Category: preaching

More on the Connecticut school shooting: the haughtiness of humanity will collapse, says Isaiah

I wondered tonight whether this week’s Greek Isaiah readings might have something to say to the recent school shooting in Connecticut. Indeed, here is Isaiah 2:17-19 (my translation from the Greek):

Then every person will be brought low,
and the haughtiness of humanity will collapse,
and the Lord alone will be exalted in that day.

And they will hide everything that is made by hand,

as they bring them into caves
and into the clefts of rocks
and into the holes of the earth,
from before the fear of the Lord
and from the glory of his strength,
when he rises up to strike the earth.

The word for that which is made by hand (τὰ χειροποίητα) refers to idols. But as I read this I couldn’t help but think of the promise from Psalm 46:

He makes wars cease
to the ends of the earth.
He breaks the bow and shatters the spear;
he burns the shields with fire.

…bows, spears, and shields, of course, all being made by hand. I suggested here that a 21st century way of reading that verse could be something like, “He crushes guns and diffuses bombs, he destroys human weapons of destruction.”

One day either we or God himself will bring all our weapons of destruction–indeed, all our evil inclinations–into “caves” and “into the clefts of rocks and into the holes of the earth,” as we recoil at the glory of God’s strength. He will make wars cease; he will end all senseless violence; he will crush evil and wipe it away from the face of the earth.

Lord, as we mourn in the meantime, please hasten that day.

He crushes guns and diffuses bombs; he destroys weapons of destruction (Psalm 46 speaks into the mass school shooting)

gun

Psalm 46, a Psalm for tragedies and disasters, reads:

God is our refuge and strength,
an ever-present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way
and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea,
though its waters roar and foam
and the mountains quake with their surging.

There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy place where the Most High dwells.
God is within her, she will not fall;
God will help her at break of day.
Nations are in uproar, kingdoms fall;
he lifts his voice, the earth melts.

The Lord Almighty is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress.

Come and see what the Lord has done,
the desolations he has brought on the earth.
He makes wars cease
to the ends of the earth.
He breaks the bow and shatters the spear;
he burns the shields with fire.
He says, “Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth.”

The Lord Almighty is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress.

The third part of this Psalm begins, “Come and see the works of the LORD, the desolations he has brought on the earth. He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth.” God is stronger than war—he can demolish even the strongest weapons of warfare. So in some kind of cosmic sense we don’t have to be afraid when there is violence.

“He breaks the bow and shatters the spear, he burns the shields with fire.” We might read this today as, “He crushes guns and diffuses bombs, he destroys human weapons of destruction.”

And then there is the main point of the Psalm, verse 10, followed by the refrain in verse 11 that appeared earlier in the Psalm: “Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth. The LORD Almighty is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress.”

Nature can appear to be in chaos, human actions can leave us scratching our heads, but neither the chaos of nature nor the chaos of human sinfulness can ultimately stand up to the power of God. He is exalted over the earth and over all people. He is a warrior God who declares war on war and causes all violence to end.

“The LORD Almighty,” a title for God from verse 11 and earlier in verse 7, is also sometimes translated “LORD of hosts,” or God of the angel armies. Based on these verses Martin Luther wrote, “LORD Sabaoth his name, from age to age the same, and he must win the battle.”

This Almighty warrior God is with us, present in chaos and suffering. He is the God of heavenly hosts of armies, yet he is the God of Jacob, too, a title that speaks of God’s personal relationship with his people.

He is a personal God that people can know. He invites us into an intimate relationship with him, especially when we are hurting, especially when things are going wrong.

The above is adapted from part of a sermon I preached a couple of summers ago on Psalm 46. I post in now in light of today’s awful news.

Jesus weeps, we weep

Shannon Hicks/Newtown Bee, via Associated Press
Shannon Hicks/Newtown Bee, via Associated Press

Jesus wept, and he weeps again today, with the horrible news of another school shooting in Newton, CT. From the New York Times:

A gunman killed 26 people, 20 of them children between the ages of 5 and 10, in a shooting on Friday morning at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., about 65 miles northeast of New York City, the authorities said.

The gunman, who was believed to be in his 20s, walked into a classroom at Sandy Hook Elementary School where his mother was a teacher. He shot and killed her and then shot 20 students, most in the same classroom. He also shot five other adults, and then killed himself inside the school.

This evil deed is so heinous that even naming and describing it feels bad. May God have mercy on the souls of those poor children, and the grieving families they leave behind.

Christians have a rich Biblical tradition of lament that we can employ in times like this. This summer after the Colorado shooting, I posted this prayer, which was an aid to me in processing the grief, anger, and bewilderment I felt after hearing such awful news.

Prayer of Lament

O God, you are our help and strength,
our refuge in the time of trouble.
In you our ancestors trusted;
They trusted and you delivered them.
When we do not know how to pray as we ought,
your very Spirit intercedes for us
with sighs too deep for words.
We plead for the intercession now, Gracious One.

For desolation and destruction are in our streets,
and terror dances before us.
Our hearts faint; our knees tremble;
our bodies quake; all faces grow pale.
Our eyes are spent from weeping
and our stomachs churn.

How long, O Lord, how long
must we endure this devastation?
How long will destruction lay waste at noonday?
Why does violence flourish
while peace is taken prisoner?
Rouse yourself! Do not cast us off in times of trouble.
Come to our help;
redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love.

For you are a gracious God
abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.

By the power of the cross,
through which you redeemed the world,
bring to an end hostility
and establish justice in the gate.
For you will gather together your people into that place
where mourning and crying and pain
will be no more,
and tears will be wiped from every eye.
Hasten the day, O God for our salvation.
Accomplish it quickly! Amen.

**From Let the Whole Church Say Amen! A Guide for Those Who Pray in Public, by Laurence Hull Stookey, pp 94-95 (Copyright 2001 by Abingdon Press). Reproduced by permission. Formatted print-friendly pdf of prayer here.

The Scriptures that the above prayer draws on are: Psalm 124:8, Psalm 37:39, Psalm 22:4, Romans 8:26, Isaiah 59:7, Job 41:22, Nahum 2:10, Lamentations 2:11, Isaiah 6:11, Psalm 91:6, Psalm 44:23, Psalm 44:26, Exodus 34:6, 1 Corinthians 1:17, Ephesians 2:14, Amos 5:15, Revelation 21:4, Isaiah 60:22.

Leslie C. Allen’s Liturgy of Grief for under $5 (ebook)

Leslie C. Allen’s Liturgy of Grief is under $5 this month in ebook form. It’s here on Amazon ($4.99) and here on CBD ($3.99). It’s a good deal for a great “pastoral commentary” on Lamentations.

I reviewed the book this summer, as well as interviewed the author.

One of my reviews to be published in Bible Study Magazine

I have written a book review that is slated to be published in an upcoming issue of Bible Study Magazine.

You can see what Bible Study Magazine looks like by flipping through this past issue.

The book I review is Lamentations and the Song of Songs, by Harvey Cox and Stephanie Paulsell. It’s the newest edition of Westminster John Knox Press’s Belief theological commentary series. (More about the book is here.)

Both authors suggest reading their respective biblical books in a “participatory mood.” Cox and Paulsell each highlight the timelessness of Lamentations and Song of Songs, surveying well their history of interpretation to help readers today apply them and enter in to the texts. A good commentary to have at hand, especially when preaching through either Lamentations or Song of Songs–something that probably doesn’t happen as often as it should.

The Gospel According to Isaiah 53, reviewed

Isaiah 53 is one of the clearest prophecies of Jesus the Messiah in the Hebrew Scriptures. This chapter has changed the lives of thousands of people–both Jews and Gentiles–who have read the text and believed in the One who fulfilled these prophecies in glorious detail.

Thus begins Mitch Glaser’s Introduction in The Gospel According to Isaiah 53: Encountering the Suffering Servant in Jewish and Christian Theology (affiliate link). In three parts the book expounds how the prophecies of Isaiah 53 relate to and are ultimately fulfilled in the person of Jesus. (The full passage the book treats is Isaiah 52:13-Isaiah 53.)

The first section, a sort of exegetical prelude, discusses “Christian interpretations” and “Jewish interpretations” of Isaiah 53. The second section is a biblical theology of Isaiah 53 (with particular attention to its use throughout Scripture). The third and concluding section speaks to “Isaiah 53 and Practical Theology,” with an emphasis on how to preach the passage, both from the pulpit and in conversation.

The book is “designed to enable pastors and lay leaders to deepen their understanding of Isaiah 53 and to better equip the saints for ministry among the Jewish people.”

The first thing I noticed about the book is that it’s just as much an apologetic for Jesus-as-suffering-servant as it is an academic study of Isaiah 53. It’s not that it lacks academic substance, though. This is a meaty book, and pleasingly so.

Regarding the book’s explicitly evangelistic intent–there may be some who are uncomfortable with the description of Chosen People Ministries’ “Isaiah 53 Campaign” (including 75,000 postcards to Jewish homes and 40,000 voice blasts=robo-calls?). I’ll admit that I question the potential efficacy of pre-recorded phone messages for reaching anyone with the Gospel (though God can use anything!). But see blogger Joel Watts for his helpful (refreshing!) take on the blending of the academic and evangelistic enterprises, especially in the context of this book.

You can find a full list of contributors in the table of contents here (pdf). A few names to highlight are Walter C. Kaiser Jr., Darrell L. Bock (one of the co-editors), Craig A. Evans, and Donald R. Sunukjian. I particularly appreciated the book’s treatment of the New Testament use of Isaiah 53. The chapter by Michael J. Wilkins lists the quotations of Isaiah 53 in the NT and additional allusions to it in the Gospels. (He makes a key point, that Jesus himself understood “his mission and death in the light of Isaiah 53.”) Darrell Bock goes in depth with a comparison of the Greek and Hebrew texts of Isaiah 53:7-8, highlighting its use in Acts 8 where Philip explains the passage to the Ethiopian eunuch.

Something to critique in this book is that there were a few generalizations of Jews that I found to be unfair, particularly in the chapter “Using Isaiah 53 in Jewish Evangelism.” Mitch Glaser writes:

I think I can safely say that, in the United States, most Jewish people would recognize Isaiah as the first name of a professional athlete sooner than they would recognize the prophet of biblical literature.

Granted, he is operating from the assumption that “most Jewish people are not Lubavitch, Hasidic, or Orthodox,” but still…. What was more surprising to me: “Most Jewish people do not understand or believe in biblical prophecy” and, “Most Jewish people do not believe in sin.” Glaser does (only later) qualify these with, “We must note that all of the above does not apply to those who hold to traditional Jewish theological positions,” but he would have been better off saying something like “many secular or ethnic but non-religious Jews…” or at least supporting his statements with statistics from surveys rather than anecdotal evidence. Glaser himself is a converted Jew who has a compelling conversion story, but I still found those characterizations to be frustrating. I wonder how helpful such statements could be in advancing an evangelistic cause in conversation with another Jew.

This next thing to highlight may seem a small point to some, but as someone seeking to keep my Hebrew and Greek going, I appreciated the actual Hebrew and Greek fonts throughout the book (i.e., not just transliteration), which are clear and easy to read. I did think, however, about an intended audience of “pastors and lay leaders” who may have desired transliteration, too. (All Hebrew and Greek is translated into English.)

Darrell Bock’s conclusion summarizes all the essays of the book, with key quotations. Having this there was a big help in piecing everything together again. The Gospel According to Isaiah 53 will not be far from my reach in coming months and years. I expect I will often reference this compendium of biblical scholarship on a vital text. My hesitations about the characterizations of Jews above notwithstanding, there is a good deal here that can be useful for Christian-Jewish conversations about the Suffering Servant.

I received a free copy of The Gospel According to Isaiah 53 with the only expectations of providing an (unbiased and honest) review on this blog. Its publisher’s product page is here. It’s on Amazon here (affiliate link).

Exegetical Guide to the Greek New Testament: Colossians and Philemon, reviewed

Getting from participles to preaching, from grammar to Good News proclamation, can be a challenge to preachers and teachers when working with the biblical text. But if there is theology in those prepositions, as seminary professors have often noted, careful attention to the morphology and syntax of the text can be key in preparing to expound God’s Word with God’s people.

B&H Academic’s Exegetical Guide to the Greek New Testament “aims to close that gap between stranded student (or former student) and daunting text and to bridge that gulf between morphological analysis and exegesis.” As a volume in a projected set of 20 volumes, Murray J. Harris’s Colossians and Philemon “seeks to provide in a single volume all the necessary information for basic understanding of the Greek text and to afford suggestions for more detailed study.” Similar to the Baylor Handbook series, the Exegetical Guide is not a “full-scale” commentary. This affords the author more opportunity to comment on the original language of the biblical text.

Both Colossians and Philemon in this volume contain a brief but sufficient Introduction. It treats authorship (Harris defends Pauline authorship based on Colossians’ similarity to Philemon, which is more generally accepted as Pauline); date (he puts the two letters at 60-61); occasion and purpose; includes an outline of the letter; and makes commentary recommendations.

Each paragraph of the biblical text has the following features in the commentary:

  • A structural analysis of the Greek. This is in sentence flow style–not sentence diagramming; Harris says the former is “a simple exercise in literary physiology–showing how the grammatical and conceptual parts of a paragraph are arranged and related”
  • Commentary on each phrase in the Greek, which ranges from morphological analysis to syntax to lexical analysis (great helps for word studies in this book!) to textual variants. Much of the Greek ends up translated into English in each passage of the commentary
  • “For Further Study,” a bibliography arranged by topic, e.g., “Prayer in Paul” (1:9-12), “The Will of God” (1:9), etc.
  • “Homiletical Suggestions,” not uncommonly more than one for a given passage

In addition, at the end of each letter there is a full English translation of that letter and an “expanded paraphrase” of the Greek. Colossians 3:12-14 in Harris’s translation, for example, reads:

Therefore, as God’s chosen people, who are holy and loved by him, put on heartfelt compassion [σπλάγχνα οἰκτιρμοῦ], kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. You are to bear with one another, and if anyone has a grievance against someone else, you are to forgive one another. Just as the Lord forgave you, so you also must forgive.

The expanded paraphrase reads, “So, then, since you are God’s chosen people, his elect, dedicated to his service and the objects of his special love….”

The structural analysis, in my view, is the best feature of this densely packed and rich commentary. For example, in his analysis of Colossians 3:1-4, Harris visually shows “Christ” (in Greek) lined up in five different instances, so that he can easily show, “Christ is a central theme of the paragraph (there are five explicit references to him in the four verses).” Just reading the Greek straight through, this may not be as obvious as it is when Harris shows it visually and comments on it.

Harris gives great attention to individual words and phrases within verses. He mentions the major Greek grammars: “Blass-Debrunner-Funk, Robertson, Turner, and Zerwick,” as well as BDAG, the Anchor Bible Dictionary, and other such standard references. Just to give one example, on 1:15 Harris writes:

The ‘firstborn’ was either the eldest child in a family or a person of preeminent rank. The use of this term to describe the Davidic king in Ps 88:28 (LXX) (=Ps 89:27 EVV), ‘I will also appoint him my firstborn (πρωτότοκον), the most exalted of the kings of the earth,’ indicates that it can denote supremacy in rank as well as priority in time.

The sermon suggestions are really just suggestions for the body of a sermon; though they are in outline form, they are not complete sermon outlines. And some of the included outlines (“Wrestling in Prayer” from 2:1-2) will preach better than others (“Introductory Greeting” from Philemon 1-3). Yet anything homiletical like this is more than some Greek-focused, exegetical series offer, and the homiletical suggestions–if not always sufficient in themselves–still make for a good point of departure for the preacher. In fact, Harris only intends “to provide some of the raw materials for sermon preparation.”

The “Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms” is one of the best such glossaries I’ve seen in a book like this. It occasionally uses examples from Colossians and Philemon themselves, which is a nice touch.

This Exegetical Guide to the Greek New Testament is a great companion to the Greek text. Harris is sensitive yet incisive, and always thorough. It’s hard to imagine a better guide for the grammatical analysis of Colossians and Philemon in Greek. I look forward to future volumes in this series. (A James volume is coming soon.)

Thanks to B&H Academic for the free review copy of the book. I was under no obligation to provide a positive review. The book’s product page is here (B&H), or see it here (Amazon).

“Bringing our Pain to God” (Michael Card)

We’re afraid of other people’s pain. Like Job’s friends, we’re afraid when we don’t have answers. Job doesn’t get any answers for his sufferings, but he gets God.

–Michael Card, from this great article on Biblical lament in worship.

He’s got an album called The Hidden Face of God, which you can hear at Grooveshark for free (or click on the album image to the left). It kicks off with a great Gospel-flavored track called, “Come Lift Up Your Sorrows.”