Author: Christopher R Smith

The Rev. Dr. Christopher R. Smith is an an ordained minister, a writer, and a biblical scholar. He was active in parish and student ministry for twenty-five years. He was a consulting editor to the International Bible Society (now Biblica) for The Books of the Bible, an edition of the New International Version (NIV) that presents the biblical books according to their natural literary outlines, without chapters and verses. His Understanding the Books of the Bible study guide series is keyed to this format. He was also a consultant to Tyndale House for the Immerse Bible, an edition of the New Living Translation (NLT) that similarly presents the Scriptures in their natural literary forms, without chapters and verses or section headings. He has a B.A. from Harvard in English and American Literature and Language, a Master of Arts in Theological Studies from Gordon-Conwell, and a Ph.D. in the History of Christian Life and Thought, with a minor concentration in Bible, from Boston College, in the joint program with Andover Newton Theological School.

How can we show that writings of the apostle Paul are reliable and trustworthy?

Q. How can we show that the writings of the apostle Paul are reliable and trustworthy, especially to someone who thinks that Paul is wrong in some of the things he says?

Our confidence in the writings that we have from the apostle Paul that are found in the Bible is based on the fact that they are part of the canon of Scripture. That is, they are among the books that Christians have recognized, through a process led by the Holy Spirit over several centuries, as inspired by God.

In other words, our confidence is not in Paul as a person, although he was certainly a very learned, intelligent, godly, and committed man. Our confidence is in God, who chose certain people at certain times to be the instruments of delivering his word in writing.

In many cases, as in the case of Paul, the biblical authors did not realize that they writing Scripture, and they were not intending to write it. They were addressing specific situations in the life of communities of believers in specific places and at specific times. But God gave their words a timeless, universal quality that has made them applicable to all believers who have come afterward.

I should stress that our confidence in the Bible as the word of God is a matter of faith, not a matter of proof. In that sense, we cannot “show” anyone that they should have confidence in Paul’s biblical writings because those writings are inspired Scripture. People need to read the Bible fairly and open-mindedly, and when they do, because the word of God is “living and active,” the Holy Spirit may bear witness to their spirit that this is indeed the word of God. I have heard many testimonies of people who have started reading the Bible and found its words to be life-giving and transforming and, as a result, they have become confident by faith that it is the word of God.

If you have a friend who is having a particular problem with some of the things that Paul says, perhaps you could encourage this friend to read some other parts of the Bible, for example, the gospels, which record the life and teachings of Jesus. This may help give your friend an appreciation for the Bible as a whole, and then, when your friend can see Paul’s writings within the context of the entire Bible, he or she may not have such a problem with them.

The Bible itself says that the “things of the Spirit of God” are “spiritually discerned.” So getting someone to recognize the Bible as the word of God is not a matter of argument or persuasion. I think instead we need to invite people to read the Bible, starting with the books they are best in a position to appreciate, and pray that the Holy Spirit will speak to their hearts through what they read.

There are admittedly many passages in the Bible that people have trouble with. (That’s why there are hundreds of posts on this blog!) But those are not necessarily central to the message of the Bible. The core of that message is God’s redemptive love for us, culminating in the life, ministry, atoning death, and glorious resurrection of Jesus Christ. I would encourage you to point your friend towards those things. He or she may never come to terms with Paul completely. But your friend may come to appreciate the central and most profound message of the Bible and, as a result, find his or her own place in God’s ongoing story of redemption.

Why did God need to test Abraham?

Q. God asked Abraham to take his son Isaac and sacrifice him as an offering to God. My understanding has always been that he was testing Abraham’s faithfulness. But wouldn’t an all-knowing God have known the results of the test beforehand, making the test pointless? Or was this not really a test but something else? Perhaps an object lesson for Abraham? But what lesson?

The Bible does begin the story of God telling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac by saying that “God tested Abraham.” However, I don’t think we should understand the word “test” to mean that God did this in order to find out something that he didn’t already know.

That can be one sense of the word in Hebrew. That is the meaning, for example, when Eliphaz asks Job, “If someone tries to speak with you, will you be upset?” It is also the meaning when Moses asks in Deuteronomy, “Has any god ever tried to take one nation out of another to be his own?” In both of these cases, someone would be trying something without knowing in advance how it would work out.

However, the word can also have a different sense: to try with the expectation of success. Think of how a climber pulls down hard on a rope to make sure that it is secure before using it to ascend a rock face. That is testing with the expectation of success. The word has this sense in the Bible when, for example, Daniel says to the guard, “Please test your servants for ten days: Give us nothing but vegetables to eat and water to drink. Then compare our appearance with that of the young men who eat the royal food, and treat your servants in accordance with what you see.” Daniel expected success: He expected that the guard would see that he and his friends looked healthier than the others, and the guard also expected that this would reasonably be the outcome, or he wouldn’t have allowed the test.

I believe that this is also the sense in Genesis when God “tests” Abraham by telling him to sacrifice Isaac. God expected success. He had every reason to believe that Abraham would obey. So why, then, did he test him, if he knew in advance how things would turn out? I think there were at least two good reasons.

Jonathan Edwards wrote, “If something is excellent, it is excellent for it to be known.” So, for one thing, God was causing Abraham’s excellent trust in him and faithfulness to him to be known by demonstration. That continues to provide an example for us today. The book of Hebrews cites Abraham as one of the outstanding examples of faith, saying, “When Abraham was tested, he had faith and was willing to sacrifice Isaac.” I have heard many sermons referencing this story and asking what we ourselves might need to “lay on the altar” in order to be faithful to God, in order to put obedience to God before anything else.

But there was also a second good reason. The story of God asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac is actually a polemic against human sacrifice. Modern readers are shocked when God tells Abraham to kill his son as a sacrifice. But the ancient audience would not have been shocked. People in those cultures did practice human sacrifice, particularly when they wanted a great favor from a god. If the followers of Yahweh did not do the same, the followers of other gods would conclude that Yahweh was not capable of doing great things and did not deserve expressions of extreme devotion. So when God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, this may have given Abraham the impression that God was more concerned about his own reputation than he was about the promises he had made to Abraham, which were in the process of being fulfilled. But Abraham gave God the benefit of the doubt. However things might have appeared, Abraham knew that he could trust God to have good reasons and good motives for what he was asking.

And in the end, it turned out that God wanted to make it clear that those who worshiped him were not to practice human sacrifice. He provided a ram in place of Isaac. And that ram had already been “caught in a thicket” when Abraham arrived at Mount Moriah. In other words, even before Abraham reached the place where he was prepared to offer Isaac, God had already made provision for him not to offer Isaac. So in its original context, this passage would have been, as I said, a strong polemic against the human sacrifice that other cultures and religions practiced. This practice was later explicitly forbidden in the law of Moses. We today live in the aftermath of this divine disallowance of a reprehensible human practice, to such an extent that sermons can metaphorically ask us what “Isaac” we need to “lay on the altar” without us being shocked by the literal reality behind the metaphor.

So, to summarize, I believe that when God “tested” Abraham, God was not doing that to find out something he didn’t already know. Rather, God was allowing Abraham’s exemplary trust and faithfulness to be demonstrated, and God was also using the occasion to make clear that those who worshiped him were not to offer human sacrifices.

When and how did Paul become an apostle?

Q. When and how did Paul become an apostle? Was Paul an apostle or disciple? Or both?

I think we can say, on the basis of Paul’s own testimony during his trials as they are recorded in the book of Acts, that Paul became an apostle when Jesus appeared to him on the road to Damascus and sent him to proclaim the good news to the Gentiles. The word “apostle” literally means “one who is sent,” so the moment of Paul’s “sending” is the moment when he became an apostle.

When Paul was on trial before King Agrippa, he told him, “I was going to Damascus with the authority and commission of the chief priests. About noon, King Agrippa, as I was on the road, I saw a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, blazing around me and my companions. We all fell to the ground, and I heard a voice saying to me in Aramaic, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads.’ Then I asked, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,’ the Lord replied. ‘Now get up and stand on your feet. I have appeared to you to appoint you as a servant and as a witness of what you have seen and will see of me. I will rescue you from your own people and from the Gentiles. I am sending you to them to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.’ So then, King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the vision from heaven. First to those in Damascus, then to those in Jerusalem and in all Judea, and then to the Gentiles, I preached that they should repent and turn to God and demonstrate their repentance by their deeds.”

So that was when Paul became an apostle. As for whether he was also a disciple, yes, he was. The word “disciple” literally means a “learner.” In the context of the New Testament, it refers to someone who is learning from Jesus how to live in the way that God wants. In other words, it simply means a follower of Jesus. We sometimes speak of his “twelve disciples,” meaning the twelve men he chose to teach in a special way, and after his resurrection, when he sent them out to proclaim the good news, they became the “twelve apostles.” (One of them, Judas Iscariot, betrayed Jesus, and so he was replaced by another man, Matthias.) But that is a specialized use of the term “disciples.” Generally, it applies to any follower of Jesus, and so it also applies to Paul.

Is “thus says the LORD” God the Father speaking?

Q. Is it correct to say that whenever God speaks in the Old Testament, such as “Thus says the LORD,” it is usually the Father speaking, but on some occasions it may be the Son or the Holy Spirit? Or is it more correct to say it is always the Father speaking? Or is there a better way to view this?

I think the general theological principle involved here is that the members of the Trinity, even though they are distinct persons, do things together. We see this, for example, in the creation account at the beginning of the Bible. It says, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (likely referring to God the Father). But this account then relates how the Father created by speaking, which would be the cooperative activity of Jesus, the Word. As the gospel of John says, “In the beginning was the Word … all things were created by him.” And in that account we also see the activity of the Holy Spirit: “the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters,” surveying the dark, formless world and no doubt planning how to bring order and light to it. So all three persons of the Trinity were involved together in the first divine action that the Bible relates, and I think that continues to be the case as the Bible progresses.

Even when the second person of the Trinity comes to earth and takes on human form, we continue to see this type of co-operation. Jesus said after one of his great healing miracles, “The Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does, the Son also does.”

I would apply this same principle to the instances of divine speech in the Old Testament. I think they are further examples of co-operation on the part of the Trinity. Interestingly, the book of Hebrews attributes to the Holy Spirit an oracle in Jeremiah that is originally spoken by “the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel,” who says of himself in that same oracle, “I am Israel’s father.” Hebrews says:

The Holy Spirit also testifies to us about this. First he says:

“This is the covenant I will make with them
    after that time, says the Lord.
I will put my laws in their hearts,
    and I will write them on their minds.”

Then he adds:

“Their sins and lawless acts
    I will remember no more.”

But, as I noted, when God speaks these words in Jeremiah, the identification we have of him seems to be that of the Father. But this is not inconsistent with the principle of co-operation among the persons of the Trinity.

Hope this is helpful!

Would a person encounter spiritual harassment for going to church?

Q. I went to church Sunday. When I got home, everything went wrong.
Could Satan be messing with me?

The Bible teaches clearly that all those who seek to follow and obey God in this life will encounter opposition from “the world,” “the flesh,” and “the devil.” These phrases refer, respectively, to the worldwide system of interests opposed to God; to that part of us that wants to live without regard to God; and to evil spiritual beings who hate God and work to defeat those who believe in him. It is often difficult to determine exactly which part of this evil triumvirate we might be up against, and so I find it helpful to think of them as a collective and not try to parse things any more finely. We can just say, “I think I’m up against the world, the flesh, and the devil here.”

However, it is also true that we human beings are perfectly capable of creating problems for ourselves! So when things go wrong, we shouldn’t automatically conclude that we are facing spiritual opposition. Nevertheless, sometimes, through spiritual discernment, we do get a sense that it is happening. Recently I suffered a minor injury right at a time when I needed good health and strength to do some important work for God. I was speaking to my pastor about this, and I said that I suspected the injury could be the result of spiritual opposition, although I also acknowledged that accidents do happen in this world. “We don’t need to blame the devil every time somebody stubs their toe,” I observed. “No,” my pastor replied, “but you can tell.”

I think that often we can indeed tell. The fact that you made a connection between going to church and “everything going wrong” when you got home suggests that perhaps, by spiritual discernment, you did recognize that “Satan was messing with you.” (That is, that you were up against the world, the flesh, and the devil.) I don’t know whether you meant that you had returned to church after some time of not attending, but if that was the case, then it would surely be likely that you would encounter turbulence as you moved from one set of commitments and activities to another set that reflected a renewed resolve to follow God. But even if you were already attending regularly, there might have been something in the experience of attending worship that day that had inspired deeper and stronger devotion, and it would not be a surprise if you encountered turbulence after that as well.

I would say that the most important thing to keep in mind in such situations is that the main goal of the forces opposed to God is to get you to act unlike a child of God. As one of my professors in seminary used to say, for as long as God has purposes to accomplish through you on this earth, “you are immortal.” The forces opposed to God cannot take you out. But if they can make you act unlike the son or daughter of God that you are, then that is a partial victory for them.

So even if one thing after another goes wrong and you are getting very frustrated, ask yourself, “How can I act as a child of God in this situation?” Recently an online vendor cancelled an order that I had placed and paid for, and the vendor only refunded a small part of the purchase price. Several weeks later, I am still trying to sort this out. But it dawned on me, when I first recognized the problem, “This is my chance to be nice.” I have made an effort to be very courteous with every person I have spoken with on the phone about this. They have noticed and thanked me for my patience. Will I eventually get the rest of my money back? I certainly hope so! But in the meantime, I want to act in this situation like a son of God.

So, I encourage you to continue attending church. Don’t let the turbulence keep you from that. Instead, you can say, “If the world, the flesh, and the devil are so upset about this, I should really keep doing it!” And if everything goes wrong again when you get home, see that as your chance to live in the situation as a son or daughter of God. God bless you!

Were the commands about kosher food and circumcision for health reasons?

Q. Why were certain foods considered unclean in the Old Testament? What was the reason/purpose for this? Why was circumcision required? What was the reason/purpose for this? I know these were based on God’s commandments, but I’m not sure of the reason/purpose. Was it for health reasons? Or something else? If it was for health reasons, doesn’t that imply we should follow these commandments today too?

Both being circumcised and keeping kosher were “insignia,” that is, signs that the people who did those things belonged to God as members of his covenant community.

Regarding circumcision, God said to Abraham, “This is my covenant with you and your descendants after you, the covenant you are to keep: Every male among you shall be circumcised. You are to undergo circumcision, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and you. … My covenant in your flesh is to be an everlasting covenant.” The Hebrew idiom for making a covenant was to “cut” a covenant, since this often involved a ceremony in which sacrificed animals were cut up and the parties to the covenant walked between the pieces to indicate, “If I break this covenant, may this happen to me!” Circumcision also involves cutting, and in that way it was a symbol for covenant membership. (But note that the Bible only envisions male circumcision. It does not provide any warrant for so-called female circumcision. Women belonged fully to the covenant even though only men were circumcised.)

Distinguishing between “clean” and “unclean” animals (that is, between those that could be eaten and those that could not be eaten) was also a covenant sign. God said to the people of Israel through Moses, “I am the Lord your God, who has set you apart from the nations. You must therefore make a distinction between clean and unclean animals and between unclean and clean birds. … You are to be holy to me because I, the Lord, am holy, and I have set you apart from the nations to be my own.” (The phrases “set apart” and “make a distinction” translate the same Hebrew verb.)

So these provisions in the law were ultimately ways by which the people of Israel were to identify themselves as God’s people. There are some similar “insignia” for the New Covenant, particularly being baptized and observing the Lord’s Supper, but the most important markers of God’s people now are the “fruit of the Spirit,” the character qualities that the Holy Spirit builds into the lives of believers: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These are the things we should be most careful to build into our lives as God’s people today. I believe we are free to make our own choices about circumcision and kosher.

Why did Saul of Tarsus want to murder the disciples?

Q. Luke tells us in Acts that Saul of Tarsus, who later became known as the apostle Paul, “was breathing out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples.” Why did he want to kill them?

Later in the book of Acts, as Paul is on trial before King Agrippa, he explains that before he became a follower of Jesus, “I was convinced that I ought to do all that was possible to oppose the name of Jesus of Nazareth. And that is just what I did in Jerusalem. On the authority of the chief priests I put many of the Lord’s people in prison, and when they were put to death, I cast my vote against them. Many a time I went from one synagogue to another to have them punished, and I tried to force them to blaspheme. I was so obsessed with persecuting them that I even hunted them down in foreign cities.”

So basically, as Paul himself describes here, he did not believe that Jesus was the Messiah. He specifically did not believe that Jesus had risen from the dead, which his followers claimed was proof that he was the Messiah. Paul felt that anyone who made these claims about Jesus was a threat to true religion, and he was so zealous for the Jewish religion that, as he describes, he hunted down followers of Jesus and persecuted them.

But Jesus revealed himself personally to Paul, and from then on Paul knew that Jesus had indeed risen from the dead. This made him a committed follower of Jesus. He always regretted how he had harmed believers, but he trusted that God’s grace could nevertheless make him an effective worker for Jesus. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “I am the least of the apostles, and I do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.”

Do the persons of the Trinity have distinct personalities?

A reader of my previous post, “In what sense is Jesus God’s Son?” (in which I mentioned the Holy Spirit briefly in the context of the Trinity), commented, “I’d like to hear your thoughts on the Holy Spirit.” Here are some thoughts.

In light of the themes of that previous post, I would emphasize primarily that the Holy Spirit is a person, not an impersonal force. As this article by Don Stewart documents well, in the Bible we see the Holy Spirit demonstrating all the attributes of a person: thinking, feeling, choosing, speaking, interacting with others in relationship. So the Holy Spirit is one of three persons who make up the single being of God. This means, as I said in the other post, that “at the essence of God is community and relationship in which individuality is nevertheless affirmed and flourishes.” We should aspire to the same kind of community and relationships as humans.

Since the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct persons, an interesting question is whether they have distinct personalities, and if so, whether we can tell that we are interacting with one of these persons rather than another from the personality of the person with whom we are interacting. Christian theology affirms that all three persons of the Trinity do everything together. They have been eternally characterized by the same co-operation that existed between Jesus the Son and God the Father when Jesus was on earth. But does this mean that as Christians, we could not also interact with one of them individually, for example, by praying to the Son or to Spirit rather than to the Father? And might we recognize a distinct personality if we did?

I’m not sure that this question can be answered through theological discussion, but let me attempt an answer by telling a story—by retelling one, actually. Here is a brief episode from a post on another of my blogs, Endless Mercies. That blog tells the story of God’s faithfulness to my late wife Priscilla and me during her courageous four-year battle with ALS. She had reached the point where she could no longer stand up, meaning that she could no longer dance even to a slow song with me holding her up. We had done that for the last time at a wedding, and some time afterward …

“Priscilla found herself half-dreaming as she woke up one morning about what it would be like to dance with the various persons of the Trinity. She imagined that with the Father it would be a more formal ‘daddy-daughter’ waltz. Jesus loved a party, she knew—hadn’t he changed water into wine to keep a wedding reception going?—and so he would probably lead her, and everyone else who was anywhere nearby, in a Mediterranean line dance. And the energetic and creative Holy Spirit, she decided, would definitely do hip-hop.”

You can read the rest of the story here. It doesn’t prove that the persons of the Trinity have distinct personalities. But it suggests that they might.

In what sense is Jesus God’s Son?

Q. What does it mean to say Jesus is the Son of God? In what sense is Jesus God’s Son? What does it mean to say Jesus is the Logos?

The Bible speaks of Jesus as God’s Son in two different senses.

The first is what I would call the minor sense. The title “Son of God” means “Messiah.” The phrase in this sense comes from Psalm 2, a royal enthronement psalm, in which a king of Israel, presumably David, says, “I will proclaim the Lord’s decree: He said to me, ‘You are my son; today I have become your father.'”

Even after Israel was no longer a kingdom, this language of being God’s Son was applied to the expected Messiah, who would resume the royal house of David. In his sermon in the synagogue in Pisidian Antioch, Paul applied this language to Jesus. He said: “What God promised our ancestors he has fulfilled for us, their children, by raising up Jesus. As it is written in the second Psalm: ‘You are my son; today I have become your father.'” So to say that Jesus is the Son of God means, for one thing, that he is the Messiah.

But there is also what I would call the major sense. In a way that is difficult for the human mind to appreciate fully, there is an organic relationship between Jesus (the second person of the Trinity) and the first person of the Trinity. Since that relationship can be well understood, according to the Bible, along the lines of the organic relationship between a child and a parent, the first person of the Trinity is called God the Father and Jesus is called God the Son.

However, there is an important difference here. An earthly parent has a child at a given time. Before that, the child does not exist. But in the case of Jesus, he has existed from all eternity, even though he is also in an organic relationship with the first person of the Trinity that can well be described with the language of a father-son relationship. That is why Christian theology speaks of Jesus being “eternally begotten” of the Father.

This brings us to the question about what it means to say that Jesus is the Logos. In his gospel, John uses the language of logos, a complex Greek term, to describe Jesus and his relationship to God the Father: “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. He was with God in the beginning.” The word logos could mean an inward thought, or speech that expressed an inward thought, or just speech. Therefore it was particularly well suited to describe the relationship between the second person of the Trinity and the first person of the Trinity, since in one sense they are separate persons (“just speech”), in another sense they are part of the same Godhead (“an inward thought”), and in yet another sense they have an interdependent relationship (“speech that expresses thought”).

This is admittedly complicated. The relationship of the persons of the Trinity (I haven’t even brought up the Holy Spirit yet!) is certainly a mystery beyond human comprehension. But I think the take-home message for us can be the reassuring conviction that at the essence of God is community and relationship in which individuality is nevertheless affirmed and flourishes. Making that the model for our own lives is enough of a welcome challenge that we do not need to try to sort out any other issues definitively.

But to summarize, the second thing we mean when we say that Jesus is the Son of God is that while he became fully human on earth, he is also fully God, eternally begotten of the Father.

Is it correct to say that the Holy Spirit has preserved the Bible throughout history?

Q. Is it correct to say that the Holy Spirit has providentially preserved (and will continue providentially to preserve) the Bible throughout history?

Yes, I would agree with this statement. I cannot think of a specific passage in Scripture that says this explicitly. But certainly we see throughout the Bible how God wants people to have his word and how God wants his people to treasure and safeguard his word. We can also see in history that while there have been continual widespread attempts to wipe out the Bible, it has not only been preserved, it has been translated and distributed to more and more groups of people. (The organization I am currently working with, unfoldingWord, states as its purpose, “The church in every people group, the Bible in every language,” and that goal could be reached in our own generation.) While the agency of the Holy Spirit in preserving the Bible is not literally visible in history, I believe that we can discern it by faith.