What’s In A Name?

“[Josiah] did what was right in the eyes of the LORD and walked in all the way of David his father, and he did not turn aside to the right or to the left….Before him there was no king like him, who turned to the LORD with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might, according to all the Law of Moses, nor did any like him arise after him.” (2 Kings 22:2, 23:25)

God has blessed Erin and I with our fourth child and second son, Josiah Everett Jones! He arrived Thursday afternoon, weighing 8 pounds 11 ounces. God is gracious; not only is little Josiah healthy, but Erin was able to deliver him naturally without pain medications and is recovering nicely. More than that, we were allowed to go home after just 2 hours from the birth!

We chose the name “Josiah” for the biblical king who oversaw a great revival in Jerusalem. The story of this remarkable man can be found in 2 Kings 22 and 23, and in 2 Chronicles 33:25-35:27.

This Josiah was a fascinating figure, whose reign was foretold by name in 1 Kings 13:2 as the one who would desecrate the pagan altar of Jeroboam. In the eighteenth year of his reign, a long-lost copy of the Book of the Law was found in the Temple, a book that is believed to be the modern-day book of Deuteronomy, and upon its discovery Josiah led his people in national repentance, re-instituted the  observance of the Passover and other feasts, and, alone among all the kings after David, destroyed the idols and high places that were competing with the true God for worship.

Josiah, despite being the grandson of Manasseh, a man so wicked that God passed a death sentence on the Jewish nation, and despite having had a father who walked in all the ways of Manasseh, was somehow brought to faith in God and obedience to his word. And so one of the lessons of Josiah’s life is that we are not doomed to be like our parents. In God, there is the hope that we can be delivered from the crimes of the past. That’s so reassuring to me as an imperfect and sinful parent, that even my mistakes cannot doom my children.

There’s a flip side to that coin, however. In our day and age, it’s common for people to point to their upbringing and to the circumstances of their childhood as an excuse for their own sins. Josiah’s life, and the lives of his father and grandfather, is a reminder that we won’t get away with that excuse before God. We will all be judged according to our own sins, not those of our parents.

Josiah’s life and reign was defined by the revival that took place under his watch. And that revival was sparked not by the discovery of the Book of the Law in itself, but by God’s granting Josiah repentance upon finding it. This revival was led by Josiah; his obedience and his zeal drove it forward. The fact that it did not persist beyond his death shows the crucial importance of Josiah’s own personal commitment to God in the life of his kingdom.

And so Josiah’s story contains a sobering warning. Manasseh, Josiah’s grandfather, was so incredibly wicked–even sacrificing his own son to the god Molech–that God passed a judgment on Judah: it would be destroyed for its rebellion. Even the remarkable reign of Josiah would not enough to change it; it could only delay the inevitable. A lesson we can learn, then, is to repent and seek the Lord when we have the opportunity, and not to put it off. We do not know how long we have and when that opportunity may be suddenly snatched away, just as Judah did not know how long God would bless them and then so suddenly remove Josiah from the scene.

And finally, Josiah was a man whose life was defined by his submission to the Scriptures. Everything recorded about his revival in the Bible corresponds to stipulations in the Book of the Law of Moses. The Scriptures were no distant and irrelevant ancient text to him. They were, rather, his very life. So, too, the words of God in Scripture should drive and guide our own lives.

May God in his surpassing grace and mercy grant that little Josiah Everett will one day turn to the Lord Jesus Christ with all his heart and soul and might–never turning aside to the right or to the left. And may we pray that this be true of us all.

For most of the last year, I’ve been using @upwiththisjones as my handle (a play on “keeping up with the Joneses”). But I’ve decided to go a little less “clever” and changed my handle.

You can follow me with my new handle, @jeffj0nes (this font on my site makes it hard to tell, but that’s a zero instead of the “o” in “jones”). Or see my profile at Twitter here.

Sorry for any confusion!

However, all the audio from the conference and from Dr. Trueman’s interview and sermon the following Sunday morning is now available online! Simply click here and you’ll find it all there, for free.

Many thanks to Dr. Trueman for braving the weather to encourage us in this way, to the many who travelled from all over Alberta to join us, to Brenna and Jamie and all the others who worked so hard to organize it, and most of all to God for the opportunity!

Forbes: China’s Growing Problem of Too Many Single Men

MSNBC: China Grapples With Legacy of its “Missing Girls”

And as for the reality that abortion in the US disproportionately kills low-income children and babies from black families: USA Today

Why such a restriction? Because it might reduce the number of babies aborted by parents seeking to select the sex of their baby.

Recently, the New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists raised similar concerns regarding the release of an over-the-counter test that can indicate the gender of an unborn baby starting at only 10 weeks.

One of the dirtiest and most hypocritical secrets of modern “feminism” and its unqualified support of abortion on demand is the fact that abortion is very often done to ensure that the parents get the sex they want in their new baby–a practice that, in the vast majority of such cases, heavily favours baby boys over baby girls. One need only look at the demographic disaster in Communist China, where the “one child” policy has resulted in a staggering imbalance of young men over young women, for proof that abortion is a practice that disproportionately kills females.

In other words: the next time you hear a feminist claim that abortion on demand “protects” women, just remember that hundreds of millions more women than men never had the chance to be born and live to celebrate their “liberation” because they were slaughtered in utero.

That’s not the only way abortion is discriminatory. In the United States, abortion kills significantly more babies from black and low-income parents than other races and income levels.

It’s a shocking indictment of the moral confusion of our day when opposition of abortion is considered politically incorrect, but the fact that abortion kills more females, more of the poor, and more people of colour is something not worth talking about.

I’m not in favour of restricting pregnant mothers’ access to knowledge of the gender of their child. And as the New Zealand story shows, technology will soon render any such law obsolete (imagine the clandestine shipments of banned gender pregnancy tests to a “black market” of curious parents!). But, most importantly, this debate really is missing the fundamental point anyway.

See, the fact that our society simply doesn’t know what to do about the reality of abortions done to “flush the females” in favour of male children shows that our culture’s morality is built on a false foundation. It’s impossible to justify abortion as somehow “protecting” women when it kills more females than males and contributes to stark and unnatural gender imbalances. But, on the other hand, if abortion is simply a “woman’s right to choose,” full stop, then no one has any right to tell any woman not to abort, for any reason at all. We need to understand that the guiding moral principle is one of convenience and expediency–what makes me more comfortable is right–and, therefore, there is left no grounds to object to practices like the deliberate killing of girls to get a boy.

Let’s put it this way. Say a woman sleeps with two men, a white man and a black man (assume the woman’s white), and she becomes pregnant. Now let’s say that she prefers a white baby over a black baby. She finds out (let’s assume by some kind of DNA test) that the baby in her womb is black. She goes off and has that helpless little black baby hacked to pieces with a scalpel and sucked out of her womb through a vacuum at a Planned Parenthood clinic. (If that description shocks you, it should. “Abortion” is a too-clinical euphemism for what really happens).

Her decision to kill the black child because she wants a white one would, I think, would be reprehensible to any person with a semblance of morality. But according to the fundamental and non-negotiable principle of the pro-abortion lobby–the woman has the right to choose–no one has any right to tell her it’s wrong or try to convince her otherwise.

In other words, it’s okay to be racist, as long as the black/white/Asian/Latino/Arab/Jew/Indian you despise is in your womb. (And, because of the horrific practice of partial-birth abortion, as long as even just the foot of that baby is still in the birth canal, it’s okay).

Does that bother you? It should. But according to the law of the land, this is acceptable. According to the rules of our political culture, it’s totally fine for parents to be misogynistic, as long as the woman’s not born yet.

The only way out of this sick dilemma is to admit that an unborn baby is, in fact, a human being, and treat that human being with the dignity and respect it deserves.

To do that means we need to reject the foundational error on which abortion stands, the belief that what is right is what makes “me” happy or more comfortable or is more convenient. To do that means we need to recover the truth: that what is “right” and “wrong” has been defined, objectively and outside ourselves, and is a law that stands over and above us. And that objective moral framework can only exist when we submit to the God who put it in place.

Part of Tolkien’s genius as a writer was in making the setting of his books come alive. Reading his books, one feels like they are peering through a window into an ancient land with a deep culture and long history.

What is sometimes overlooked is that Tolkien was a linguist before he became a writer. He was one of history’s most notable conlangers (those who invent languages). He once called it his “secret vice.” Since his childhood, he was developing languages. And his writing of the Middle-Earth epics was, in one sense, an effort to give a context and mythology to the languages he developed. In other words, to Tolkien, the story served the languages, and not the other way around.

Among his many languages was a family of “Elvish” tongues, derived from a mother tongue called “Quenya.” Tolkien, a devoted Catholic (try looking for Catholic ideas and themes in his books sometime!) actually translated prayers, such as the Lord’s Prayer and Hail Mary (RTF download), into Quenya. His voluminous writings contain many Quenya renderings of biblical and religious terms.

Given Tolkien’s devoted fan following, I suppose it isn’t a surprise to find that many biblical texts have now been rendered in Elvish, including Genesis 1 and 2, Luke 2, the Gospel of Mark, Matthew 1-5, and the entire Johannine corpus! Some of the work shows not only considerable linguistic skill but also notable artistry.

What to make of all this? I’m torn on this, honestly. On the one hand, my brother Mike was right to point out, when I mentioned this to him, that all this effort translating the Word into invented languages would be far better spent on translating it into real languages for people who don’t have the Bible. There are hundreds of language groups that do not possess any of the Scriptures at all, and thousands that lack the whole Bible. In that light, all the Elvish Scriptures of the world look like a frivolous waste of time. I’m sure Elrond and Legolas could use the Gospel, and having these works would certainly help, except for the minor issue that they are fictional characters only!

On the other hand, from looking through the commentary on these sites, many of these people aren’t believers anyway. So I’m at least glad they’re working in the Bible, even if it’s for the wrong reasons; perhaps God will use this to draw some to himself. In another important sense, they are in a narrow and unwitting way “preaching Christ” to their community, and so, in a Philippians 1:15-18 sort of way, I have to see that as something positive.

Anyway, I found that interesting, though a little strange…

It’s an important text for child-rearing, but often misunderstood. Have a read!

Remember: all of us were once under God’s judgement. The lives of every one of us were once forfeit. We all robbed our Master in heaven of His glory, deprived him of the service he is owed, ungratefully rejected his authority over us and chose to go our own way. We are all sinners, and we all were once under God’s condemnation, bound for eternal punishment in hell for the crimes we committed. And so every one of us, without exception, stands in need of forgiveness from God.

But for those of us who believe in Christ, that forgiveness has been granted. When our hearts were changed by the Holy Spirit and we stopped trusting in ourselves, when we instead turned our backs on our sins and trusted in Jesus Christ alone to save us, then we were forgiven. God put our sins out of His sight, out of His mind, and welcomed us back, the same way Paul urged Philemon to take back his runaway slave. We were once runaways from God, but we have been received back into the household, welcomed back into the family. God forgave everything we have done to him.

How ungrateful of us, then, when we refuse to forgive others for what they do against us! When we hold bitterness in our hearts toward another, when we hold the thoughtless and vindictive acts of others against them and do not forgive, we forget how much we have been forgiven. Nothing another human being can do to us can compare to what God forgave us for. Jesus compared 100 denarii – 100 days’ wages for a laborer, say $10,000 today – to a debt of ten thousand talents. That was millions of dollars in the ancient world. The difference between what that person did to you and what you did to God is far more than even the several orders of magnitude Jesus described in the parable. No, your debt to God was infinite. You could never have paid it back.

But, if you believe in Christ, that means God forgave you. He paid the price Himself, took that loss in Himself, to bring you back.

That has staggering implications for forgiveness. See, to refuse forgiveness to your brother or sister is like saying that the hurt you suffered is greater and more important than your offence against God.

Let me put it another way. When we fail to forgive, we declare ourselves more important than God. That’s the utter height of arrogance, the very pinnacle of idolatry. It is a rejection of God’s divine and kingly authority and a diminishment of His grace and His glory.

That is why forgiveness is so vital in the Christian life. It is when we forgive that we are most like God in our actions. It is when we forgive that we most closely mirror and image the perfection and beauty of God’s character. To refuse forgiveness is a sign that we, in our heart of hearts, do not truly understand who we are before God, that we do not see the seriousness of our own sin. That has terrifying implications for one’s eternal fate. A true Christian can never be lost, but one who thinks himself a Christian who persists in refusing forgiveness to another has great reason to doubt whether they have been truly saved, really born again, in the first place.

Don’t fail to forgive, brothers and sisters.