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Is Paul quoting Isaiah 45 in Philippians 2? I have often heard people make this claim and it seems to be uncontroversial. However, I’m not really sure. Below is a table comparing these texts. Note, especially, the underlined words.

Our faith is under attack. Though many of us are not on the front lines, we all have the responsibility to be ready to make a defense to anyone who asks us to give an account for the hope that is in us (1 Peter 3.15). Sadly, in most churches we do not do well preparing and teaching our people the reasons why we believe what we believe. For example, why do we believe that there is a God? How do we know the Bible has been reliably transmitted? How can we be so sure that Jesus really was raised from the dead? These questions and many more are increasingly being asked, especially of those in college. What makes matters worse is that the anti-Christians, be they professors or fellow students, are often much better prepared to defend their position than we are. Does Christianity require a leap of faith regardless of the facts? What right do we have to say other faiths are in error if we cannot explain why our own is true? Questions like these have driven me to regularly expose myself to the field of apologetics (not apologizing, but defending or giving reasons for the faith). In this blog post I have collected together a number of resources that may help you give an answer to those attacking our faith.

This year my wife and I decided to celebrate Hanukkah with our family. We enjoyed it immensely and found it to be entirely compatible with biblical Christianity. My son Noah, asked for a couple of nights afterward if we could do Hanukkah that night, but we had to explain to him that it only lasts for eight days. Maybe you would like to celebrate it next year.

Interpretation #1:
From eternity past the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit existed as a community of one, perfect in love, harmony, and joy. In the enternal counsels of this triune God the plan of salvation for the yet-to-be-created human race was decreed. The only question was who would go. Overwhelmed with self-sacrificial love, the Son volunteered to humble himself by uniting humanity to his divinity, veiling his deity by taking on human flesh. Two thousand years ago, this salvation plan was carried out by the second person of the Trinity. He entered the virgin womb of Mary and suddenly she became pregnant with God the Son. He was perfect God and perfect man, not half divine and half human like Hercules, but fully God and fully man in a totally unique way. This incredible event is called the incarnation—the moment when God became man for our salvation. In fact, the cross is not really the most important event for redemption, the incarnation is. For without the humbling act of God giving up his divine prerogatives to condescend to the lowly state of a first century Palestinian Jew, the cross would mean nothing. Thus, in the grand scheme of things, the incarnation is the premier event that brought God to man so that man could be reconciled with God.

Yesterday, at school we were discussing the work of William Carey who wrote a persuasive piece designed to inspire his fellow Baptists to send out and support missionaries in 1792 called An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens. His unrelenting desire to save the lost drove him to study languages incessantly. He was a shoemaker by trade who taught himself Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Dutch, and French. Eventually he moved to India with his family and some others to spread the gospel there. He translated the Bible into Bengali and Sanskrit and distributed it among the people. Below is a quotation that I found challenging. Part of his treatise included a series of tables listing the population of each known country in the world along with religious affiliation. He estimated that out of the 731 million people in the world 420 million were still in “pagan darkness.” Looking at statistics today, there are roughly two billion Christians out of 6.5 billion people. Are Carey’s words any less relevant today than when he penned them more than two centuries ago?

In Church History class I had to read Jerome’s twenty-second letter written to Eustochium (a wealthy Christian living in Rome). Most of the letter contains practical advice on how to remain celibate even while living within society. In this letter, which is very long, he relates an incredible story about his own life.

He had been really struggling to prefer the Scriptures over secular literature. He had a vision in which God condemned him as a follower of Cicero rather than of Christ. This scared Jerome straight and he never read worldly books again. (However, other early Christians, such as Augustine, believed that secular books could be read so long as one exercised discernment.) Here is Jerome’s first-hand account. I wonder what you make of it.

1Thes 5.22 [KJV]
Abstain from all appearance of evil.

It is amazing how one little word can change a meaning so much. I bet a lot of puritanical church rules were generated by a concern to avoid even the “appearance” of evil. Matthew Henry’s commentary (from 1706) says:

We should therefore abstain from evil, and all appearances of evil, from sin, and that which looks like sin, leads to it, and borders upon it. He who is not shy of the appearances of sin, who shuns not the occasions of sin, and who avoids not the temptations and approaches to sin, will not long abstain from the actual commission of sin.

In addition the Geneva Bible Notes (1576) say:

Introductory Remarks

When we first started kingdomready.org we developed a static website which combined ministry related content with web resources primarily focused on evangelism. Our motto was and continue to be “helping people to get ready for the kingdom.” However, once people had sufficiently explored the website (usually after about a week) we noticed that for many there was not a need or desire to continue visiting the site (other than once a week to download the Sunday sermon or watch the web-cast). At this point I asked JohnnyO what we could do to increase traffic and bring more people in. He suggested that what people are looking for is not merely static content but a changing website where people could interact through conversation. We discussed the various ways that this was done (message boards, guest books, blogs, podcasts, etc.) and decided that the mechanism that best suited our needs was to have a blog. The original conception was simple: we wanted to have a section of kingdomready that was alive and changing on a regular basis. It was (and still is) our desire to have a new blog post every other day. Beyond this, we did not really have guidelines in place for what the blog posts should contain.

eschatology = related to the end of the age (i.e. kingdom of God, return of Christ, resurrection, etc.)

I thought the following quote summarized a good way of thinking about ethics in light of the kingdom.

Yet the existence of this strong tradition of intensified Jewish ethics may indicate the preresurrection source of a realized eschatology in Jesus’ own preaching. Why would Jesus make such demands of his followers? Why would they listen to him? Because, as authoritative spokesman of the Kingdom, Jesus created around himself a community of those who would live, prolepticly, according to the “new” Torah written upon their hearts. the Torah according to which Israel would live when the Kingdom came: [Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000)]

Monday was orientation for me (and JohnO) at Boston University. It was a long day starting at 8:30 am and not ending until 4:30 pm. At the end of the day one of the facilitators led us in the prayer of examen. This prayer was made popular by Ignatius of Loyola (the founder of the Jesuits in the 16th century). The prayer of examen is simply a way of reviewing your day and offering God thanks, confession, or petitions as you feel led. I had first come across this prayer technique when I went to Rob Bell’s impressive website (Rob Bell is the pastor of a large church in Grand Rapids, MI, called Mars Hill). Here is a link to the description that he put together. For the upcoming Royal Family Reunion I’ll be leading a workshop called prayer and meditation during which I will be introducing people to this particular prayer along with some others. In light of that I recently put together the following instructions: