‘Victory’ is a word we hear bandied about in Christian circles with great amount of frequency; it is a common theme of many televangelists and prosperity preachers. And yet many believers in the West experience very little victory—and when we do it can often feel a trumped-up, hollow victory that we have convinced ourselves of more than something greater. Doesn’t God want believers to experience victory that is real and meaningful?



Psalm 118 is a psalm of victory and in it we can observe several critical aspects of victory that is often overlooked in Christian circles today. The psalmist writes: “The Lord is my strength and my song; he has given me victory” (Ps 118:14, NLT). We know that God desires victory in our lives, and that this victory only comes through the power of God working in our lives. So far so good. But at this point many Christians then look to God to provide victory over their finances, over their health, over their family struggles, into their lives. When these problems don’t soon disappear they rally themselves with more ‘faith’ or turn away from the church.

The concept of victory in Psalm 118 is ‘deliverance’ not a bloodless, Hollywood-type of victory. As the psalmist says: “The Lord has punished me severely, but he did not let me die” (Ps 118:18, NLT). Deliverance and salvation entails the idea of difficulty, of sacrifice. The psalmist composes his song in the aftermath of a battle. There is no sugar-coating; the psalmist is bloodied and bruised but therein lies the victory: Only by the grace of God did the Psalmist not perish in the fight.

We have misunderstood victory. Victory is not God doing the miraculous that allows us to escape troubles; victory is God saving us from the depths of trouble and destruction that we have gotten ourselves into as willing participants in a broken, selfish world. The psalmist cries out joyously to God not because everything is perfect but because in the midst of his brokenness, God is there.

We all pray for God’s victory in areas in which we want victory (and that’s a good thing). But how often do we go to God and ask, ‘God, what is the victory that you want to bring to my life?’ It may be that in the midst of the bloody battle over our finances, our family, and our jobs that the victory God has planned doesn’t have anything to do with ‘solving our problems’ as much as it does with us learning to “take refuge in the Lord” (Ps 118:8, NLT).

Of course, all of this points to the messianic expectation in the psalm—the idea that God’s great deliverance will come from someone the world rejects, who we know today to be Jesus the Messiah. His victory, too, was of God’s choosing, not his own request; and it was not bloodless, but by his bruising we are delivered. This victory allows us who believe to say, “Open for me the gates where the righteous enter, and I will go in and thank the Lord” (Ps 118:19, NLT).

The SimChurch blog tour starts today, and a list of the participating blogs are below. If you're not familiar with a blog tour, it is when a book makes the rounds on lots of top blogs on the same day or week to generate discussion. Most of the stops on the blog tour include q&a between myself and the blogger.

Theology and the SimChurch [a chat with Douglas Estes] at Dan King's blog, BibleDude

SimChurch Blog Tour Discussion and Can a Church Exist in Cyberspace? at Chad Estes' blog, Captain's Blog [Chad is not related to me, that I know of!]

Book Review of SimChurch, plus questions about WikiWorship at Eric Nygren's blog, Returned Sheep

SimChurch and Typical Churches at Mark Robert's blog, MarkDRoberts.com

Intro to Online Churches at Cynthia Ware's blog, The Digital Sanctuary

Discussion on the Advantages of Virtual Churches at Kent Shaffer's blog, Church Relevance

Book Review of SimChurch at Dave Bourgeois' blog, Lessons from Babel

Plus an unofficial post on the blog tour, my myth-busting In Defense of Virtual Church over at Christianity Today's blog, Out of Ur

Know of someone else blogging about SimChurch? Please let me know!

[This week I posted this blog over at Koinonia to encourage thinking on the challenges of understanding the Bible -- DCE]

I am convinced the Bible is at times just plain hard to understand. When I was younger, I thought that most people who had a hard time understanding the Bible didn’t read it; I figured they just didn’t make time for it. When I encouraged people to read the Bible, often they came back to me saying they had a hard time understanding it, and I remember at times dismissing this as their unwillingness to ‘open their eyes and ears’. But is it really that simple?

As I got older, I met and even lived with people who were not Christians, who were strong advocates of other religions, and who read the Bible, yet they didn’t seem to understand it at all. I got ‘witnessed’ to by many people from pseudo-Christian sects who would quote the Bible but from my vantage point also didn’t understand it at all. (At least not the way it has been classically understood by the church for two millennia).

Even more problematic, I pastor a church in a particularly biblically-illiterate area of the US, the San Francisco Bay area. Over and over again, I meet people in my daily travels who seem interested in spiritual growth but to them the Bible can be very confusing and hard to understand. Even when I recommend they try a modern version, frequently they come back to me as if I asked them to read something extraterrestrial.

Why is the Bible hard to understand? Why did God in his infinite wisdom allow the writers of the Bible to write books that would prove to be hard to understand? (So that people like me—Bible scholars and translators—could be gainfully employed?) Couldn’t God have found a better way?

Augustine said that the Gospel of John was shallow enough to wade in but deep enough to drown in. We could say the same thing for the whole Bible. In many places it is deep enough for people to drown in. We all know someone who has tried, unsuccessfully, to get a handle on the Bible. We could argue that all those people from pseudo-Christian cults who study the Bible regularly are drowning in it, with no hope of survival.

But if God loved the world (as we know he did), couldn’t God have figured out a way to make the Bible more simple?

I don’t have the answer to this question, and perhaps there isn’t an answer. So let’s turn this blog post into a free-for-all and see what happens.

Before we do, let’s chase three rabbits that will surely try to come out of their holes during the discussion:

First, I expect some will write in about how the hard-to-understand Bible encourages people to dig deeper. This may be true but it doesn’t answer why the Bible is hard to understand—the Bible could have been easy to understand but still allow us to dig deeper in our faith. For example, my wife really likes the The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein, a book that is both simple but deep. I’m not comparing Silverstein to the Bible; I am just pointing out that there are books that are both simple to understand but with deep content. In comparison, the Bible is difficult and deep. Why did God add the difficult part?



Second, I suspect others will cite Jesus’ statements about the difficulty of understanding his parables (such as Matthew 13:14–16). Even if we extrapolate this idea to say that the Bible was written for those who can ‘see and hear,’ can we say that people who struggle to understand the Bible just don’t have the ‘right’ eyes and ears? Remember, both people of faith and seekers can struggle with understanding the Bible. Even more, we must remember Matthew 13:11 where Jesus responds to the disciples’ question about his use of parable-speak with, “The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them.” If we in the same way extrapolate this to the whole Bible, we get a rather cold view of God. Do we really want to say that God intentionally hides the truth from people (not counting the Tower of Babel)? (We could argue it is the Enemy that obfuscates our understanding, as in 2 Corinthians 4:4–6). Since God could have created an easy Bible, and the Enemy still could have blinded the minds of unbelievers, all this together doesn’t actually address the question: Why is the Bible hard to understand?

Third, I know some will point out the role of interpretation. They will argue that the shift in culture, language, and time is what makes the Bible hard to understand. Of course, we can all agree the need to interpret adds to the difficulty but this line of reasoning doesn’t appear to address my favorite verse in the Bible: 2 Peter 3:16. (Yes, this is the real 3:16 verse!) For those of you who haven’t committed it to memory or painted it on placards for football games: “[Paul] writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction” (NIV) (emphasis mine). Here even Peter—who by the way we can all agree is not blinded to the truth and has dug deeper into the Bible—admits that at the least Paul’s letters (and potentially the other scriptures) are hard to understand, and that this hardness is used by evil people to lead other people away from the truth.

This gets us back to our central question … why did God allow the Bible to be hard to understand that at times even a disciple and apostle of Jesus felt that way? So why is the Bible hard to understand?

Today I posted a review of a great book—A.F. Christidis' A History of Ancient Greek—over at Zondervan's Koinonia blog (here, if you want to read the post).



While this book is intended for language professionals, I mention it here because it implicitly tells a great story about the language God chose to be the bearer of his message to the world (the New Testament, as well as the Greek Old Testament). While all human languages have played a part in this, Greek is one of—if not the—most pivotal of all. You don't have to know Greek; but understanding the Bible better is a calling for all followers of Jesus. The more we learn about the past, the more we can teach accurately in the present and affect positively the future.

This week, someone asked me about the Bible’s reference to ‘three’ heavens. Why does the Bible refer to three heavens? Are there multiple heavens or levels to heaven?

“I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows.” 2 Corinthians 12:2

Out of all the times the Bible speaks of heaven, only once does it refer to numbered levels: 2 Corinthians 12:2. The Bible does use a couple of different words and quite a few images and metaphors to describe heaven. While some Christians over the ages have felt this means they should try to parse and quantify every nuance to create an elaborate heaven-system, this approach to the Bible never works—it’s the same mindset the Pharisees used all over again.

In essence, there is only one heaven in the Bible: The dwelling place of God. Why then does Paul refer to three heavens?

The shortest answer is that he doesn’t. This passage is a strange one, and has been prooftexted from the Bible at least since the Gnostics, into parts of the medieval church, and is still regularly grabbed out of context by modern day Mormons, mystics and other groups in order to argue for all kinds of abiblical views of heaven. Since the passage is highly poetic, we need to treat it with care.

First, most people believe Paul is referring to himself when he says, “I know a man in Christ”; he’s using indirect language to say that he was the recipient of the vision discussed in 2 Corinthians 12. The rest of the verse in English reads “caught up to the third heaven,” but in the original language of the New Testament, the preposition here is not “to,” it’s really “until.” This particular preposition is frequently used in a superlative sense; often it carries the idea of “until the end [is reached]” or “as far as” (BDAG).

So what Paul says here is, in essence, “[I] was caught up (so taken over by God’s vision) until I reached/as far as the third heaven.” In the ancient world, popular mythology held that there were lots of heavens and levels of heavens: 3 and 7 were most common, but some people even thought there were 365. What Paul says—using a popular metaphor ancient Greek speakers would have understood—is that when God gave him a vision, his spirit soared all the way to the top of heaven.



Think of it like this: If someone asks you how bad you want something—something that you really want—you might respond like, “I’d sail the seven seas to get it!” You don’t literally mean that there are only seven seas (or that you would literally sail all seven); you just mean you would do whatever it takes to get it. You would go until the end / as far as you could to get it. People who spoke Greek at the time would recognize that Paul was saying that his vision of God was the highest, greatest view of heaven he could ever imagine, and not saying that there were necessarily three levels to heaven.

The Bible always presents heaven as the place where God dwells. If a person establishes a covenant relationship with Jesus then that person will dwell with God one day. No levels, no divisions, no castes, no pecking order, for the “old order of things has passed away.”

This week, in honor of John Calvin's 500th birthday, I am blogging a week-long series for Zondervan at their biblical studies blog, Koinonia. You can go to the blog's homepage here or each of the individual blogs here, here and here.



For those unfamiliar with John Calvin, he lived during the 16th century and was one of the key reformers of the church. He is also considered one of the greatest theologians in the history of the church. He lived much of his life in Switzerland, was French by birth, and was a pastor by trade. His theological emphasis was the majesty and glory of God.

Today is July 4th in the US—Independence Day, a day Americans celebrate and remember our freedoms, most specifically the freedoms we gained from the British during our War of Independence. I’ve been watching the so-far most excellent John Adams mini-series this week, and it’s a great reminder that when we use the words freedom and independence in America, that those words are not abstract ideals; they are ideals rooted in a specific time and place. All things considered, this fact is something the Founding Fathers of the US probably understood very well.

In the same way, our society talks today a great deal about freedom but freedom in and of itself is not a neutral, abstract ideal that modern secular culture often makes it out to be. Today, many people see freedom as more of a license for any person to do almost anything that person sees fit to do, an idea that would have been foreign to all of the Founding Fathers (whether Christian, Deist or other), and very foreign to the Bible.

The Bible complicates terribly our modern understanding of freedom. The Merriam-Webster English dictionary defines freedom first as “the absence of constraint in action” (the modern idea), but then second as the “liberation from slavery or restraint or from the power of another” (the classical idea—and far closer to the biblical sense). In its best and most classic sense, freedom is not the absence of oppression or tyranny; freedom is the removal of a tyrannical power over our lives generally by or for a different power/ideal. Let me say it another way: There is no such thing in our world as freedom without allegiance to someone or something. When citizens living in an oppressive society flee that nation, they always must flee to another nation. While that other nation may have ‘freedom,’ that ‘freedom’ comes at the cost of allegiance to that new, more ‘free’ nation. Freedom in our world is always liberation and not a complete absence of all constraints.



In the same way, the Bible tells us that all people live under the oppression and tyranny of sin. When we move away from sin in our lives, we have freedom. This freedom is not an abstract place of goodness (or non-sin), but is a liberation and allegiance to God. Without this allegiance to God, we are fooling ourselves to think we are in any way free from our corrupt, self-centered nature. In a biblical sense, freedom is a gift from God to live without oppression but only within God’s sphere of influence.

While there are people in our world who deny God, and his role in our world, it is just that—a denial. Without God, there can be no real freedom, because without God we are oppressed by our own humanity. We cannot become neutral ideals of freedom; either we are in allegiance with ourselves or in allegiance with God. The Bible says we are slaves either way—but a slave to sin only endures slavery, whereas a slave to God is freed, liberated, redeemed by Jesus’ great sacrifice.

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“But whenever someone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. For the Lord is the Spirit, and wherever the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” 2 Corinthians 3:16–17

In our last message series at BVC, “Testing the Limits,” we talked about how we as Christians struggle with ‘fences.’ Wow, what a difficult series—and so I had a few more thoughts I wanted to add to our discussion. Think of it like this: In our day-to-day world, a fence is a marker or barrier that separates two different places. When we become a follower of Jesus, we start to be aware that there are things we shouldn’t do, and things that maybe we should start doing if we love God. We begin to see two different places: areas outside of God’s plan for our lives (where we are in disobedience), and areas within God’s plan for our lives (where we are faithful). When we study the Bible, pray, and seek God’s will, we sense where these markers are—the ‘fences’ that God says, “Don’t cross,” because if we do we enter into an area outside of God’s plan for us. These fences are helpful because they show us where the line is between God’s plan for us and our own self-centered desires (sin). The problem is that once we have been a Christian for a while, we actually get comfortable with many of these smaller fences—I know I do—and even though we may not cross one of these fences, we can live our lives right up against them very comfortably. In fact, against our own best interests, we test the limits that God has set for us with these fences.

Some of the fences that God says, “Don’t cross,” are big and obvious, such as idolatry (Galatians 5:17). If the Bible addresses an issue at all, it’s a big fence that we cross at our peril. So, if we build an idol and worship it, this is a huge (and deadly) fence for us to cross. Snuggling up to this fence is a bad move as well, because at best we are keeping God at a distance and worse just putting us an inch away from being outside of God’s will. Anything the Bible mentions is a big fence.

But many of the fences that God doesn’t want us to cross are less obvious. These little white fences seem innocent enough, but crossing them moves us into an area outside of God’s will. Like little white lies, little white fences that we cross start adding up in limiting our relationship with God—not to mention our abundant life here on Earth and our service for the Kingdom. But the problem is that we often have a hard time telling the difference between little white fences and grey areas (areas that are ok by God’s will). For example, if I lie to a dying person that they will get well, am I crossing a little white fence (because I am speaking untruthfully), or is this a grey area (ok by God)? If I download copyrighted music from the internet, is this a little white fence or a grey area? If I find a loophole when I file my taxes, is this a little white fence or a grey area?



How do we determine if something is a little white fence or not?

The Bible doesn’t really mention little white fences per se. Romans 14 is probably the best example of a little white fence issue, though it is rooted in a specific problem in the early church. Based on this passage and few others, we can say this:

* If something bothers us at all, it’s probably a little white fence.

* If it bothers other people around us, it’s also probably a little white fence.

* If you can do (or not do) something and have peace in your spirit about it—even if it’s a hard decision—it’s probably a grey area.

One of the greatest challenges in faithfully following Jesus is to be able to see the little white fences that are holding us back from greater relationship with God–and not just dismissing them as grey areas.

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“Blessed are those who don’t feel guilty for doing something they have decided is right. But if you have doubts about whether or not you should [do or not do] something, you are sinning if you go ahead and do it. For you are not following your convictions. If you do anything you believe is not right, you are sinning.” Romans 14:22–23