Every week, my local newspaper runs a small piece called “A Student’s View,” written, as you can probably guess, by a high school student on the topic of his or her choice.

In a recent one, titled “Oh my God,” a Jewish girl wrote protesting her parents’ insistence that she attend synagogue services for the High Holy Days. The author was clearly bright, and the piece was thoughtful and well-written. And having experienced teenage rebellion in various forms firsthand, I pass no judgment on her or her parents. (If anything, I admire them for insisting she attend.)

Making no excuses but raising a good point, she writes, “A majority of my classmates . . . say the Lord’s name in vain all the time. . . .” And it’s not just her classmates. All day, every day, on TV and in movies, in real life and in books, the phrase “Oh my God” is uttered. Hearing that relentlessly, what must young people think? How could it not diminish the meaning behind the name?

It wasn’t always so. I don’t remember hearing the phrase as a child, on TV, or used by my classmates. But it slowly crept into common useage and is now ubiquitous, with its very own texting shorthand, “OMG.”

I sometimes wonder what would happen if school children—or TV characters—en masse started saying “Oh my Allah” instead. I doubt that would be tolerated. But never mind the sensibilities of believing Christians and Jews. And how many of us say it ourselves? How many of us let it slide when others say it? We allow it to happen.

Writing for Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, S.M. Hutchens describes a scene in C.S. Lewis’s book, Perelandra. The character representing Satan continually calls out the name Ransom, who’s been sent to oppose him. The first few times Ransom hears his name he answers, “What is it?” “Nothing,” comes the reply. This continues until Ransom simply stops responding.

Hutchens writes: “[A]t the heart of this nothing was a denial of the person called upon, an aggressive attempt to negate his being, an attempt to equate him with nothing, an attempt to kill.”

Perhaps that’s the reason behind the Third Commandment.

I wonder what it feels like to know you are an indestructible man. That’s what Caleb son of Jephunneh was. Not many of us have a guarantee that we will live tomorrow, but Caleb did. The fact is it was impossible for him to die before he received the promise made to him 45 years earlier.

The time was Moses’ time, and the place was the Wilderness of Zin. Twelve men, a leader from each tribe, were sent to spy out the territory for conquest (Numbers 13). Twelve men saw the same lay of the land in Canaan, but 10 came back to camp with a recommendation not to attack; best to wait till a more opportune time; too many contraindications at present. Only Joshua and Caleb said, “Yippee, let’s go!” Just for that, the Lord told the 10 “realists” they would never enter the land. But as for Caleb:

“. . . my servant Caleb, because he has a different spirit and has followed me fully, I will bring into the land into which he went, and his descendants shall possess it” (Numbers 14:24).

And today, Joshua 14, is payday. The Israelites have won all the marbles, and Joshua is divvying them up. A delegation from Judah arrives, with Caleb leading it. He takes the initiative and reminds Joshua of the Lord’s promise, reviewing the whole story. How many times, I wonder, has he rehearsed this speech—to his wife and kids, to himself on his bed on sleepless nights.

O Lord, God of vengeance,
O God of vengeance, shine forth!
Rise up, O judge of the earth;
Repay to the proud what they deserve !
O Lord, how long shall the wicked,
How long shall the wicked exult?
They pour out their arrogant words;
All the evildoers boast.
They crush your people, O Lord,
And afflict your heritage
(Psalm 94:1-5)

Caleb is about to find what the Apostles found when they asked Jesus where to make arrangements for the Passover; and Jesus directed them to go into the city, where he told them they would find a man carrying a pitcher; and to follow that man into a house; and in that house they would meet the master of the house and would ask for a guest room:

“And the disciples set out and went to the city, and found it just as he had told them . . .” (Mark 14:16).

Isn’t it delightful when we step out onto God’s promises—when we get out of the boat with Peter—and find that they hold?

“. . . If it seems slow, wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay” (Habakkuk 2:3).

And the waiting time between promise and fulfillment, between prayer offered and prayer answered—well, it is no more empty of activity than a drop of water is empty of microbes. It’s in the long stretch of waiting that we learn about ourselves and learn about God. Still, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?

As a postscript, I am glad to see Caleb still filled with the Spirit after all these years. (See Joshua 14:6-12). They couldn’t take that away from him, that blessed fanatic.

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.

In teaching the fourth through sixth grade girls Sunday school class at my church, I use the Desiring God curriculum, How Majestic Is Your Name, which details the many names of God. Last Sunday we studied Jehovah-Jireh: “The Lord Will Provide.”

As the girls and I were going through the lesson, I had the opportunity to share with them how I was planning to trust God with our future transportation needs. Our van was having some issues, but at that point on Sunday it was still running. I told the girls that I knew I would have to eventually trust God with the van, but what I didn’t know is that the next day our van would break down for good.

Hebrews 11:1, of course, reminds us, “Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what do not see.” Well, we’re living in the tension between faith and certainty right now. Do we sit tight and see how God provides? Do we crunch numbers and see what kind of monthly payment we can afford? If we do the latter, does it negate the former? Is it possible to really trust at the same time you are scrambling to find the solution yourself?

In the past, my mistake is usually that when I trust God to provide, I place parameters on his provision. For instance, in this scenario, I think God’s provision should look like a brand new car in the driveway tomorrow. I realize, however, He has provided for us already by allowing us to test-drive a car from Chevy for the past month and having our pastor offer us his family’s second minivan for the weekend. In addition, when we go to my husband’s family’s farm next week for Thanksgiving, we’ll bring home his parents’ van as a loaner for a few weeks.

At the same time, we will begin looking for replacement options. We’ll sweat a little over it, but we won’t worry. Because the God who can give us a new Chevy for a month, a loaned van for the weekend, and another one for as long as we need it will continue to provide for our needs.

I have faith in that certainty.

Enough looking back. Time to move on again. That rearward glance was just to energize you for the next conquest. The people of God are not a backward looking people (Philippians 3:13; Isaiah 65:17), except to draw strength for the present by remembering God’s power and faithfulness. Joshua in chapter 13 lists the real estate yet to be conquered.

We might well do the same in our lives. Like Auntie Em said to Hickory the farmhand when he started rhapsodizing about the statue that the townsfolk would erect for him someday: “Well, don’t start posing for it now.” You got saved, but that wasn’t for sitting on laurels but for walking on water. You conquered the overeating problem, but there’s the condescending attitude that still needs dealing with.

And then there’s the world to conquer, not just your world but the one out beyond your front yard. We are to enforce the victory obtained on Calvary. Pastor Bill Johnson of Redding, Calif., writes:

“It’s time for a revolution in our vision. When prophets tell us, ‘Your vision is too small,’ many of us think the antidote is to increase whatever numbers we’re expecting. For example: if we’re expecting 10 new converts, let’s change it to 100. If we were praying for cities, let’s pray instead for nations. With such responses, we’re missing the sharp edge of the frequently repeated word. Increasing the numbers is not necessarily a sign of a larger vision from God’s perspective. Vision starts with identity and purpose. Through a revolution in our identity, we can think with divine purpose. . . .

“Many, if not most, theologians make the mistake of taking all the good stuff contained in the prophets and sweeping it under that mysterious rug called the Millennium. . . . I do want to deal with our propensity to put off those things that require courage, faith, and action to another period of time. . . .”

I am amused by the way the Lord matter-of-factly ticks off the names of the next regions to be conquered (verses 2-7). When God is with you, you can count the chickens before they hatch. I imagine the Israelites not being as daunted by this list of lands slated for conquest as they were by the list before Jericho. By this stage of the game they have a track record with God, a cognizance of his past faithfulness that gives confidence for the future.

I see the dynamic in miniature in my own little life challenges. Two years ago I could not have envisioned being able to write a blog post a day. When Dr. Olasky offered me this job on a silver platter, I asked for two weeks to think about it (to his bafflement, I expect). But 24 months and 537 posts later, there is a literal paper trail of God’s ability to supply a little bit of oil and meal in the widow’s jars.

Joshua 12 and 13 form an “encouragement sandwich,” as my son Jae would say. The top layer of bread is the recital of God’s faithfulness in the conquests thus far (12:1-24). The meat in the middle is his commands of further conquest (13:1-7). The other slice of bread resumes the recital of God’s faithfulness evidenced in the division of the claimed land.

There is value in writing things down, in keeping lists of concrete answers to prayer. “Vague confession yields vague absolution,” said the Friar to Romeo. Similarly, vague awareness of God’s benefits toward you yields vague gratitude—and negligible encouragement for future battles.

Verse 22 is an embarrassing postscript for Balaam. The once famous man is reduced to a footnote. So it is with all who are wined and dined and flattered for a season. The sought-out prophet was a double-minded man who loved money and the proximity of power. But every man dies alone in the end.

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.

The grandiosity and confidence of some theologians and pastors in an age of democratic theology is something the early church fathers would find puzzling. If you’re attending a vibrant church, it seems easy to assume that your church must be “right.” In evangelicalism, what qualifies as credible is often church size and pastoral charisma. If the church is big and the pastor is a good speaker, then the church must be preaching something right. God must be “in it.” However, in an age where theological accuracy and biblical fidelity to the historic teachings of the church are authenticated by the size of parking lots, media appearances, profiles in Christian magazines, the pastor’s “hipster” quotient, believing that Christianity began in the 16th century, and so on, I’m not so sure we should be as dogmatically confident as we profess.

Churches without pastoral leadership bound and accountable to higher ecclesial authority and oversight, outside of the local congregational setting, typically end up with pastors who surround themselves with “yes men.” These men may be called “elders” but they were selected by the super-pastor and are not considered his theological equal.

For pastors driven by numbers (followers), influence, making the church catholic into their own image, and so on, it is also easy to fall prey to the group-selected narcissism that feeds the arrogant self-deception that “pastor X’s” or “Dr. X’s” theological preferences are best for the church universal. A congregation’s “vision/mission statement” or “statement of faith” is treated as creedal and used as a basis for assessing the orthodoxy of the church down the street.

Perhaps this is why celebrities, in general, believe their own hype as suggested in Dr. Gad Saad’s article, “I’m not a Doctor, But . . . ,” in the most recent issue of Psychology Today. Narcissism, grandiosity, fame, “yes, men,” the post-modern democratization of opinion lead us to wrongly believe that well-known people must be right. I think issues may apply to well-known pastors, theologians, and Christian musicians, as well.

Honestly, I struggle with theological humility in my own writing and speaking. This is not a problem, then, exclusive to those who are well-known. There is also the opposite extreme of those who believe they are “right” because their church world is small and their pastors are not well-known.

What’s different about a church world of democratized theology is that we no longer have the authority to declare something heretical nor in error. We can’t remove bad teaching from church communities. We can only blog about error or slander error on Facebook and Twitter. Sadly, numbers feed the self-deception that Paul the apostle would agree with whatever your church teaches and practices. Church history should remind us that it is entirely possible, because of sin and deception, for any of our churches to be large, or your favorite pastor or theologian to be famous, because God is, in fact, not “in it.”

It is beneficial to stop and take a regular tally of the deeds of God in your life, as we do in this chapter. Living through the drama of the conquest of Ai was exhausting—hopeful at the outset, demoralizing in the middle, exhilarating in the end. The rear-view mirror perspective reveals God’s justice and mercy and brilliance in it, which escaped us when we saw only trees and no forest.

My favorite example of the advantage of compressed time is always the way the 12 tribes of Israel came into existence. There was a decade-long flying of fur and pulling of hair between Leah and Rachel—and when the smoke cleared, 12 sturdy sons stood all in a row.

The Messiah’s two Comings looked like one Coming from the perspective of the Old Testament saints. The prophets themselves were puzzled by their own prophecies, perhaps expecting every prediction of theirs to occur simultaneously in one great finale. A favorite seminary metaphor for explaining this optical illusion is that of two mountains standing one behind the other in your line of vision. As we now know, the valley of millennia separates Christ’s “First Coming” and the “Second Coming” from each other. But from where the ancients stood, it looked like one mountain; they could not spy the farther mountain behind the closer one. In this case, it was they, not we, who saw the time compressed.

The whole Bible record is, of course, time compressed for our edification—thousands of years between two leather covers. It is the closest we come to God’s own control-tower vista, the beginning from the end.

We need to be able to practice the same thing with our lives—find patterns in the tangle of threads behind us. Paul Miller wrote his excellent book on prayer, A Praying Life, in which he rightly observed that a book about prayer is really a book about learning to know God. God is weaving a story in our lives, but while you’re caught in the skein of wool, you don’t always see what he is doing. There is activity in the long waiting periods, when nothing seems to be happening. It is here when our mettle is being tested and we are learning things both about God and ourselves.

Chapter 12 of Joshua is a pause to take stock of where we’ve been and what we’ve done—more importantly, what God has done. The dust has settled from 11 chapters of unrelenting warfare, and at the end of it, Joshua may list the following conquests: Jericho, Ai, Jerusalem, Hebron, Jarmuth, Lachish, Eglon, Gezer, Debir, Geder, Hormah, Arad, Libnah, Adullam, Makkedah, Bethel, Tappua, Hepher, Aphek, Lasharon, Madon, Hazor, Shimron Meron, Achshaph, Taanach, Megiddo, Kedesh, Jokneam, Dor, Gilgal, Tirzah.

Behind each conquest, a whole story. Just like your life.

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.

Why did Jesus speak so often in parables? One reason, perhaps, is that the people He addressed had never seen the Kingdom of Heaven. Hearing a good parable is the next best thing to understanding through personal experience. Of course, people need to open their hearts and minds to be willing to listen and perceive.

I can’t take my kids with me back in time to observe and learn from all the ugliness of real-life socialism. Sharing some of my actual experiences leads to confusion—attitudes and actions that were the norm at the time don’t always make sense for those who have grown up in a very different environment. Thus, to save time, I often resort to allegorical tools. While analyzing market vs. government failures with my students, I found a little inspiration from P.J. O’Rourke to share my personal experiences as a swimmer living on Long Island, N.Y.

What shall we say the market is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? The free market is a dangerous place. It’s full of jellyfish, sharks, and rip currents. It’s like going to Gilgo Beach when the summer is over. No appointed experts to save you from drowning—you enter it at your own risk. No signs to tell you how to swim. Or breathe.

The unfree market is just as dangerous. It’s also full of jellyfish, sharks, and rip currents. But you have Big Brother taking care of you. It’s like going to Jones Beach. There’s a big sign that says, “Swimming Prohibited.” There’s a police car patrolling the beach ready to arrest the unruly, irresponsible, under-informed, stupid tourists who dare to get wet above their ankles.Big Brother never sleeps. He watches after those naive ci

tizens who have developed the unhealthy idea that they should be in charge of their own lives. Big Brother is there to discipline the troublemakers who believe that they should be responsible for their own actions. And if you refuse to pay taxes to keep Big Brother’s police car driving along the deserted beaches, they cuff you with the cuffs you bought for the murderers and rapists and put you in a cell they built with your money for the thieves and false witnesses.

It is “chariots” that strike me in my “just one thing” from this chapter of Joshua. The word is not dropped idly here by the Lord. There is a vendetta behind this. God makes a point of noting that when Joshua swept the land clean of God’s enemies, “he hamstrung their horses and burned their chariots with fire” (verse 9).

There is a sense in which the whole Bible is the record of the enmity between God and chariots. The narrative describing Pharaoh’s defeat at the Exodus never misses an opportunity to emphasize the chariots that Pharaoh counted on (Exodus 14:7, 17) and the total annihilation of the same (Exodus 14:18, 23, 25, 26, 28; 15:4, 19).

The Lord knows how impressive and fearful the chariot is, so He addresses the issue in a preemptive way when He sets down his laws for warfare:

“When you go out to war against your enemies, and see horses and chariots and an army larger than your own, you shall not be afraid of them, for the Lord your God is with you. . . .” (Deuteronomy 20:1).

It begins to dawn on us that the chariot is imbued with symbolic meaning for God, representing all the powers of man that vainly vaunt themselves against Him. This is personal. The contest is on throughout the course of history. To the bitter end, the hellish enemies of God that are coughed out of the bottomless pit carry the sound of chariots (Revelation 9:9).

Later, the Ephraimite tribe’s two lame excuse for not taking possession of their allotted inheritance will be the forests and the chariots: “. . . all the Canaanites who dwell in the plain have chariots of iron, both those in Beth-shean and its villages and those in the Valley of Jezreel” (Joshua 17:16). Joshua is supposed to be sympathetic to this, but it leaves him cold:

“Then Joshua said to the house of Joseph, . . . “You are a numerous people and have great power . . . though it is a forest, you shall clear it and possess it to its farthest borders. For you shall drive out the Canaanites, though they have chariots of iron, and though they are strong” (Joshua 17:17-18).

Later, in Judges 1 we are told outright that the tribe of Judah was not able to drive out the inhabitants of the lowlands because they had chariots (verse 19). If we weren’t aware of the shameful background to this comment, we would almost accept it as a legitimate excuse. But we now recognize Israel’s self-defeatism and its inevitable consequences: Because they believe themselves unable to possess the land, they are indeed unable.

Fear of chariots is, of course, a subset of fear of man, whose flip side is confidence in man. These are people who would prefer to take their chances with human help than divine help. Someone endowed with a fascination for the more mathematical features of the Word of God pointed out to me the ultimate thrilling chiastic structure of the Bible—that the very middle verse of the entire book is Psalm 118:8:

“It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in princes.”

The delightful surprise, by the time we meet Elijah centuries later, is that the man who forsakes his trust in human chariots, far from forsaking his protection, now enters the exclusive club of those protected by the chariots of God. Elisha gets a glimpse of them as his mentor Elijah is carried off to heaven (2 Kings 2). The sight so captures his imagination that he is unruffled by the sight of Syrian horses and chariots encircling him and Dothan; he sees the outer ring of heavenly chariots ringing those (2 Kings 6:8-19).

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.

Thanks to President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, most Americans have at least heard of the godfather of community organizing, Saul Alinsky (1909-1972), and his 1971 book, Rules for Radicals. Turn on conservative talk radio any day and there’s a good chance you’ll hear Alinsky’s Rule No. 13 cited derisively: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, politicize it and polarize it.” It’s important to understand this rule, but I think it’s more important to understand why Alinsky wrote this book that continues to influence the American left.

In the book’s prologue, Alinsky wrote:

“The revolutionary force today has two targets, moral as well as material. Its young protagonists are one moment reminiscent of the idealistic early Christians, yet they also urge violence and cry, ‘Burn the system down!’ They have no illusions about the system, but plenty of illusions about the way to change our world. It is to this point that I have written this book.”

Sprinkled with religious language, profanity, Scriptural references as well as a dedication to Lucifer, Alinsky sought to guide members of the younger generation interested in changing their world.

Yet it’s apparent that Alinsky sought to give them something much more important than rules for radicals. He wanted to give them meaning for life. In the prologue he continued, “Today’s generation is desperately trying to make some sense out of their lives and out of the world. . . . The young are . . . looking for what man has always looked for from the beginning of time, a way of life that has some meaning or sense.”

On the last page of this manual that teaches community organizers how to take from the “Haves” and give to the “Have-Nots,” Alinsky wrote, “The human cry . . . is one for a meaning, a purpose for life—a cause to live for and if need be die for. . . . This is literally the revolution of the soul.”

According to the Chicago-based organizer, there were no fixed principles by which the community organizer should live, other than the 13 rules for radicals. He said that the organizer “knows that life is a quest for uncertainty. . . . He knows that all values are relative, in a world of political relativity.” Yet the atheist Alinsky wrote, “[T]he organizer is in a true sense reaching for the highest level for which man can reach—to create, to be a ‘great creator,’ to play God.”

He said that the young “are searching for an answer, at least for a time, to man’s greatest question, ‘Why am I here?’” In short, the writer told his followers to find life’s meaning and salvation in conflict-based community organizing for the purpose of taking from the Haves and giving to the Have-Nots.

When we think of Alinsky, we miss the bigger picture if we focus on Rule No. 13. However misguided, he sought to give his followers meaning for life. By sharing the gospel with modern-day community organizers, we can show them true salvation in Jesus Christ and life’s meaning and purpose in glorifying God.

As we reach chapter 10, I was thinking that the story of Israel’s conquests could have ended abruptly and ignominiously at chapter 7. That was the first battle of Ai, the one they entered jubilant after Jericho and exited dejected after sin was discovered in the camp.

Some children of God might have lost heart and concluded that they could never make much progress in the land because they could never hope to be pure enough. They might even have couched this spiritual defeatism in comforting theological terms, evolving an elaborate theology of limited expectations, teaching in their schools and synagogues that though someday we will conquer all strongholds of evil, at the present time in this earthly dispensation we should not expect more than sporadic and modest conquests because we are still full of sin. In fact, people who imagine that much conquest is possible are fanatics and troublemakers.

If Israel had taken that attitude, the subsequent history of the nation would have looked very different. They would have been forever reminiscing around hearths about Jericho as if it were a big deal, and erecting statues to it. They would perhaps have settled in middling contentment on their little piece of real estate with their little memories of little achievement—never realizing that they had been meant for a much more glorious destiny. They were meant to have much more on this earth—more adventure and more enlarged borders, a la Jabez (1 Chronicles 4:10).

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.