Marginal Christianity

The Book of the Twelve for Lent 2016 The Prophet Goes to Meddling! – Amos (3) Lent 13 We’re okay with prophets as long as they’re goring someone else’s ox. But when they train they guns on us and our practices, well . . . it’s time to run them out of town. Especially if they are an outsider. And Amos was a southerner called not merely to preach but to meddle in the lives and affairs of the northern kingdom! And his meddling is specific and wide-ranging. And precisely in its specificity and comprehensiveness it hits home with us today in 21 st century North America. The sheer volume of the indictments in Amos presses on the reader their seriousness. I have reproduced those sections below without comment. I invite you to reflect on them yourselves and feel their critique for whatever area of life they prick your heart and conscience about.   “ because they sell the righteous for silver,     and the needy for a pair of sandals—   they who t...

Russell Moore | February 25, 2016 | 10 Comments         Brian McLaren, the liberal “emergent” evangelical activist, re-emerged last week to announce that he is rewriting the hymn “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” The hymn is too warlike, he writes , as is much of evangelical hymnody, in his view. Our hymnody should be, he writes, “refocusing on the teaching of Jesus about peacemaking,” steering clear of warlike imagery. He’s wrong. McLaren believes that hymns with war imagery can lead to hatred and violence. In “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” for instance, McLaren finds “ambiguous” language about the “foe” against we should fight, “which could (in the minds of some) refer to our neighbors outside the church.” Well, I suppose, “in the minds of some” there might be confusion that “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” refers to Spanish soccer star Jesus Navas, but such a reading would be ignorant of both the context o...

The Book of the Twelve for Lent 2016 Grace – Amos (2) Lent 12 As always in the Bible god’s grace comes first and human response follows it. The same is true in Amos. Twice in the early chapters this prophet directs attention back to the founding liberation of the Hebrew people from Egypt as the foundation of their relationship to God. On the basis of this grace shown this people, God expects them to live and love toward him and other peoples the same way.           In Amos 2:10-11 we read: “10  Also I brought you up out of the land of Egypt ,                 and led you forty years in the wilderness,                 to possess the land of the Amorite.               11  And I raised up some of your children to ...

The book of the Twelve for Lent 2016 Idolatry and Injustice – Amos (1) Lent 11           With Amos, a shepherd from Tekoa, a southerner called to preach to the northern kingdom of Israel, we enter a different world. Hosea and Joel have set the table (as it were) for reading the book of the Twelve with their exposure of i-dolatry as the people’s basic problem, the necessity and urgency of their “return” to God, and God’s sovereign rule over every nation and all history. The preaching of these first two prophets of the Twelve gives us a framework and the essential presuppositions for reading the Twelve. With Amos, however, the book of the Twelve goes from preaching to meddling! Now the prophets “name names” so to speak with a specificity that makes it almost impossible to deny the prophetic accusation or avoid the realization that we today are implicated in similar such perverted behavior. Or that we have normalized such attitudes ...

Feb 21 by Jeff Bilbro   Suffering Servant, Donald Jackson, Copyright 2005, The Saint John’s Bible, Saint John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved. During this season of Lent, Christians reflect on the role of suffering in God’s redemption. Not only are we saved by Christ’s faithfulness through great suffering, but we are called to share in his suffering. As Peter writes, “rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ’s sufferings” (I Peter 4:13). This message is far from intuitive in our culture of ease and affluence, but perhaps Isaiah’s description of the suffering servant can open our eyes to this uncomfortable edge of the gospel. Read more at  http://christanduniversity.com/2016/02/21/suffering-servant/  

The Book of the Twelve for Lent 2016 The People’s Repentance - Joel (5) Lent 10           Well, I lied. We will not start Amos today but rather tomorrow. We have one last post on Joel I overlooked last week. So here it is today. The people Joel preached to apparently genuinely repented and returned to the Lord.           The storm clouds of locusts undoing the national economy heralding the Day of the Lord prompted Joel to call for a national gathering in Jerusalem at the temple (2:1). Their scorched earth policy (2:3) left the people helpless and hopeless (2:6). They had hit bottom.           My pastoral experience has led me to conclude that people change for one or a combination of three things. Either they   -are forced to change by some external force or authority, -hurt so badly that they are internally impelled to ...

The Book of the Twelve for Lent 2016 The Lord “Relents” - Joel (4) Lent 9           The nature of God’s relation to his people as their divine Parent who sometimes has to exercise “tough love,” the Day of the Lord as moments of judgment and restoration throughout rather than just at the end of history, God’s penchant for “relenting” from his determination to judge – these are key themes we have explored thus far in Joel. In today’s post, the last one on Joel in this series, we’ll look at a couple of other matters in the book that emphasize God’s role as the Lord and Ruler of history.           First of all, God declares his intent to be “known” by his people and the watching world as faithful God willing and able to do what he promises his people (2:27; 3:17). In 2:27 God specifies that knowledge to be of him “in the midst of Israel and that he is God alone. He is the great God Almi...