Kiss the Son, But Not Like Judas
Judas kissed the Son, but not the way Psalm 2:12 envisioned. His kiss was deceptive, insidious, wicked. The imagery of the Psalm 2 kiss was never to be disconnected from a heart of trust and submission. The kiss of Judas was rebellious and thus an act of disobedience. In Psalm 2:1–2, people were described as plotting together against the Anointed One. And Judas was numbered among them. He’d agreed to kiss the Son, but only as a ploy, an identifying signal.
In the second psalm of the Bible’s inspired hymnbook, the wicked receive fair warning about the Lord’s righteous indignation if they continue their defiance. What the raging nations and plotting peoples should do is submit to the Lord’s authority instead of trying to cast it off (Ps. 2:1–3).
The rebellious leaders should be terrified by God’s wrath and by his installation of the Messiah, whose reign will overcome his enemies (Ps. 2:5–6, 9). They don’t fear the Lord, but they should. They don’t serve him, but they should. The psalmist says, “Now therefore, O kings, be wise; be warned, O rulers of the earth. Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling” (2:10–11).
The psalmist gives a closing command in the closing verse of Psalm 2: “Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled. Blessed are all who take refuge in him” (2:12). Kiss the Son.
The Son in verse 12 is God’s Son (v. 7), and he’s the same figure as the Anointed One (v. 2) and God’s King (v. 6). To kiss the Son is an act expressing allegiance, deference, submission. This isn’t a polite greeting between relatives or friends after a time of undesired distance.
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Tulip: Total Depravity
Sin is the master of our lives before the Spirit changes our hearts, which means we are in bondage that we cannot will ourselves out of (Isaiah 53:6, Romans 3:9-12), partly because we cannot, but also because we love it.
Yesterday, I found myself in the enviable position of explaining the difference between reformed theology and “not” reformed theology. I was asked by my small audience for an example of the difference, and the first example that came to mind was God’s sovereignty in salvation. As I spoke about this doctrine, I could see the gears cranking in her mind. Her eyebrows furrowed, her head tilted, and then came the inevitable question: “how is that fair?”
The Sweet Aroma of Tulips
The question of fairness in salvation should first be understood within the proper context. It makes sense for someone to reason something like: “if everyone is born a sinner, and God only saves some and condemns others, but has the ability to save all, then isn’t that unfair?” Now, once deeply immersed in the sweet aroma of tulips, it may offend our sensibilities to think this way. But, we must remember that a scant few were saved as Calvinists, but rather we were eventually shown this by the Spirit’s kind mercy. What the person who thinks this way must fully grasp is the deep and abiding wretchedness of sin, and its repugnance to God.
The very existence of sin requires salvation. Few Christians will refute that Christ came to save us from sin, but a great many may argue over the effect that sin has on our nature. They may argue that while sin has seriously affected man’s nature it has not left us spiritually helpless. They’ll say that God graciously enables every sinner to repent and believe, but he does so in a manner as not to interfere with man’s free will, and his eternal destiny depends on how he uses it. However, the bible paints a drastically different picture.
A Red Flag
On the sixth day of creation, God made the first man: Adam. Adam was placed in a garden, given dominion, and freedom, but with one restriction – a prohibition from the fruit of one particular tree. Well, the story ends poorly. Adam is disobedient, he eats the fruit, and God makes good on his promise: he dies (Genesis 2:17). But a red flag is raised by some, “but he did NOT die! He was only banished from the garden!” This is true. However, God was not speaking only of literal death, but also spiritual death. He did eventually die, but because of Adam’s sin, all of his progeny would also be dead in their sin and completely unable to come back to a right relationship with God, which would be proven true by the fact of their eventual literal death. (Romans 5:12; Ephesians 2:1-3; Colossians 2:13)
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The Problem of Christian Passivity, Part Two
The church needs a Christlikeness which is modeled on Christ himself, and on every aspect of His character and teaching. When the church once again looks like Jesus, then—if history is any indication—more seekers than ever will say, as I once did, that “there must be something in this idea that gives it power.”
In part 1 of this article, I argued that a temperament of “Christian passivity” is a problem in the contemporary church. In part II, I argue that the Bible warns us against sins of passivity and calls us to boldness. I also offer some suggestions for promoting a Christian culture that can cultivate the virtue of boldness.
A second argument—one less outwardly vapid—urges that “while Christ’s harsh language is always righteous, ours is tainted by sin.” Like the previous argument, the statement is entirely factually correct, but does nothing to justify the implied conclusion.
The problem with this argument it is not that it observes that human anger is usually sinful, which is obviously true. Instead, the problem is that it assumes that human passivity is not sinful—or, at least, that it is less sinful than anger. But this is simply begging the question: the argument commits the very practice it is trying to defend, assuming a standard of passivity and then reading the Bible according to that standard.
What, then, do biblical ethics teach us about passivity? To begin with, if passivity is good, or even preferable by comparison to anger, we would not expect Jesus to single out sins of inaction as particularly egregious. Yet this is precisely what Jesus does, such as in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats.
The Bible presents passivity as sinful in direct terms. To take the most well-known example first, consider Peter’s denial of Christ. When Jesus asked Peter “Do you love me?” three times in John 21, this seems to have wounded Peter far more than when Jesus called Peter “Satan” in Mark 8. Yet Christ delivered the rebuke, not because Peter was sometimes abrasive—which he was—but because Peter had been a coward. Peter’s denial of Jesus—a sin committed specifically to avoid conflict and its consequences—is presented as a profound betrayal of Jesus, not a minor offense. This fact, by itself, refutes the idea that conflict-avoidant meekness is somehow the standard of goodness.
Likewise, when God warned Ezekiel about what would happen if Ezekiel did not “speak to warn the wicked from his wicked way,” He was not warning Ezekiel away from being overzealous, but from being too passive. This verse—Ezekiel 3:18—has been cited throughout church history by Christians who have taken bold positions, such as Ambrose of Milan when he barred the Emperor Theodosius from communion in 390, or by Gregory VII when he excommunicated Henry IV in 1076.
The reason the Bible condemns passivity is because it leads to hellish suffering and hell. In some of the most grotesque passages in the Old Testament, the authors condemn cowardice using the motif of a man who will not risk his safety to defend his wife or concubine from sexual abuse. This occurs in Judges 19, in Genesis 12, 20, and 26, and in 1 Kings 20. One striking aspect of these stories is that they present pure inversions of the Gospel. Christ loved the church as His bride, and therefore gave Himself up for her sake. In contrast, the man in each of these stories loved his own bride so little that he was willing to give her over to be raped for his own sake. He committed, in other words, an act of pure evil.
Appropriately, then, Revelation 21 lists “the cowardly” first among those who “will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur,” together with “the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars.” The Greek word translated as “cowardly” connotes—among other things—being agreeable in order to avoid conflict. In the Iliad, for example, Achilles uses the same word when he tells Agamemnon “Surely I would be called cowardly and of no account, if I am to yield to you in every matter that you say.”
I note with some hesitation that, while the Bible also condemns sinful anger—in Greek, “Ὀργίζεσθε”—this word does not appear in Revelation 21’s pantheon of evil. I mention this not to make light of sins of anger—which I know firsthand can be ruinous—but because Christians have committed the opposite error. We assume that sins of passivity are less deadly than sins of zeal but, if anything, the inverse is true. When Simeon and Levi defend their sister by massacring the entire male population of Shechem, there may be a suggestion of moral judgment from the author. But this judgment pales in comparison to the nihilistic abyss of Judges 19. By the end of the story, the Levite protagonist seems like Tolkien’s Gollum: a withered creature barely recognizable as a human being. This is cowardice, one of the fathers of all sin, in all its wretchedness.
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The Significance of the Shema
Written by Rhett P. Dodson |
Saturday, July 15, 2023
Our Christian discipleship should be no different. God calls us to live a Bible-saturated life so that the truth of Scripture fills us to overflowing and spills from us in our speech. Then, by speaking God’s powerful Word, we make other disciples, men, women, and children who love the Lord and seek to walk in the way of devotion, reflection, and instruction because they, too, serve the only true and living God. This is the path of discipleship. This is the path of the Shema.Before there was the Westminster Confession of Faith, before Christians affirmed the doctrines of the Nicene Creed or recited the Apostles’ Creed, the people of God summarized their faith with the words of the Shema: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deut. 6:4). The Shema derives its name from the Hebrew imperative translated “hear,” the command with which the verse begins. The Lord called on His people to listen, to receive the truth about Him so that the truth might mold and shape the way they lived. The Shema is a theological affirmation that provides a foundation for discipleship. Let’s look at that foundation and at three of the ways that we are to build a godly superstructure on it.
The theological foundation that we have in the Shema emphasizes the uniqueness and unity of God. The Lord our God is one because He is the only God who truly exists. Israel first heard these words on the plains of Moab. Though the people had left the idols of Egypt behind, they were about to enter Canaan, a land filled with gods, where they would face great temptation to give their devotion to someone or something other than Yahweh. All other gods, however, are meaningless. They can offer no hope or comfort to their devotees. The Lord God of Israel is the only true and living God. As Christians who read the Shema in the light of the full canon of Holy Scripture, we realize that this affirmation also stresses the unity of God. Yahweh is a plurality in unity—or to put it another way, Yahweh is the triune God. The one true God exists in three distinct persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
What kind of life should God’s people build on this foundation? First, a follower of Christ should exhibit a life of wholehearted devotion to the Lord. Immediately after the declaration of God’s uniqueness and unity, Moses writes, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (v. 5). Love is a central characteristic of obedient discipleship. When a Pharisee asked Jesus to identify the greatest commandment, the Savior quoted Deuteronomy 6:4–5.Read More
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