Pop’s Page

Although this is supposed to be a “Jeremiad”, a blog on the book of Jeremiah, a new reader just picking up this thread will wonder how—after a rather extended drought of blogs on this topic—we got into the New Testament. So, as a reminder, note that Jeremiah is the greatest Old Testament proclaimer of the new covenant, an accomplishment that sets him up to be extensively quoted by the New Testament writers. In fact, the author of the book of Hebrews honors him by making one of his prophecies (Jer. 31) the longest single quotation of the Old Testament in the New.

As a result we determined to trace the usage of the word “covenant” in the New Testament leading eventually to the aforementioned quotation in Hebrews. Along the way we examined our Lord’s use of the word in establishing the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. And more recently we saw how John the Baptist’s father Zechariah used the word in his song that unleashed his muteness after John’s birth.

In my ESV Bible, that passage in Luke quoting Zechariah’s song has the word “covenant” marked by a small italicized lower case letter “d” that refers the reader to a similar passage somewhere else in the Bible. That somewhere else, as it turns out, is in dreaded territory; namely, Romans 9. I say dreaded because in that chapter and the two following, the Apostle Paul makes statements about God that frankly send shivers down my spine. Here’s one of the them: “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated” (verse 13).

The physicist Niels Bohr once said: “If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.” As a corollary, Richard Feynman, another Nobel Laureate noted, “No one understands quantum mechanics.” In other words, though the theory works, it describes a nonsensical world of particles that act like waves, and waves that act like particles. The human mind simply isn’t able to grasp “the truth” that is embedded in this particular aspect of the way the universe is designed.

So it is with the doctrine of election. It is clearly taught in scripture—as the above passage indicates. And it well describes our fallen world where there are those who simply won’t believe, no matter how persuasively the case for Christianity is argued. Our American minds recoil at this: a world which seems fundamentally “unfair.” The Gospel is offered equally to all, but only those whom God has chosen will in the end come to Him.

There, I’ve said it. Yet, as the great preacher Charles Spurgeon once pointed out, talk to someone who seems clearly outside the elect, and ask him if he wants to be elected. Never! The whole religion thing seems to him utter nonsense and anathema. Better to spend eternity (which he also rejects) living in seeming autonomy than bow the knee to a sovereign Creator. There is a flavor in this reaction that causes John Paul Sartre’s thesis that “hell is other people” (in his play No Exit) to ring somewhat true.

Which brings us to the specific quotation from Paul that includes the word covenant. Because, you see, Paul there speaks of Hell—and even places himself in it! Hear his words:

I am speaking the truth in Christ–I am not lying; my conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit–that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh. They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises. To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen. (Rom 9:1-5)

So it seems that Paul, the great Jew and great Christian, is saying that he could wish that he himself could be sent to Hell if that meant that his fellow Jews could be saved. Why did he feel so deeply about this? Because of the covenant! Actually, because of the covenants (plural) along with the other items he lists including the adoption, the glory, the giving of the law, the worship and the promises—culminating in the appearance of God in the Flesh, the Christ who by human reckoning is…..a Jew!

I have many questions about this passage that I’m not prepared to answer. These include:

·Why is covenant pluralized? I.e., what are the covenants he is talking about?
·What is the adoption?
·What is the glory?

(I assume “the glory” has to do with the pillar of fire and cloud that led the children of Israel out of Egypt. But it might mean other things as well.)

Suffice it to say that Paul, like Zechariah before him, looks back in the history of God’s chosen people and sees the covenant as a key way of God’s dealing with those whom He has chosen. To Zechariah it was God remembering His covenant through that special providence which was the birth of Zechariah’s own baby boy who was to prepare the way of the Messiah. To Paul, it was God declaring His covenantal love for the sons of Israel who would be the ancestors of the Messiah. “Jacob I loved….”

As for me, I leave it to the Sovereign Lord to make His sovereign choice in election, while I focus on being the receiver of His covenantal love. That love for Jacob is also a love for me and mine who like him are the beneficiaries of the “new covenant in His blood.”

{Comments and suggestions on those questions above that I fail to address in this blog will be greatly appreciated.}

I was struck by the following article in the Wall St. Journal about our 40th president’s faith in our Savior. I was also struck by the fact that Reagan’s mother spelled her first name exactly the same way as did my mom, with an “e” on the end: “Nelle”.

His Last Crusade
By PAUL KENGOR
June 11, 2004; Page W13

A few years ago I began researching a book on Ronald Reagan — in particular, on the personal role he played, during his White House years, in the attack on Soviet communism. Most books on the subject, up to that point, had more to say about the administration than the man.

I began with the official presidential-documents collection, a record of every presidential statement. I read innumerable Reagan letters and vetted the massive presidential handwriting file at the Reagan Library, which included all documents in his hand. I spoke to cabinet officials, political associates and people whose lives had crossed his own, including a 93-year-old woman in a nursing home in Dixon, Ill., who was baptized with Reagan in 1922.

I was surprised to find, in all this material, a long record of religious comment. I was startled, for instance, to note that Reagan offered a parable about Jesus and Judas at the Garden of Gethsemane for a toast at the 1988 Moscow Summit — in the heart of the evil empire itself. Speaking of the “evil empire,” it was a revelation to me to learn that Reagan wrote probably half the speech that made that phrase famous, delivered to the National Association of Evangelicals in 1983. I also encountered items like a March 1978 letter from Reagan to a liberal Methodist minister who doubted Christ’s divinity. The future president quoted John 1, 10 and 14 and employed C.S. Lewis’s lapidary “liar, Lord, or lunatic” argument about Christ’s biblical claims.

It became clear that, for all the sniping of his detractors, Reagan was a devout Christian, a Protestant who felt a keen fellowship with Catholics and Jews. He was obsessed, during his presidency, with helping Jews emigrate from the Soviet Union. He raised the issue so often that Mikhail Gorbachev snapped at him more than once for “lecturing” him on human rights.

True, Reagan did not attend church regularly when he occupied the White House (as his critics have noted). But he had done so in California (a fact they ignore). Thanks to the assassination attempt early in his presidency, Reagan’s security apparatus was especially onerous: A SWAT team had to accompany him to church. Guards had to search his fellow worshipers for weapons before they went in to pray. After attending church for a few Sundays, Reagan decided to quit going. A lack of faith had nothing to do with it.

And how, exactly, did Reagan’s faith affect his presidency? In many ways, but perhaps most of all in his view of Soviet communism. Reagan was born not long before the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917, and he lived to watch communism’s collapse. During his presidency he called for a “crusade” to undermine the Soviet regime. It wasn’t just the regime’s repressive nature that inspired a sense of mission in him, or its ghastly record of blood and suffering. It was the official atheism of Soviet communism that especially angered Reagan and convinced him that he was dealing with an “evil” adversary.

“There is sin and evil in the world,” he told the evangelicals in March 1983, “and we’re enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might.” He saw his confrontation with communism as a spiritual one. He told a joint session of the Irish National Parliament in June 1984 that the “struggle between freedom and totalitarianism today” was ultimately not a test of arms or missiles “but a test of faith and spirit.” It was, he said, a “spiritual struggle.” The Soviets did not fail to notice such rhetoric. Their official news agency, Tass, declared: “President Reagan uses religion with particular zeal to back his anti-Soviet policy.”

So much has been said about Ronald Reagan this week, and more will be said today at his funeral ceremonies. Some would-be eulogists have pointed to the way he invigorated the American economy and restored American morale. Some have called him, not without reason, the man who won the Cold War. My bet is, though, that Reagan would himself have liked to be eulogized as a man of God who exercised a form of practical Christianity — the kind that he learned from his mother, Nelle, and from the preachers at the little Disciples of Christ church in Dixon in the 1920s. Surprised? So was I.

Mr. Kengor, the author of “God and Ronald Reagan,” teaches political science at Grove City College in Pennsylvania.

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108690583450134441,00.html

On my birthday, my sons and daughters-in-law composed a song for me to be sung to the tune of Ein Feste Burg by Luther, aka “A Mighty Fortress….” I post it here for the record with no comments on its content except to say it will now be hard to sing the real hymn without recalling the words below. For those unfamiliar with Dishman family humor, these boys of mine think I have something wrong with my pronounce-i-ation. I have no idea what they are talking about!

Pop’s Birthday Song

1. A mighty father is our Pop
A man of much computing.
He organizes all his days
With matrices exuding.
Doest ask who that may be?
John Dishman, it is he.
At times he will endo
Alzheimers flares also.
His name is Pop with a crapital P.

2. A mighty planner is our pop
With a strong bent to’rd science
He strives to bring all of the facts
Into a strict compliance
Plan, do, check, act he crows
To vanquish family woes
Let us not logic kill
But rather feel the thrill
Of pathways walked with wisdom.

3. A mighty father is our pop
A grandpop never failing
Our helper he amidst the flood
Of verbal slips prevailing
Far from the nursery home
His syllables do roam
He scratters them about
He has much lingual clout
And this at Bornes and Noble

4. He’s fond of adding R’s to words
Which otherwise don’t need one.
Like “Churken,” “Air herd,” “Crapitalize,”
And the infamous “Warshington.”
Our Puddleglum is grim
Because we laugh at him.
He suffers from R-squared
In his vocabulaire
One little word shall sproil him

5. He likes to snurf the internet
While list’ning to toccata in puge
He’s got a pair of twenty socks
Look out or he will call you YOU!
The squirting butter flows
Over his po-TA-toes
He loves his Atkins fries
With churken on the side
His LDL is plummeting.

6. Did he in his own strength confide
His biking would be losing
Thorns, thistles, mud and grabbing vines:
Would give him a bad bruising
The gash in his forehead
It smarted and it bled
Peroxide saved the day
He gargles it alway(s)
And it must win the battle.

It’s NOT been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my home town! In fact it’s not been quiet since around the 14th of May when I headed out to North Carolina to attend Jamie’s graduation, and then on to St. Louis to attend Peter’s, and then back to David’s–where Delta stranded me for a day–and then on the road with Shari and Jamie as we moved Jamie to Texas pending her wedding on July 16. Jamie and Shari are still with me along with Peter, so I’ve been pretty busy just trying to keep up with all their doings. So to those faithful blog readers, I apologize for my extended absence, and hope to return to Jeremiah real soon.