But One Needs Water Before Wine

As my first week of classes wraps up, I understand what how rock feels after dynamite has done it's work. My mind is being blown.
I look around at all these other "top-of-the-class" students around me, and I feel a mutual humility, like a group of self-perceived geniuses learning we are actually hamsters. In all our previous efforts, we thought we were drinking the nectar of the gods, when we were lapping at water bottles in wire cages.
So I approach the year with a dogged determination to learn. I intend to discern, and catch my blind spots by running into walls. With that hopeful, humbled approach to being a back-boned interpreter, I share a few quotes from my profs from the first week. Enjoy.

Jon Laansma (Hermeneutics & N.T. Exegesis prof)

"Presuppostions are not a bad thing; we have to have them. We just need to get better ones."

"The goal of this course is not to kill your passion for Scripture and make it a frog for you to dissect on a table. The goal is the wisdom of God and the edification of the church."

"The way of knowing something must conform to the thing itself."

"Despite modernism's assertions, ontology precedes epistemology. We exist (in relationship) and thus we know." (parentheses mine)

Nicholas Perrin (N.T. Theology)

"I value good writing. To say that content is more important than form is bad Christology, I think."

Holy Malcontent

Comfort is poison to growth. Progress, and especially progress in the faith, is not made from a Lay-Z Boy. It is made with sweat, tears, and sometimes blood. A toddler learning to walk falls and gets bruised. A 7-year old taking off his training wheals for the first time falls and gets abrasions. A teenager trying to stick an ollie or sweet half-pipe landing falls and breaks a bone.
And so it is with your growth in faith. Put some elbow-grease into it, get dirty and bloody, and work out your salvation. And you know you can work it out successfully, since God is the one working in you. In other words, He is the power behind your work, the generator to your light bulb, and what better assurance could you have that your work will succeed?
Do not be content with comfortable.

Not A Spectre, Nor A Circus Act

I have often wondered why, in Paul's Ephesian command to be drunk on the Spirit ("Here, here, I'll drink to that!) that the first means he proffers for acquiring this holy inebriation is by "addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart." That seems like a very loud and public thing to do.

It is ever the nature of us dyed-in-the-wool, conservative, "rightly-dividing" types to be cautious when it comes to the Pentecostal movement. It simply will not do to be excessive, and if one were to throw out a red herring here, it would be in the form of a dog-barking, aisle-storming Benny Hinn circus act (analogous to denouncing literature because Twilight was published). And with our caution we tend to let pendulum's momentum carry us, so that we become very wary of too much talk of this "Holy Ghost," or as Francis Chan calls him, our "forgotten God."

But it is by the Spirit that we can put to death the misdeeds of the body (to steal another Pauline segment), and it is
And it is very interesting the sort of power a good anthem has.

Consider 2 Chronicles 20. Here, the righteous king Jehoshaphat has a host of enemies descending on him, and his first reaction is the right one. He did not call his banners and ride forth immediately to meet the threat, he did not send out spies and backstabbers to infiltrate and rot his enemies from within. No, rather, he "was afraid and set his face to seek the LORD, and proclaimed a fast throughout all Judah." He sought Yahweh and got everyone else to do it too. He prays before God for righteous judgment, and God (ponder this) sends His Spirit to let them know that He knows who is righteous and who is not up in this mess, and He's gonna dispense some holy butt-kicking. So they get the army together go out the next day, and Jehoshaphat " appointed those who were to sing to the LORD and praise him in holy attire, as they went before the army, and say,

"Give thanks to the LORD,
for his steadfast love endures forever."

Do you see what happened there? He sent the singers before the army. Who does that? Surely a good troubadour has a better use than arrow fodder. In a normal battle, if armies clashed with singers between them, the singers would only squish, and contribute nothing to their side. So when does it make sense to send the singers before the army? The answer; when you're not the one doing the fighting. When God is on your side, song becomes a weapon, and singing a part of spiritual warfare.

So sing when your heart dims, when your sins burden you, when He seems far. Sing boisterously and often.

And don't sing Lady Gaga.