In this life temptation will come.  It is inevitable.  It is the very nature of the world.  But not every season in life and not every temptation is the same.  There are unique temptations that come in the difficult and desert seasons in life.  We struggle with things we are not able to overcome and over issues we feel are noble but don’t seem to bring anything but pain.  We feel as if God has abandoned us or may even actively be against us.  These are real seasons in life with God, and can be some of the most difficult, but God has some things to say about the temptations of the desert.

Though the language is stark, it is nonetheless true – God led his people in the wilderness and even tested his people through the trials they faced there.  Moses says, “And you shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness , that he might humble you, testing you” (vs. 2).  In the desert God’s people faced some very real and difficult things, beginning with hunger and thirst.  Adding to the natural difficulties is the fact that God did the leading into the desert with a few things in mind for them including humility, obedience and testing.

The inclusion of humility here is powerfully instructive.  They were the children of generations of slaves and had spent their entire lives wandering in a barren wilderness.  Do they really need humility?  Hasn’t life been difficult enough on them?  It turns out, however, that God’s most-used descriptor for them is not “humble,” but some form of “stubborn” or “stiff-necked.”  Neither the ignominy of slavery nor the difficulty of the desert made them humble.  Humility is not a function of our physical or material position in life, but of the position of our heart with God.  The most destitute can be proud; the wealthiest among us can be humble.

In addition to humility, they needed to learn where their source of all sustenance came from.  Moses says that God did these things, “that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord” (vs. 3).  They wandered in a desert where there was no bread, so God provided bread from heaven.  They had not meat, so God sent quail.  There were no water supplies easily at hand, so God cracked open a rock and water flowed.  There were no major cities along the way where they could buy new clothes for the ones that were wearing out in the wilderness wanderings, so God kept their shoes and clothes from growing thread-bare.  These needs were met, not by what we might recognize as normal or natural means, but by the voice of God commanding that their needs be met.

Possibly the deepest fear we face when we wander through a desert is that we simply will not be take care of, that our needs won’t be met.  We are accustomed to working to pay the bills and applying our own skills and talents to our lives so things go as smoothly as they can.  But when we are met with the barrenness of a land with no food or water, our abilities run out quickly.  And often this is the only place where we learn – really learn – that the voice of God is our only source of provision.

And then we know that the abundant provision of the Promised Land is the voice of God working to provide for his people. “For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land” (vs. 7).

To drive the point home, when he was hungry after forty days of fasting in the wilderness, Jesus Christ rebuked Satan’s temptation to turn stones into bread by quoting from Deuteronomy 8.  Jesus refused the bread of temptation in favor of the food that can only come from the voice of God himself.

The freedom and forgiveness in the Christian life can sometimes be misunderstood as an excuse to continue in a life of sin and rebellion.  And what is true today, it turns out, was true in Paul’s day.  Paul had to confront the notion that if God’s grace is a good thing, then we need to continue to sin so God has more chances to display his forgiveness.  This idea displays a radical misunderstanding of what God does to the human heart, and, surprisingly enough, baptism proves Paul’s point.

“Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” (vs. 3)

In certain parts of the early Christian church baptism was a rite that was earned and not simply given away.  When a person became a Christ-follower, instead of being immediately baptized they were put through a sometimes lengthy process of education and life transformation.  The church needed to be sure the convert knew what they had done and that their life reflected that change.  Only when they were sure of these things did the church allow baptism.

While very few churches would treat baptism this way today, this practice highlights what is being demonstrated in the act of going under and coming out of the water.  It is true that one of the clearest symbols of baptism is that our sins are washed away – we go into the water as a sinner, we come out a forgiven and cleansed child of God.  But Paul takes us a couple more steps down the path of what the act means.  As it turns out when we go into the water we are participating in the death of Jesus Christ.  We lie in the grave with him, as it were.  As Christ died, so we die.

And we die to a way of life.  The life ruled by my dysfunctional passions and severely limited abilities has gone away in the death of the believer in Christ Jesus.  I am dead now to sin.

But death is not all there is.  As we go under the water and die with Christ, so we come out and now live in the new life that Christ offers.  Just as Christ was raised from the dead, so now we can “walk in newness of life.” (vs. 4)  It is telling that Paul does not say here that Christ rose from the dead that we might live with him for all of eternity.  Though that is true, the point here – the point of baptism – is that we walk in the resurrection life here and now.

The resurrection life is not just about what happened to Jesus Christ 2000 years ago when he walked out of the tomb, and it is not just about what happens to the believer when they die and go to be with him.  It is also about what I do when I wake up every morning.  It is about the power of God living and breathing in his children so that we may live his kind of life in this world.  We die to sin and we come alive to the life of God.

If you were put in that early church where they required a developed knowledge of Jesus and evidence of a transformed life, would you be baptized by now?

That said, the real sad and unspoken truth is the reason why everyone’s been obsessed with this trial: because demonizing Casey Anthony makes us feel better about ourselves. The screams, shouts, and cries of outrage aren’t just damning Casey for what we perceive to be her actions, but in a weird way putting ourselves up on a pedestal for…well, not being Casey Anthony. Through the expression of our frustration, we bury our transgressions and sins by shoveling mounds of hate onto her.

So why are we so angry? It could be that like so many other things, we’re letting out anger and frustration over unrelated things and attributing it to this trial. Maybe we carry an insecurity that requires us to show other people that we’re a good person, and we think that rage against what we perceive as a great evil will do just that. Perhaps there’s something deep down that’s frustrated with Casey Anthony getting away with the unthinkable while we face consequences every day for far lesser misdeeds and mistakes in our own lives. Regardless of the reasons, all this anger can’t be healthy.

Though Marshall hints at our sense of justice and moral outrage being one of the reasons we are upset at the verdict, the cultural picture he paints is one largely devoid of genuine moral categories.  Instead of our reaction being prompted by justice, we are psychologised into a box of “unhealthy anger.”  His view of moral reaction, though common today, is radically shallow.  It exchanges pop-psychology for moral reasoning and leaves us all poorer as humans than when we began.

Let’s try a different approach to our reaction.

We are indelibly moral creatures hard-wired to react against what we view to be a moral tragedy.  We react against the moral wrong because we believe the good, beautiful and the true ought to win more often than they lose.  Our anger is entirely healthy as long as it is moral indignation and leads us to work on a better way of doing things where justice is done more often.  Moral outrage is not about me, it is about objective moral values and their integrity in our culture.  I react, not because I want to demean another person, but because a moral law has been broken and I have the inescapable sense that something needs to be done about it.

That section of Scripture tells the story of one of David’s most grievous sins – he takes another man’s wife as his own and arranges for the husband’s death. In response to this radical injustice, God sends the prophet Nathan into him to tell him what will be the consequences of his actions. As far as I can tell, the only passage that would be used to say that God commands rape here is 2 Samuel 12:11:

Thus says the LORD, ‘Behold, I will raise up evil against you out of your own house. And I will take your wives before your eyes and give them to your neighbor, and he shall lie with your wives in the sight of this sun.

As I asserted below, context has a lot to do with what this passage actually says. David took another man’s wife from him, and there are textual hints that she might have been a more than willing party to their behavior. David did not rape Bathsheba – their sex was consensual. In response, David is told that several of his wives will be taken away from him and given to his neighbors and they will be brazen about their sexuality. David took Uriah’s wife, his wives will be taken. No rape indicated, hinted at or explicitly mentioned in either scenario.

We might get hung up on the idea that God will give David’s wives to his neighbors. Here it is helpful to have a sense of how the OT communicates things like punishment for sin. There is reciprocity here to be sure, but the phrase, “I will take your wives” is shorthand for the natural flow of events which will result from David’s behavior. The OT understands God as punishing sin, so it has no problem assigning the reciprocity to God’s judgment. It need not be a heavy-handed judgment, as if God is forcibly removing women from David’s home and handing them over to violent rapists. In fact, that reading is directly contrary to the plain sense of the text.

In addition, the verb for, “shall lie with,” shakab, is a very common Hebrew verb in the OT for consensual sex (it is such a straight-forward verb that if often means literal sleep with no sexual overtones). It is, in fact, the same verb used in 2 Samuel 11:4 to describe the meeting of David and Bathsheba. In neither instance is rape explicitly mentioned or implicitly hinted at.

The plain, straightforward, and natural reading of the 2 Samuel 12:11 text is that David’s wives will be unfaithful to him just as he was unfaithful to them. It takes a strained and quote-mining reading of the text to conclude that it supports the idea that God commands or condones rape.

She has a point.  It appears that the more available the Bible has become both in print and in virtual form, fewer and fewer Christians read it any more.

According to a 2010 survey, more than a third of born-again Christians “rarely or never” read the Bible. Among “unaffiliated” people – that is, Americans who don’t belong to a religious congregation – more than two thirds say they don’t read the Bible.

Is it really a stretch to believe that our general trend to define genuine engagement down from face-to-face conversation all the way to tweets, will leave the Bible exempt?  It shouldn’t surprise us that more Christians read large chunks of the Bible less.  While it is becoming more popular to “share” favorite or inspiring verses online, that limits us to our software-induced character limit.  Since when had a serious thought been limited by 140 characters?

Skeptics are not exempt from this malady.  Often the quotations (or misquotations) used to attack the faith are short, misunderstood, and out of context.

Christians need to recapture the virtue of reading and taking the Bible seriously.  Though I don’t believe the church as a whole will crumble under the weight of virtual communities, its value to the individual can be seriously threatened by the thoughtless and unreflective believer.

Paul has never been to Rome, but he is anxious to visit.  He is looking forward to encouraging the church and to proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ.  He hopes, more specifically, that there will be a harvest among his brothers and sisters in Christ and among the Gentiles.  Paul knows the gospel is powerful when it is shared among believers, and powerful when it is shared with people who don’t yet know and love Jesus Christ.  In fact, under no circumstances is Paul ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

When Paul writes this letter he has already been around most of the Mediterranean world preaching and receiving mixed results.  In some places he is heartily received by an excited set of new believers.  In some places he is barely noticed, and in some places he is run out of town on a rail or stoned.  But in all places Paul is unashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The gospel of Christ is true, powerful, beautiful, transformative, holy and glorious – all on its own.  It is all these things without my help or contribution.  The gospel is untarnished by human error or cultural corruption.  Though it steps into our lives and histories and has the power to change us, we cannot change it.  The gospel does not need my help to be attractive, my strength to stand in our world, my intelligence and cleverness to be true or triumphant.  It is not within my abilities to make it what it is and always will be – the power of God for salvation.

There is no good reason to be ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ.  But there are a lot of bad reasons.

It might be peer pressure of some sort.  The crowd I find myself in may be put-off by Jesus’ story, or they may find it a quaint belief for some small set of people who don’t have the wherewithal to stand on their own two feet.  We may even recognize that the crowd we want to fit into looks down on what they think is the childishness or lack of sophistication of the gospel.  They are all wrong on all counts, and these are bad reasons to be ashamed.

I may simply be a spiritual sloth – a lazy bum when it comes to my relationship with God.  How is this being ashamed?  Will a lazy believer stand for the truth of their belief when the pressure is on?  What about when there is a better offer from another point of view?  Will they know how to address the skeptic who confronts them or the pains of life when they assail them?  They won’t, and while the spiritual sloth may carry their faith lightly on good days, they will drop it quickly on the hard ones.  Laziness is a bad reason to be ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Paul writes these words maybe 15 years before he is able to actually visit Rome.  We know Paul backs up these words with his deeds when he writes them.  But when he actually gets to Rome – when his wish of visiting them is fulfilled – he arrives in chains.  By then he is a prisoner for the sake of the gospel of Jesus Christ.  When he raises his hand to hug his friends they are in shackles.  Paul lives unashamed of the gospel and arrives in Rome unashamed of the gospel.

There is no good reason to be ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ.  It is the very power of God himself.

There is a lot we can learn about the Christian life from the way the apostle Paul introduces himself in his letters.  Though these sections often feel like simple boiler-plate, they contain far more than inconsequential pieces of information about Paul.  They become doors of insight into some of the goals of the Christian life.  They challenge us to be able to introduce ourselves in the same way with the same level of authenticity.

“Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ.”  Paul likes describing himself as a servant, the word means a willing slave, to Jesus Christ.  We cannot confuse his sense of servanthood with our notion of slavery, however.  When we encounter the concept, we tend to think of people carried across the world against their will, and the best thing we could do for them is set them free.  The best thing for Paul, as far as Paul is concerned, is his willing slavery to his Savior.  Paul has subjected himself to Jesus Christ as a servant on purpose.  Have I?

“Paul…called to be an apostle.”  Paul is called.  This means God has done something with Paul.  For most of us it could be said that we are doing something with ourselves, but that leaves us in the position of being subject to our own shortcomings and failings.  A calling by God means there can be a divine purpose for our being and our doing instead of just my purposes for being and doing.  As Paul will make clear over and over, being called by God means we are called to salvation for occupation.  God does the work of making us His own, and then we are to live for and work for Him.

Paul is an apostle.  In its simplest form, the term means he is a messenger.  Paul travelled the Mediterranean world taking the Gospel to people who had never heard.  And though Paul is one of the original, and probably unique, apostles, we are not exempt from the task.  Before his introduction is over he tells his readers that “we have received grace and apostleship” (vs. 5).

Paul also addresses all of his readers, as he does in so many of his letters, as saints.  He says the Romans were “called to be saints” (vs. 7).  If we conjure up images of “saints,” our heads might be filled with half-remembered paintings of people with halos, and stories of special devotion to God under harsh and trying circumstances.  And though those people may legitimately be saints, such images have the unfortunate effect of separating the rest of us from the calling of saint.

Paul says you are called to be saints – every one of you.  If we strip away the caricatures, we see that people called to be saints have a new life running through their veins that is not tarnished or overcome by this world.  We see that people who are called to be saints are anchored and secure in Christ.  Saints are not people whose lives are free from storms, but people whose lives are safe and secure in every storm.  And people who are called to be saints are not sedentary – they change things for the Kingdom of God.

You are called to be a saint.  Anything less is beneath your dignity.  Anything less is beneath who God created you to be.

The first topic that really piqued my interest was the matter of Abraham being commanded to sacrifice Isaac.  In all honesty, that is a difficult passage to deal with.  God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son of promise, and Abraham essentially says, “OK.”

One of Copan’s first moves is to examine the text of Genesis 22 itself.  Though this seems like an obvious thing to do, it is actually rarely done by stone-throwers.  Through the text he arrives at four reasons why the event is not the child-abusing horror it is often made out to be.  The one reason he lists that I found particularly convincing is that the whole event is described as a “test.” As such, the point of the story is not to actually take the life of Isaac, but to test Abraham’s trust in God.  It appears God’s plan includes not actually taking Isaac’s life, and as such, the story does not include that particular indictment of God.

But Abraham seemed ready and willing to go through with it.  Doesn’t that in and of itself make the story unpalatable?  At this point, Copan cites the ethicist John Hare and a thought experiment.  Abridging the thought experiment, imagine a world with different rules for life and death – like a world in which you were assured of being raised stronger and healthier if you were killed at the age of 18.  The wise choice would be to have killing parties at 18, and the less wise choice would be to continue to live less strong and less healthy.

As odd as that may sound, it speaks to the plausibility structure of Abraham at the time of God’s command and what that structure actually made of his rational choice.  The story itself tells us that Abraham believed God was able to raise the dead, that Isaac was a specific child given to him by God (the “child of promise”), and that Abraham fully expected the both of them to return home.  Because Abraham believed in a God who would keep his promise made to him through Isaac and that he was able to raise the dead, his choice to sacrifice his son was not irrational, but an act of trust in God.

And as it turns out, Abraham trusted God, God had no intention of letting Isaac die at his father’s hand, and God did fulfill his promise through Isaac.

Seen through the lens of naturalism, the story of Abraham and Isaac seems worse than incomprehensible.  Seen through the lens of the text itself and the existence of God, we can come to terms with what happened and why.

There are a lot of good definitions and descriptions out there about what they are, and I have compiled my own kind of simple description from several of them.  The spiritual disciplines are deliberate activities designed to put us in God’s way.

They are deliberate.  We do not grow and mature as Christians on accident or from circumstance to circumstance.  If we allow our soul’s formation to simply happen to us, we will be not be unformed spiritually, but malformed.  Instead of the malformation available to us through our day-to-day lives, we decide to engage in activities designed to bring us closer to God and the kinds of things he wants to do with our lives.

They are designed.  By this I mean there is a tried-and-true historical method we can be a part of.  I do not believe it is the case that every activity is a spiritual discipline, though to the properly disciplined every activity becomes an act of worship and discipleship.  So, prayer, for instance, is designed and guided by the Scriptures and tradition instead of the whimsy of personal experience.  And in this way our experiences grow deeper and deeper as we step into God’s ocean instead of wading in our kiddy pool of subjective reality.

They put us in God’s way.  I need to come up with a better analogy, but this one came to me years ago and it still communicates my point.  The spiritual disciplines are not the things that “make us better people,” they are the things that get us out of the way and allow God to do his job of transformation.  For example, if I want to be hit by a car (I told you it was a bad analogy), I will never succeed by sitting at my keyboard and thinking about it.  But, if I get up and walk the few blocks to the interstate and put myself in the way of oncoming traffic, I will likely succeed.  It’s the walking that makes the difference.

The spiritual disciplines are like taking a walk to put ourselves in God’s way.  Sitting here thinking about life with God is nearly useless.  But if I begin to take steps in the right direction there is no telling what God can do.  The spiritual disciplines are those steps.  They are not magic.  They are not instant miracle cures to vice.  They are the ways in which God gains access to me – to every part of me – so he can overcome my brokenness and make me into the image and likeness of his Son.

There are times when a passage of Scripture is so well known to us, that in reading it we may lose sight of the context or the passage that follows.  The opening praise of Psalm 19 is so catching it is easy to miss the lines that follow.  It is gloriously true that all of creation sings the wonder and praise of its Creator.  It is no less true that the law of the Lord is itself glorious.

This passage looks at the law of God the way we may rotate a crystal under a light.  With each turn we see a new facet, a new color emerges.  David rotates the law of God under a light and with each turn of phrase we learn something new and beautiful about the ways and precepts of our God.

The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul.

There is nothing lacking in the law of the Lord.  If we are searching for wisdom, meaning and truth, there is nowhere else to go.  And since each human has an insatiable longing for God, it is only He who can quench that thirst.

The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.

All God says is completely trustworthy.  When we trust in the ways and wisdom of men, the wise become foolish.  When the simple trust in the absolutely sure and steadfast word of God, they become wise.

The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart.

We look for joy in all the wrong places.  We return again and again to the empty and leaking wells of this world, when obedience to God’s precepts provides true joy.

The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes.

They are pure the way light is radiant.  We cannot see in the dark – there is no light for our eyes to use.  But when the light shines, our eyes work the way they were created to work and we see.  The commands of our Lord shine on our lives, and in obedience we see.

The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever.

Our reverence can be measured by the thing we revere.  To be in awe of empires and political schemes is to have a small and unrequited awe.  But the fear of the Lord is fear rightfully and eternally placed.  He is greater than and will outlast every human endeavor.  Thus, the fear of the Lord is right and eternal.

The rules of the Lord are true, and righteous altogether.

My rules are not true.  Your rules are not true.  Neither are ours righteous for they are by necessity stained with our sin and short-sightedness.  The rules of the Lord are not easy and comfortable to follow, but they are true and wholly right.  His rules do not always fit well with what I want to do with myself, but they are my only source of true, righteous and moral guidance.

These laws and ways are to be desired more than any other thing.