What sacrifice really is
Issue #141
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Chris Wiley writes on Twitter:
Turning away from having children is sometimes attributed to a growing self-centeredness. I’m not so sure. I think it might have more to do with loss of faith—faith in God, faith in the future, faith that the sacrifices are worth it. (twitter.com/crwiley1962/status/17226848…)
Chris is discerning an important connection that the church itself is supposed to know intimately, but has completely lost in the modern day.
Here's another way to put this:
Man is made to sacrifice; that is, to give up of himself to something higher.
The most basic and natural sacrifice is to the spouse, where each gives of themselves to the other to become a greater whole, one flesh, issuing in still more: children. But this sacrificial pattern begins and ends in God himself. He is its origin, as each Person empties himself into the others and receives back twice in return. But he is also the top of the mountain; the One to whom all sacrifice rises and finds its fulfillment.
So, when you remove God, the sacrificial pattern that he built into creation loses all blessing. You can't see it as a participation in a great chain of being. You have no faith that everything is ordered so that you'll receive greater blessing back than you had to give up. Therefore, all sacrifice seems an imposition on the self, rather than an expansion and fulfillment of it.
Lack of faith issues in self-centeredness. Doubt in God is doubt in the future. Turning away from God causes us to turn inward and cling to the present self in the present moment.
The corollary of this is that when you see people turning inward and clinging to the present, such as when they prioritize health over worship and safety over community, you can be sure that they have unseated God from the top of the sacrificial mountain. They no longer understand that our bodies are living sacrifices, that we must take up our crosses daily, that it is more blessed to give than to receive, that the last will be first, that he who seeks his life shall lose it, and that except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it beareth much fruit.
In other words, the church no longer understands or lives as if Christ is Lord, as if the gospel is true, and as if participation in these things matters. Most pastors today cannot even die the tiny death of repenting for their refusal to embody or allow Christian sacrifice during covid.
This is just one obvious example of the larger idolatry of evangelicalism.
Forasmuch as this people draw nigh unto me, and with their mouth and with their lips do honor me, but have removed their heart far from me, and their fear of me is a commandment of men which hath been taught them; therefore, behold, I will proceed to do a marvellous work among this people, even a marvellous work and a wonder; and the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the understanding of their prudent men shall be hid. (Is 29:13–14)
Spurgeon says, "Affliction hardens those whom it does not soften."
You can't avoid pain and difficulty. This world is cursed. Death, disease, and destruction will happen.
You must choose how you will react when the inevitable comes your way.
Will you turn upward to God in faith—or will you turn inward to yourself in unbelief?
It is the decision between a soft heart that finds comfort in the Father of Lights, and a hard heart that finds nothing but self-indulgent misery.
Lust destroys
In 2 Samuel 13, Jonadab provided Amnon with a strategy to realize his lust towards his sister, Tamar.
John Trapp summed up Jonadab well:
A friend no friend; a carnal friend, a spiritual enemy, who advised, for the recovery of the body, the ruin of his soul.
The "manosphere" is filled with Jonadabs, usually for hire. They will give you a strategy to satisfy your lust, but they won't tell you the truth:
Lust can't ever be satisfied.
Lust twists. It corrupts. It destroys. It ruins.
It'll ruin you. It'll shame you. It'll rob you.
Amnon’s lust twisted his mind so much that he called his incestual desires towards Tamar love.
But that was always a deep fiction.
Fiction is make-believe, and that becomes all the more clear when you try to make-it-real.
So it was for Amnon.
He acted out what he undoubtedly had imagined so many times: he took his sister's virginity by force.
He shamed her (v. 13).
He violated her (v. 14).
He stole her purity (v. 18).
He desolated her (v. 20).
The destruction he wrought upon her was returned to him, as we all reap what we sow.
Then Amnon hated her with very great hatred, so that the hatred with which he hated her was greater than the love with which he had loved her. (v. 15)
This is the way of lust. It's the way of destruction. The way of anti-sacrifice.
So we need anti-Jonadabs.
Lust will kill you from the inside out—but not before it first destroys everything you claim to love.
Successful reformation requires participation in the center, not just the fringe
2020 was a market disruptor mega-event.
Upstarts and small organizations were able to grab up large portions of the market, due to people rethinking their way of life or business.
This was culture-wide—applying to both businesses and churches.
If you produced a lot of content on the relationship between the church and civil government, your platform exponentially grew, as Christians were desperate for ways to navigate the new landscape.
If you had a large stash of stateside inventory, you were able to pass up much larger competitors who depended on foreign suppliers and just-in-time delivery.
If you were a non-woke church that met physically with low to no covid restrictions, your congregation quickly swelled as other churches were either closed or were merely echoing the regime talking points.
But that all is cooling down.
Restrictions have been lifted.
The supply chain, though forever changed, is healing.
Many existing churches have returned to their pre-2020 and, perhaps, even pre-BLM/Ferguson/Floyd standards. A few even apologized for their 2020 behavior.
The "market" that was up for grabs is returning to something closer to normal—and people love normal.
Normal is stable.
During the disruption, you could grow if you checked just a few boxes…even if you were lacking in many fundamentals.
That won't be the case moving forward.
For many, 2020-2023 looked like an inflection-point toward more permanent reformation.
But for many, it was only a fleeting moment of popularity or prominence, because they are one trick ponies—lacking the fundamental discipline required to achieve lasting change.
A big part of reformation is just recovering the basics.
Christianity is a treasure chest. You can dig your hand deep down into it, looking for some unique interesting gem. They are a lot of them for sure.
And during a disruptor event, having just the right shiny object for the occasion can look like a real win.
But surface level treasure—all those coins and diamonds at the top—is still treasure. It’s still the bulk of the treasure.
Yes, Lady Wisdom is a character in Proverbs…and yes, she is Jesus
Don’t lose your mind just yet.
Here’s the context:
Michael Spangler, a man worthy of respect, tweets to please stop saying “Lady Wisdom” in reference to the book of Proverbs:
https://twitter.com/spanglermt/status/1720546893648814156
He makes several good points:
1. Wisdom is feminine in Hebrew, and therefore has feminine pronouns. But unlike “the foolish woman” (Prov. 8:13) or “the virtuous woman” (31:10), Wisdom is not called a woman, except indirectly (7:4).
2. Some of her actions could be read as womanly, e.g. having maidens, and offering bread and wine in her house (9:3, 5, 14), but are not necessarily so. Other actions are more distinctly masculine: e.g. hewing her house’s pillars (9:1) and preaching publicly (1:20, 9:3).
3. Proverbs 8 describes Wisdom as being sinless, v. 8, the one through whom kings reign, v. 15, who grants life, v. 35, without whom men die, v. 36, who has been with the Lord from the beginning, v. 22, “set up from everlasting,” v. 23, present with him in the work of creation, and daily his delight, v. 30. To put it simply, Proverbs 8 on Wisdom could be described as a poetic expansion of John 1 on the Word. This is so because Wisdom and the Word are the same divine person. Note the similarity of the two names themselves.
4. Historic orthodox interpreters agree, Wisdom is the Son of God. Notably, the Arians join them: they hotly contested the orthodox interpretation of Proverbs 8, but did not disagree it was about the Son. Wisdom in Proverbs is the Son of God himself. Not a lady.
This is all true—and yet it remains fully congruent with Proverbs to speak of Lady Wisdom.
Firstly, there’s no question that the wisdom of God is the Son. Jesus himself makes that connection if you compare Luke and Matthew.
“Therefore also said the wisdom of God, I will send unto them prophets and apostles…” (Lk 11:49); cf Mt 23:34: “Therefore, behold, I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes…”
But here’s the problem:
“Wisdom is justified of all her children” (Lk 7:35).
Reading the Bible as if one passage can have only one meaning seems to be a Reformed overreaction to untethered medieval allegorical exegesis, compounded by an Enlightenment hermeneutic of reductionism.
Ironically for this issue, it is not how God speaks.
Proverbs invites us to read Wisdom as a lady by contrasting her to Folly, using a feminine noun for her name. You think God didn’t organize Hebrew that way?
It concludes with an embodiment of Lady Wisdom in Proverbs 31.
Clearly we are meant to think of Wisdom in feminine terms, that relate her as the glory of kings, to woman as the glory of man.
Yet equally clearly, Wisdom is a person of the Godhead, begotten by God before all ages (e.g., compare Pr 8:22 with standard Chalcedonian Christology).
Proverbs is written by a man with a mastery of fractal patterns and layered meaning; a man who has learned the god-like skill of concealing things in darkness so that others may grow in stature and attain to glory by searching them out (Pr 1:5-6; 25:2).
A univocal, reductionist interpretation of scripture reveals that the reader has not yet attained to this.
Notable:
Intersectional Implicit Bias: Evidence for Asymmetrically Compounding Bias and the Predominance of Target Gender (PDF). A dry title concealing a rather remarkable finding (remarkable in that it was published): “Across five studies (N = 5,204), we investigated implicit evaluations of targets varying in race, gender, social class, and age. Overall, the largest and most consistent evaluative bias was prowomen/anti-men bias, followed by smaller but nonetheless consistent pro-upper-class/antilower-class biases. By contrast, we observed less consistent effects of targets‘ race, no effects of targets‘ age, and no consistent interactions between target-level categories.”
Tyrese Gibson's Ex-Wife Regrets Divorce, Says Her Friends Influenced Her To Do It
Talk again later,
Bnonn
Good piece Bnonn. I've often wondered about Proverbs 8 in the same way. Thanks for the clarification and insight.