King, Servant, and Prophet
The Father’s words in Matthew 17:5 were a mouthful! Jesus is the promised king, servant, and prophet. He fulfilled those Old Testament expectations, and the Father himself claimed that it was so.
When Jesus shone on a mountain and a cloud overshadowed the disciples, the Father said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him” (Matt. 17:5). The transfiguration was glorious because glory was there.
But did you hear what the Father said about his Son? There is glory in what was heard as well as what was seen. I want to look at the Father’s words in three parts. First, “This is my beloved Son.” Second, “with whom I am well pleased.” Third, “listen to him.”
When the Father said “This is my beloved Son,” the language alluded to Psalm 2. In Psalm 2:7, the Father said, “You are my Son.” The recipient of those words was the Davidic king, the promised descendant who fulfilled the Davidic covenant (2 Sam. 7:12-13). In the context of Psalm 2, the promised king was God’s Son, and this sonship would envelop a royal rule. The Son would rule the nations with a rod of iron (Ps. 2:9). When would this king come? The Father declared on the mountain that Jesus was this king. Jesus was the promised royal Son.
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5 Myths about Human Reasoning
Written by Vern S. Poythress |
Tuesday, May 9, 2023
Human reasoning, intuition, emotions, and all the other aspects of who we are all contaminated by sin (Ephesians 4:17–19). No one of these areas of human life is absolutely trustworthy. Christ came to redeem us comprehensively. That includes not only giving us the forgiveness of our sins, but through the Holy Spirit progressively moving us out of our sinful desires and habits and into a life of joyful service to Christ and to the Father.Myth #1: Human reasoning operates in essential independence of God.
The Bible teaches that we are continuously dependent on God (Acts 17:28). This dependence includes not only dependence on him for food and physical sustenance (Matthew 6:25–33; Acts 14:17), but dependence on him mentally:
He who teaches man knowledge—the Lord—knows the thoughts of man,that they are but a breath.—Psalm 94:10–11
But it is the spirit in man,the breath of the Almighty, that makes him understand.It is not the old who are wise,nor the aged who understand what is right*.—Job 32:8–9
In any sound reasoning, we are imitating the original rationality that belongs to God. We are made in the image of God (Gen. 1:26–27). We are dependent on God and on his knowledge.
Myth # 2: The laws of logic are common to everyone, whatever his religion.
God, the one true God, is the God who rules over all. His own consistency and faithfulness of character are the basis for human logic. So the divine reference point of God’s rationality is the same for everyone. But sin corrupts us, including not only our desires but our minds:
They [the Gentiles who do not trust in God] are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart.—Ephesians 4:18
This darkness of sin generates subtle differences between the way that a Christian and a non-Christian understands logic. As an example, take the law of noncontradiction. A Christian knows that the law has its foundation in God’s character and his consistency with himself. God does not contradict himself. By contrast, a non-Christian tends to treat himself as if he were the final standard for what is contradictory.
In addition, the laws of logic display in subtle ways the mystery of the Trinity–that God is three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. How is the Trinity displayed?
All laws about the universe are laws that issue from God. God said, “Let there be light, and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). In a similar manner, the laws of logic can be considered as what God speaks. And what God speaks has a Trinitarian structure. At the foundation for any specific words of God there is the grand truth of John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word.” God the Father eternally speaks the Word (who is God the Son) in the context of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit, according to Ezekiel 37:10, 14, functions like the breath of God. So the law of non-contradiction comes as Trinitarian speech.
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What Would A Political Backlash To The Sexual Revolution Look Like? Maybe Like This Country
It is too early to tell whether Orbán’s agenda will ultimately be successful—but it is indisputably true that he is one of the only conservative leaders who is actually attempting to fight back in any significant way. He is funding conservative institutions, working to spread conservative ideas, fighting to keep LGBT propaganda away from children, seeking to reduce abortions and promote families, and refusing to back down in the face of elite opposition.
If there is to be a backlash to the cultural revolution that has conquered the West, what might it look like, politically speaking? Many writers have been considering what it means for Christians to live in a post-Christian world, but outside of the United States, where every federal election has taken on a frenetic and frantic tone, there is little discussion about what political leaders seeking to turn the tide might actually do to accomplish that—if it is even possible.
One example of what it might look like is the Viktor Orbán agenda in Hungary. I’ve been fascinated with the ongoing government project to reduce abortion, boost the birthrate, and encourage marriage for some time, and have interviewed both Hungarian ambassador Eduard Habsburg (yes, from that Habsburg family) as well as Family Minister Katalin Novák for The American Conservative to discuss this agenda. We don’t yet know how the Hungarian agenda will play out in the long-term, but there have been some encouraging short-term results.
Rod Dreher of The American Conservative has been writing from Hungary for several months while he works at the Danube Institute, and it has been interesting to see him become a full-throated supporter of Orbán (while admitting that it is obviously not all roses.) Most conservative leaders tend to conserve whatever status quo they get handed when achieving power. Thus, progressives utilize their time in office to move the ball down the field; conservatives do nothing to turn back the clock, and we go from debating same-sex marriage to whether or not minors can get castrated in two decades without any meaningful opposition from conservatives. Especially in the Anglosphere countries (Canada being a particularly egregious example), so-called conservative politicians have shown little to no appetite for fighting back even when it comes to minors getting sex changes. Cultural surrendur is the standard.
Viktor Orbán, perhaps due to his past as an anti-Communist, understands how progressives won (and win) in the first place. Interestingly, when Orbán does precisely what progressives do—appointing like-minded people, funding conservative outfits, and launching a right-wing long march through the institutions—he gets called an authoritarian. The New York Times, for example, recently reported that Orbán’s government has granted a total of $1.7 billion to Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) “with the aim of training a new generation of conservative elite across Europe.” That is precisely what conservatives should have been doing for decades, instead of ceding one field after another to those who hate Western civilization. Progressives, of course, don’t care for being beaten at their own game.
Hungary has even modeled one potential method of pushback to the LGBT agenda. Over the last several years, an internecine fight broke out amongst American conservatives over the limits of the use of government power, with David French representing the libertarian wing and Sohrab Ahmari making the case that conservatism has conserved almost nothing over the past several decades. I think Ahmari was being hyperbolic, but then again, French did refer to Drag Queen Story Hour as one of the “blessings of liberty” in his insistence that there was nothing conservatives could do in response to these new cultural cancers. Over at his blog, Rod Dreher describes how Hungary has responded to the explosion of LGBT propaganda targeted at children:
Hungary is being punished severely by the European Union for having passed a law this summer that restricts the presentation of LGBT content to children and minors. Hungarians are not religious, but they are culturally conservative. The government, seeing how the constant stream of LGBT propaganda aimed at children is changing Western societies (e.g., a 4,000 percent increase over a decade in the number of UK minors referred for transgender treatment), chose to fight back in a modest way. Every society chooses what is appropriate for its youth to experience, and usually codifies that in law. Not every society agrees on these points, but every society sets these rules. There is a reason why our laws set the age of sexual consent at a certain point. Societies differ on what that age is, but all societies recognize that children must be protected from the sexual desire of adults. Societies also set restrictions on whether or not minors can receive certain kinds of sexualized information — porn, I mean. Unlike the countries of Western Europe, Hungary believes that children and minors should not receive information normalizing LGBT. They are trying to protect their youth from the cultural revolution that has consumed the West. They are trying to protect their kids from decadent propaganda.
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Angry and Holy: How Your Anger Can Be Righteous
Any emotion can lead to sin. Our happiness over a new job could lead to unkind gloating when we’re with our friends. Our passion for theology can lead to pride when studying the Bible with those who don’t understand the long words we use. Anger likewise can become sinful, but it can also be untangled from our sinful nature and become righteous as well.
If you’ve been around kids long enough, you know how short their temper can be.
I sat on the floor with one of my fourteen-month-olds, helping him learn to build a tower with rubber blocks. He had watched his older brother and his twin brother do it, and now he wanted to try himself. I lay down on the mat and gathered eight blocks in front of him. I placed the red one to start and handed him the orange one. He smiled, and his big brown eyes lit up as he took the block in his little, pudgy hand. He delicately placed it on top of the red and grinned at me as he clapped his hands together. I cheered for him and passed him the yellow one.
He lifted the block above the orange, but not quite high enough. The yellow block in his hand bumped the orange one and knocked it to the floor. As he watched the orange one fall, he quickly tried to put the yellow one on top of the red, but with his haste, it tumbled to the floor as well. He furrowed his dark brows together and grunted, then tossed the red block.
My first instinct when I see anger in my children (or in myself) is to squash it. No, you’re not allowed to be angry; anger is a bad emotion. Stop being angry and start being happy, grateful, or some kind of positive emotion. Anger is sin.
When I started therapy, however, I was taught that anger isn’t an enemy to squash. As I, in turn, searched Scripture, the Holy Spirit guided me to see that he’s not anti-anger either. All anger isn’t sin. Rather, anger is a good emotion when rightly used. As a professional emotion-stuffer, this has been a hard lesson to learn and one that God, in his good patience, is teaching me over and over again as I parent my children and re-teach myself.
Is Anger Always A Sin?
I saw a pastor post online, “Only one person [Jesus] can have a ‘righteous frustration’ just as there is one who can have a ‘righteous anger.’” When someone challenged this comment by reminding the pastor that the Bible instructs us to be like Christ, he said this was a divine attribute we are unable to foster. I know this pastor’s beliefs are not alone; I remember hearing a similar sentiment from a professor lecturing at a Christian university a few years prior.
Many Christians are taught that anger is sinful and—like me—stuff their anger and shame themselves for having such an emotion. Yet is this true? Can only the holy Godhead have righteous anger?
In Psalm 4:4, David instructs Israel by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, “Be angry, and do not sin.” Paul, quoting this Psalm, tells the church in Ephesus, “Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger” (Eph. 4:26). Both passages instruct believers to be angry, and their only qualification is to avoid sin. If righteous anger is impossible, why would the Bible call us to it?
We like to set boundaries for ourselves as believers to avoid sin, but often we go beyond Scripture to the point of declaring what God calls good evil. Yet just because an act or emotion raises the possibility of being abused by our sinful hearts doesn’t make it evil.
The Pharisees did this during Jesus’s day. In efforts to protect Israel from breaking God’s law again, they created man-made laws that stretched beyond God’s perfect law, to the point that they followed their man-made laws to the neglect of God’s law. They wouldn’t help the poor on the Sabbath because it was classified as work by their man-made laws.
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