probable events.

    In any case, read the whole post at Exploring Our Matrix.

  • Those Gritty Physical Metaphors

    The gospel for Proper 14B is John 6:35, 41-51.  This isn’t an exposition of that passage, but something that passage brought back to my mind.

    Jesus starts with the bread metaphor.  Now for many of us, comparing spiritual food to bread comes quite naturally.  We’ve read this in the gospel many times, and we’ve heard it in churches.  Such expressions as “fresh bread for the people” or “break the bread of life” are still quite common.  But at the end of this passage Jesus touches on a theme that will become much more common through this gospel and is harder to take:  his flesh (v. 51).  This metaphor gets quite heavy in verses 52-58, as Jesus tells people they must eat his flesh and drink his blood.

    The metaphorically challenged get some kind of cannibalism out of all of this.  Yet even many Christians are uncomfortable with strong “blood” metaphors these days.  “Are you washed in the blood of the lamb” is a song lyric that is less popular than it used to be.  We want soft metaphors.

    We are also often less anxious to compare the physical and the spiritual.  There’s the saying, “so heavenly he’s of no earthly good.”  The problem with that is that if we read Jesus correctly, being of no earthly good is not, in fact, very heavenly.  Sure, we know what that saying means.  There are many people who are very “spiritual” and don’t really comprehend the things of this earth, or at least so it appears.  But I’m going to suggest that if you don’t comprehend the things of this earth, you’re not going to comprehend the things of heaven.

    I have a friend who has led many mission trips.  He’s all about providing dental care to needy people.  He gives generously of time and resources to make it happen.  But once when I was on a mission trip with him, he told me and others that he didn’t think he was very spiritual.  Now in the sense of soaring off into heavenly places over a hymn or a praise song, I would agree he’s not.  But if Matthew 25:31-46 is to be believed, he may well be the most spiritual person of us all.

    The doctrine of creation tells us that God is the creator.  The greatest thing that heaven has done in relation to us is physical.  Now somebody is sure to point me to salvation as the greatest thing.  But that is another instance of the same sort of thing.  Salvation, recreation, was a restoration of what was supposed to be in the physical universe. No matter how spiritual we make God, if we stick with scripture, he is the creator of the physical universe.  Nobody could be more “heavenly” than God, yet God creates and uses the physical.

    Those who think we should retire “blood language” as out of date and out of tune with the modern age should consider what the idea of eating human flesh and drinking human blood would have sounded like to a Jewish audience in 1st century Judea and Galilee.  It would have been very shocking language then.  And the fact is that sometimes we need shocking language to make us take a subject seriously.

    You see, we are not sort of spiritual beings who need a little elevation; we are fallen beings who need serious intervention to restore the image of God and bring us back to our spiritual place.  Sin isn’t a mild infection; it is a virulent, deadly plague.  Shocking language is needed about our shocking condition and activities.

    And sin occurs here on earth, in the physical universe.  A few shocking physical metaphors are, I believe, good for our souls!

  • Parsimony of Miracle Assumptions: Matthew 21:1-7

    Or I might title this “Was Jesus a Horse Thieving Magician?”

    I learned this story so long ago I don’t remember just when it was, but I got a Sunday School version that left me with the impression that because Jesus was God, either he knew everything, or his father revealed to him the location of the donkey, and the words to use so that the disciples could get away with it. Probably the divinity of Jesus and his command shone through his disciples, thus preventing their arrest as horse (or donkey) thieves.

    This left a glow in my mind until I thought about the story some more later. I’ve observed this same interpretation in debates online. Someone objects to the story on the basis that Jesus is supposed to be sinless, so how could he steal a donkey? (Or perhaps merely borrow one without permission.) Sadly, in the most recent case I observed, the next comment from the defender of Christianity (non-professional variety) was that Jesus could take the donkey because he was God, and after all owned everything. So who was the owner to object?

    While it’s true that in Christian theology Jesus is God, and God owns everything. But if you think about it a bit, such an argument could make the sinlessness of Jesus pretty meaningless. Why was he sinless? Well, anything he did could be justified by the fact that he was God.

    Now real Christian apologists will generally regard this as a particularly weak stab at Christianity, though I would have to say that I take seriously those objections that objectors take seriously, even though it sometimes requires effort. There is, however, no reason to get stuck on this one.

    There is no need to justify donkey stealing. Let’s go back to the start, sticking with only the version in Matthew 21. There is simply no suggestion of a miracle, such as miraculous knowledge of the donkey’s location. There is no suggestion that divinity needed to flash forth to make the story work. It is simply told bare bones. So supposing this is a modern scene, and you’re walking down a road with someone, and he says, “Go over to that farm you can see off to the left, and you’ll find a horse tied to a tree. Untie it, and bring it here. If anyone asks, say, ‘His owner needs him.’”

    Would you assume that your walking partner had received a vision, or that he knew there was a horse normally tied up there, or perhaps had some valid reason to know there was one tied up there now? Would you assume that he was asking you to participate in a bold act of horse theft, or that he had the appropriate rights to use the animal? I suspect our first assumption would be that the person had naturally acquired information, and that unless he was some kind of criminal, that he was not choosing this casual means to launch a life of crime.

    So why do we assume that Jesus did otherwise? We know he fed the 5,000, but we don’t assume that he miraculously produced every breakfast. We assume he’s sinless, so why would we assume an explanation here that opens him up to the charge of theft?

    Imagine this story instead. The day before, Jesus was going through that village, and a follower there offered him the donkey for his use. He told the man that he didn’t need the donkey that day, but would call for it later, and they agree where it would be. When he was ready to use it, Jesus used this purely mundane information to call for a donkey to which he had every right. And that is hardly the only possible set of assumptions that works with the story.

    So why didn’t Matthew fill in a few more blanks for us? First, I doubt he thought anyone would make the assumption that Jesus was stealing the donkey. Second, Matthew is trying to present Jesus as king, and telling the story in this bare bones way leaves open the impression of a sovereign requisitioning what he needed to accomplish his mission.

    Most objections to scripture result more from what we say about scripture than from what scripture says itself. Don’t get stuck with unnecessary assumptions, even if they sound miraculous and holy.

  • Jesus the Logician Project

    Joe Carter at evangelical outpost is trying to relaunch his Jesus the Logician project. I think it’s an interesting idea, and an index that I would like to see, though writing this type of material would not be my cup of tea. Thus I will simply put in this plug for those who might participate, or who might want to access the index of articles on this topic.