Josh and Jeff interviewed me on The Remnant Radio:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InKAO3x5N5o
(I usually don’t have time to watch videos, but I can listen to them when I exercise or something!)
What does revival look like? II. Returning to God’s Word—2 Kings 22:10-20. A. Setting the stage
Walking into certain Christian bookstores (or scanning certain YouTube videos) can sometimes be a traumatizing experience for a Bible scholar. It might be something like a nutritionist or cardiologist stepping into a greasy burger joint reeking with the odor of fries, or a respiratory therapist walking into the smoking area of an airport, or … well, you get the picture.
I may exaggerate somewhat: usually even some of the lighter fare (such as many encouraging testimonies) is spiritually healthy. But it can’t substitute for the Bible or what helps us understand the Bible, even if it makes a nice dessert topping. Regarding the Bible, the most knowledgeable voices are not always the best communicators, and even they do not always have the best marketers. In keeping with U.S. culture, the religious market, like other markets, is driven by consumer appetites whetted by good marketing.
Bibles sell well, but difficulties in understanding parts of the Bible mean that even in a land saturated with Bibles, many people do not read them much, or read isolated verses apart from the context that helps explain their purpose. (We have instant foods and other shortcuts; we sometimes treat the Bible in the same way.) Meanwhile, in some less information-glutted parts of the world, people are desperate for Bibles in their language, just like in some parts of the world, people would be desperate to eat much of the food that many North Americans throw away.
Jesus taught that the first commandment is to recognize that there is just one true God, and so to love him with our whole being (Mark 12:29-30, citing Deut 6:4-5). That passage goes on to speak of keeping God’s words in our heart and reciting them for successive generations (Deut 6:6-7). (Most people could not read, so they had to learn and recite.) God’s law should be what they talk about at home and when they’re not at home (i.e., wherever they are), when they lie down and when they rise (a nice Hebrew way of saying, all the time; 6:7). They should surround themselves with reminders of God’s law everywhere (6:8-9). When God blesses his people with material prosperity, they should take heed not to forget him (6:10-15), but should continue to keep his commandments (6:17).
But Israel did forget God’s law. Many still claimed to follow their national God, but they no longer tested things from Scripture. Many of the priests and scribes who were supposed to instruct them tried to be more progressive and incorporate religious traditions from surrounding, polytheistic cultures. More commonly, the people who lacked teaching simply adopted traditions from such cultures without recognizing what was forbidden. They worshiped on high places, and worse yet used deity-images, and dedicated some of their babies as bloody sacrifices to obtain divine favors.
Such behavior prevailed through royal example through most of the reign of Manasseh, who reigned for over half a century. Manasseh experienced a latter-day change of heart (2 Chron 33:12-16), but pagan practice was now too deeply entrenched among his people to change their practices (33:17). After all, most of them had grown up with this state of affairs. His son Amon carried on this line of behavior for two years. When Manasseh’s eight-year-old grandson Josiah came to the throne, he followed a different path, probably encouraged in it by tutors put in place by the aged and repentant Manasseh before his death. But what could Josiah do? After all, he was righteous as best as he knew, but he did not have other standards to go by. Scripture had been suppressed or forgotten; certainly it was no longer center stage.
Throughout the ancient Near East, collections of laws were promulgated and then often forgotten. But foundation documents were often preserved in temples. To honor the Lord, Josiah orders the high priest to begin repairing the Lord’s house (2 Kgs 22:3-7), and what happens next sets a revolution in place. Christians in parts of Western Europe experienced something similar when Erasmus made available the New Testament in Greek: in a time when scholars were interested in going back to the classical sources and people were tired of corruption in the church, more leaders realized that the church’s foundation documents—Scripture—taught something different than many of the customs that had grown up since then. This discovery sparked the Protestant Reformation, as well as reform within much of the rest of the Western Church.
In Medieval Western Europe, most people could not read and many priests had inadequate knowledge of Scripture. Today we can read, but the book of the law has been lost in much of Western Christendom because of skepticism, difficulty understanding different literary genres, or most often simple negligence. Some simply defend adamantly their denominational traditions without searching Scripture for themselves; others depend on various other filters (their pastors, radio preachers, etc.) for their access to biblical truth. Some of these sources are trustworthy and valuable, but how can one evaluate which is which? Teaching is necessary, but devotional materials (including my blog posts) cannot be a substitute for direct engagement with God’s word itself, where (as for anyone with a Bible or internet access) that is available.
What happened when the book of the law was discovered in the temple? That’s the story that’s the heart of this lesson. It is the subject of the next lesson. (See also part I: http://www.craigkeener.org/what-does-revival-look-like-part-i-the-spirit-speaks/; http://www.craigkeener.org/what-does-revival-look-like-the-spirit-speaks-application/)
Behind in school
Should wives call their husbands “lord”?—1 Peter 3:6
When Peter calls on slaves to submit even to harsh treatment (2:18), even beatings (2:20), is he endorsing slavery? Is he at least suggesting that we should embrace harsh treatment even when we can avoid it?
When we look at Peter’s sections addressed to slaves (2:18-25) and wives (3:1-6), we should consider what setting Peter was addressing. He was not addressing a setting of voluntary employees who could simply resign from work if they were being mistreated. He was not addressing women who might readily find different husbands who did not expect unilateral submission.
Peter’s advice to both slaves and wives belongs to his larger section of what are often called household codes, which ancients in turn often discussed in the context of civic management (2:13—3:12). Ancient writers often used such codes to express conventional expectations. For the sake of honoring the Lord (2:12-13), Peter urges compliance when possible with “every human institution” (2:13). This exhortation not endorse all these human institutions, such as slavery (2:18-25), monarchy (2:13, 18), or wives calling their husbands “lord” (3:6), as universal and eternal. It is not claiming that all these human institutions are permanent divine institutions. It is just calling on those in these settings to make the best of their circumstances.
Unless they earned enough money on the side to buy their freedom, slaves did not have much say concerning their slave status. Slaveholders often did eventually free slaves (though sometimes to preclude having to support them in their old age). A minority of slaves in the Roman empire achieved status and even wealth—even as slaves. But the legal authority to emancipate slaves lay solely with the slaveholders. Peter thus provides advice for how to bear up under a difficult situation that his addressees could not control, not how to address a situation that they could not control. This is the same approach taken by many ancient moral teachers, such as Stoic philosophers, who focused on what is in our power to control, rather than on what is not.
His comments to wives follow along a similar line. (The first word in Greek in 1 Peter 3:1 is homoiôs, which the NRSV translates, “in the same way.” It explicitly links the case of wives in 3:1-6 with the case of slaves in 2:18-25.) Addressing wives married to nonbelieving husbands (3:1), Peter urges them to win over their husbands by gentle and pure behavior. Illustrating such behavior, he uses the example of matriarchs such as Sarah who, functioning within the conventional expectations of her culture, obeyed Abraham. Sarah calls her husband “my lord” (Gen 18:12), fitting convention (though not always translated this way from Hebrew), just as others could so address various respected figures (Gen 18:3; 23:6, 11), including fathers (31:35) and brothers (32:4-5, 18; 33:13-14).
Yet just as Sarah may have done what Abraham said, so also Abraham did what Sarah said (Gen 16:2), once with God’s direct backing (21:12)! So why does Peter offer only the example of Sarah? Only Sarah’s example is relevant for these wives, because they cannot control what their husbands will do. Although the degree of power varied, in virtually all cultures Peter addressed, husbands governed their wives.
Yet we need not infer from this an endorsement of universal husbandly rule or lordship any more than we infer an endorsement of a universal practice of slavery in 1 Pet 2:18-25. Husbands ruling their wives is common through history, and we might expect as much from the effects of the curse (Gen 3:16). Yet we are not called to enforce the effects of the curse (e.g., requiring men to sweat when they work, or proliferating sin and death as much as possible).
Although Peter is mainly addressing those in subordinate positions in society (1 Pet 2:13), and ancient evidence suggests that women probably outnumbered men in the churches, Peter addresses husbands here as well. He summons them to care for and honor their wives (1 Pet 3:7).
In the case of wives, Peter is addressing the norm in his day, not the question direct physical abuse that he addressed with slaves (2:20). Unlike slaves, wives were not usually objects of beating in the regions that Peter addresses (1 Pet 1:1). Also unlike slaves, wives had options to safely remove themselves from such situations, if they arose; no laws compelled them to stay. Even Judean Pharisees, who normally recognized only the husband’s right to divorce, approved of intervening and making an abusive husband grant a divorce, thus freeing his wife to remarry. In other words, Peter is not advising against escaping such abuse for those with the freedom to do it.
Is it ethical to flee abuse? Scripture provides numerous examples. David fled from Saul, and Jesus’s family fled to Egypt to escape Herod. Even in cases of persecution for the name of Christ, Jesus allows fleeing (Matt 10:23), and his disciples normally did so when possible (Acts 14:6).
Let us be careful to use these passages the way they were meant to be used: to encourage one another’s faith in the face of difficult situations, not to make those difficult situations harder!
(This brief study addresses one subject only, not all the nuances of ancient slavery, the Bible and gender, etc. I originally wrote this as part of my preliminary contribution to an Anglican study group on 1 Peter at Lambeth Palace in London. The group’s final version will probably look different, so they should not be blamed for any oversights in my own!)
Foreign 20 Blackbirds
What does revival look like? The Spirit Speaks (application)
(picking up after last week’s post)
What did revival look like in 1 Samuel? First, it affected even the wider culture, even those who would not have been seeking God on their own.
Second, there can be times when the corporate presence of God is so strong that it affects even those around us. That is, its effects are not exclusively individualistic, though it begins with individuals whose hearts are for God. In terms of personal responsibility, we want to live our individual lives in the light of God’s presence. But sometimes God’s Spirit impacts even those around us through what we do or even how we worship.
I never visited “the Toronto Blessing,” and my illustration here need not reflect on everything that happened there. But I had a friend who visited it to check it out. He tells me that as he was approaching the entrance of the building he spoke to someone beside him, whom he didn’t know. “Do you think this is for real?” he asked. The other man shook his head. “I’m just coming to prove how fake it is.” The moment their feet touched the threshold, the other man dropped flat on his face, and my friend jumped back. “Is he dead?” he asked himself, terrified. Anna Gulick, a neighbor who participated in the Asbury Revival of 1970, said that even a block away from the campus, one could feel the presence of God so strongly that one could barely speak, so in awe was one of God’s holiness.
Third, we can see one of the ways that hearing from God spread from one boy, Samuel, to many others over the course of a generation. In a time when few were hearing from God (though some were—cf. 1 Sam 2:27-36), God sovereignly reached out to a boy consecrated by others for his service. Samuel began hearing from God and became widely known for this as he grew to be a young man (3:19-21). Still, Israel was following its institutional leaders, who were either corrupt (Eli’s sons; 2:12-17, 22, 25) or compromised and ineffective (Eli himself; 2:22-25, 29), and they led the entire nation into judgment (1 Sam 4). After twenty years, Samuel was in a position to summon Israel back to the Lord (7:2-6).
But many were thereafter drawn to Samuel, and learned from his experience of God. As we see in 1 Sam 19, Samuel was mentoring many younger prophets. Although God’s Spirit speaks perfectly, we humans do not always hear perfectly. Samuel, who had a perfect batting average in prophecy (3:19), could oversee younger prophets and help guard against them going astray. (In the first-generation churches of the Pauline mission, Paul has to appeal instead to peer review; 1 Cor 14:29; 1 Thess 5:19-22.)
Was this generation a one-off? Or did God work this way at other times? In a generation when Jezebel killed the prophets of the Lord (1 Kgs 18:4, 13) and replaced them with her prophets of Baal (18:19), Elijah thought that he alone was left a prophet of the Lord (18:22; 19:10, 14). (Technically, 18:4, 13, suggest that he was wrong, though he was probably the only one still speaking for God publicly.)
But by the time that Elijah is about to be taken to heaven in a chariot of fire, the land abounds with prophets (2 Kgs 2:3, 5, 7; cf. 1 Kgs 20:35). Although 1-2 Kings does not specify Elijah’s time mentoring these prophets, we do see his successor Elisha leading them (2 Kgs 4:38; 6:1; 9:1; cf. 2:15; 4:1).
I believe that this suggests that God can raise up leaders who not only experience the Spirit but who lead others into this experience, who over the course of a generation transform their generation by the spreading of the Lord’s message.
We shall see something similar or related in the Book of Acts, in (hopefully) future installments on this theme. Prophetic revival is not, however, the only way that God works, as if he is limited to a single method. God also works through societal transformation through godly leaders, as we see through King David or King Josiah or William Wilberforce. (I will take Josiah as my example for this.) God also brings revivals of worship, as we shall see in 1-2 Chronicles. God also works in other ways than what we might call revival in any sense—e.g., through promises of progeny to patriarchs (Abraham and Sarah) or through preserving people in famine (Joseph).
What does revival look like? And who gets to define it as such? There have been times in my life when I experienced such a deep spiritual connection with certain brothers and sisters that when we encountered each other even in a casual situation we began to overflow with worship and soon prophesying. Sometimes in a small group we would take turns prophesying. (Apologies to my cessationist brothers and sisters here, but with some of you I have experienced the same joy of us excitedly discussing Scripture; we all agree that God speaks through that, at least!) Essentially, we worshiped God, experienced his Spirit strongly, and I shared what I felt that he was speaking and encouraged others in the group to do the same. We sometimes kept going for a couple hours. Of course, in that small setting we could also offer course corrections without embarrassment if the others felt that someone went off biblically or said something that interfered with the sense of the Spirit’s approval (cf. 1 Cor 14:29). But it wasn’t something we worked up; it flowed naturally from the overflow of the experience of God’s Spirit among us. Whether you want to call that prophecy, as I would, or just worshiping and listening for God’s voice, seems to me just a matter of semantics.
I don’t think that a small group experiencing God’s voice together is what people mean by revival. But what happens if it spreads?
When I came here to teach at Asbury Seminary I learned more about the two twentieth-century revivals at Asbury College (now University), which of course impacted the seminary as well. When Anna Gulick shared with me her own experience of the 1970 revival, it triggered my memories of experiences I had at a Pentecostal Bible college (now part of a university) maybe ten years later. More than once the Spirit so moved us during worship in chapel that we couldn’t stop worshiping without neglecting his awesome presence (and who would do that?) Classes had to be canceled, and the Spirit of worship and prayer settled on the campus for days. Through Spirit-led leadership, we regularly sent out mission teams. We didn’t know to call that “revival.” But we cherished it, and expected that it would happen periodically.
What is the long-range impact? That’s much harder to measure. Out of the Asbury Revival did come a generation of servants impacting the world for Christ, such as Ajith Fernando. I have kept up with a couple of my friends from those small, usually spontaneous prophetic prayer meetings; one went to share Christ with an unreached people group, and the other facilitated training for over a million believers in a closed country. Not all my colleagues from Bible college even persevered in the faith, but many are now doing ministry all over the world and leading in cutting-edge mission. While we’re called to evaluate fruit, however, only God’s perspective in eternity will show us the fruit that comes from the true moving of God’s Spirit.
Whether we want to call something revival or use some other terminology, may we embrace whatever God’s Spirit wants to do among us. When our hearts are so tender before him that we want what he wants, willing to interrupt our otherwise-appropriate schedules when he invites us into special times of intimacy with him, when we refuse to limit what God might do if he wishes … call it what you will. Just welcome, embrace, and passionately desire his presence.
Big words
What does revival look like? Part I: The Spirit Speaks
Many of us pray for revival, but what are we expecting? How would we recognize that God is answering our prayer?
Since our usual definitions of revival are largely shaped by movements of the past few centuries, rather than from a particular passage in Scripture, it’s possible that we are blending together a few different biblical models of how God works. That is, God works in various ways, and we have clustered some of those ways under particular expectations of what we mean by revival.
Having said that, there are times in history when God expressed his presence in such a way as to transform a generation, and if we are praying for such transformation, these are worth looking at. We cannot determine what shape the answer to our prayers will take—Hannah was simply praying for a son from a desperate heart, not for revival. Revival was in God’s own heart when he answered Hannah’s prayers with the boy Samuel. God is sovereign, stirring us to prayer and answering prayers in ways that sometimes make us uncomfortable. Catholics were praying for a new era of the Spirit just before the Pentecostal revival broke out among ultra low-church Protestants. Many Pentecostals were suspicious when the Spirit began moving among mainline Protestants and among Catholics. And Peter was certainly taken by surprise when his sermon was interrupted by God’s Spirit falling on uncircumcised gentiles.
Moreover, keep in mind that the long-range measure of impact may take a generation—or even eternity—to evaluate. Nevertheless, those experiencing God’s presence in these dramatic ways were not waiting for such full-scale evaluations, but were embracing what God was doing in them and through them at that time. So let’s look at one example of a revival that changed a generation. Because even this part I (on 1 Samuel) is longer than most of my posts, I will divide it into two sections.
When Samuel was a boy, the word of YHWH was rare and visions were infrequent (1 Sam 3:1). But by the time that Samuel is an old man, prophets are traveling in bands, prophesying all together with their worship instruments (10:5-6, 10). The Spirit of the Lord could come on someone else who came among them so that he too began prophesying, although afterward he might act mostly the same at the beginning (10:10-13).
By “prophesying together” I do not mean that they were prophesying in unison, but that they were all experiencing the Spirit’s inspiration and were expressing this inspiration from God rather than, or more than, paying attention to each other. Or possibly they were taking their turns (if we think of something more orderly, as in 1 Cor 14:31). The point is, that the word of YHWH was no longer so infrequent. (For the sake of some readers who are accustomed to hearing “inspiration” used in a narrower, more technical sense, I add a parenthetical digression here: I do accept Scripture as inspired [2 Tim 3:16] and as uniquely canonical. But I am using the term here in the broader sense of the Spirit moving people to speak or act for God. The English term has wider usage, of course, than even how I am using it here.)
What changed between 1 Samuel 3 and 1 Samuel 10? The author may take for granted that we already know, but he nevertheless provides a window into what was happening. Later we see Samuel presiding over a group of prophets who are prophesying (1 Sam 19:20). The Spirit of God was so strong among them that when Saul sent messengers to apprehend David, the messengers, overwhelmed with the Spirit, began prophesying. This happened also with the next two groups of messengers that Saul sent (19:20-21). Finally, Saul himself went to capture David, and was so overwhelmed by God’s Spirit that he too cast off his honorable robes and, on the ground, prophesied all day and night (19:23-24).
Keep in mind that this same Saul had lost the royal anointing of the Spirit earlier, replaced by a spirit sent for judgment (16:14). Saul had been “prophesying” by this bad spirit (18:10), and had wanted to kill David as this spirit was tormenting him (19:9-10). But when he came to where God’s prophets were prophesying, the Spirit of the Lord was so strong in that place that Saul fell down and began prophesying by God’s Spirit.
This account provides us with several insights. First, just because someone can prophesy doesn’t mean they’re super “spiritual”; it might just mean that they’re in a place where God’s Spirit is moving. There may be some leaders today living in sin who experience God’s anointing not because they are walking with God but because their mission is bathed in prayer by others. Their anointing is not permanent; compare those whose gifts leave them because of persistent sin, as in Judg 16:1-20). In times of revival, even the wicked may be affected, though they may still be wicked when the anointing “wears off.”
More next week …
Delayed ordination
Life is for God’s purpose
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1)
All things were created through Him and for Him (Col 1:16)
In him was life, and the life was the light for humanity (John 1:4)
You [God] created all things, and on account of your will they were and were created (Rev 4:11)
So why would we live for anything other than God’s eternal purpose in Christ?
Those whom he foreknew, he also decided in advance to be conformed to the image of his Son, so that he would be the firstborn among many siblings; and whom he decided in advance, these he also called; and whom he called, these he also put right with himself; and whom he put right with himself, these he also glorified (Rom 8:30)