Couldn't Help Noticing

Dale Ralph Davis on Joshua II

Dale Ralph Davis identifies a movement within the Book of Joshua, from the kingship and kindness of God (chapters 1-21), leading through to the requirement of Israelite obedience (chapters 22-24, which include no less than three assemblies of God's people, where the people receive their commands via Moses and respond with the promise obedience).

To be frank, I have no idea if Ralph got this completely right. I know enough to see that he didn't get it wrong. The movement from God's sovereign and gracious initiative, to the expected response of obedience, is there from the very beginning of Scripture and doesn't stop until the very end. In Genesis 1-2, God creates and commands, and Adam and Eve attempt obedience for a short time. In Revelation 22:20, the Lord Jesus promises to return, and the writer of Revelation responds with eager expectation. In the gospel of Jesus' death and resurrection, God comes to us clothed in flesh and requires of us that we turn to him with repentance and faith. So without a doubt, if Ralph has observed this pattern in Joshua, he is not importing an idea that is foreign to the relationship of creature and Creator.

Dale Ralph Davis on Joshua I

Last Monday (May 7) I heard Dale Ralph Davis, an Old Testament specialist from the Deep South of the USA, talk about the book of Joshua. He's a man whose brain appears to move just slightly too fast to be a genuinely effective public speaker—words rushing out in an attempt to keep up with ideas—so I'm not sure why I found I couldn't stop listening. I was part of the crowd at the Sydney Missionary Bible College Preaching conference, where, having failed to register (I O SMBC $20), I snuck in with a laptop and managed to collect a few ideas.

Ralph (every learned American seems to be known by their middle name) thinks that these verses in Joshua are the key that unlocks the whole book:

Thus the LORD gave to Israel all the land that he swore to give to their fathers. And they took possession of it, and they settled there. And the LORD gave them rest on every side just as he had sworn to their fathers. Not one of all their enemies had withstood them, for the LORD had given all their enemies into their hands. Not one word of all the good promises that the LORD had made to the house of Israel had failed; all came to pass. (Joshua 21:43-45)

This, said Ralph, is the hinge of the Book of Joshua. Chapters 1-21 are an extended, enjoyable and important prologue that introduce key themes: assurance, grace, power, the wrath of God, true wisdom, admonition. Read those chapters and learn, and realize that the three verses of Joshua 21 that Ralph quoted summarize all of these ideas. They then lead us into the final three chapters, where the key concern of God is obedience to his command.

Let me be honest and say, not having read Joshua closely for several years, I have no idea whether Ralph was right. But when I next read the book, I'll start not at the beginning but at Joshua 21:43-45, so that I can test the theory.

Wilberforce’s world-changing home group

(From Briefing reader, Roslyn Phillips, National Research Officer of Festival of Light Australia.)

It's been 200 years since British MP William Wilberforce's bill to abolish the slave trade was finally proclaimed into law in 1807, after a 20-year battle. The world, including Australia, is celebrating that well-known achievement. But less well-known is the fact that William Wilberforce was a committed evangelical Christian. Moreover, his Christian friends—who formed a type of home fellowship group—played a key role in the long and bitter anti-slavery campaign, praying for, encouraging and advising Wilberforce in the face of powerful enemies, including some Church of England leaders.

John Newton, the former slave trader who committed his life to Christ during a violent storm at sea and who later wrote the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’, made a deep impression on the young Wilberforce, as did John Wesley, the famous evangelist and founder of Methodism. Both men encouraged Wilberforce to use his parliamentary power for good. Wilberforce was also a member of a group of Christians known as the ‘Clapham Sect’ by their detractors —influential citizens who lived near and worshipped in Holy Trinity church on Clapham Common in south London. Under Rev John Venn's faithful biblical ministry, men (including MP and financier Henry Thornton and East India Company chairman Charles Grant) and their families lived near each other, prayed, studied the Bible and encouraged one another.

Clapham Sect members were wealthy, but lived modestly. They used their money to finance projects like helping and teaching the poor at home, and spreading the gospel overseas. Wilberforce and his friends founded the Church (of England) Missionary Society, which still flourishes in Britain and Australia. He also founded a group similar to Festival of Light, quaintly titled the Society for the Reformation of Manners.

Wilberforce never set foot in New South Wales, but he played a key role there. Historian Keith Windschuttle writes,

[T]he Australian colony harboured a vigorous Evangelical movement ... It aimed to apply the principles of the Gospels to social life. Its major causes were penal reform, the abolition of slavery, and missions to the native peoples of the empire. ...

While Wilberforce's main project was the abolition of slavery, he was also concerned with improving the living conditions of convicts, Aborigines and Pacific Islanders. From the outset, he took a close interest in New South Wales, soliciting reports from his Evangelical followers in the colony and acting as patron of their appointments. (Source.)

Wilberforce successfully nominated the colony's first two chaplains, Richard Johnson and Samuel Marsden. Colonists who had dealings with Wilberforce, or who gained positions in New South Wales on his recommendation, included Matthew Flinders and Charles La Trobe. Ralph Darling and George Arthur were governors who owed their appointments in part to their actions against the slave trade.

Elizabeth, the second wife of Governor Lachlan Macquarie, was also highly influential. She had a strong Christian faith, and opposed all forms of slavery, believing that human creatures are equal in the eyes of God. Her respect for all human life made a deep impression on her husband, causing him to turn the “punitive regime for convicts” into “a program for their regeneration”. He also

moderated corporal punishment, reduced life sentences to fifteen years, and reprieved a number of convicts sentenced to death. Where William Bligh had granted two pardons during his eighteen-month term as governor, between 1810 and 1820 Macquarie gave 366 absolute pardons, 1365 conditional pardons and 2319 tickets-of-leave (certificates of exemption from compulsory labour).

He granted land to emancipists and expirees and even invited some to dine with him. (Source.)

Sadly, Lachlan Macquarie's generosity and mercy led to dissension among Sydney's free settlers which finally brought him down. But Macquarie's policies worked: a significant number of the 160,000 convicts transported in 80 years were transformed from the criminal subculture of their youth into useful citizens, farmers, tradesmen, soldiers and, in a small but notable number of cases, successful professional and business men and women.

Moreover Macquarie implemented Wilberforce's Aboriginal policies. He established an institution to teach Aboriginal children, settled Aboriginal adults on a farm at George's Head, built huts for others at Elizabeth Bay, and gave them a boat, tools and supplies. In 1814 he held the first annual gathering and feast for all Aboriginals in the Sydney region. While his policies were unsuccessful in the long-term, his efforts are a reminder that Christian values were promoted by some leaders in the new Australian colony from the beginning.

William Wilberforce's contribution is well-known because, as a great MP and orator, his words were widely reported. But those compassionate policies would not have existed without the prayer and encouragement of the many less prominent members of the Clapham Common ‘home fellowship’, and the power of God working where “two or three” were gathered in his name (Matt 18:20).

(For further reading, see G R Balleine's A History of the Evangelical Party in the Church of England, Church Book Room Press, London, 1951.)

Ancient practices

The Anglican archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola, is coming to America to preside over a ceremony to install a bishop of the Convocation of Anglicans in North America. According to this report, the Episcopalian Church USA is not pleased about the archbishop's visit.

The Rev Mark Harris, a member of the Executive Council in the ECUSA said, “The archbishop of Nigeria may think the Episcopal Church has acted wrongly, but that is quite different from using that as an excuse to cross boundaries and do things that violate longstanding practice”. A similar response was given by Katharine Jefferts Schori, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, when she said that Akinola's visit without notice or invitation was not keeping with the “ancient practice” of the church that bishops do not minister outside their jurisdictions.

It has hard for me to understand how Harris or Schori do not see the obvious irony in their comments. They both cite the longevity of a practice to prove its worthiness. However, one of the reasons archbishop Akinola is making his visit is because evangelical Episcopalians are tired of the ECUSA breaking with ancient practice. The practice of not ordaining homosexual bishops goes straight back to that ancient book known as the Bible and has been practised much longer than Anglican polity.

How does one decide which ancient practices are worth holding on to and which ones are not? The knock against the Bible-based tradition of barring homosexuals from ministry is that it is culturally conditioned, outdated and thus easily jettisoned. Could not the same argument be used against this “ancient practice” that Harris and Schori are so set on upholding? With technology, travel and global communities being as they are, it would be quite easy to build a case against this longstanding polity practice.

I suppose citing Mark 7 would be one of those ancient practices not worth holding on to.

An idiot’s guide to life

Of late, I've been hearing an interesting line of thought swirling around the Christian circles in which I operate. A few weeks ago, I listened to a man thanking God for giving us his word as “our instruction manual for life”, and then, just the other day, I overheard another person describe the Bible as our “handbook for living”.

As innocent as these phrases sound, I wonder if they are, in fact, damaging to how we view God's word and ourselves. Consider the analogy: an instruction manual is never the object of our desire. It has been written to convey information about how to use the purchased item. It is simply a means to an end. The TV, the MP3 player or the cell phone is more of interest to us. As a result, many of us try to read as little of the manual as possible. Most of us just want to glean enough from it in order to make our new gadget do all its tricks.

Many who read the Bible, while not admitting to it (or even recognizing it), treat the Bible in just this way. Since the Bible is life's instruction manual, the subject of the Bible must be my life. Each passage, then, is read with one main question in mind: “What is God saying to me or about me?” How often is the thought “I need to read just enough of it to learn how to get God to bless my life” in the back of our heads as we do our morning devotions?

It's easy to see why some Christians think this way. Each week we show up to church to hear sermons about ... us! So we come away from Sunday thinking the passage is about us and our lives. And if a sermon is about something other than that, we complain it was too abstract and not relevant to our lives.

At the risk of sounding reductionist, I think it really comes back to Jesus. Reading through Graeme Goldsworthy's latest book on hermeneutics, I've been reminded that, as we've removed Jesus from being what the Bible is all about, we've removed him from being what our lives are all about, and in his place we've placed ourselves.

If the Bible is indeed an instruction manual for life, it is really nothing special. It is just another addition to the Idiot's Guide series, taking its place among the ranks of self-help books.

But Goldsworthy's words are a good remedy to this sort of thinking:

[T]he hermeneutical question about the whole Bible correlates with the question, ‘What do you think of Christ?’ The authority of Christ appropriates the spoken/written word in the Bible. The hermeneutic centre of the Bible is therefore Jesus in his being and in his saving acts—the Jesus of the gospel.

(Gospel-Centred Hermeneutics, Inter-Varsity Press, Leicester, 2006, p. 62.)

Putting Jesus back at the centre of our Bible reading will restore the Bible to being the book of all books. It will make the Bible much more interesting, improving the subject matter a hundredfold. It will also restore us to our proper place—as being, dare I say, idiots clinging to the death of Jesus.