Bully's Blog

Warren Gage/Christopher Barber and then James Jordan on Joseph’s wisdom:

“How strange Joseph’s behaviour toward his brothers appears to a modern reader! He recognises his brothers immediately but maintains his Egyptian disguise. He speaks harshly to them and then only through an interpreter. He charges them with spying — a capital crime for which he can sentence them to death. He takes one brother as a hostage. He returns their silver as they go home for the first time, and then he sets the brothers up in order to accuse them of stealing his silver cup on their second return trip, at which point he has them arrested. In short, he terrifies them.

What does this all mean? Is Joseph seeking revenge? Clearly that is not the case, for he so loves them he can hardly restrain himself fom revealing his identity — and his forgiveness — to them. Surely he is not vengeful. Why does he act this way? And why does the text go to such lengths to describe all of this?

Continue reading

“If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful
than you can possibly imagine.” —Ben Kenobi

Herod and Vader are maggot-filled men. They are the living dead. Christ and Kenobi are willing to die. They become the dead living.

One factor the Bible matrix continually brings out in its various occurrences throughout Scripture is the transformation of knowledge into wisdom — through death. In some profound way, knowledge is singular but wisdom is plural.

The Lord gives Adam the knowledge of the Law, and Adam is expected to obey and become wise. We can see, in his failure to confess his sin, that he was no wiser than before.

Continue reading

Under the title Baptism working against you…, my Presbyterian friend Uri Brito wrote:

“Reprobation is a real theological and biblical idea. It is directly related to the idea of apostasy. Apostasy is a real theological and biblical idea. It is directly related to baptism. In baptism, apostates find their worst nightmare. It is better to be baptized by a cult (which is an invalid baptism to begin with) than to be baptized by an orthodox Trinitarian church. The problem for the apostate with the latter baptism, is that they incur the full wrath of the waters. As Leithart writes: ‘Their baptisms are effective in being witnesses against them.’ Baptized apostates will receive what the Egyptian army received.”

How can an involuntary baptism be a witness against anyone? If I am in a coma for some reason on my wedding day and the best man has to make the vows for me, what sort of case are the witnesses going to have if I break those vows because I feel like I have woken up with Leah instead of Rachel?

Continue reading

“The time when you least feel like obeying God
is the time when it is most important to do so.”
–Keith Piper

“Very much of human life is ‘there and back again,’ or chiastic. This is how God has designed human beings to live in the world. It is so obvious that we don’t notice it. But it is everywhere. This shape of human life arises ultimately from the give and take of the three Persons of God, as the Father sends the Spirit to the Son and the Son sends the Spirit back to the Father. We can see that literary chiasm is not a mere curiosity, a mere poetic device to structure the text. It arises from the very life of God, and is played out in the structure of the lives of the images of God in many ways and at many levels. It is because human beings live and move so often chiastically, that poets often find themselves drawn to chiastic writing. God creates chiasms out of His inner life, and so do the images of God.

Continue reading

or The Modern Absence of Quest

A review of the movie of Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book observed that the absence of a quest, something to be overcome or achieved, makes the film bland. It has everything else: family issues, fantastic characters and first-rate special effects. But at the end of the day, without a “holy quest” all that is left is a lot of bumming around discovering how cool the world is. Or, worse, like much modern infants’ education, how cool we are.

Continue reading

Some excellent thoughts on unity from Tim Nichols:

Endeavouring to Guard the Unity of the Spirit

It is a cherished dictum that as Christians, we are a community of faith and therefore our unity is based on doctrine. In fact, this very thing came up in a recent comment thread on another post here. I want to make it clear I’m not taking a shot at any of you who’ve discussed that matter here. I do, however, want to address the way this concept is often applied in the Christian world.

Continue reading

or Life in a Trinitarian Universe

Doug Jones writes:

Continue reading

or How Not to Read the Bible

We moderns have not been trained in how to read texts, let alone ancient ones. Reading texts requires not only an understanding of what is said but an appreciation of how it is said. Consequently, the sacred texts are simply scanned for information that supports what we have already received or they are mishandled entirely. T. David Gordon asserts that this is the reason modern preaching is so disappointing and unengaging. See Why Johnny Can’t Preach and Threshing the Text. We won’t allow the Bible to say anything new.

Continue reading

“What makes a man a good cricketer? Practice. What makes a man a good man? Practice. Nothing else.”

Henry Drummond on the fruits of the Spirit:

.

Now the business of our lives is to have these nine things fitted into our characters. That is the supreme work to which we need to address ourselves in this world, to learn Love. Is life not full of opportunities for learning Love? Every man and woman every day has a thousand of them. The world is not a play-ground; it is a schoolroom. Continue reading