Good Question

Referencing the Bible without using chapters and verses

Readers of this blog will have noticed that in my posts I never reference the Bible by chapter and verse. That’s because the original purpose of this blog was to be a resource for individuals and groups who were using the Understanding the Books of the Bible study guides from InterVarsity Press. Those guides were designed to be used with The Books of the Bible from Biblica, an edition of the Scriptures that takes out chapters and verses and instead presents the biblical books in their natural literary forms.

This blog’s readership has now expanded well beyond the circle of the users of the study guides, as others have been reading along and asking their own questions. I’m very glad to have everyone aboard. But I’m sticking with the original format of no chapters and verses for some very important reasons.

Chapters and verses are late and artificial additions to the Bible that distort our understanding of the literary structure and genre of its books. By making all the books appear to be look-it-up reference material, they suggest the wrong answer to the question, “What is the Bible and what are we supposed to do with it?” They make it only too simple to zip in and out of the Bible, looking at statements without regard to their literary and historical settings. (I explain much more about this in my book After Chapters and Verses.)

For all of these reasons, I reference instead by content and context, which I find much more meaningful and more respectful of the Bible. In this recent post, for example, I refer to how Paul in 1 Corinthians “applied the law about not muzzling an ox to his own right to receive support as an apostle.” This kind of referencing encourages greater biblical literacy: once you learn even a little about 1 Corinthians, you can find that place without difficulty, whether or not your Bible has chapters and verses in it.

This is actually how Jesus and the apostles referenced the Bible. For example, when disputing with the Sadducees about the resurrection, Jesus referred them to a particular passage by asking, “Have you not read in the Book of Moses, in the account of the burning bush . . .?” And in Romans, Paul refers to “what Scripture says in the passage about Elijah—how he appealed to God against Israel” before he quotes Elijah’s words at Mount Horeb, ““Lord, they have killed your prophets and torn down your altars . . .”

And when it comes to referencing the Scriptures by content and context, we today enjoy one great advantage that Jesus and the apostles didn’t: hypertext. If we are writing online (or in any other format that supports hyperlinks, including even email), we can link our descriptive references directly to the actual text of Scripture on an online Bible site. (When I do this, as you can see in the preceding paragraph or in any of my previous posts, I choose a key word or phrase in my context-and-content reference to serve as the link.)

There are many good Bible sites out there to choose from; I’ve always linked my blog posts to BibleGateway because it’s my personal favorite for online Bible reading, searches, and so forth. So far, over the life of this blog, readers have clicked through to BibleGateway many hundreds of times to read the actual text of the passages I’ve been discussing.

Here’s what I hope will happen when they do, so that we don’t perpetuate that zip-in-and-zip-out mentality. I try to provide as much of the immediate context as possible for each reference. However, if a statement might be hard to locate, I may cite it alone. Either way, I hope that readers will use the “expand” button in the middle of the BibleGateway toolbar just above the text, to call up an even wider context. And I also hope they will use the “Page Options” button to turn off verse numbers and headings. That way they will be reading the Scriptures as this blog has intended to present them from the start, as they appear in The Books of the Bible.

I encourage all of you to get into the habit of referencing the Scriptures by content and context and then providing hyperlinks to the actual text in your own writings about the Bible. This will be more meaningful and respectful, and still allow the same ease of access as chapters and verses, but without endorsing them as if they constituted the real structure of the Bible.

Full disclosure: I was already planning to write this post when I received an invitation to become a charter member of the Bible Gateway Bloggers Grid. Its members are asked to link the Scripture references in their posts to Bible Gateway—something I had already been doing from the start. They’re also asked to put in a good word for the site from time to time, which is also something I’d been doing already (as in this post). It’s something I’m happy to do because, well, I’m a fan. In return, BibleGateway will promote my posts from time to time, particularly when they have some direct connection with the site. I’m very pleased to have this new association.

Sample page from BibleGateway with "Page Options" used to turn off chapter and verse numbers. The "Expand" button (four horizontal lines) is in the center of the toolbar just above the text. — Sample page from BibleGateway with “Page Options” used to turn off chapter and verse numbers. The “Expand” button (four horizontal lines) is in the center of the toolbar just above the text.

Why did Jesus agree to the demons’ request to go into the herd of pigs?

Q. In the story where Jesus drives demons out a possessed man and into a herd of pigs, the demons implore him not to send them to the abyss. Why did Jesus have mercy on the demons? Does he feel compassion even towards those who are with the devil?

Also, though Jesus never sinned, why was it not wrong for Jesus to send the demons into the herd of pigs, thus driving the herd off a cliff, if he knew that it would cost the owner of the swine greatly to lose his whole herd? Jesus could have just ordered the demons to the abyss, and that would not have cost the swineherd so much. Who knows, it might have ruined the swineherd’s livelihood and put him in great debt. Why didn’t Jesus save the swineherd from losing all of his pigs, and keep the pigs from dying if he had the option to?

I personally don’t think that in this episode Jesus was showing mercy to the demons or having compassion on them. The gospel writers typically tell us explicitly when Jesus is acting out of compassion (for example, “When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them and healed their sick”). But there is no reference to this in any of the three parallel accounts of this episode, in Matthew, Mark, or Luke. Rather, Mark and Luke say that Jesus “gave them permission” to enter the pigs, and Matthew says that he commanded the demons, “Go!”

So if Jesus was not motivated by mercy or compassion, what might have been his motive in agreeing to the demons’ request to enter the pigs? I believe he did this not because the demons asked, but because when they asked, he recognized that it would be strategic for the proclamation of the kingdom of God if he agreed.

The fact that the entire large herd of pigs—two thousand, according to Mark—rushed down the bank and drowned in the lake shows that Jesus indeed cast a huge host of demons out of the afflicted man. (They called themselves “Legion, for we are many”; a Roman legion had several thousand soldiers.) Presumably if there had only been one demon, or just a few, only that many pigs would have rushed away. But when thousands of pigs were affected, this was evidence of a very powerful exorcism, showing that the kingdom of God had indeed come with great power in the person and ministry of Jesus.

To answer the second part of your question, it may be that Jesus realized that such a demonstration would be worth making to everyone in the area, including the swineherd, even if it cost the swineherd his entire livelihood. Jesus told the parables of the hidden treasure and the pearl of great value to illustrate how finding the kingdom of God is worth giving up “everything we have.” It’s a bit like when Jesus told his first disciples to “follow me” and they left behind their fishing boats and nets. The one difference is that the disciples got to choose ahead of time to leave everything behind and follow Jesus, while the swineherd would have had to realize after the fact that losing everything was worth finding out about Jesus’ great power and love and choosing to follow him.

We don’t hear anything more about the swineherd in the story, but we do hear about the man who was delivered from the demons. He wanted to leave his family, friends, and home country behind and travel with Jesus and his disciples proclaiming the kingdom of God. But Jesus recognized that he would be a more strategic witness right there in his home country and so he told him, “Return home and tell how much God has done for you.” Maybe Jesus had the same thing in mind for the swineherd, if he too realized that the kingdom he had just seen come in such great power, bringing liberation, was worth everything to obtain.

James Tissot, “The Swine Driven Into the Sea,” c. 1886 (Brooklyn Museum)

If you put the Bible in a flow chart, is it still the Bible?

Q. If you put the Bible in a flow chart, is it still the Bible?

That’s one of the intriguing questions posed in the cover story of the current issue of Christianity Today, which explores how people are using the concept of “big data” to organize and present data about the Bible as well as the data in the Bible.

The question applies specifically to a flow chart that Vincent Stetterholm of Logos Bible Software created to present systematically all of the laws in the Bible relating to oxen. I’d like to respond to the question in light of that chart.

Flow chart excerpt — Detail from Stotterholm’s flow chart, which is far more extensive.

First, some appropriate disclaimers. Stetterholm explains that he created the chart simply as a “proof of concept” and that it was “never really intended for publication.” Fair enough. We will approach it with that in mind and not consider that Stetterholm himself ever advanced this chart as “the Bible.” Rather, we are addressing a question raised by the Christianity Today article in the course of its discussion of how Scriptural data can be presented.

Beyond this, it must be said that the flow chart itself is simply marvelous. Creative, clever, but at the same time concise, informative, and accurate. Not to mention a lot of fun. So I have no objections to the chart itself, as a flow chart. It’s beautiful. But the question remains: Is it still the Bible?

I want to offer three reasons why I think this particular chart is not the Bible. But I also want to offer a suggestion at the end for how another kind of flow chart might be the Bible.

(1) This flow chart is not the Bible because it is not just the Bible. Stetterholm adds witty and informative but nevertheless additional commentary to the biblical text. (Example: If an oxen falls into a pit that you own, “Now you know why you’re supposed to cover your pits, fool.”) So we need to recognize that this is biblical content plus some added interpretation. (Admittedly what we know as the Bible these days typically does include commentary in the form of subject headings, notes, etc., so it’s important to distinguish between that and the biblical text itself when we think about the Bible “is.”)

(2) This flow chart is not the Bible because it changes the literary form in which the biblical content was delivered. Just as God used human languages in creating the Bible, God also used existing human literary forms. And when we change those into other forms, we’re making at least as much difference, but arguably much more difference, than when we translate the Bible from the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek into other languages. Think about the psalm that begins “The Lord is my shepherd” rewritten as a thank-you note to God for taking as good care of us as a shepherd would if we were sheep and you’ll get the idea of the difference that changing literary form makes. The content is the same but the expression is not, and I believe that the form of expression is an intrinsic aspect of each of the literary creations that together make up the Scriptures.

(3) Most importantly, this flow chart is not the Bible because all of the biblical laws regarding oxen occur in collections of laws where they are offered, together with similar laws that have other subjects, as examples of more general principles that readers are supposed to recognize, internalize, and apply to other situations. For example, the law that says not to plow with an ox and a donkey yoked together appears with other laws that say not to plant two kinds of seed in your vineyard and not to wear clothes of wool and linen woven together. All of these laws are intended to prevent the kind of magical “mixing” that the Canaanites thought generated procreative power.

Similarly, the law that says to care for a stray ox until its owner comes to recover it goes on to say, more generally, “Do the same if you find their donkey or cloak or anything else they have lost.” The real point in this law, and several of the surrounding ones, is what it looks like to do right by your neighbor.

We might well ask, as Paul did in 1 Corinthians when he applied the law about not muzzling an ox while it was treading out grain to his own right to receive support as an apostle, “Is it about oxen that God is concerned?” The answer is, “Not only about oxen.” God does care about them, but about much wider things as well, and the danger of producing a flow chart specifically about oxen and considering it the Bible is that it leaves out this wider dimension.

But so much for possibly too-serious thoughts about a delightful and playful proof-of-concept. Let me conclude by suggesting that in some cases the plain biblical text might helpfully be presented as a flow chart. For example, the laws about offerings at the beginning of Leviticus could very meaningfully be presented, verbatim, that way. The first branches would distinguish between the types of offerings: burnt, grain, fellowship, etc. Subsidiary branches of each would then distinguish occasions within these types of offerings: “If the offering is a burnt offering from the herd . . . from the flock . . . of birds”; “If you bring a grain offering baked in an oven . . . cooked in a pan . . . of first fruits”; etc. There is a real “decision tree” embedded in this collection of laws and a flow chart might show that very nicely. And still be the Bible.

“Honey” in the Bible is not date paste (and why this matters)

Several times now I’ve heard the claim that the “honey” mentioned in the Bible is not actually the sweet food produced by bees from flower nectar, but rather a paste or syrup made from dates or grapes. (To give just one example, an online recipe for a [great-looking] Date Honey Nut Cake says, “Biblical scholars believe that the honey repeatedly mentioned in the Torah likely came from dates and other fruits, not bees.”) Ancient Palestine was not conducive to bee hives or beekeeping, this interpretation holds, so we should actually think of something like date paste when we come across biblical statements such as Jacob’s instructions to his sons as they were returning to buy food from Joseph in Egypt: “Put some of the best products of the land in your bags and take them down to the man as a gift—a little balm and a little honey, some spices and myrrh, some pistachio nuts and almonds.”

This interpretation should not be difficult to check against the biblical text. If we find references to things like bees and honeycombs in connection with honey, then it is not correct. Biblical honey does come from bees. But if we find no such references, just mentions of “honey” along with dried goods such as nuts, as in the case above, then maybe the interpretation is correct. What do we find?

• When Samson walked past the carcass of a lion he had killed earlier, “in it he saw a swarm of bees and some honey. He scooped out the honey with his hands and ate as he went along.”

• When Saul was leading the Israelites against the Philistines, his “entire army entered the woods, and there was honey on the ground. . . . Jonathan . . . reached out the end of the staff that was in his hand and dipped it into the honeycomb.”

• In Psalm 19, David says that the decrees of the Lord are “sweeter than honey, than honey from the honeycomb.”

• The bridegroom in Song of Songs says, “I have eaten my honeycomb and my honey.”

References such as these show that the “honey” described in the Bible can indeed be the sweet food produced by bees.

Now it is not necessarily the case that every single reference to honey in the Bible is to this food. There are other references to “honey” in association with agricultural produce that suggest that something more like date paste or grape syrup may be in view, even though the Hebrew word is the same. These include the episode in Numbers where the spies sent into Canaan bring back a huge grape cluster and exclaim, “We went into the land to which you sent us, and it does flow with milk and honey! Here is its fruit.” Similarly, when Moses speaks in Deuteronomy of Canaan as “a land with wheat and barley, vines and fig trees, pomegranates, olive oil and honey,” or when Chronicles describes the Israelites giving “the firstfruits of their grain, new wine, olive oil and honey and all that the fields produced,” this sounds more like agriculture than beekeeping.

But many obvious references in the biblical text such as the ones cited above certainly rule out the claim that ancient Palestine was not conducive to bee hives. And so whenever we see “honey” mentioned in the Bible, we do not need to consider this to be a reference to something like date paste or grape syrup. It is most likely honey from bees that is meant.

Now why does this matter? Simply because the mileage this claim has been getting is another marker of the decline of biblical literacy in our day. Only a generation or two ago, anyone who tried to advance this claim would have been immediately answered by crowds of knowledgeable Bible readers—ordinary readers, not even pastors or seminary professors—who would have recalled the Bible’s many references to bees and honeycombs and recognized that at least some of the honey described in the Scriptures does indeed come from bees. But in our day many are accepting this claim uncritically, not knowing any better because they simply haven’t read or remembered that much of the Bible.

This makes me wonder: what other claims are being successfully advanced these days that a basic familiarity with the Bible would lead us to question? And is something much more significant than the nature of honey at stake in some of these questionable claims?

Was James a carpenter like his half-brother Jesus?

Q. We’re using your study guide to biblical wisdom literature in our Sunday School class. We’re currently studying the book of James and we have a question about its author, the half-brother of Jesus. Would he have been a carpenter too?

John Everett Millais, “Christ in the House of His Parents” (“The Carpenter Shop”), c. 1849. Is this how we should understand the biblical references to Jesus as a “carpenter”?

The place to begin answering this question is by asking whether Jesus was actually a carpenter himself. Mark records in his gospel that when Jesus returned to Nazareth and taught in the synagogue there, the hometown crowds were amazed at his wisdom and power and asked, “Where did this man get these things? . . . Isn’t this the tektōn?” In Matthew‘s version of the same episode, the people ask, “Isn’t this the son of the tektōn?”

In these cases the Greek term tektōn is traditionally translated “carpenter,” and this has led to popular pictures of Jesus at work with his father in a carpenter’s shop, building tables and chairs for friends and neighbors. But the term actually has a broader meaning. In classical texts in can refer to a worker in wood (for example, someone who makes plows and yokes for farming). But it can also refer to a “joiner,” that is, a construction worker who puts together buildings out of wood. In other texts it describes workers in stone, i.e. masons, and in rarer cases it even describes a metal-worker.

So we should really understand tektōn to mean something like “construction worker.” This gives us a very different picture of Jesus from the one that has him working in the family carpentry business. Jesus most likely took construction jobs wherever he could find them, such as over in the larger city of Sepphoris near Nazareth. He was, in effect, a day laborer. This helps us appreciate, for one thing, how Jesus shared all aspects of our human condition during his incarnation, including uncertainty over employment.

But knowing the broader meaning of the term tektōn also helps us appreciate that Jesus may have been regarded as socially inferior by many in his home town because of his occupation. The word seems to have those associations. For example, according to Walter Bauer’s Greek-English Lexicon, Aristoxenus says that the father of Sophocles was a tektōn. But the Life of Sophocles rejects this idea and suggests instead that the father may have had tektōnes among his slaves. So the occupation was considered lower class and perhaps even dishonorable.

This gives a more dismissive and condescending ring to the comments Jesus heard from the townspeople when he returned to Nazareth. But this is another way in which Jesus “made himself nothing” and took on the “nature of a servant” when he came to earth, as Paul says in Philippians.

And as for his half-brother James, if the father and the eldest brother were each a tektōn, then it’s likely that this was a landless family of day laborers and that all of the brothers would have worked in this same profession. One can easily imagine people from Nazareth hearing the wisdom teaching that was later collected in the book of James and wondering similarly, “Where did this man get these things? . . . Isn’t this the tektōn?”

Does God command particular actions because they are morally right, or are actions morally right because God commands them?

Q. How would you answer the “Euthyphro Dilemma,” that is, the question that asks, “Does God command particular actions because they are morally right, or are they morally right because God commands them?” If you accept the first option, it would seem that God is not the basis of morality, but is simply a “recognizer” of morally right things. On the other hand, if an action is morally right because God says so, it means that it could be potentially morally right and obligatory to inflict pain and suffering on others. There is more to the discussion than just that, obviously, but I was just wondering which (if either) path you tend to favor and how you answer this “dilemma”?

(This question was asked in a comment on my recent post on the topic “Why does the Bible say it’s wrong to have sex outside of marriage?” because I said both that God had set apart sex as holy and that sex was intrinsically holy.)

The “Euthyphro Dilemma” (so called because it is first raised in Western literature and philosophy in Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro) is a truly vast question that has received much consideration over the whole history of Christian moral theological reflection. I won’t be able to do much justice in a short blog post, but let me say briefly that I’m among those who consider this actually to be a false dilemma. I believe that the inherent moral structure of the universe reflects the character of the God who created it, and that God’s own assessment of actions (whether they should be commanded or forbidden) similarly reflects His own character, so we don’t have to choose between where we think the rightness or wrongness of an action should be grounded.

From this perspective of mine, there’s no problem of God being subject to a moral authority outside himself. There’s also no problem of anything morally questionable that God might command (such as lying, killing, etc.) being “good,” because we have things like conscience and natural law, built into the moral fabric of the universe, to help us recognize that when God does tell people to do such troubling things, this must be under exceptional circumstances and for exceptional reasons that are somehow justifiable.

However, there still are a couple aspects of the question that remain something of a “dilemma” for me. First, exactly what is going on in those “exceptional” circumstances? How could a good God command lying or killing at all? I’ve discussed this in some other posts on this blog; for example, for lying or deception, see the series of posts that begins here; for killing or “holy war,” see this post. I say in these posts that these “exceptional” cases are among the most difficult and troubling passages in the entire Bible for thoughtful readers, and so in saying that I consider the Euthyphro Dilemma to be a false dilemma, I don’t want to minimize that at all.

The second aspect of the question that remains a dilemma is that there is no outside standard by which to determine whether what God has generally commanded and built into the moral fabric of the universe as an expression of His own character is objectively good on any other basis. We are, in effect, “trapped” within the creation of this God, and as His creatures we can only flourish within it by conforming ourselves more and more to His character. Now personally I have no problem with this! But for those who might want to be able to hold God accountable to some objective standard, that actually isn’t possible. (This is one of the main issues raised and debated in the book of Job, as I show in my study guide to that book.)

Nietzsche argued that the Christian ethic of love, compassion, humility, and forgiveness bred “weaklings” who failed to assert themselves, as they should, in acts of power against other creatures. Nietzsche didn’t believe in God, but if he did, he would no doubt have said that the wrong kind of God had made our world and given us the wrong kind of guidance in our tender consciences and innate sense of fair play.

There’s no way to answer such a perspective, which is really an expression of faith in a way of life opposite to the one the Christian faith teaches, except by faith itself. We can’t prove that we love and serve the best possible God from within a beautifully ordered moral universe of His creation. We can only say that as we are getting to know Him and serve Him better and better, this certainly seems to be the case. We have to take all the rest on faith.

The meaning of Daniel’s seventy weeks

Q. . . . Which elements of dispensationalism do you most find fault with? Perhaps you could touch on your understanding of Daniel’s seventy weeks, the “great” tribulation, and the status of the nation of Israel in regards to the promises God had made specifically to it in the Old Testament.

I answered the first part of this question more generally in my last post. Let me address here some of the specifics you’ve asked about.

Daniel’s “seventy weeks” are literally “seventy sevens.” Dispensational interpreters take this to mean seventy periods of seven years each, and they understand the “great tribulation” described in Revelation to be the last of these periods. The events that will take place over this whole period of time are described at the end of Daniel’s third vision. There the angel Gabriel explains:

The archangel Gabriel, depicted in a fresco in a church in Tsalnjikha, Republic of Georgia

“Seventy ‘sevens’ are decreed for your people and your holy city to finish transgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for wickedness, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy and to anoint the Most Holy Place. Know and understand this: From the time the word goes out to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Anointed One, the ruler, comes, there will be seven ‘sevens,’ and sixty-two ‘sevens.’ It will be rebuilt with streets and a trench, but in times of trouble. After the sixty-two ‘sevens,’ the Anointed One will be put to death and will have nothing. The people of the ruler who will come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. The end will come like a flood: War will continue until the end, and desolations have been decreed. He will confirm a covenant with many for one ‘seven.’ In the middle of the ‘seven’ he will put an end to sacrifice and offering. And at the temple he will set up an abomination that causes desolation, until the end that is decreed is poured out on him.”

As I explained last time, John Nelson Darby, who developed dispensationalism as we know it today, believed that the Jewish nation would replace the multinational community of Jesus’ followers as the people of God on earth at the end of history. And so he was inclined to apply these words to the Jews and to believe that they would be fulfilled in the “end times,” as world history reached its culmination.

But expecting a future fulfillment of biblical words like these inevitably involves much speculation, and continual revision as world events overtake whatever scenario is originally conceived. That is why you are probably familiar with numerous timetables for how these “seventy sevens” play out and various versions of the “great tribulation” or last “seven” at the end.

I think it is more responsible, and more in keeping with the way we interpret the rest of the Bible, to ask first whether Gabriel’s words in Daniel’s third vision might not already have had their specific historical fulfillment, so that anything we can anticipate in the future will be something analogous, not something directly predicted. Here’s what I say about this in my study guide to Daniel and Revelation:

– – – – –

Biblical scholars have discussed and debated Gabriel’s words extensively, but they haven’t reached any consensus about how to interpret them. It’s not obvious how they line up with events in later history, and attempts to explain them can quickly become speculative and fanciful. One observation we can make, however, is that many of the details Gabriel provides seem to correspond with events in the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes:

– “The anointed one will be put to death” may describe the murder of the Jewish high priest Onias by his rival Jason in 171 B.C.;
– “He will make a covenant with many” may refer to the agreement Antiochus made with the Jewish nation once Jason seized power;
– “In the middle of the ‘seven’ he will put an end to sacrifice and offering” may describe how Antiochus suppressed Jewish worship three and a half years after making this agreement;
– “He will set up an abomination that causes desolation” may indicate how Antiochus desecrated the temple;
– “The end that is decreed is poured out on him” could describe Antiochus’s sudden death from disease in 164 B.C.

The explanation of what Daniel found “beyond understanding” in the previous vision, therefore, is that the temple, desolate in his day, will be rebuilt, but then desolated again by an evil ruler who will ultimately be judged by God. This is a further warning to God’s people that they need to be faithful, even to death, and refuse any compromise. It’s still not evident, however, how the “seventy sevens” get the reader down to the time of Antiochus from Daniel’s day. So, much remains to be understood in this fascinating but cryptic prophecy.

– – – – –

You can see that I take quite a different view from the one that characterizes dispensationalism. But it’s because my interpretive presuppositions are so different. In the same study guide I explain the four ways that the book of Revelation is interpreted, and the same approaches can be taken to the book of Daniel:

– – – – –

The book of Revelation is interpreted in four major ways. The futurist approach understands it to be a description of the events of the “end times,” at the end of human history. (Works like the novels and movies in the Left Behind series follow this approach.) The historicist view sees the book as a prediction of the whole course of history, from Jesus and the apostles down through the present to the end of the world. The idealist interpretation is that Revelation depicts the struggles and triumphs that followers of Jesus will experience everywhere, but it doesn’t have any particular place or time in view. The preterist approach is to try to understand the book by reference to the time and place it was written in–western Asia Minor towards the close of the first century.

– – – – –

After this review of approaches I explain, “This study guide will consistently pursue a preterist interpretation. If this is new for you, and you’re much more used to hearing the book treated differently, just try to keep an open mind and look for the potential benefits of this approach as you and your group do the following sessions together.” I should say the same thing about the posts on this blog!

One last item you asked about was “the status of the nation of Israel in regards to the promises God had made specifically to it in the Old Testament.” Let me refer you to this post for my thoughts on that. And yes, that post, too, is written from a preterist perspective.

Why doesn’t God actively judge today, as in the Bible?

This question, like the one I answered last time, was asked in a comment on my post about “Why did God create Satan?”

Q. If God is the same, yesterday, today and forever, why is He not dealing with our immoral, worldly society as He so often did in the Bible? Be it the flood, Sodom & Gomorrah, or any other references, He did not drag His feet, so to speak, and rendered swift judgment. The more I read the Bible, it seems like there are actually three different Gods in one, in the regard of how He was, is and will be.

At least as I understand it, the statement in Hebrews that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” was intended to encourage second-generation followers of Jesus to hold fast to the faith they had been taught by His first-generation followers. (Right before this statement the author says, “Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith.”) So this not so much an assertion that God, over the course of the whole Bible, has never changed the way He deals with humanity as it is a claim that we can continue to have confidence in the gospel, the good news about Jesus and what he has done for us, even though those who personally witnessed his earthly ministry have long passed away.

As for whether God deals with humanity differently now than He did in the Bible, here’s what I said about that in response to the question, “Does God change over the course of the Bible?”:

“From the start we see that God is consistent in his character qualities: creative, loving, generous, merciful even in judgment, and so forth. But these qualities do seem to get expressed in different ways as the divine-human relationship unfolds over the course of the Bible. . . . For example, when humans turn out to be so wicked, God regrets making them and destroys almost all of them through the flood. But afterwards, recognizing that ‘every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood,’ he resolves never to destroy them all again.”

In other words, to use one of the examples you cited—the flood—God says explicitly in the Bible that He will not again respond to human wickedness the way He did at that time. I suggest in the same post I just quoted that “God himself actually changes in terms of how much relational experience He has with humans.” So it is not so much a case of there being three different Gods—a past judgmental one, a present merciful one, and a future judgmental one—but a matter of God’s relationship with us changing as it unfolds over history and experience.

The prelude to the gospel of John says that “the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” So we today are very blessed to live in a period of redemptive history when the mercy that is always balanced with justice in the character of God is at the forefront. But we must be careful not to presume on that mercy, but remember, in light of all the judgment passages you mentioned, as Peter writes in a long and unforgettable sentence (with which I will close):

“If God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to hell, putting them in chains of darkness to be held for judgment; if he did not spare the ancient world when he brought the flood on its ungodly people, but protected Noah, a preacher of righteousness, and seven others; if he condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah by burning them to ashes, and made them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly; and if he rescued Lot, a righteous man, who was distressed by the depraved conduct of the lawless (for that righteous man, living among them day after day, was tormented in his righteous soul by the lawless deeds he saw and heard)— if this is so, then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and to hold the unrighteous for punishment on the day of judgment.”

Why didn’t God protect the children he created from an evil being like Satan?

This question was asked in a comment on my post about “Why did God create Satan?” It reflects the same concern as the person who asked the question I originally addressed in that post: If earthly fathers would do everything they could to protect their children from evil people, why didn’t God protect the children he created from an evil being like Satan?

Q. Even as an earthly father, if I had the ability to place my daughter in a perfect environment and allow her to be spotless and live forever, why would I ever create something evil to tempt her, all the while knowing she would give in?

I don’t believe that God deliberately and intentionally made a creature whose role would be to tempt humans to do wrong and so forfeit their innocence and their place in an earthly paradise. As I tried to explain clearly in my original post, I believe that God created Lucifer, not Satan, an angel with great powers and the awesome responsibility of choosing how to use those powers. There was as great potential for good as there was for evil. Unfortunately Lucifer fell through pride and so became Satan.

I also don’t believe that God knew in advance that Eve and Adam would inevitably give in if they were tempted and deceived. I believe they were given freedom that was so genuine that what they would ultimately choose was unknowable in advance.

I am aware of a stream within theology (technically known as “infralapsarianism”) that says God ordained the fall so that it would become the occasion for redemption. This is the felix culpa or “happy fall” idea expressed in the traditional Latin mass for the Easter vigil:
O felix culpa quae talem et tantum meruit habere redemptorem =
“O happy fault that merited such and so great a Redeemer.”
I personally see such serious implications for the character of God that I don’t celebrate the fall in these terms.

I’m rather what’s known as a “supralapsarian.” God did not ordain the fall, but once it happened, God worked from “above” it, not from “within” it, to bring about our redemption. For me this idea preserves God’s love and human freedom even while it correctly portrays God as the sole agent of our salvation.

I hope these further thoughts are helpful.

What “sea creatures” had been “tamed” in New Testament times?

Q. I am doing the James sessions from your wisdom literature study guide in my Sunday School class and this question came up: When James is talking about taming the tongue, he says, “All kinds of animals, birds, reptiles and sea creatures are being tamed and have been tamed by mankind.” What “sea creatures” had been tamed by the time of the early church? (Dolphins??) Or does “tamed” means subdued or mastered rather than domesticated?

Rather than having specific “sea creatures” in mind that humans had trained and domesticated, I think James here is using another one of those “marvelous Hebrew expressions for totality” that I also discuss in this post. In effect, he means that “every creature” can be at least subdued, if not tamed, by humans. (The verb is damazō and in this context, as you suspect, it more likely means “subdued” or “controlled” than “tamed” or “domesticated.”)

One way the biblical authors speak of every creature is to refer to “the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the fish of the sea,” as Hosea does, echoing the three-part division of the creation in Genesis into land, sky, and sea. But sometimes the land creatures are subdivided, as when Zephaniah speaks of “man and beast . . . the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea.”

Another distinction among land creatures is between those that go on all fours and those that creep on the ground. In the Genesis creation account, on the sixth day God makes “the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds.” Significantly, the word used in the Septuagint or Greek New Testament for creeping creatures is herpetos, the same word that’s translated “reptiles” in James. It should probably be understood with this broader meaning there.

This allows for a fourfold division of all creatures, such as appears in God’s words to Noah after the flood in Genesis: “The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea.” (In this case, the Septuagint uses the Greek word for “moving” rather than herpetos, but the same distinction is in view.)

In the story of Peter’s vision in Acts, the narrator says similarly that the sheet he saw lowered from heaven “contained all kinds of four-footed animals, as well as reptiles [herpeta] and birds.” When Peter himself describes this vision later in the book, he divides the land animals even further into “four-footed animals of the earth, wild beasts, reptiles [herpeta] and birds,” arriving at the characteristic four-fold division meaning “all creatures” even without citing sea creatures. Paul does something similar in Romans when he speaks of “images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.”

So we should recognize James’ phrase about “animals, birds, reptiles and sea creatures” as his own version of the variable three-fold or four-fold formula meaning “all-creatures.” It’s important not to think the Bible is providing specifics when it’s speaking generally this way. Otherwise we get into questions like the one asked in your class that can needlessly call the accuracy and thus the truth of the Bible into question.

More importantly, we might misunderstand James means when he says that “no human being can tame the tongue.” That’s the whole point he wants to make by drawing his comparison to the taming of creatures. If we believe he’s making a universal statement, rather than a general one, then we’ll conclude it’s pointless to try to tame our own tongues. But that is precisely what James is encouraging us to do here. He says, holding up an ideal standard we should aspire to, “Anyone who is never at fault in what they say is perfect, able to keep their whole body in check.” More is at stake than just our understanding of the Bible in cases like this; our obedience depends on it.