Like the rest of Scripture, the psalms are both divinely inspired and thoroughly human. Even more wondrously, they are simultaneously God’s words to us and our words to God. Most important, these spiritual songs filled and expressed the heart of the eternal Word made flesh. They prophesied cosmic wholeness, and they fed the soul of the human who’d accomplish it.

Our era is marked by a deep hunger for wholeness, intactness, integrity. We’re all painfully aware that—globally, nationally, and personally—“things fall apart.” Christians know the Lord is the one in whom all things hold together (Col. 1:17) and that he’ll return to bring full healing to a fallen, fragmented world. But what happens in the meantime—when, under severe pressure, our most personal way of connecting to him collapses as well? If we’re not careful, efforts to bind up a brokenhearted faith can create further fractures within our souls.
In a moving personal reflection, James K. A. Smith describes himself as a philosopher who has lost faith in the religiously persuasive power of reason. Smith isn’t advocating an anti-intellectual faith; he’s calling for anti-intellectualism in connecting to Christian truth. He decries the emotional barrenness and pastoral ineptitude of the “baseline Platonic picture of the human person in which reason rules the passions and emotions.”
Smith’s confidence in philosophy (as he frames it) crumbled during a time of deep depression when reason couldn’t make sense of his condition, much less lift him from a pit of inexplicable despair. He lauds the presence of his counselor who, instead of offering abstract analysis, lovingly jumped in beside him.
Seeing his personal despair writ large in culture, Smith concludes that “we can’t think our way out of this mess.” Tired of trading in the “truths of the intellect,” he announces: “I’m throwing in my lot with the poets and painters, the novelists and songwriters.”
My purpose here is not to directly respond to Smith (others have done so). If Smith is merely rejecting rationalism and its residue in Western faith, then with him I say “good riddance.” His vision for creative art’s contributions to faith and human wholeness is beautiful. Yet there is a warning in the way that—in tune with our tribalistic times—Smith praises good things partly by punishing other good things for being different.
Fragmented Faith
Smith cites Hans Urs von Balthasar as motivation for a new modus operandi: “Love alone is credible; nothing else can be believed, and nothing else ought to be believed.” Smith reasons, “If love alone is credible, literature is truer than philosophy.” He wants to write with “allure rather than acuity,” in a way that works “from the imagination up. Philosophy is out because it “doesn’t ‘speak’ imagination,” and the logician “speaks a tongue that’s foreign to the heart.”
Read More

It appears that it is to the sin of homosexuality alone that Christians must exercise such caution and censorship of the biblical and theological language. As Johnson puts it: “Our children and grandchildren are watching… I am not saying we are at risk of losing Christians who are attracted to members of the same sex. That’s a given. I am saying we are at risk of losing the next generation” (216). Care, not cure is the only acceptable approach to homosexuality for the Christian minister.

Greg Johnson, Still Time to Care: What We Can Learn from the Church’s Failed Attempt to Cure Homosexuality. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2021. Hbk, 304 pp. ISBN: 9780310140931. $25.99
Greg Johnson is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and has served as a pastor for many years. In his new book, published by Zondervan and entitled, Still Time to Care, he repeatedly proclaims his love for Jesus Christ and his gratitude for Christ accepting him. At the same time, Johnson also asserts that his ongoing experience of homosexual attraction and his ongoing gay identity is a reality that the church has not handled well. He dedicates the book to, “Every gay person who has ever heard the call of Jesus and found life.”
The body of the book is divided into four parts, but the introduction provides essential framing for the arguments to follow. In the introduction, Johnson recounts what he now considers to be early indications of his homosexuality: his desire for an Easy-Bake Oven when he was young; his lust and curiosity over groomsmen at weddings; the fact that he never fit in in with stereotypically masculine or heterosexual identity with his peers (xvi). After an encounter with the gospel, however, all this seemed to have changed. His story became: “Gay atheist falls for Jesus” (xvi).
The change he experienced was so significant that Johnson recounts telling people that he used to be gay, that he was “an ex-gay” (xvi).  He did not believe he was lying at the time, though in hindsight he does not believe he was telling the truth. Looking back, he sees his earlier declaration as a failed attempt to understand how his faith informed his sexual urges. Now Johnson says he “used to be an ex-gay” (xx).
The burden of the book, then, is to advocate for a paradigm of caring for those in similar situations. Its intent is to “cast a gospel vision for gay people” (xx). Part of this vision consists in convincing those who might consider calling themselves ex-gays, as Johnson once did, that the terms and ideas behind this label are false. The ex-gay movement, according to Johnson, was a “Potemkin village” (85).
Throughout the book, Johnson writes in a discursive and personal manner. His own story, told succinctly in the introduction, figures prominently in the arguments to follow, as do the stories of many others. Also, although the exact statistical estimates change, Johnson treats as axiomatic throughout the book that only a very small percentage (1% is suggested at one point) of people attracted to the same sex experience change in the orientation of their sexual desires. The majority need to be protected from “unsafe churches” (53); and churches themselves need to embrace a paradigm of care, not cure. He writes, “After four decades, the path to cure was a dead end. The ex-gay movement had died” (133). Near the conclusion to the book, Johnson puts it this way: “The church’s attempt to cure homosexuality failed” (243).
To cast his vision for a new paradigm in the absence of a cure Johnson begins by turning to four Christian leaders from the past who will be known to most evangelicals: C.S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, John Stott, and Billy Graham. Each of these figures, according to Johnson, provides a model for how homosexuals should be treated within the church.
He begins with C.S. Lewis. Johnson notes that Lewis had a close friend who was tempted and often succumbed to homosexual urges. Lewis treated him with sympathy as a friend. In addition, Lewis apparently did not believe that the ultimate societal solution for homosexuality lay in criminalization of homosexual behavior. He also did not see homosexuality as having been the most prevalent or serious sin in his unhappy boarding school. This is all beyond dispute and comes from Lewis’s own writings.
Johnson finds another key in Lewis’s writing on marriage. Lewis advocated that civil and Christian marriages be viewed differently. Johnson reaches the following conclusion: “In the world we inhabit, after the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges case that legalized same-sex marriage in the United States, Lewis’s perspective on marriage law may provide a paradigm for Christian political engagement (or disengagement) on sexuality” (9).
This goes far beyond what Lewis wrote. It is anachronistic at best to suggest that Lewis would have favored the reasoning in Obergefell; but employing Lewis in the service of movement toward so-called gay marriage is more sinister than that. Christians like Lewis have always acknowledged the validity of marriages between non-Christians, and they have always understood that the demands of biblical Christianity place a high premium on marital fidelity (Lewis’s basic point); but the underlying issue in the debate surrounding Obergefell was whether a homosexual union could in any real sense be considered a marriage. On this, the Bible, our confession, and the entirety of Christian tradition—Lewis included—is quite clear. What Johnson is advocating is less clear, but it appears that he is extrapolating from what Lewis wrote to suggest that Christians should consider another approach to the debate over what is called same-sex marriage. If this is what Johnson is proposing, and it seems that it is, then it is both highly significant and greatly troubling.
The section on Francis Schaeffer centers on his ministry to students at L’Abri. Johnson portrays Shaeffer as fostering an environment, “where homosexuals—both lesbians and gay men—are welcomed…no one is telling them they have to change” (13). One problem with these historical memories is that they come via Francis’s son, Frankie. This does not mean they are inaccurate, but a note of caution might be in order. Frankie’s published recollections paint a negative portrait of Francis, his ministry, and his family. If one were to accept Frankie’s accounts, his father would hardly be considered a public example.  Notwithstanding these historical questions, it is also the case, as Johnson points out, that Schaeffer distinguished between temptation and action, and warned against pride when dealing pastorally with homosexuality. He was also quite clear that homosexuality was sinful, seeing it as a “breakdown in the biblical distinction of the sexes” (11).
Billy Graham is probably the best known of Johnson’s positive examples, but it is hard to understand why he was included in the argument. What Graham’s example boils down to is that he cautioned President Lyndon Johnson against reacting too harshly when one of his advisors, Walter Jenkins, was caught engaging in homosexual sex in a public restroom in Washington DC in 1974. It seems as if Graham was careful in doing so, but all we have is the record of one phone call.
While Johnson commends Graham for this phone call, he also regards Graham’s behavior in other circumstances to be concerning:
But the learning curve would be steep for Graham. In response to one 1973 letter from a young Christian woman asking about her attraction to another woman, Graham bluntly warned her that such a path leads to destruction. He warned her of judgment and pointed her to conversion and regeneration, even though she seemed to indicate that she was already converted. I can only imagine that his comments might have left her questioning her salvation. (17–18)
Isn’t it surprising that Johnson, a presbyterian minister, would find Graham’s words here in need of correction? Was it a problem that Graham issued a warning spelling out the fact that sin leads to judgement? Should he have avoided calling this woman to repentance and faith rooted in the new birth? According to Johnson, Graham should not have written these things at all. It was part of Graham’s steep learning curve, because “I can only imagine that his comments might have left her questioning her salvation” (18). If the fact that Graham may have caused this woman to question her salvation presents such difficulties, one wonders how the warnings and commands directed at professing Christians within the New Testament might raise similar concerns.
When it comes to Stott, the picture becomes murkier, although Stott is regarded by Johnson as the “architect” of the paradigm he is advocating. The confusion stems from the fact that most of the chapter on Stott is taken up with an anonymous book that he did not write, but that he was rumored at times to have written, entitled, The Returns of Love. This book apparently spoke with great feeling about homosexual longing. It was written in the form of letters between two men who expressed love for Jesus Christ and trust in His Word, but who lived in deep pain because of their celibacy in the midst of homosexual urges.
Again, it must be said (and Johnson eventually acknowledges this), John Stott did not write the book. But Stott apparently did later indicate that he found the book a helpful resource in understanding the pain of homosexual longing (28). This statement, combined with the fact of Stott’s unmarried celibacy and the false rumors that he had written the book, set the stage for the other strand of evidence in Johnson’s case, which is that Stott was emphatic that sinful pride should never enter in when dealing with homosexuals. He was not a culture warrior in this sense, and he cautioned Christians against a culture war approach, while still maintaining a consistent witness to biblical sexual ethics.
The point of Johnson’s uneven and anachronistic presentation of these four men is to hold them up as examples of a “paradigm of care” (33). What does this consist of? Johnson writes a kind of staccato manifesto on page 33, with a list of ideas which encapsulate this vision of Christian ministry taken from the examples of these four evangelicals: “[Avoid] hammering at them with your theology.” “Instead feel empathy toward sexual minorities.” “Defend gay people when under attack.” “Be honest about the relative fixity of sexual orientation for most people. False hope doesn’t help anyone.” “Like Lewis, commend gay people who follow Jesus. Tell their stories. Hold them up as models to follow” (33).
All these statements need to be questioned seriously and critiqued biblically, and they hardly seem to follow from the historical material Johnson presents. There is no indication that these men believed what Johnson assumes throughout—that deep internal change in sexual desire is impossible. They cared, but they did not explicitly set this in opposition to the possibility of change.
Read More

The task of Moses was to bring the whole nation to stand at the foot of the mountain, like a bride prepared for the coming of the bridegroom. They were to meet with this great God…Moses ascended to the top of the mountain, while God descended upon the top of the mountain. This is the meeting of heaven and earth.

In their album based on the epistle of Hebrews, Psallos has a song about the tabernacle and the old covenant that was made with Israel at Sinai. In that song, they call it a come-but-stay-away covenant, and our present text will display how true that description is. At the very heart of our passage is the reality that Israel was coming “to meet God” (v. 17); however, that is flanked by repeated warnings of the deadly consequences of coming too close. Come, but stay away.
Consecrate Them Today—Verses 9-15
Our text picks up where we previously left off. The Israelites are now encamped in the wilderness all around Mount Sinai, and God summoned Moses up to receive words for all the people. Yahweh then gave Israel a three-verse summary of the covenant that He was making with them, and all the people of Israel responded that they would be faithful to do all that God commanded them. After this, we read:
And the LORD said to Moses, “Behold, I am coming to you in a thick cloud, that the people may hear when I speak with you, and may also believe you forever.”
When Moses told the words of the people to the LORD, the LORD said to Moses, “Go to the people, and consecrate them today and tomorrow, and let them wash their garments and be ready for the third day. For the LORD will come down on Mount Sinai in the sight of all the people. And you shall set limits for the people all around, saying, “Take care not to go up into the mountain or touch the edge of it. Whoever touches the mountain shall be put to death. No hand shall touch him, but he shall be stoned or shot, whether beast or man, he shall not live.’ When the trumpet sounds a long blast, they shall come up to the mountain.” So Moses went down from the mountain to the people and consecrated the people; and they washed their garments. And he said to the people, “Be ready for the third day; do not go near a woman.”
Verse 9 is the context for the remainder of this chapter. Although Moses has already spoken a summary of the covenant to Israel on God’s behalf, Yahweh was going to descend upon the mountain in an especially glorious manner so that the people of Israel would hear Him speaking audibly to Moses. Of course, Moses would continue to be the mediator between them and God; the LORD was only going to pull back the veil of His glory that they may see the outward manifestations of God’s glory with their own eyes and hear God’s voice with their own ears and then believe Moses as God’s prophet forever.
The words that God would actually speak for all of Israel to hear are the Ten Commandments in 20:1-17, and after hearing the voice of Yahweh and seeing the storm of His glory, the people cried out to Moses, “You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, lest we die” (20:19). Thus, they ended up begging for Moses to be their mediator permanently.
In preparation for the LORD’s mighty descent, He commanded Moses to consecrate the people for two days, and He was speak to them on the third day. Notice that the counting of days is like Christ’s resurrection on the third day. We would probably tend today not to include today if we made plans three days out. Our thinking would be tomorrow, the next day, and the day after that is the third day. Yet God told Moses to “consecrate them today and tomorrow, and let them wash their garments and be ready for the third day.” Again, the counting is like the three days that Christ spent in the grave being the very end of Friday, all of Saturday, and the beginning of Sunday.
Regarding consecration, we should remember that it means to set apart someone or something for God, to make it holy. After the Passover, God gave Israel a perpetual command to consecrate their firstborn sons to Him, which was a symbol of His possession of each household in Israel. This, however, was a special consecration of the entire nation. Indeed, just as God told them that they would be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, these two days of consecrating themselves for that role.
The text gives three main actions that Israel needed to take: wash their garments, set a limit around the mountain, and abstain from sexual relations. The washing of their garments was a physical picture of their need to be cleansed of their sin before encountering the presence of the Holy One.
The command “do not go near a woman” does not mean that women are themselves unclean and men could not be in their presence for three days. No, this was a command to abstain from marital relations. Of course, this was not God condemning sex as sinful; it was His design, after all. Instead, this was essentially a corporate fast in which the entire nation set aside otherwise proper earthly pleasures in order to set their minds and hearts upon God.
Finally, the boundary that was to be set around the mountain was for the purpose of preventing the people from touching the mountain, in which case they would need to be put to death. Here is that come-but-stay-away element. The LORD was coming down to speak to Israel; however, they still needed to keep their distance from Him. Anyone who went past the designated limit would be guilty of trespassing against God’s holiness and would be sentenced to death. In order to distance themselves from the offender, no one would be allowed to touch the condemned man or animal; rather, the execution would need to be carried out by stoning or by bow and arrow.
If our response to all of this is to ask why such a big deal, then we reveal both the callousness of our own hearts as well as our ignorance of God. Back in 2015, President Obama came to give a speech in our town, and though our city is very solidly conservative and most of its residents fundamentally disagreed with every one of his policies, his visit was still a big deal. For a few hours surrounding his speech, main roads were blocked off and traffic of about half the city was rerouted. And that was all for a president, not a king, in a town where he had few active supporters.
Now consider the weight of coming into the presence of a king in the ancient world. One of the most suspenseful moments in the book of Esther is when she must go into the king’s presence unrequested. As she tells Mordecai:
All the king’s servants and the people of the king’s providences know that if any man or woman goes to the inside the inner court without being called, there is but one law–to be put to death, except the one to whom the king holds out the golden scepter so that he may live. But as for me, I have not been called to come in to the king these thirty days.Esther 4:11
If entering a king’s presence was a fearful thing, how much more the presence of the King of kings, the Maker of heaven and earth? Establishing the reality of God’s awesome presence is precisely the point of the next few verses.
Read More
Related Posts: