That Holy Ghost Kind of Holiness
Are we concerned enough about our sin to not only want Jesus to pay for it, but to rid ourselves of it for good? Do you want to be holy? I mean really holy, not just “enough to get into Heaven holy,” but holy as the Lord is holy.
Of the many passages of Holy Scripture that give me pause every time I come across them none give me more trouble than 1 Peter 1:15-16. There the apostle says, “…but as He who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, because it is written, ‘Be holy, for I am holy.’”
That is a pretty tall order. Yet because the Christian grace which is granted to us in the Holy Spirit is our power and strength we have no excuse to not be holy as the Lord is holy. The issue is not one of ability, but of desire. Many times we use our remaining sinful nature as an excuse for not giving up the things which keep us from experiencing the blessings of holiness. We are to be holy, for Jehovah God is holy. The standard is the standard. No amount of nuancing our way out of it is going to change the fundamental truth of the Bible. As the prophet Obadiah notes the church of Christ should be known for being a place of obedience and love for God, “But on Mount Zion there shall be deliverance, and there shall be holiness.”
As a believer in the Lord Jesus we are called to be set apart from the world and not to be as the world, and are to, as the previous verses note:
…gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and rest your hope fully upon the grace that is to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ; as obedient children, not conforming yourselves to the former lusts, as in your ignorance.
Not only do we have the grace to be holy, but the Lord has given to us in His mercy means by which to improve on that gift. Prayer, praise, and fellowship are but the main avenues of that blessing. The first expression in the verse above is one we have heard before. It is almost always used for a man getting ready for battle. In the days before pants everyone wore a long dress. As any lady will tell you running in an evening gown is not going to gain you many medals in track and field. What the men would do is tie up the extra cloth around their waist so as to create a sort of military onesie to help with maneuverability in battle. They had to be ready for the fight and it took some preparation to get there. What does that have to do with being holy? Well, think about all the language in the Bible about the warfare between good and evil. There is no real question as to whether or not we are going to be involved in it. The Scriptures know nothing about a spiritual Switzerland. You are either for the Lord or for the Devil. Either Jehovah is your Father or Satan is. Two teams. Two outcomes. If you were going to choose on which side to fight what would be your banner of truth?
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“Save Alive Nothing That Breathes”: How Should We Understand Divine Commands to Destroy? A Response to Paul Copan
Written by Nicholas K. Meriwether |
Tuesday, March 26, 2024
God requires that the state, a collective entity, punish evildoers (Rom. 13:4). This “sword” can be carried by the state in dealing with its own citizens, or with the army of a foreign power. Of course, to go beyond those directly responsible for the evil being judged and to punish the innocent along with them requires the explicit instructions of God, and this has occurred in only one instance: the herem against the peoples of Canaan, people groups so evil that the land itself “vomited” them out (Lev. 18:26-28). Without explicit divine instructions, however, innocent civilians may not be singled out by an army or the state, which is precisely the evil perpetrated by Hamas against Jews on Oct. 7.On Nov. 27, Paul Copan responded to a reader’s inquiry concerned about the language of divine judgment in Ezekiel 9, specifically, Ezek. 9:5-6. 6 men, likely angels, are appointed by God to exercise divine judgment against the inhabitants of Jerusalem. One man is assigned the task of marking those who are repentant so that they may be spared, but the others are to kill the rest of the people, including women, young adults, and children:
And to the others he said in my hearing, “Pass through the city after him, and strike. Your eye shall not spare, and you shall show no pity. Kill old men outright, young men and maidens, little children and women, but touch no one on whom is the mark.”
While there may be various factors that lessen the severity of the divine injunction, such as that not everyone in the city is destroyed, there is no getting around the fact that in this and in other instances of divine judgment, some who appear innocent of the actions bringing judgment are not spared, including children, even infants, as well as adults not in positions of authority. The moral question is intensified by the fact that in several passages, it is not angels who execute divine judgment, rather God commands the nation of Israel itself to carry out his judgment, that is, to carry out herem (Deut. 7:1-2; 20:16-18; Josh. 6:21; 1 Sam. 15:1-3).[1]
Paul has written extensively on this topic, most recently in Is God a Vindictive Bully?[2] In his response to the inquirer, Paul claims that such passages do not mean what they appear to mean, rather this is Ancient Near Eastern hyperbole, or “trash talk,” mixed with merism, an inclusive rhetorical expression, as when we say we looked “high and low.” While I appreciate the enormous effort Paul has made to exonerate God of acting unjustly, and though I am neither a theologian nor a Bible scholar, I remain unconvinced that he is successful in respect to herem.[3] While it’s always possible that the Bible exaggerates or employs widely-accepted hyperbole, several instances in which herem against the innocent is commanded specifically and in detail make it implausible that mere hyperbole is meant.
Which Cities to Destroy: Deuteronomy 20:10-18
Here God instructs the Israelites regarding how to attack a city. They first must offer terms of peace, and only besiege it if the residents refuse. By contrast, if the city is a Canaanite city, they must “save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall devote them to complete destruction” (vv. 16-17). The interpretation that this is mere hyperbole doesn’t fit with the fact that two categories are specified, and different instructions assigned to each category. Why would mere hyperbole be employed in the giving of instructions if the eventual treatment is the same? I suggest the simpler explanation is that we take the instructions at face value. This interpretation is reinforced in the passages below.
Achan and his Family: Joshua 7
God had commanded Joshua to place the entire city of Jericho under herem (6:17-18) in keeping with the deuteronomic herem policy for all the Canaanite peoples (see above). However, Achan violates the policy by keeping some of the herem bounty for himself, and so Israel is defeated by the people of Ai. When Joshua cries out to God, he is divinely guided to Achan. The latter, his entire family, and all their earthly goods are placed under herem, viz., Achan and his family, including his sons and daughters, are stoned, and all Achan’s goods are buried under rock (vv. 24-26). Joshua’s actions are fully in keeping with the herem policies in Deut. 20; there is simply no reason to think this is hyperbole or merism. But if it is not in this instance, why should we think the original policy is?
The Destruction of the Amalekites: 1 Samuel 15
Saul is instructed to destroy the Amalekites. Speaking for God, Samuel tells Saul,
“Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction [herem] all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” (v. 3).
Yet Saul fails to complete the task, sparing the sheep and cattle as well as the king, Agag, and for this reason, is rejected by God. God tells Samuel, “I regret that I have made Saul king, for he has turned back from following me and has not performed my commandments” (v. 11). When Samuel goes to deliver the news to Saul, he says, “What then is this bleating of the sheep in my ears and the lowing of the oxen that I hear?” (v. 14) Saul responds by saying that although he had devoted the Amalekites to destruction, he had spared the livestock as well as the king (v. 20). Is Saul using hyperbolic language with Samuel? This hardly seems likely. After announcing to Saul that he has lost the throne, Samuel calls Agag, who comes hoping “the bitterness of death is past” (v. 32). Why would Agag anticipate his death if no one other than Amalekite warriors had died in battle? Samuel then kills Agag himself (v. 33). The straightforward reading is that this passage is consistent with Deuteronomy 20 and Joshua 7: Saul had violated herem when he spared Agag after killing all the Amalekites.
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When the Family Is Abolished, People Starve
The peasants “were swollen with starvation, while the cadres were swollen with overeating.” The destruction of the family in China didn’t mean “more care, more love.” Mao knew. Communist Party Vice-Chair, Liu Shaoqi told Mao, “History will record the role you and I played in the starvation of so many people, and the cannibalism will also be memorialized!”
Sophie Lewis wants to Abolish the Family. In her sympathetic review of Lewis’s book, Erin Maglaque traces through the “utopian” views of the anti-family movement. She tells of the 19th Century Fournier communes that “freed” women of the “drudgery” of cooking for their families. Lewis wants to expand on the idea of kitchenless households to include collective childcare. Maglaque writes,
The family, Lewis and other abolitionists and feminists argue, privatises care. The legal and economic structure of the nuclear household warps love and intimacy into abuse, ownership, scarcity. Children are private property, legally owned and fully economically dependent on their parents. The hard work of care – looking after children, cooking and cleaning – is hidden away and devalued, performed for free by women or for scandalously low pay by domestic workers.
“If we abolish the family,” Magaque writes, “we abolish the most fundamental unit of privatization and scarcity in our society. More care, more love, for all.”
Family abolitionists see themselves as liberators, but their dreams are dystopian. Only through force can the family be abolished as a crucial foundation of society. There is no love in force; the utopian hope of “more love” really means more hate for all.
“More love for all” was not how it worked out when Mao sought to abolish the family during his Great Leap Forward. Like the Chinese communists, Lewis sees no need for every family to cook, wash clothes, and raise children. For the Chinese, instead of paradise, the outcome was the worst man-made famine in history.
In his meticulously researched book Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine 1958-1962, Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng reports, in harrowing detail, the totalitarian-induced famine that killed 36 million Chinese. The toll of Mao’s famine exceeds, by many times, the toll of Stalin’s death by starvation of Ukrainians.
Mao and other Chinese communists, according to Jisheng, saw “the family as the social foundation of the private ownership system and a major impediment to communism.” In a 1958 speech Mao said: “In socialism, private property still exists, factions still exist, families still exist. Families are the product of the last stage of primitive communism, and every last trace of them will be eliminated in the future.” Mao continued, “in the future, the family will no longer be beneficial to the development of productivity … Many of our comrades don’t dare to consider problems of this nature because their thinking is too narrow.”
Jisheng took a deep dive into the Chinese Communist Party archives. Chinese premier Zhou Enlai believed “thorough liberation required liberating women from their household duties.” Enlai “promoted communal kitchens and communal nurseries as the sprouts of communism.” Vice-chair of the Communist Party Liu Shaoqi observed: that “by eliminating families it would be possible to eliminate private property.”
The intent was to make the Chinese population more controllable and China more productive. A 1959 party report laid out the results:
People eat together in the canteens and go out to work together … Before the canteens, commune members could only work for seven to eight hours a day; now they work an average of ten hours a day … At breakfast, as soon as the bowls are pushed away, the section heads lead people out to work … Before and after meals, commune members read newspapers and listen to radio broadcasts together, improving their education in communism.
Food is usually cooked by families because it is efficient that they do so. During the Great Leap Forward, communal kitchens were rapidly established, some feeding up to 800 people. Jisheng reports, “The communal kitchens were a major reason so many starved to death. Home stoves were dismantled, and cooking implements, tables and chairs, foodstuffs, and firewood were handed over to the communal kitchen, as were livestock, poultry, and any edible plants harvested by commune members. In some places, no chimneys were allowed to be lit outside the communal kitchen.” In short, households lost even the ability to boil water.
The consequences were catastrophic. Jisheng writes, “Eliminating the family as a basic living unit reduced its capacity to combat famine.”
Introducing communal kitchens meant people had to go to a kitchen to be fed. Jisheng observes, “In the mountain regions, people had to tramp over hill and dale for a bowl of gruel.” The details reflect the mad arrogance of the planners:
In the spring of 1960 the newly appointed first secretary of Yunnan Province went to the countryside for an inspection. In the hill country he saw an old woman, covered from head to toe in mud, lugging a basket up a slope during a rainstorm on her way to the kitchen. Some villagers told him that this elderly woman had to cover only two hills and seven-plus kilometers, which was not so bad; some had to travel fifteen kilometers on their donkeys to reach the communal kitchen, spending a good part of a day fetching two meals.
The abolition of the family meant families couldn’t divide labor as they cared for the young, elderly, and infirm. Individuals can see through the eyes of love, but all that mattered to the communists was productivity. A party official proclaimed: “Even the old and feeble cannot be allowed to eat for free, but must contribute their effort. If they can’t carry a double load, they can share a load with someone else, and if they can’t use their shoulders, they can use their hands; even crawling to the field with a bowl of dirt in one hand contributes more than lying in bed.”
The communists seized homes. Jisheng reports, “Kindergartens, nurseries, and facilities for the elderly were established with resources seized from families without compensation, and homes were vacated to house the facilities.”
Of course, none of this was voluntary. Jisheng explains that “Cadres and militia ransacked homes and sometimes beat and detained occupants. When villagers handed over their assets, it was in an atmosphere of extreme political pressure. The campaign against private property rendered many families destitute and homeless.”
Jisheng describes, how initially, with “free” food, commune members gorged themselves:
The communal kitchens were most damaging in their waste. During the first two or three months that the canteens operated in the autumn of 1958, members feasted. Believing that food supply problems had been completely resolved, Mao and other central leaders worried about “what to do with the extra food,” which in turn led villagers to believe that the state had access to vast stores of food to supplement local supplies when they ran out. The slogan was, “With meals supplied communally, there is never any fear of eating too much.”
Of course, as food ran out, not all were equal. Jisheng reports on how the cadres [officials charged with managing communist party affairs] “helped themselves to white rice, steamed rolls, stuffed buns, steamed buns, and meat and vegetable dishes, while ordinary commune members ate watery gruel.” The gruel “was often execrable. Boiling cauldrons of congee might contain rat droppings and sheep dung.”
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When Our Words Fail
Those times remain etched in my heart because an assailant at the Covenant School in Nashville shot and killed that custodian. I flew back to Tennessee to play for Mike Hill one last time – at his funeral. The opening hymn, Great is Thy Faithfulness, includes the line I often use in my prayers, “Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow.” Sitting at the piano, just a few yards from the casket of that dear man, I purposed to play that hymn with zeal and passion – as a believer, not just a mourner.
Praying during seasons “…when sorrows like sea billows roll” can be difficult. The words seem elusive, and faith often falters. Caring for my wife, Gracie, for nearly forty years through a relentless and painful journey of severe disabilities, those seasons of sorrow often seem interminable. What do I petition God to do in those times: ease her pain, grow her legs back, or guide the surgeon’s hands on her upcoming 86th operation?
All those questions (and many more) have flooded over me countless times. Yet, in those moments, I find solace in the hymnal. A pianist longer than a caregiver, I regularly retreat to the piano in dark moments when words fail. Picking up a hymnal, I find comfort, strength, and resilience in the prayers of those who penned the cries of their hearts and set them to music.
The stories behind those hymns add an even greater poignancy to the lyrics. Horatio Spafford’s timeless “It Is Well,” written over the watery grave of his children in the Atlantic Ocean, continues to comfort people worldwide. Reverend Cleland McAfee wrote “Near to the Heart of God” after disease took the lives of his young nieces in the same week. When penning, “In seasons of distress and grief, my soul has often found relief,” William Walford pointed the world to the “…Sweet Hour of Prayer.” Despite being deserted by his father during childhood, Henry Lyte gave us the incomparable “Abide With Me,” and William Monk wrote the tune for that hymn – after the death of his three-year-old child.
Those are only a few of the countless hymns written by those who took their agony to God.
We all face moments when our heartache overpowers the ability to speak. During those times, I sit at the keyboard and use the music and words of others. Sometimes I played them in a hospital chapel, and other times, in an empty church sanctuary – particularly in a large church we attended years ago when we lived in Nashville, TN. While playing in that sanctuary, I discovered I wasn’t alone. The church’s custodian, Mike Hill, swept, organized hymnals, and frequently sat in the back to listen as I poured out my heart at the piano. I often stopped and asked if there was something I could play for him.
His simple response was always, “Just keep playing.”
Those times remain etched in my heart because an assailant at the Covenant School in Nashville shot and killed that custodian. I flew back to Tennessee to play for Mike one last time – at his funeral. The opening hymn, Great is Thy Faithfulness, includes the line I often use in my prayers, “Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow.” Sitting at the piano, just a few yards from the casket of that dear man, I purposed to play that hymn with zeal and passion – as a believer, not just a mourner. He would have wanted me to do so.
“Just keep playing.”
Even when our words fail us, a treasure trove of words remains in our church hymnal. The writers and composers of those hymns left us a legacy that provides text to our grief and strengthens our weary and troubled hearts.
The closing hymn of Mike’s funeral in Nashville echoed lines from Pastor Ray Palmer’s “My Faith Looks Up to Thee.” When waking in the “…valley of the shadow of death”, this hymn settles my soul and fixes my eyes forward.
“While life’s dark maze I treadand griefs around me spread,be Thou my guide.Bid darkness turn to day.Wipe sorrow’s tears away,not let me ever stray from Thee aside.”
While prayers seem easy to some, I often struggle to express my heart to God. In those times, I remain deeply grateful that so many took time to journal their anguish – and leave exquisite prose for those of us who often feel at a loss for words.
Peter Rosenberger hosts the nationally syndicated radio program, Hope for the Caregiver. His newest book is titled, “A Minute for Caregivers – When Every Day Feels Like Monday.”Related Posts: