Monthly Archives: July 2013

Slavery and Racism in the Bible?

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Comment: God allowed Israel to take slaves from other nations. This is immoral and racist. So if Christians were consistent they would also reinstate slavery and institutionalized racism.

Response from John Hendryx at monergism.com: We must remember, the removal of the Canaanite peoples was a judicial ruling by God. Consider, in the USA we give people rights. But those rights can be taken away if people commit a crime. It is called prison.

Is that hypocrisy to say people have rights (out of one side of our mouth) but then put them into prison (out of the other)?

No, because those persons gave up their rights when they committed a crime. There were no prisons in Canaan. As a judicial ruling, God told Israel to dispossess the people in the land. They were either to kill them or in some cases enslave them. The Canaanites had already lost all of their rights and were under God’s just judgment. There was no justification for arbitrary chattel slavery in the Bible — (the kind which we knew in antebellum times) … in fact the slavery which kidnapped people and sold them as property was punishable by death (Exodus 21:16).

No, they were ONLY to kill or enslave under God’s direct verbal orders. Remember, He is God so His judicial ruling is more just than any human court has ever been since He knows all of our crimes perfectly. So when Israel killed people they were simply acting as God’s hand, speeding up the death sentence we all justly deserve.

You think this racist because it targets foreigners? Think again. God also warned the Israelites that they were not immune from the Canaanites’ judgment: “But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land, those you allow to remain will become barbs in your eyes and thorns in your sides. They will give you trouble in the land where you will live. And then I will do to you what I plan to do to them.’ “(Numbers 33:55-56).

So not only were foreigners made slaves … when the Israelites disobeyed God – REMEMBER – they were carried off in the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities. So God is not partial or racist.

Again, the Israelites deserved judgment just like the others, whether Egyptian or Canaanite. This should serve to remind us that we may not assume that those who suffer unique or catastrophic calamities in this life are any worse than we ourselves, since it is only the grace of God in Jesus Christ which makes us to differ from anyone (see Luke 13:1-5; 1 Cor. 4:7).

Also Christians, being consistent with the scripture and understanding this, would never enslave people. God has commanded us to set all men free with the gospel. The time between Christ’s coming and His return is a time of forbearance. But the time is coming when God’s patience will end and justice will be carried out in full measure. So it is important to differentiate what God commands as a way of life for us and his judicial rulings. The confusing of them causes college professors to misrepresent the beliefs of both Jews and Christians, and many atheists, who are ignorant of the fullness of what the Bible says, take this up and make unfortunate misrepresentations of the Bible in public. But at least it gives us an opportunity to bring the truth to light. So for this I thank you.

Lesson: We must learn to distinguish God’s judicial pronouncements from his commands about a way of life for us so as not to mix apples and oranges.

The Numbers Game

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j-i-packer“I have found that churches, pastors, seminaries, and parachurch agencies throughout North America are mostly playing the numbers game—that is, defining success in terms of numbers of heads counted or added to those that were there before. Church-growth theorists, evangelists, pastors, missionaries, news reporters, and others all speak as if

(1) numerical increase is what matters most;

(2) numerical increase will surely come if our techniques and procedures are right;

(3) numerical increase validates ministries as nothing else does;

(4) numerical increase must be everyone’s main goal.

I detect four unhappy consequences of this.

First, big and growing churches are viewed as far more significant than others.

Second, parachurch specialists who pull in large numbers are venerated, while hard-working pastors are treated as near-nonentities.

Third, lively laymen and clergy too are constantly being creamed off from the churches to run parachurch ministries, in which, just because they specialize on a relatively narrow front, quicker and more striking results can be expected.

Fourth, many ministers of not-so-bouncy temperament and not-so-flashy gifts return to secular employment in disillusionment and bitterness, concluding that the pastoral life of steady service is a game not worth playing.

In all of this I seem to see a great deal of unmortified pride, either massaged, indulged, and gratified, or wounded, nursed, and mollycoddled. Where quantifiable success is god, pride always grows strong and spreads through the soul as cancer sometimes gallops through the body.

Shrinking spiritual stature and growing moral weakness thence result, and in pastoral leaders, especially those who have become sure they are succeeding, the various forms of abuse and exploitation that follow can be horrific.

Orienting all Christian action to visible success as its goal, a move which to many moderns seems supremely sensible and businesslike, is thus more a weakness in the church than its strength; it is a seedbed both of unspiritual vainglory for the self-rated succeeders and of unspiritual despair for the self-rated failures, and a source of shallowness and superficiality all round.

The way of health and humility is for us to admit to ourselves that in the final analysis we do not and cannot know the measure of our success the way God sees it. Wisdom says: leave success ratings to God, and live your Christianity as a religion of faithfulness rather than an idolatry of achievement.”

– J. I. Packer, A Passion for Faithfulness: Wisdom from the Book of Nehemiah (Wheaton: Crossway, 1995), 207-209.

Justification Quotes

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judge-gavelIn the New Testament, words for salvation include: propitiation, vitally important for understanding the nature of the atonement yet only mentioned four times; Reconciliation is found just five times (all Pauline); and Redemption is not very common. But when we come to justification, we have 81 occurrences of the adjective, 100+ of the noun, 39 of the verb, and 5 of the adverb. Justification could be called the central idea in the doctrine of salvation.

John Calvin (1509-1564), “Justification is the main hinge on which salvation turns.”

Martin Luther (1483-1546), “When the article of justification has fallen, everything has fallen … This is the chief article from which all other doctrines have flowed … It alone begets, nourishes, builds, preserves, and defends the church of God; and without it the church of God cannot exist for one hour. Justification is the master and prince, the lord, the ruler, and the judge over all kinds of doctrines.”

Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556), “Justification is the strong rock and foundation of Christian religion. Whosoever denies this doctrine is not to be counted for a true Christian man but an adversary of Christ.”

John Stott, “Justification is not a synonym for amnesty, which is pardon without principle, a forgiveness which overlooks – even forgets – wrongdoing and declines to bring it to justice. No. Justification is an act of justice… When God justifies sinners, He is not declaring bad people to be good, or saying that they are not sinners after all; He is pronouncing them legally righteous, free from any liability to the broken law, because He Himself in His Son has borne the penalty of their law-breaking. We are justified by His blood.”