The last couple weeks have been pretty crazy; I’m hoping that things will clear out a bit for the next couple. We had a big meeting today at the church which took a lot of time and mental energy for preparation, and which I think went fairly well; we’re dealing with the big questions of identity and vision, working towards developing a ministry plan for the next 3-5 years, so there’s a lot on the line here, but I think we made a good start on it. We just need to keep praying and thinking and trust God to lead us.If the pace does slow a little, one thing I want to do is catch back up with various blogs. Hap, for instance, has been doing some interesting work on Psalm 119, working through the acrostic; and most recently, she has a remarkable post up titled “healing, community, and the poverty of availability.” It’s a valuable rumination on the cost of being available to others, and why even ministry must be held in balance with the rest of life; as such, after a week like this, it’s just what I needed to read. I commend it to your careful consideration.
Monthly Archives: January 2009
The Mission to the Nations
(Isaiah 41:1-20, Matthew 5:13-16)
Having made his case to his people in the passage we read last week, God now turns through his prophet to address the peoples of the world; and he does so with a trope that Isaiah seems to have been quite fond of—the court scene. We’ll see it more than once during this series. We have the summons in the first verse—the NIV doesn’t quite get the full import here: “Come before me in silence, you islands! Let the peoples renew their strength!” “Islands” here represents the peoples at the farthest edges of the known world—one of many indications, by the way, that this prophecy was given through a prophet who lived in Israel, not in Babylon; this is the language of a coastal people. “Come, all you peoples, even the most distant, and let me renew your strength.” God is offering the same gift to all the nations that he has offered to his chosen people, if they will only accept it, and so he summons them to come to him for mishpat.
Now, mishpat is the word the NIV translates “judgment” here, and that’s not really a very good translation; when we hear that, we think of passing sentence, and that’s not what this word is on about. Mishpat is another one of those loaded Old Testament words; it’s the word we usually translate “justice,” but even that doesn’t go far enough to help us understand the concept here. This isn’t just about punishing those who do wrong, or giving people what they deserve, which is what we tend to think of when we think of justice; it’s much larger than that. The Old Testament scholar Paul Hanson, who has studied the word closely, defines it as “the order of compassionate justice that God has created and upon which the wholeness of the universe depends.” It’s not just concerned with one country, or a set of laws, or even just with human beings, but with the whole world. This is because “the chaos or harmony that results from disobedience or obedience affects the entire universe . . . human history and natural phenomena alike.” Mishpat, God’s justice, is the restoration of the original created order of the universe, when “everything was right, just, whole, in accordance with God’s perfect will.”
The problem is, the nations do not have mishpat—which is both to say that they don’t act with justice, in accordance with God’s perfect will, and that they don’t have the blessing of God’s justice, they don’t experience the rightness of God’s just order, and the peace that goes with it. Thus God extends an invitation to them: if they will come to him and accept his authority, taking their proper place in the ordering of creation, bowing their heads to his justice, they will experience the blessing of that justice in the peace of God and the renewal of their strength. As Sara noted, what we’re seeing here is the same thing we see in John 3:17: God acts in the world—through Israel, through his prophets, ultimately in Jesus Christ, and then through us—not because he wants to condemn the world, but because he wants to redeem and restore it.
Of course, if he’s going to convince the nations of the reality of his offer, God must naturally prove his case; he must demonstrate to the peoples of the world as he has demonstrated to Israel and Judah that he has the power to do what he promises to do. Enter, then, for the first time, the great Persian conqueror Cyrus—still unnamed, as yet; as yet, we have only the sound of his approach. “Who has stirred up one from the east,” he asks, “whom Righteousness calls to his service? He hands nations over to him and makes him dominate kings.” We get a picture of the unstoppable swiftness of Cyrus’ conquest, which we can see more clearly if we drop the “before” from verse 3: Cyrus’ armies blow through the armies of his enemies with such force that they remain unscathed, moving so swiftly that it’s as if their feet never even touch the ground. And who has made this happen? “I have,” says the Lord, “I who am the first and the last.”
In the face of this magnificent invitation, how do the nations respond? They run—not to God, but away from him, and to their idols. They see the conqueror’s approach, but instead of casting in their lot with the God who summoned him, they turn to their own gods to resist him; and so we have this picture of them encouraging each other and telling each other, “You’re doing a great job building that idol.” Once again, Isaiah makes the point that these people have to nail their idols down so that they won’t fall over, highlighting their utter powerlessness in the face of the living God.
Here, Isaiah also seems to emphasize the amount of work that goes into making an idol, both the heavy, rough work of molding and welding the thing and of forging the nails to hold it in place, and the delicate, skill-intensive work of plating it with gold; wouldn’t it be easier just to trust in God than to go to all that effort to avoid him? And if your gods are that dependent on their people for their very existence, are they really all that likely to do you any good? Consider this: where the God of Israel pronounces comfort and gives his people words of hope and assurance, the idols of the nations say nothing at all; their people are left to comfort themselves.
But though the nations fear the Lord and the approach of his conqueror, he makes it clear to his people that they have nothing to fear. “You are my servant,” he declares. “Don’t fear, for I am with you; don’t be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you—I will uphold you with my right hand. All those who oppose you will perish; though you are feeble, I will make you capable of overcoming any obstacle.” Human power failed the people of Israel and Judah time after time, because they were not a strong nation; and if we look at the history of the church, we can see that even when the church has been rich and powerful, human power has rarely done it any good, either. When the people of God act just like the world, we usually wind up getting whupped in the end (one way or another), because quite frankly, the world outguns us; but when we’re faithful to live as God wants us to live and to do what he calls us to do, it’s a very different story. For all this world’s power and all its accomplishments, as we saw last week, are utterly insignificant compared to God.
As are all the challenges with which it presents us. The picture shifts in verse 17 from weakness in the face of opposition to one of weakness in the face of adverse circumstances: the poor and helpless lost in the desert, searching desperately for water. God says, “I will cause rivers to flow where there is no water, and then springs to burst forth, until the barren desert is well-watered ground; and then out of the barren, hard-baked soil, I will raise trees for shade.” Water and shade—the two great needs for survival of anyone traveling in the desert; in the face of the adversities of life, God will provide what is necessary to deal with them, and to continue on the journey. Why? “So that they may know that the hand of the Lord has done this, that the Holy One of Israel has made it happen.” So that people will understand who is the redeemer, and who is able to provide for our needs.
And what is the point of all this? What is God’s agenda? It’s to reach the nations. It’s the purpose for which he chose Israel as his servant to begin with, that they might draw the nations to him, and it’s the broader purpose behind his deliverance of his people from exile. Yes, he’s doing it for their sake, but he’s also doing it to demonstrate his power to the nations. This is why he announces the coming of Cyrus the conqueror, and part of the reason he proclaims that Israel will return to their land—something which just didn’t happen; peoples who were conquered and dragged away disappeared from history. The fact that Israel reappeared on the world scene in a meaningful way was an unusual event, to say the least. These promises God is making to his people, when they are fulfilled, are in part to give support to their assertion that their God is not as the gods of the nations, but that they alone worship the Lord and Creator of the Universe; for who else could possibly have the power to do such things? Certainly not Marduk of the Babylonians, or Ishtar of the Assyrians, both of which disappeared from history when the empires who worshiped them fell to the armies of the conqueror. Only the one true God can do what Isaiah here promises he will do.
The circumstances have changed, but God’s purpose has not: he still seeks to draw all the nations to himself, and he still seeks to use his people to do so; which means that this mission is, in part, ours. When Israel would not be a light to the nations, he sent his Son to be the light of the world, and his Son called us in turn to be the lamp to hold his light—so that when the world looks at us, they would see him shining through us. He made us the salt of the earth—and remember what we said about salt a few weeks ago: it’s always active, affecting anything it touches, purifying, preserving, flavoring—melting ice—and, yes, sometimes irritating. He has sent us out to be carriers of his grace and truth and love, to bring those into contact with everyone we meet, by the things we say and the way we say them and how we live our lives. And if we will go out as he sends us, though we will know difficulties, we will see God’s victory in the end.
Economics in its proper place
A while back, I put up a post riffing on Colossians 2 and asking, “What are the spirits our society accepts as the elemental powers that rule human destiny?” I didn’t have a lot of answers to that question, but the estimable Doug Hagler had a good one: “ECONOMICS.” In support of that, he offered a very interesting point, which hadn’t occurred to me before (emphasis mine):
Everyone treats economics as a science, which in our culture, means a truth-discerning and truth-telling method, when it is in fact a value system of subjective measurement.
I posted again, noting his penetrating observation and interacting with it a little more; and then a little while later, I ran across Kent Van Til’s article in Perspectives titled “Not Too Much Sovereignty for Economics, Please: Abraham Kuyper and Mainstream Economics.” Due to technical difficulties, I didn’t manage to get it posted at the time, and other things intervened. I did want to come back to it, though, because it’s a remarkable piece—particularly when considered in conjunction with Doug’s argument, because Dr. Van Til works with the idea that economists are primarily, not scientists, but storytellers offering an explanatory story of the world. As he notes, the promises they make for their story tend to go beyond what they can actually keep:
In spite of their role as writers of fiction . . . economists pretend to be physicists who deal only with empirical data. They also mainly talk about what has already happened because they aren’t necessarily great predictors—if they were, they’d all be rich.
Dr. Van Til’s analysis is of particular interest when he applies it to rational choice theory, pointing out that people cannot be reduced to “rationality” (and especially to one particular definition of what it means to be rational) and “efficiency.” As he argues, such a reductionistic understanding of human beings can only lead to injustice if left unchallenged; thus it is critically important to see ourselves as more than homo economicus, but with Abraham Kuyper to insist that
economics is not the only sphere of life, nor the only explanatory model of human action. The attempt by one sphere to suppress or dominate all the others must be resisted.
As such, Dr. Van Til writes,
We must urge that humans are more than individuals who rationally satisfy their preferences. We must insist that there really are sins and evils, not merely sub-optimal conditions or disequilibria. We must contend that all goods are not reducible to the one goal of utility. We must contest the notion that the ultimate meaning of the good is only a composite economic good for many individuals. And we must say that all grand narratives are ultimately foolish unless their denouement is found in Christ. That is simply to repeat after our Master that it makes no sense for us to gain the whole world but lose our souls.
So much for bipartisanship
It looks like the “stimulus” package coming out of DC is going to be a pure Democrat bill, not the bipartisan legislation some folks were talking about. Whether this is the bill Obama wanted and thus represents “the greatest head fake ever” from the Obama team (as some commentators think) or whether it represents a victory for hard-left Congressional Democrats over the incoming administration’s centrist economic team is unclear at this point; but it really doesn’t matter. On the first major vote of the next two years, it’s already crystal clear that bipartisanship is clean out the window. How Barack Obama responds will tell us whether his apparent move to the center will follow it.
These people deserve a medal
The emergency landing of US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River is a story which will not be soon forgotten, especially in New York; I suspect many people now know a lot more about bird strikes and the damage they can cause than they ever did before, and there are probably a lot more folks out there who know what FOD means than there were. (For those of you who don’t, it stands for “foreign object damage.”) What should be remembered longest, however, is the extraordinary job the captain and first officer of that Airbus A320 did to keep everyone alive. As the Wall Street Journal summarized the accomplishment,
The pilots of US Airways Flight 1549 achieved one of the rarest and most technically challenging feats in commercial aviation: landing on water without fatalities.Although commercial jetliners are equipped with life vests and inflatable slides, there have been few successful attempts at water landings during the jet age. Indeed, even though pilots go through the motions of learning to ditch a plane in water, the generally held belief is that such landings would almost certainly result in fatalities.
And yet, with their engines disabled by a flock of geese, Capt. Chesley Sullenberger and his FO were able to keep their plane in the air and their speed up long enough to maneuver around the skyscrapers of Manhattan and land safely in the Hudson. It was a remarkable technical and personal accomplishment, and I’m not kidding: they deserve a medal. Congress needs to get on that.
How cold is it?
That’s frost on the inside of our back door.
Meditation
My old InterVarsity staffworker, Joel Perry, posted this video on Facebook, and it’s so beautiful and meditative that I just had to share it. This is the Bulgarian National Choir singing Otche Nash (“Our Father”), a setting of the Lord’s Prayer by Nikolai Kedrov.
The ethics problems are supposed to wait until the administration starts
but so far, things aren’t working that way for the Obama administration. I’d figured the revelation that Treasury Secretary-designate Timothy Geithner had failed to pay his self-employment taxes from 2001-04 was pretty much irrelevant—it was carelessness, surely, but understandable, and besides, who was going to raise a fuss? The GOP certainly wouldn’t, since Geithner’s about the best nominee for the position that conservatives are likely to get; and as for the Senate Democrats, whether they like the nominee or not, there’s no way you can imagine them starting off Barack Obama’s first term by pinning that sort of tag on him.Unfortunately, it appears that Geithner’s carelessness was significantly greater than first reported. As John Hinderaker summarizes the matter,
IMF employees received additional compensation that was earmarked for their portion of FICA taxes. Their incomes were, as the IMF put it, “grossed up.” Thus, Geithner accepted “reimbursement” from the IMF for taxes that he didn’t pay. Not only that, he certified that he would pay the taxes.
Further, this was in the face of the fact that “the IMF took great care to explain to those employees, in detail and frequently, what their tax responsibilities were.” As such, Hinderaker concludes—rightly, I think—that this “represents a level of carelessness that is not going to be tolerated in a Treasury Secretary at this moment in history.” He adds that he expects Geithner’s nomination to be withdrawn. We’ll see.
The Democratic Congress as an elected dictatorship
Last August, I wrote this:
When I lived in Canada, I used to describe the Canadian government as an elected dictatorship. This is because Canada is a parliamentary democracy in which the standing rules of Parliament gave the Prime Minister an extraordinary amount of power to coerce and punish MPs (Members of Parliament) who don’t cooperate (I don’t believe that’s changed, but I can’t say for certain). As a consequence, the people of Canada elected the parliament every so often, thus determining who would be the PM, and the PM then pretty much ruled as dictator until the next election. To me, it seemed like rather a travesty of democracy (though to the Natural Governing Party, aka the Canadian Liberal Party, it seemed like a pretty good deal, at least during their long stretch in power).It appears, however, that Nancy Pelosi doesn’t share my opinion; judging by her behavior today, in which she attempted to use all the powers of her office to shut up a GOP challenge to her preferred policies, it seems she would like the same ability to dominate, manipulate, and otherwise control the House of Representatives that Jean Chrétien once wielded in the Parliament of Canada. Fortunately for us—and I do mean for all of us; if her tactics work, they might be good for the Democratic Party in the short run, but they’ll be bad for the nation in the medium and long run—some of the House GOP have been displaying unaccustomed backbone in the face of her political thuggery, refusing to go home like whipped curs with their tails between their legs. I particularly appreciated this line from Michigan Rep. Thaddeus McCotter: “This is the people’s House. This is not Pelosi’s politiburo.” Amen to that.
Now, Speaker Pelosi—and Harry Reid, her Senate counterpart—are taking parliamentary dictatorship to the next level. Indeed, they’ve pushed it so far that even the Washington Post is expressing disapproval. As the D.C. Examiner put it,
We know Democratic lawmakers have taken their bully-boy tactics too far when even The Washington Post worries about the lack of civility in the 111th Congress. As the Post notes, during the 110th Congress “Democrats brought more measures to the House floor under closed rules—permitting no amendments—than any of the six previous Republican-controlled congresses.” Barring amendments to proposed legislation, of course, means take it or leave it, which renders floor debate all but meaningless. . . .Considering how Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are treating Republicans in the new Congress, the brazen muzzling of minority rights will continue. Take the pork-laden $10 billion public lands bill Reid ram-rodded over the weekend. It combined more than 160 discrete bills in one omnibus monstrosity, with no amendments permitted. In fact, it’s been six months since Reid permitted Senate GOPers to offer amendments to any Democratic proposal in the Senate. By stifling GOP amendments, Reid is robbing millions of Americans of their right to be heard in the Senate. As Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK, says: “Offering amendments is a right and responsibility of senators, not a special privilege or scheduling inconvenience.”On the House side, in addition to severely limiting the GOP’s right to propose amendments from the floor, Pelosi has even gone after the hallowed minority prerogative of offering a motion to recommit a bill before a final vote on passage. Recommiting a bill sends it back to committee, which usually kills it. During their dozens years as a majority, House Republicans only rarely limited Democrats’ ability to offer recommit motions. Unless Pelosi relents, House Republicans and dissident Democrats will be all but shut out of the legislative process in 2009.
I suspect that “dissident Democrats” are the real target here, and that the chief “dissident” they have in their sights is Barack Obama. It’s pretty clear that Speaker Pelosi et al. want to govern from the hard left, and so far, with his appointments, statements, and actions, the president-elect has been sending strong signals that aside from abortion, he has no intention of cooperating with that agenda; it looks to me like Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid are marshaling their forces to try to force him to do so. In order to set the agenda, they have to be sure that if they need to override a veto, they can whip the necessary votes into line; these sorts of measures, combined with the signals they’ve sent that they’re willing to remove committee chairs from their positions for reasons other than death or gross malfeasance, give them at least some ability to do so, and prepare the ground for any further moves they might need to make toward that end.
The (effective) end of the second Bush term
I’ve thought for a while that the thing that shipwrecked President Bush’s second term was the decision to kick it off with an attempt to reform Social Security. It was brave, because this badly needs to be done (I’ve never talked to anyone in my generation or younger who thinks we’re going to get Social Security when we reach retirement—there seems to be widespread agreement that the program’s going to collapse before we get the chance), but it was also politically stupid, because it gave the Democrats all sorts of chances to beat him up. There simply wasn’t the political will to address the situation, or any sort of constituency already in place for the effort. If he’d spent a couple years building that constituency and creating a sense of urgency while he worked on other things, it might have gone somewhere; as it was, all it did was burn all his political capital and leave him defenseless when Katrina hit and Iraq went into reverse.In light of that, it was interesting to note last week that the President appears to agree with me, telling Cal Thomas that if he could do one thing over, he would have given up Social Security and gone to work on immigration reform instead. As he told Thomas, border security is a real and significant issue, as is the fact that “a system that is so broken that humans become contraband is a system that really needs to be re-examined”; while the political will wasn’t there to address the looming issue with Social Security, “because generally legislative bodies don´t react until the crisis is upon us,” even when they know it’s coming.It’s a good interview of the sympathetic sort, and worth your time to read.