Was Ahithophel speaking for God?

Q. How should we understand the passage where King David’s former counselor Ahithophel advises David’s son Absalom, who has rebelled and seized the throne, to sleep with ten of David’s concubines to make a permanent break with his father so that his followers will fight desperately? The Bible says, “Now in those days the advice Ahithophel gave was like that of one who inquires of God. That was how both David and Absalom regarded all of Ahithophel’s advice.” So was Ahithophel actually speaking for God? If so, how can we justify his advice? Wouldn’t God have wanted to protect these concubines? And wasn’t this advice  explicitly contrary to the Law of Moses, which says, “Do not have sexual relations with your father’s wife; that would dishonor your father.” What is going on here?

First, the statement that kings who consulted Ahithophel treated his advice like advice they would have gotten by inquiring of God does not mean that Ahithophel spoke for God. Rather, this expression means that kings had such confidence in his advice that they accepted it unquestioningly, as they would do if it came from God. The narrator, seemingly expecting that readers would find it hard to believe that Absalom actually did what Ahithophel advised on this occasion, apparently felt a need to add this explanation. That is, the narrator anticipated that readers would have the same questions about it and problems with it that you do, for the good reasons that you do.

So what is going on here? It seems that Ahithophel had a further motive besides giving Absalom what he thought would be the best advice for this situation. If we read more widely in the book of 2 Samuel, we learn that Ahithophel had a son named Eliam, and that a man named Eliam was the father of Bathsheba. Bathsheba was the married woman whom David had sexual relations with and, when he got her pregnant, whose husband he arranged to have killed to cover up his actions. If the two Eliams are the same person, which many interpreters agree is the case, then Ahithophel apparently wanted to get revenge against David for what he did to his granddaughter and her husband. This was his further motive.

In fact, as the story continues, the next thing Ahithophel says to Absalom is, “Let me choose 12,000 men to start out after David tonight. I will catch up with him while he is weary and discouraged. He and his troops will panic, and everyone will run away. Then I will kill only the king, and I will bring all the people back to you.” So it does appear that Ahithophel had been waiting for a chance to take revenge against David, and he saw his opportunity here. His advice was not the counsel of God. It was the manipulative plan of a vengeful man who saw a way to get an inexperienced young would-be king to carry out some of his revenge.

David does bear some of the responsibility for what happened to his concubines, because it was his own actions that led Ahithophel to seek revenge against him. But David had every reason to believe that his concubines would be safe in Jerusalem when he left them there to look after the palace. They would have been protected by law, custom, and decency. And the concubines would indeed have been safe from Absalom if Ahithophel had not given this advice and if Absalom had not followed it unquestioningly. What Absalom did was an outrage. Ahithophel’s whole argument was that Absalom should commit such an outrage so that it would create a permanent break with David. So while David does bear some of the responsibility for the way these concubines were victimized, Ahithophel, in his desire for revenge, is the one who is primarily responsible. He was certainly not speaking for God.

Is Ezekiel’s parable of Oholah and Oholibah pornographic?

Q. How should we understand Ezekiel 23? Is it pornographic?

The parable that the prophet Ezekiel tells about two sisters named Oholah and Oholibah is not pornographic in itself. However, since it does use explicit sexual imagery, I would encourage people who struggle with pornography to be careful about reading it. I’ll discuss some options for them at the end of this post.

Pornography, by definition, is gratuitous. That is, it uses explicit sexual imagery only to excite sexual desires in readers or viewers. The imagery serves no higher purpose.

In Ezekiel’s parable, by contrast, all of the sexual imagery is used carefully to serve a higher purpose. Ezekiel wants the people of the southern kingdom of Judah to feel a proper sense of shame for their worship of idols instead of the true God. He also wants them to realize how foolish it is for them to worship idols when they have already seen God judge and punish the people of the northern kingdom of Judah for doing exactly the same thing.

The parable is essentially an extended metaphor: Idol worship is like infidelity in marriage. Because the people of Judah would have felt a sense of horror and shame about infidelity, Ezekiel describes it in explicit terms to try to make them feel the same thing about the way they have betrayed God by worshiping idols. All of the imagery, while graphic, is presented in a controlled and purposeful way. It is subordinated to the higher purpose of trying to call shamelessly disobedient people back to God before it is too late and they need to be judged and punished for their disobedience and disloyalty.

However, as I said, if someone struggles with pornography, then it may be difficult for them to read this passage without losing ground in that struggle. In that case, one possibility I would suggest is that they not read it. Even within a program to read through the Bible, such as many churches and other organizations sponsor, the understanding could be that in the interests of the highest goal of that program—a closer walk with God—participants would be free not to read this chapter if doing that might lead them to stumble.

Another possibility would be to read the chapter in a version of the Bible that translates it less explicitly. This might be a version translated at a simpler reading level whose intended audience includes children.

The final suggestion I would make is that if someone who struggles with pornography decides that they do need to read the chapter (in order to read all the way through the entire Bible, for example), they should not read it online or in any Bible app that appears on a screen. Instead, they should read it in a printed Bible. This will avoid reinforcing any connection between sexually explicit material and the greater visual stimulation of a glowing screen.

Was it necromancy when Moses and Eliljah appeared to Jesus in the Transfiguration?

Q. How would you respond to a non-Christian who says that when Moses and Elijah came and spoke with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration, this incident would fall under necromancy, which is forbidden in Deuteronomy? I know that interpretation is wrong and that the Transfiguration was not necromancy, but I wasn’t sure how to explain this.

It is true that the Law of Moses says in Deuteronomy, “Let no one be found among you … who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead.” But we need to understand what is being prohibited, and why.

This particular prohibition comes within a cluster of similar ones that forbid various kinds of practices by which people seek to call upon ghosts or evil spirits or other occult powers. The principle behind all these laws is that human beings need to respect their own finiteness and not try to draw upon other powers to get what they want. They need to respect the boundaries between life and death, good and evil, and humanity and the spirit world. Rather than seeking to get whatever information or results they want by calling on other powers, they need to live in fellowship with God and dependence on God, accepting that what God has for them is the best and that it is all they need.

But God is the Lord of life and death. The Transfiguration episode, in which Jesus is revealed in his heavenly glory on top of a mountain and Moses and Elijah come to speak to him, shows that when it suits God’s purposes, and when it is the best thing for humanity, God has the power and the right to send people who have already gone to live in his presence back to earth to fulfill a particular mission. (We don’t know how or in exactly what manner these two returned to earth; the Bible does not explain that.)

Luke says specifically that when Moses and Elijah appeared, they spoke with Jesus “about his departure, which he was about to bring to fulfillment at Jerusalem.” This means that they came to speak with him about how he would soon die as the Savior of the world. This was so important that God wanted to make sure that Jesus was prepared and informed beforehand, so God sent these two trusted servants of his to speak with Jesus about it.

That, by itself, is enough to show that this was not a violation of the command not to consult the dead, as people would do if they were trying to take matters into their own hands. Rather, God himself, the Lord of life and death, who gave that command to keep people in their proper sphere, exercised the authority of his own sphere and sent servants from the heavenly part of his realm to support and encourage a very special Servant who was then living in the earthly part of his realm.

But there is more. When Luke says “departure,” he uses the Greek term exodus. This is a hint that the appearance of Moses and Elijah also has symbolic significance. Moses, who let the Israelites out of Egypt in the Exodus, also wrote the first part of the Old Testament. Elijah represents the prophets, who composed or collected the next major part of the Old Testament. Later in the gospel of Luke, Jesus tells a parable in which Abraham tells someone who is concerned about his family members, “They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.” He doesn’t mean listen to them literally; he means to read their writings in the Scriptures. (By “Moses and the Prophets,” he means all the Scriptures that had been written by that time.)

And significantly, in the Transfiguration episode, God says, “This is my beloved Son. Listen to him.” So it seems that by sending Moses and Elijah, God was also signaling that Jesus would be the fulfillment of the Scriptures, certainly in his sacrificial death for the world, but also in his life and teaching. (People are to “listen to him” as they would “listen to” Moses and the Prophets, that is, the Scriptures.)

So there was both a practical reason and a symbolic significance for the special mission that God sent Moses and Elijah to accomplish. The fact that they did this by traveling temporarily from one part of God’s realm to another, on God’s instructions, does not mean that they violated God’s command for human beings to remain within their own realm and not try to call on other powers to get what they want. I hope this helps answer your question.

Can Christians engage in peaceful protest or non-violent civil disobedience?

Q. Today, Election Day, my daily Bible verse from BibleGateway.com was Romans 13:1, “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.” I am struggling with how to understand and accept this. Was Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrong to actively work against the Nazi government? Was Martin Luther King, Jr. wrong to (peacefully) break the law in order to protest racial injustice? Is it wrong for citizens to (peacefully) protest government actions or passively resist going along with such policies?

We get the full counsel of God from the Bible about any given matter not from a single verse, but by putting the various things that the Bible says about it into conversation with one another. While the Bible does say in the book of Romans that believers should be subject to the authorities, it reports in the book of Acts how the apostles refused to obey the orders of their governing officials when they told them not to teach in the name of Jesus. The apostles insisted, “We must obey God rather than human beings!” And the book of Revelation was written to warn Christians living in western Asia Minor under the reign of Domitian that they needed to resist the emerging Roman government policy of emperor worship even at the cost of their lives. There was to be no submitting to the governing authorities on that matter.

So how do we sort this out? I think the context in Romans is quite clear about the basis on which followers of Jesus are being told to obey  government officials there: “They are God’s servants to punish those who do wrong.” So Christians are to support the government and cooperate with it in its role of maintaining the rule of law and punishing wrongdoers (even to the point of willingly paying taxes to support the government, Paul adds).

It is an entirely separate question what Christians should do when the government instead punishes those who do right, for example, those who teach in the name of Jesus, or those who refuse to worship a human being. Other parts of the Bible address that separate question, and the answer seems to be that Christians need to obey God, rather than people, when what people want conflicts with what God wants. Christians even need to be willing to suffer for doing right the kinds of punishments that the government would ordinarily inflict on a wrongdoer.

The examples you have given of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King, Jr. represent Christian leaders who have followed this course in more recent years. (Regarding Bonhoeffer specifically, you may want to read this post.) And I would say that peaceful protest and non-violent civil disobedience are other examples of measures that Christians can take to help call the government back to doing right and punishing wrong. These are loyal measures, taken in the best interests of the government itself, not acts of defiance against the government.

However, I really should distinguish between peaceful protest and non-violent civil disobedience in one important sense. Peaceful protest is actually something that is encouraged and protected by law in free countries. So it should not be seen in any way as failing to submit to the government. Rather, it is doing exactly what the government says it hopes its citizens will do. Governments of free countries also hope that their citizens will exercise their rights to vote, assemble, and speak out. Christians should be doing all of these things, and none of them represent a failure to submit or obey, even when they represent working within the system to change existing policy.

There may be other circumstances in which Christians will need to obey God by disobeying laws and policies that are contrary to God’s ways. As I said earlier, when they do that, they need to be willing to suffer if necessary, trusting that God will ultimately use their obedience to him to bring about transformation in the society and culture.

I hope these thoughts are helpful. I also hope that you voted today! I did.

What is the Abrahamic covenant from Genesis?

Q. What is the Abrahamic covenant mentioned in Genesis 17:7, 17:13 and 17:19? What aspect of the Abrahamic covenant is everlasting? Why don’t Christians practice circumcision if the Abrahamic covenant is everlasting?

Here’s what I say about that passage in my study guide to Genesis. I believe these observations address your concerns. Basically, God is not making a new covenant with Abraham here. Rather, God is ratifying the covenant that he made with him earlier. (You can read or download the whole study guide for free at this link.)

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God speaks to Abram to renew and extend his covenant with him. God introduces himself by a new name, El Shaddai (“God Almighty”). This name expresses his strength and power to fulfill his promises.

God also gives Abram and Sarai new names. Abram means “exalted father.” God changes this to Abraham, “father of a multitude,” to express his purpose to make Abraham “very fruitful,” the “father of many nations.” And God changes the name Sarai to Sarah, a more recognizable form of the word meaning “princess,” since “kings of peoples will come from her.” Through these new names, God expresses and guarantees the purposes that he will fulfill in their lives. The names are, in effect, miniature covenant vows.

In addition to guaranteeing his covenant with new names, God also guarantees it with a sign, just as he gave the sign of the rainbow for his covenant with Noah. God uses the sign of circumcision to guarantee his covenant with Abraham, to symbolize how this covenant will not be just with Abraham, but also with his son and with all of their descendants, perpetually. [That is what “everlasting” means here.] The sign would be replicated in the bodies of all future generations: “My covenant in your flesh is to be an everlasting covenant.”

Descendants of Abraham who practiced circumcision were showing that they belonged to the community that was created by God’s covenant with their ancestor. But a new kind of community has now been created by God’s covenant with Jesus. It has a new sign of its own. Baptism is the sign of belonging to the community of Jesus’ followers.

Baptism symbolizes God’s covenant obligations to us by illustrating his promise to raise us from the dead, both physically (when we die) and spiritually (as we experience new life in Christ). Baptism symbolizes our covenant obligations to God by illustrating the way followers of Jesus are supposed to die to sin and rise to a new life of faith and obedience.

Why do the heroes of the faith have to wait for us before being made perfect?

Q. What does this statement in the book of Hebrews mean? “These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised, since God had planned something better for us, so that only together with us would they be made perfect.”

This is the conclusion to the section in the book of Hebrews that is sometimes called the “Hall of Fame of Faith.” The author describes how  people whose stories we know from the Old Testament trusted in God by faith and lived on earth as if “they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one.” As a result, the author says, “God is not ashamed to be called their God,” and “he has prepared a city for them.”

The author describes this “city” in the next chapter. He calls it “Mount Zion, “the city of the living God,” and “the heavenly Jerusalem.” There, he says, there are “thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly.” This is the home of “the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven.” It is ruled by “God, the Judge of all,” and we are commended to him by “Jesus the mediator of a new covenant.” And there, the author says, are “the spirits of the righteous made perfect.”

So perhaps, in one sense, these great heroes of the faith already have been made perfect, in the heavenly city. But the Bible, in its final book, the book of Revelation, also portrays this heavenly city coming down to earth so that “God’s dwelling place will be among people.” This has clearly not happened yet. It will be marvelous when it does. Those who lived on earth as if they were longing for a heavenly home will find that they can live in that heavenly home right on earth, as God brings heaven and earth together as all things come obediently under his rule.

So why has this marvelous thing not happened yet? God is waiting for even more people to live faithfully like the ones the author describes so that they can be part of it too. This is meant to be a great encouragement to us who are reading these words in the Bible and admiring the lives of these faithful people of the past. Knowing that God doesn’t want this to happen without us, we should be all the more eager to be part of it ourselves. That is why the author of Hebrews says, between the words you are asking about and the description of the heavenly city, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.” Jesus is the ultimate example of faith and obedience. And the other heroes of the faith are “witnesses” to us of what a faithful life looks like, and “witnesses” of our own lives as they cheer us on from heaven.

Think of it this way. It’s as if you were invited to a party, and right up to the last minute you weren’t sure whether you were going to go, but then you heard that the hosts had said that they really wanted you to come so much that they weren’t going to start without you. You would certainly feel very welcome and valued, and this would be a great incentive to get to the party. That’s what the author of Hebrews is saying in these words.

How could the Holy Spirit have moved upon the waters before the earth was created?

Q. Most English Bibles translate the first word in the Old Testament, bereshith, as “in the beginning.” This implies that the statement that follows is telling us what was created first: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” So if this is the case, how is it possible that the Holy Spirit “moved upon the the face of the waters,” as it says in the next verse? The waters had not been created yet!

One may argue that the word “earth” in the first verse includes the entire face of the planet, including the oceans—the water. However, this only works in English. In ancient (and modern) hebrew, the word ‘eretz, “earth,” specifically refers to dry land alone, not water (mayim). See Rashi, who discusses this question and translates bereshith slightly differently. However my question specifically refers to the usual Christian translation.

Thank you for your question. I discuss essentially the same question in the following post, so I think that if you read it, you will find an answer to your own question:

Does the creation account in Genesis begin with matter (in the form of water) already existing?

It is possible grammatically to translate the opening of Genesis this way: “When God began to create the heavens and the earth …” At least two English Bibles, the Common English Bible and the Living Bible, translate it that way. But you’re right, overwhelmingly English Christian Bibles translate it as, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” And as I say in the post for which I have provided the link above, I think that is the correct translation. The solution to the problem is instead that the ancient Hebrews regarded water as effectively equivalent to “nothing.” As I say in that post, for them, de aqua was the equivalent of ex nihilo.

What are the three types of love and their definitions?

Q. What are the three types of love and their definitions?

Erōs is romantic love that includes sexual attraction.

Philia is friendship love. It is based on a sense of commonality between people, the sense that there is something in each person that “meets” or “matches” the other person.

Agapē is spiritual love. It is God’s love living in a person and pouring out to other people. It is unconditional and freely giving, not based on anything that is in the other person or that is desired from the other person. As Flannery O’Connor wrote in one of her stories, it is “love that appears to exist just to be itself.”

The verbs corresponding to each of these nouns already existed in Greek, and the last two were practically interchangeable. For example, Jesus said of the Pharisees that they “love the most important seats.” Luke translates the word “love” in that statement with the verb agapáō, while Matthew translates it with the verb philéō. However, only the first two nouns are attested in Greek literature before the New Testament. The early Christian community apparently coined the term agapē from the verb agapáō to describe a new kind of love, God’s unconditional love, that had not been seen before and so did not have a word to describe it. That usage is reflected in the New Testament.

All three kinds of love are part of God’s plan for a healthy and blessed human life, as long as they (and we need to be especially careful about the first one) are pursued within the framework that God has established for them. But the one we should make the greatest effort to cultivate is agapē. It will also make relationships based on the other two kinds of love that much better.

Why couldn’t Jesus’ disciples understand the Parable of the Sower?

Q. You say in your comments about the Parable of the Sower that people with the heart for Jesus will hear the parable and understand. The disciples, I would think, had a heart for Jesus, yet they asked Jesus to explain the parables. So why were their ears not open to understanding the meaning of the parables?

The disciples needed to get a start somewhere. They needed to know that the stories Jesus was telling in his teaching had a meaning deeper than the surface-level meaning. The point of the Parable of the Sower wasn’t just that farmers should be careful where they sowed their seed, because it wouldn’t grow well in some places. Jesus was really talking about his own message and how people would respond differently to it based on the state of their hearts.

Significantly, when the disciples ask Jesus to explain this parable, he responds, “Don’t you understand this parable? How then will you understand any parable?” In other words, this parable is a key to all the other ones. It is a parable about parables. It has been called a “meta-parable.” Once Jesus explained its meaning to the disciples, then they realized that they would need to try to understand the deeper meaning of such stories.

This took time. The disciples needed to learn how to recognize these meanings. And Jesus took the time to teach them. Mark says at the end of the section in which he relates the Parable of the Sower and other parables, “[Jesus] did not say anything to [the crowds] without using a parable. But when he was alone with his own disciples, he explained everything.”

It was precisely because the disciples’ hearts were open to Jesus that they were able to benefit from this instruction. If their hearts had been hard, the stories would have remained just stories to them, with no meaning deeper than what was on the surface.

For his part, Matthew records in his gospel this interesting exchange between Jesus and his disciples, similarly at the end of a section in which he relates Jesus telling many parables:

“Have you understood all these things?” Jesus asked.
“Yes,” they replied.
He said to them, “Therefore every teacher of the law who has become a disciple in the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.”

This shows that the disciples were catching on to the meaning of the parables, and, as Jesus notes, as a result, they were understanding how the new things that he was bringing fit in with what God had been doing all along.

This would not have been possible if their hearts had not been open to Jesus. That was a necessary condition, but we see that it was not a sufficient one. Jesus also had to get them started on how to understand the parables using their open hearts. We can be grateful that the gospels record Jesus’ explanations of several of his parables so that we can have the same benefit ourselves. We just need to make sure that our hearts are open, too.

Is cremation acceptable for Christians?

Q. For Christians, is cremation an accepted form of the disposition of a person’s final remains, or is it a sin? What if you are a Christian living in a land-scarce country or city and cremation is the preferred method?

As far as I know, the Bible does not comment specifically on cremation. The preferred practice within the believing communities of both the Old Testament and the New Testament was burial. It was considered an insult and a sacrilege to leave a body exposed without burial, and the Law of Moses forbade doing that beyond sundown on the day a person died.

But this does not mean that cremation was unknown to those communities. For example, it was widely practiced within the Roman Empire until, interestingly, over a couple of centuries the influence of Christians and other groups with a strong belief in the afterlife changed the preference to burial. So one observation we can make is that  the New Testament writers knew about cremation, and so if they had wished to condemn the practice, they could have, as they do condemn other cultural practices that they deem unacceptable.

But I think the most useful observation is that the Scriptures know (if I could personify them, as the biblical writers themselves do) that not everyone has the opportunity to be buried. For example, some people might be lost at sea when a ship sinks. That is why, I believe, the book of Revelation, envisioning the Last Judgment, says, “The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what they had done.” (I take “death” and “Hades” here to be references to the underworld or abode of the dead, presumably of those who were buried.)

The bottom line, in other words, is that no matter what the disposition of a person’s final remains, everyone will be raised from the dead and judged appropriately, with hopefully many being welcomed into God’s presence for eternity.

This makes sense, because even a body that is buried completely decomposes after some time. It’s not as if buried bodies remain intact until the resurrection, while cremated bodies are incapable of resurrection. Either way, God must somehow reconstitute a body. We do not know exactly how that is done, but it seems not to depend on why the body needs to be reconstituted.

So I would say that cremation is an option that Christians may validly choose, perhaps for the reason you mentioned, to practice good stewardship of scarce land, and perhaps for further reasons as well.