Christian Living, Biblical Studies, Religion, Spiritual Growth, Theology
John Beeson
The Faith of Unbelief

Bart Ehrman has perhaps done more to undermine the credibility of the Bible than anyone else in my lifetime. But his story didn’t begin that way. Ehrman is a New Testament scholar and skeptic. Ehrman grew up in a Christian home, attended a conservative Bible school, and then found his way to a liberal seminary where his faith in the God of the Bible unraveled. That seminary happens to be the seminary I would attend a couple of decades later.

For Ehrman, everywhere he looks he sees holes in the biblical story. The inconsistencies that he sees have led him to determine that he cannot trust in the God of the Bible.

The Faith of Unbelief
Christian Living, Culture, Spiritual Growth
John Beeson
Don't Numb Your Feelings

“Don’t listen to your feelings; remember what Jesus did for you!”

“Don’t be guided by your feelings; listen to what God commands you to do!”

In just the past week, I heard both of these warnings. Two very different Christian speakers urged their audiences to shut down their feelings. These admonitions resonate. They contain truth. It is correct that our feelings don’t override truth, nor do our emotions negate what God has done. Neither do our feelings give us an out for what God commands us to do.

Don't Numb Your Feelings
History, Spiritual Growth, Suffering, Wisdom
John Beeson
Lord, Reach Your Justice Down

I had outsized emotions as a child. Games, especially, would get the best of me, whether cards or boardgames or sports. In response to a stroke of bad luck, a hot surge of anger would erupt, followed quickly by tears and then embarrassment.

Emotions are God’s gift to us in many ways. They are one of his kind ways of showing us where our deep attachments lie.

Our son started his freshman year at the University of Arizona this fall. It’s been a great experience for him, but not without its adjustments. The climate of a secular school is quite different than the Christian school he graduated from

Lord, Reach Your Justice Down
Culture, Generosity, Nature, Relationships
John Beeson
Marshmallows and Friends

Most have heard of the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment. In 1970, psychologist Walter Mischel invited kids into his lab. A child was offered a marshmallow that they could eat, or, if they waited until the researcher returned, they were given a second marshmallow. About one-third of the kids waited approximately fifteen minutes for the additional reward.

The study then tracked those children over time and found that children who waited for the second reward tended to have higher SAT scores and lower body mass indexes. Later tests have challenged those outcomes, but it hasn’t stopped parents everywhere from running the experiment on their kids, often with humorous results.

Marshmallows and Friends
Christian Living, Culture, Politics
John Beeson
Uprooting Our Political Identity

Happy election day!

In 2016, data scientists Eitan Hersh and Yair Ghitza analyzed data among registered voters to determine how often Democrats and Republicans married. They learned that 9% of marriages had the spouses registered in the two parties. Over the next four years that meager number would drop precipitously, down to 4%.

 As Jonathan Haidt and others have successfully argued, the ideological disparity between FOX News and CNBC are child’s play compared to the engineered social media algorithms that create hermetically sealed echo chambers for our political views.

Uprooting Our Political Identity

shepherds

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How Jesus’ Birth Foretells His Death: the Shepherds

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How Jesus’ Birth Foretells His Death: the Shepherds

Jesus’ story begins with shepherds coming to him, the lamb of God. It ends with the Shepherd being struck down and the sheep scattering. And then there is a final twist.

The story begins with sheep being drawn to the lamb:

8 And in the same region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. 9 And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear. 10 And the angel said to them, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. 11 For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. 12 And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.” 13 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying,

14 “Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!”

15 When the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.” 16 And they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in a manger. 17 And when they saw it, they made known the saying that had been told them concerning this child. 18 And all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them. 19 But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart. 20 And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them. [Luke 2:8-20]

God loves shepherds. Abel, Moses, David, and Amos are all shepherds. In Psalm 23, God refers to himself as a shepherd. It’s no surprise that God would allow these nameless shepherds to be the first witnesses of the birth of Emmanuel.

To top it off, God promised that the Messiah would be a Shepherd-King.[i]

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The Angel's Christmas Song

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The Angel's Christmas Song

One of the ways, it seems, that God gets particular satisfaction is pouring out his breathtaking beauty in the unlikeliest of places. Consider the absurd beauty of the Aurora Borealis, which only a tiny fraction of the world’s population has ever beheld. Consider places of remote and stunning beauty that only a few humans have ever witnessed: caves, Antarctica, the Amazon rainforest, the depths of the ocean. Or things that no human has ever seen in person, such as the Sombrero galaxy or interstellar clouds that can be seen from the edge of the Milky Way. God delights in putting his glory on display for small audiences.

There was an audience who beheld the glory of God in a way we can scarcely imagine the night of Jesus’s birth.

Picture it: you’re a first century Jewish shepherd. Like a modern day trucker or an early American cowboy, yours is a life of solitude. Your companionship is with your fellow shepherds, conversation shared over meals and tea. And like you, they have been shaped by quiet. The rocky and hilly Judean desert is laid out in front of you. Silence blankets the familiar landscape, interrupted only by the soft bleating of the slumbering herd behind you.

And then, suddenly, the heavens pull back like the curtain of a stage and a fearsome angelic warrior of the Lord appears. You gasp in fear. Your heart stops.

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