The Economics of Sacrifice

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson, here with Greg Uttinger. We are missing Bryan Broome tonight, so we will save our intro question fun game thing that we were going to do this week for next week when Bryan will be with us, we hope.

Today we’re talking about the economics of sacrifice. We’ve talked a little bit about what the Old Testament sacrifices were. We talked about the function that they served in Old Testament Israel. This week we’re talking about the economics of sacrifice – what it cost, what that meant, and what the implications are for international trade, for example.

Sacrifice means death. This is kind of something that you talk about from time to time, Greg. We talk about sacrificing time and sacrificing opportunities sometimes, but it’s not really a sacrifice unless something dies.

This started when some of our students at school would write us thank-you letters that became more and more generically the same thank-you letter that would say, “And our teachers sacrifice so much,” and it got annoying. I know they meant well, and they were echoing what they had been told by their elders and, unfortunately, perhaps by some of us, but that’s not the way the Bible uses the word sacrifice. Sacrifice is not giving up something you want or even something you need. Sacrifice means killing something. Insofar as the word appears in scripture directly, that’s always the meaning.

I pointed out to our staff and teachers, and they to the younger kids, that it is not a sacrifice to do what God calls you to. Now, if by that you mean that by faith I’m united to Christ and in him am a living sacrifice in all that I am and do, good and well. We all are sacrificed in that sense. Worship itself is sacrificial as we come to Christ and let him put to death more and more of the old man and do heart surgery on us by his Word. But if it means that Christian schoolteachers don’t get paid very well, and that’s a sacrifice, no.

When you work for the King, you don’t complain that the assignment he gave you does not meet your economic standards of livelihood. You go where you’re sent, you do what you’re told, and you rejoice at the privilege of working for the King.

I haven’t mentioned it as much lately, but for a while there I was pounding on it a lot, that we need to stop talking in the ‘poor me’ voice that says, “I sacrifice so much to do this.”

“Well, then stop it and go someplace else and do something that will get you the kind of income and lifestyle that you apparently really want, and quick complaining to Jesus that he’s a hard taskmaster.”

We need to get away from that kind of language, because it’s sloppy and because it is the language of worship. There are better ways to approach anything where we have to give up something. We can say “scrimp and save,” that’s fine, but when we start talking about sacrificing, that’s biblical language and at the very least we need to be very careful in what we communicate to ourselves, let alone to our kids.

When we come to talk here about sacrifice, we’re actually talking largely about killing things – bulls, goats, sheep, pigeons, doves. Whereas plants are not soulishly alive, we kill some plants too, and we cut up some frankincense trees pretty well so that they’re bleeding all over the place. I suspect that that’s not an accident. We’ll talk in a bit about how frankincense is made.

There is one message in this, obviously. The bulls, the goats, and the sheep were expensive. I don’t know what they cost now. Quite a few years ago, somebody in the Irvine Mesa 4H club said, “Expect to pay $100 to $300 for a registered dairy goat kid, and between $150 to $350 for a pygmy goat.” Those are little bitty things. I don’t know if being pygmy makes it more expensive or less, but with inflation I’m sure the price has gone up since then. So you’re offering a bull? Do you have any idea how much they cost to buy? I haven’t done the research.

I have no idea. I don’t think I even know any dairy farmers. I know other kinds of farmers.

We’ve talked before about how bloody worship was. It was also very expensive and also very time-consuming. Even though the priests did a lot of the work, presumably you stayed and watched. You killed the animal and watched it drain, then watched it be sliced and diced and put on the altar. You didn’t just say, “I guess we’re done for today. I’ll let the priest take over.” You stood and saw all this bloody mess, because there’s a message there for you. “This is what you deserve.”

The reason that sacrifice means death is because that’s what the altar means. Things have died and then they’re placed on the altar. Before they go on the altar they have to die. If we are going to be living sacrifices, we have to have died in Christ. We come to the altar and there’s a choice. I can either suffer the death penalty for my sins in eternal hell, or I can give myself wholly to God because I’ve died in Christ. My life is forfeit one way or the other. It’s either forfeit to eternal hell or it’s forfeit to God’s sovereignty and to Christ’s lordship.

It is a life and death thing in the full sense of the word, and to bring it down to the level of, “Yeah, I gave up chocolate for Lent” is not anywhere near what we’re talking about, or watering down the language of, “Yeah, we sacrificed that extra burger so that we could give a little to the church.” No, it’s not hurting enough yet and it doesn’t work. That’s not enough. Sacrifice should be expensive. It sends that message, and yet fundamentally we’re talking about killing something.

Can we take a minute to clarify the distinction between sacrifice and fasting, since you just brought up Lent. They’re not the same thing.

They’re not the same thing, because in sacrifice you’re killing something, and fasting in the biblical sense – I’m not going to appeal to anybody else’s tradition of what they may understand by fasting – but fasting is doing without something, normally food, so that you can devote yourself to prayer or to some other task that God has set before you.

Isaiah speaks of the fast that God has chosen as breaking every bond. I don’t remember the exact language without looking. It’s the idea of setting people free and ministering to the poor, feeding your bread to the poor and releasing them from their bondage, that kind of thing, to be so busy in the work of active, even aggressive charity that you forget to eat. You don’t have time to eat, or you take your food and give it to someone who actually needs it, then you go do your thing before God.

Sometimes it’s prayer, and prayer and fasting are often associated with scripture, but there are other things that can accompany it. The main focus seems to be removing yourself from distractions or turning the very distraction of hunger into a symbol – “Oh, I’m hungry. Oh, that’s right, I’m supposed to be praying.”

Let me refocus here. The Bible never suggests that simply not having food is somehow spiritually beneficial.

Wouldn’t that be kind of Gnostic?

Yes, but we’re good at Gnosticism in America. Here’s the passage from Isaiah 58:

Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and shew my people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins. Yet they seek me daily, and delight to know my ways, as a nation that did righteousness, and forsook not the ordinance of their God: they ask of me the ordinances of justice; they take delight in approaching to God.

So that’s God’s Word to the prophet to Israel. Israel’s response is:

Wherefore have we fasted, say they, and thou seest not? wherefore have we afflicted our soul, and thou takest no knowledge?

And God answers back:

Behold, in the day of your fast ye find pleasure, and exact all your labours. Behold, ye fast for strife and debate, and to smite with the fist of wickedness: ye shall not fast as ye do this day, to make your voice to be heard on high.

Is it such a fast that I have chosen? a day for a man to afflict his soul? is it to bow down his head as a bulrush, and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him? wilt thou call this a fast, and an acceptable day to the Lord? Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke? Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh?

He connects it later with the Sabbath day. It’s not simply abstinence that constitutes virtue but laying aside things that are pleasurable so that we can devote ourselves to action at hand, action that is necessary, action that actually benefits somebody.

So as I said, giving up chocolate for Lent doesn’t carry any brownie points with God as such, unless it gives an opportunity to devote yourself to the work of the Lord in some way, more than just saving some calories. If you have a problem with gluttony, probably you need to do more than just scratch out chocolate for Lent. So that’s fasting.

Sacrificing is a different thing. It’s God portraying, and we keep coming back to this, that God portrays in the sacrament that he set before us the penal substitutionary death of his son. Our guilt, our need for a substitute, and the all-sufficiency of Christ as our substitute, as our covenant representative who with his own body bore our sins on the cross, so that we, being dead to sin, might live unto righteousness. That is the gospel and that’s what sacrifice is about.

Recognizing this and thinking about this and preaching this by our actions may take some time and may take some cost. God does not need any money from us, although his church may, other Christians may, but he does want us to be serious and he sometimes wants to get our attention to say, “Hey, this is serious. Don’t give me stuff that costs you nothing.”

David says that when he’s trying to buy the Temple Mount, and the Jebusite owner – who may have been a former king of the Jebusites, at least it says he as a king did give to the king the things he needed – the Jebusite says, “Well, take it all. You need this to save Jerusalem. Take it all. I give it all to you.” David says, “No, I will not take this from you for nothing, nor will I give to the Lord that which cost me nothing. I’ll pay full price,” so there’s that.

Isn’t there a parallel there with Abraham purchasing Sarah’s burial cave?

At least to the extent that God had promised Abram the whole land of Canaan and it was his by divine right, and yet he bought it in order to have a place to bury his wife, because that was part of his covenant responsibility.

I suppose he could have simply said, “It’s mine. Everyone back off. I have a bunch of armed servants who will back me up,” but rather he humbled himself and paid the money to maintain the peace and to get what he needed to get on with life. Beyond that I’ve not thought of another connection, but there may be something else I’m missing.

So animals are expensive. You’ve got to have animals. Where do you get animals? “Well, you go out in the pasture and…” – wait. When I was a kid, literally I could have gone out in the pasture. Now, the animals weren’t mine, but you know, at night I suppose…

That’s called rustling.

Yes. There was a huge cow pasture behind our little suburban home, our little small town home, I guess, and there were frequently cows and occasionally they managed to get through the barbed wire fence into our back forty, our back half-acre or whatever it was, and dad would go out there and have to chase them off. What do you do? You just shout a lot and jump up and down and hope they remember how they got in, because that’s the only way back out again.

I grew up around cows, not that I ever did anything with them besides watch them, but they were there, and so with a lot of people in the small town I grew up in. Cows were a pretty common thing. But where I live now there is one small island of non-civilization. It’s where Placer County and Sacramento County meet, where there is this large pasture area.

When my little Emily was one or two, I would drive down there and there were cows in the field, and a few other farm animals, which to that point she’d only seen in a little children’s book. I would point and say, “Cow. Emily, can you say cow?” She didn’t talk but that was her introduction to farm animals, because they’re not common around here.

I know a family that, when they would pass a herd of cows driving down the road they’d say, “Look at the birds, kids!” which is a cruel trick to play on your children. Don’t do that.

But the point I was trying to make in all this is that most people don’t know anything about cows, and cows are not a thing that are readily available. In Israel they were fairly available. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob did both sheep and cows, lesser and larger cattle, the Bible says, but not everyone in Israel was a herdsman. You had to trade, barter, buy and sell, so division of labor was a real thing in Israel, as it is everywhere, and lawful.

The Bible puts no prescriptions on, “Well, these are sacrificial animals; therefore, their price must be set. You have to buy them, so we’re fixing the price.” God never does that. You’re on your own. It’s a free market.

Christ, when he came amongst us and saw the buying and selling that took place in the temple, was infuriated that there were monopolistic prices being set on these animals by the temple authorities to enrich themselves. The Bible does not provide for any of that.

Having said that about animals, either Israel had to be an agrarian society or it had to carry out and risk trade with some nation nearby that was. It seems that mostly they produced their own, but your herds and livestock are going to be in need of reinvigoration, I would think now and then, so that’s a thing.

But when we come particularly to the so-called meat offering, grain offering, tribute offering, whatever you call it, it came with frankincense. You were supposed to bring frankincense and put on it. The frankincense would go with the part that was offered on the altar and would come up as a sweet smell before God.

Also, the anointing oil for the priest and the incense that was used in the holy place on the altar of incense contained frankincense. Frankincense was not something that grew in Israel. From a quick look at Wikipedia I knew it grew in Oman, but it also grows in Somaliland in Africa. Apparently, at least according to the website of the company that produces it in Oman, theirs is the richest and best and most fragrant and most desired frankincense in the world.

Until I did the original research for this, I didn’t know what it was. I just assumed, “It’s a spice that comes from somewhere.” Actually, it grows on a particular tree. We would call it frankincense, but it has a botanical name that I don’t know and can’t remember. It grows in the wilderness. It grows in very arid lands. In fact, it can grow out of solid rock. It’s not something you find in your garden or in a forest. You find it out in the desert on rocky things.

So there’s no imagery going on here at all.

No. Well, it gets worse. You come up to this tree that has very little in the way of flowers and very little in the way of leaves.

Nothing to recommend it, you might say?

Nothing to recommend it. And you take a metal blade and you slice its skin and it bleeds, but it bleeds this resin, a kind of silvery resin, and you walk away and you leave it for a couple days. You come back and that resin is beginning to harden up into balls or other odd shapes. You take your blade and clean it off, and then you set this stuff out to dry, and it dries for four months.

Only at that point can you take it and work with it and mold it into the pretty shapes you want and such, but it still doesn’t do its thing generally unless you set fire to it. You either warm it on coals or burn it, and then that will release its aroma.

When I was doing the same research I did for pygmy goats, I saw an ad that said a 3.36-oz bottle of Omani Amouage perfume with frankincense costs about $350. I don’t know how much of that cost is because of the frankincense, but the article was about frankincense and presumably a good deal of that is the price of frankincense. It’s expensive.

Interestingly enough, the article I read said, “Oh, it’s cheap.” Well, I guess it depends who are and how far you have to go to get it, but the point here is not so much the expense, although that’s a recurring thing we see here. Worship can be very expensive. But it’s not something Israel had. In order to get it, Israel had to engage in trade with other nations.

Since Israel is nowhere near Oman, this is international trade. You have to trade with somebody who trades with somebody whose camels go there. If you’ve cut off all communication with the outside world, you cannot worship God the way you’re supposed to, and that’s a huge thought here.

The Bible never mentions it, but again, as with so many things, the Bible assumes that the people who at least first heard it understood the cultural background, since they lived in it, and that either they passed on enough or we with our historical studies could fill in the gaps so that we can see – or botanical studies, in this case – what God was really asking.

He was telling them implicitly, “You’re going to trade with the rest of the nations if you’re going to worship me right. There has to be some kind of intercourse back and forth between you and the Gentile world, or you can’t worship me the way I demand that you should.”

But how could they engage amicably with pagans who are doing all sorts of dreadful things?

“I can’t go buy things at the market! The people there are pagans!”

There are a lot of stores that people will not go to, not because they’re selling wicked products – pornography or idols or something – but simply because, “I hear that some of this money goes to wicked causes.” When you’re paying wicked people, it all goes to wicked causes. This is something we haven’t really figured out yet.

I think earlier generations of Christians may have got that and just decided they would only frequent Christian establishments, but the reality is all the time we engage in business with people who are not believers, and the money we give them often does go to support an ungodly lifestyle, and that’s not our problem. God does not hold us accountable for what they do with what they have lawfully obtained by trade.

This means some things. It means we’re going to have to figure out how to speak their language, at least to the degree where we can communicate the nouns that are associated with what we want to buy.

And the numbers.

And the numbers! We have to be able to track with them numerically so that we are ordering the right quantity and understand the price we’re being charged, or it’s going to break down real fast and there’s going to be a lot of disagreements and even some violence involved with accusations of theft or fraud or misrepresentation. Trade doesn’t get anywhere that way.

One of the questions I’ve asked my kids before in Economics is, “To what degree does the separation of tongues at Babel actually affect international trade?” and the answer, of course, is hardly at all, because there’s always somebody who has the guts to go over and make a fool of himself and point at things and raise fingers and do some kind of pidgin-English or pidgin-Hebrew or whatever to try to communicate, because they see dollar signs. They see profit.

It’s not that hard, as long as you don’t get killed for crossing borders you shouldn’t, to actually make a deal with someone who speaks a different language. Eventually you’ll figure out each other’s language because you want more. You want to do better business. You want other things that they may know about. You want to know about opportunities on the other side of their country.

“Wait, I see you’ve got that.”

“We don’t make that.”

“Who did?”

“Them.”

“Who’s them? Tell me about them. I need to see them.”

If that’s true on an economic level, how much more should it be on the level of basic evangelism, of communicating truth to the whole world. It was not Israel’s job to go out and be missionaries, although on occasion they did. Sometimes they were forced to, like when God scattered them across the Babylonian world, and afterwards.

God placed them at the crossroads of three continents, and the trade routes went right through Israel, and they would have many opportunities to talk to many people and find out about products that were far away, so trade would start out like that. Then the Israelites could pursue it with more vigor as time went by.

So that’s one thing. As I was re-reading my notes, something else struck me. You mentioned it in the notes for the show and I kind of looked at it and said, “Wait, how does that come in?” until I re-read the notes and said, “Oh, that.”

The Tree of Life in the garden was the first sacrament. It was a tree. Adam and Eve didn’t have to do anything but reach up and pluck a fruit and eat it. There was no distinction between the part you chew and the part you drink. The juice and the fruit were wrapped up together. If they wanted to sit down, they could sit at the base of the tree and lean against it, or they could climb up the tree there.

The Tree of Life was the throne of God, because when Adam and Eve left, it was the Tree of Life that was guarded by the cherubim, and throughout the rest of scripture cherubim guard God’s throne, but what a throne. It’s a tree.

Now, we fast forward into the Mosaic economy and we have a tabernacle. We have sawed boards. We have hammered gold. We have squeezed pressed fruit, both for the olive oil and for the wine with the shewbread. We have grain that’s been pounded.

Going back to the tribute offering particularly, the offering that says that all my stuff is God’s, that was expressed by not only sheaves of grain, but more particularly by cakes that were baked or fried. That means that in order to bring the sacrifice to God, I need to plant wheat, harvest wheat, thresh wheat, turn the threshed wheat into flour, make an oven, start a fire, bake the thing, figure out how leaven works, and have some kind of iron skillet or something to bake it in or to fry it in. All of these things have to happen in order for me to bring a simple offering to God.

God is tapping my land, my time, my labor, my tools. These are the basic elements of economics. Without these there is no economic life, and yet God puts a tax on all of these. “All of these things you bring to me as tribute, and my worship is not complete until you have.”

So in order to do what God demands in worship, man has to go out and work. He has to subdue the earth. He has to plant. He has to reap. He has to build. He has to work with metals. He has to work with fire. There’s a lot that has to go on in order for God to be acceptably worshiped.

Now fast-forward to the New Testament. The liturgy is much simpler, the ritual much more non-complicated, but we still speak of the table of the Lord, and traditionally there has been a table. There have been goblets or cups, or a cup at least for wine, which is still something that is produced by mostly mechanical means, unless you get some Italian mamas out there stomping on the grapes as in one episode of I Love Lucy, and then the bread.

The bread is made, hopefully not pressed out of something by machine. It’s actually some kind of bread, and we’re supposed to sit in God’s presence, so you sit at the table. Someone has to make chairs. Again, even in something as simple as the Lord’s Supper, we’re still reflecting the ongoing success of man’s dominion over the planet.

This is what we bring to God in worship, and if we don’t, if we’re a primitive people incapable even of growing wheat, then we are not able to worship God the way he planned and the way he says.

I understand, at least in some missionary situations, this has been a problem. What if you go to a country that doesn’t have wheat and doesn’t have grapes? Can you substitute? I suppose you can.

This is the rice cake broken for you.

Yeah, this is the rice cake broken for you. This is the guava juice poured for you. I don’t know what you do at that point. It’s one thing to substitute in an emergency. We have precedent for that kind of thing. But to be satisfied with that is to ignore what God has actually said, so the culture needs to move toward wheat, of all things – maybe not processed the way we do it in America and the West, but certainly wheat, certainly grapes, fermentation and all that.

These very ordinances of worship do have economic, ecological, and cultural implications for our work, for our priorities, and for what it is we’re to bring to God. We bring to God more than just our hearts. When we say, “Oh, but God has my heart, he just doesn’t have my wallet,” then there’s a problem there because he probably doesn’t have your heart either.

There’s some sort of connection here – I’m trying to put my finger on it – between what we’ve been talking about and that essay “I, Pencil,” where all the different pieces have to come together. Nobody can make a pencil. It’s the result of this vast spontaneous coordination.

Yeah, and our Libertarian friends – if we have any left – will appreciate this. Leonard Read wrote the article, “I, Pencil,” and I make sure all my students read it. No one knows how to make a pencil – no one person knows how to make a pencil – because what goes into a pencil?

You’ve got the wood, which comes from I believe California someplace, and the graphite which comes from mines in some other part of the world. If it’s real rubber, you’ve got rubber plants. If it’s not real rubber then you’re dealing with something else. You’ve got the little metal thing that holds it in place. That’s mining tools and mines, which again are someplace else on the planet.

The yellow lacquer that goes on it is again from someplace else, and then the tools to do all these things – to saw and to shape the wood, to mine the graphite, to mine the metal – think of all the tools that go into that. And then we’re already in different parts of the world, so how do you get it all in one location for the person who finally puts all the pieces together? That involves some kind of transportation system, mostly ships and trains, I would imagine, because I don’t think we would fly that on airplanes.

These things have come into being, and in a sense the need and the opportunity created. “People need a writing device. What if I were to…”

“But where would you find that, Bob?”

“Well, uhh, I don’t know. The people over there who make those rubber balls, where do they get their rubber?”

“I think from some place in India, I don’t know.”

“Well, let’s check it out.”

You start looking for ways to bring this thing together, and there you have the imagination, the creativity, the entrepreneur, the willingness to think in new ways, try new things, and take a risk to bring it all together. Is that exactly what this is talking about? Maybe not, but it’s certainly harmonious. They go together.

What we see in the frankincense that goes on the altar, both altars, is the bringing together of things from different places to create a product. The people who cut the frankincense probably have no idea where it’s going to end up and what they’re going to do with it, and nor do they really care – probably, unless until at some point Israel apostatizes and suddenly there’s no longer a demand for frankincense, but then what’s the world going to hear? What’s Oman going to hear?

“Oh, those Israelites who were your best buyers – yeah, they’ve forsaken their God and they don’t need your frankincense anymore.”

“They abandoned their God? What kind of people are these?”

“Yeah, that’s not good.”

We bind all this together and the ascension offering or tribute offering are testimonies that we belong to God with all that we are, all we have, all of our stuff, all of our time, all of our energy, and this was the heart of worship under the old covenant.

Jesus, the Messiah, the Lamb of God, he dies for me and takes away my sins, the penal substitution. He bears the just penalty I deserve, but in doing so he buys me as a possession for God with all of my stuff. That means I’ve got a lot of work to do, not to earn my salvation, but to finish the work that God has called me to and to show my thankfulness and joy in what God has done in saving me from hell.

Sacrifice leads to a theology of dominion, but we have to get the order right. We don’t do these things so that God will bless us. We do these things because God has blessed us and because now he’s set us free from sin to serve him, and we want to go on worshiping and we want to go on saying thank you, we want to go on preaching the gospel, whether by word or by ritual and sacrament. In order for that to happen, some economic realities have to go into place.

A Gnostic theology will not understand this. “These are all worldly things. What matter they to us? They can all perish. All that matters is my soul’s rightness with God.” The Bible never teaches that anywhere. It teaches us not to hold the things of the world too closely, because they’re here on loan to us for now, but one day there are greater treasures and greater riches, and there’s no notion that they are not in some degree physical real things that God is preparing us for. All of that and more gets wrapped in this.

And one parting observation. Men take these things – they take the frankincense, well, they take the frankincense tree – and they apply a steel blade and they apply time and labor. What finally ends up in the temple is not, “Hey, I brought your frankincense tree.” It’s something that’s been processed, as opposed to something that’s natural. The same thing with the wheat. The same thing with the wine. These are all things that are processed through human labor and time.

The word ‘processed’ has become kind of a bad word these days. If something is processed, we don’t like it. We want the natural thing. Well, you know, some natural things aren’t all that great. Olives naturally are inedible. In fact, they’re poison.

They’re pretty gross. I actually grew up across the street from an old olive orchard.

Did you ever try to eat any of the olives?

I did, and it was a bad decision.

Yeah, it’s not a good thing. The world is cursed. The whole generation that came through the ‘60s and bore fruit on into the ‘90s had this idea that anything that’s natural is better. Not necessarily! Nature is not normative anymore. Sometimes human effort is not only required to bring out the best in a thing, but to correct the curse in the thing. What we see here on the altar is stuff that’s not purely natural, but stuff that’s been processed by human labor, time, energy, and intelligence.

The processed is often what God demanded on the altar. In fact, I can’t think of anything offhand that wasn’t in some degree processed to get there. Even the grains that grew in the field were not things that grew wild. They were the work of the farmers’ efforts, experience, and intelligence. They didn’t just spring up someplace. “Oh look, wildflowers. I’ll bring them to God.” God nowhere demands wildflowers.

He already owns them.

He already owns them. He can see them anytime he wants.

I remember a friend of ours using this illustration about music, that soundwaves are naturally chaotic. When we just listen to the sounds around us, there’s not order there. It’s through effort and a kind of redemption that we order them, we set them right, and that’s what God does to us and to our history. He reaches into the chaos that we’ve created by messing with his idea and sets it right. So to do this on a smaller scale is to imitate God.

Yes, absolutely. Again, we’re back to talking about dominion, but we’re trying to place it in a biblical framework. Dominion doesn’t mean go out and take over things and rule the world and make everyone behave. That’s not it, and it’s unfortunate that the word dominion kind of has that association and connotation these days.

Dominion is first of all an attribute of God. God has absolute dominion, and he rules in a kindly, orderly, generous way, letting his rain fall on the just and the unjust. There will be a day of final judgement, but until then God is exceedingly gracious for the sake of Christ, and his grace overflows into what some people call common grace, restraining grace, that blesses everyone at least outwardly for a while.

On dominion, as the discussion of fasting earlier, we don’t need to go out with our wand of faith detection and say, “Are you saved? – beep beep beep, mehhh. Oh, I guess not. I can’t give money to you because you’re not a true believer. Beep beep beep – he is. I’ll help him. I won’t help you.”

You give money to the believer. The believer turns around and hands it to the unbeliever.

Yes. We all know Paul’s injunction. If a man doesn’t work, neither should he eat, but that’s a broad description to the Church and a basic philosophy of life. He doesn’t mean that if someone stands at your door with his hat in his hands and says, “I’m awfully hungry. Could you spare a sandwich?” that we are sinning by giving him a sandwich.

Now, we probably should tell him about Jesus in the process, because Jesus said a cup of cold water in his name, but this dominion thing is not saying, “Well, come be my slave and I will give you…” No, it’s “How can I help you? Really help you.” Maybe it’s giving you food, maybe it’s not, depending on the circumstances. God puts us in the place of making hard calls in charity in wisdom, but also in justice, and that’s what the Bible talks about.

When it talks about us as kings and priests before God, it’s always kings and priests together. We’re not sometimes kings and sometimes priests. It’s one office – prophet/priest/king before God – so we’re always working on what for us is a balancing act, which to God comes naturally because that’s who he is. But we, because of our sin, sometimes see it as a balance between mercy and justice, between holding a tight line and opening a wide hand, but we’re called to be like Jesus.

He did not ask how many of the 5,000 believed in him before he fed them. They were covenant people. Actually, with the 4,000 they weren’t even all covenant people. A lot of them were Gentiles, and yet he fed them. Was that an act of dominion? Yes, it was. He asserted the authority of God over creation and showed it before men. “I have the power to make stuff out of nothing. I have the power to feed you,” and there are spiritual lessons here as well.

As we talk about dominion, we need to not get sidetracked into some kind of political model where we are grabbing seats of power to reshape the world. That’s not it. The cup of cold water in Jesus’ name with Christian testimony is far more effective in and of itself than circulating political fact sheets or petitions – not to say the other is wrong, but we need our priorities straight. The river of water of life that flows from God’s garden is the spirit of the gospel. It’s not a stream of votes for a right-wing candidate.

Yeah.

Do you have any recommendations for us this evening?

Yes. Getting married and having children.

That’s a good recommendation.

That’s a good recommendation. God kind of recommended it at the dawn of creation. My own children are now at the point where one of them is 21, another one is about to turn 20 in a month or less, and the other is 18 going on 30. They’re at the point where they’re beginning to get their own social lives and make even their own theological choices in some areas. “Which church are you going to go to? Okay. You know what you’re doing? You talk to God about this?”

They’re grown-ups, nearly so, and yet this last year or so has been, in many ways, one of the best of my life, despite COVID, despite the riots, despite government intrusion and oppression, because interestingly enough it’s forced us to be home more together, and it is my absolute delight to sit around with my family and hear my girls and my wife all talk about whatever.

The conversations range from cooking to old movies to old books to new books to songs that are not Top 40, at least not now. They might have been 30 years ago. There’s gardening and philosophy and theology, and to do so politely. My girls are very different from one another, and yet they’ve learned to respect one another and listen to one another. They all have jobs. They all go to college. They all read a lot, even the one who says she doesn’t. It’s been a great thing, and these are girls who are going to go on having an effect long after I’m gone. I’m much older than my daughters are, but they’ve been a tremendous blessing to me, especially of late.

I know that God does not give the blessing of children to everybody, at least not right away, and sometimes not without some help, and I would never make it a matter of guilt for such a thing. But insofar as it’s possible, it’s a wonderful path that God’s called us on and generally makes possible for most married people.

To hold back from it indefinitely because, “I’m too busy,” or “I have a career,” or “I’m afraid of the pain even,” although I understand that – I’ve never given birth but I’ve had a few kidney stones and they say it’s close – whatever the excuses and the reasons or justifications, children are a wonderful thing, at least they can be. So I recommend getting married and having children. That’s my recommendation tonight.

That’s infinitely better than my recommendation.

What is yours, Emily?

I have an old book to recommend.

Okay, what’s your old book?

This is called The Heliand. Have you heard of it?

No, I have not.

It is a collection of songs written by a monk, I gather, ministering to the Germanic peoples subdued by Charlemagne in the 9th century.

Oh, okay. That was kind of classy, though. I see how you did that.

He tells the story of the gospels, adapting here and there to the Saxon cultural context. There are points where he’s completely unorthodox, like at certain points 0 out of 10 for theology, but I’ve never shared the gospel with a 9th-century pagan so who am I to really throw a stone here?

He does some interesting things over the course of the work. There are 71 songs or something like that. And he does what I call the Joss Whedon thing, which another friend of mine calls the anime thing, where you start off with certain assumptions and then you start to question those assumptions as you go along. In this case it’s fate and time being ultimate, because that’s what the Norse mythology was and that was the worldview of the people that he’s trying to minister to.

So he starts off and it’s like, “Oh, this is very syncretistic,” and then it goes on and it goes on, and then he has to sort of deal with “God ordained this, but this person chose this, but how is what is fated different from what God ordained?” He doesn’t draw it to its full conclusion, but I think it’s very interesting what he does.

The translation I have is by G. Ronald Murphy, who’s a Jesuit, and the translation is a little bit clunky, but only because it’s so transparent. You can tell when it’s ‘human beings’ every time, instead of ‘mankind’ or something like that. It just grates on me a little bit. It’s like, “It would sound much grander if you just said ‘men’ and it wouldn’t bother me.”

Anyway, it was a very fun read and I would recommend it to the discerning reader who enjoys Norse mythology.

Okay, very good.

By the way, some large animal just walked past your back window. I would like to say it was a really huge cat, but I don’t know for sure. It was just kind of slinking by.

That’s terrifying because we have a balcony. Was it on the balcony?

No, it looks like there’s a sidewalk out there past the railing? It was there but it was quite big.

I’m not going outside ever again.

With that, we will bid you a good night. Thank you so much for this conversation. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to our financial supporters. If you would like to join their number, you can visit our website at anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion. That is also where you can find all of our show notes and transcripts for every episode.

Thanks so much for listening. See you next time.