Not Of This World

There's a worship song we sometimes sing at church with an ambiguous lyric. It goes like this: You unravel me with a melody You surround me with a song Of deliverance from my enemies 'Til all my fears are gone I'm no longer a slave to fear I am a child of God (No Longer Slaves, Bethel Music) listen to it here It's a beautiful song--I really like it--but ever since I noticed it was ambiguous, I haven't been able to enjoy it.  The ambiguous part is the a slave to fear . It happens to be ambiguous because both to  and fear  can belong to two different parts of speech. To  can be a non-finite marker or a preposition, while fear  can be either a noun or a verb. The intended meaning is I'm no longer a slave of fear . That is, that I've been set free from fear.  The idea of freedom from slavery goes hand-in-hand with salvation in the Bible. A s I discussed in the post from a couple of weeks ago,  the Israelites del...

One Christian doctrine that sets it apart from other religions is that of the Trinity. The idea here is that there is one God that is made up of three Persons--the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. They are each distinct, with their own characteristics, but also unified as one. An analogy I've heard to explain it is the three parts of the egg--the white, the yolk, and the shell, and how they are each separate, but they all come together to make just one egg.  One consequence of this is that God has as a fundamental characteristic the value, desire, and even need for community. But that need is fulfilled within Himself, since He, in His very essence, is Three. When John writes, " God is love " (1 John 4:8b), he hints at this idea, since one cannot love without something to love.  And as so very often happens where there is love, the love overflows: " Then God said, 'Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion...

Yesterday was Palm Sunday, which means that this week is probably the most important week in the Christian faith--the week leading up to Easter. So that is what I am going to write about today. This is how the story goes... Jesus had been traveling and preaching throughout Israel for about three years, and all this time, the religious Jewish leaders (called the Pharisees) were getting all worked up about him. They had been grumbling about Jesus for a while, but things were getting bad:  "Then the chief priests and the Pharisees  called a meeting  of the Sanhedrin. ' What are we accomplishing?' they asked. 'Here is this man performing many signs.   If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our temple and our nation.'   [...]   So from that day on they plotted to take his life.  Therefore Jesus no longer moved about publicly among the people of Judea.  Instead he withd...

There are a lot of paradoxes in the Bible, and one of them is the opposition between love and justice. Last week, I wrote of God's love, which is such an essential part of his character that John once wrote "God is love" (1 John 4:8b NIV). On the other hand, God is just.  Both of these qualities culminate in the story of Easter, which is celebrated in just a couple of weeks.  "He is the Rock,  his works are perfect,      and all his ways are just. A faithful God  who does no wrong,          upright  and just is he." (Deuteronomy 32: 4 NIV) Love and justice are inherently in opposition with each other. If, for example, someone steals something, the loving thing to do would be to forgive them and move on, while the just thing would be for them to be punished for taking something that is not theirs.  But both sides are needed.  I'm sure you have seen in the news stories of people who do not get con...