Our text this past Sunday was Acts 2:42-47, a text which represents, in many ways, the DNA of the Church. The followers of Jesus devoted themselves to the Apostles' doctrine, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer. When we talked about how they devoted themselves their fellowship-- koinonia-- we explored how easy it is for us to imagine Church to be an ideal community. Worse yet, we tend to bring our own ideals into whatever church we join, setting ourselves up for disappointment and disillusionment... ...which is why, yesterday, in my sermon I read portions of this excerpt from Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Life Together about the necessity of becoming disillusioned with our ideal of community: “Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it had sprung from a wish dream. The serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community, is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and to try to realize it. But God’s grace speedily shatters such dreams. Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves." Bonhoeffer calls us out. We do come into a church with a set of ideals and expectations. But Bonhoeffer does the unexpected by saying that it is God's grace that shatters those dreams. Most of us are familiar with disillusionment, particularly with Christians. But how is this a "grace"? "By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come...

[EDITOR'S NOTE: The following six-part series of blogs are adapted from a paper I wrote this year in my Pentateuch class with Dr. John Goldingay at Fuller Theological Seminary. These thoughts are not meant to be the final word on the matter, nor to form a sort of apologetic against atheists. This is not material for an argument. It is simply a response based on a closer reading of the Torah-- the first five books of the Bible. My hope is that it will help Christians avoid simplistic views about the "God of the Old Testament. Read Part 1 HERE, Part 2 HERE, Part 3 HERE, and Part 4 HERE.] Grace and Gospel in the Torah To briefly explore the question in the affirmative—if we ask what sort of God the Torah reveals YHWH to be—we find a portrait of a loving and gracious God. We see a God who creates the world on purpose, who blesses it and calls it good and beautiful. We see a God ho chose Abraham not because of anything Abraham had done, but simply by grace. We see a God who reminds Israel in Deuteronomy that God did not choose them, the descendents of Abraham, again in a fresh, existential way because of their size or strength. When God calls Mosese as the burning bush, He says that He has heard the cries of His people (Exodus 3). Salvation in the Torah is not dependent on obedience to the law. God saves Israel because He chose Israel, not the other way around. Then, when God gives them the commandments in the wilderness, these are not pre-requisites but confirmation of their status as His people. Just as a parent can only give a curfew to his or her own children, so YHWH give instructions to...

[EDITOR'S NOTE: The following six-part series of blogs are adapted from a paper I wrote this year in my Pentateuch class with Dr. John Goldingay at Fuller Theological Seminary. These thoughts are not meant to be the final word on the matter, nor to form a sort of apologetic against atheists. This is not material for an argument. It is simply a response based on a closer reading of the Torah-- the first five books of the Bible. My hope is that it will help Christians avoid simplistic views about the "God of the Old Testament. Read Part 1 HERE, Part 2 HERE, and Part 3 HERE.] Claim # 4: "The God of the Old Testament is...a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."-- Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion. Is God a Malevolent Bully? The fourth and final claim is that the God of the Old Testament is a “misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” Here Dawkins gives up totally on a reasoned critique and starts shooting out phrases that form poetic cadences on paper. He is saying—with one enormously large sweep—that YHWH hates gays and Gentiles, and kills babies, whole people groups, someone else’s sons and daughters, and crops and livestock for the sake of his love of self, love of suffering, and just for the fun of it, simply because He can. There are several assumptions built into this last tirade. They must be taken one by one to see what the Torah has to say about them. The first assumption is that just because God prohibits something He hates it. “Hate” is an interesting word in the Torah. In the ESV, hate is never used to describe how God feels about anyone. It frequently describes how...

[EDITOR'S NOTE: The following six-part series of blogs are adapted from a paper I wrote this year in my Pentateuch class with Dr. John Goldingay at Fuller Theological Seminary. These thoughts are not meant to be the final word on the matter, nor to form a sort of apologetic against atheists. This is not material for an argument. It is simply a response based on a closer reading of the Torah-- the first five books of the Bible. My hope is that it will help Christians avoid simplistic views about the "God of the Old Testament. Read Part 1 HERE and Part 2 HERE.] Claim # 3: "The God of the Old Testament is...vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser..."-- Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion. Is God a Vindictive, Bloodthirsty Ethnic Cleanser? The third claim is that God is a “vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser.” There is legitimate evidence in the Torah for this claim. God kills the firstborn males in Egypt and “gives” them a land that requires cleansing it of its inhabitants. All along the way from Egypt to Canaan, there are people groups that Israel fight in battle, with YHWH providing the victory. (See: Amalekites.) But there is also a thread of God’s love and ultimate goal for ethnic outsiders. Right from the beginning, the plan is to bless “all the families of the earth.” As selective or exclusive as the call of Abraham in Genesis 12 appears to be, the point is always “all the families of the earth.” As C. S. Lewis once wrote, God uses the “chosen” for the sake of the “unchosen.” Abraham seems to grasp this when he prays for Sodom and Gomorrah—two cities that clearly fall in the “unchosen” category—to be spared despite their wickedness. Perhaps Abraham saw God’s redemption up close and personal in...

[EDITOR'S NOTE: The following six-part series of blogs are adapted from a paper I wrote this year in my Pentateuch class with Dr. John Goldingay at Fuller Theological Seminary. These thoughts are not meant to be the final word on the matter, nor to form a sort of apologetic against atheists. This is not material for an argument. It is simply a response based on a closer reading of the Torah-- the first five books of the Bible. My hope is that it will help Christians avoid simplistic views about the "God of the Old Testament. Read Part 1 HERE.] Claim #2: "The God of the Old Testament is...a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak."-- Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion Is God a Petty, Unjust Control-Freak? The second claim is that God is “a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak.” We will deal with the “unforgiving” claim as a subset of the next claim that the Old Testament God is vindictive. The rest of these claims could be further separated and dealt with, but they are interconnected. Let us assume for the moment that Dawkins knows that they are. It would seem, however, that he does not know how these things are connected. For example, one could make the case that to have any rules at all is to be “petty” and “controlling.” But to have no rules would be unjust. Genesis 4 shows us what happens without clear instructions from YHWH. Two brothers, left to sort out how to “love God and love each other” end up in relational tension. YHWH warns Cain to do what it is right, but he disregards it and kills Abel (as pictured above in the Il Tintorreto painting). YHWH then banishes Cain. The story serves as instruction—the word “Torah” means instruction not laws—for future generations about God’s...

[EDITOR'S NOTE: The following six-part series of blogs are adapted from a paper I wrote this year in my Pentateuch class with Dr. John Goldingay at Fuller Theological Seminary. These thoughts are not meant to be the final word on the matter, nor to form a sort of apologetic against atheists. This is not material for an argument. It is simply a response based on a closer reading of the Torah-- the first five books of the Bible. My hope is that it will help Christians avoid simplistic views about the "God of the Old Testament."] Richard Dawkins, perhaps the most influential atheist of our generation, wrote in his book, The God Delusion: “God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." Dawkins’ claims are bold and sweeping, but we will deal with them one by one. Before doing so, however, we must deal with how Dawkins names the God revealed in the Old Testament. To Dawkins, He is simply “The God of the Old Testament,” but within the Old Testament this is not how He is named. Such a name, for obvious reasons, would not make any sense. “God” in the Old Testament is not a generic, abstract, absolute deity. He is the revealed God, the Creator-God, the God who made a covenant with Abraham and Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. His covenant name—His revealed identity—is YHWH, not simply “Elohim.” This, I think, is the point Goldingay is trying to make when he refuses the term “mono-theism” to describe Israel’s faith. What God commands in the Torah is not simply monotheism—the worship of...

What is the mission of God, the missio dei? Is to save a collection of individuals? Or is to have a community for himself, to make for Himself a people? When we think of the mission of the church, the temptation is to see the church as a sort of "sales and marketing team" for the Gospel, to think that our sole purpose is to "win more souls." But imagine for a moment if a young single man took a young single lady out on a date and said to her: "Look, let's cut to the chase. I'm not really interested in who you are or what movies you like or what you hobbies are. I really just want to have lots and lots of kids. I mean, I've got this big house with lots of rooms and I just want to fill it." Now, on the one hand, the young lady might find this refreshing: a man who wants to have kids right away! But on the other hand, there is something quite disturbing about the whole thing. He almost makes it sound like any girl will do; having kids is the real goal. As bizarre as this sounds, I wonder if this is a little bit like a pastor or church-planter saying, "I want to plant a church to reach more people." No doubt: we need to keep announcing Christ to those who have not heard. And we start new churches and campuses to enable us to announce Christ to more people. But I suspect that something can easily get out of order here. The Church is not a means to an end, a vehicle to "reach more people"; the community of the people of God is the end goal. In Acts, churches are formed because new people...

This is a new billboard in our city. While some may have a strong reaction to a sign like this, I think Christians ought to listen to what our atheist friends are saying to us because it says a lot about us. The billboard is a massive mirror of how our lived faith looks. (This is not unlike Nietzshce's late 19th-century proclamation that "God is dead", which was not a statement about belief in God but an indictment of a culture that claimed to believe in God while they had functionally deconstructed a theistic worldview.) The uncomfortable truth is that for many Christians, God is like an imaginary friend. This is especially highlighted around Easter season by the way we talk about Jesus' resurrection. Broadly speaking, Evangelicals think the Resurrection means some combination of these three things: 1. EVACUATION: Because God raised Jesus from the dead, we know that Jesus really was God, and therefore those who believe in Him are going to be taken out of this world one day and go to heaven. God, in this view, is an imaginary Fireman who will rescue us from the flames of Hell, which are even now consuming this world. 2. COMPENSATION: Because God rasied Jesus from dead, we know that Jesus was God and so we ought to listen to what the Bible says and do good things if we want to be rewarded. God, in this view, is an imaginary Santa Claus who "knows when we've been bad or good" and will compensate us accordingly with a scolding or with ethereal rewards in heaven. 3. CONSOLATION: Because God raised Jesus from the dead, we know that Jesus is God and since He ascended to heaven, we'll go there one day too. God, in this view, is an imaginary therapist--...

In honor of the 100th anniversary of the tragic sinking of the Titanic, here is a little known story about a nearby ship that could have rescued quite a few more passengers. The following is an excerpt from my first book, Butterfly in Brazil: How Your Life Can Make a World of Difference: Cyril Evans is not a name you would easily recognize. He wasn’t then nor is he now well known. Evans was a radio operator aboard the Californian, a British steamship, under the command of Captain Stanley Lord. He, along with Captain Lord and the rest of the crew left London, England, on April 5, 1912, bound for Boston. Though the ship could carry as many as 47 passengers and 55 crewmen, on that particular voyage, there were no passengers on board. Nine days into the voyage, they encountered a large and dangerous ice field. They were just south of Newfoundland. Finding themselves surrounded by ice and deciding it to be too dangerous to continue, the Californian reversed its engines and stopped for the night. Around midnight, Second Officer Herbert Stone began his watch. When he arrived, his apprentice seaman, peering intently through a pair of binoculars, informed him of a steamship in the distance. Third Officer Groves, whose shift Stone was relieving, had been the one to spot the ocean liner. Curious to know what other ship was out in the middle of the ice field, Stone ordered his apprentice to try to establish contact. They tried their Morse lamp. No response. The apprentice left to record the unusual events. Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, Stone saw an explosion of white light filling the night sky. It seemed to come from the direction of the other ship. Then came another. And another. Five rockets...

The past few Sundays, I've found myself saying to my congregation that if they could leave a service and apply what I've just preached, then I've failed them. Sounds a bit strange, I know. But I was explaining to them why communion is now at the end of our services-- as the climactic moment not an afterthought-- instead of having it right after the singing portion of our worship, as we had done for the better part of two years. (We made the switch during Lent.) The reason is quite simple: The proper response to the preaching of the word should not be, "Oh, that's a great little insight. I think I'll go apply that." I think it ought to be, "O God, what are we going to do now?" The New Testament often records people being "cut to the heart" after one of the apostles preached. Their goal was not to give people a few tips on their marriage or a few pithy phrases to guided their business transactions. (Though there are "wisdom" books in the Old Testament that do that...there is a place for it.) The overall goal in New Testament preaching was to reveal Christ-- Christ as the full revelation of God the Father, Christ as the only Savior of the world, Christ as the true and rightful King of this world, even now! When you preach that way, people will inevitably see how far off we are. No theatrical voice inflections or guilt trips required. The Scripture is sufficient. I had a professor in my undergrad who used to say that we read the Bible so that we can "know God and become His people." When the Word is proclaimed, when we enter the story and soak ourselves in the narratives, not only is God revealed,...