Mark by R.C. Sproul

This book is essentially a collection of sermons working through the Gospel of Mark verse by verse. It’s a sort of light touch commentary.

It does what it says on the tin really well. If you want someone to preach the entire Gospel of Mark to you in book form, look no further than this one. Each passage is included in the text together with, as you’d expect, sermon illustrations and points for application throughout.

I want to say this is a good book, but to be honest I’m not really sure who I’d recommend it to. It’s certainly not an academic work and doesn’t try to be a detailed exegetical commentary, but the sheer scale of it I think makes it a but daunting for a casual read. Perhaps it would work well as part of a daily devotional or something.

Sproul does well not to repeat himself too often so it can work simply as a book to read. In short, if this sounds like the sort of book you’d like to read, I think you would.

I got this book for free from Reformation Trust Publishing in exchange for an honest review.

ONE – the Gospel According to Mike by Michael Williams

This is an awful book.

Ok, perhaps that’s a bit unfair; I’ve read worse, but not much worse. On with the review.

The subtitle of the book (The Gospel According to Mike) is spot on. The gospel presented in this book is certainly according to Mike. Reading the introduction you might be tricked into believing that it’s the biblical account, but unfortunately that simply isn’t the case. I was hoping (again, from the introduction) that this was going to be a well-developed study of a topic I love: the Church is one new man in Christ. But I’m genuinely sorry to say that it is far and away the worst development of that idea I’ve ever seen, for two main reasons.

Firstly, and most importantly, Williams’ attitude to the Bible would be laughable if it wasn’t so tragic. In his eyes the New Testament is only useful as commentary on the Old Testament; apparently Paul says quite a lot of good stuff (when Paul agrees with Mike), but the other authors got quite a bit wrong. It’s lucky Mike’s around to correct them. He misquotes Scripture (spends half a chapter talking about what ‘the lion will lie down with the lamb’ means – that isn’t in my Bible). He adds his own words to make Scripture says what he wants it to say. He ignores Scripture’s own interpretation of events and adds his own interpretation because the Bible authors didn’t really understand what was happening.

Secondly, Williams’ misrepresentation of Christianity is embarrassing. After discovering this ‘true gospel’ he apparently searched for five years, but couldn’t find one single person who believed it – alarm bells should have been ringing by this point! For Mike, evangelical Christianity is characterised by ‘Word of Faith’, prosperity gospel preachers, people who evangelical Christians would most likely distance themselves from. He ridicules anyone who doesn’t agree with him, saying that the only Christians he respects are members of Westboro Baptist Church (again, alarm bells) because Christians demand that everyone must agree with them. Which is sort of what he is saying in this book anyway.

If I’m being honest here, there were some little nuggets of usefulness in this book. Some of his observations are alright, but all I’d recommend this for is a training course in discernment. One example of this would be Williams’ ridiculing of Christians who believe that the rainbow showed God’s mercy for all humanity at the flood (i.e. not just believers). He clearly misses the point that the flood killed everyone except those on whom God’s grace rested (i.e. believers).

In short, please don’t buy this book. I got it for free from SpeakEasy in return for an honest review.

The Grace of God by Andy Stanley

Well, a book about grace. In terms of theological areas it’s tempting to think that this one’s been covered already, but the author admits this in the introduction and is pretty humble about it, which sets a good tone for the rest of the book. It’s split into two parts which roughly reflect the Old and New Testaments, each chapter of which retells a particular Bible story (e.g. creation, Joseph, King David, Matthew), with a particular (and healthy) focus on how the grace of God is demonstrated.

Being reminded about the grace of God is one of those things that you think you know enough about because you’ve heard it all, until you actually spend time looking at it again. It’s probably been less than a year since I read a book about grace but I found this one to be a refreshing way of communicating it. Stanley has the ability to tell familiar stories in a way which highlights things you might not have spotted the first time in a way that’s easy to read and can bring you close to laughter or tears.

It’s written very simply, so is ideal for new Christians or those of us who are less academic, but doesn’t get particularly meaty with its theology so if you’re more an N.T. Wright than Rick Warren reader the chances are that you won’t feel like you get that much out of it, although I expect you’d find it a good read anyway.

I’d recommend this to most Christians to be honest. It’s difficult to read it and not identify areas of your life you don’t want to change, and that for me is a good thing. I’d definitely give it to a churchgoer who wasn’t that into Christianity. But I’d probably hesitate before recommending this to a non-Christian – it doesn’t quite have that evangelistic edge in my personal opinion.

I got this book for free from BookSneeze.com. I’m not required to give a positive review.

When to get baptised

English: Baptism of Christ (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’m not sure what’s happened but everywhere I look at the moment someone seems to be talking about credos and paedos.

Yes, I know. People who believe that infants should be baptised have historically been called paedobaptists, and someone somewhere thought it would be a good idea to shorten that to paedos. No points for you. Credobaptists believe that only believers should be baptised. And holding either position requires that you think the others are wrong, plain and simple.

Here’s where the problem comes in; only one of the following is true:

• Baptism is the New Testament version of circumcision in the Old Testament (OT). Children born under the OT were circumcised, so kids born to Christian parents should be baptised.
• Baptism is a required response to demonstrate our faith. Kids aren’t born with a Christian faith, so shouldn’t be baptised.

It can’t be both. If the first is true then Christian parents are being disobedient to God by not having their kids baptised, and if the second is true then having kids baptised is a waste of time at best, and a heretical practice of works righteousness at worst.

A couple of Bible quotes to muddy the waters (no pun intended):

In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. (Colossians 2:11-12)

We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. (Romans 6:4)

For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. (Galatians 3:27)

Baptism, which corresponds to [Noah's Ark], now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ (1 Peter 3:21)

From a biblical perspective baptism seems to be important then! It would appear that it’s through baptism that we’re united by faith in Christ, saved from the wrath of God by his death and raised to new life by his resurrection. It’s not enough to say baptism just represents something (often the stance taken by credobaptists), but it’s very difficult to align these passages with the paedobaptist view seeing as the Bible’s very clear that salvation is by grace, through faith…and newborns don’t have that.

So here’s my twofold conclusion. (1) I think believers’ baptism fits the Bible passages better. (2) Baptism is far more important than it’s often made out to be.

If you’re logical, you should be a Christian

English: Photo of Bart D. Ehrman taken following the Greer-Heard Point-Counterpoint Forum at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If Wikipedia is to be believed, Bart Ehrman is a New Testament scholar who became a Christian as a teenager before ultimately changing his views and becoming agnostic (read: atheist) due to the problems of evil and suffering. He’s now pretty well-known among apologists as a more reasonable version of Richard Dawkins.

It’s no surprise, therefore, to see him in a debate about the existence of Jesus, who he states was a real human being, but is not God. Andrew Wilson over at WYTM has handily picked out the most useful quotes, so I’m not just going to copy-paste them here, but here’s the summary for you time-starved individuals who can’t be bothered to even read a summary:

• Where multiple unconnected individuals recall the same version of events, the likelihood of it being true increases exponentially; they couldn’t have all made it up.
• The bias of these accounts has no bearing on the situation (in any case, all accounts of the truth are biased to a certain extent).
• Therefore, Jesus Christ, attested to in multiple sources both in and not in the Bible, both Christian and non-Christian, must have existed.

The problem for Bart Ehrman, it would seem, comes up when you use his own logic on Jesus’ miracles. Here are Andrew Wilson’s words:

The fact that [these multiple sources] provided independent, multiple attestation of all sorts of events (healings, multiplication of loaves, casting out demons, the empty tomb and the resurrection appearances) would clearly indicate that the writers of those sources had not invented them. Interesting.

Presumably, the fact that these events both involved “miracles” and supported Christian belief might bother Bart Ehrman, and lots of other New Testament scholars, on the basis of their materialist presuppositions. But that would not stop them from having happened. As historians, the variety of independent sources available should lead them, and us, to conclude that these things were not invented. That this might be inconvenient for the secularist’s worldview is irrelevant, historiographically.

So there you have it. Bart Ehrman, like most secular moderns, does not believe Jesus rose from the dead. But, on the basis of his own argument, he probably should.

Indeed.

No, I was not like!

Photograph of the debating chamber of the British House of Commons in the Palace of Westminster, London, looking north-east (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’ll surprise no-one (and that really says something) that I just overheard someone’s phone conversation:

…and he was like, ‘what are you looking at?’ And so I was like, ‘nothing,’ but he was like ‘it looks like you’re watching that guy.’

Now, here’s the thing: in conversation this seems fine, but written down it’s a bit odd. Can you imagine reading a newspaper and reading:

In the House of Commons today the Prime Minister stood up and was like ‘here’s our new bill,’ but the Shadow Chancellor was like, ‘that’s a silly idea.’

But my prediction is that over the course of the next generation this is just going to become an accepted part of the human language; to say something ‘was like’ will somewhat replace saying ‘he said.’

Stranger things have happened.

Just a little idea, I suppose. Language just changes, but without knowing what something meant when it was written it can be difficult to understand it. The Bible was written over a very long period, a very long time ago, and some bits of it were difficult to understand even at the time (just look at 2 Peter 3:16!) – when we read the Bible we should be asking these questions in this order:

1. What does the passage mean?
2. What did it mean at the time?
3. What should I do as a result?

Is God mean or loving?

Image via Wikipedia

I can remember studying Christianity in my RE class at school, and being told that the God presented in the Old Testament is this mean, judgmental God of fire and brimstone, but that He must have gone on holiday for a couple of hundred years and apparently came back a changed, more left-wing God for the New Testament. Old Testament = Mean God, New Testament = Tolerant God.

And the first Christians I properly got into conversations with tended to confirm this – I was pointed to Jesus’ words that the Old Testament teaching of ‘an eye for an eye’ was being replaced by ‘love your enemies’. It was only last week that a friend of mine told me that ‘God learned to love’.

Well done everyone.

No, sorry, I just don’t buy it. In the opening chapters of the Bible Adam and Eve just completely lose it and disobey God, then lie about it and blame one another. The God of Wrath we’ve been told about doesn’t fly off the handle, he prepares clothes for them. A couple of chapters later we see that the entire population of the world was caught in an orgy of sin and evil but that God poured out undeserved grace on Noah’s family to preserve humanity in the face of the coming floods.

This theme of grace is repeated throughout every story in the Old Testament – it would seem that the God of Wrath is some fictional character rather than the actual Christian God. No wonder Dawkins hates him so much, he doesn’t sound very nice at all but thankfully is a figment of our imagination.

But I don’t think that the idea I was given of the God of Tolerance is much closer to the truth either! In the New Testament we see Ananias and Sapphira killed on the spot for lying about how much money they gave to the church, and Jesus seems to have something about casting out unfaithful servants to places of darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth…so the God who simply accepts everyone as they are seems to be a fictional character too.

Is it possible that God is actually completely holy, righteous and just, and can’t bear sin in His presence or among His people so promises to punish sinners for stepping even ever-so-slightly off the mark, yet would sort the whole problem of sin out in one action through the grace-fuelled punishment of his only Son as a substitute sin-bearer and redeemer for anyone who believes? Well, that doesn’t sound like either of the false gods presented in my RE class.

But He sounds a whole lot better in every way.

Presumption, presumption, presumption

Cover of True Women

Presumption is generally seen as a bad thing, but in truth we all presume something to a certain extent. And presumption on its own is certainly not bad, it’s only bad if it’s incorrect.

So Andrew Wilson has acknowledged that he has presumptions when it comes to his view on women as elders (i.e. that women shouldn’t be elders). But he’s then laid his presumptions out for all to see, critique and comment. They’re available over here, where a little conversation has started, but here they are in summary form:

1. We should presume the Bible is true for everyone until it’s proven it’s only true for some (e.g. ‘fetch the parchments’ 2 Tim 4:13).
2. We should presume that 2,000 years of history is more correct than 20 years of societal change until proven otherwise.
3. We should presume that specific teaching in the Bible is of great importance.
4. We should presume that teaching in the Bible is compatible, however incompatible it may seem.
5. We should presume that if two Christians hold different positions from the same Bible passage, the most counter-cultural is the best.

Obviously he unpacks it all in his original post but hopefully that should give you a flavour.

Half of what I believe is probably a plain lie

Check this out. The following stories I was taught in History class are actually lies, made up by various people to make the heroes out to be more important than they were:

Christopher Columbus never ‘proved that the world was round’. At the time he sailed west it had already been mathematically proven. In fact, everyone educated knew that the world was larger than Columbus thought it was, but he was so stubborn he just called the people he met Indians anyway. Good work, great historical figure.

Sir Walter Raleigh wasn’t nearly as chivalrous as the books tell us – he pretty much definitely didn’t cover a puddle with his coat, and introducing the potato to Europe had happened ages before he went off on his merry journies.

There are more (a bit more relevant to American readers) over here, but there’s something oh-so-slightly concerning that I was taught these as fact, and have just blindly believed them ever since. Surely the best way we could know that what we believe about history is true would be if:

1. we had direct access to texts actually written at the time
2. the copies we had access to were as close to the originals as possible
3. other texts from the same period in history don’t disagree with them

Agreed? Sounds logical to me.

Turns out that using the above criteria, the New Testament is the best record of historical facts we have, by about 25,000%.

Proverbs 2:6-8

Image via Wikipedia

‘For the LORD gives wisdom; from his mouth come knowledge and understanding; he stores up sound wisdom for the upright; he is a shield to those who walk in integrity, guarding the paths of justice and watching over the way of his saints.’ (Proverbs 2:6-8)

For

There are certain words in the Bible which should sound alarm bells in our minds; ‘for’ is one of them. We can’t understand this passage properly unless we understand what this is ‘for’. Reading Proverbs 2:1-5, as we did last week, we find out that God has promised wisdom to those who seek it, if only we put our trust in Him; it’s almost too simple to communicate. And these verses tell us why it is that simple.

The LORD

Reason one that we can know that wisdom will come our way is down to who God is. Read the passage above and it’s clear that it’s all about God. We can know that verses 1-5 are true because God has said so: ‘the LORD gives wisdom’. If God wants us to be wise, we will be wise. It’s the same with His mercy: ‘I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.’ (Exodus 33:19, Romans 9:15) This doesn’t take anything away from our free will, it simply underlines God’s almighty power and control.

His people

But there is a bit of a flaw in our logic. We have assumed that we are the ones who receive wisdom, but where have we got this idea from? Reading this verse it’s clear that God’s talking about a particular kind of person: ‘the upright,’ ‘those who walk in integrity,’ and ‘saints’. If my personal record is anything to go by I am extremely likely to sin today, tomorrow, and every day for the rest of my life. I’m not upright, I don’t walk in integrity, and I am certainly not a saint! This seems to be bad news – that wisdom is not for me after all.

But we have the joy of seeing the Old Testament through the lens of the New Testament, and it all eventually comes back to the fact that God is in control. As much as many want it to be true, our receipt of wisdom and mercy is not down to us working hard and doing well! The apostle Paul is always good at summing this up:

‘For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. For the Scripture says, “Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.” For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him. For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”’ (Romans 10:10-13)

Our qualification as ‘upright’ or as ‘saints’ is not down to our own efforts, but down to whether or not we have called on His name! This is the same message that we have been seeing throughout Proverbs: wisdom does not begin by opening an encyclopoedia, it begins with fear of the LORD. As we humble ourselves before Him, then we will be given the qualifications we need to begin on the path of wisdom. Glory to God for His grace.