Our Friends and Our Future

Tony Reinke Friendship, Proverbs

Proverbs 13:20:

Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise,
but the companion of fools will suffer harm.

Proverbs 27:17:

Iron sharpens iron,
and one man sharpens another.

Daniel J. Estes, Handbook on the Wisdom Books and Psalms (Baker Academic, 2005), page 239:

Proverbs makes it clear that friendship has a great potential for good or for bad. In essence, we choose our friends, and our friends change us. … The influence of a wise friend can sharpen one’s discernment, perspective, and insight in many ways that one could not achieve by individual efforts. Because of the significant effects that friends produce in those who are close to them, to a large degree the friends we choose determine what kind of people we become. Consequently, we must choose our friends wisely, for in choosing them we are likely choosing our own future.

The Hobbit

Tony Reinke J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings

Filming of the movie adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit has officially started (three cheers!).

Part one (of two) will open in theaters on December 19, 2012 (in 3D). Until then, director Peter Jackson plans to keep us in the loop as the filming progresses in New Zealand. On April 14 he posted on his Facebook page the first in a promised series of update videos. The 10-minute video provides fans with a nice look at the beginning stages of what will be a lengthy filming process.

You can watch it here:

HT

Easter and Apologetics

Tony Reinke Easter

Gordon Fee, 1 Corinthians, page 760:

There is a place for apologetics, that is, the defense of Christianity to the unconverted; but Easter is not that place.

Easter, which should be celebrated more frequently in the church, and not just at the Easter season, calls for our reaffirming the faith to the converted. The resurrection of Christ has determined our existence for all time and eternity.

We do not merely live out our length of days and then have the hope as an addendum; rather, as Paul makes plain in this passage [1 Cor. 15:20–28], Christ’s resurrection has set in motion a chain of inexorable events that absolutely determines our present and our future. Christ is the first fruits of those who are his, who will be raised at his coming. That ought both to reform the way we currently live and to reshape our worship into seasons of unbridled joy.

Amen to that last paragraph.

But what about the first two paragraphs? Do you agree? Disagree? Should Easter morning be used for apologetics?

I see Fee’s point, but I’m not sure the unbridled joy of Easter for the believer should eliminate any apologetical use of the sermon (I think of Acts 17:30–31).

But what say you?

Snakes in the Wilderness

Tony Reinke BR > Crossway

From Russell Moore’s new book Tempted and Tried: Temptation and the Triumph of Christ (Crossway, 2011), page 191:

In my nightly Bible readings with my family, I read a selected narrative in the canon, but every night my children beg me to read “the one about the snake.” For some reason they love to hear about Moses combating the fiery serpents in the wilderness with the bronze serpent on the pole and about the afflicted finding healing when they look at the emblem of the very curse that’s killing them. My little boys don’t simply have a morbid fascination with venomous snakes among the wandering Israelites. In fact, they are never satisfied to end the story there.

They wait in silence until we turn to what they call “the other pole,” the picture of the cross of Christ. That’s when I tell them how mysteriously this seemingly helpless, executed man confronted the snake of Eden right there on “the other pole” and finally did what God had promised since the beginning of history. He crushed its head. He went out beyond the gates of Jerusalem to “where the wild things are”—and he conquered wildness forever. They seem to sleep better hearing that.

And so do I.

Speaking of snakes, a video trailer for the book was released last week. You can watch it here:

Deadbolting the Idols Out

Tony Reinke Family, Family worship, Parenting

While intermarriage appears to have been tolerated early in Israel’s history (Abraham, Joseph, and Moses married foreign women, perhaps for political reasons), this later changed. In fact, intermarriage was especially forbidden when Israel was at its weakest, according to John Goldengay. “Ezra and Nehemiah assume that the little Second Temple community living among other peoples is too weak to risk the loss of its identity by absorption into the wider group through intermarriage” (OTT1:747–748). But the concern was larger than identity, and it’s not hard to imagine why. A foreign wife carried her foreign-deity-baggage into a marriage, and likewise, a foreign husband carried his foreign-deity-baggage into a marriage. The addition of these deities into an Israelite home invariably shaped the spiritual devotion and worship practices of a family, making any wholehearted worship of the living God impossible (see 1 Kings 11:1–13). Goldengay takes this one step further by suggesting that Israelites may have been tempted to intermarry to secure divine insurance, a way to broaden one’s base of collected gods to better ensure personal blessing, peace, and financial prosperity. Whatever the motive, intermarriage with a non-believer, he writes, “compromises the principle that Yhwh alone is the one from whom the community must seek help and guidance for its life concerning matters of a moral and religious kind and concerning the future” (Ex. 34:12-16, Deut. 7:1-4, Ps. 106:34–36). Thus, the forbidding of intermarriage in Old Testament history was not a matter of racial preference, a point made especially clear with the Moabite people. It was faithless Moabite women who led Solomon’s heart astray and it was the faithful God-fearing woman named Ruth, also a Moabite, who became the great-grandmother of King David, thus finding herself in the lineage of the Savior. The bottom line: intermarriage was forbidden to preserve undistracted devotion to Yhwh. John Piper summarizes the point well: “The issue is not color mixing, or customs mixing, or clan identity. The issue is: will there be one common allegiance to the true God in this marriage or will there be divided affections?” God wants our homes to be places of guarded worship for Himself alone. There’s application in there for us all.

The Gospel Coalition

Tony Reinke spurgeon

It’s been a great joy to attend The Gospel Coalition National Conference here in Chicago with 5,500 others to celebrate the gospel of Jesus Christ. Rarely do I get to reconnect with so many old friends, and make so many new friends, than at this conference.

But it’s also very easy to get lost in the now-ness of the conference and to forget that this gathering (and others like it) are the realized dream of a previous generation of Christians, many of whom have now passed on to glory. One of those men was Dr. Carl F. H. Henry (1913–2003).

For several years my friend Owen Strachan served as the Managing Director of the Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. While recently sifting through Henry’s old letters, Strachan found a letter from Henry to Mark Dever written on September 12, 1989. In the letter, Henry wrote the following comment:

I may see Al Mohler at Southeastern. He has many gifts. Who knows how our Lord may bring together a core of young evangelical spirits for some dramatic breakthrough a half generation down the road. While we move under His banner who are, in any case, destined for victory.

We are now about a half generation down the road. It was quite fitting that the 2011 TGC conference opened this afternoon with a message from Dr. Mohler.