Category Archives: Old Testament

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The call and the cost—Jeremiah 1:4-19

God had a plan for your life long before you started learning about it. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,” God told Jeremiah. “Before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations” (Jer 1:5 NIV). There is often a rush of excitement learning that God has a special plan and significance for us, special gifts and roles in his larger plan.

We may, however, also experience a sense of apprehension. What if we already had different plans of our own? Different plans do not always prove incompatible, but sometimes they do. Jeremiah’s mission would end up consuming his attention and most of the rest of his life. If our plans prove incompatible with God’s, it’s wise to scrap ours straight off and not waste time fooling around. (Moses and especially Jonah took a good bit of persuasion, and, especially in Jonah’s case, it wasn’t pretty.)

Jeremiah’s objection was different. “Oh, Lord, I can’t speak in front of people! I’m just a kid!” he protested (Jer 1:6). Protocol back then meant that people’s rank in society dictated the weight attached to their words. Who would listen to Jeremiah? Protesting one’s calling was not a new thing. Moses, who could have protested that he was too old (eighty, Exod 7:7), tried to explain to God that he was a bad speaker. Nobody was going to listen to this old shepherd from the backside of the wilderness (Exod 4:10; 6:12, 30). Gideon protested that he was youngest member of the least respected family in his tribe (Judg 6:15). Most of us could at least voice Isaiah’s objection: confronted with God’s absolute holiness, he recognized the finiteness and weakness of his own lips (Isa 6:5).

Most of us would love our lives to have significance in God’s plan. But most of us also recognize that having such a role demands something more than what we seem to be made of. A prophet to the nations? (Jer 1:5) (Jeremiah was mostly a prophet to Judah, but also offered oracles concerning many nations, which helped put his prophecies to Judah in perspective. Later Paul as an apostle to the nations/gentiles would actually proclaim the message of Christ in many gentile cities.)

The bad news is that our initial fear is correct: we’re not capable of doing what God called us to do. The good news is that we’re in good company, as neither is anybody else. God delights to use people who can’t fulfill his call in our own strength, so that we have to depend on him. By the time God fulfills what he calls us to do, we recognize that he gets the credit, not us. (Some of you read my blogs because you know me as a Bible scholar. You probably didn’t know that for a few years I was really worried whether I would even get into a PhD program. I’m doing now what I was made to do, but though it burned in my heart back then, it seemed entirely possible that I would just pastor small congregations and support myself by flipping burgers. And there are still aspects of my calling for which I look to the Lord.)

The really good news is that when God calls us, he is with us to fulfill his calling. It’s not our doing: it’s him using us (Jer 1:8-10, 18-19). God’s word was going to come to pass, because God was speaking it (1:12, 14-16); but Judah needed to hear the message beforehand, so that they would understand why God was judging them.

Now some more bad news, at least from the human perspective: people were not going to like what God was giving Jeremiah to say. This may be harder on those of us who are sensitive to what others think than on somebody thick-skinned and pugnacious. It was certainly going to be hard on Jeremiah. God’s assurance, “Don’t let them scare you! I’ll rescue you!” (Jer 1:8) gave a hint where this was going. “If you give in to them, you’re through,” God essentially says (1:17). Jeremiah would struggle inwardly, but he never did renounce his message to Judah.

“They’ll fight against you,” God warns, but it will be okay because God will be with him and rescue him (1:19). Centuries earlier, Moses asked, “Who am I?” (Exod 3:11), and instead of answering who Moses was, God reminded him that God was with him (3:12). God also provided a more important declaration of identity: “I AM who I AM” (Exod 3:14). It’s not who we are but who God is that makes the difference.

In the short run, this was bad news for Jeremiah. Following God’s will meant that he would be ostracized and attacked. “Nobody owes me money, nor do I owe money to anybody else, but everybody curses me anyway!” (Jer 15:10). He would have to stay single—to spare him from the grief of having to lose a family when judgment came (16:2-4). He couldn’t attend parties or funerals; separated by his devotion to God, he fed on God’s words but was isolated from what mattered to the rest of society (15:16-17; 16:5-9). His closest friends would turn on him (20:10). He would endure public beating, humiliation and imprisonment for not being appropriately “patriotic” (20:1-3). His own relatives, priests in Anathoth (cf. 1:1), would want to kill him (11:21).

Yet in the long run, he turned out to be the one true prophet of his generation. His generation didn’t listen to him, but after judgment fell, Judah learned their lesson. Three books of the Bible written after Jeremiah’s lifetime emphasize that God’s words to Jeremiah were fulfilled: Daniel (Dan 9:2), the conclusion of 2 Chronicles (2 Chron 36:21-22) and the beginning of Ezra (Ezra 1:1).

When Jesus called disciples to follow him, they had to leave their professions and everything they owned behind, at least for awhile (Mark 1:18, 20). In the end, they found themselves unprepared for Jesus’s even greater demands to take up their cross and follow him (8:34; 15:21)—although that changed after Easter and Pentecost (Acts 2:14, 37, 42).

We live on the other side of Easter and Pentecost. Your calling might seem big or small in others’ eyes. Maybe all you know about God’s plan for you so far is the basics: love him, love your neighbor, love your fellow believers, and share Christ with the world. Whatever God’s plan is for you, are you ready to surrender everything to him? Are you ready to recognize that his plan for you is what is best, and is worth any price you must pay along the way?

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COVID 19 and biblical grounds for social distancing

Nearly all of my posts are scheduled far in advance. None of them (including the recent post on the biblical book of Job) was precipitated by news of the coronavirus. But since the topic is on people’s minds, I offer here just a small possible contribution.

For those wondering whether quarantine or social distancing can be biblical: I have long taken biblical texts about isolation as potentially relevant precedent for certain conditions. (Admittedly, I have some bias: some have thought me OCD because even in regular times I wash my hands after being settings with much handshaking. But when I do, fairly rarely, catch colds, sometimes they develop into worse and protracted conditions.)

The relevant OT passages have more to do with ritual purity (and the ritual contagion of impurity) than with contagious diseases in our modern sense. Nevertheless, they also incidentally illustrate that the idea of isolation or distancing for perceived causes of a sort of contagion has some biblical warrant. (Because my PhD and my usual teaching area are NT, I should defer to my OT colleagues for correction on this, though I think all of us would agree that there is modern medical warrant for social distancing.)

Here I give the example of “leprosy” (a label used in our translations of the Bible for a range of skin conditions, but which were associated back then with ritual impurity):

“The priest shall examine the disease on the skin of his body, and if the hair in the diseased area has turned white and the disease appears to be deeper than the skin of his body, it is a leprous disease; after the priest has examined him he shall pronounce him ceremonially unclean. But if the spot is white in the skin of his body, and appears no deeper than the skin, and the hair in it has not turned white, the priest shall confine the diseased person for seven days. The priest shall examine him on the seventh day, and if he sees that the disease is checked and the disease has not spread in the skin, then the priest shall confine him seven days more. The priest shall examine him again on the seventh day, and if the disease has abated and the disease has not spread in the skin, the priest shall pronounce him clean; it is only an eruption; and he shall wash his clothes, and be clean. But if the eruption spreads in the skin after he has shown himself to the priest for his cleansing, he shall appear again before the priest. The priest shall make an examination, and if the eruption has spread in the skin, the priest shall pronounce him unclean; it is a leprous disease” (Lev 13:3-8, NRSV).

The NASB repeatedly employs the English term “isolate” in this chapter (Lev 13:4-5, 11, 21, 26, 31, 33). In Num 12:14, Miriam has to remain outside the camp for seven days after her outbreak of this condition.

In the NT, Jesus clearly transcends ritual impurity, touching the impure. He models for us compassion, trust in God’s power, and courage to cross barriers. Jesus made the impure pure. There are undoubtedly also various “spiritual” applications of the purity principles in Leviticus (such as avoiding what is spiritually impure).

Nevertheless, the application that I suggest here rests not on analogy with purity regulations per se but with recognizing the practical value of containing what was understood as contagious. We are not bound to follow levitical regulations, but we can still learn principles from them. Moreover, doing church is less about being spectators than about relationships, so we do not always need to meet 5000 strong to be the church (cf. http://www.craigkeener.org/the-new-building-program/; http://www.craigkeener.org/megachurch/).

It is not OCD to follow guidelines from the CDC (Centers for Disease Control). If the CDC (in the U.S., or equivalent professional bodies in other nations) provides warnings how to prevent the spread of something that harms our neighbor, we should do our best to comply.

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Job and his comforters, or: how not to do grief counseling

I often think painfully of godly students or friends who died quite young—for example, Caritha Clarke, Nabeel Qureshi, Aaron Nickerson, and most recently Brittany Buchanan Douglas. The news of these events made little sense to me emotionally, though I have confidence in each case that they are celebrating now; they made it to God’s throne ahead of me. With less sorrow, I think of godly friends (or my wife or myself) who suffered but experienced healing and restoration in this life.

You won’t have to read many of my blog posts to figure out that I believe God does miracles. But if you’ve been around very long, you probably also know some people who haven’t experienced healing, despite much prayer. You undoubtedly know godly people who have experienced tragedies. Some of us live through our tragedies and find happiness on the other side, but that not everyone does is itself often part of our experience of tragedy.

How do we make sense of these things? Sometimes those of us who are theologically inclined bristle at leaving some things a mystery, such as why one person is healed (sometimes even in inexplicably dramatic ways) and another person isn’t. Although there are definitely principles that change outcomes in many cases, there are some exceptions to all our humanly devised theological rules.

The Book of Job addressed God’s people facing tragedy and not understanding why. For those who persevere it offers hope (James 5:11), whether in the short run or the long run. Sandwiched between its narrative introduction and its narrative conclusion, most of the book consists of Job’s poetic dialogues with his “comforters,” who actually prove to be rather “sorry” (NASB) or “miserable” (ESV, KJV, NET, NIV, NRSV, WEB) comforters (Job 16:2). They withhold kindness and prove to be fair-weather friends (6:14-17, 21a).

Job’s comforters start out helpfully, lamenting with Job and staying silent for seven days (Job 2:12-13). They mourn with those who mourn, sharing Job’s pain. If they would have just kept their mouths shut the story would have taken a different turn. Instead, they soon begin spouting conventional wisdom, providing many wise sayings but misapplying them to Job’s case. Knowledge can be applied in foolish ways: “The legs of a disabled person hang limp; so does a proverb in the mouth of a fool” (Prov 26:7 NRSV); “Like a thorn that falls into the hand of a drunkard, so is a proverb in the mouth of fools” (26:9 NASB).

Job didn’t need their theology lesson about why he was suffering. Job already knew the sorts of “wisdom” they were unloading on him: “What you know, I also know; I am not inferior to you” (Job 13:2, NRSV). He really didn’t need them to justify God by condemning him: “If you would only keep silent, that would be your wisdom!” (13:5).

Job’s friends kept insisting—and more so as the conversation progressed—that God is righteous and punishes the wicked. That, of course, is true. But they also kept insisting—and again more so as the conversation progressed—that this meant that Job must have sinned. Job didn’t understand his situation, but he knew that he wasn’t being punished for impiety. Certainly he at least was no worse than his accusers. So he pushed back—and himself the more so as the conversation progressed—insisting that he was innocent and that God would not justly find fault with him. God’s power is unlimited, but if God heard Job’s plea he would vindicate him.

In the book’s closing chapters, God calls to account both Job and his friends. God first answers Job at length (Job 38—41). Does Job understand all the secrets of creation, all the interests that God must wisely balance in bringing to pass his purposes? Before God’s infinite majesty, Job confesses his own inadequate understanding of the divine purpose (42:2-6; esp. 42:3 with 38:2). But God also speaks, far more concisely, to the leading voice among Job’s friends. (God sidesteps directly answering the speech of Elihu in Job 32—37; scholars differ as to whether this is because Elihu voices God’s perspective or does not even merit an answer!)

To Job’s chief comforter, God replies: “I am angry with you and your two friends, because you have not spoken the truth about me, as my servant Job has.So now take seven bulls and seven rams and go to my servant Job and sacrifice a burnt offering for yourselves. My servant Job will pray for you, and I will accept his prayer and not deal with you according to your folly. You have not spoken the truth about me, as my servant Job has” (Job 42:7-8, NIV).

Indeed, Job was more righteous than they, and while God would reprove Job’s pretense of understanding, he would defend Job before his friends. They submitted to God immediately, and God answered Job’s prayer to forgive them.

In one way, God reproved both Job and his friends, because in a sense they both misunderstood God’s ways. Job’s friends believed that bad things should happen only to bad people, and therefore Job was bad. They were theologically wrong, and their assumption that Job had merited his suffering was morally wrong, misjudging Job and contributing further to his suffering.

Job misunderstood God’s ways in a slightly different sense. Backed into a rhetorical corner by his accusers, he kept insisting that he was not a bad person, and that God should vindicate him. Yet Job was still partly working from the wrong assumption that his friends shared: that bad things should happen only to bad people. God’s answer to Job was to show his glorious design in nature, that his wisdom is beyond our wisdom, and therefore to leave us back at the bothersome answer we often want to dismiss at the beginning as simplistic.

We may be welcome to explore and seek for greater knowledge, but we are finite and some things will always be a mystery to our limited intellects (cf. Deut 29:29; Prov 25:2). We know enough that we should trust the Lord who is smarter than we are when there are some things we don’t know. If we think we can explain adequately all the Lord’s ways, we, like Job, may learn otherwise when we stand before him (Job 42:5-6).

God never explains to Job the backroom discussion with the superhuman accuser (Job 1—2) who is far more powerful than Job’s earthly accusers. He never explains the sorts of celestial negotiations that may go on behind the scenes, to which we are normally not privy except when he grants special revelation. Job doesn’t need to know those things, and wouldn’t have been prepared to understand them in his era if he had. He does need to remember that God is trustworthy no matter what. Further, Job may be innocent with regard to the suffering, but that is beside the point. His own right hand cannot deliver him (Job 40:14). In NT language, God’s blessing comes by grace.

In any case, Job was right that he had not merited his suffering, and his friends acted sinfully when they judged him. Unless God provides insight into a given case, we don’t know why a given person is suffering. Looking down on them is sometimes a way of distancing ourselves from having to consider that we could experience suffering ourselves. “You see my suffering and are afraid” (Job 6:21b).

Others do not assume that the suffering have sinned, but they assume that they lack sufficient faith to escape. Some quote Job 3:25: “what I fear befalls me, and what I dread overtakes me,” as if Job’s fear brought these events on him. But Job probably refers to his present fears; he had reasons for posttraumatic (or in this case, during-trauma) stress. Compare Job’s lament about how unexpected his sufferings were: “When I expected good, then evil came; When I waited for light, then darkness came” (30:26, NASB). Part of the point of the book is that Job did not do anything (1:1)—or neglect anything (cf. 1:5)—to deserve his suffering. God himself declares this: “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil” (1:8, NRSV).

When brothers and sisters suffer, let’s mourn with those who mourn (Rom 12:15), like members of one body who suffer together (1 Cor 12:26). Mystery can be difficult from the standpoint of theodicy or apologetics. Scoffers may complain, “Where is their God?” (cf. Ps 42:3, 10; 79:10; 115:2; Joel 2:17). But while we do our best to honor him, God is able to defend his own honor, and he owes no answers to scoffers. Sometimes, in this life, he does not even explain himself to us.

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“Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it”—Psalm 81:10

Against preparing sermons, some preachers used to quote the verse, “Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it” (Ps 81:10). Or perhaps I should say more precisely, they used to quote a single line of the verse. Their resistance to preparation apparently extended to examining the context of the lines they quoted.

In the verse itself, God reminds them that he redeemed his people from slavery in Egypt and spoke to his people in the wilderness (81:8-10). His people resisted obeying him, following other gods, so God punished them (81:11-12). But if they would obey him, he would bless them, as he wanted to do (81:13-16).

What would he fill their mouths with? In this case, not what should come out of the mouth (words) but what should go in (food). As God provided manna for his people when they were in the wilderness, so he longed for their obedience so he could bless them with food:

“But you would be fed with the finest of wheat;with honey from the rock I would satisfy you” (Ps 81:16, NIV)

The verse is about provision, but not about providing sermon material without study, when we have access to be able to read the Bible. It’s about God supplying the needs of his people when they follow his ways.

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Against the grain—the prophet Jeremiah

Many people thought that Jeremiah was a stick in the mud, a contrarian, and certainly unpatriotic. He went against the mood of his culture. Jeremiah was summoning Judah back to the values of God’s covenant with them, but they didn’t think that they had strayed. Most of the common people couldn’t read Scripture, so they depended on what their preachers taught them.

And most of their preachers assured them that God was with them. After all, they were his chosen people, and they alone of all peoples worshiped God. These preachers remembered part of the covenant message. But over generations they had also adapted it—keeping up with the times, so to speak. Jeremiah likewise recognized that some particulars of God’s message might vary from one generation to another depending on the setting of God’s people: that’s why judgment was sometimes the right message. But the leaders’ “progressive” adjustments rested not on what God was really saying but on what seemed good to them, which was shaped by generations of tradition and by the climate of public opinion. They could overlook some immorality; after all, God loved his people and some of the supposed immoralities were being committed by the preachers themselves.

Yet God told Jeremiah, “I did not send these prophets, but they ran. I did not speak to them, but they prophesied. But if they had stood in My council, then they would have announced My words to My people, and would have turned them back from their evil way and from the evil of their deeds” (Jer 23:21-22, NASB).

It was like a century earlier, when the more openly idolatrous northern kingdom of Israel could cry out, “My God, we of Israel know you!” (Hos 8:2)—even while continuing to honor golden calves at Dan and Bethel. Now, in Jeremiah’s day, priests and prophets were still telling God’s people how much God delighted in them without warning them of judgment to come.

It was indeed true that God loved them. But the God who loves us comes to transform us and invite us into relationship with him, not to leave us wallowing in de facto rebellion against him. Judgments on societies are sometimes wakeup calls because God loves us too much to let us continue to be deceived. They come when more direct means of admonition have failed—when people do not listen to God’s message through the prophets, or when the prophets fail to speak the full truth of God’s message.

The prophets of Jeremiah’s day fixed on the covenant blessings, and took encouragement from one another’s prophecies (cf. 23:30) that they were saying the right thing. Who was Jeremiah to think that he alone was hearing from God? (Still, he may have had some sympathizers at some point. The extrabiblical Lachish letters from this time may suggest that some Judahite prophets were not being as “patriotic” and encouraging of the war effort as Judahite military leaders thought they should be.) How could Jeremiah dare to prophesy one thing when everybody else was prophesying something different? And something that nobody wanted to hear! Yet the majority of the prophets proved wrong about the big picture.

Jeremiah was often discouraged about his mission. To whom could he speak, when the people were closed to his message (Jer 6:10)? Yet he was full of God’s wrath; he could not hold it inside any longer, and had to speak (6:11). The prophets and priests had healed his people’s wound only superficially, promising them well-being (6:14); but they needed to return to the ancient covenant, to God’s Word that he had given long ago (6:16). Listening to the consensus of preachers is no substitute for going back to the Scriptures ourselves. Most Judahites were illiterate and lacked this option, but no one who’s able to read this post has such an excuse.

God explained that his people did not know him (8:7), despite their insistence: “How can you say, ‘We are wise, and the law of the LORD is with us,’ when, in fact, the false pen of the scribes has made it into a lie? The wise shall be put to shame, they shall be dismayed and taken; since they have rejected the word of the LORD, what wisdom is in them?” (8:8-9, NRSV). From prophet to priest, eager for popularity, the leaders had been assuring God’s people that all would be well, but it was not what God was saying (8:10-11).

How could Jeremiah challenge the consensus of the appointed leaders of his people? Yet God’s word within him could not remain silent. His voice for God incurred his rivals’ hatred. “Alas, my mother, that you gave me birth,a man with whom the whole land strives and contends!I have neither lent nor borrowed, yet everyone curses me” (15:10, NIV). “I never sat in the company of revelers, never made merry with them; I sat alone because your hand was on me and you had filled me with indignation. Why is my pain unending and my wound grievous and incurable? You are to me like a deceptive brook, like a spring that fails” (15:17-18 NIV). God did not even allow Jeremiah to have a family—and in his case it was mercy, to protect him from the coming grief (16:1-3). Jeremiah was not allowed to join others in mourning or feasting (16:5-9); God had set him apart to show his people what was coming.

In some spheres, it looks like everything will be well. And maybe in those spheres it really will be well for a time. Readers of these blogs live in many nations and many situations. When the consensus is all one direction, it is easy to regard one’s own spiritual sense as unduly shaped by natural optimism or natural pessimism, and we must be open to that possibility too. What matters, though, is not our natural disposition but what we are hearing from God when we listen, and especially when we go back to God’s heart in Scripture and weigh popular opinion by that.

Granted, we know in part and prophesy in part (1 Cor 13:9), so different ones of us may hear different parts of God’s message. But if the word of the Lord that we hear consistently and urgently calls God’s people to awaken, to turn more wholeheartedly to him, how can we hold that inside? May God grant us both courage and wisdom to serve and shepherd his people wisely.

Jeremiah’s generation didn’t listen to him, but his message turned out to be true. And while Jeremiah himself did not live to see it in this life, the next generation affirmed his message (2 Chron 36:22; Ezra 1:1; Dan 9:2). Together with the exile, Jeremiah’s message from God ultimately brought a paradigm shift among his people. God’s time is not our time, but he calls us to be faithful even in the face of opposition. It is not what our culture thinks. It is not whatever seems good in our own eyes. It is the word of the Lord to which we must look.