Facing Giants
From the Hosts
God didn't actually expect the people of Israel to fight giants and win, did He? Well, He wasn't surprised by their faithlessness when they were too afraid to enter the Promised Land. Nor is He surprised by our faithlessness when we let our fears stop us from sharing the Gospel. And yet, He still intends for His gospel to go out and convert the nations, and His people are His chosen messengers.
This Episode Features: Giants And Grasshoppers; Once Upon A Time There Was A Calvinist Evangelist; Eschatology; Self-Conscious Wheat; and The Lays of Ancient Rome
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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 and Bryan Broome.
Today we’re talking about Joshua and Caleb and the giants that were in the land of Canaan. Now, when we say giants, yes, we actually mean giant human beings who are giant-sized. About how tall were these giants, Greg?
We’re not given an exact figure for the ones that Joshua and Caleb and the spies saw. The faithless spies exaggerated a bit and said, “We seem like grasshoppers in their sight.” No, they weren’t that big. The only giant in scripture for whom we have an exact measurement, of course, is Goliath, and he is roughly 9’6”. That’s tall. It’s not incredibly tall. It’s not like I can go boating in his shoe or something.
No, it’s not the giants of folklore and myth or Norse mythology. There’s another giant, though, that we do have a hint about. The children of Israel, when they subdued Transjordan before entering the Promised Land, came upon Og, king of Bashan, and we are told that his bedframe was nine cubits long. That’s about 13-1/2 feet, so if he filled up his bed substantially, he probably outsized Goliath.
Down through the years, the centuries, the millennia now, people have seen giants. The early explorers who crisscrossed the world in the late 15th and 16th centuries mostly all reported giant tribes here or there. Although they didn’t have tape measures, they seemed to have been looking at people who were 7’ or more. There have been skeletons that have turned up in excavations across North America whose heights tend to be between 7 and 9 feet, and many have had six fingers like Goliath’s brother, a not unknown condition, made much use of in The Princess Bride.
That’s good. We were coming up on our limit of how many episodes we can go without referencing The Princess Bride, so this will reset the counter.
Giants have a way of looking really impressive, and they can be big and strong. They probably aren’t terribly dexterous at the same time because men aren’t really designed to be that big, but to a bunch of people who have been enslaved for a few generations and are coming out of the wilderness and suddenly see these great tall walled cities and big guys hunkering under the gates to pass through them, it would be easy to say, “Wow, these guys are too big for us to take on. We can’t possibly do this,” and that’s the report the spies brought back.
This is a land flowing with milk and honey. Moses had sent them in to do reconnaissance and get some sort of idea of what they were dealing with, and they brought back the fruit of the land. The grapes were so enormous and so large on the vine that they took two staves to carry them back out. The pomegranates and other fruit – “Yeah, yeah, it’s beautiful fruit, wonderful land, all that’s great, but we have great cities walled up to heaven and giants.”
The sons of Anak, they were called. That was the tribal name, and the spies concluded, and managed to convince Israel, that “There is no way under heaven that we can take on these things, so this whole thing has been a really bad idea from the beginning and we probably should consider our options.”
That night the children of Israel did a lot of weeping around their campfires and a lot of complaining and a lot of speculating as to what was their best move now. By morning time, they were seriously thinking about choosing a new leader, replacing Moses, and going back to Egypt because the Egyptians were really competent at running culture and civilization and things like that, which was true enough.
But what role do you want to play in that society? If you go back, I can guarantee you where you’re going to be.
I think they kind of understood that, but it was okay because safety and security were more important than risking your life on pie in the sky bye and bye, when it was so obviously bye and bye. “Once we’re dead, maybe we’ll get some phantom version, but we’re never getting this Promised Land.”
It’s unclear what happened here. They have seen Yahweh annihilate Egyptian culture with plagues of apocalyptic proportions. They’d seen the whole army destroyed in the Red Sea. They were trailing underneath the guidance of the glory cloud above them, with God raining manna on them daily, and yet somehow when it came to this, they couldn’t handle it. They were very simply afraid, and when you’re afraid, all kinds of things that rational people might consider really stupid and dangerous seem like perfect solutions.
This is true anytime a society loses hope. When you value your life – what Francis Schaeffer used to call your personal peace and affluence, your little wedge of the good pie of contemporary culture and happiness – and something threatens that, then it’s very easy to say, “Yeah, I can give up my rights, my freedoms, my liberties, the legal traditions of a couple hundred years, as long as people leave me alone. I don’t need this freedom stuff. I don’t need an Electoral College or representative government or the protection of any 10 amendments.”
You can just start throwing things away left and right because you want to be safe. Without a hope that transcends your immediate condition and your immediate happiness, if there’s no higher value that you place on life and the things of this world, you will sell out.
When I was a kid, the phrase “better Red than dead” was still a thing. People were so afraid of the possibilities of nuclear warfare that it seemed sensible to unilaterally disarm, as it were surrender to the Soviet Union. Surely, they wouldn’t be that bad. No doubt they’re just misunderstood and as afraid as we are. If we back down, they’ll be okay. Nothing too terrible could happen. If we all become communists, so what. It’s better than dying.
This kind of mentality is, in many ways, still with us today. We are afraid of the boogeyman and we’re not sure what to do about that. Neither were these guys. The giants were boogeymen. They weren’t any kind of normal threat, and even God apparently could not handle them, so what do you do now?
How interesting, too, that we can see that kind of reaction even in just the average modern Christian’s life – not even just modern, just any Christian’s life. God has sent his Son to die for you. He has conquered your sin. He has raised you up to the status of son or daughter alongside Christ, in Christ, and then it comes to something affecting us personally that isn’t spiritual, and our first reaction is to say, “Well, obviously this is hopeless!”
Yeah. “There’s nothing we can do here. Throw in the hand. Raise your hands. It’s a loss.”
In the original essay that I wrote on this topic, I suggested three possible directions the conversation might have gone around the campfire. This is a bit imaginative, to be sure, but based on the way American Christians have thought for the last 50, 60, 70 years now – oh, it’s 2020-something, wow, so 70-some years – I suggest these for your consideration.
“God promised to give us the land. There was nothing about human effort. Obviously, God doesn’t expect us to usher in the kingdom. Only he could do that. This whole thing smacks of a false gospel, of a social gospel. We can’t do anything to change world conditions or to change political or social conditions. That’s not even our business. We need to trust God to give us the land on his time, and we’ll just sit here and wait and not be misled by false gospels that actually expect us to do anything, as if we in our Pelagian strength could somehow take down giants. Yeah, there you go. Good.”
Or, “God will give us the land someday, maybe when Messiah comes. It’s eschatological, but in the meantime we’re hardly safe here or competent enough to run a society. The Egyptians though, they were really good at that, so why don’t we let them take over practical social matters until Messiah comes and God just does what he promised he would do, give us the land at Messiah’s coming. Yeah, that sounds good.”
Then finally, “But do we even need the land? We’re already God’s firstborn. He’s made us a kingdom of priests. We’ve been redeemed. We have his Word. God himself dwells in our midst. What more do we need, save Messiah himself? This whole business about the land seems like a carnal diversion from our true calling, a clouding over of our true position in Yahweh. We’re already in Messiah in principle. We don’t need no stinkin’ land.” Hit the gong for the Gnostic bell now.
Or maybe they just said, “Nah, we just don’t believe in God anymore, so let’s get out of here.”
It’s hard to know what excuses they used, although it’s pretty easy to look back at the last 70-some years of American church history and see what Christians have used as excuses. “We can’t do cultural engagement, that’s social gospel. It’s nice that you’re concerned about social reform, but Jesus will do that when he returns and sets up his millennial kingdom. We’re already positionally in Christ. We have everything that we need. We don’t need any more, and God has not promised any more. All we’re waiting for is the second coming.”
These are all things that I’ve seen in writing from competent-enough theologians over the last 70 years, some of them more recent, over against this clear command called the Great Commission that says, “Go make disciples of all nations,” which surely reminds us to keep the balance between the gospel of justification by faith alone and the outworking of that gospel in the life of the believer, as more and more he trusts God for all things and tries to serve God in all areas of life.
When we turn it around, yeah, we get a social gospel. We know that. No big surprise there. But to think that the gospel stops at making us right with God and has no effect on anyone around us or any further dimension in our own lives is to stop reading the New Testament. Just pick up Paul’s epistles and read the so-called application sections. He talks about marriage. He talks about business relationships and slavery in that world. He talks about how you relate to the civil government. He talks about work. He talks about social interaction with pagan culture.
There’s all kinds of things that becoming a Christian is supposed to effect. Even if we are one Christian in a small 1,000-house community in a pagan world, our light is supposed to shine and that leaven is supposed to make a difference, and we’re not to be afraid of it.
And it may be incremental. I was just talking with a friend this morning about the pro-life movement and how there is this sharp divide between those who want to take the next practical step to abolish abortion and those who say, “Nope, no intermediate. We just need to get rid of it all at once.”
It would be nice if we could get rid of it all at once, but I was noticing in Exodus 23:29, “I’m going to drive out the nations before you little by little, because if I take them out all at once the land is going to be desolate. It’s going to be overrun by wild beasts.”
That runs contrary to the perfectionistic impulse of it needs to be perfect all at once. “If we are in the land at the same time as these Canaanite nations, we’re co-existing. That’s unacceptable.” But that’s not how God works.
No, and the co-existing thing – there’s a number of ways of co-existing, depending upon all sorts of things. If you are a tourist in a pagan land, you probably have the ability to do a little bit of evangelism depending upon the laws of the land. And if you’re living in America and your neighbor next door is not a believer, you have the ability to show them the love of God and help them raise up a fence and plant a tree and share an apple pie and, again, communicate to them gospel truths. That’s a form of co-existing.
What Jesus does not give us permission to do is to shut up, sit still, and never do anything, and yet too often that’s what we do. I must confess that Presbyterian and Reformed Christians are particularly bad about this. I grew up being told Calvinists have this wonderful heritage of missionary activity. Yeah, we did.
Once upon a time Calvinists were the forerunners in the missionary movement back in the old days, and of course we still support missionaries around the world, but you want to talk personal evangelism, it’s not exactly our strength. Whether we can blame that on a perverse notion of predestination or weak eschatology that simply accepts defeat as a way of life, I don’t know exactly.
Or personal fear – back to giants. When the guy next door looks like a giant because talking to him about Jesus is going to take me out of my comfort zone, we have a problem. We are fearful. The book of Revelation, when it lists the people who go to hell, amongst them are the fearful, the unbelieving, right alongside the warmongering and the dogs.
There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear because fear has torment. He that fears is not made perfect in love. I John 4:18
So yes, there are giants, and yes, we can be fearful, but it flies in the face of 1) Jesus’ commandment, and then 2) therefore what Jesus promised. Jesus does not say, “Go try and make disciples. Good luck with that one. I’ll watch you all martyred and meet you on the other side.” That’s not it. He sends us forth with confidence that “All power is given me in heaven and earth. Go, therefore.”
This is the sum and substance of the prophets, all the prophetic vision of the glorious success of the gospel to the Gentile nations, of all the ends of the earth turning to Messiah – as you say, incrementally. We want things to happen – and this is something we’ll be talking about probably at the end of Joshua, I think – but we want things to happen right now.
Ever since the Reformation and the Great Awakening in America, we are ready for the next big thing that will transform society. Back in the ‘70s it was, “Elect the right president. Have a moral crusade – the Moral Majority.” We keep looking for what will win the world to Christ in our generation. I’ve seen all of those in my lifetime, and in and of themselves they’re not bad goals, but they’re not generally how God does things and, in fact, are not how God did things. God gave us a little here, a little there, and then took away a little here and a little there.
We’re at a point now where I’m not even sure where the Church stands eschatologically anymore. When I was younger, Dispensationalism was the big thing. Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth was a bestseller, and everybody was sure that Jesus was coming in our lifetime. Lindsey picked on the rebirth of Israel as a nation in 1948. 48 + 40, that’s a generation, so back it up 7 years to fit in the Great Tribulation, and 1981 looked like it was probably it, 1988 at the least. Little pamphlets appeared on cars in church parking lots – “88 reasons that Jesus will appear in 1988.” The next year it was, “89 reasons why Jesus will appear in 1989.” I don’t know what the other reason was.
Maybe so. But the culture I grew up in was very much a bugout kind of culture. “The bad guys are coming, but Jesus is going to rapture us out and we’re never going to have to face tribulation. We’re never going to have to face anything really bad.”
How we said this with a straight face to Christians in Russia and China, I’m not sure, because somehow we didn’t translate it cross-culturally. We assumed that the rest of the world is just like us, and the Church will never go through tribulation – at least The Tribulation – so there was no conception that America could ever see anything really too bad. I mean, it might begin to tilt that way, but the moment it did, Jesus is coming back and we’re on the clock and the clock is ticking already.
There was the optimism of, “Things are about to get really bad and we’re not going to be here, so no sweat, no planning. You can put off marriage, put off having children, put off college, put off getting a job. Just kind of drift from one Christian rock concert to the other, because before we’ve gone over all the cities of America the Son of Man will come.”
I don’t know where we are today. I don’t know if anybody has a systematized eschatology anymore – pre-millennial, amillennial, or post-millennial – that looks at the condition America is in and says, “Here’s what we can expect.”
Certainly, yeah, but there’s also the problem of making America the reference point. You were mentioning the problems with the Dispensational approach. You see it also with the more extreme post-millennials as well, that America is triumphing, we’re strong, so therefore the Church is strong, so therefore we’re making it. But you have to have a pretty narrow historical window that you’re looking at to say, “Yes, the Church has triumphed. Just don’t look at Africa or the Middle East or Asia.”
And you also need a heavy set of blinders to ignore the problems we still have and to even come close to saying, “We’re close to the Golden Age, guys!” Normally, at least in my experience, those particular statements come from people who are more or less the problem.
Yeah, I’ve heard a lot of weird stuff over the last year, both how this is the end of everything and how God at the last minute was going to use Donald Trump to turn everything around and, like a new Moses, take us through a new Red Sea and blah blah blah… and not from total psychotics.
Where you put your hope matters. If your hope is in earthly princes of either party, whether you’re Progressive or Libertarian or Conservative or something else, it honestly does not matter because political solutions do not work. The Christian gospel has political implications, but its solutions are not political. Its solutions are spiritual, and they start by changing the hearts of people, but that only happens if people actually hear the gospel so their hearts can be changed. In that sense, we have this awesome responsibility. The Holy Spirit, in a sense, waits on us to actually tell people about Jesus.
Now, in the total plan of God he’s got it covered and he’s not going to miss any bets, but from where we sit we wonder, “Why aren’t those people over there being saved?” and the question should come back to us, “Have you gone and talked to them about Jesus?”
“Let me get this straight. You understood that God had a plan to save those people, and you sat there and did nothing?” That’s what we do.
That’s what we do. And as you said, often it is simple fearfulness – fear of the face of man, fear of going outside our comfort zone, fear that we’re going to be mocked. I’ve got a good one – we’re afraid we’re going to sound too much like Arminians. I actually got that from older folk. No, just do it. It’ll be fine.
Look, I’ve got as many disagreements with Arminianism as either of you do, and as many as they do. They’re still our brothers and sisters in Christ.
They are indeed, and in general tend to be out there evangelizing a whole lot more than we are.
And sometimes what you mean by Arminian simply means sort of Arminian. Most Arminians that I know probably would not pass an Arminian test because they believe too much in God. They pray for people to be saved. They believe that God can change hearts. It’s just when you nail them down on little fine points that they kind of get their back up and want to remind you that man has a free will, but they preach Christ. And insofar as we don’t, we’ve got a problem.
We wonder why Reformed and Presbyterian denominations by and large – with some notable exceptions – are shrinking. I understand the OPC is actually experiencing some moderate growth right now. Our little denomination ain’t.
That’s a big Lutheran accusation leveled. They argue that Calvinism does not present a free offer of the gospel, that the gospel is contingent on you being elect, which is not how a faithful Calvinist should be telling them the gospel. We do believe in the free offer of the gospel to all people.
Oh dear. Sometimes you hear people get their hackles up over that kind of presentation, and they would say it like that because we really don’t want to sound like Arminians.
Because really the offer is, “If you believe, you will be saved. God will be faithful to that promise that he’s made.” Yeah, in the background of our head we know that you’re not going to be saved, you’re not going to believe if you’re not elect, but that doesn’t mean we don’t tell them that that’s the promise.
And we don’t know who this person is. We don’t know if they’re elect or not. That’s secret information that’s none of our business, nor should we be operating in terms of it. As you say, the promise is good if you believe, so we challenge them to believe, and yet I think there are some Calvinists who say, “We can’t do that, because they’re not capable of believing.” If God opens their heart, they sure enough are.
And also God uses means. When God says he uses means, he doesn’t mean “be mean when you tell them.”
When you show them the love of God, show them that God loved the world in such a way that he gave his only begotten Son, the love of God is wrapped up in Jesus and I’m offering it to you right now, there’s nothing non-Calvinistic about that.
True, the ultimate outcome is dependent upon God’s sovereignty, but that’s true of everything. Whether or not we all three survive the next three minutes is also within God’s sovereignty. Asteroids could crash down on our respective homes and end that, so shall we be afraid because that’s a possibility? I think not.
And here eschatology perhaps plays a part. I think because of the doctrine of predestination, we misread that to mean God doesn’t love very many people. Now, how you get that out of “God has an elect people,” I do not know. It presents God as very stingy in his love and having given his Son for not much.
There are all kinds of verses in scripture that describe what Jesus purchased as “the world,” as “a great multitude that no man can number,” as “all nations.” Going with that confidence that if we simply want to talk secularly and play the odds like we’re gambling in Vegas, the odds are that the person we’re talking to really might be elect, and God is just waiting for someone to bring the gospel to them. If we don’t do it, it might be our Arminian brother down the street, and sometimes that’s more horrifying to us than the fact that our friend here is going to hell because we haven’t borne witness to him.
And Paul didn’t mind that. He’s like, “As long as they’re preaching Christ.”
And honestly, if they’re at risk of being proselytized by somebody else who’s a Mormon or a Jehovah’s Witness, that should make you want to do it more, because then they’re not being preached Christ.
That reminds me in an odd way of my lovely wife. Anytime that Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses are in the neighborhood to stop at her door, she will engage them for as long as she possibly can. Her logic is that even if she can’t win them to Christ, while they’re busy talking with her they’re not insinuating themselves into the good graces of any other at-home mom on the block. She has a good track record of that kind of thing.
The boldness to take up a battle, to face people and not just close the blinds when the Jehovah’s Witnesses come and pretend we’re not here, it’s a mission field at our door. We can take some time and try to win these people, too.
I remember being challenged by a Jehovah’s Witness once at my door. I offered her some material and she said, “But you didn’t bring that to my door. I’m at your door.” Point taken.
In the last generation and perhaps still today – we’re talking about figurative giants – there were four great worldview systems that were contending on earth for control of the planet – five if you count Christianity, but besides that. These four all had a couple things in common. They all believed in the historical inevitability of their victory, and thus they all had an eschatology of victory. They actually had an eschatology.
The first is Marxism. Marxism is a philosophy of economic determinism whereby history itself, the very forces of history, of economics, are pushing mankind toward a glorious era of pure communism, utopia, where everyone will share and everyone will love and all class distinctions will fall away and everybody will be happy and perfect. There will be no squabbling and no bitterness. It’s inevitable. It has to come.
The early communists, particularly in America and in Europe, used this as a selling point to win the unconverts for the cause. “You’re fighting for the fate of the world. You’re fighting for eternal happiness for generations beyond you. What’s a little sacrifice to ensure that your great-great-grandchildren and theirs and theirs and theirs will be happy and safe, and that the world will finally know peace? Isn’t that worth your dedication?” and for a great many it seems it was. They bought into it.
Then you have secular humanism, which has kind of lost its way, but at the time it still said, “Look, scientific planning, the inevitability of forward evolution. We will be able to hand you a scientifically-created utopia within a few centuries, between medicine and sociology and communication. We’ve got this down. We’ll abolish death itself before we’re done. Just give us a little more time.”
I’m getting That Hideous Strength vibes, and yet even that story shows how secularism is untenable in the long run.
Yeah, for any of a number of reasons, but they spoke well and it was the religion of the public school system, at least at that time.
Then there’s New Age mysticism, a little less rigorous in its thinking because, well, half these people were on drugs all the time, but still. With someone I used the phrase “the Age of Aquarius” lately and they didn’t know what I meant. Was that you or not?
It’s the idea that the destiny of our world is written in the stars, so it’s an astronomical inevitability, a cosmic inevitability. “When the moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars, then peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars. This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.”
A friend of mine showed me a really cool cover of that song recently, by the way.
There were lots of people who believed that. The older generation is lost and has been and there’s no hope there, but the younger generation – we’re in tune with the cosmos. Just give us time. As long as we can survive the bomb of the older generation on nuclear war and all that, peace is coming. It’s written in the stars.
Then of course the last one is Islam. They had it really simple. “It is the will of Allah.” You can’t lose. God has predestinated absolutely that the whole world will fall into submission to Allah and to his prophet. Every step forward, every death toward that great cause is a step toward paradise. We can’t possibly lose.
Then there was Christianity that basically said, “We’re culturally irrelevant. We are going to have no effect on the larger stage of history. Christian influence is diminishing, and that’s all right because it’s all prophesied. That’s the way it’s supposed to happen, maybe until the millennium, so it’s good news. That means that Jesus is coming back real soon.”
The one representation, such as it was, of the gospel was the very worldview that had no cultural optimism, no historical inevitability of victory, no “The Great Commission will succeed in time before Jesus comes back.” It was just sort of, “Yeah, well, Jesus wasn’t serious about that anyway.”
It’s kind of odd how that view both pushes off what we’re supposed to be doing today, and brings forward the ultimate separation between the wheat and the tares. “Oh, no, we have nothing to do with the tares. They’re just sort of there alongside us,” meaning we haven’t been separated yet. It’s kind of anticipating the separation that hasn’t yet occurred.
I guess the idea is the Holy Spirit will do that at the rapture when he leaves and takes us with him, whereas when Jesus told the parable, the separation takes place as the wheat and tares both mature. It’s only as the wheat matures into truly being self-consciously wheat, as we see what it means not to be humanistic, not to be mystics, not to be Progressives and Marxists, that we will set ourselves apart from the tares, and the tares themselves will turn and run away because, “We’re sure not Christians, if that’s what Christianity is.”
It would be a wonderful thing right now if everybody who was not in fact a Christian would simply say so, but we’re not there yet. We’re at a place where a lot of people whose theology bears very little resemblance to that of Nicaea or Chalcedon continue to claim to be Christians and to mean well and to have our best interests at heart. If we question them, we’re unloving and we’re judgmental. As they used to say, “We need to push the antithesis,” but as Bryan said, without being mean about it, without being arrogant, without being willfully malignant.
We need to take a stand and say, “Look, we understand you don’t like what I’m about to say, but this is the gospel. This is Christianity. This is what the Bible says. I’m not saying it to offend you, but I understand it does.”
And it’s not even ours to take credit for. If they’re offended at it, there’s no reason to take it personally, although the fear of rejection is real and huge, but the rejection is not of us personally.
And there should always be a sense of self-analysis to determine, “Okay, were they getting upset because of my delivery or because of what the gospel says about them?”
Absolutely, and oftentimes it is because we’ve been rude, we’ve been arrogant.
There’s also just a thing that I see far too often. I see it mainly in the Presbyterian Reformed tradition because those are my circles where I see this happening. They basically say, “I told this person the gospel. I did this and this and they got upset at me. That means that I’m doing it right,” even though it wasn’t the gospel that they got upset at. It was the way that they spoke to them in either a tone of condescension or of even hatred – for instance, just seeing the way that some people in Christian pro-life movements and things – these ones are small – it’s the same level of vitriol the pro-choice people use against them but just with the pro-life position. They’re like, “We need to be like this, because how else are they going to listen to us?”
Exactly. You’re not opening them up to anything except for the opportunity to scorn you and to scorn the message that you’re not shepherding well.
There’s a comedian who talks about his bread research and he’s like, “I think we should change the name of all bread to the Body of Christ, just make it official. Don’t worry, I’ve also done gluten-free bread research. I think we should call it the Gluten-Free Body of Christ as well.”
Okay, anyway – hope. A society needs hope. Christians need hope. Hope is both eternal and it’s temporal. We are saved by hope and in hope, Paul tells us. We hope that God has good plans for us, that the thoughts he thinks to us are good thoughts, that he intends to use us and that he’s not done just yet, and that the things that we do may have ramifications, may send out ripples that last 100, 1,000, or 10,000 years if Jesus is pleased to tarry.
We have to live with that kind of optimism, knowing that everything is not going to happen now. Americans are really good at living short-term – short-term being, “You mean Jesus is going to turn the world around in the next 10 years?” Probably not, actually.
You look at the inertia that this thing has, the amount of force it’s going to take.
I think partially that just comes from our own culturally-rooted mindset of being revolutionaries. It’s like, “Okay, cool. We’ve just got to get out there and be revolutionary for Jesus and it will all work itself out in 15 years. We’ve just got to get this done now and then we’re good.”
Yeah, and again I appreciate the passage you mentioned earlier – little by little. We’re going to come back to that theme again, that God is not in a hurry. It’s taken Jesus 2,000 years to get the Church to where it is now, and where it is now is a whole lot better than where it was 2,000 years ago, but compared to where it could be, it’s not that great. There’s proportion.
We have technology that can beam the gospel signal around the world. We have ways of translating and communicating and moving about the planet like no one has even seen or dreamed of until our generation. The technology is there. We have an awful lot of Christians – Bible-believing Christians, in fact. We have a lot of money, and we still have a relatively free America and a few other nations that can serve as a base of operations to launch missionary activity into other countries. We’ve got a lot of good stuff going on here, but we also have some very stiff opposition, both on foreign shores and in our own midst, and within the Church itself, so we need to continue to hope and believe.
Hope is not “I hope so, maybe.” It’s not a leap of faith. It’s reading the promises of God with conviction and believing, “Yes, this may not all happen in my lifetime, but God’s intentions for this planet are good. They’re bigger than anything I can imagine, and more than I would ever do for this world.” Jesus gave his life for the world, and there’s nothing non-Calvinistic about that either. So we live by hope.
Joshua and Caleb took a stand. What they did ultimately had an influence far beyond any two little people taking a stand should have had. Little events, the days of small things, can change the world.
That’s why I’ve always found it interesting, and I don’t mean to take pot shots at your camp, but I’m going to do it anyway. There’s a certain part of the Christian Reconstruction movement that is basically saying, “We’re preparing for everything good that the West has to fall apart so that we can take control next and make it Christian and make it good.” It’s that revolutionary mindset to it again.
You were talking about what a blessing it is to have these countries in the West to serve as bases of operations to reach the lost around the world. It’s so short-sighted to say, “Okay, we’re just waiting for this to fall apart so that we can take power.”
Why would you want that to happen? Why wouldn’t you just say, “Look, yes, culture is messed up right now. We’re not saying it’s all good or it’s all totally lost, but look at what good you can accomplish for people that don’t even have the gospel yet,” because America and the UK even, most of Europe really, still have all this infrastructure and underlying Christian cultural influence that lets you do this. Why would you want to throw all that away because you think it would be better for your country?
Yeah, that’s senseless. Again, we have proved ourselves very bad at predicting the future – both successes and failures. I don’t know how many times I was told as a young person growing up, “America has got X number of years left and then it’s gone.” I lived in the shadow of that oftentimes, of the fear. These were people I was told I should be trusting and they’re telling me I’ve only got until 1972, 1976, 1980.
Yeah, I think there’s actually a pattern there. And you know what? America is still here. Given the last election, I’m sure there are some people who are absolutely convinced that America is done-for. It’s all over. But America is kind of a big nation with a lot of social momentum, and we’re rather stubborn. God uses all of our weaknesses and even our sins to forward his kingdom.
There’s a hymn I love, God the All-Terrible. “Through the thick darkness thy kingdom is hastening.” God does it with both hands tied behind his back and while we look what’s up his sleeve. He keeps it going, because if he just simply stepped into history with his bare power, big deal. He’s God. Of course he could do that. But to win through the back door, to win in the darkness, to win through the little things that no one saw coming – a baby in a manger, a man dead on a cross – that’s God, and no one sees it coming.
Great. Any recommendations to close us out this evening? Bryan, do you want to go first?
Sure. As a child of the evangelical ‘90s, I was told not to read Harry Potter growing up, and I just finished reading the very first Harry Potter book today actually, and it’s delightful. It is well-written and clever. It’s good. I know, if you’re listening to this and you’re thinking, “But witchcraft” – it doesn’t really work like witchcraft does in the Bible. It’s okay. You’re fine.
Yes, incredibly bad Latin, but it’s so enjoyable. It’s very light and fun. It reads a bit like a kid’s book does because it was written for kids, but it doesn’t feel like one still. Things kind of move along at that kind of chipper pace and…
It doesn’t linger on any action set piece, at least in this book, so it’s got that feel like kids’ books do. “Ah, this amazing super cool thing happened, then we’re on to the next thing because we’re kids.” It’s very good and very enjoyable. I’m moving on to the next one as soon as it’s available from the library. So that’s my recommendation, Harry Potter.
Awesome. I’m going to recommend a YouTube channel called The Minimal Mom. The problem with minimalism is that, first of all, it’s an -ism and I don’t like it as an -ism, but as a tool I like it a lot. However, one of the downfalls of minimalistic propaganda, if you will, is that it pitches minimalism really hard to single people who don’t have to interact with other human beings, which makes it really unrealistic for people who are married, let alone have a larger family. But that is not true of this YouTube channel, again called The Minimal Mom.
I think she’s a Christian. Sometimes it’s hard to tell on YouTube if they’re Christian or they’re Mormon. I think she’s a Christian. I’m not positive, but definitely one of those. She has super great realistic things to help streamline things like laundry or meal planning or changing out your seasonal wardrobe, if that’s a thing that you do in the place where you live. You guys probably don’t because California is perfect all year round, right?
Oh man, yikes. It’s supposed to get down to 8 over here, and that’s not even cold. Anyway, this channel has a lot of great tips for if you’re feeling overwhelmed by the amount of stuff, which is not uncommon. If you feel that way, you are not alone in America and there are ways to circumvent that situation and gain control of your stuff. Like Rachel Cruze says, “It’s okay to have stuff, just don’t let your stuff have you.”
Well, at my wife’s suggestion I’m going to recommend the ballad stanza. Everybody needs to have and practice the ballad stanza. It’s four lines of alternating iambic pentameter and trimeter rhyming A-B-X-B. It is a simple formula for writing poetry, one of the easiest for writing poetry, and an awful lot of older hymns were written that way, as were many television themes – to wit, The Ballad of Gilligan’s Island.
Yeah. It allows you, because of its omnipresence within our society, you can always test yourself, test your rhythm and meter by singing – whether it be Amazing Grace or The Ballad of Gilligan’s Island. You can sing and know that you’re right, because if it doesn’t fit the music you’re wrong.
For those of you who don’t know what iambic means, that’s the non-accent followed by the accent.
Duh-duh, duh-DUH. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” or “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me” or “Sit right back and hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip.”
Four beats, four accented syllables, three accented syllables on the next line, then back to four, then back to three, and two three’s rhyme and it’s really easy. Even junior high students can learn to do this, because my wife has been pounding it into them and they are grasping it.
I’ve been doing it with high schoolers for a long time, and usually out of a class of 20 I get about 17 who can do it pretty well, a few who do it excellently, and a couple who have no idea what a syllable is and are absolutely hopeless. But it’s a tool for writing poetry. Rhythm and meter hardly define poetry, but it’s a tool and a technique that many poets have used, and once you begin to recognize it for what it is you’ll see it everywhere and you’ll wonder how you missed it. There you go.
And then you can sing The Lays of Ancient Rome to the tune of Gilligan’s Island. Much joy will be brought into your life.
Thank you, guys, so much for this conversation. It’s been a delight. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband.
Thanks also to our financial supporters. We appreciate you helping to keep the show rolling. If you’d like to join their number, you can visit our website. That’s anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion.
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Recommendation: Ballad Stanzas