Tag: Goliath

Pastors. Consider This For Your Sermons

What are some things I would like changed in sermons? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

As readers should know, I am in therapy here recovering from my divorce and learning social skills for dating. My therapist was asking me about how I’m doing spiritually and one thing we talked about were sermons I attend. I mentioned some concerns I have with them and I would like to write about them now.

The first point I want to make is that too many sermons seem to focus on the experience of the pastor. I get especially concerned when I hear them talk about things that God told them. Those are dangerous words. That is giving divine authority to whatever you say next. Are you willing to do that? While I realize we don’t live in Old Testament times, in those times, the penalty for saying “God said” when He did not say was death. We can say that that won’t happen anymore, but are we to think God doesn’t still take seriously people claiming to say what He didn’t say?

I often hear people who give announcements at church say the same thing. “Well, God brought in enough money for us to do XYZ” or “God laid it on our hearts to build the new building” or “God put this idea in us for the new Vacation Bible School.” How do you know? I always want to ask that question. It’s not just a Protestant thing. I have heard it in Catholic and Orthodox churches as well.

Pastors. If you spend too much time on your experience, you will be the focus. It will not be what the church is to do in Christ. It will be about what you think Christ is doing in you. I don’t come to church to hear about you. I come to church to hear about Jesus.

Second, is that too often we focus on application which boils down to advice. I am not saying application is not part of a sermon, but it should be the minimal part after the main message has been given. Lewis once said the world is full of good advice and if all Jesus came to do was give us good advice, it was a wasted effort. We have rejected much advice before. Why not the best of all?

If this is all we do, then we are not different from many other groups except we sprinkle a little bit of Jesus in there to sound spiritual. We’re pretty much a club at that point. Now I get that part of coming to church is community and we should have that, but the main draw should not be community. The main draw should be Jesus.

There’s a reason we have negative terminology for preaching and a sermon. If someone starts telling us what to do over and over we say “Don’t preach at me” or “I don’t need to hear a sermon.” Those are negative terms and really, they’ve been sadly earned. If you’re a pastor, do you want your sermon to sound like that?

Finally, present the grandeur of God in Christ in all your sermons somehow. For instance, when I was at church Sunday, the sermon I heard was on Mark 4. What’s it about? Jesus calming the storm. You know what we too often make the sermon about? Jesus can calm the storms in your life!

Well, yes, He can. But He won’t always. However, before saying that Jesus can calm the storms in our lives, let’s look at what this text is actually about.

Jesus calming an actual storm.

I’m going to wager a hunch that very few of you reading this have successfully gone outside to face a horrendous storm of some kind and calmed it down by your words alone. I’ll even say most of you have never attempted such a thing before. Who are we to calm storms, after all? Yet Jesus did it!

What does that tell me about Jesus? What does that show me about who He is? What does that tell me about the power that He has?

Another passage like this is David and Goliath. The passage becomes about facing your giants. What are the Goliaths in your life? Can you take them down? Let’s look at what the story is about.

It’s about the covenant God of Israel having a faithful servant in the next king, David, who trusts so much in YHWH to fulfill His covenant promises if one is faithful to Him that he is willing to face the giant on this God’s behalf.

The story of the three Hebrew boys thrown into the fire is about three Hebrew boys being faithful to YHWH in a pagan kingdom against a pagan king not even knowing if they would be spared. The miraculous preservation of them showed that yes, God can deliver, but it also showed something else. God is superior to the will of the pagan kings.

We could go on and on easily. In all of these stories, by jumping to application, you miss the message. Do you think Mark really wrote the story of Jesus calming the sea to show that God can calm the storms in your life? No. He wrote it to tell us about Jesus.  The writer of Samuel did not write to tell us God can overcome your Goliaths. He wrote to tell us about faithfulness to YHWH by David in a time when Israel was under oppression by an evil foreign adversary.

The story of the Hebrew boys was not written to show God can deliver you from your furnace. It was written to show that God was faithful even in a foreign land and greater than the gods of the most powerful empire on Earth at the time. It was written to show His covenant had not been abandoned.

Think back to a time when you fell in love with someone. Did you need to hear advice about how to love them? Not saying it wouldn’t have helped, but generally, when you were presented with the loved one and who they were, you wanted to do the good automatically. There’s a reason the saying was that the face of Helen of Troy could launch a thousand ships. Present a man with the beauty of the woman and he will tend to want to do great things. Beauty is very inspirational.

What will a man do when presented with the glory of Christ?

Now if you want to say God can calm the storms in your life and other things, make sure that is secondary. The primary thing is what God has done in Christ and in the lives of the saints of the past. Present them this God that they are to trust in and if God calms the storm, great! If not, He will be with them through it.

For those of us who are Protestants, we stand on a treasure trove of great theology. I am part of an Aquinas Zoom meeting on Thursday nights and I hear good theology as we discuss what Aquinas says about God. That’s our theology also. The Reformers and immediate predecessors would have no problem with much of medieval theology. It’s only in more recent times that we started having people seriously question simplicity, impassibility, omniscience, etc.

We have a great God. Let people see Him. We have a great savior in Christ. Let people see Him.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Spiritual Deception in the Highest Part 7

Who killed Goliath and other questions? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Well, we all know how it works by now. My doing this is a demonstration that some suffering is self-inflicted. Let’s see what we have from this work today to deal with.

Bible Question #15: Who slew Goliath?

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This is an easy one! Now turn to 2nd Samuel 21:19. Depending on the ‘modern version’ it will say something like:

“… Elhanan … killed Goliath …”

What do you mean Elhanan killed Goliath!? This is wrong you say. Most Sunday school children know that David slew Goliath! Well, you’re right. This is clearly in error.

Look at the same passage in your King James Bible. The Authorized King James Bible has the correct reading which is:

“… Elhanan … slew THE BROTHER OF Goliath …”

Spiritually, as Christians, we are the equivalent of David. Spiritually, Satan is the equivalent of Goliath. Just as David slew Goliath (with a rock), we Christians are “more than conquerors” as we have overcome (slew) Satan by the blood of the lamb (Jesus Christ, the rock!) and by the word of our testimony. Not only are ‘modern versions’ in error; but major doctrinal issues are involved here. Think about it.

To begin with, why do these modern translations sometimes differ? Because they are trying to be faithful to what the text says. Unfortunately, Johnson produces no material on the textual variations or the translating of Hebrew or anything of that sort.

My ministry partner, J.P. Holding, has this to say at Tektonics.

Many conservative commentators, like Archer, have supposed that in the first verse, “Lahmi the brother of” was somehow transformed into “the Bethlehemite”. Alhtough I priorly considered this a suitable textual explanation, I am now persuaded that it requires more explanation (on this, see our response to Human Faces of God, ch. 7). Even so, Callahan’s objections are not sufficient. He objects as follows (here, and now we add, in Secret Origins of the Bible [248]):

  1. First, he says, “Archer is using a method that he would scoff at if it were used by advocates” of the JEDP hypothesis. Indeed? Unless Callahan finds a place where Archer actually does this to an explanation of the same sort advanced by a JEDP theorist, he is merely making an ad hoc accusation.
  2. Second, he says he finds “no particular reason” to accept Archer’s idea “over a more simple and direct one of a later writer trying to resolve an inconsistency.”Well, I do: It has to do with giving ancient documents the benefit of the doubt; it has to do with textual criticism; it has to do with not assuming that ancient people were too foolish to see the obvious. Archer’s explanation is quite within the canons of textual criticism.
  3. Callahan wonders then why both Samuel and Chronicles use the “like a weaver’s beam” in their conclusions. The use of the phrase elsewhere is exactly the sort of thing that would induce an errant scribe to use it elsewhere in an effort to make the text coherent, or make it more memorable in an oral-based society. Callahan’s comment that a scribe would have to both move a portion of the word while leaving it there at the same time is mistaken — this is a perfect description of a known type of textual error called dittography.
  4. Finally, Callahan objects that the explanation contradicts Archer’s earlier assertion that “God kept the authors of the books, and by logical extension the editors of the canon, from error.” Archer may or may not argue this, but it doesn’t matter anyway. We do not believe that God preserved copyists from error. This is not asserted in any doctrinal statement on inerrancy (such as the Chicago Statement).

For the record, here is a summary of Archer’s explanation: 1) a copyist first mistook the sign of the direct object before “Lahmi,” which was ‘-t, for a b-t and got Bethelehemite; 2) the copyist also misread the word for “brother” (‘-h) as the sign of the direct object before “Goliath” and made “Goliath” the object of “killed” instead of “brother” as Chronicles does; 3) the word “weavers” was also misplaced after “Elhanan” to make the name “son of the woods of weavers,” which is quite an unlikely name.

Now you might not find that persuasive entirely, and that’s fine, but the point is that this should show it’s not a clear and simple question. However, looking at the end of what Johnson says, he is taking an interpretation of the original text, as Goliath being Satan and each of us being David, and then insisting that that interpretation is trying to be covered up by the modern versions. (Which, you know, all include the story of David and Goliath so how they’re covering this up is a mystery.) Yet there is given no reason why I should accept the interpretation or think it’s at all what the original writer had in mind.

Bible Question #16: Jesus said that our heavenly Father will forgive us of our sins. However, we are told that; likewise, there is something we must do. Do you remember what it is?

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Let’s turn, in a ‘modern version’ to Mark 11:26. Are you not able to find it? Are the verses in Mark chapter 11 numbered 23, 24, 25 and then 27!? Is verse 26 missing? Well, there is nothing wrong with your eyesight! Verse 26 is not there (or it is in brackets, casting doubt on it). It’s ANOTHER omission.

Now turn to the same verse in your Authorized (King James) Version. The KJV says:

“BUT IF YE DO NOT FORGIVE, NEITHER WILL YOUR FATHER WHICH IS IN HEAVEN FORGIVE YOUR TRESPASSES.”

Oh, man! This is important to know! Leaving out verse 26, leaves out an important piece of Christian doctrine. Verse 26 needs to be there! And, that’s why it is properly included in your King James Bible.

The question though is not what Johnson thinks needs to be there, but what is there. Mark often does give shorter versions of what is said and if verse 26 wasn’t in the original manuscripts (And by the way, verse numbers weren’t in the original manuscripts), then whether one thinks it needs to be there or not, faithfulness to the text says to not put it there. I could say “You need to believe in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus to be forgiven needs to be in the text also!”, but if it was not in what Mark wrote, then it will not be included.

By the way, modern translations do include that in passages such as following the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6. Again, an odd way of covering up doctrine.

Bible Question #17: What did Jesus say about religious hypocrisy?

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First, let’s take a look in a ‘modern’ version of the Bible. What does it say in Matthew 23:14?

Actually, it says nothing! ( The verse is missing in many modern versions ).

For the word of God, turn to the same verse in your King James Bible. What does it say?

“WOE UNTO YOU SCRIBES AND PHARISEES, HYPOCRITES! FOR YE DEVOUR WIDOWS’ HOUSES, AND FOR A PRETENCE MAKE LONG PRAYER: THEREFORE YE SHALL RECEIVE THE GREATER DAMNATION.”

Jesus does not like hypocrisy. Notice how God knows our heart!

Again, this does not show up in the manuscripts that are being used, but here’s something to consider. I just took a few minutes to do a search of the word “hypocrite” in Matthew. It shows up multiple times never in a flattering light. Six of those times are in this very same chapter!

No one reading the chapter in a modern translation would walk away confused about what Jesus thinks about hypocrisy. KJV-Onlyists can condemn the modern versions all they want, but arguments like this are thoroughly dishonest and saw more about KJV-Onlyists than they do about their opponents.

We’ll continue next time.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)