Category Archives: history

The hazardous art of predicting the future

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“And it happened that as we were going to the place of prayer, a certain slave-girl having a spirit of divination met us, who was bringing her masters much profit by fortunetelling….” (Acts 16:16)

Some culture writers and half-serious columnists do it for fun, giving their forecasts on life in the future.  Some, like meteorologists, work at it seriously to protect lives. If the hurricane in the Caribbean is headed our way we need to know it.

But then, there are those strange individuals who believe they are endowed with supernatural gifts of prophecy and fortune-telling. (There was a young woman possessed with such power in Acts 16.  Its origin was satanic.)

If you have such a gift, I have a word for you.

Give it back.

An article from Newsweek of January 1, 2000, reported on a prediction from 98 years earlier.  In the 1902 Atlantic Monthly, economist John Bates Clark had written a piece called “Looking Back on the 20th Century.”  Mr. Clark had projected himself into  the year 2000 and concluded we would be seeing….

–strawberries the size of apples and oranges growing in Philadelphia.

–Moving sidewalks through pneumatic tubes in order to transport people

–No more slums

–War and poverty eliminated.

–A near “pot-hole free expressway of progress” for all of mankind

–Wealth evenly distributed

According to Mr. Clark, “Humanity has it made in the shade” by the start of the 21st century.

Well, he got the strawberries thing right. And airports have the moving sidewalks.  However, far from being free of war, the 20th century gave us two of the worst conflicts in the history of mankind resulting in the deaths of hundreds of millions.  (He also missed entirely any mention of air travel, being one year short of the Wright Brothers’ invention.)

War and poverty are alive and well in the year 2024, to our sadness and shame.

Here’s a question for those who would like to turn this into a parlor game.  What did Mr. Clark miss? What did he overlook which made his predictions so much rosier than the reality?

He missed “the elephant in the living room.”

He missed the dark side of human nature.  The sinful, selfish nature of fallen man.

What the Bible calls sin.

Mankind has such capabilities and potential. However, he is always hampered by a dysfunctionality about himself: he is his own worst enemy.

Take wars, for instance.  During the late 1960s when the U.S. was deeply involved in war in Southeast Asia, at the funeral for one of our soldiers, I heard the preacher say, “We do not know where wars come from.”  I wondered if he had never read God’s word.

What is the source of the wars and the fights among you? Don’t they come from the cravings that are at war within you? You desire and do not have.  You murder and covet and cannot obtain.  You fight and war (James 4:1-2).

Make a list of mankind’s ills and in one way or the other, they all go back to the lusts and cravings of the human heart. It wants what it wants and refuses to take ‘no’ for an answer. If using others to get what it wants is required, the human heart will find a way.

We were talking about the business of foretelling the future.

God’s preachers must be careful not to get into the act.  We know no more about the future than anyone else.  We have not solved the prophecy riddle, sad to say, and a thousand certainties preached in past generations by prophetic know-it-alls have been proven false.  To our shame, that does not impede this generation of self-appointed experts on prophecy from announcing their findings.

I’m not saying we should not be teaching Ezekiel 38-39 or the books of Daniel or Revelation. Only that humility is called for when approaching these teachings that have perplexed the Lord’s people from the beginning.

A little historical perspective is in order.

If past generations were mistaken about the identity of the Antichrist (Hitler, Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, the head of the European Common Market, Henry Kissinger, FDR, Guru Maharaj Ji, and Saddam Hussein have all received nominations!), it’s almost a lead-pipe certainty that you and I haven’t figured it out either.

In his final epistle to Timothy, the Apostle Paul said, “Reject foolish and ignorant disputes, knowing that they breed quarrels” (2 Timothy 2:23).  And this: “The Lord’s servant must not quarrel, but must be gentle to everyone, able to teach, and patient, instructing his opponents with gentleness…” (2:24).

Humility is always in order.  Gentleness in teaching will not elicit a chorus of ‘amens’ from the back pews and will not get you invited to deliver that oration at the next conference of pulpiteers.  Kindness in your manner probably will not drive your audience to their feet as they call out their approval of that rousing sermon.  But it will please your Father and it will instruct the Christlike.

What it will not do is tickle the fancies of the sensual and carnal.

But you can live with that.

What it will do is stand the test of time.

“Preach the Word.”

Never hesitate to say “I don’t know” when asked questions outside your understanding.  Because you do not know a thousand things about what God is doing in this world.  What you and I do know beyond any doubt is this:  Trusting our Lord is always best and right and wise.

Trust and obey. For there’s no other way. 

Those who have trod this ground before and made it sacred

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Who has walked this ground before me?

As a teen, I wondered that while working on our Alabama farm.  Walking behind our mule, I would find the occasional arrowhead and once in the same day my brother and I found two tomahawks. I have these rocks today in a cabinet in my living room, the earliest part of my treasured rock collection.

The Creek Indians, we are told, lived in those hills and hollows in North Alabama before President Andrew Jackson ordered the tribes east of the Mississippi River to be removed to Oklahoma. This “trail of tears” constitutes a sad saga in American history.  The teenage boy which I was, was fascinated with thoughts of the native Americans who lived here long before we arrived. (May I recommend a book? A Brutal Reckoning: Andrew Jackson, the Creek Indians, and the Epic War for the American South by Peter Cozzens.)

Once while giving some Atlanta friends a tour of New Orleans, I asked, “Did you know Abraham Lincoln came to our city?”  They didn’t.

Few people do.

The teacher in me kicked into overdrive.

“Lincoln came to New Orleans twice, once in 1828 when he was 19 and again in 1831, at the age of 22,” I told them.

In those days, people would build flatboats and float down the Mississippi bringing crafts or produce to sell.  On arrival, they would peddle their cargo, then tear up the boat and sell it for firewood.  They would walk around for a couple of days and “see the elephant,” as they called it, then book passage north on a paddle-wheeler.

The first time, Lincoln came as a helper for his boss’ son, and the second time he was in charge.

Professor Richard Campanella of Tulane University wrote Lincoln in New Orleans, published in 2010 by the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press.  It’s the best and most complete thing ever written on the subject, I feel confident in saying.  Subtitle: The 1828-1831 flatboat voyages and their place in history.

Now, the book is so dense, with interesting insights and details on every page, that reading it is a slow process.  Campanella even tells us where the flatboat probably docked, where Lincoln and his friend may have stayed, and which slave auction they may have watched.

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C. S. Lewis’s Christmas sermon to pagans

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Note from Joe: I picked this up off the internet. Am reposting it here because I love it so much and want to preserve it nearby.  Use if you can.

Editor’s Note: In December of 2017 the world got a Christmas present – a lost C.S. Lewis work was recovered.

Stepanie Derrick, a PhD student at the University of Stirling, found the following article doing her research. It comes from The Strand a now-defunct and historically significant publication in the U.K.

We are publishing the piece here to highlight Lewis’ provocative idea that a re-paganization of the West would be useful for the cause of the Gospel.

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Making a difficult subject more enjoyable: What good writers do

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Winston Groom, known to most as the author of Forrest Gump, was a well-respected writer of historical stuff including Shrouds of Glory, Shiloh 1862, and Vicksburg 1863.  What makes Groom’s Civil War books different from most is the stuff he inserted into the narrative. Like these, for instance….

ONE. Rebel General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a case study in a hundred things–ego, confidence, brilliance, foolhardiness–caught up with Union Colonel Abel Streight near the Georgia line. Flying a flag of truce, Forrest invited Streight to surrender.  Now, bear in mind that Forrest was out-numbered over three to one.

General Streight agreed to surrender if Forrest could convince him that he had a completely superior force.

Forrest was ready.

He had arranged for his soldiers to haul the only two pieces of artillery they possessed around in a circle, across and behind a high cut in the road, so that it would appear to Streight that whole batteries were being brought up to the front.

Finally, Streight gave in. “How many guns have you got? There’s fifteen I’ve counted already!”  Forrest said, “I reckon that’s all that’s kept up.”

Sensing the futility of his position, the Yankee colonel handed over his 1,466 troops with all their horses, artillery, and equipment. When he learned that Forrest had only 400 men and two guns, he demanded that his men and arms should be returned and that they should fight it out.  Forrest laughed, patted him on the shoulder, and said, “Ah Colonel, all is fair in love and war, you know.”

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What the Roman world was like when the Gospel came

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Robert Harris is the best historical novelist on the scene today. He puts you in the time period.  You come away knowing those people.  Everything he writes is so readable.

Conspirata is a sequel to Harris’ novel Imperium, which chronicles the rise of Cicero in ancient Rome.  He sticks to the facts and to the actual speeches of Cicero as much as possible, which is what make this so valuable.  You feel you know these people afterwards.

Conspirata  tells of Cicero’s consulship in which he ruled over the Roman Empire for a brief period, his work as a senator, and his brilliance as a lawyer and orator.  It’s impossible to recommend this novel too highly; I loved it.

I was struck by the conditions in Rome at the time the story begins, which is 63 B.C. This was the most civilized and progressive society known to western man at the time.  We still speak of “the glory that was Rome.”  It was glorious, but only to a point and dependent on the strata of society you occupied.  Not everyone had it good.

Into this world, Jesus Christ was born. Into this culture the gospel came.  To these people, God sent a Savior.

Here is an excerpt. As you read it, ask yourself, “Man, did these people ever need a Savior?”

Such was the state of the city on the eve of Cicero’s consulship–a vortex of hunger, rumor, and anxiety, of crippled veterans and bankrupt farmers begging at every corner; of roistering bands of drunken young men terrorizing shopkeepers; of women from good families openly prostituting themselves outside the taverns; of sudden conflagrations, violent tempests….and scavenging dogs; of fanatics, soothsayers, beggars, fights. (p. 7)

And that’s only one paragraph!

Superstition pervaded every aspect of life. When the Senate convened, before any business was enacted, priests performed rituals to determine “the auguries,” or supernatural signs.  Flights of birds or lightning flashes were interpreted as warnings or encouragements.

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The abrasive Christian

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“The Lord’s bond-servant must not be quarrelsome, but be kind to all, able to teach, patient when wronged, with gentleness correcting those who are in opposition, if perhaps God may grant them repentance, leading to the knowledge of the truth…” (Second Timothy 2:24-25)

In Lynne Olson’s Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941, I found this interesting depiction of Harold Ickes, a member of FDR’s cabinet during the Second World War:

“According to T. H. Watkins, Ickes’ biographer, ‘a world without something in it to make him angry would have been incomprehensible to him.’ A disgruntled Republican senator who had been the target of one of Ickes’ verbal assaults called him ‘a common scold puffed up by high office.’ To one cabinet colleague, Ickes was ‘Washington’s tough guy.’ To another, he was the ‘president’s attack dog.’”

Olsen tells how an assistant secretary of state once refused to shake hands with Mr. Ickes and described him in his diary as “fundamentally, a louse.”

Having such an irritating person in high government office is one thing; having them in church leadership is quite another.

She had a reputation for being a strong witness for the Lord, even to the point of teaching classes on faith-sharing.

One day I called her office following up on something her boss had told me.

I was amazed by her reaction.

“He did not tell you that!” she said.

When I insisted gently that this is precisely what her employer had said, she grew stubborn and let me know in no uncertain terms that I was badly mistaken.

The conversation ended quickly.

I never told her boss about that, but the memory lingers with me to this day.

The incident has remained as a reminder that sometimes the Lord’s children who have a reputation as strong and effective witnesses for Christ are driven less by His love than by an abrasive and domineering personality.

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Tough choices: No way to evade them

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Carl Sandburg said, “There is an eagle inside me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus inside me that wants to wallow in the mud.”

We all get to choose–we have to choose!–every day of our lives whether to soar or wallow.

Chuck Colson once asked a prisoner on death row if he wanted a television in his cell. “No,” he said. “TV wastes too much time.”

Time  was a commodity of which he had little.

We get to choose–we have to choose!–what to do with our time each day.

Thomas Merton said, “There were only a few shepherds at the first Bethlehem. The ox and the ass understood more of the first Christmas than the high priests in Jerusalem. And it is the same today.”

We choose what to do with Jesus.

Someone called our church office inquiring if non-members were allowed to use the sanctuary for weddings. The secretary informed her that the answer was “no.” A few minutes later, the woman called back. This time she wanted to know if the pastor could marry her and her fiance over the phone.

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Word Wrangling: Not for this rodeo

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Many of us pastors have trouble staying out of the ditches and onto the road.

A scholar friend says, “Truth is a ridge on either side of which are vast chasms to be avoided at all cost.”  One side is called liberalism, the other legalism.  Rigid fundamentalism on the right, worldly compromise on the left.  In between is the road.  The way.  It’s narrow.

Truth always is.

It’s one thing to love word-study and to delight in finding a particular word in Scripture that yields a well-spring of insights and applications, but a far different thing to fight over the meaning of some obscure Greek word.

Somewhere I encountered a translation of I Timothy 6:5 that warns God’s leaders about “word-wrangling.” This morning, looking that passage up in various translations and commentaries and other study helps, no one has it that way, but more as “constant striving” and “chronic disagreement.” (The Greek word—ahem, here we go now–is disparatribai, a double compound word which according to Thayer, means “constant contention, incessant wrangling or strife.”)

“Thayer” refers to a well-respected Greek-English lexicon used for generations. In the above quote, he used the word “wrangling”. Maybe I got it from him.

The image of wrangling suggests a cowboy roping a dogie, jumping off his horse, and wrestling the animal to the ground.

Some of us do that with words. We capture them, hogtie them, and put our own brand on them. The result may be to make the word mean something entirely different from the writer’s original intention.

And since our audiences–that would be the men and women of our congregations–are not knowledgeable about the Greek and Hebrew (most don’t have a clue what a lexicon is!), when we start parsing (ahem) these words in sermons, they either shift into neutral intending to catch up when we return to the main highway or they stand in awe, assured we must know what we’re talking about since we use phrases like “the original Greek says” and “my Hebrew professor used to say this word means.”

Why our people put up with this stuff is beyond me.

They shouldn’t.

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Into this world, God sent a Savior

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Conspirata is a sequel to Robert Harris’ novel Imperium, which chronicles the rise of Cicero in ancient Rome.  Harris is a great novelist, and he sticks to the facts and to the actual speeches of Cicero as much as possible–which is what make this book so valuable.  You feel you know these people afterwards.

Conspirata  tells of Cicero’s consulship in which he ruled over the Roman Empire for a brief period, his work as a senator, and his brilliance as a lawyer and orator.  It’s impossible to recommend this novel too highly; I loved it.

I was struck by the conditions in Rome at this time (the story begins in 63 B.C.). Keep in mind that this was the most civilized and progressive society known to western man at the time.  We still speak of “the glory that was Rome.”  It was glorious, but only to a point and depending on the strata of society you occupied.

Into this world, Jesus Christ was born. Into this culture the gospel came.  To these people, God sent a Savior.

Read what Robert Harris said about these people and think, “Man, did they ever need a Savior!”

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On July 4, while waving your flags, give thanks for this…

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A fellow interrupted our Facebook discussion on apostasy/faithfulness in my denomination to slam various denominational leaders and then veered a half-mile off-subject onto his lasting loyalty to the Confederate cause.   Each year, he said, he travels to the Confederate cemetery back at home and honors the people, the cause, the flag, etc.

I don’t know the guy, so this is not so much to him  as it is to all those unreconstructed Southerners who still cannot get past the CSA, who idolize Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, and who would die for the Stars-and-Bars before they would the Stars and Stripes.

We have no argument with honoring the dead.  I’ve stood at the gravesites in Columbus Mississippi’s Friendship Cemetery and shed more than one tear for those on both sides buried there.

But no matter your position on the Southern Cause, my friend, there is something you should give thanks for.

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