Couldn't Help Noticing

Family Bible time

The other night we had the best family Bible time we've had for ages. In my family, there's four of us: my wife and I, and my 16-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son. We made the decision to do a significant Bible study together one night a week. (Hopefully making this commitment public via this CHN will help us to stick with it this time!) So the other night we did Study 1 of From Sinner to Saint.

And we really got into it. We pushed through and tried not to let it drag on too long. (Actually we finished in slightly less than the recommended time frame of 60 minutes). It really worked; my son even said afterwards how good he thought it was.

So what was it that made it work for this slightly odd ‘home group’? Two things, I think.

Firstly, it wasn't ‘Dad’ trying to teach the kids, and it wasn't 45 minutes of listening to him drone on, with the occasional (more telling) comment from Mum. Instead, we discussed and answered questions, then had a break from each other for a few minutes while we watched someone else on the video. This broke up the study and helped with concentration too.

The second thing was the ‘someone else’ on the video. John Chapman (‘Chappo’) is a master at keeping his Bible teaching simple and clear. He has honed this craft as an evangelist who has often spoken to people who had very little understanding of the Bible. In some ways, this makes him an ideal teacher for children (and for adults!).

Perhaps I'm jumping the gun here; it was just the first study. Maybe next week will be a different story. But I'm excited that we may have found a really good resource for studying the Bible with older kids. If your family is in the same stage of life as mine, perhaps you could give it a try too.

The English Standard

Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest:

I was privileged to act as General Editor of the English Standard Version, and now that I look back on what we did in producing that version, I find myself suspecting very strongly that this was the most important thing that I have ever done for the Kingdom, and that the product of our labors is perhaps the biggest milestone in Bible translation in certainly this last 50 years, and perhaps more. Perhaps I ought to be saying 100 years—I think I should, actually—because it was almost 100 years ago that the paraphrase renderings of the Bible began to present themselves, as they did, as the version that you ought to read if you want to understand the Word of God. I think that, while in the short term it was not false entirely, did set the world of Bible translation and distribution off on what long-term was going to prove a false trail.

(JI Packer, author of Knowing God.)

[Thanks to Justin Taylor, via Craig Schwarze.]

Playing down death’s grimmer side

Why is it people feel the need to make death seem more palatable? In Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, Death keeps a library full of hourglasses (one for each human being), speaks in “in small capitals”, rides a horse named ‘Binky’ and has an almost unhealthy fascination with life. In Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics, Death is a young woman with curly black hair and pale skin who dresses like a goth and who spends one day every century as a mortal.

Now a small Mexican fringe group that worships Santa Muerte (or ‘Saint Death’) have given the object of their veneration a makeover. According to this SMH article, instead of sporting a long black cloak and carrying a scythe, Death is now represented by a brown-haired woman with a “porcelain” face wearing a gold dress and a veil, and holding a rose. Traditional Mex-USA Archbishop David Romo claims that “This image is one of justice, of freedom, but above all one that reveals the face of God”.

But it seems to me that, in the Bible, death is all about injustice and the restriction of our freedom. Death is the tragic end of human existence—a reminder of the effects of the Fall. It limits our sinfulness so we cannot offend God for all eternity. According to 1 Corinthians 15:26, it is our “enemy”. It separates us from our loved ones, and renders our lives temporary and fragile (Is 40:6-7). Why worship it?

Why not, instead, worship the one who defeated it (1 Cor 15:20-26)? As Paul writes,

When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:

“Death is swallowed up in victory.”
“O death, where is your victory?
    O death, where is your sting?”

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Cor 15:54-57)

Apologetics and idiot drivers

There's a story behind the latest op-ed piece on Paris Hilton I did for The Daily Telegraph.

I emailed Justin at the Tele and asked if he wanted a piece on Mohammed Haneef, the cousin of the man involved in the failed Glasgow bombing attempt. Haneef was arrested last month under our new terrorism laws and interrogated for nearly two weeks before being released and deported without being charged.

Justin's reply said, “Thanks for the offer, but our readers aren't that interested and I wouldn't want you to waste your time. But you could do something on Paris Hilton or idiot drivers.” Hence the Paris Hilton piece.

Now I am a great fan of apologetics, and I see my writing for the paper in this category (‘apologetics’ here defined as using arguments to defend a Christian world view or attack a non-christian world view, with the ultimate intention of winning a better hearing for the gospel). In fact, I've just finished a four-week session with a group from 5:00 pm church at St Paul's Carlingford on just this subject. (Thanks Chris F and Tracy G for the help!)

But this email exchange with Justin was a good reminder of what I already believe—which is that apologetics is always going to be a handmaiden to evangelism. That is, it should take second place to telling people the gospel. There are a huge number of people out there who just don't have a great interest in the outside world—or at least not the sort of things that Christian apologists sometimes feel they ought to be interested in. To destroy a person's unsustainable and damaging world view by clever and intelligent argument is a good thing to attempt. But there will be a good proportion of the population who will rise from the ashes to say “Right ... so who do you reckon will win the game on Saturday?”

In Romans 1:16, Paul insists “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek” [emphasis mine]. There is a lot to be said for cutting straight to the chase and just telling people the simple, unadorned news that, through Christ Jesus' death and resurrection, the full forgiveness of sin is available to those who repent and trust him as Lord. If Justin at the Tele was a Christian, he would tell you that's pretty much what the readers need to hear (not to mention the rest of us).

The next pandemic

We are long overdue for a major pandemic along the lines of the Spanish flu of 1919, which killed 50 million people worldwide.

Having little children makes me constantly aware of the fragility of life—something I just didn't think about when I was 20 years old, but something which I now think about most days. The threat of an influenza epidemic is one of the things I'm aware of, among other possibilities.

This piece in The Sydney Morning Herald, which talks about responding to pandemics, is what started me on this current train of thought. Illness, death and suffering are not topics we enjoy contemplating but they put me in mind of Ecclesiastes 7:

A good name is better than precious ointment,
  and the day of death than the day of birth.
It is better to go to the house of mourning
  than to go to the house of feasting,
for this is the end of all mankind,
  and the living will lay it to heart.
Sorrow is better than laughter,
  for by sadness of face the heart is made glad.
The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning,
  but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.
It is better for a man to hear the rebuke of the wise
  than to hear the song of fools.
For as the crackling of thorns under a pot,
  so is the laughter of the fools;
  this also is vanity.

(Eccl 7:1-6)

Earthly calamities and the associated mourning are, of course, just a foreshadowing of eternal judgement, which could easily come upon us before the avian influenza does. Perhaps it's for this reason or another that I find I spend even more time thinking about the coming judgement than I do about coming diseases.