Friday in the Wild: December 22, 2023

Happy Friday! After a couple of dry weeks, and now being away from home for the Christmas season, I wasn’t sure that there’d be a Friday in the Wild this week, either. Nonetheless, the Internet came through.

In today’s A la Carte post, Tim Challies linked to his 2014 post about the two kinds of blog—content creation and content curation—and why he started doing both. He writes, “I am a pretty normal person and have pretty normal tastes. If I find it interesting and worthy of a few minutes of time and attention, I suppose other people are likely to as well.” I highlight this because that’s basically my philosophy, also. If I find something interesting or helpful or funny, probably someone else will, too.

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The Gospel Coalition celebrates the 50th year of J. I. Packer’s Knowing God:

Knowing God is Packer’s attempt to tell us what Scripture says about God. It isn’t a technical dive into the doctrine of God, accessible only to seasoned theologians, but neither is it a merely anecdotal survey of God’s character and deeds. It’s substantive without being off-putting. It’s straightforward while avoiding the shallowness that characterizes so much contemporary writing about God.

[Read “Knowing God” Turns 50: Why We Still Need J. I. Packer’s Classic Book]

Packer says that to know God, we need to know about God, and he has revealed himself in the Bible. If I’m ever asked what books (apart from the Bible itself) are essential for a new Christian, Knowing God tops my list.

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Some “Satanists” erected one of those moronic Baphomet statues in the Iowa legislature. Apparently, last week a Christian veteran knocked it down and beheaded it. To add insult to injury, someone further desecrated Our Lord Below by slapping a “Christ is Lord” sticker on him.

Doug Wilson, whose Canon Press happens to publish the stickers used in this, shall we say, direct action, wrote this:

Someone in the grip of fussy process concerns believes that if Jesus gets to call the Pharisees whited sepulchers then they need to be given equal time to call Him a demon-possessed drunkard. Because they are consumed with process, it does not concern them that what Jesus said was true, and what the Pharisees were saying about Jesus was false. True? False? These are strange words. Tell me more about this religion of yours.

[Read Toppling the Cosplay Satan]

There’s part of me that’s all for law and order. But the majority of me cheers on these modern-day Gideons who knock down the local idols. If Baphomet is so great, let him contend for himself. Some “Satanists” have called the act “cowardice” and a threat to free expression. Shut up, nerd. “Satanism” and their stupid statues exist only to disrupt Christian norms. Now we’re disrupting your norms. Pray we don’t disrupt them any further.

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If you’re having difficulty with one of the New Testament’more problematic passages—“baptism now saves you” (1 Peter 3:21)—then Jesse Johnson at The Cripplegate wrote a helpful post:

Despite the parallels with water, the main point of correspondence between the ark and baptism is that of faith. If baptism is “an appeal for a clean conscience—through the resurrection of Jesus Christ,” then logically, this implies that the one being baptized has placed his or her faith in the death, burial, resurrection, and even ascension (1 Peter 3:22). Without that attendant faith, the baptism is a bath, and the water represents death and judgment, but not life, regeneration, sanctification, or hope.

[Read “Baptism Now Saves You”]

In other words, baptism is a symbol that points to the reality: what saves is the “appeal for a clean conscience” it represents. Confusing the symbol and the substance (saying baptism removes sin and regenerates the sinner) or completely divorcing them (saying baptism is merely a testimony to faith) are both erroneous.

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At Ad Fontes, S. Mark Hamilton writes about those contemporary embellishments to traditional hymns:

Evangelical worship artists have been adapting or modernizing ancient hymnody for a little over twenty years. Musically speaking, some of these adaptations are quite good. Others are wincingly bad. Lyrically speaking, on the other hand, most of these adaptations are, I’m sad to say, either substance-less to the point of nausea or substantive-ish but largely uninspired, almost cliché compared to the lyrical content of the original. Then there are those adaptations whose lyrics flirt with theological dangers. For reasons that should become clear in a moment, I refer to the former as lyrical chaff and the latter as lyrical wheat.

[Read Good News of Great Joy That Will Malform All the People]

My “favourite” example of what he calls “lyrical chaff” is actually quite old: the hymn “At the Cross,” originally by Isaac Watts, to which Ralph E. Hudson added the chorus:

At the cross, at the cross, where I first saw the light,
And the burden of my heart rolled away—
It was there by faith I received my sight,
And now I am happy all the day.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with these lyrics, except that the original hymn is about godly sorrow, and “now I am happy all the day” is fluffy and cheerful: completely incongruous with Watts’s sentiment.

And that’s it for this pre-Christmas Friday. Until the next installment, Share and Enjoy.