A Rod For The Backs of Slaves

You could use the rod on a slave? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

Now we’re getting into some stuff that people really consider problematic in the Old Testament Law. We’re looking at Exodus 21:18-21. Let’s see what it says.

“If people quarrel and one person hits another with a stone or with their fist and the victim does not die but is confined to bed, 19 the one who struck the blow will not be held liable if the other can get up and walk around outside with a staff; however, the guilty party must pay the injured person for any loss of time and see that the victim is completely healed.

20 “Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, 21 but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property.”

The first scenario we might not have much problem with. If you support the death penalty, it makes sense. Two men fight and one hits the other so hard that it kills him? Then that first one dies since he took another person’s life. This is also consistent with Genesis 9 where an attack on man is an attack on the image of God and the life of the attacker is to be given back to God.

What if he doesn’t die? Well the man is unable to provide for his family then. Many of us today have missed work and know how hard it can be when that happens. Imagine how much harder it is in a society where your daily bread did depend on working. You didn’t have refrigerators to store the food in. Now imagine losing that income. Who will provide?

Furthermore, what if you were the one who had to pay up for losing your temper? Where will your income come from? That which you’ve worked to earn has to go to someone else to pay for your lack of self-control. You can be sure the Mrs. would not forget about that and neither would you. It would be a costly reminder of sin.

All well and good. Now we come to this.

Slaves?

Let’s start with something as we’ve said. The slavery was not exploitation. No doubt, sometimes it was used that way, but that was not the view of Israel here. Slavery was done so people could provide for their family. Some readers might think the idea of selling your labor to someone else to provide for your family sounds ridiculous.

This is said right before you go to work for your boss who takes you on so you can do a service for him, to which he’ll pay you so you can provide for your family.

Are the two identical? No. You don’t usually make contracts with your boss, he usually doesn’t give you a place to live, and there are not likely to be situations where you will be beaten.

However, there are still enough similarities that we can grasp what is going on and understand some of how the system worked. The idea was the poor would go to the rich for a job so they could provide and when hired, they were expected to do the job.

In the time of Israel, physical discipline was a common form of punishment. We still use it today. Some do debate it and there is no doubt that it can turn into abuse, but some readers of this blog will likely be people who were recipients of physical discipline when they were growing up and sometimes, they’ll admit they deserved it and are the better for it.

But notice that if the slave dies as a direct result of beating, the master must be punished. Considering this came right after punishment for the taking of another life above having the death penalty as the punishment, there’s no reason to think that there is suddenly some other punishment. Note then that this means murder was treated exactly the same whether the person was a slave or not.

Okay. So what explains the other difference? What if the slave gets up after a day or two? Why is the owner not punished?

Note above the punishment was paid money for the loss of services. In this case, the master himself is losing the service of the slave and is suffering as a result. He will not be punished, but he will get no monetary relief for his actions. When he sees how badly his income suffers in comparison to his competitors, that should be enough.

What happens if the slave dies a few days later which would be an indirect result? This is where we get the principle of the benefit of the doubt. The idea is to assume the slaveowner meant to discipline but unfortunately, something went wrong. It was not his intention to kill. In other words, it’s accidental death much the same for any other event of accidental death.

In other words, the penalty would be exactly the same regardless of who was killed.

Once again, none of this is meant to be an ideal utopian society. What it is meant to be is a society in reformation. It is God working with the culture as it is planting little seeds of reform. When it comes to the eventual abolition of slavery, one will see that this is also what happened there.

At this point, the skeptic must simply show that ancient slavery in Israel was like modern slavery in America. That will be difficult, but he is welcome to try.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Personal Injury in Exodus

What about how you hit me? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

It’s good to be writing again. Our home was one that was in the area of the storm. We didn’t get hit, but we had damage to our internet. I just recently was able to get back on again and after some posting, figured it was time to continue the OT look. Let’s go to Exodus 21 again.

“12 “Anyone who strikes a person with a fatal blow is to be put to death. 13 However, if it is not done intentionally, but God lets it happen, they are to flee to a place I will designate. 14 But if anyone schemes and kills someone deliberately, that person is to be taken from my altar and put to death.

15 “Anyone who attacks their father or mother is to be put to death.

16 “Anyone who kidnaps someone is to be put to death, whether the victim has been sold or is still in the kidnapper’s possession.”

For the first three verses, we in our society would not have much problem. If you kill someone, you yourself get killed. Some will object to the death penalty, but even still they could likely understand that it isn’t the barbarism that so many skeptics usually associate with the Bible. For the concept of a place to go to in case of an accident, that will be dealt with when we get there.

Note that this even includes a sudden killing out of anger as opposed to a deliberate planning. This would teach the Israelites about controlling the passions in their society and realizing that they were not sovereign and meant to take life by their own standards but were to trust in YHWH.

What about cursing a father and mother? Some of us think it is extreme to have the death penalty here. Note that this is more than just disagreement or words of anger. This is specific cursing. This is an act of uncontrolled hatred that will lead to the breakdown again of the family.

In the ancient world, your heritage was extremely important. Where you came from mattered. For us, when we read a passage like Genesis 5 with its genealogies or read the first nine chapters of 1 Chronicles, we probably have our eyes glaze over wondering why this is in the Bible. Many who start out reading the gospels can wonder why Matthew began his gospel with a genealogy.

For a Jew, this would have been one of the most important parts and a part of great honor.In looking at this, the Jew could see where he came from. It would show his position of honor in society as it would be good to have relatives who behaved well and were honorable in your family tree.

To denounce that tree is to denounce your whole family and your whole society. It would be the equivalent of what we today call treason and even today, treason in the United States can be punished with the death penalty.

Kidnapping might seem severe to us, but why should it? For the ancients, kidnapping could destroy the unit of the family as well as stealing someone’s work force and could possibly lead to taking advantage of them in order to gain land privileges. In other words, the breakdown of the society would be far easier if kidnapping were allowed. This should show us the value God places on the order in society and the family unit.

What can we get from all of this? We can get that God is not a God of wanton destruction. He wants a stable society and He’s giving strict rules to show that. These rules would also be didactic. That means, not everything would be spelled out immediately but wise judges would work them out. Today, just one of our laws can be longer than the Torah itself. The Jews were expected to have wise people amongst them who could judge accurately.

We’ll continue next time.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Exodus 21:2-11

Why this slavery stuff in the Bible? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

I developed the idea last night that so many skeptics raise up points about the Law in the OT so why not just go straight through the Torah and look at the laws that we do not understand and explain them on a point by point basis? That does not mean that we will not have diversions from time to time based on current events and such, but hopefully this will be the kind of thing that can set some matters to rest.

The text I will be looking at is Exodus 21: 2-11.

“2 “If you buy a Hebrew servant, he is to serve you for six years. But in the seventh year, he shall go free, without paying anything. 3 If he comes alone, he is to go free alone; but if he has a wife when he comes, she is to go with him. 4 If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the woman and her children shall belong to her master, and only the man shall go free.

5 “But if the servant declares, ‘I love my master and my wife and children and do not want to go free,’ 6 then his master must take him before the judges. He shall take him to the door or the doorpost and pierce his ear with an awl. Then he will be his servant for life.

7 “If a man sells his daughter as a servant, she is not to go free as male servants do. 8 If she does not please the master who has selected her for himself, he must let her be redeemed. He has no right to sell her to foreigners, because he has broken faith with her. 9 If he selects her for his son, he must grant her the rights of a daughter. 10 If he marries another woman, he must not deprive the first one of her food, clothing and marital rights. 11 If he does not provide her with these three things, she is to go free, without any payment of money.”

To begin with, slavery is not to be confused with slavery in the Civil War. In that time period, a people was exploited and taken advantage of based on their race and it was done at their expense. In the ancient world, slavery was still a necessity. You did not have a Wal-Mart around the corner that everyone could go and work at and get jobs. Out wandering in the wilderness, the Israelites had to work for someone and like today, if you have a job, it is because of a richer person. (The exception being rich people who run the companies themselves)

So what we have going on is Joe Israelite. He is poor and needs some money. What does he do? He goes and offers himself on a contractual basis to one of his fellow Hebrews to be provided for. The statement is that if the Hebrew will provide room and board for him, then he will be sure to work in exchange. What if this man is married? Then when he comes, his wife is to be provided. The wife doesn’t even have to work.

What if the master gives a wife? The master is doing that for the benefit that can come from the wife true, but also it would be a way of creating an alliance between the two families. When the two families joined together, it created a system to ensure the survival of the family unit. The only way that can happen is if the two are connected for life and if the man wishes to leave, that will break the connection resulting in the woman not being able to be provided for in the future.

Hence, if the man wants to ensure the welfare of his wife, he needs to stay with the master. Besides, the wife belonged to the master prior to the servant and that has not changed. The master would lose out if that happened and that would mean his own future family would be in danger. In the ancient world, you didn’t give something for nothing. There was always some sort of exchange going on.

Of course, a man could become a servant for life. If that was the case, then they had a ritual to bring that about. Now someone could ask “Yeah. But what kind of treatment would he get?” We will deal with that later in the text.

Now what about the last part of selling a daughter as a servant. Why would a guy do this? Because he doesn’t have the means to provide for her and wants to make sure that there will be a family that will. This was looking out for the family unit. Tying together two families would ensure the survival of both families. Notice some aspects about what would happen when the exchange took place.

To begin with, the master was expected to honor his covenant. He was not to treat her like an object but rather as a person. He is the one who has broken faith. Note that. The woman does not break faith. The man is to be held responsible for breaking his covenant with a woman. If he gives her to the son, he must treat her as if she is a daughter that is born to her. If he marries another woman, he is not to neglect her. The law at this point is entirely looking out for the woman, which is exactly the opposite of what we’re always told about this sexist society. The man will have an easier time taking care of himself than the woman would.

Now to be sure, this is not ideal for us, but that is fine. The goal was not to create the ideal society at that moment. The purpose was to begin the creation of a really good society. That was an incremental process that would happen step by step.

Hopefully this has shed light on the passage and further passages will explain the Jewish system even more.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Are The Jews Privileged?

Is there any merit for them before God? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

The good news of the gospel that was preached was preached originally to the Jews. We find this often in the Bible in that Jesus has His apostles go first to the Jews and not go into Samaria or into Gentile territory. Jesus makes His presentation to Israel first to give Israel one more chance to be the light of the world. We know that the story ends with the Jews rejecting Jesus and sadly saying that they have no king but Caesar, a direct contradiction to the desire to be ruled by YHWH.

When we read the book of Romans, part of it I think is meant to ask the question about Jews. Jews had been expelled from the city and the Gentile church went on fine without them and then lo and behold, these Jews come back and the church doesn’t know what to do. How are we to respond to these people? Could it be as some Christians have unfortunately said throughout the ages, that we ought to despise them for what they did to Jesus? Should we consider them our enemies? What is their relationship to us?

Let’s answer the question of if we should hold the Jews responsible. The answer is no. No Jew today was around when Jesus was crucified. I have the exact same stance for slavery today in America. It’s done with and the sooner we stop holding it over the heads of people, the sooner we can move on past it. The Christian worldview has no place for anti-semitism. Our Lord Himself was Jewish and we should honor the Jewish heritage that we have.

Now when it comes to the gospel, is there a special privilege in being Jewish? Some will answer “Yes! Didn’t Paul say that there is an advantage to being a Jew?” He did indeed. What was that advantage? The advantage was that it was your people that received the Scriptures and it was your people through whom the Messiah would come. The Gospel did come to the Jew first and even Paul in his evangelism seemed to follow that pattern.

Yet while there is advantage there, there is also more responsibility. Because the Jews were in a favored position with regards to receiving the Scriptures and having the lineage of the Messiah, they should have known better. We often can talk about whether people are chosen by God and see that as meaning that it is a position of greater honor. It is a position of honor, but it is also a position that comes with great responsibility. Let’s consider for instance this text in Amos 3:2.

““You only have I chosen
of all the families of the earth;”

Yeah! That’s right! The chosen ones! That can lead to shouts of acclamation! What a great joy it is to be chosen by God! But yet that same verse ends this way.

“therefore I will punish you
for all your sins. ”

It is because of being chosen that punishment comes. In Acts 14 and 17 we have Paul saying to the people that God did overlook their ignorance. Now He is calling for repentance. The Gentiles could have been said to have more of a reason for not doing what was right. They did not have it explicitly spelled out for them from on high. The Jews could not make any such statement.

Even John the Baptist warned the people of his time that God could raise up from the very stones around him children of Abraham. Don’t look at the natural descent you have from Abraham and think that matters a rip to God. God could care less about the person in your family tree that you call father. What God calls about is if you see Him as the Father. What He cares about is if you are honoring Him as God. Your blood will not save you.

What this tells us is that in our age of equality, God is fully equal with the gospel. Some might be in a position where it could be easier for them to hear, but when it comes to judging, all are equally sinful before God and condemned in His sight. No one can totally claim ignorance on the last day. Everyone will know of some good that they denied. Everyone will have their hearts laid bare before the judge.

The message to the Jews was repent, and when we look at the destruction that came on the temple, we can know that God did judge them. Being of the blood of Abraham was not enough. God is fully equal with His treatment. If you are not with Jesus, then you are against Him and if you are against Him, it is something that God takes seriously. There can be no new competition to the new covenant, and that includes the old covenant as well.

Now does this mean we are to be opposed to the Jews? Not at all. What should be our response? Humility. We need to be watching ourselves. This is what Romans warns us about. It says that some Gentiles were talking about how they were grafted into the tree when some natural branches were broken off. Yes, says Paul. They were broken off for unbelief. You’re not even a natural branch. What’s to make you think that you yourselves won’t be broken off if you don’t honor the new covenant? It means to recognize that you have a position of privilege and to not disregard the natural branches. My fellow Gentiles. We must remember that when we meet someone Jewish, they do not have the position before YHWH based on their blood and origin, but they are still the ones through whom and to whom the Scriptures were first delivered and through whom they were handed down and they are the ones that brought our Messiah into the world.

Let us seek to win them over to their Messiah with zeal and keep in mind Messiah is a term for the Jews. We are to let them know the one they awaited has come. The promises of YHWH have been fulfilled. We meanwhile should hold our place with fear and trembling. We are not here either because we are someone special. We are just those who happened to willingly submit to YHWH and His King Jesus. If we fall out of line, we are just as prone to have what happened to us that which happened to the Jews in 70 A.D. If we want to see what it means to stand in the way of the king, let us look there and realize, the king means business. Let’s hope we mean business in serving Him too.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

So What’s The Problem?

Why is there a gospel at all? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

Last night, I wrote about what the gospel is. Often, when we do our evangelism, we tell people that they are sinners and that they need forgiveness and that God loves them and wants to save them. Yes. This is true. Yet at the same time, if we approach the gospels that way, we will miss a lot.

For instance, is the story of Jesus just meant to tell us that God loves us? We can say that actions speak louder than words, and they do, but while we can say that God is saying that in Jesus, and He is, could we not say that He is saying more than that? I recall being in a Sunday School class where we were told the reason Joshua was written was so that Israel would know to obey God.

Of course Israel needed to know that, but could there not be something about the one who comes after the Law guiding the people into the land of promise and providing deliverance from their enemies all around them and in the end asking them to remain faithful to the covenant?

Quite interesting that that person in the Old Testament is Joshua, which would also be Yeshua, the name of Jesus.

You see, in the second century, there arose a heretic named Marcion who wanted to separate the God of Christianity from the wicked God of the Old Testament. He only had the non-pastoral Pauline epistles and a highly edited gospel of Luke in his canon. He wanted nothing to do with the God of Israel.

Now many Christians today would not say the God of Israel is a bloodthirsty fiend like someone like Marcion or Richard Dawkins would, but many of them are in fact Marcionite in their practice acting as if the God of Israel has nothing whatsoever to do with the God revealed in Jesus Christ.

If we start with us, we miss a lot of the problem and we miss a lot of what the story of Jesus is meant to tell us. For instance, readers of the blog know about my fanaticism when it comes to the series Smallville. If you watched the final episode without seeing the series, you could understand a good deal of it. Yes. Clark Kent must defeat Darkseid. Yes. Lex Luthor must be stopped. Yes. Clark puts on the suit and flies. You know the story ends happily. Clark Kent has become Superman.

If instead you have watched the whole series you know all about not just what Clark did there but how he got there. You understand how the battle against evil for him started at the very beginning. You understand that the meteor freaks at the start were the way Clark learned to fight and eventually become Superman. You learn about all the trials Jor-El put him through and the friendships developed with people like Chloe, Oliver, and Tess. All of these make the story all the richer for you. You can get the basic enjoyment the person who just sees the final episode gets, but you get so much more because you understand where it fits in the grand scheme.

We have enough of a problem already with this in our world. We have taken the gospel with this and made it all about ourselves. The gospel is about how God makes a wicked people to be righteous so they can be with Him. It is about how they can live forever. It is about how they can be forgiven. Here’s something to ponder. Why should God care?

In Christianity, we do know that God would have been fully justified in letting us go our own way. We all deserve hell. There is nothing special about any of us in that regards. God still cares. Why? Go look repeatedly in the account of the Exodus and the wanderings in the wilderness and see what happens.

Why does God not destroy Israel out there? Moses tells Him that the Egyptians will see and know that God was unable to deliver. His glory will be cast down because of that. See why it would be said the temple was destroyed. It would be because the people were becoming a blight on the name of God. Their lifestyles were not honoring to Him. Why are they coming back? For God’s Name sake. It is not because God owes Israel a thing. It is because He has chosen them regardless and for the honor of His Word, He will save them.

It is the same for us. God saves us for His glory and so that we can reflect that glory. It is not about doing works just out of gratitude, while that is part of it. It is also about doing them to bring about the glory and the kingdom of God, something that is absent from our gospel presentations.

When we look in the gospels, it is not a surprise, or at least it should not be, that the Old Testament is all throughout there. I’ve written much recently on how people don’t bother to understand the context of the Bible to see what is going on in the world. The Bible itself shows that is needed as to understand the New Testament, you need the Old Testament. Sure. You can get the message from just the New Testament, but you’re getting an incomplete story. Your understanding is enriched by getting the full account.

If we go to the gospels and read them like they were written to us today and have no understanding of the story of Israel, we will miss much. If all we understand is that we are sinners in need of a savior, we will get benefit of course, but we will not get all that we could. Surely we all want to get all we can out of the Bible! Then we must understand the story of Israel. It is not an accident that the gospels show us that Jesus is god with us and the Messiah. Both are essential. We can go and seek to establish the latter while ignoring the former as if being the Messiah was a side point. To take what Jesus Himself said, we should do the former without neglecting the latter!

Yet if we continue this inane approach, it will only make us more self-centered. It is already happening with several who wish to try to see where America is in the Bible or to see where “I” fit in in the Bible. To wrench the Bible completely from its time, culture, and context will make it say things it does not say and not allow it to say what it is meant to say.

If we want to understand the epistles, we need to understand the mindset from which Paul and the rest of the writers are arguing from. This is especially so in the book of Hebrews. If we want to understand Acts, we need to understand why the mission is spreading to begin with. If we want to understand the apocalypse of Revelation, we definitely need to understand the Old Testament. Revelation very rarely quotes the Old Testament, but it is alluded to well throughout the book. If you do not understand the Old Testament, you will not understand Revelation, PERIOD!

This will get us off of ourselves and onto the gospel. The gospel is not about God wanting to be with us as if we were so special, but about Him knowing we are incomplete without Him and wanting us to share His glory all the more. We are most glorious when we are in Him. Think of it as a marriage. A man and a woman can work quite well on their own, but when the two come together, they can far outshine what both of them could do separately. This is especially true in the sexual act. After all, it is only by their sharing glory with one another that they can bring about the glory of new life.

This also means that this is not about following a list of rules. It’s not about doing good just because that’s what good Christians do. You do good because it is how you win. We are told that Constantine had a dream where he was shown the cross and told that under this sign he would conquer. The reality is it was under that sign he had already been conquered. It was the cross that had overtaken the Roman Empire, not by the sword, but by doing good. This is not meant to ask if war might ever be necessary, but it is meant to show that when it is necessary, it is not as a means of evangelism.

The problem is not just your sin. That is a symptom of the problem. It would be like treating the flu by making sure your temperature stays down. You need to do that. You need to stay hydrated. The most important thing to do however is to kill the flu. The problem of your sin and mine is a symptom. It is a symptom of the disease of a world in rebellion against God. Let us be sure about how our lives are being lived. We are either advancing the kingdom of God or the kingdom of satan and if we are advancing our personal kingdoms, guess which side we’re really working for. It brings a whole new emphasis to good works when you see them as doing the work of the kingdom and conquering the kingdom of the devil.

Israel is not an accident. The whole point of the gospel story is not you. It is not even Israel to be sure, but Israel sure plays a much greater role in it than you do. If you are to know and appreciate the gospel, you will need to know what it was that God was doing in Israel in the Old Testament and how He deals with Israel in the New and what the person of Jesus really has to do with it all.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

What Is The Gospel?

Did Jesus preach what we preach? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

Just recently I got from the library N.T. Wright’s “How God Became King” and started reading it. What Wright wants us to emphasize is that the middle portions of the gospels matter. We can skip straight from birth to cross and forget that the early church thought it was important for us to know what Jesus said and did.

Often, we want to rush on to the epistles because they’re written in the style that we usually think best in. They are logical outlines and this is the way Westerners think. It’s difficult for us to read a story like the gospels and grasp everything that is underlying them.

When we teach about the gospel, we teach the death, deity, and resurrection of our Lord. Those are all what we should teach in a salvation message, but we must remember when Jesus showed up, he said, and this is early in both Matthew and Mark, that he was calling people to believe the gospel. It could not have been to believe in the death, deity, and resurrection then. Only deity was around at that point and we don’t really see Jesus going around just saying “I’m God. Believe in me.”

It’s interesting in fact that it’s Matthew and Mark that the term gospel shows up in. It doesn’t show up at all in Luke and John. It is not that either of them would be opposed. We even call John 3:16 the gospel in miniature and yet nowhere in John 3:16 do you see anything about the cross and the empty tomb. Matthew is written by a Jew quite familiar with Jewish thought and Mark is supposed to be from Peter himself. Luke could be the most Gentile gospel of all and John is meant to show a contrast of who Jesus is. It is the most different. Why is it two gospels heavily Jewish would be the ones that mention the term gospel?

Also just as important is to realize that we are often looking at the events after the cross and tomb. However, we do believe that Jesus came and spoke a message to the people at the time and we have an accurate presentation of His words. If the gospels say He was preaching to the people to believe the gospel, then He was telling them to believe the gospel. Now we must learn to step outside of our modern western perspective. What was Jesus calling them to believe?

On the one hand, we know that the death and resurrection of the Lord fall into this somehow as Paul says in 1 Cor. 15 that this is the gospel that he preached. Yet at the same time, we know that there must be some continuity between what Jesus said then and what Paul said later. How are we to unite the two?

When we step outside of ourselves, we learn to think of a Jew in the first century and this is where we often start making big mistakes. Anyone who studies anthropology will tell you that one of the worst mistakes you can make when starting to study a different culture is to assume that that culture is like yours. The Jewish one in the Mediterranean area in the 1st century was not like ours.

This affects the way we read the text greatly. We take many writings literally. Of course some Jews did, but some they did not. We think about what the message means to us as individuals. They thought about what it meant to them as a community. We think about justification by faith. They think about the rescue of God. We think about going to Heaven. They think about being righteous in the sight of God.

Sorry to some, but you won’t understand the Jewish people in their historical and social context just by reading the Bible. You’re going to have to do your homework. Why should this be a surprise? We do this in our own culture. I’m happily married now, but in learning to love my wife, I then and now have to do my homework. When we’re out looking at a store I listen and if she says she likes something, I keep it in my memory banks knowing her love language is gifts. I have to learn to think the way she would about a situation and try to come from her perspective. If I have to do this with the person I sleep next to every night, why would I be so foolish as to think I don’t have to do that for a whole culture separated by time, space, language, etc.

If you were a first-century Jew, chances are you were awaiting the coming of the Messiah. You were tired of the Romans being in charge and dominating your holy land. You had returned from exile or so you thought, but here you were in the land and you were hostages in your own country. Sure, you were granted tolerance, but you were not your own kingdom. Rome would not stay out of your business.

Religion? Of course it was a central part of your life, but the oral tradition of the Pharisees got worse and worse. The Sadducees were dominating the Sanhedrin. The temple itself was more made by a king you considered more pagan than Jewish and you could not entirely trust what was going on in it. You knew the system was the revelation of YHWH and you would die for that system, but you also knew some changes needed to be made.

What are you wondering?

Where is YHWH?

When Jesus shows up, this is what He is saying. “YHWH is on the move.” Think of the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.” What do we hear? Aslan is on the move. Everyone is waiting for Aslan to come and deliver the people from the rule of the White Witch.

Interestingly, YHWH is far more active in Jesus than He could have been in anyone else. Jesus alone is the image of YHWH and in Him, God is acting to bring about the freedom His people long for. It will not be by the way of conquering Rome, but rather by conquering the real enemy, the devil himself. It will not be by a sword but by the cross that YHWH will conquer. In doing so, He will also bring about the full fruition of Judaism. Judaism and Christianity are not opposed. Judaism is the seed. Christianity is the flower. The Christian needs to understand Judaism to understand all the truth of his religion.

How is this connected? Jesus is telling us before the cross “See that YHWH is active in me. See that He is on the move. The good news is that redemption is coming. Trust in the promises of YHWH in me to see them brought about.” After the cross, we are told to see how YHWH has moved in Jesus and wishes to continue the movement through the church.

The message is still the same. YHWH is on the move. The gospel then is not about us. It is not about what happens to us. It is about what is happening with God. We are incidental to it. We are not necessary for God to move, but we are invited to join in. We have made it be that we want people to believe the gospel for what will happen to them. Of course, something will happen to them, but let us think not about what will happen to us, but what we will do for God.

If YHWH is on the move, we are either with Him or against Him, as Jesus Himself said. If we are with Him, then let us take up the arms described in Ephesians 6 and continue our fight. If we are against Him, then we will find we are fighting a force we cannot defeat and will be conquered by. Let us not make the silly assumption that we are neutral. No one is.

If YHWH is on the move, then He is on the move and that is it. Perhaps if we realized how serious the call is on our lives, we would take it that much seriously. We Christians have a problem with Jihadists who speak of a holy war that involves taking up the sword, but they do have one aspect right. There is a war going on and we are involved. This is not a war that will be won with material weapons, but with arguments that demolish lies that keep us from being free. The truth will set us free after all.

Our good news today is related to the good news they heard before the cross. As Christians, it is to our benefit to read the gospels to see what the good news was and continue the work of our Lord today.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Abraham Lincoln Never Existed!

Did the 16th president really exist? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

I’ve been going through J.P. Holding’s “Shattering the Christ Myth” which was published in 2008. I’m on the section talking about Lord Raglan’s study of the Mythic Hero and how Francis Utley wrote a work on how Abraham Lincoln fulfilled the criteria as well for being a Mythic Hero. One aspect of the hero mentioned was how the hero had victory over a king, giant, dragon, or wild beast. Now normally, this was seen as referring to slavery or his political opponents, but reading it today, I realized that here in 2012, the truth had come out!

Abraham Lincoln was a vampire hunter! He regularly slew evil creatures then!

Now already I know your objections, but the reasons you have these objections is that you’re uninformed. It could be worse. It could be your mind has been closed by the so-called “scholars” of history who are wanting to keep alive a tradition of a great hero who let his people go.

“After all,” you say, “This is just a movie you’re talking about.” So what? James Cameron had his movies as well and these were readily accepted by audiences. Why should it be that James Cameron can do that, why not Timur Bekmambetov? Are we going to discount the information in a source based solely on the medium from which it is given?

In fact, since this is a movie, this lends more credibility seeing as that in the ancient world, the legends were told often through the medium of the plays. We do not have just plays today but we have movies and now we see that myths are being reborn and adapted for the time, as all myths are. Of course, we all know that with the recent book tour of Bill O’Reilly’s “Killing Lincoln”, that the historical fundamentalists are hard at work to make sure we all realize that Abraham Lincoln really was a historical figure. We see right through their claims however!

“But how come scholars haven’t noticed this?” Pssh. Isn’t it obvious? They just haven’t studied enough. Scholars have not spent sufficient time checking the real sources that they should check. They’re just far too ingrained in their historical fundamentalism. If they simply studied the sources that were used for “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” they would see the truth.

The reason this was not held widely was because vampires were held to not exist. Obviously, this was part of a huge cover-up by historical fundamentalists to make sure the truth was never uncovered. Why would they do this? To protect their reputation in academia! If word got out to other fundamentalists that they believed in vampires, then they would be shunned. In order to avoid that, they simply buried the evidence as far as they could. It’s no shock then that the evidence can only be found in those works scholars have neglected. Don’t give me this nonsense about the works not being scholarly and properly evidenced! There is just obviously a conspiracy!

The best aspect of this is that the historical fundamentalists will likely claim that we’re adding details that would be considered legendary to a real historical figure. Oh please. Let’s just make it all easier. The real historical figure himself never even existed. He was made up at a time of peril to the people and the idea of slavery was turned to vampires. After all, if you are a vampire, you are a slave to wicked desires within you! The vampire motif had to be turned into the slavery motif to make it believable. Let’s not forget that we know little of Lincoln’s childhood and he was supposedly slain on Good Friday as well. Our supposed savior from slavery and vampires died on the same day that the supposed Jesus died!

Fortunately, the truth is coming out to the people these days and we can free ourselves from the historical myths of supposed presidents that freed the slaves. Now we know that what happened was that the story of a vampire hunter was made into the story of a great hero and this great hero embodied what the people wanted in a president and when they wanted to accredit someone with freeing the slaves, they chose Lincoln.

If someone wants to argue against this, well that will just show how closed-minded they are and how much scorn they want to reap on everyone who just differs from the ” majority” opinion. We can rest assured that those of us who are Lincoln mythicists know the real truth about this great figure and everyone else is just ignorant.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Study To Show Yourself Approved

Is it necessary to understand someone else? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

Yesterday I was involved in a dispute on a secondary matter in Christian doctrine when I asked people I was debating with how many of them who were arguing against my position had actually read anything by someone of my position. I got the reply from one of asking why should we? We have the Bible after all!

This is a reply that just irritates me to no end. It’s the very reason I left the discussion immediately.

I can already think of numerous atheists who are willing to agree. Some like Penn Jillette whose book I reviewed recently has stated that reading the Bible is one of the best ways to become an atheist. Why? Because he finds so much that is absurd and/or wicked in the Bible and therefore decides its nonsense. Now someone can say “Yeah, but you’re not properly understanding this part” (Which he is not). The place to make that appeal is by having a study of the Bible and one does not get this from just the Bible itself.

The position becomes one of arrogance. “Why do I need to hear a voice contrary to my own? I have the Word of God. I don’t need that. God will guide me Himself into the truth.”

The reality is, we all know we have huge blind spots. This is one benefit for instance of counseling. When you enter a counselor’s office, you could be wrestling with an issue and don’t know what to do about it. The counselor as one looking outside can often point out a position you have not considered because you could be too close to the situation or too emotionally invested or any number of reasons. When you read a book, you are asking the author to do the same thing to you. You are asking the author to tell you something you might not notice on your own. Hopefully, you are doing the same when you read this blog.

That’s why it’s good to study the other side on issues that matter to us. The issue I was debating was a secondary issue but when I prepared to speak on my position on it at my former church, where my view was in the minority, I contacted a professor who holds to the contrary side and said “What are the best books from the other side you can recommend to me?” He told them to me and I went to the library and got them. I wanted to make sure I was giving the other position a fair hearing.

Some of the opposite school who think such is ridiculous would say “But the Bible is the Word of God. God’s Word should be simple for the common man to understand.”

Serious question here. How many of you really think God is a simple concept to understand? I hope the answer is zero.

But when He speaks, you’re going to assume that that is easy to understand. You’re going to assume that the book He wrote for all of us is one that needs no serious study. “Well yeah! Doesn’t God want believers?” No. He wants disciples, and disciples are those who are willing to wrestle with something and learn it. If the Bible was a simple book to understand, we wouldn’t have all these commentaries and books on it and have to hear sermons or attend schools to know more about it. In fact, this kind of thinking is quite prone to producing not believers, but unbelievers.

It is in fact a position of arrogance. Do you really think that you will understand it all without any aid from those who came before you? If you are Christian, you hold to the Trinity, for instance. Aren’t you glad you don’t have to reinvent the wheel? Aren’t you glad you don’t have to go back and wrestle through everything and come up with the doctrine of the Trinity on your own? Instead, you can see what the early church said and look at Scripture and decide “Well they got it right! That is a fine answer!”

If you’re a Calvinist, aren’t you glad that you don’t have to go back and invent TULIP on your own? You can just look at the Scriptures and see if you think they got it right. You can be thankful if you’re an Arminian that you don’t have to redo the work of Arminius or Wesley. If you’re a dispensationalist, you don’t have to redo what Darby did. The reality is the positions we have are also learned positions that could start from Sunday School but hopefully have more serious engagement. The views we have should also be subject to change. There are views I hold today I never would have thought I would ever hold and there are views I’ve abandoned that I look back and say “I can’t believe I once believed that!”

The apostle Paul said to study to show yourself approved. This shows knowing what you believe and what your opponents believe. If you think a position is serious enough to argue for, you should think it’s serious enough to have done some study on. If you haven’t studied it, by all means have an opinion, but do not think that you can grasp the opponent’s view without studying it. You do not just him but yourself a disservice that way.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Biblical Words

Does your Bible come with a glossary? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

Today, I happened to view a remark someone made to me in a Christian debate on the meaning of a certain word in the Bible as stating that it was very interesting that I was going outside of the Bible in order to find the meaning of a biblical word. A lot of people have a similar position looking at this as something scandalous to the faith. The question that needs to be asked is “What about this is so terrible?”

Let us go back to say, Moses, although Job is supposedly our oldest book in the Bible. He begins to write the words of Scripture. Can we picture him saying “Lord. Please show me a list of words that I am allowed to use!”? No. Not at all. Moses used the words that his people used and that would be understood by the culture. It is the same thing we all do. It is what I try to do every time I sit down and write a blog.

When we come to the NT, do we really think Paul was going around with a glossary of “Accepted words to use when writing Scripture”? No. Paul did the exact same thing. He spoke and wrote like a man of his time. In fact, if it is the case that we can’t use outside sources, we will be in a quandary when it comes to hapax legomena. What are those? Those are words that only occur one time in the writings of a writer. Paul has a few of these. The only way we can really tell what they mean is by seeing them used in other works or comparing them to other words.

Let’s suppose we go through the NT and we find Greek word X. Now let’s suppose we go through the writings of Josephus and find the exact same Greek word. Then, we go through the writings of another Greek writer and find the exact same word. Are we to assume right off that the word when used in the Bible has a totally different meaning? No. It would make sense to study this word as it shows up in other texts and see if that can tell us anything about how it would be used in the biblical text.

The position that is held here is one that is a kind of Gnosticism in fact that says that no study should be done. God will just tell you what the word means and you need not defile the text by looking at the meaning of words outside of the Bible. Now of course the Bible is more than just a book of words, but it is certainly not less. It is a book and it has words and we should use the basic rules of understanding and word meaning that we would use anywhere else.

If we are to be diligent students of Scripture, we should seek information about the words of Scripture wherever we can find them. To do otherwise is to isolate the Bible not just from other texts, but ultimately from being the revelation it was meant to be. The original hearers of the Bible would all hear words that they knew in every day language that they used or at least could determine the meaning of. It does not require any super secret ability to understand the words of Scripture. If we want to say God spoke to the populace of the world in the 1st century, we need to realize He spoke in their language. If He spoke in their language, we can go to that language to find out what the words mean. If He did not speak in their language, then it would seem that they received a message of nonsense. Do we really want to say the apostles were going around speaking words that could not be understood and the epistles did the same?

Such would be a kind of unthinking that is too common in evangelicalism. Let us treat the Bible highly as we should, but let us remember to not deify it at the same time and treat it like a Gnostic work.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Book Plunge: Heaven Is For Real

Heaven is for real, but is the book? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

“And a little child shall lead them!”

Ah, but where shall he lead them?

This is the question and this is the problem that we have. In “Heaven Is For Real” we have the supposed account of a little boy when he was around 4 years old of going to Heaven. This review is not to say anything about all near-death experiences. I will also say some of my information comes from Gary Habermas in my personal communication with him on near-death experiences. Unfortunately, I was unable to reach him prior to this blog for his specific opinion on this account.

One point that Dr. Habermas has made about near-death experiences is that one wants to find out the details of that experience as soon as possible. This did not happen in the case of Colton Burpo, the little boy who purportedly had the experience. It was only months after his surgery that we start hearing anything whatsoever about the details of his visit. While the parents can remain skeptical of where some information could come from, we must remember this is a ministry household and such information that Colton had could have been found.

There are some problems with the account of Colton (He will be referred to by first name and his Dad as Todd to avoid confusion). To begin with Jesus is described as having the marks from the cross in his hands. Yet those who know about the crucifixion know that Jesus had the nails put in his wrists instead of in his hands. Had they gone in his hands, then Jesus would have fallen off of the cross.

We also have the Holy Spirit being seen as incarnate in Heaven. The only instance we have of someone who is a member of the Godhead becoming incarnate is that of Jesus. It is likely we have a dangerous precedent being encouraged here and one that could quite easily lead to a sort of tritheism. Some information that Colton also gives would have been easily known just from reading the Bible. We don’t need a heavenly vision to know that Jesus really loves the children.

What is most dangerous about all of this is that a child is being given the authoritative power to tell us what Heaven is like and rather than interpreting his experiences by the Scriptures, we find that we are interpreting the Scriptures by his experiences. Colton in the book becomes an authority to people on what Heaven is like all based on a vision. If we are to follow visions like this, perhaps we should also follow that of Joseph Smith or any other number of people who have visions.

What really happened to Colton? I cannot say. It could be that he did have some sort of experience but it kept being added to. I don’t really know. Some might say “Maybe God gave a vision that would be fitting for a child.” While this is possible, the problem is much of this information would have been deceptive for a child and given not an incomplete view but rather given an inaccurate view. Of course one can speak to children, but we will still try to be accurate.

Note I am also not giving any view to Colton that would imply something immoral necessarily on his part. I do not know what happened, but I know that there are problems with this book. I do not question that Heaven is real in a sense, but I do question the validity of what Colton has said. There are problems with a near-death experience when events only come out months later rather than immediately as there is plenty of time for elaboration.

Readers are invited to stick to more authoritative sources.

In Christ,
Nick Peters