3 Lessons Learned From Harold Camping
May 24th, 2011 § 2 Comments
by Matthew Raley
Let’s make that, “Lessons Camping has taught inadvertently.”
1. An interpreter of the Bible has to exhibit sound reasoning.
Camping consistently appeals to what he calls the “spiritual” meaning of the text. There’s what a passage says, and then there’s a secret code in it that contains what God really meant. You crack the code by “comparing Scripture with Scripture,” as Camping likes to say. This procedure of his reduces to cut-and-paste: pull this fragment of a verse from here, join it with this bit of numerology from there, and, lo, the “spiritual” meaning is clear.
There is no “spiritual” meaning of Scripture. There’s just the meaning. “Spiritualizing” is nothing but an escape hatch for a teacher who can’t find a legitimate connection between a biblical passage and life. And Camping is far from being the only pastor who uses it.
We grasp the meaning of the Bible in the usual way: by applying the knowledge of vocabulary, grammar, history, genre, literary allusions, and lines of reasoning. Many pastors do not want to do the work of learning these things, much less be held accountable for demonstrating that their interpretations are valid.
Which brings us to …
2. Debate among pastors and scholars is a safeguard for congregations.
If you’re going to teach God’s word, you’d better be prepared to argue your case. Pastors are guilty of a breach of ethics when they refuse to answer questions, or debate the many problems of interpretation, or expose the line of reasoning behind their preaching. A pastor owes it to his people to be accountable to the community of scholars in this way.
Camping is a classic prophet-leader, who relies on his authority over his followers to answer all questions.
Today, just as many pastors don’t want to debate, so many believers don’t want to hear arguments, regarding debate as inherently divisive. I hear people say, “Let’s not argue about words. We all believe the same God.”
Their aversion to public argument is foolish. It reduces every disagreement to a matter of preference between the personalities or styles of teachers, instead of recognizing that there are real issues to be decided that are larger than mere points of view. The folly of this reductionism is that a cult leader like Camping thrives in a contest of personal loyalty.
Where mere personal appeals are the issue, believers are not safe. They need to be challenged to think, not just prefer.
3. A Bible teacher is responsible for what he teaches.
Camping keeps saying, as many pastors say, “I’m just teaching the Bible. I’m not responsible for what it says.”
This is another escape hatch. As a teacher, I am responsible for what I teach. I am not at liberty to equate my interpretations with the Bible, so that if you reject my teaching you are by definition rejecting God. I am morally accountable for my expositions of Scripture, for the workmanship of my sermons, for the clarity of my reasoning, and for the precision of my applications.
This is an awesome responsibility. A few people’s hope, health, and decision-making are deeply influenced by what I say. This reality is what drives me to study: When I come before the throne of God, the Lord will render a verdict on whether I accurately taught his word.
Camping should repent of his self-indulgence. Judgment Day is indeed coming for him.
The Cosmic Vending Machine
January 14th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
by Matthew Raley
Americans, pragmatic as they are about everything, tend to evaluate God the same way they evaluate their congressman: What have you done for me lately?
There shouldn’t be any question on God’s part about whether to keep our blessings coming: the financial windfall, the narrow escape from an accident, robust health, and above all, fun. He knows we’re not perfect. He knows we try — at least when we feel like it. And he ought to know that, despite our limitations, we’re doing a pretty darn good job with life.
So, when we put a prayer in the heavenly slot, we have a right to hear some clicking, a whir, and a final clop as the item we requested appears. Fair is fair.
The biblical word holy intrudes on this fantasy.
When Isaiah sees God enthroned in the temple (Isaiah 6), some of the more threatening aspects of the vision are the seraphim. These creatures have six wings apiece: two pairs to pay deference to the Lord by covering face and feet, and one pair to fly. The verb stem of fly is intensive, meaning not merely that they hover, but that they dart around the high throne.
All the while, they call warnings to each other: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!” These calls are loud and deep enough to shake the foundations of the temple.
The root idea of holy is separate, or unmixed. To say that God is holy is to call him Other.
But that is not all the seraphim are saying. The Hebrew language is built on repetition; to repeat a word is to compound its force. “Holy, holy” would be the maximum imaginable Otherness. The seraphim are calling, “Holy, holy, holy”: the Otherness beyond your ability to imagine.
No wonder Isaiah says, “I’m dead!” He and his people are unclean — that is, mixed and corrupt, unable to survive the presence of utter holiness.
America pragmatism doesn’t work well. We resent that the cosmic vending machine won’t deliver on demand, and that heaven is silent when we pound it. If Isaiah’s vision is true, then we are operating on a theory of God that is disastrously wrong.
Pragmatists have no category for holiness. This omission means that we not only can’t understand God’s judgment but, even worse, we can’t understand his grace. The Lord says the same thing to us that he said to Isaiah: “I will make you clean.”
God’s holiness means that every single blessing we receive has crossed the infinite chasm between us and the purity of his being. It means that his extension of cleansing to us is life itself.
The Debt I Owe When I Cannot Repay
December 23rd, 2010 § Leave a Comment
by Matthew Raley
We tend to associate gratitude with being polite — or worse, being respectable. And I suspect our view of Christmas is tainted as a result.
In our point of view, I show gratitude to avoid giving offense. After all, if someone helps me out, I don’t want to take the help for granted, as if I were entitled to it. That would foreclose the possibility of being helped again. So I show gratitude for the same reason Americans are polite generally: pragmatic vigilance.
The lower form of this pragmatism is to tend appearances. I don’t want someone to think I’m ungrateful, so I express gratitude to maintain respectability.
This kind of gratitude is alien to the Bible.
Here’s one of the Bible’s most important, and most neglected, verses (Romans 1.21). “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.”
To explain the depth of human perversity, Paul says that we did not “honor God as God.” God is the creator of all things (vv 19-20, 25). He has a rank that is infinitely above ours: creator to creature. Honor in this case is not a matter of politeness, but of profound, inflexible, eternal indebtedness.
Giving thanks is the payment. The gratitude is not about being appreciative, as if we were supposed to say, “Wow, it was so nice of you to make me and all my stuff!” The gratitude is what we owe God when we cannot repay the debt. “You gave me life. I can never repay what I owe you. But I can live for your glory in humble gratitude.”
I understand this best as a parent. When my sons spontaneously say, “Thanks, Dad!” for something I do, I am repaid in the coin of honor. More than the thing I provide, they value me.
How does this concept of gratitude relate to Christmas?
Christ Jesus came to this world to give his life for our redemption. He did so when we were still ungodly — still expressing ingratitude for created life, giving no honor to him as God (Romans 5.8). So what we celebrate in this season is the double-gift of life that is doubly beyond our ability to repay.
We are celebrating our debt of gratitude.
This ALWAYS Happens To Me!
December 16th, 2010 § 3 Comments
by Matthew Raley
Bitterness is a conviction that your life is filled with unfairness. It is one of the most common spiritual conditions I come across, and it is debilitating. Here are some characteristics of bitterness that I’ve noticed in myself and others.
1. Bitterness is a story.
When someone expresses his bitterness, it has characters and plot. “First they took my lunch money. Then they stole my invention — which would’ve made me rich. Then they cut off my unemployment. And now you want a tip! This always happens to me!”
Here is Jacob’s response when his oldest son Reuben needs to take the youngest son to Egypt to buy food during a famine (Genesis 42.36): “You [Reuben] have bereaved me of my children: Joseph is no more, and Simeon is no more, and now you would take Benjamin. All this has come against me.” Jacob has been telling himself a story about Reuben.
A good start at dispelling bitterness is to notice the stories you tell yourself.
2. The bitter story is deceitful.
The story usually lumps disparate people into one category. They stole my lunch money, my invention, and my unemployment benefits. You want a tip. Ergo, you belong with them. Time to challenge the composition of they.
Also, the story interprets actions as if they are about “me.” Life is unfair because people are always against me, stealing from me, dissing me. But, reality is, no one thinks about me as much as I do.
Jacob’s story leads him to blame Reuben for events that were not Reuben’s fault. But it makes total sense to Jacob because deception wears a cloak of plausibility.
Another way to dispel bitterness is to challenge your own assumptions.
3. Bitterness ignores God’s story.
Because I am the center of the bitter story, and my point of view dominates, I can edit the parts that confuse the plot. The part where, for instance, someone gave me a sandwich after my lunch money went missing. The part where my invention that was going to make me billions didn’t actually work. Or the part where I started a new job after my unemployment ran out. These scenes mess up the story, so out they go.
In Genesis 42, Jacob doesn’t know yet that Joseph is alive, that it was Joseph who arrested Simeon in Egypt, and that it is Joseph who will save the family from starvation and bring reconciliation. And Jacob has conveniently forgotten how God protected and provided for him before.
God is busy working his agenda for our lives, and he is not going to adjust it to our preferences. Nor should he: his agenda is good. So, in addition to forgiveness, the most helpful single way to dispel bitterness is hour-to-hour gratitude, which prevents the bitter story in the first place.
The Fearsome Nature of Forgiveness
November 17th, 2010 § 2 Comments
by Matthew Raley
The word forgive has fallen into disuse, and we’ve substituted the phrase move on. But the two actions we describe are different.
The object of my “moving on” or “forgiving” is a wrong someone has committed against me.
To move on is to leave that wrong behind on life’s road. I strive to put my relationship with the wrong-doer on a new course. I also strive to prevent my emotions returning to the wrong, so that I stop feeling angry, resentful, or grieved. And I strive to think of myself as no longer defined by the wrong: I am not a victim.
The wrong is still there. I am choosing to ignore it.
"Prisoner," Christian Rohlfs, 1918, Museum of Modern Art
To forgive is more radical. The New Testament word aphiemi does have the idea of “letting go,” but with a greater specificity. It came to be used as a legal term for debt cancellation and divorce. A creditor’s claim no longer adhered to the debtor; a husband’s claim no longer adhered to the wife. In forgiveness, what is owed is zero.
This is the word Jesus uses when a paralytic is brought to him (Mark 2.1-12). He says to the paralytic, “My son, your sins are forgiven.” He is not saying, “God has moved on from all of the wrongs you have committed.” He is saying, “The claims against you are canceled.”
The enormity of Jesus’ statement is obvious to the religious leaders listening. “He is blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” To zero-out the moral debts we owe is an action only God can take. Jesus heals the paralytic to verify that he does indeed have the authority to forgive. And in doing so he is claiming to be God.
The basis of Jesus’ authority is that he “gives his life as a ransom for many,” a payment to redeem sinners from their debts (Mark 10.45).
Our “move on” method of repairing personal harm doesn’t work.
For starters, it doesn’t deal with the nature of wrong-doing. Harm leaves a debt. Unpaid debt is loss. Every time I hear someone say he has “moved on,” the very next words out of his mouth reassert the loss he bears. At one moment he pretends the loss is negligible, and at the next he proves how heavy the loss remains.
Deeper, “moving on” never discharges the wrong-doer. His wrong is still back there on the road. Let two people’s road cover ten years, and let the road be covered with harm’s wreckage, and then see how free and honest the two are after all their moving on.
We’ve probably stopped forgiving not because we don’t know what it means, but because we do know. We have no real basis for canceling debts, and we refuse to lie. We move on instead.
What would happen in our relationships if our own debts were canceled, and if we canceled each other’s debts on the basis of Christ’s payment? Christianity would happen.
First Teaching Experiences in Penang
June 29th, 2010 § 1 Comment
by Matthew Raley
On Sunday, I preached in an international church in Penang, the beginning of an intense week of speaking.
The church meets in a hotel ballroom, and is a diverse group, reflecting the variety of people who live here. I met a professor from Sarawak, on the island of Borneo, a Malaysian Chinese who had been a student in the U.S., a South African couple, and several Canadians and Indians. There was also an American student who had grown up in Penang, but is now attending Simpson University, just an hour north of my home.
It was especially encouraging to see the open communication in this body of believers. There was a time of testimony in response to my sermon that set the tone for many conversations afterward. People hung around to talk for quite a while — always a good sign for a church.
This morning, I spoke for about five hours at Malaysian Baptist Theological Seminary, with some short breaks. I did the first four sessions of my class on story-telling and biblical literature, and also preached in chapel.
My students are superb. They are Chinese, Korean, and Indian, with one American — all ages, men and women. I am impressed by their understanding of the art of teaching, of the English language, and above all of the Bible. Right away they were asking pointed, informed, and perceptive questions. I haven’t had such a good time teaching in a long, long while.
My sermon in chapel was my first experience speaking through a translator (Chinese). It took me a while to get the rhythm of it, but by the middle I felt that Miss Koh Tan Peng and I were working smoothly. The place was packed with people from all over the world, and Bridget and I were given a warm welcome.
Three things were of great help to me today: water, air-conditioning, and immediate unity with this body of believers.
What is Rebellion’s Target?
May 19th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
by Matthew Raley
As a parent, I find it easy to think that my boys are rebelling against my rules. They don’t like the limits I set, so they try to overturn them.
Until recently I have read the stories of Israel’s rebellions against the Lord from the same perspective. The people hated the law, so they disregarded it. My misconception could stem from the definition of rebellion: it is the overthrow of authority. So the target of rebellion would seem to be law.
Yet, when Moses writes his song of witness against Israel’s rebellions (Deuteronomy 31-32), the law of God is only a secondary focus.
Here is the song’s theme (32:4): “The Rock, his work is perfect, for all his ways are justice. A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and upright is he.” This teaching about the Lord’s name (32:1-3) should “drop as the rain” and “distill as the dew, like gentle rain upon the tender grass.” The knowledge of God’s faithfulness renews the nation’s life, keeping it tender and green.
The witness Moses writes is not first concerned with the nation’s sin, but with God’s faithfulness.
Moses sings of it both in the past and the future.
The Lord found Jacob “in a desert land, and in the howling waste of the wilderness.” There the Lord kept Jacob “as the apple of his eye,” leading him into the fruitful land (32:10-14).
The Lord’s faithfulness will not change in coming generations, even after Jacob rebels against him. As a contrast to helpless idols (32:36-43), the Lord will “vindicate his people and have compassion on his servants.” God proclaims, “See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god beside me.” Ultimately, he “cleanses,” or atones for, the land.
Here is what I learned from the song about rebellion’s target. Moses does not charge the people with rebelling against law, but against grace.
To be sure, Israel has broken God’s law, and no man can itemize the trespasses in greater detail than Moses. Yet Moses charges the people with rebellion against the Lord’s protection (32:11), guidance (32:12), and material gifts (32:13-14). He portrays the Lord as jealous, like a spurned lover (32:21). Israel’s rebellion is perverse, in other words, because the people cast aside God’s goodness.
This means that the four characteristics of rebellion all target God’s faithfulness. Idolatry says that the living God cannot be trusted because we cannot manipulate him. The principal lies rebels tell are slanders against God’s record of goodness. Rebels scoff at God’s gifts, especially his forgiveness. A rebel’s refusal to listen is driven by his bitter determination that God is against him.
Studying Moses’ song has clarified my focus as a dad.
Rules matter. But I am not to be focused on them primarily. I am to call on my boys to trust me, and I am to demonstrate trustworthiness.
For instance, I have been deliberate about keeping my promises to the boys. But I want to go further. I want to gain their implicit confidence. I do this by taking the initiative to help them with problems, not just waiting for them to ask for help. I also nurture this confidence by helping them express themselves when they’re having trouble, and by paying careful attention to their emotions. I want them to assume that I am for them, not against them.
Here’s what I’ve found in applying this focus. When my boys trust me, the rules usually aren’t an issue for them. They tend to comply readily.
In other words, this approach is a way to teach obedience toward God in faith. In Christ, God’s authority is expressed toward us through grace.
Rebellion and Stubbornness
May 12th, 2010 § 2 Comments
by Matthew Raley
We’ve been seeing that the sin of rebellion is, at its core, a refusal to deal with reality.
Moses’ description of Israel in Deuteronomy 31-32 shows a nation unwilling to worship the real God, serving only their imagined deities. They were unwilling to face the real past and present truthfully, but fabricated bitter histories. And they were unwilling to face life with humility, preserving a deluded superiority with scoffing.
The fourth characteristic of rebellion in Deuteronomy is foolish obstinacy. Repeated experience of reality will not turn Israel from folly.
Moses calls the people “stubborn” (31:27), noting that their rebellion during his life will only intensify after his death. In his song, he dramatizes their refusal to listen, calling them “foolish and senseless,” and pleading (32:6-7), “[A]sk you father, and he will show you, your elders, and they will tell you.”
Yet again, this is a quality all too familiar in the nation’s history.
The Lord called the people “stiff-necked” after they made the golden calf (Exodus 32:9). Nothing had changed by Ezekiel’s time. The Lord warned him (Ezekiel 3:7), “But the house of Israel will not be willing to listen to you, for they are not willing to listen to me. Because all the house of Israel have a hard forehead and a stubborn heart.”
Again, the logic of rebellion dictates this attitude. No rebel can admit having learned from anyone except himself. To learn from experience would be to admit that he was wrong. To listen to others would be to admit that their priorities matter. To be taught, by definition, is to be turned from one’s own way. None of these things are tolerable.
The rebel would rather self-destruct than submit.
Now, there is an important consideration for a parent in this regard. I worry about a child who has no fight.
One of the biggest reasons I am against authoritarian parenting systems that emphasize compliance — systems like Michael Pearl’s, for example — is that they are designed to break a child’s will. Not soften. Break. That is why Pearl describes his system in terms of conditioning animals.
It doesn’t take too much acquaintance with life to realize that a child is going to need his or her will to be strong. Adults have to make decisions, and make their decisions stick. Christ calls us to persevere against the world’s constant wickedness. A Christian’s duty is frequently to stand alone.
In light of this, I am not raising compliant boys. I am fortifying their wills for the days ahead, when they will need every last bit of resolution for godliness.
Is there a difference between resolution and obstinacy?
I believe there is. I’ve noticed that resolute people are able to persist in moving toward their goals because they adapt. They are profound learners, and quick listeners. That is, they do not ignore reality, but find real ways around real barriers.
A resolute leader such as Lincoln offers a good example. He refused to consider any outcome of the Civil War but restoring the Union. But in his drive toward that goal, he adapted to circumstances constantly. He changed his generals, maintained political coalitions, and managed the timing of such pronouncements as the Emancipation Proclamation. He adapted.
So how do we foster a resolve that is tempered by a willingness to learn?
Teaching a high view of God is the answer once again. When our children are taught to listen to him, to learn his ways, and to pursue his goals, they inherit a balance of traits than can only come from reverence. Our awe of God teaches us both what is yet to be learned and what must never be compromised.
Next week, we’ll discover from Deuteronomy what may be the most important point of all about rebellion.
Rebellion and Idolatry
April 14th, 2010 § 3 Comments
by Matthew Raley
Rebellion in a child is not a phase, and it doesn’t just happen. Rebellion is the sin of disregarding or overthrowing authority, and as we saw last week, it is the convergence of four patterns.
These four are on display in Deuteronomy 31-32, where Israel’s past and future rebellions are confronted. In chapter 31, the Lord commands Moses to draft a written witness against Israel to set beside the ark of the covenant. Chapter 32 contains the witness itself, a song about the Lord’s faithfulness and the nation’s twisted response.
Let’s think in more detail about the first pattern described in these chapters, idolatry.
After Moses’s death, the Lord says (31:16), Israel “will rise and whore after the foreign gods among them . . . .” The sexual metaphor captures the intimacy of Israel’s coming betrayal: having taken God’s faithful love the people will reject any bond with him.
Moses dramatizes this unfaithfulness in the song of witness (32:16-18). “They stirred him to jealousy with strange gods . . . They sacrificed to demons that were no gods, to gods they had never known, to new gods that had come recently.”
Rebellion through idolatry has been characteristic of Israel throughout Moses’s life. Most notoriously, the nation made the golden calf at Sinai (Exodus 32:1-6), calling it by the Lord’s name and proclaiming that it had brought them out of Egypt. Israel also worshiped Baal of Peor in Moab (Number 25:1-5).
Israel’s idolatry after Moses is well-documented in the Old Testament. The prophet Ezekiel, whom the Lord called to “nations of rebels” (Ezekiel 2:3), offers an important reference point. He gave repeated descriptions of the nation’s whoring after false gods, with abominations even brought into the temple (8:7-18). Inside, “engraved on the wall all around, was every form of creeping things and loathsome beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel.”
So Israel’s rebellion both under Moses and after him consistently involved the worship of false gods.
The close association between the scriptural concepts of rebellion and idolatry is no accident. Rebellion has a perverse logic. The Bible’s God is sovereign, making submission to him the only option. For the rebel to gain control of his life, he must fabricate a new god, a pliable deity whom he can manipulate through rituals and rationalizations. A woman who was leaving her husband put this rationale to me quite succinctly: “My god wants me to be free.”
People often grow up treating God like he’s made of Legos.
There’s a pile of ideas of about God on the carpet, and your job is to assemble God out of them. So you try different ideas and see how God looks. If an idea about God’s justice doesn’t work for you, it’s like a black Lego that looks out of place. Pull it off and try a red one, a piece of mercy perhaps, and see if it doesn’t look better. Or if a Bible verse seems like a “hard saying” to you, it’s nothing more than a block that’s too big. The Bible has other verses. Find a smaller block.
Whatever. They’re your Legos.
If you want to nurture your child in a way that prevents rebellion, that first thing you have to do is teach him about idolatry. Train him that the real God does not conform to his imagination.
"Head of Buddha," ca. 4th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art
One summer when Dylan was 2 years old, we stopped in Ashland, Oregon, one of neo-paganism’s many little pleasure domes. In a store, I noticed a wall full of Buddhas and a sampling of Hindu gods. I walked Dylan over to a shelf at his eye-level, got down on one knee, pointed to a fat and happy Siddhartha, and said, “Son, this is an idol. Many people believe this is a god.”
Knitted eyebrows.
“People pray to him, and even bring him food.”
Laughter.
I pointed at the whole wall of shelves. “This store sells idols.”
I did this more than once when Dylan was small. He is now 9, and has a deep aversion to idols. The other night, I was reading him The Lightning Thief, the well-written series opener by Rick Riordan that treats Greek mythology as if it were happening today. We enjoyed it enormously. After I closed the book, he knitted his eyebrows and said, “I can’t understand why anyone would pray to those gods.”
When we instill the truth early that God is God, and will not yield His being to the human imagination, we are building powerful categories for discerning reality from fantasy. Further, we are teaching a child to yield to reality — the one thing a rebel will never do.
