The grace of the Lord Jesus be with you today.

My week of vacation is drawing to a close. It has been lovely, but next week I’ll be back to my desk and back to the regular schedule of posting original articles.
Transgression Is Passé
Carl Trueman: “One of the hallmarks of the modern age has been the death of the sacred. Nietzsche’s Madman understood that this was one of the central consequences of the death of God. But he, unlike the polite atheists he berated in the town square, knew that this was both an exhilarating and a terrifying matter: Now human beings would themselves have to rise to be gods, to create their own systems of value, their own sacred rites, their own meaning of life.”
Encouragement for the Weary Mom
Weary moms (and probably well-rested moms as well) may benefit from this one.
With the Wild Animals
Ever wondered why Mark specifically mentioned that Jesus was in the wilderness “with the wild animals?” Mitch Chase explains why that’s meaningful.
Opposition is Bad, but Hell is Worse
“When we proclaim the Word of God, we will often face resistance from every side. We can begin to see the scope of the opposition to the Word of God when we consider two themes Scripture proclaims clearly—sin and the gospel.”
The Fall of Adam
Kim Riddlebarger explains the basis of Adam’s fall into sin. “Most Americans operate on the sincere but misguided assumption that deep down inside people are basically good. When we compare ourselves to others, we might be able to measure up pretty well. Sure, there are some who we might begrudgingly admit are better people than we are, but still, we usually do pretty well in most of our self-comparison tests made against others.”
Store Up Today for Tomorrow’s Crisis
Trevin Wax explains how important it is to store up the right things—character traits in this case—for the days we need them.
Flashback: Post the Strongest Soldiers at the Weakest Gate
It is right to discipline ourselves toward all godliness, but absolutely necessary to carefully customize our habits so they lead us away from that particular weakness, that particular sin, that particular temptation.

Grace is not simply leniency when we have sinned. Grace is the enabling gift of God not to sin. Grace is power, not just pardon. —John Piper

May the God of love and peace be with you on this fine day.

Logos users, there are some good deals to be had this week, including Epic!
Today’s Kindle deals include quite an extensive list of titles.
(Yesterday on the blog: A Tribute to Those of Simple Faith)
From Meat to Meta: Facebook’s Disincarnate Dreamworld
“I find myself strangely grateful to the Zuck for giving me a new appreciation of the beauty of Christ’s enfleshment.” Here’s why one writer is strangely grateful for Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of a better world.
Night watch
“I remember when the two emails arrived. One after the other. To our inbox in Karachi. Same time. Same message. Traveling across the world. From opposite sides of the United States.”
Advice About Hard Bible Passages from the Bible
Here’s some help with hard passages. “One of the marvelous things about the Bible is that in it, God speaks to many of the challenges we face—including difficult passages in the Bible itself. We will look at one such section of Scripture in this article.”
A monument of gift
“There’s a principle in the Bible that’s foreign to our Protestant intuitions. When the people of Israel were dramatically saved by the Lord, they built a monument.” And that’s significant in its own way.
Giving thanks between two cultures
I enjoyed this little look at how different Christian cultures give thanks differently.
Should We Pursue Self-Love?
If you’re familiar with Randy Alcorn’s writing, his position on this matter won’t shock you. “I’ve often heard it said in evangelical messages, books, and articles that God’s Word teaches three kinds of love—love for God, love for others, and love for self.”
On Cigarettes, Vaping, and Nicotine
And if you’re familiar with John Piper’s writing, his position on this matter won’t shock you either. You may not fully agree, but he does lay out his position very clearly.
Five Words to Improve Every Sermon
Jason Allen: “Over the years, as I have monitored my own preaching and observed others, I have come to realize how intentionally using a few key words will strengthen most any sermon.” He offers five…
Flashback: Fears and Fleeting Faith
Our faith is shockingly shallow on the day of uncertainty. Our fears quickly overwhelm our fleeting faith.

Our everyday moments might be ordinary, but when we accomplish them while displaying the fruit of the Spirit, they reflect our extraordinary Savior. —Emily Jensen

It is one of those biblical commands that has always perplexed me. If it appeared just one time in Scripture I might be tempted to pass it by. But it appears no less than three times, in Exodus 23:19, Exodus 34:26, and Deuteronomy 14:21. The repetition tells me that God is quite concerned that his people pay attention to his command and obey it. The command is this: “You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk.”
So why did God care how his Old Testament people cooked their goat? And is there any possible application to us today?
Not surprisingly, commentators are a bit divided on God’s intent in this injunction. There are broadly two different schools of thought. While some scholars choose one of the two options, a good number suggest both are relevant.
The first suggestion is that the Canaanites followed a religious ritual that involved this very thing—boiling a young goat in its mother’s milk. They would then take that milk and sprinkle it on their fields, hoping that the gods would respond by making the land fertile. This makes sense in the immediate context (of the first use in Exodus, at least) where we find laws about the various feasts and festivals, including ones related to harvest. The weakness of this theory is that there is no substantial proof that this was actually a Canaanite ritual and no substantial proof that the Israelites knew anything of it. It makes good sense and is quite plausible, but remains unproven.
The second suggestion is that there is something too ghastly and too contrary to nature in using a mother goat’s milk to cook her baby. It’s not that it was wrong to cook a baby goat or even that it was wrong to cook a baby goat in milk. It was simply wrong to cook a baby goat in its own mother’s milk. Philip Ryken explains this well: “A young goat is supposed to be nourished by its mother’s milk, not boiled in it.” To use the source of nourishment to be the source of seasoning or tenderness somehow opposes a principle of life. If we understand the command in this light, it might be similar to the prohibition against taking both a bird and its young (Deuteronomy 22:6). In that case, it is essentially a call to kindness in place of cruelty. God permits man to use and eat animals, but we must still treat them with dignity as beings created by his hand.
Which of these positions is correct? We cannot know definitively and thus need to hesitate about taking too bold a position. And while the Israelites probably understood better than we do, the main thing for them was not understanding but obedience. Their call was to obey God and refuse to ever boil a baby goat in its mother’s milk. Simple enough!
Is there anything we can gain from these parallel verses? Are they in any way profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness? I see two possible applications.
The first is to guard ourselves against worldliness. If the first theory is correct, then the Israelites, when they entered their new land, would be tempted to imitate a common practice that would tempt them away from reliance on God and tempt them toward reliance on superstitious ritual. We are certainly not immune from this temptation—to begin imitating behavior that may seem reasonable, yet still reduces our reliance on God. Perhaps we can do this when we follow secular financial practices that prompt us to reduce what we give to the church because we believe a comfortable future depends upon reaching a certain savings goal. Perhaps we also see this in cultures elsewhere in the world where people profess Christ and join a church, but still “hedge their bets” by maintaining traditional rites and rituals.
Perhaps God’s prohibition prompts us all the more to be consistently pro-life knowing that cruelty toward animals may become cruelty toward human beings.Share
The second is to value life—human life primarily, of course, but also animal life. God permits his people to eat animals and demands they sacrifice animals, so we have the right to kill and eat them. But we must still treat them with dignity, knowing that God created them and cares for them. To use the milk of the mother to cook her baby appears to be contemptuous of life and the special relationship between parents and children. This being the case, animals serve as a smaller picture of the greater reality of human beings. And in this way perhaps God’s prohibition prompts us all the more to be consistently pro-life knowing that cruelty toward animals may become cruelty toward human beings.
Whatever else is true of the Canaanites and the other foreign nations within and around the Promised Land, they were most certainly pagan and most certainly cruel. And boiling a baby in its mother’s milk was pagan or cruel, or perhaps pagan and cruel. God’s people, however, were to be holy and compassionate. Such set-apartness was to be displayed not only in the temple and in formal religious rituals, but even in the kitchen and in the way they prepared their food. Because to live for God demands living for him in every possible sphere and every possible activity.