The Peace of the City

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome.

We’ve been talking about the book of Daniel. The nation of Judah has been carried away into captivity in Babylon, which brings us to the writings of the prophet Jeremiah regarding the Babylonian exile. He said – let me sum up, because I’m pretty sure we’re going to read it later, but the quick version is, “Seek the peace of the city. You’re going to be there a while. Get used to it. Plant a garden. You’re going to be there a while.” That doesn’t sound very encouraging.

It only doesn’t sound encouraging if you’re thinking of things in terms of human victories and human standards.

Yeah, I mean I think a garden is always a victorious thing. It speaks to my agrarian soul, Thomas Jefferson and all that.

There’s also something just very – I don’t know what the adjective form of genesis is, but very back to the beginning. God is essentially saying, “Look, you’re going to be in this rough situation. Go back to the beginning. Do what you were supposed to do.”

Your job is still what it was. That’s so interesting. I had not thought about that.

Still dress and keep. I think of it that way because it’s essentially what we’re still doing today. We’re still dressing and keeping the places that we’ve been given, whether or not they’re actual gardens. My wife and I have a garden in our backyard and we’ve been very tickled, to use a term off the top of my head, by the parallels to Genesis and what humanity was originally meant for.

My English teacher in college once taught a class on horticulture in literature. I wish I had been able to take that class. It was a schedule conflict, but one of my favorite references is in Voltaire’s Candide, which I hate. I hated the entire book.

Well, because it’s Voltaire.

Yeah, I don’t dig Voltaire, but the last line of the book is, “So we all must tend our garden.” It’s like, “Well, here we are,” and I’m like, “Yeah, you got something right there.” Greg, you’ve been very quiet. Thanks for letting us ramble.

I’m just enjoying listening to you two talk here, and you’ve given me a really good idea of something I did not address at all in the original article. First of all the whole back to Eden thing, but it’s not quite back to Eden because it’s “Build houses and dwell in them and plant gardens and eat the fruit thereof,” something new – houses. So we have the gardens and the orchards and all that, but we’ve gone a little further.

Now, here’s the thing. The houses that they were living in were almost certainly not houses they built. They were houses that the Babylonians built and they got stuck into, so does it still work? What happens when the pagans obey the dominion mandate after a fashion and they plant the gardens and they build the houses and they dig the wells? Surely they are now contaminated for God’s people and we wouldn’t dream of using them. We should all be Amish and go back and start really at the beginning.

How far back do you want to go?

Well, that’s kind of the problem here, isn’t it. God’s people tend to be very inconsistent at this point. “We don’t want anything that smacks of the world.” Jeans? There are some people who are opposed to jeans because in certain segments of the country, at least 20, 30, 40 years ago, they were too worldly, especially on girls. TV? Yeah. Phones? Oh.

I remember when cell phones came out. One gentleman came to me and complained, “There’s a deep evil here. This is designed to put a block between the generations!” It was funny a few weeks later to see him standing on one side of the road during school pick-up and his wife on the other, talking to each other on phones. “You could walk over and say hi to your wife.”

We are always suspicious of culture, especially when we didn’t build it. Something that Jeremiah is saying here – and we’ll get the background here in just a second – is not, “Start fresh. Okay, you’re in a new place so get rid of all the traces of Babylonian-ism and start fresh and be content until God calls you back to the Promised Land.”

Then this is something that is in the notes. “You’re living in a pagan city dedicated to a pagan god. It’s been mapped out by magic. There’s a ziggurat in the center. It’s built on the very foundations of the original Tower of Babel.”

It doesn’t get more ungodly than that.

Yeah, as far as externals go it’s pretty bad, and yet God’s response is, “So? Settle down for a while. It’s going to be 70 years.” With that in mind let’s go back and look at the story just a little bit.

The first phase of captivity had taken place. That’s why we’re jumping in here. Daniel and his friends had already gone. Jehoiakim had gone and been reinstated and then replaced by Jehoiachin or Jeconiah, depends how you want to pronounce it, who had gone into captivity, so we’re winding down here to the very last days of Jerusalem. Presumably Zedekiah is on the throne. The city still stands. The temple stands, the palace stands, there’s still an heir of David on the throne, and people are hopeful.

In the midst of this God sends Jeremiah and says, “I’ve given all these lands to Nebuchadnezzar. Submit. Bow to him. Obey his laws. This is the way it’s going to be. This is what I have ordained,” and that didn’t go over too well.

Then God told Jeremiah, “Make some yokes, big wooden yokes, and wear one of them around.” Eventually he sends some to other kingdoms to say, “Put it on. It’s the yoke of Babylon.” In other words, “And all you other countries submit,” but particularly now to God’s people in Jerusalem he’s wearing this thing around, looking kind of funny. God does that to his prophets sometimes, and the message is, “Bear the yoke and it will be all right. If you submit to God’s chastening it will be all right. Jerusalem does not have to fall.”

But after a bit there’s another prophet, a man who at least claims to be a prophet and has a reputation as such. His name is Hananiah. He comes to Jeremiah and says, “I got a new message from God. The captivity is going to be short. Within two years Jeconiah and all the people and all the temple vessels are all coming back. This is almost over. We’ve just got to hang in there a little while longer and it’s all coming back.”

Jeremiah looks at him and says, “Amen. The Lord do that. That would be great. Wonderful. Love the message. However, all the prophets who’ve gone before you and me prophesied of war and plague and famine and complete desolation.” That’s just what prophets do because God’s people don’t exactly have a track record of being faithful, do they? “So I like your message, but I’m suspicious, and when it comes to pass – the prophet who prophesies peace, when his words come to pass then we will know this was the word of the Lord.”

Hananiah gets very bold and takes the yoke off of Jeremiah rather forcibly and throws it to the ground and breaks it and says, “Thus saith the Lord, I’ve broken the yoke of Nebuchadnezzar.” All the people were really impressed and it looks really dramatic and all that.

Jeremiah isn’t quite sure. He’s got his suspicions, but sometimes God is unaccountably gracious – well, all grace is unaccountable, but you know, he’s been prophesying doom and gloom and has God really changed his mind?

He goes home and God comes to him and says, “That was not me. I did not send that message. He broke your yoke of wood. Make a yoke of iron. Let’s really put an exclamation point on this one. And as for Hananiah, he’s going to die real soon because he’s taught rebellion. He’s falsified prophecy in my name in order to lead my people to rebellion, so he’s gone.”

That brings us to what you were talking about earlier. God tells Jeremiah, “Look, let’s get this straight and let’s let people on the other end know what’s going on. Write a letter and tell them this is not a 2-year captivity. This is a long captivity – not an eternal captivity, but by human standards fairly lengthy,” and this is part of what God has Jeremiah write –

Thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, unto all that are carried away captives, whom I have caused to be carried away from Jerusalem unto Babylon; Build ye houses, and dwell in them; and plant gardens, and eat the fruit of them; Take ye wives, and beget sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters; that ye may be increased there, and not diminished. And seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the LORD for it: for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace.
For thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; Let not your prophets and your diviners, that be in the midst of you, deceive you, neither hearken to your dreams which ye cause to be dreamed. For they prophesy falsely unto you in my name: I have not sent them, saith the LORD.

For thus saith the LORD, That after seventy years be accomplished at Babylon I will visit you, and perform my good word toward you, in causing you to return to this place. For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the LORD, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end. Then shall ye call upon me, and ye shall go and pray unto me, and I will hearken unto you. And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart. And I will be found of you, saith the LORD: and I will turn away your captivity, and I will gather you from all the nations, and from all the places whither I have driven you, saith the LORD; and I will bring you again into the place whence I caused you to be carried away captive.

Did you notice that a couple of those passages haunt the hallways of Christian memes a great deal?

Yeah, I’ve noticed that.

“I know the thoughts that I think toward you…”

“I know the plans that I have for you, plans to prosper…” on every Christian graduation card ever.

“You shall seek me and find me when you search for me with all your hearts, and I will be found of you.” They’re very common verses, wonderful verses, but the context is “…after you’ve waited 70 years.”

Yes, God has a plan. It’s a good plan. It’s a plan for your welfare, but the part that you’re interested in isn’t going to go into effect for 70 years. God has already got the pieces moving. The machinery is cranking. The current is on. The seeds are in the ground. It will take 70 years to mature.

In the meantime, the things we talked about – build houses, plant gardens, eat the fruit of them, take wives, beget children, take wives for your children, so that you can grow. This is the time to grow and not to shrink, so that when it’s time to come home there will be more of you. That’s the plan. And pray for the city.

The city that’s built on pagan gods and all that? Interesting.

Isn’t it. It was a hard pill for those in captivity to swallow, so part of the message God includes is – he had already implied this with regard to Jerusalem by killing one of the false prophets there, but he tells the people in captivity, “And don’t listen to the prophets there who say otherwise, because they’re prophesying what you caused them to prophesy. They know what you want. They know what’s going to put bread on their table. They’re going to say exactly what they want, and it’s not what I said so don’t listen to these people.”

Interestingly enough, at the end of all of this word gets back from the captivity to Jerusalem to tell the current high priest –

The LORD hath made thee priest in the stead of Jehoiada the priest, that ye should be officers in the house of the LORD, for every man that is mad, and maketh himself a prophet, that thou shouldest put him in prison, and in the stocks. Now therefore why hast thou not reproved Jeremiah of Anathoth, which maketh himself a prophet to you? For therefore he sent unto us in Babylon, saying, This captivity is long: build ye houses, and dwell in them; and plant gardens, and eat the fruit of them.

Then Zephaniah the priest, rather than doing anything, just goes and reads the letter to Jeremiah like, “This is what he’s saying about you.”

Then came the word of the LORD unto Jeremiah, saying, Send to all them of the captivity, saying, Thus saith the LORD concerning Shemaiah the Nehelamite [the false prophet on the other end]. Because that Shemaiah hath prophesied unto you, and I sent him not, and he caused you to trust in a lie: Therefore thus saith the LORD; Behold, I will punish Shemaiah the Nehelamite, and his seed: he shall not have a man to dwell among this people; neither shall he behold the good that I will do for my people, saith the LORD; because he hath taught rebellion against the LORD.

Then the story goes on in bits and pieces throughout the rest of Jeremiah until we get to the final fall of Jerusalem, but people on both ends don’t really want to believe this. They believe that God’s judgement couldn’t possibly last that long. “I mean what have we really done to deserve this? Aren’t we God’s people?”

“I think 70 years sounds pretty short after our time in Egypt.”

So we’re faced with understanding then the theology behind this, which is simply to say understanding the God who would do such a thing and say such things. How is it that God banishes his people into the world, the mostly worldly kind of world, back to Babylon, not just someplace nearby like Ur of the Chaldees. They’re in Babel, and the ziggurat that they can look up and see was built where the original Tower of Babel stood.

Why does God do that to them? I mean sure, they made a few missteps, they had some mistakes. Okay, they sinned here and there, but they’re the covenant people, right? And God’s kingdom is going to win, so…and then there’s this ‘pray for the city.’

“What? These people are pagans. It’s not just pray for the people individually. We’re used to proselyting Gentiles and making them God-fearers. We understand that maybe, but you want us to pray for the city as a city, as a community, a society with government and street sweepers and dog catchers and a court that sits at the gate, and businesses and finances and currency. You want us to pray that all of that goes…these people are your enemies, Lord. What in the world are you telling us? Is this really God talking? Is it somebody else? Is this one of the guys in the office making a joke? We don’t get this.”

I’m going to throw it back at you two for a few minutes because I don’t have an immediate place to go here and I think you will have some good things to say. If you were there, how would you answer these people? Do you have something to say on behalf of God?

I can’t help but notice the way that we as Reformed believers sometimes fall into the same sort of fatalism when we’re dealing with the unbelieving world. We have this very strong sense of the antithesis between God and the world, and we know that finally there will be a very clear distinction between the elect and those who are rejecting God. It’s easy to sort of skip to the end of the story and not consider that the elect have to come to believe. They’re elect from God’s perspective. He’s the one who chose them. From our perspective we still need to be out there making disciples, spreading the gospel to those who will hear it for the first time and believe.

Bryan, what do you think?

I definitely agree. I think there’s a strong tendency for us to basically say, “Well, you know…” We really have a hyper-Calvinizing instinct.

We like to go to the extreme of whatever we do, as humans.

As human beings we just have a tendency to be like, “Well, you know, que sera sera. What will be will be. God’s going to bring it all together the way he wants, and who am I to get in the way of that and mess up his divine plan with my meddling.”

There is a very real sense in which it’s not entirely just, moral, sanctifying to say, “Screw society. I’m going to go live on my own,” because society is where sinners are and we’re called to preach the gospel to sinners. We’re supposed to be where they are, not just on a weekend on a soapbox on the street corner, although that can help. That can be a good thing, but actually being with them and interacting with them.

Of course, when you have the instinct to say, “Let’s go out in the country and live by ourselves and be holy there,” you end up finding out, “Oh, there’s sinners out here because there’s society out here too, because there’s people out here.”

“And they are me.”

We have a very strong instinct to – stealing a term from I don’t know exactly where – to immanentize the eschaton.

I believe that’s a philosophy of history term.

I believe it is too, but we have that instinct in us as believers of a certain stripe, and we have to really fight that sometimes – sometimes less so. I mean sometimes there are people even within our own tradition who find it very easy to go into society and spread the gospel and talk about faith and make disciples of all nations.

There’s lots of talk right now – me being the only one who is lurking still on Twitter – about something called Christian nationalism, and it’s gone in a very short time, like nine months, from “That doesn’t exist. None of us believe that,” to “Oh, here’s a book we wrote defending it.”

Published in Moscow, Idaho, to the surprise of no one.

Unsurprisingly. You look at that and you read them and you think this instance of it, this particular formulation of it is a little bit out there theologically speaking, logically speaking, but at the same time you have to say, “Well, but yeah, we should be trying to make the individuals of a nation Christian. We should be making disciples and we should be good citizens of the nation that we’re in, seeking the good of the commonwealth,” although trying to avoid the connotations that commonwealth has had in history and political history.

I don’t know exactly where that thought was heading, but there’s a lot of words for you.

I Googled, courtesy of Wikipedia, “Don’t immanentize the eschaton.” I’m just reading Wikipedia here – “Modern usage of the phrase started with Eric Voegelin in The New Science of Politics in 1952. Conservative spokesman William F. Buckley popularized Voegelin's phrase as "Don't immanentize the eschaton!"”

That’s so interesting. I only know it from discussions of a particular stripe of postmillennialism and a meme where it’s a machine called the Eskatron 2000, and there’s a big button that says “Immanentize.” [all laughing]

I’m horribly afraid that we’ve lost some people with that. Let me try to explain as best I understand what the phrase means. Eschaton is simply the Greek word that means the end, which throws really frightening light on Eskaton Village, a local retirement community for seniors.

Yeah, that’s always weirded me out a little bit.

I remember passing that and thinking, “That’s dark.”

To immanentize the eschaton would mean to bring the end, with all that that means, right into our presence and plop it down in our laps, to identify the end of history and the end of time and the goal of everything with our current existence.

Speaking of Christian nationalism.

Yeah, and there’s a number of ways you could go about that, anywhere from blowing up the world, to establishing the final order that will endure through all eternity. It’s at odds with scripture in that God has a plan, and the plan ticks off day by day, year by year, century by century, and we can’t rush it.

Those who try to bring whether it be utter desolation, Armageddon, or some kind of Christianized Utopia about now, they’re not thinking like Christians. They’re not thinking like covenantalists. They’re not thinking organically. They’re trying to mechanically or magically make it all about us right now. We’re going to create eternity in a pot on the stove right now and this will be it. This will be the defining moment for all of time, which will now melt into eternity because this is it. We’ve got it.

It can be the destruction of the planet or it can be the salvation of the planet, depending on your view of what’s better, I suppose. So that’s that. Jeremiah is not that.

It reminds me of when you put the timeline in your classroom as a history teacher. You don’t end with the year 2022.

No, I don’t. I learned that a long time ago and then I went through some interesting relationships with people who were very pro-nationalist and did see America as the end of history, both as the stopping point and the goal. So I’ve learned that when I draw a timeline I bring it through the present, extend a little beyond, and then do a dot-dot-dot-dot and stretch it a lot further.

I also tend to insert the Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire and then America’s history, all of 200 to 300 years, depending on how you measure it. Here’s this 1,000-year Byzantine Empire with its roots in a 500-odd-year Roman Empire. It’s like, “Guys…”

“We’re the new kids on the block.”

It’s also interesting just because throughout the history of Christendom in particular since Pentecost, every major empire that has been part of Christendom has said, “Oh yeah, we’re the end-all. We’re the end, because how could it ever get higher than 300 AD Rome?” and we’re 1700 years on from them. You’ve got to think bigger.

And what doesn’t fit is – casting things in Reformation terms – going to Rome and buying a house and living in the shadow of the papacy for 70 years. God did not ask Israel to do that. God made Israel do that. He sent them into Babel. He sent them into the territory of the anti-Christ as he was manifest in the moment in the person of this guy Nebuchadnezzar, to whom God says, “Obey him.” This is not far from God saying, “Obey the anti-Christ. Pray for him. Pray for his kingdom. Sweep the streets. Shovel the snow. Give presents – Christmas presents? Hanukah presents? Passover presents? …

Hanukah hasn’t been invented yet.

That’s true … “to your mail carrier. Babysit for the neighbor. Take the old lady across the street a hot meal. And those prostitutes who are gathering down there? You might ask the cops to do something about that, or maybe you just go down there and evangelize them. In other words, have a practical realistic input into this pagan culture.”

Here’s the thing back of all of this. This is what everyone tends to forget. We confess it in our creeds. We fight for it when the subject of creation/evolution comes up, and yet practically we ignore it. God owns the world. That piece of ground? It does not matter that the Babylonians have conducted magic ceremonies on it and established a temple to a false god and had all kinds of idols. It’s God’s land. He owns it. He has plans for it. We still don’t know the full extent of those plans, and he’s not impressed when the devil comes along and squats.

God is not like, “Oh no, he’s squatting on my land. I guess I have to yield to him. Okay, no one go near that because the devil’s been there. It could be bad, and I don’t know that I can control that. He has claims. We’ve got to allow the devil his claims.” God, the creator of the universe, is he the owner of the universe or not? And if he owns it, then what’s wrong with him asserting his sovereignty, his claims, his certainty even over a pagan land?

This is something that really on a more intellectual and sophisticated level still bothers theologians today. How could God possibly press cultural claims, legal claims, political claims against say the government of the United States and its culture, or that of the former Soviet Union, or Russia and its culture, or China and its culture? It’s not like God owns all this…or…wait. Maybe the Father owns it, but the Son doesn’t because….

All authority in heaven and earth…

“Let’s just go back to he’s God. What are you saying? What kind of trinitarian heresy is this that says the Father has one kingdom and the Son has another kingdom?”

“Well, there’s a kingdom of creation and a kingdom of redemption, and apparently the Father and Son send notes back and forth occasionally but it’s not the same kind of rule, nor for the same sorts of goals, so yeah, in the Father’s kingdom be nice to your neighbors. In the Son’s kingdom go and evangelize them.”

This feels like squinting and crossing your eyes to see two things, where there’s only one thing.

Crossing your eyes, it’s very close in front of you.

And so as we look at this we need to remember that is not a side issue or a side note. Jeremiah is not a common grace prophet. He’s a Messianic prophet. Everything he has to tell us is in terms of the coming Messiah.

Now, he gets the bad news. “Yeah, Messiah’s coming, but first there’s what will seem to you like a detour of 70 years. But you know what? That has a plan.” So does all of this, because when these people go there to Babylon and to Ecbatana or Cairo (Alexandria at the time – well, not yet but eventually) or Damascus or the Greek city-states or eventually to this far away place called Rome, if they do what Jeremiah does they’re going to settle down, they’re going to build houses, they’re going to plant gardens, they’re going to have orchards, they’re going to eat, they’re going to build a family, and when the call comes in 70 years, “Okay, come on home,” guess what? They’re not all coming. They’re going to stay there because now after 70 years this is home.

“Oh no, God’s plan just failed! They’re supposed to all come back because it’s all about the Promised Land.”

Well, these are not the first hints but a strong hint towards the inclusion of Gentiles in the new covenant. You can see that the heart of God is for his people to be included from all nations. It’s not just Israel. They have been set aside obviously as a nation of priests, just like believers are, but at the same time he’s not saying, “Okay, there’s a holy political nation and nobody else is included unless they become a sovereign citizen of that nation. Everything else is satanic. If you’re in Celtic Ireland or something you’re doomed forever because you are not a member of the Israeli state.” It is meant to spread beyond the borders of Israel.

Yes. Two things then. First of all, immediately pray for these people. What are they supposed to pray for? Well, the most obvious thing is that they come to put their trust in the God of Israel. They’re evangelistic prayers. Now not only that. They should pray for their health, their arthritis, their rheumatism, the plague that sweeps through, the little child who gets lost and no one can find her – pray for everything, every aspect of God’s good gifts to people – but the primary thing they’re going to pray is, “May these people come to know you, oh Lord, and wait for Messiah as you do.” That doesn’t mean they have to become Jews, but God-fearers will do just fine.

The second thing is that all of these communities spread across the entire world as they knew it are the places the apostles are going to stop first to dispense this gospel of salvation. These are forward bases of operations for Messiah’s plan of conquest. These are the places the apostles are going to go to preach the gospel and to gather that nucleus of church after church after church, and city after city after city.

So at the very moment when people are saying, “You’re sending us into exile! That’s defeat. Oh, you’re going to call us home? But people aren’t coming. That’s defeat.” No.

“Actually, you’re recon scouts.”

But you don’t know it because God has not briefed you on it because he doesn’t want to. He actually doesn’t want to tell you the long game plan. Isn’t that strange? Shouldn’t it all be right there in scripture so that we can check off century by century, decade by decade, what the king of the north is going to do, and what the southern confederacies are going to do, and who this beast in Daniel is going to be? Shouldn’t that all be just perfectly plain to us?

It would just be so much easier if Agatha Christie told us who the murderer was on page one.

Yeah. That way I don’t have to think, and I won’t be in any kind of trepidation as I come to the end.

And I won’t be wrong about who I think it is, which is very important.

That is incredibly important. Our pride is the most important thing. In case you need it, that was sarcasm.

I think our listenership can tell that.

We have smart listeners.

Yeah. Here’s a quote from Philip Ryken, a Presbyterian commentator. He says –

Seeking the peace of the city means being a good neighbor. It means shoveling the sidewalk. It means cleaning the street. It means planting a tree. It means feeding the poor. It means volunteering at the local school. It means greeting people at the store. It means driving safely and helping people with car trouble. It means shutting down immoral businesses. It means embracing people from every ethnic background with the love of Christ.

He goes on to make it clear, “But that’s not all there is,” and he says, “By themselves, random acts of kindness cannot bring enduring peace,” and then he goes on to talk, of course, about the gospel. But if gospel preaching simply becomes putting another notch in my belt for the soul I’ve won, well, the soul thanks you very much, but you’re producing a distorted version of the love of Christ and of the kingdom of God.

“Okay, I brought you to Christ. You’ve made confession. There’s a church over there. Go be part of it. I’ve got more souls to win.”

I don’t think Paul even did that. Even those who have a primary call to evangelism and missionary activity don’t stop there, because the command is to make disciples, not just win souls, as basic as that is, but make disciples, and that requires relationship. It requires treating people as people, caring about their health and their finances and their homes and their children and all of that. If we’re going to try to witness to our neighbors or the person at the store or the guy on the street, we have to be able to talk to them. We have to care.

I’m reminded of my middle daughter, and I always get this story wrong but it’s something like this. Having had a little fender bender with a gentleman, she drove off and then realized, “Oh wait, I didn’t share Jesus Christ with him,” and then turned around and drove back to the scene of the accident, where the guy was still sitting there, and said, “By the way, I didn’t tell you about Jesus,” and went on to share the gospel.

That’s amazing! I love that.

This one’s even funnier, and funny in a good sense. She had overslept her alarm a few days ago and the phone rang. Fortunately for her, it got her out of bed because she had to be someplace. But the guy on the line I think was some kind of telemarketer. She’s kind of vague in how she describes it, but he was a telemarketer who was having a really bad day and said, “I’m just calling to annoy you.”

So he’s an honest telemarketer.

Yes, an honest telemarketer. So she begins in with, “Oh, what’s wrong? You’re having a bad day? Tell me about it,” and before long she’s saying, “Yeah, that’s a really rotten day. You know, do you know Jesus Christ?” and she goes on to evangelize this rather odd telemarketer, and I think it went well for a while. She said something that eventually got him to hang up, and it wasn’t because she was being rude. I think she just asked too personal a question about his sin or something, I don’t know, but she’s giving us those kinds of very practical examples. What does it mean to be a good neighbor? Ultimately it means to share the gospel with people, but it means to do it as a human, not as a robot.

We’ve all seen the memes of Reformed Christians sharing the gospel. “Sir, God may or may not love you and may or may not have a wonderful plan for your life. Let me tell you the gospel. The sovereign God predestined some people to be saved through the death of his Son. You may or may not be one of them, but if you are and you believe now…”

The sad thing is sometimes it’s true, and some people with the best of intentions who aren’t really like that, they want to hurry things up. Sometimes you just need to treat the person like a person and just talk to them, move the conversation that way as you can, and sometimes back off and sometimes take the detour with them. Let them know that you care about them and you care about what they’re thinking and you want to hear what they’re thinking. There’s this thing of our common humanity.

“But they’re sinners and they’re not elect.” First, you don’t know they’re not elect. Secondly, yeah, they’re sinners, just like us.

This reminds me of what we talked about last week with the microwave oven culture, where we want things to be fast. Even in that caricature of the Reformed evangelist, “If God predestined you to be saved you will believe right now.” You don’t know how much life that person has left or how long the Lord has planned out for them before they come to believe.

Also, the way that we’re accustomed to working in such a scripted cause and effect framework – with our microwave oven, if your food doesn’t get hot for some reason after one minute it’s like, “My microwave is broken.”

It’s like video games. I play Stardew Valley. I’ve logged way too many hours on Stardew Valley, but part of the game is that you’re this little farmer and you go around this little town and you get to know the villagers, and they have all these idiosyncrasies and things they like and dislike, but you know the whole time it’s a script, of course, because it’s a video game.

I started to notice very early in the COVID lockdowns when I clocked way too many hours every single day that it really colored the way I went about the rest of my life. It was like, “If I do this, then that will happen. If I behave in this way, that person will respond in this way.” No, they’re people, they’re not a script. But the way we interact technologically with one another – I know at least for me it can really get in your head in an unhealthy way.

Speaking of scripts, I was looking at the original article. We’re told to pray for the peace of our city, and here are some things that I noted, and I’ll just kind of skim and read.

First, we should pray for the financial stability and well-being of our city. Think of COVID, when a lot of businesses closed down, restaurants particularly, these little mom and pop places. Do we pray and ask God to open them up and to give them favor with the eyes of the government, and inventive ways of presenting their food and services?

We should pray that there will be work for those who want it and charity for those who need it. We should pray for the businesses and industries that fuel our local economy, that they prosper, assuming of course that they’re not making anything that creates an abortion, that they would function ethically, that they would directly or indirectly be a blessing to the church.

We should pray for the safety of the city. We should not want to see our city destroyed by tornadoes and hurricanes and earthquakes and drought. We should thank God for domestic peace, and pray that he would continue to restrain injustice, violence, and lawlessness within our city borders.

I’ve had relatives who’ve lived in the middle of the territory between one gang and another. Yes, if you don’t live in California, gangs are a real thing, and they do things like shoot each other. My sister-in-law at one point in her family heard the first shot and yelled, “Get down on the floor!” as they continued to hear shots ring out down the street. We should pray that that doesn’t happen, and that these gangs get along or that they’re converted or the police round them up or something, that this does not continue. We should pray that he would protect us from our enemies without and within.

We should pray for the officials of our cities – mayors, councilmen, department heads. It’s easy to pray against them, and I know our own governor has been in for more than his share of imprecatory prayers, but we need to also remember to pray first for his salvation, and secondly he’s a family man. He’s got a wife, he’s got kids, he has health, he has responsibilities. We may not like the guy a whole lot, but that doesn’t mean that we should not pray for him, again as a human being, as we would want people to pray for us.

There’s a marvelous section in Screwtape that I’ve taken to heart a lot, and I’m trying to get to understand it. I think I’ve misunderstood it at times, but it amounts to this. He’s talking to Wormwood, the demon. He says, “You know, when you’re tempting your patient, the human being, he’s going to pray. Make sure when he prays for his mother he always prays about the condition of her soul. Don’t let him pray about her arthritis, because what you’re doing is you’re creating a character in his mind who is largely artificial and unreal.”

The real woman has arthritis, but by extracting her soul and its sinfulness and her sinful behavior toward him, and putting that kind of one side on a shelf and forgetting things like she cooks your meals, she cleans your house, she has arthritis, and we don’t pray for that too, we’re praying for a non-reality and it becomes easier and easier to pray for the idealized mother, while you’re slapping the real mother around in a very physical literal sense.

I think Screwtape makes a remark like, “I’ve known patients who were able to be praying to God one moment, and slapping their wives the next, because you’ve so separated this theological religious ideal of saving a soul from the real person.”

As we pray for our county and state and federal officials it’s easy to mock them, to get satirical and sarcastic about them. God did not say to do that with Nebuchadnezzar. He said submit and he says pray, so we need to maintain a balance there. Paul says much the same thing, that we should pray for kings and all those in authority so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty in 1 Timothy 2.

Then finally we should pray for the people of the city. We should pray that the gospel will reach every soul, that the churches will be faithful in their worship and witness, that whole families and neighborhoods would turn to Christ and know his peace. We should pray for revival, renewal and reformation. But as long as we’re convinced, “This is a pagan land, these are pagans, and I don’t like them and I don’t really even care if anything good happens to them,” then we’ve got an issue.

We sound like Jonah.

Yeah, remarkably like Jonah, in fact. So I guess the motto here is don’t be Jonah. Be more like Jesus.

And with that we should make some recommendations. I have one, because I put it on hold from last week. This is my hot toddy recipe. It’s not a legit hot toddy, which I think if you’re a purist is whiskey and sugar and lemon juice or something. This is hot apple cider with a shot of caramel vodka, Smirnoff, and a shot of bourbon. It’s a 12-oz drink if you do an ounce each of the liquors, and then the rest of your mug full of hot cider. It’s very nice on a cold evening.

That sounds incredible. I am going to recommend believing in the creeds, which should be a standard thing. The background for this is apparently there are two individuals from a particular shared ecosystem of ours as Reformed believers, and one of them is pressing the other one. They’re both fairly well-known and I’m just going to avoid names.

This makes this a sub-tweet though, and I’m just opposed to that on principle. This is a public forum. They’re public individuals.

Very well, I will name names.

You can name names, but then you have to come up with a real recommendation that’s not “don’t be like them.”

But the recommendation is to be a historically-minded Christian who believes what the Church has always believed.

So just be better.

Okay fine, I’ll come up with a different one that’s better. Anyway, the two people in question are, sadly, Gary DeMar and Kenneth Gentry.

Oh! What?

Gentry is okay in this particular instance. I don’t know him as well as I know of DeMar’s stuff.

I don’t know if I’ve ever heard his name. Wow.

I know of him. In fact, my extended family has a very close connection with him, but I won’t go into it. Okay, continue.

In any case, Gentry has been pushing DeMar for an answer on a question, and the question is, “Do you think that there’s a physical resurrection at the end of history and a future return of Jesus Christ?” and DeMar has been dodging the question.

It should be an easy question. That should not require dodging.

Gary DeMar has been dodging, which is odd because there’s been many things he’s written that are very excellent. I forget, is he the guy who was an economist, or is that the one who passed away recently?

No, that’s Gary North. Gary DeMar traveled in the same circles. He wrote the God and government series that we use to some extent at school. He wrote Last Days Madness, which is a good critique of modern Dispensationalism. But you know, I hate to say this but unfortunately I was afraid this might be the case. I don’t have anything to point at and say, “Look, this is heresy.” I just have, “You talk all about eschatology and this seems to not be something you’re not talking about, which is…”

A little bit odd.

Yeah, more than a little bit odd. When hyper-preterism was a thing 10 or 15 years ago, it went in directions that were surprising. People you would think should know better caved on it or kissed up to it or had trouble seeing what was so bad about it. And as you say, the church for 2,000 years has agreed.

Now, here’s the thing. “Oh, the church says…”

“Well, what about the Bible?”

The church says it because the church has been reading the Bible for 2,000 years. Thank you. That means there are millions of Christians who, having read the Bible, say that it says this, as opposed to you handful of people who’ve been reading the Bible for 20, 30, or 40 years and say that. Who should we believe here? Who do we think has a better handle on the Bible? 2,000 years of Christians who have read it faithfully in churches and church councils and hymn writers and commentators and theologians, or you new-fangled people who think you’ve found something new and cute?

When we start talking about the creeds, that’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the priesthood of the believer. We’re talking about the perspicuity of scripture. We’re talking about the ability of the average common believer to read the Bible and understand it, because if we lose that we lose everything. Then we get a whole new priesthood of people who know this special hermeneutic that allows them to get truth that everyone else has missed. It’s bad when it happens in Genesis 1 and it’s bad when it happens in Revelation 21 and so on.

There are some things the Bible is clear about, and when we say “The creeds say…” we’re not setting up a separate authority. We’re acknowledging the authority of scripture to talk to us. So I hope Gary has not gone that way, but unfortunately I’m worried.

I also listened to a podcast where he was a guest, and unfortunately he said something like, “It’s very hard to coexist in some churches that hold different beliefs about XYZ” with regards to the eschaton. He said, “My daughter came home from school one day and said, ‘Daddy, Daddy, you don’t understand. They’re saying Christ is coming back in the future.’” He said, “Yes, yes, I know, but you have to deal with that.” I was like, “Oh no, oh no.”

I don’t like to traffic in gossip, which is why I listened to the podcast instead of believing what people said was on the podcast.

I appreciate that, Bryan.

This is bad news.

It is very bad news. I’m sorry. Recommendations – the place for sad things.

And it’s good to be sad. It’s not good to erupt in righteous rage and name-calling. He has served the church faithfully in many ways, and we can hope this is a blip in his understanding that he’ll recover from. Yet we can say, “You know what? You’re wrong. That doesn’t mean we hate you. It just means you’re wrong,” and we can pray for that.

Bringing it back up from the valley that I just plunged us into, I’m going to recommend Christmas markets if you’re in an area that has them. Here in Wisconsin where I live, there’s a town about 20 minutes from where we are that has a big German Christmas market, and it’s basically a place for all these places from around Wisconsin to come and hawk their wares that are vaguely Christmas-themed, or not even Christmas-themed. They’re just stuff.

Something you can buy for Christmas for people.

Exactly. This year they had pork schnitzel on buns and German potato pancakes. They had a food section and everything was really good, like mulled wine. It’s a fun activity. This one is only open for like 10 days and it’s really great. We did it last year about two months after we got married, and we did it this week with my brother-in-law and his wife and it was just fun. It was a good time. Merry Christmas.

In light of that, I think I’m going to recommend celebrating Christmas.

You’ve triggered all the Puritans who are listening to our podcast – all two of them.

The reluctance to celebrate Christmas I think can come from two different directions. One is a religious thing, and that’s actually not really what I had in mind. I have known people who either downplay any kind of Christmas celebration, and I’ve known people who flat-out say it’s sinful. How this squares with Paul saying that he who regards a day regards it to the Lord and you should not pass judgement, I am not sure.

“Well, it has all these pagan elements.”

“You mean like Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday? Like Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn?”

Like the country where you live?

Yes. It just to me seems a very narrow-minded hypocritical inconsistent hermeneutic that goes that way. Now if you just don’t want to do it, that’s your business, because it does work both ways. This is a recommendation, not a requirement. You’re not a bad Christian if you don’t celebrate Christmas, on the assumption that he who regards not the day, regards not the day to the Lord, that all days are alike because you’ve given them all to Jesus. That’s another way of looking at the Christian life.

What I’m looking more at right now is that as the kids move out and the grandkids aren’t around, it can become very easy to just get tired of the hustle and bustle, to get tired of the shopping, and mistake the externals for the reality and just say, “I don’t want to do any of that. We’re not playing Christmas music. We’re not sending Christmas cards. We’re not saying Merry Christmas in the store.”

I think that’s a mistake. Here is an opportunity to think back on one of the most important things in redemptive history, the incarnation and birth of our Lord, and here is a time within our culture where it’s still okay for now to say it out loud, and most people will not get offended.

I’ve already been greeted any number of times with “Happy holidays,” and my response, if I’m on my toes, is always, “Merry Christmas.” And more often than not, I get a smile or a thumbs up or, “Merry Christmas to you, too.”

I think a lot of people are just tired of the political correctness, and there are a lot of Christian brothers and sisters out there, or those who grew up in Christian homes and still have some memory of what that’s all about, and this is an opportunity when we can remind them, even with just a few words.

And it’s a time when we play music. Yes, there’s some guy with a reindeer running over Grandma, and some kid losing his two front teeth and all that, but there’s still an awful lot of Christmas music that preaches the gospel in no uncertain terms, and it gets played in secular stores still.

And there’s the opportunity for caroling. When our school has gone caroling, we have gone to the post office and we’ve gone to City Hall. No official organization has ever turned us away. In fact, City Hall says, “Can you come at this time so more people can hear you?” I think the last time we tried this, “Oh, it’s so great you’re coming to see us, but there’s this other branch of our operations that’s over there, so could you go see them, because no one ever goes and sees them.” Unfortunately, we couldn’t because the logistics just didn’t work out for us.

Here are wonderful opportunities to remember what Jesus has done, to talk to other people, to celebrate it. You don’t have to go endure Black Friday. You don’t have to have a shopping list with 20 million items on it. You don’t have to break your bank account. You don’t have to eat any kind of Christmas cookie or candy that you don’t like.

Unless your grandma made it.

In which case, you probably have to eat them all year round. It’s not a Christmas thing.

But there are wonderful things here and wonderful opportunities. Even if you don’t believe in celebrating Christmas, it doesn’t mean you can’t make use of some of these opportunities to be a faithful witness and to enjoy the goodness of God, even in this late secular age of ours.

One of the things I always find interesting from people who religiously do not observe Christmas is that they’re still letting the church calendar determine what they preach on. It’s just the opposite. “All right, we know that December 25 is not the day to teach on the incarnation. That’s the one day you can’t do it, because otherwise they’ll think we’re doing a Christmas sermon.”

I’ve belonged to a couple churches that don’t do a Christmas eve anything. They don’t really change up their liturgy, and I enjoy it. I like that it’s just continued peace. Sundays are a peaceful day and we’re continuing to have the peace of Christ.

It was funny in the church that I went to in college, the pastor was like, “I’ve never preached an Easter sermon, except for that one time when we were preaching through the Gospel of Luke and it just sort of happened. It was Easter Sunday and there I was at the resurrection.” It was like, “Well, the Lord did that one for you.”

Thank you, guys, so much for this conversation. It’s been a delight. Thank you also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to you, our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in.

If you’d like to get in touch with us you can send us an email at [email protected].

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