Did King Jehoram have Crohn’s disease?

Maybe:

“And after all this the Lord struck him in his bowels with an incurable disease. In the course of time, at the end of two years, his bowels came out because of the disease, and he died in great agony.” -2 Chronicles 21:18-19

Crohn’s disease is known for causing fistulas between the bowels and other organs, including sometimes the skin. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of anything else that could cause his bowels to “come out”. The etiology must not have been infectious, or at least not transmissible, since the text singles out Jehoram himself as having the disease. He died at the age of 40, and so the time of onset of the disease was probably about right–it usually starts between the ages of 15-35. Since it wouldn’t have become so severe as to kill him immediately, it makes sense that he may not have died until age 40. Additionally, Jewish ancestry is a risk factor for Crohn’s disease. Anyone else have any other plausible ideas for King Jehoram’s differential diagnosis?

The major rift between Christianity and culture is not belief or disbelief in absolute truth

I’ve often heard that the major rift between Christianity and US culture is this: Christians affirm absolute truth, but culture affirms that truth is relative and not absolute. That is, Christians affirm that we’re correct about God and that contrary thoughts are incorrect. Culture at large affirms that there is really no truth, and that people can choose their own truth, follow their own religion, and that it’s most  important for us to all get along.

However, I don’t think this is the fundamental discordance between US Christians and US culture. The idea of relative truth is certainly in our culture, but the silly thing about this idea is that it’s self-refuting. To claim that “there is no absolute truth” is to claim that the statement itself isn’t necessarily true. Because there is no absolute truth, the statement that “there is no absolute truth” can’t be absolutely true. Disbelief in absolute truth is an obviously inconsistent and illogical thing to believe.

I don’t think that most people in the U.S. are actually this dense. Common, everyday people are intelligent enough to see that disbelieving in absolute truth is nonsense. I’m sure you can find a number of philosophy professors who would take issue with this, but I doubt you can find very many everyday people to agree with them. People are smart enough to believe in absolute truth, and I don’t think this is the major rift between Christianity and U.S. culture.

Rather, I think the major discordance is between our values. The general culture in the U.S. believes that the most important virtue is to avoid causing harm to other people–whether that harm be physical, psychological, social, or otherwise. Some particularly virtuous people might say that the most important virtue is to do good to other people and that nothing can be more admirable and moral than to seek the good of others.

The difference between these values and the values of Jesus seems slight if you’ve never thought about it before. About 2,000 years ago, Jesus told us what our chief virtue as His disciples should be:

“And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ‘Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?’ And he said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'” -Matthew 22:35-39

As Christians, our most important virtue is to love God. Secondly, we’re to love people. The central truth of being a follower of the Messiah is that God can satisfy us more than anything else on earth. If we have faith in Jesus’s sacrifice, we can be made spiritually alive, and in this redeemed state we can love the God who saved us.

But our second imperative is to love other people–and this means telling them about God, about Jesus who came to die for us, and about how they too can be made spiritually alive. For each and every person who lives, loving and knowing God is the most satisfying thing they can do. Because of this, there’s nothing more kind than to tell another person about Jesus, and about how He can save them as He has saved us.

And this is where Christians clash with most non-Christians in the US. If you tell someone to seek God, they may not like hearing that. They may want to go on believing that there is no God, or at least that God doesn’t matter. If you tell someone to seek God, you may cause them to be uncomfortable–and this is counter to the number one imperative of our culture: do no harm to other people.

As followers of the one true God, there is no way we can get around this disagreement. It’s the core of our faith to believe that by knowing God, any and every human will be infinitely better off than if they did not know God. If we ourselves know God, then we’ll tell our friends, family, and acquaintances that they should know Him too. It is secondarily important that we all get along and be kind to each other, but it’s far, far more important that as many people as possible come to know Jesus as their Savior.

“All that is gold does not glitter”

The first nine chapters of Chronicles are boring.

These chapters are all genealogies. There are a few details about various people’s vocations, or where they lived, or what happened to them during their lifetimes, but for the most part these chapters tiredly recite who was the son of whom.

But my life is at least as boring as Chronicles. I was born, I’ll hopefully have children. I’ll live somewhere and do something, and then I’ll die. But the first nine chapters of Chronicles assure me that these kinds of things matter. God works through ordinary people doing ordinary things, and in Scripture He has recorded His work in people’s lives for all of us to see.

There in Scripture is a march of names, some who served the Lord and some who didn’t, but all of whom displayed His glory. God’s will was done in spite of the people who opposed Him, and His will was done through those people who submitted to Him. God worked through each life, through their relationships, activities, and conversations. He can work through my life too, if I submit everything, boring as any of it may seem, to Him. The same is true for you.

Throw yourself into the sea

After the crucifixion, Peter had failed as a follower of Jesus. Rather than remaining by Jesus’ side until His death on the cross, Peter had fled, and then denied ever having known Jesus. He had thoroughly abandoned his teacher. What else could he do but go back to the life he knew before Jesus had called him? He certainly couldn’t claim to be a disciple anymore.

“Simon Peter said to them, ‘I am going fishing.’ They said to him, ‘We will go with you.’ They went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing.” -John 21:3 (ESV)

Peter went back to being a fisherman, but now he was even failing at what he used to do for a living. He had failed as a disciple, and he had failed as a fisherman. He got into the boat, went back to his old business of fishing, and he caught nothing.

So is it surprising that Peter dives into the sea and swims when he sees Jesus standing on the shore? What other chance does he have to be useful for anything? Only when he was with Jesus had Peter ever been useful. Jesus made Peter come alive in a way that nothing else ever had or ever could. When Peter was with Jesus, Peter had a purpose. Jesus had been building something great with Peter and the other disciples, and Peter craved the sense of purpose he had known as a disciple of the One true God. He must have remembered what Jesus had told him:

“You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” -Matthew 16:18 (ESV)

So, although he was “stripped for work,” Peter “threw himself into the sea.” Only Jesus had ever made Peter come alive with excitement and purpose. Without Jesus, Peter was just a failure, plodding through life as a common fisherman.

The same is true of me. Jesus has made me come alive in a way nothing else ever has or ever could. The same can be true for you and for every other person. Without Jesus, we have no purpose. We fail at life. Only He can make us come alive. Only He can give us purpose. So why would we want to keep plodding through life and toiling away and catching nothing? We need to leave behind anything worldly that we think is important. I need Jesus, you need Jesus, and everyone else needs Jesus. He can build us into a rock, and even the gates of hell cannot stop us from doing His work.

Some words from my favorite pastor-poet

Brother Begg’s sermons are like poetry. I can’t quite describe why, but I just think they’re beautiful. I hope to eventually do a series of posts on my understanding of the Gospel. Until then, here’s a beautiful sermon on the Gospel (and when I get around to my posts they most definitely will not be as beautifully composed as this). So give it a listen:

\”The Gospel\” by Alistair Begg

A peg in a secure place

For about the past six weeks, I’ve been studying for twelve hours each day. I know this because I’ve been timing myself. I keep a stopwatch on my desk. When I’m studying, I start it, and if I get up to get a snack or go to the bathroom, I stop it. It helps me stay motivated and keep account of my time.

I’ve been studying because I take step 1 of my licensing exam in three days. There are three parts of the exam, but the first is the most important, because residencies use the scores to sift which students they will and will not seriously consider hiring. I’ve rarely been this stressed in my life, and I’ve rarely ever worked this hard. Sometimes, the weight of studying seems crushing, as page after page accumulates, and half-remembered factoids keep me awake at night as I try to remember what I’ve forgotten.

There’s a beautiful and terrifying passage in Isaiah that describes ancient Judah in a much more dire situation than mine. The Assyrian empire is ravaging the world, and the tide-waters of the Assyrian army are lapping at the gates of Jerusalem. While Jerusalem is under seige, King Hezekiah sends Eliakim out of the city gates to negotiate. At this point, everything Judah trusted in has failed them. Egypt won’t rescue them. Their army is dwarfed by the Assyrians.

Eliakim and two others go out alone to meet the Assyrians, and Rabshakeh, apparently some kind of Assyrian commander, begins to mock and taunt. Rabshakeh promises that Jerusalem will fall, that Egypt won’t save them, that the Jews have no strategy, and that God Himself certainly won’t rescue Judah.

Eliakim must have been terrified. You can imagine him standing before the countless, clattering Assyrian army, trying to remember what he was supposed to say. Isaiah describes the moment colorfully–Eliakim is a peg in a wall, and all of Judah’s hope is hanging on his negotiating skills. At first, he is strong and secure, but as item after item is hung on the peg, the tension builds. Eliakim fails, and the peg with all the pots and pans that were hanging on it comes crashing to the ground:

“In that day I will call my servant Eliakim the son of Hilkiah… And I will place on his shoulder the key of the house of David. He shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none shall open. And I will fasten him like a peg in a secure place, and he will become a throne of honor to his father’s house. And they will hang on him the whole honor of his father’s house, the offspring and issue, every small vessel, from the cups to all the flagons. In that day, declares the Lord of hosts, the peg that was fastened in a secure place will give way, and it will be cut down and fall, and the load that was on it will be cut off, for the Lord has spoken.”
-Isaiah 22:20-25

When Rabshakeh is done taunting, Eliakim doesn’t know what to say. Rather than negotiating, or boasting that God would save them, Eliakim asks Rabshakeh to please speak in Aramaic, rather than Hebrew, so that the soldiers on the walls of besieged Jerusalem will not be able to understand, probably hoping that the soldiers on the wall won’t become even more terrified (Isaiah 36:11). Predictably, Rabshakeh then begins shouting to the men on the wall in Hebrew, telling them that their God and their king can’t save them, and that they should either surrender or die (36:13-20).

Israel’s response? “But they were silent and answered him not a word.” (36:21).

Eliakim had failed. Like Israel, I often hang all my hopes on the amount of studying I do, and on my own ability to learn material. This is a mistake. At some point, I will fail. I’m not a secure peg. Studying is necessary, but only God can make me succeed–only God can make anyone succeed.

Hezekiah was crushed when Eliakim returned with the news. Now that Israel had nothing left to rely on, Hezekiah could only rely on God. He prayed, and the Lord answered. There was some kind of plague, or something more miraculous, and thousands of Assyrians died, so that they had to return home (Isaiah 37:36-37).

I am not a reliable peg, and nothing I study is a reliable peg. God has gotten me into medical school, and He’ll take me through it with just the right step 1 score, and just the right grades. All of my hopes and concerns should be hung on Him–anything else is bound to fail eventually.

“Therefore thus says the Lord concerning the king of Assyria: He shall not come into the city or shoot an arrow there or come before it with a shield or cast up a siege mound against it. By the way that he came, by the same he shall return, and he shall not come into this city, declares the Lord. For I will defend this city to save it, for my own sake and for the sake of my servant David.”
-Isaiah 37:33-35

Holy

Holy, holy, holy!  Lord God Almighty!

Early in the morning our song shall rise to thee.

Holy, holy, holy!  Merciful and mighty,

God in three persons, blessed Trinity!

 

Holy, holy, holy!  All the saints adore thee,

casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea;

cherubim and seraphim falling down before thee,

which wert, and art, and evermore shalt be.

 

Holy, holy, holy!  Though the darkness hide thee,

though the eye of sinful man thy glory may not see,

only thou art holy; there is none beside thee,

perfect in power, in love and purity.

 

Holy, holy, holy!  Lord God Almighty!

All thy works shall praise thy name, in earth and sky and sea.

Holy, holy, holy!  Merciful and mighty,

God in three persons, blessed Trinity.

 

-A hymn by Reginald Heber, 1826. Too often, we forget God’s holiness.

Someday, troops will till corn fields

“Daddy, did you fight in a war?”

“Yes son.”

I scrambled to catch up with my father in the grocery store parking lot, but my 7-year old legs were very short. I didn’t mind doing a bit of a run in my cool new velcro-strap tennis shoes. He must have slowed down for me.

“Was it exciting?”

“No son. War is not exciting. It’s terrible.”

I remember this clearly. He said it forcefully, almost as if he was annoyed. There must have been at least a few moments of silence while I processed the information he’d just injected into my developing mind. We walked through the sliding glass doors. I don’t remember what we talked about next–I probably asked if we could buy some candy.

I grew up in a town that exists largely to serve a military base. Many of my other friends also had dads who fought in Operation Desert Storm. Our fathers left, and then returned several months later. I remember playing “army men” in a field with one of my friends–we wandered the farm field in the back of his house with our plastic helmets and plastic guns, shooting imaginary enemies. F-16 fighter jets used to fly drills over my house and then far out over the wheat fields at night. I remember finding the doppler-shifted roars vaguely comforting as I fell asleep. To my 7-year old mind, I just wanted to be like my dad. He put on camouflage in the morning, so I did too. Jets soared overhead, so I flew my toy jets over my Lego figures. It was innocent. But that conversation with my dad in the grocery store parking lot was the first time I realized that people die in war. What had seemed fun was beginning to seem obscene–and rightly so.

War is apalling. I believe that some wars are just, and some are unjust, but war is apalling. Hopefully, the UN action in Libya will bring justice, prevent huge loss of life, and allow the country to improve, but that doesn’t change the fact that people–people who may have been trying only to make money, or to keep themselves safe, people who may have been caught up in something they didn’t understand–have died.

I grew up far, far away from any of the horrors of war. The armored vehicles I saw were not rolling through smoking battlefields, but through miles of wheat fields swaying in the breeze, through rolling prairies with grazing cattle.

God is tired of war. He’s tired of people dying, of children starving, of women losing husbands. Like in the time of Noah, evil makes God sorrowful. And eventually, like in the time of Noah, God will destroy the destroying. He’ll save those who belong to Him, and the world will be transformed. Vehicles once used for violence will be useless. Someday, the Lord will harvest His people like the farmer harvests the wheat in the fields, and the only use for our instruments of war will be for peace–perhaps tanks will carry hay bales and helicopters will dust crops.

“It shall come to pass in the latter days
that the mountain of the house of the LORD
shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
and shall be lifted up above the hills;
and all the nations shall flow to it,
and many peoples shall come, and say:
Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD,
to the house of the God of Jacob,
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.
For out of Zion shall go the law,
and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between the nations,
and shall decide disputes for many peoples;
and they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war anymore.”
-Isaiah 2:2-4 (ESV)

A confession of relative incompetence

I need to confess to you that I’ve been lazy. I’ve known the Lord for nearly ten years, and God speaks to us through reading the Bible and through prayer, both things Christians should do regularly. There have been times when I’ve done this, but largely I’ve been sporadic in my habits, especially for the past few years.

By now, I should know the basic principles of Scripture, but I barely do. Hebrews chapter 5 tells us that we need to learn the basic principles, and then move on to become a more mature Christian. We need to train our “powers of discernment” by constant practice. My confession to you is that I haven’t done this adequately.

Why does this matter?

It matters because I’m writing. It matters because “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” (Hebrews 4:12)

Scripture is how God changes our hearts. We need to learn Scripture intellectually, but we also need to feel Scripture. We need to fear God’s wrath, faint at His love, be saddened by the crucifixion, excited by the resurrection. If we are Christians, then God changes our hearts through the Holy Spirit and with Scripture. And our hearts and minds desperately need changing.

“For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. The good person out of his good treasure brings forth good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure brings forth evil.”
-Matthew 12:34-35

What’s in your heart? I believe that evil is the absence of good (1 John 3:4–“Sin is lawlessness.”) I had been filling my heart with other things, many of which are good, but many of which are neutral at best. Lately, I’ve been reading the Scriptures more. I’ve always taken breaks from studying, usually to read the news. So lately I’ve been reading less news and more Scripture. I manage to read about ten chapters a day, and this has been a tremendous blessing to me. The Bible is an enormous book with a great story, but you can’t understand it unless you’re diligent in reading it.

If you haven’t read the Bible and you want to start, I might suggest reading these books in this order: Matthew, John, Acts, Romans, and then the Psalms. That’s just a suggestion of mine. Otherwise, read what you’re interested in. For me lately, it’s been best to read large sections of Scripture at a time. I’ve also found it helpful to study a chapter in depth and take notes, or to look at only a few verses and think and pray about them for several days.

So read the Bible somehow. It’s God’s word to you. God’s word to you. Let Him change your heart. Let Him place good treasure there, so that it changes your thinking, makes you a more loving person, makes you a joy and an inspiration to everyone around you.

Will God punish sons for the sins of their fathers?

One concept that has always galled me is the promise of God to punish a son for his father’s sin. Why should a person be held responsible for something their parent did? It doesn’t seem fair.

In fact, I have misunderstood this idea–God does punish sons for their fathers’ sin, even today, and it’s not a terribly unjust thing to do. The statement appears first in the ten commandments:

“I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate Me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love Me and keep My commandments.”

-Exodus 20:5-6

This is about God and how He deals with people.  Firstly, I misunderstood this passage because I read it with the wrong emphasis. I immediately focused on the fact that God will punish the third and fourth generation of a sinner. The fact is that He also shows “steadfast love to the thousandth generation.”

To the thousandth generation!

The purpose of the passage is to exhort Israel to love God. God didn’t want Israel to love things--idols–more than they loved Him. God cannot let sin go unpunished, and so He would exact justice if there was wrong-doing, and the ultimate wrong-doing is to hate God and to love things more than God. However, if only a single person in Israel loved God, He would show steadfast love to a thousand generations after that person.

Our love is insignificant compared to God’s love, but so is our sin, because God has multiplied His love and continued to multiply it until it’s sufficient to cover all our sins. In Israel, people rebelled horribly against God, and they did so almost continually, as chronicled in Judges, Kings, the prophets, and the rest of the Hebrew Bible. God did punish them, and many generations of Jews were exiled to Babylon, Assyria, and Persia. But there were also a few in Israel who loved God–you only need to read David’s Psalms to find beautiful examples of this.

Because of only a few who loved Him, God kept His word to Israel, showing steadfast love to thousands of generations of Jews, until at last He sent His Son, the ultimate manifestation of His love, not just for the Jews, but also for all people everywhere. So God’s love is greater than our sin, and He loves more readily than He judges.

But in the shadow of God’s mighty promise to love for a thousand generations is still the promise to punish sons for the sins of their fathers. This isn’t an obscure passage. It’s a robust, undeniable theme throughout the whole Scriptures. It occurs repeatedly, quoted word-for-word in several places (Exodus 34:7, Numbers 14:18, Deuteronomy 5:9-10, Jeremiah 32:18). The idea also occurs in the Psalms and in numerous other places.

Paul tells us that we inherit sin from Adam, who is the first man, the father of us all, and the first sinner. By being Adam’s descendants, we inherit his sin, and we inherit the punishment for his sin–death (Romans 5:12). Because of this, every single one of us is a sinner from birth (Romans 3:23). David agrees, mourning in Psalm 51:5 that he was born sinful–“In sin did my mother conceive me.” And again in Psalm 58:3, “The wicked are estranged from the womb; they go astray from birth.” Paul restates in Ephesians 2:3 that we are sinful “by nature“.

And for the longest time each one of these verses bothered me a bit. Shouldn’t we all be innocent until we do something that makes us guilty? But then I realized–I think by reading C.S. Lewis–that we all do things that make us guilty. This is the second reason I misunderstood this passage.

The issue is not so much that we inherit our father’s punishment as it is that we inherit our father’s sins. You’ve seen this everywhere. Children of lazy parents grow up to be lazy people. Children of angry parents grow up to be angry people. Children of abusive parents often grow up to abuse their children.

It’s a terrible, terrible cycle, but you’ve probably seen it in your own life. I’ve certainly seen it in mine. My dad has trouble making himself help my mom (who still has kids at home to care for) clean up around the house. You may ask my wife, and she’ll tell you that this is something I struggle with as well. I sometimes get to thinking that my school work is more important than a clean house that she’ll enjoy–but it certainly isn’t.

So why should it bother me that the Bible affirms something I’ve seen over and over in people all around me? The answer is that it shouldn’t bother me. It is the truth. God has blessed us infinitely more than He has judged us, and the fact that children inherit sin from their parents is patently obvious.

Furthermore, God’s love has been multiplied through all the generations of Israel and Christians, and I have been a recipient of grace upon grace–the grace of being alive and experiencing life, and the grace of His Son, Jesus the Messiah, who took the punishment that I inherited–the punishment for my sin–and paid for it completely with His life.

You have inherited sin as well–I’m sure you can tell me a million little things that you fail at, things you shouldn’t have said or done, people you should have been kinder to or more helpful to. The sins may seem small, but what about when you have a child? You may lose your temper sometimes, but your child may learn this from you. Perhaps his temper will be worse than yours, and perhaps he will teach his son to be angry as well. Our sins multiply. Even what seems like a small thing can affect someone else profoundly. You can crush a person’s ego for life with a single poorly-considered word. The son of a hothead may grow up to be a murderer, and that father, who merely had a temper, would be largely responsible for the lack of self-control that he taught his son.

The Gospel is that we can have a new Father in heaven. If you have not believed in God and in the sacrifice of His Son, then you still have your inherited sin, but if you accept Jesus and His saving sacrifice on the cross, you can have a new Father (Galatians 4:1-7). From this new Father, you will inherit not sin and a punishment of death in hell, but righteousness and eternal life with Him in heaven. God is “a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” and you need only to accept Him as your God.

“In the same way also, when we were children, we were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.”

-Galatians 4:3-7

[You might also want to check out this wonderful lady’s blog post: http://meetingintheclouds.wordpress.com/2010/10/03/part-8-i-am-adopted-i-have-a-father/ She is a 74 year old Christian in Australia, and she understands this verse in Galatians in a profound way. I stumbled across her blog a few months ago.]