Creativity, and how nobody really has it

by Dan Phillips

Like you, I've often said that this or that artist, writer, guitarist, is really "creative." But when we say that, we're always wrong.

No human being has ever, strictly, created anything. That is, we've never brought anything brand-new into being ex nihilo. At our very best, we're re-creative. We may rearrange some molecules or tonalities in an inventive or fresh way. But even there, "What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

And when we are re-creating, I wonder whether all of us face the same frustration.

For instance, I've actually very recently gone back to drumming. (Cue our Bill Gothard alum readers.) Listening to Chicago's Danny Seraphine in my teens got me interested in drumming, and my longsuffering parents let me purchase a drum set. As in so many things, I was too undisciplined to stick with lessons, but I wailed away on my own in my room, until I was probably somewhere around "barely adequate." Then, after my conversion, the ministry I was under told me rock was bad, so I got rid of the drums.

But I've always had a love of rhythm, and a deep feel for it, even in playing guitar. (The Gothard fanboy readers cock an eyebrow and nod significantly.) Our church has a very skilled drummer (cue our "Satan put drums in church" readers). I sat down and messed with the drums a couple of times when no one was looking. Then I started finding extra time to practice a little, and scrape off the rust. Then the pastor heard me. Then he invited me to sit in one Sunday evening when they had no drummer.

And the rest, as they say, is history. Now I'm in the rotation, and scheduled to play again for the two services this Sunday. (Cue the "amateurs performing in church" critics.) (Cue the "I-can't-believe-you-used-the-word-'perform'" gang.) (Cue the "too-many-parenthetical-remarks" colloquium — oh wait, that's my crowd!)

All that to say this: every time I play, I'm frustrated. I have some really great ideas in my mind and (you'll pardon me) soul, but I just can't get them out my hands and feet! It was the same playing guitar.

In fact, it's the same in everything I do, even the things I arguably do better than other things. I love preaching more than just about anything — but in maybe three decades of preaching, I've never yet sat down and felt a sermon was exactly what it should have been. Ditto my writing, my parenting, my husbandry. More or less adequate for the task; never just what I was aiming at, to say nothing of what it should be.

So?, you ask.

So this makes me think how great God is. Listen:

The LORD by wisdom founded the earth;
by understanding he established the heavens;
20 by his knowledge the deeps broke open,
and the clouds drop down the dew (Proverbs 3:19-20)

Listen again:

By the word of the LORD the heavens were made,
and by the breath of his mouth all their host.
7 He gathers the waters of the sea as a heap;
he puts the deeps in storehouses.
8 Let all the earth fear the LORD;
let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him!
9 For he spoke, and it came to be;
he commanded, and it stood firm (Psalm 33:6-9)

Or consider the Creation narrative of Genesis 1—2. These chapters stand in such stark contrast to contemporary creation myths of Moses' day and earlier. In those fairy tales, there is no account of ultimate origins; all is born of strife and battle among the gods.

By stark contrast, Genesis depicts one God creating everything out of nothing, by the mere exercise and expression of His will. There is no struggle, no challenge. He says, "Let there be," and there is. Just like that.

I picture the array of the Krell power dials in the wonderful classic Forbidden Planet. Were they measuring the exertion of God's power in creation, not a needle would have flickered. God's power is that vast; quite literally unimaginable.

And what's more, He never experienced the frustration that you and I feel, the disconnect between heart and hand, between idea and reality. "Good," He says, again and again throughout creation. And then finally, when He has crowned the whole with the creation of man, "Very good." Creation reflected the idea of God. The Father's decree was carried out by the Son (John 1:3), and overseen by the Spirit (Genesis 1:2), and the whole embodied exactly what He had meant to create. Perfect conception, perfect execution.

That's creativity.

Creative? You, me? Nahh, not really.

But God?

Oh, yes. The Creator, you might say.

---

By Special Request

by Phil Johnson

---

Proverbial pairings, triplings

by Dan Phillips

A hotly-debated topic in deeper studies of Proverbs is the question of the book's arrangement. When I first started teaching the book, decades ago, it was a "given" that each verse of most of chapters 10-30 at least was largely without immediate context. The rule we all apply to other portions of Scripture — pay close attention to the immediate context! — simply does not often obtain here. Hence, Proverbs 10:1 is a complete thought, 10:2 is another, 10:3 yet another, and so on.

This dictum has been challenged by several scholars and commentators. Duane Garrett makes arrangements for the book; and that deep and wonderful Biblical scholar Bruce Waltke (who I admire deeply, but who has driven me a bit nuts — more than once), sees arrangements throughout the book.

The problem, however, is as Tremper Longman observes: these arrangements vary from scholar to scholar, and seem to reflect the ingenuity of the individual commentator more than Solomon's design.

My own position is that as a rule I do not see arrangement throughout those chapters, yet it is (to me) undeniable that some passages have related themes. I'll read (say) Garrett, and say to myself from verse to verse, "Okay... yes... maybe... what?!!" But even among the "yeses" and the "maybes," the tantalizing question is: how much of these thematic groups was Solomon's design, and how far does each verse advance the thought of how large a section?

These verses stood out to me recently as an example:

10 The name of the LORD is a strong tower;
the righteous man runs into it and is safe.

11 A rich man's wealth is his strong city,
and like a high wall in his imagination.

12 Before destruction a man's heart is haughty,
but humility comes before honor.
(Proverbs 18:10-12)

Now, each verse stands on its own two feet, makes perfect sense, and could be expounded irrespective of the others.

Yet, is there more to it? Do the three verses join to communicate a single, complex thought? If so, here's how the thought might develop:

Verse ten depicts the man who apparently has nothing — materially. Yet he has a lively faith in Yahweh. You can't see it, but he has a strong tower in the name of Yahweh. And so, in reality, though having no visible means of support, he has limitless and matchless invisible means of support.

Verse eleven, by contrast, portrays the man who apparently has everything — materially. What you can see looks like a fortress, like a strong city. He seems to have vast and powerful means of support. However, the situation is only so in his imagination. He sees it that way. But he is wrong.

Verse twelve comments chiastically (as it were) on both of those verses, beginning with the latter (v. 11), ending with the former (v. 10). The rich man's heart is haughty, imagining that he has great and real resources and wealth and provisions, and resting on them alone. But he (and they) are doomed to destruction.

By contrast, the humble man who trusts in the name of Yahweh alone is headed — not for the eternal humiliation and destruction of the rich materialist, but — for everlasting honor.

Now, there it is. Clever? I suppose. Biblical? Beyond all doubt.

But was that Solomon's intent? That's the big question.

I see some hints that it was.

There are two connections which are more easily seen in Hebrew than in English. "Strong" in v. 10 is the word `ōz, the same word as "strong" in v. 11. Also, and less visibly in English, "and is safe" in v. 10 translates a form of the Hebrew verb śāgab. It's the idea of being safe by being put up in an inaccessibly high place. It is seen again in "high" in v. 11. Same verb, same stem (niph`al, for any fellow Hebrewiacs).

I don't see any direct verbal connection with verse 12, though there is a semantic one. The word for "haughty" means "high, lofty" — a different word, but arguably a synonym for "high" in vv. 11-12.

So while I'd not argue that it's a slam-dunk that Solomon meant these three stand-alone proverbs to unite to tell a single tale, I'd certainly say that (A) he could well have, and (B) they quite handily do.

---

There's No God like YHWH

by Frank Turk

My friend Phil ended his last post in the "Elijah" series by saying this:

It's always interesting (isn't it?) to look back on an episode like this and marvel at the wisdom and goodness of God, who can bring so much eternal good out of a moment of tragedy. But real faith is to be able to trust Him in the midst of the tragedy—before we see the final outcome—and rest in the assurance that He does all things well.

And so be it -- amen. I would agree with Phil, and add the encouragement of James the brother of Jesus that we should count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

It's true, and I have no qualms with that -- this is how true faith, saving faith, acts out. This is what it does.

But as we consider the contemporary church, there is a greater danger to faith which is manifest every single day on the blogosphere and in our culture which God also warns us about, and ironically, it's that we have it pretty good.

Just to change things up a little, in order to explain that, I'm going to use the Message (don't faint):

When God, your God, ushers you into the land he promised through your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to give you, you're going to walk into large, bustling cities you didn't build, well-furnished houses you didn't buy, come upon wells you didn't dig, vineyards and olive orchards you didn't plant. When you take it all in and settle down, pleased and content, make sure you don't forget how you got there—God brought you out of slavery in Egypt.[Deu 6:10-12]

This is from the part of Deuteronomy where God, Moses and Israel are having a sort of one-time event -- you have read me go on about it before, I am sure. Moses was on the mountain receiving the 10 commandments, and when he came down the people were afraid of him and of God because of what they saw going on up there. So they say to Moses, [this is a paraphrase] "Dude, don't make us go up the mountain to God, because we won't make it. If God wants to say something to us, you go find out what it is, and whatever it is, we'll do it."

And when Moses delivers that message to God, God is actually pleased with Israel -- He tells Moses, [again, paraphrase] "If they'd always think like that they'd stay out of trouble, because this is one time they have a right-minded fear of YHWH." And in that, God gives Moses the Sh'ma and what follows.

Listen: God doesn't ever miss a beat when it comes to knowing who we are and upon what we usually hang our hopes. Here He's telling Moses to tell Israel that it's pretty easy to remember that God loves you when He's a cloud of fire and lightning on the mountain who's delivering bread every morning and squab every night, and that's all you got. But think about His warning here: "you're going to walk into large, bustling cities you didn't build, well-furnished houses you didn't buy, come upon wells you didn't dig, vineyards and olive orchards you didn't plant. When you take it all in and settle down, pleased and content, make sure you don't forget how you got there". That is, when you need Me, you're pretty quick to treat me like I'm God, but when I give you all the blessings I want to give you, you're going to like the blessings more than you like Me.

I'm pretty sure that there's not another verse of the Bible more specifically useful to most American Christians than this one -- and it's not because this verse promises us prosperity.

It seems to me that this relates directly to why we are worried about becoming "too God-centered" when a bridge falls down. Haven't we forgotten who God is because we have it so good in the first place? We're spoiled, really -- we think (each one of us) that we're the king of the world and we should have a really sweet existence where the part of "me" is played by Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie, and we each get to tell all the good jokes and hook-lines, and gas for our Sports Utility pleasure barge is free, and our jobs should not intrude outside of Monday thru Thursday 8-4 (well, Friday if you must) (and I need to catch up on my blogs before break [!] on Monday), and so on. We have a nation we didn't build, in cities we didn't toil for, and we get food we didn't plant, and we have homes that frankly pop up out of nowhere -- we didn't have to frame one wall or float any sheet rock.



We need to remember something before we start thinking about how God provides in the bad times: we need to remember -- we who are sitting in our homes reading this post via the internet -- how good God is to us almost all of the time.

I was in church on Sunday (weren't you?) listening to my Pastor close up week 20 of a 15-week series (seriously) on the core convictions of our faith, and we wound things up with the doctrine of the eternal state -- the doctrine of Heaven, and the doctrine of Hell. And as the Tad-meister was really swinging for the parking lot, I got a little stirred up and frankly I wept over the beauty of God's plan and the exquisitely-generous provision He has made for us in Christ -- and to be honest, the provision He has made for me, because I am certain it is a larger provision than average -- because my need is so much greater than average.

And my kids were sitting with me (weren't your's?), and they both put their arms around me when I was weeping.

After church, as we were driving home, my boy asked me, "Dad, why were you crying in church?" And we pulled the vehicle over so we could talk about why I was crying in church. It wasn't exactly like this, but here's mostly what I said:

The next time your child asks you, "What do these requirements and regulations and rules that God, our God, has commanded mean?" tell your child, "We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt and God powerfully intervened and got us out of that country. We stood there and watched as God delivered miracle-signs, great wonders, and evil-visitations on Egypt, on Pharaoh and his household. He pulled us out of there so he could bring us here and give us the land he so solemnly promised to our ancestors."

That is, "Son, it's because God has done something for me which I did not deserve and which I couldn't do for myself. I deserved to be sent to hell, and instead God sent Jesus to take the punishment for me." We talked about Leviticus (which we are reading), and how only blood pays for sins, and how God didn't take my life, but took Jesus' life in my place -- canceling the record of debt that stood against me with its legal demands. This He set aside, nailing it to the cross.

This is when it matters -- our theology and who we say we think God is. It matters when we are in the midst of plenty, and we still can see that what God has done is the most valuable thing, the most beautiful thing, and that it is worth proclaiming and telling-forth.

Here's the challenge, folks: if faith is built up under trial, how do we build up our own faith when we are full up to the chin with blessings which 98% of all people who will ever live never have? And what do we make of our faith when it is tested so infrequently?

---

The Conversation Continues

by Phil Johnson

inistry duties have brought me to New Jersey this week. Today just before lunchtime, I'm going to be meeting with a group of pastors and church leaders who have asked me to join them for a conversation about the Emerging Church. It's an impromptu meeting that wasn't originally part of my schedule for the week, and I'm not personally acquainted yet with any of the pastors who have asked for the meeting, so I don't quite know what to expect.

Just for safety's sake, I'm taking a couple of frozen meat chubs, hidden in some rolled-up posters:

---

One last last look at Elijah in Zarephath

by Phil Johnson

ast week I promised to draw out some practical lessons and underscore a few other things to remember from Elijah's experiences in Zarephath. Here are some lessons that stood out to me as I read over that episode:

1. Providence is characterized by many unexpected twists and turns. This reminds us that God's ways are mysterious and beyond human scrutiny—so that all we can know for sure about God's sovereign dealings with us is that His purposes are always righteous.
        Often He intervenes in our lives in ways that don't instantly appear good to us. Elijah was a prophet, but even he did not see the death of the widow's son coming. When the boy died, Elijah was clearly as shocked and dismayed as anyone about it.
        Those are the times when we need to remind ourselves that God's thoughts higher than ours, and His ways are not like ours (Isaiah 55:8). But He is still working all things together for our good. His purposes and His strategies are better than the way we would do things. And He hasn't lost control—even if at the moment our whole world might seem to be in complete disarray.
   
2. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away—and we should praise Him in either case. This woman had benefitted from God's generous provision in the time of drought, but she had no right to interpret that as a guarantee that her life would be free from calamity from then on. God has as much right to afflict us as He does to bless us. And we should glorify Him in either case.
        In John 6:49, Jesus says, "Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead." The manna was a temporal blessing to sustain life for a season. But the time came when those Israelites died anyway. All of them.
        The same is true of this woman and her son. God graciously kept their oil and flour from running out—but that didn't mean they would never die.
        God doesn't promise that all His dealings with us will always be pleasant and easy. On the contrary, He assures us that trials and afflictions will be our lot and our portion. But He promises grace to endure, and He commands us to trust that His purpose for us is ultimately good. We must learn to trust in the dark times as well as in the times of good fortune.
   
3. Temporal blessings are nothing compared to Spiritual blessings. Consider this: the time eventually came when that boy died again. He may have lived to adulthood. Tradition says he became a lifelong servant of Elijah. One ancient rabbinical tradition even held that he became the prophet we know as Jonah. (It's pretty hard to see how that's possible, because Jonah was Jewish, and this boy was the son of a Phoenician woman. Also, Jonah is identified as the son of Amittai [2 Kings 14:25; Jonah 1:1]; nothing suggests he was an orphan like this boy.)
        In any case, it is safe to assume that this boy died at the end of his life, just like everyone in Scripture except Enoch and Elijah. It is appointed unto men to die once (Hebrews 9:27). In this boy's case, he was appointed to die twice.
        And so the one enduring aspect of this miracle is seen in the faith of the widow. That was the greatest miracle of all—not that the boy was given his life back. (That was merely a temporal blessing.) But that a heart once dead to the things of God could be established in unshakable faith, with a rock-solid pre-modern conviction that the Word of God is absolute truth.
        That is the aspect of this miracle that bore eternal fruit. It was also vital to the real purpose of God when he brought this tragedy about in the first place.

It's always interesting (isn't it?) to look back on an episode like this and marvel at the wisdom and goodness of God, who can bring so much eternal good out of a moment of tragedy. But real faith is to be able to trust Him in the midst of the tragedy—before we see the final outcome—and rest in the assurance that He does all things well.

---

Night-Caps Recommended

Your weekly dose of Spurgeon
posted by Phil Johnson

The PyroManiacs devote some space each weekend to highlights from The Spurgeon Archive. This excerpt is a short satirical piece Spurgeon wrote for the January 1884 issue of The Sword and the Trowel. We post it for the benefit of whoever suggested Spurgeon was too nice a postmodernist to ever employ sarcasm:

   CERTAIN Dr. J. Mortimer Granville gives a word of advice about dreams. He says:

"Many persons who are not by habit 'dreamers,' are dreaming a great deal just now, and wondering why they do so. The answer is very simple. When cold weather sets in suddenly, and is much felt; at night, the head, which is uncovered, has the blood supplied to it driven from the surface to the deep parts, notably the brain, the organ of the mind. The results are light sleep and dreams. The obvious remedy is to wear a nightcap, or wrap the head warmly, at least while the cold weather lasts. It is a 'faculty' idea that we of this generation suffer more from braintroubles than our predecessors because we leave the head exposed at night, and the blood-vessels of our cerebral organs are seldom unloaded."

This paragraph is affectionately commended to certain Expounders of Prophecy, Fashioners of New Theology, and Propounders of Theories concerning Perfection in the Flesh.

We are getting a little overdone with their dreamings. Let the brethren try night-caps during the present wintry weather.

Dr. Granville is quite right about the fact that people are dreaming a great deal just now; we can hardly take up a pamphlet or a religious newspaper without saying to ourselves, "Here's another dreamer!" This is a great pity; for there are people about who accept these visions as gospel, and we are in a fair way to be driven away from solid truth into a dreamland of either fanaticism or unbelief.

The remedy suggested by the worthy physician might at least be tried. Our fathers were wont to encrown themselves with a tasseled triangle, which was enough to frighten any burglar out of his senses; but then they did not dream as our rising generation is doing. A red bandanna was a very picturesque head-protector. Could such a thing be bought in these degenerate days?

At any rate, let something be done to stop this dreaming. Our philosophical youths, who wear the cap of Liberty by day, have only to keep it on by night, and their cerebral organs, being delivered from the rush of blood, will be unloaded, and enjoy a little rest.

The worst of it is that, if some of our theologians give up their dreams, they will have nothing else left.

Open Mike Friday: publishing, self- and otherwise

by Dan Phillips

Unless your last name rhymes with BacBarthur, it can be pretty challenging to get published. Since many of our readers also write in some way or another, and since our readers do include some (variously) published authors, this seems like a good topic for us to bat around here.

At my blog, I shared my hardly-secret ardent aspiration to be published, hopefully some time before I expire, and sketched out some of my past efforts in that direction.

There are many self-publishing companies, and seemingly more all the time. Xulon press does Christian self-publishing, and says it is "fast, easy, and affordable." Lulu has won an award for its site, and bills itself as "fast, easy, and free." Now even the sell-everything web-giant Amazon has gotten into the game.

There were some helpful responses on- and offline to my blog's post; now the mike is open to you-all. Here again are the questions:

1. Have you done self-publishing?
2. If so, with whom, and what did you think of it?
3. (This, to me, is the big one): does self-publishing pretty well stigmatize you as lame, and ruin you forever as to the likelihood of being picked up by a "real" publisher?

Looking forward to the discussion.

---

Yes, We Do NEED Sarcasm

e've been defending the judicious use of sarcasm, and I have been personally been amazed (and appalled) to see that some Christians think sarcasm is always a vice. In fact, some on the Emerging side of the blogosphere are evidently convinced sarcasm is a worse vice than cusswords and deliberate nastiness.

Well, we beg to differ. Sarcasm can be high virtue, when applied to a good cause. At times, it is as necessary as oxygen. And today, thanks to a link I followed from Doug Wilson's blog, I found some blogs that prove the point:

• The "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks
  
• Literally, A Web Log
  
• Apostrophe Abuse
  
• lowercase L
  
• Crummy Church Signs

Note: The premise of each of the above blogs is safe enough. Most of them live outside the Christian districts of the blogosphere, however, so exercise due care before following their links or probing beyond page 1.

---

Raising the Dead

by Phil Johnson

arlier in the week, we began observing a series of surprising plot-turns in 1 Kings 17:17-24. Elijah's presence in a widow's home had resulted in life-saving daily provisions for her. But then, unexpectedly, her little boy died. In response, she angrily and uncharacteristically lashed out at Elijah. In the process made a stunning confession of her own guilt.

Elijah's response is also surprising. Verse 19: "And he said unto her, Give me thy son. And he took him out of her bosom, and carried him up into a loft, where he abode, and laid him upon his own bed."

Elijah was by nature a man of strong passion. He was on occasion a hot-tempered man. In 1 Kings 18, we read about Elijah taking vengeance against the wicked prophets of Baal by killing 850 of Jezebel's favorite Baal-priests. In 2 Kings 1, he calls down fire from heaven twice, and each time he destroyed a company of fifty men. Elijah had little patience with sinful unbelief. He was not generally known for gentleness when he responded to the taunts and challenges of unbelievers.

But his answer to this grieving widow's angry outburst was the very model of a soft answer that turns away wrath. He took no notice whatsoever of her insulting and unkind words. His entire reply to her is only two words in the Hebrew. "Give me your son."

And with that, he took the boy's corpse and retired to his room in the attic of the woman's house, where he would pour out his deepest passions alone before God.

We might have expected a fiery prophet like Elijah to answer the widow firmly and possibly harshly. But instead, his response was tender and compassionate and gentle.

Elijah's own grief in this situation is obviously profound. And in fact, his prayer to God is yet another surprise:

"And he cried unto the LORD, and said, O LORD my God, hast thou also brought evil upon the widow with whom I sojourn, by slaying her son? And he stretched himself upon the child three times, and cried unto the LORD, and said, O LORD my God, I pray thee, let this child's soul come into him again" (1 Kings 17:20-21).

The prayer is surprising for several reasons—most notably the boldness of Elijah's request. No one in the history of the world had ever before died, and then been resuscitated from the dead. This is the first incident in scripture where a dead person came back to life.

So it took an extraordinarily bold faith for Elijah to ask for such a thing. But I also want you to notice the surprising way he sought this miracle from God.

First, he did his praying entirely in private. He didn't exploit this incident for publicity. He didn't make any public display of raising the boy from the dead. Even after the miracle occurred, he didn't parade the boy in public as an example of his miracle powers. Instead, he went through this whole ordeal in the privacy of his own loft, which was the most private venue he knew.

In fact, Elijah seems to have deliberately prayed in complete solitude for this miracle. He didn't even invite the widow to join him in prayer. He took the matter to God alone. Remember, "The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much." (James 5:16). It's not necessary to enlist everybody you know to pray in order to get answers to your prayers—as if God could be persuaded by popular opinion. Jesus expressly taught that being wordy or ostentatious will not help our prayers be heard. Neither will dragging private matters into a public venue. Matthew 6:6: "Thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly." That was exactly Elijah's approach in this situation.

What is even more remarkable here is the way Elijah took that dead child from his mother into his own heart. Remember that in Old Testament Israel, the bodies of the dead were ceremonially defiling. Because this was such a defiling thing, the law expressly prohibited priests from ever touching any dead bodies. Here's Leviticus 21:1-4:

And the LORD said unto Moses, Speak unto the priests the sons of Aaron, and say unto them, There shall none be defiled for the dead among his people: But for his kin, that is near unto him, that is, for his mother, and for his father, and for his son, and for his daughter, and for his brother, And for his sister a virgin, that is nigh unto him, which hath had no husband; for her may he be defiled. But he shall not defile himself, being a chief man among his people, to profane himself.

Even among non-priests, no one would normally touch a dead body except for the family members who were responsible to prepare the body for burial.

So by clasping this little boy's body to his heart, Elijah was breaking Jewish convention. But he was in effect accepting this widow and her son as his own family—even though the woman was a Gentile from a pagan background. He was bearing her burden. He was sharing in her grief. And the threat of ceremonial defilement would not deter him from this gesture of identification with that woman and her son.

So Elijah carried the lifeless boy up into his loft and laid him on his own bed. And there, it says, "He stretched himself upon the child three times, and cried unto the LORD." Here was total identification with the dead child.

A generation later, in similar circumstances, Elijah's successor, Elisha, had occasion to pray for the life of another little boy who died. Second Kings 4 describes that incident. And it says Elisha "went in . . . and shut the door upon them twain, and prayed unto the LORD. And he went up, and lay upon the child, and put his mouth upon his mouth, and his eyes upon his eyes, and his hands upon his hands: and he stretched himself upon the child; and the flesh of the child [became] warm."

That's the same picture we get of Elijah here—stretched out over the child, mouth to mouth, hands to hands, as if he himself wanted to breathe into the corpse the breath of life again, and as if the warmth of his body could be transferred back to the cold corpse and revive the boy.

And Elijah passionately besought God, "O LORD my God, I pray thee, let this child's soul come into him again."
May I point out what a perfect illustration this boy is of the plight of unbelievers? Scripture says they are dead in trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:1). Here is the very picture of death. This boy was no longer capable of responding to any stimulus. Despite the intensity of his passions, regardless of how many times Elijah stretched out on him or tried to restore warmth to his cold body, that corpse had no ability whatsoever to respond. Only God could restore life to the dead boy. And until God did restore the soul to the body, all Elijah's techniques were utterly powerless to elicit a response.

That is precisely how it is with unbelievers. They are spiritually dead, and nothing but the sovereign work of God in their hearts can awaken them from that state. All our tender pleading and evangelistic appeals are fruitless unless God sovereignly regenerates that person. We were not born again in response to our faith. Rather, it was the regenerating work of God in our hearts that elicited the response of faith.

Someone will inevitably ask, "Then what's the point of evangelism? What's the point of pleading with the lost to believe? Why should we expend any effort at all witnessing to people who have no capacity to respond unless God first awakens them to faith?

You might as well ask why Elijah went through the motions of stretching himself out over this child. Could God have raised the child without Elijah's body heat? Of course. But these were the means through which God chose to work. He allowed Elijah to participate in the miracle. That does not diminish the fact that the regenerating work that took place was the work of God and God alone.

So it is with our salvation. God uses external means. He employs His word and the gospel message to reason with sinners, to plead with them, and to beseech them to be reconciled to God. But apart from a miracle of regeneration, not one sinner would ever respond to the gospel plea. Remember that when you're sharing the gospel, and be sure to do what Elijah did here: take the case to God, and ask Him to work that miracle of regeneration and open the unbeliever's heart to receive the truth. Otherwise you are merely pleading with a spiritual corpse.

Elijah's prayer of faith was answered. Here's the final surprise in this chapter:

And the LORD heard the voice of Elijah; and the soul of the child came into him again, and he revived. And Elijah took the child, and brought him down out of the chamber into the house, and delivered him unto his mother: and Elijah said, See, thy son liveth. And the woman said to Elijah, Now by this I know that thou art a man of God, and that the word of the LORD in thy mouth is truth (vv. 22-24).

The child comes back to life. I'll confess to you that if I had been standing there watching this scene, I would have been thinking it was utterly hopeless.

After all, why did God allow the boy to die in the first place, if His purpose was only to bring him to life again?

And by the way, for any skeptics inclined to think this was merely a near-death experience, and Elijah raised the boy with a kind of rudimentary CPR treatment, the language of Scripture is clear. The boy was dead. His soul had departed from his body.

Remember, this was the first-ever case of anyone returning from the dead. Yet Elijah's faith staggered not at the magnitude of the miracle he was seeking from God.

He knew God to be gracious, compassionate, and righteous. And so he pleaded with God on the basis of those attributes. He could not fathom that it would be God's ultimate purpose to kill this widow's only son after she had shown hospitality to God's prophet. So he was emboldened to pray that God would return the boy's life.

God granted the miracle.

Notice the woman's testimony: "Now by this I know that thou art a man of God, and that the word of the LORD in thy mouth is truth."

Whether she was a genuine believer prior to this incident is not clear. Some commentators say no; others say yes. It may be that she had already come to saving faith, but her faith was weak and immature. Or this may be the first genuine expression of genuine faith in her heart. Either way, this miracle had the effect of strengthening her faith and deepening her assurance.

So what began as a dark providence and a painful tragedy ends with this woman glorifying God and celebrating His bountiful goodness.

And I especially like Elijah's response. He just hands her the boy and says, "Look. Your son is alive." Always a man of few words. But you can bet that inside, he was as deliriously happy and as grateful as the widow.

Next week, I'll post a series of short practical applications drawn from this passage.

---

Oil and Water

by Phil Johnson

From time to time we pull classic comments up out of an old thread's combox. What follows is one of those.

ere's part of a discussion I had with a quasi-regular commenter who asked some questions about my stance against blending ministry with politics. I've edited it slightly to correct a couple of misspellings, to keep my interlocutor anonymous, to abbreviate some redundancies, to stress a point or two, and to add the quotation that I initially referred to and couldn't produce off the top of my head:

Here are my two top reasons for believing the church (n.b.: not necessarily individual Christians, but the church) should keep her hands off the machinery of secular politics: There's no positive example of political lobbying or organizing from either Jesus or the apostles. Every movement in the entire history of the church that has regarded political activism as a legitimate facet of gospel ministry has allowed political ideology to eclipse the gospel. That's true from Constantine to Cromwell to the Liberation theologians. Note: I haven't suggested that the church should "be silent" about social (or even governmental) evils; merely that we have a more vital way to remedy those evils than by lobbying for legislation. Also: It's not that I oppose legislation that would eliminate certain expressions of the evil that rules men's hearts. If our legislators outlawed abortion, homosexuality, bestiality, gambling, drunken theologizing, and other similarly gross evils, I would celebrate. If a statute promoting righteousness or outlawing unrighteousness is on the ballot, I'll vote for it. But our collective calling as a church is to announce the remedy for the evil itself. Lets not get sidetracked in the electoral process. Let the dead bury the dead. That's what I'm saying. R____: "Part of what makes it hard to figure out what's appropriate for the church to be involved in is the fact that policy making was so far from participatory in the NT era. There was no lobbying for Jesus and the apostles to be involved in!" Perhaps, but so what? Jesus is rightful Lord of all. If straightening out earthly political institutions had been any part of His work, why not mount a revolution? That's what the Zealots were trying to do. That's what the disciples originally expected Jesus to do. That's what politically-zealous Christians under non-democratic governments have often tried to do. It's something Jesus had every right to do, because He alone has a legitimate claim to the title "Lord of all." It's significant that Jesus didn't mount a revolution. And (the beliefs of some of my postmill friends notwithstanding) He didn't command the church to commandeer the machinery of earthly politics on His behalf, either. It is a fact of history that every time the church has dabbled in politics—including in the very best cases, such as Calvin's Geneva—the experiments have ultimately failed. Usually in disastrous ways. Will Durant had an insightful quote about the impossibility of harnessing human governments to help accomplish the true Christian mission. You'll find it where he deals with Cromwell's failure. But I remember reading it and thinking he captured my thoughts exactly. I'll try to locate that quote and perhaps include it in a future blogpost. [Found it. Durant wrote: In public [Cromwell] maintained an unostentatious dignity; privately he indulged in amusements and jesting, even in practical jokes and occasional buffoonery. He loved music, and played the organ well. His religious piety was apparently sincere, but he took the name of the Lord (not in vain) so often in support for his purposes that many accused him of hypocrisy. Probably there was some hypocrisy in his public piety, little in the private piety that all who knew him attested. His letters and speeches are half sermons; and there is no question that he assumed too readily that God was his right hand. His private morals were impeccable, his public morals were no better than those of other rulers; he used deception or force when he thought them necessary to his major purposes. No one has yet reconciled Christianity with government. Will and Ariel Durant, The Age of Louis XIV (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963), 192.] But Jesus said it best of all: "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those who are great exercise authority over them. Yet it shall not be so among you. . ." (Matthew 20:25-26). See the context for even more insight into what Jesus meant.

---

A Response to David Aikman

by Frank Turk

{For those to whom this sort of thing matters, I e-mailed this letter to Mr. Aikman earlier this week so he had a head's up}

Dear Mr. Aikman;

Undoubtedly, you have already received a raft of e-mails from so-called "attack dogs" regarding your essay in the August 2007 edition of Christianity Today. Let me first of all apologize for those who don't have the sense to apologize for themselves, and agree with you that there's a problem with civility in our civilization. And I say this as someone who, frankly, has frequently been accused of violating such a thing because of my opinions.

However, I have two topics I'd like to propose to you for your consideration related to what you wrote for CT: consistency, and criticism.

On the first topic, here's what I'm thinking: it is possible that your essay is correct in its assessment of the plethora of organizations that are critical (particularly) of the American Christian landscape. But problematically, your essay does what it sets out to criticize. For example, you broad-brush the matter of what kind of criticism is out there by putting all kinds of criticism in the same bucket. You equate criticizing Joel Osteen with KJVO enthusiasm – trying, I guess, to demonstrate how backwards and uninformed these opinions must be.

Your criticism of them, in a nutshell, is that their "approach" is flawed – and this may well be true. But your approach to reproach is not really much better – because it does the kinds of things you are very sincerely worried about, only without the Biblical epithets of "whitewashed tombs" and "vipers".

I realize that you had space restrictions and a word-count to abide by, so making an encyclopedia entry for the various phyla and species of "attack dogs" and their arguments was not in the scope of your work here. That's fine – in fact, I think that's admirable that you were willing to take on such a broad topic in a one-page essay. But if that's an out for your own mistakes here – and let's face it: equating criticism of Joel Osteen's preaching to a KJVO bibliology is a stretch at best – it at least takes the edge off the "attack dogs" complaints as they work mostly in a blog environment which works with blog readers' limited attention span. {Note the readers: I'd apologize to you at this point, but the ones who will be offended stopped reading at "vipers", above}

And in that, here's my second thought: there is more to criticism than merely having an opinion. There's a scene in Star Trek VI where the president of the Federation is addressing the Kitimer Conference, and he's on about Interstellar politics, and he says to the gathered delegates, "Let us redefine progress to mean that just because we can do a thing, it does not necessarily mean we must do that thing." I realize that that's not a Biblical prooftext, but I think that's great advice for people who think they have something to say, especially in an age when you can set up a blog and, if you get yourself added to the right blogrolls, have an audience of thousands in a matter of weeks.

See: one's criticism ought to be able to both demonstrate the problem and outline or present the solution to that problem – and in doing so, perhaps it ought to in and of itself be an example of what it's talking about. So if your concern, for example, is how mean it is to publicly criticize other Christians, and how confused that makes non-Christians and the marginally-churched, I'm not sure that publishing that essay publicly dispels the problem: it is by definition part of the problem because it is a public criticism of other Christians.

Rather, what if one took some of the examples you used in your essay, and pointed out that there is a wide diversity of criticisms pointed at that object of criticism, and that some of it is well-considered and useful while other critics don't really grasp how the tools of criticism work. What this would do is advance the idea that criticism is both useful and necessary for the body of Christ, but that some criticism is like using a salad fork to take an eyelash out of someone's eye.

And in that, we have another aspect of criticism: being a receiver of criticism, which is something you did not even brush up against in your essay. One of the main reasons that popular criticism reaches such a fever pitch in this iteration of popular culture is that people have no idea how to receive criticism without taking it personally and being the wrong-kind of defensive. Every criticism coming in is received as personal, vengeful, spiteful, mean, hurtful, unloving, etc. And in that, all people who are disagree with "me" are seen as "ag'in' me", and only those who are in agreement with me are seen as my friends.

Let me say something plainly: if this problem was resolved in popular public discourse, it would be the end of most of the hard feelings in both the blogosphere and in public life. And those who trade in this currency are the real villains, the ones who are actually moving public conversations away from civility and toward intellectual warfare.

So, for example, it is not unloving for Christians to be critical of Pat Robertson for speaking for God and calling down judgment on this person or place – because Mr. Robertson has demonstrated frequently that he is not a prophet; he gets it wrong often and makes the supernatural claims of the Christian faith look like superstitions and folk religion. And on the other side of the fence, it is right for Christians to be critical of Tony Campolo for pointing fingers at Christian conservatives when he cannot be bothered to represent their theology or their good social work in any meaningful way. Dr. Campolo is an educated man, and for him to use the kind of provocative language he uses to discredit those with whom he disagrees does not wash – he ought to know better, and ought to do better if he has a case which is solid and compelling.

And lastly, things like humor, sarcasm, polemics, hyperbole and the biblical categories of thought are the tools of the trade for criticism – and it is not wrong to use them. It is wrong to misuse them. It is wrong to be a one-note tuba, especially when one can't get that one note on-pitch. But when these tools come into play, and someone finds sarcasm (for example) offensive, it only demonstrates one's inability to receive criticism and does not speak to whether the writer meant something vile by it.

That last bit probably could use some more unpacking, but I've chosen to make my letter not any longer than your original essay. I didn’t quite make it, but I don't have an editor making me stay on one page.

My thanks for thinking about this with me, and for giving a public stage to the criticism of Christians by Christians. It's the right thing to do.

---

Preaching the Cross to those without the categories to understand it

by Dan Phillips

Back in late June, I had the great joy of being at the Founders Conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with Frank and Phil.

One of the best of many excellent addresses was that by Dr. David Wells, in the 6:30pm session on June 27. The title was "Preaching the Truth of the Cross for the Modern Age." M'man Frank Turk live-blogged it, and you should read his notes. What follows is from mine own.

Wells painted a vivid picture of the breakdown in our moral world. He pointed to four major sign-posts, indicating changes that hasten people out of the moral world that the West long inhabited. Thinking has shifted from the objective and/or transcendent, to the subjective and culturally relative. The sign-post shifts are:

• from thinking about virtue, to thinking about values
• from thinking about character, to thinking about personality
• from thinking about nature, to thinking about self; and
• from thinking about guilt, to thinking about shame.
  

Follow these, Wells observed, and you’ve exited a moral world. The Cross then becomes simply incomprehensible. [Update 12/26/2011: Wells expands on this in The Courage to Be Protestant, 143ff.]

And Wells made this very powerful statement, as my notes have it:

Our task today is to tell people — who no longer know what sin is, no longer have the categories to understand it, no longer see themselves as sinners, and no longer have room for these categories in their non-moral universe — that Christ died for sins of which they do not think they’re guilty.

Then he said that this is why the Bible does not begin with John 3:16, but with Genesis 1. Again, from my notes:

What we see at work between those two points is the patience of God who, bit by bit and stone by stone, lays the foundation and builds an edifice of understanding, which corresponds to what is there. Only when this long work of preparation had been completed, when the last stone had been put in place, God sent His Son, born of a woman, to redeem those under the Law. Cross is a message of substitution – Him, for us. It is not just a formula, nor a product to be sold. It is to be anchored in true truths. God’s enduring character of holiness has been established long before John 3 was written.

From that previous revelation, we know about ourselves, made in the image of God, a people who are willingly sightless. So when John 3:16 was penned, this message of the Cross was positioned to connect with these other foundational truths, without which the message of the Cross is incomprehensible.

So our question to our PoMo neighbors and colleagues, is (or should be): which of these points do you not understand, or do you reject? But often we don’t have the patience to do this. We want instant results, now!

So between Gen 1 and John 3 is a long, patient work of God, so that people can understand the Cross. Can’t we learn something from God’s slow, long, patient work? If we did, we might end up with disciples, instead of simply converts.

Doing, not just talking. I found this all very incisive and thought-provoking. But regular readers will know that I grow a bit impatient with discussions about "how we ought to" do this or that, which don't themselves issue in doing it. I read so many wonderful debates and expatiations about how we ought to "do" apologetics, but none of them issued in a "Here, let me show you." So I attempted one myself.

Well similarly here, what Wells said really lodged in my brain, and excited my thinking.

And so on August 5, at Soaring Oaks, I attempted to do just what Wells suggested. The sermon I preached is titled, "Why Does It Matter That Jesus is a Ransom?"

You can listen to it HERE. My intent was, and my hope is, that it could find its way into the hands of just some such folks.

---

New BlogFeature

by Phil Johnson

'll occasionally notice a particularly nice comment in the combox of an old thread here at PyroManiacs, or somewhere in the bowels of my former blog, and I'll think to myself, Hey, that would have been a pretty decent post in its own right. Too bad it was buried in some ridiculous thread somewhere.

So I'm going to start resurrecting some of those dead-and-buried comments from time to time. It'll save me time blogging, and it could prove fun. In fact, let's start with an amusing one from my original blog. This comment's nearly two years old, but just as timely as ever:

Hey! By now, you should know better than to use humor on my blog. There are people watching on the periphery of this place who can quite easily get seriously injured if you're the least bit wry, mischievous, sarcastic, ironic, sardonic, or (heaven forbid) derisive. Let me try to draw a timely parallel for you: Intellectually, PyroManiac[s] is what you might call "a low-lying community." (I'd like to deny that, but let's be completely honest.) Posting a sarcastic remark or a caricature of any kind is the psychological equivalent to breaching the levy that holds the waters of post-modernism at bay. I BEG you: don't do it again. --Phil Johnson

PS for Dan and Frank: these are even more bumpable than my typical posts.

---