Isaiah 28:28: Grain for bread is crushed. You are God’s field, God’s vineyard. You are His planting, yield from the seed of His Word planted in the ground of your heart. You are the grain and the grapes of His harvest. The Lord is a wise farmer. He knows His land, knows just how much plowing it needs to give the best yield. He knows His dill and cummin and wheat and barley. He knows when to thresh with a... Read more
Epiphany is a season about light, about the light that God is, about the Light from Light that God sent, about the light from the Light of Light that shines from the church to draw the nations to the brightness of His rising. Epiphany is also, inescapably, about darkness. Light came into the world, but men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. The Magi followed a bright star to the Light, but King Herod tried to... Read more
Many of the goddesses of ancient paganism were domestic types. The goddesses were mother goddesses, or weaver goddesses or sometimes associated with higher arts of civilization – writing and other cultivated elite arts. Tikva Frymer-Kensky notes ( In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth ) : “In this mythic depiction of women-in-the-family, social roles are not portrayed by human women, whether legendary or real [as in Genesis!]. They are modeled by goddesses,... Read more
The first phrase of Song of Songs 1:5 is usually taken as a contrast – “black but lovely,” though some have noted that this is not a necessary translation of the phrase. It seems the most likely, though, that the blackness is seen as a negative, but in spite of her blackness, she remains beautiful. Verse 6 confirms that there is something negative about her coloring – she is blackish, swarthy (in Hebrew a form of the same word) because... Read more
Charles Adams ( Those Dirty Rotten taxes: The Tax Revolts that Built America ) notes that the clash between North and South was exacerbated by the Confederate decision to lower tariffs and create a free trade zone. Northern interests recognized that this would ruin their trade and manufacturing, as cheap European goods were redirected to Southern ports. The North reacted with ferocity, claiming that Southern trade policy was an attack on northern civilization. This, Adams thinks, accounts for the savagery... Read more
In his The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present , Jan de Vries notes connections between the “Confessionalizing” movement of the seventeenth century and the rise of “genteel” standards of taste and consumption: “While an awakened desire for God’s grace should not be made one with a new desire for a more refined manner of living, or genteel grace, the practice by which the construction of both types of desire was cultivated interacted with... Read more
INTRODUCTION Throughout the first half of his prophecy, Isaiah addresses the Assyrian threat and its geopolitical consequences (Isaiah 1-12). In a series of six woes in chapters 28-35, he deals the temptation for Judah’s kings to rely on Egypt for protection (e.g., 30:1-5). Then, Yahweh personally delivers Jerusalem from an Assyrian siege, proving His reliability (chs. 36-37). He proves that He is able to make good on His promises to gather even Egypt and Assyria to Himself (cf. 19:24-25; 27:13).... Read more
Deuteronomy 6:7: You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up. We don’t worship simply by putting a service on the calendar and showing up. We put the service on the calendar and show up so that we can do the work of worship, the chief work of the church. In the same... Read more
We don’t offer animals on altars, but the Christian life is more sacrificial than the ancient Jews’, not less. For us, the world is a temple, our lives a continuous offering, our actions moments of a daily liturgy. Paul’s rapid-fire series of instructions in today’s New Testament reading (Romans 12) is not a random list of moralisms. It’s a description of the new covenant sacrificial system, Leviticus redux. We don’t offer whole-burnt ascension offerings. We are whole-burnt offerings as we... Read more
Joyce Appleby’s Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England has a forbiddingly monographic title, but don’t be put off. It’s a profound meditation on the earliest construction of modern economic theory, an attempt to explain “how the market becomes central in a given society” and to fill in a gap that has failed to explain “the intellectual response to capitalism as a creative social act.” The writers she examines are long forgotten, their eulogy spoken by Adam Smith under the... Read more
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