Suzerain-Vassal Treaties & the Books of Moses: Joshua Berman
I had the privilege of interviewing Jewish scholar Dr. Joshua Berman, professor of Hebrew Bible at Bar-Illan University in Israel, on the fact that the books of Moses, the Pentateuch, follow the late second Millennium BC format of a suzerain-vassal treaty. This fact strongly supports the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, and, hence, the existence of genuine and unavoidable predictive prophecy in the Bible, and, thus, the Bible’s Divine authorship. Jehovah, the God of Israel, is the suzerain or great King, and Israel is the vassal, the subordinate dependent on the suzerain.
When my wife and I visited Egypt last year as part of a faculty tour of Egypt led by evangelical scholar James Hoffmeier, we had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Berman in Luxor, Egypt, on the issue of suzerain-vassal treaties (he prefers to be called “Joshua.”) Joshua Berman explains the issue quite clearly and effectively, so if you find the terminology “suzerain vassal treaty” scary, watch the video below of the interview, and I suspect you will both understand the issue and see the value of it for Christian apologetics.
I have posted about apologetics videos recorded on this trip to Egypt in previous posts on this blog, such as this one on the famous Merneptah Stele.
Ironically, when I debated president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Dan Barker, on the Old Testament, Mr. Barker claimed that “The Israelis over in Israel … the archaeologists are throwing up their hands saying, ‘No, there’s nothing. None of these stories has any archaeological evidence at all.’” Barker’s assertion was always ridiculous, as was demonstrated within the debate itself, but the interview with Dr. Berman provides even more evidence for the foolishness of Mr. Barker’s argument.
After the interview with Dr. Joshua Berman, other scholars, including Kenneth Kitchen (On the Reliability of the Old Testament), James Hoffmeier (The Archaeology of the Bible), and Meredith Kline (Treaty of the Great King: The Covenant Structure of Deuteronomy) are also quoted. You can learn more about archaeological evidence for the Old Testament here.
So please watch the video below. You can watch the embed below, or view it on faithsaves.net here, or on Rumble by clicking here, or on YouTube by clicking here.
–TDR
The Gospel Is the Power of God Unto Salvation, pt. 6
Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five
The Apostle Paul writes that “the gospel is the power of God unto salvation” (Romans 1:16). He uses those words to explain why in the first half of the same verse that he is “not ashamed of the gospel of Christ.” Maybe you might think that when Paul is saying that he is not ashamed of the gospel, that there was no way he would be. Paul ends Ephesians and Colossians asking for the churches to pray for boldness for him to preach the gospel.
Not Ashamed of the Gospel: Worship
Paul could be ashamed, but he wasn’t, because the gospel is the power of God unto salvation. If he was ashamed, that meant less gospel preaching and then less salvation. What occurs when shame for the gospel brings less gospel preaching?
Earlier in Romans 1, Paul writes, “For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his Son.” His word “serve” translates the Greek word latreuo, which is translated “worship” elsewhere (Philippians 3:3). As the word “serve” it is the priestly service, which enacts the offerings and the sacrifices. The priests presented these to God as prescribed by Him in His Word. This hearkens to the language of Paul in Romans 12:1, “present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.”
To “present” is to “offer.” “Service” in Romans 12:1 is latreia, the noun form of the verb latreuo. It is reasonable worship. Worship is giving God what He wants. Priests in the Old Testament sacrificial system served, but it was the priestly service of offerings. They presented to God what He said in His ceremonial law.
Jesus made New Testament believers “priests” (Rev 1:6). As Peter wrote, New Testament believers are a holy priesthood, offering up spiritual sacrifices unto God (1 Peter 2:5). This equals or surpasses what Old Testament priests did. It isn’t lesser.
In Romans 1:9 the Apostle Paul says his gospel preaching is to worship with his spirit. Worship must be acceptable to God. His preaching of the gospel is acceptable unto God. Worship glorifies God.
The Missionary Psalm
The glory of God corresponds to the perfections of God’s attributes. His attributes are revealed before men. Glorifying God exalts those attributes by showing them. Preaching the gospel shows forth the attributes of God. With regard to this, I think of Psalm 67, what Spurgeon and others called and call “the missionary psalm.”
1 <To the chief Musician on Neginoth, A Psalm or Song.> God be merciful unto us, and bless us; and cause his face to shine upon us; Selah. 2 That thy way may be known upon earth, thy saving health among all nations. 3 Let the people praise thee, O God; let all the people praise thee. 4 O let the nations be glad and sing for joy: for thou shalt judge the people righteously, and govern the nations upon earth. Selah. 5 Let the people praise thee, O God; let all the people praise thee. 6 Then shall the earth yield her increase; and God, even our own God, shall bless us. 7 God shall bless us; and all the ends of the earth shall fear him.
Spurgeon writes in his Treasury:
How admirably balanced are the parts of this missionary song! The people of God long to see all the nations participating in their privileges, “visited with God’s salvation, and gladdened with the gladness of his nation” (Ps 106:5). They long to hear all the nationalities giving thanks to the Lord, and hallowing his name; to see the face of the whole earth, which sin has darkened so long, smiling with the brightness of a second Eden.
Exalting God Before the Heathen
Evangelism makes God’s way “known upon the earth,” His “saving health among all nations” (verse 2). The point of this in the end (verse 7) is that “all the ends of the earth shall fear him.” Worship starts with knowing Who God is, which brings reverence of Him, respect of Him, lifting Him up to His rightful place in the imagination of men. The gospel shows who God is in all His attributes. This is worth consideration.
Believers can talk about the gospel among themselves. It’s worth it. However, God wants exaltation among the heathen, among the nations, and in the world. He made those people in His image. He created them for His pleasure. Even if they don’t believe the gospel, they should hear it. When believers preach it, the true gospel, they exalt God.
To be ashamed of the gospel is to be ashamed of the power of God, which is an attribute of God. However, salvation itself as told by the gospel also manifests attributes of God: His holiness, His righteousness, His love, His goodness. His justice, and more. Even if someone doesn’t receive the gospel. believers worship God by preaching it.
More to Come
The Gospel Is the Power of God Unto Salvation, pt. 5
Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four
In my own experience, people don’t use the word “salvation” much. Over time it became a distinctly religious or theological term. With a deathly illness, can a doctor save his patient? When he does, he saved his life. For a time, he saved him from physical death. He will still die later. A doctor saved him with a medication or a surgery. He still dies though, just later.
THE IMPORTANCE OF SALVATION
When Paul says “salvation” in Romans 1:16, he means eternal salvation. It is salvation from physical death, because of bodily resurrection. However, most of all it is salvation from sin, from spiritual death, and from eternal death. We can hardly fathom the immensity of trouble, pain, and loss of eternal death. Therefore, we can’t fully understand the full significance of the salvation that is eternal life.
People place temporal worldly gains above eternal heavenly ones. The Lord Jesus addresses this reality with His statements in the gospels about gaining the whole world but losing your own soul. Nothing is even close to as bad, including physical death, to eternal death. No loss is even close to as catastrophic as losing the eternal soul.
Men look to solve the problems they deem most serious. That’s where they spend their time, energy, effort, and money. The latter gives evidence of the former.
When men elevate to the most serious problems much lesser problems they take away the importance of what is really serious. Nothing is more serious than eternal death. The gospel is the only solution to that problem. If the gospel is the power of God unto salvation, and salvation is salvation from eternal death, then the gospel is the most important solution to mankind.
THE PRIORITY OF PREACHING THE GOSPEL
I write all of the above because of the priority of preaching the gospel. Only the gospel alleviates the worst to bring the best. When I say worst, I mean worst. This is no exaggeration. It isn’t close. And so when I say best, whatever you might think is best, this is far better.
People receive renown on earth for “saving” people from far less than what the salvation of Romans 1:16 saves them from. What they get in their temporal salvation doesn’t last. What someone gets from eternal salvation lasts through all eternity. Yet still, people, even Christians, elevate these lesser savings or salvations to greater than the eternal salvation of Romans 1:16.
Salvation of Romans 1:16 also means salvation from a wasted life and salvation from unfulfilled purpose for life. Man can’t glorify God or please God without the salvation of Romans 1:16. He may please himself and others, but not God.
The gospel brings the outstanding accomplishment of eternal salvation. God uses the person preaching the gospel to attain this greatest achievement. The world, however, touts and will laud the short term attainments. Someone donates for new uniforms. A wealthy man pays for a new wing at the hospital. A celebrity buys and then serves turkeys at Thanksgiving or Christmas time.
THE REWARDS FOR SALVATION
A war hero visits the White House for the Congressional medal of honor. Hollywood produces a film about a man who saved dozens from a concentration camp. The NFL honors a football player with a statue in the Hall of Fame. The NBA pays a star player 50 million dollars for one year. Biographies are written about leaders of human empires. Men build a museum to an inventor. Heaven though rejoices over the salvation of a single lost soul (Luke 15:7).
The gospel is the power of God unto the salvation over which heaven rejoices. The New Testament calls the presentation of the gospel, preaching. When someone preaches the gospel that saves, the one hearing often cringes or scowls. I saw that all the time in my life. Your reward for preaching the gospel is a cringe or scowl or worse. Many times someone yelled at me for showing up to preach the gospel to him. More than once someone said he would call the police if I didn’t walk away from his house, when there preaching the gospel.
Believers do not look for temporal rewards. They want the eternal ones. Few would even offer a temporal reward for preaching the gospel. Churches might pay a pastor, who does the work of the evangelist and equips his church for preaching the gospel. They might support a missionary to go and preach where they can’t or won’t preach the gospel. This aligns with the rejoicing and purpose of heaven.
More to Come
Should Christians Learn the Biblical Languages? Part 3 of 7
Should Christians learn the Biblical languages, Greek and Hebrew? Continuing to summarize Reasons Christians Should and Can Learn Greek and Hebrew, the Biblical Languages, Christians should learn Greek and Hebrew because:
1.) Computer tools are insufficient substitutes for actually knowing the Biblical languages. There are many precious gems in Scripture that someone who knows the Biblical languages will see easily, while one who does not will likely miss entirely.
2.) Computer tools do not enable a student of Scripture to follow the syntax of the Biblical languages, or to catch markers punctuating a discourse.
3.) Computer tools are unlikely to enable a reader to grasp the exegetical significance of the Hebrew accent system.
4.) Sometimes computer tools are making exegetical, interpretive decisions, not simply identifying forms in the Biblical languages (compare the study of Matthew 6:13 in Reasons Christians Should and Can Learn Greek and Hebrew, the Biblical Languages).
5.) The student who does not know the Biblical languages will often find himself at the mercy of others as he studies the text fo Scripture. It is hard for him to accurately evaulate arguments made in scholarly commentaries, for example.
Romans 12:3; Ephesians 4:11; Deuteronomy 24:1-4; John 1:1; Genesis 1:1; Habakkuk 2:4, and other texts illustrate these truths. Questions such as whether all teachers are pastors; whether divorce can be justified; the exact affirmation of John 1:1 about Christ’s Deity; the emphasis in the first verse of the Old Testament; the theme of the entire book of Habakkuk and the entire book of Romans, and others are all greatly impacted by details of the Hebrew and Greek Biblical language text.
To understand these arguments, please read Reasons Christians Should and Can Learn Greek and Hebrew, the Biblical Languages up through page 23. I trust that the exegetical insight into the passages examined will be a blessing as well as illustrating the value of the Biblical languages.
–TDR
The Gospel Is the Power of God Unto Salvation, pt. 4
Scripture evinces a tendency to distrust the gospel. This reveals itself in trying other means than the gospel for salvations or increased numbers of conversions. When Paul writes, “the gospel is the power of God unto salvation,” he says that it is only the gospel that is the power of God unto salvation. No human instrument helps the gospel.
I explained the harmony of the working of the Holy Spirit with the gospel, their being the same. Love, compassion, and all of that, which accompany the gospel, are not accomplished by human means. They are God working “in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure” (Philip 2:13). God uses believers as instruments. As before mentioned, they are messengers (cf. Malachi 3:1). He uses hard or blessed providences to prepare men’s hearts.
Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matt 5:3). The infliction of hard providences conditions hearts for reception. As Jesus said (Matt 9:12), “They that be whole need not a physician.” In Mark 2:17, He portrays the same truth: “They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” We know that hard, worldly, and superficial heartedness affects reception of the gospel seed (Matthew 13:1-23). None of these truths detract from the truth of “the gospel is the power of God unto salvation.
Many different ways professing believers or perhaps non-believers show their unbelief in the gospel as the power of God unto salvation, represented by various categories of manifestations of their unbelief.
Human Means or Methods Better Than the Gospel
For many and from a human perspective, the gospel is ineffective. It doesn’t work. Paul pointed out this error in 1 Corinthians 1-2. To the lost, he says “the preaching of the cross,” the gospel, “is foolishness” (1 Cor 1:18). They want either something more clever, inventive, or scholarly, what Paul calls “wisdom” (1:18-21), a human type, or a kind of ecstatic experience, quasi supernatural, that would indicate divine power, what Paul calls “signs” or “might” (1 Cor 1:19-27). The gospel doesn’t fit either demand of the world for persuasion.
The gospel is the prescribed method of God for salvation because it gives glory to God. Its inexplicability leaves God only as the source of its work and effects. Then “no flesh should glory in his presence” (1 Cor 1:29). “He that glorieth. . . glorie(s) in the Lord” (1 Cor 1:31).
Part of the wisdom of man, his personal nobility, manifests itself in impressive rhetorical flourish or “excellency of speech or of wisdom” (1 Cor 2:1). The speech is the style and the wisdom is the superior intellect. The gospel is not an exercise in amazing speech and human ingenuity. It is a fulfillment of faithfulness, the one rowing in the galley of the ship (cf. 1 Cor 4:1-2), keeping his hands on the oar. It isn’t beyond a believer to do.
God gifts some more to do it (gifts of prophecy and teaching, verbal gifts, 1 Cor 12, Rom 12, 1 Pet 4), but everyone can do it because it requires only faithfulness. This may and does include studying scripture to the extent that he shows himself a “workman that needeth not to be ashamed” (2 Timothy 2:15).
Playing Along with Unbelievers
Using other means than the gospel plays along with unbelievers, accrediting their rejection of or indifference to it. The world wants something smart and something amazing to it. A professing believer or just an unbeliever, who claims to be a believer, thinks or says:
The world likes this. It likes this when I do it. The world then responds to this. My group gets bigger because of this. It’s smart and amazing. The world recognizes this. This is what I should.
This too is human wisdom and seeking after signs, when no one is getting signs. It glorifies the one who came up with the acceptable idea, going along with the world liking what it accepts. This doesn’t glorify the Lord though and it doesn’t even work, even though it looks like it’s working, part of its deceit.
What really works makes someone the offscouring of the world and hated, as Christ talked about to begin the Sermon on the Mount (1 Cor 4:13, Matt 5:10-12). Depending on God for His work gets a reaction like someone in the world would never want to have. He knows he will get it, so he moves a different direction, the broad road, to avoid it. Becoming hated doesn’t seem like an effective method. Being liked looks more like what will work, so instead of faithful service, professing believers and probably unbelievers signal their own virtue with their methods.
More to Come
The Gospel Is the Power of God Unto Salvation, pt. 3
If the gospel is the power of God unto salvation, then what does that say about the Holy Spirit and His work? Does He have a part? The gospel is a message from the Bible and the Holy Spirit works through that message. The Holy Spirit speaks through the Bible. I have appreciated the language, “the mouthpiece of the text.” In Ephesians 6:17 language, the Word of God is the sword of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit works, but He works through the Word of God. This helps explain one aspect of how the gospel is the power of God unto salvation.
The Substance of the Preaching of the Gospel
Furthermore, the gospel made of scripture or the declaration of scripture itself is powerful, as Hebrews 4:12 says. “The gospel is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth.” This couples or harmonizes well with Romans 10:17, “faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.” Faith comes by hearing the Word of God.
The gospel is the power of God unto salvation, not some kind of work of the Holy Spirit separate from words. I’m speaking of the unbiblical teaching of “regeneration precedes faith.” No. The gospel is the power of God unto regeneration, part of salvation. Even though scripture does not teach regeneration preceding faith, it says gospel preaching precedes faith. The Holy Spirit uses the message to regenerate, just like the Word of God generated the world in Genesis 1.
The Greek term for “word” in “word of God” in Romans 10:17 is rhema, not logos, both translated “word” in the New Testament. Rhema does not speak of scripture or the Bible as a whole, but an individual passage. Faith does not come from opening the pages of the entire book, but using the specific texts of scripture in the appropriate manner. There isn’t power in a wrong interpretation as if the Bible is a kind of talisman with magical qualities. The power comes through its message, what the text actually says.
What I’m writing fits with 1 Corinthians 1:21, when Paul says “it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.” This again corresponds to Romans 1:16, written also by the Apostle Paul. “Preaching” isn’t a tone or a style, yelling or bellowing forth. It is the Greek word, kerugma, which refers to the substance of the communication. It is not preaching the act, but preaching as in the message of the declaration. The preaching is what is being said, not how it is being said.
More people are not converted because someone is more clever in his speaking. People are saved because they hear the truth, the right content, and they respond to that. As you read this, you might think that something else could help the gospel along. I don’t think we should separate sincerity and compassion from the message itself. Paul uses the terminology, “speak the truth in love,” in Ephesians 4:15.
Compassion or the Lack and More Either Diminish or Adorn as Part of the Message
First, it is love to speak the truth, as opposed to (1) speaking error and (2) not speaking it, remaining silent. Jesus spoke the truth. Paul spoke the truth. Also though, someone could speak the truth without love or do it with some other wrong motive. This is one of the wrong motives referred by Paul in 1 Corinthians 13. Though you speak with the great eloquence, that is, with the tongues of men and angels, if you don’t do it with love, it is “sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.”
Sounding brass, what I like to call a gong, and tinkling cymbals, which imagines banging on forged metal platters, both percussion types of instruments, don’t have meaning without accompanying instruments that would offer a melody. They also dissipate upon striking, needing to be hit again. Without love, our communication is temporal.
Jude writes at the end of his epistle (v. 22) that compassion makes a difference to the presentation. How does this harmonize with the gospel being the power of God unto salvation? Is it better put, gospel and love are the power of God unto salvation? No, love itself is part of the message. Romans 1:16 stands. This fits with an adaption of the Marshall McLuhan statement, “the medium is the message.” The absence of love lessens the message, diminishes it. I believe accompanying truths buttress this.
Peter says that good works themselves, when beheld in a believer, have an effect of their “glorify[ing] God in their day of visitation” (1 Pet 2:11-12). The absence of the good works undermine the message. They are part of the message of the gospel. Paul speaks in Titus 2:10 of “adorn[ing] the doctrine of God our Saviour” with “all good fidelity.” “Fidelity” translates the word for “faith.” Several other passages provide further evidence for this point.
Good works alone, fidelity, compassion and other accompanying traits of the message do not act as “the gospel.” They are not “the gospel.” Paul extols the preaching of the gospel by those with a bad motive. He says in Philippians 1:15-16 that men preached “Christ even of envy and strife” and “of contention, not sincerely.” Paul rejoiced that they preached the gospel. He didn’t say their message should not have been preached at all.
People are often quick to judge the works and the motives of those who preach the gospel. They did that with Paul himself. I write to make this point though, that the gospel doesn’t need the accompanying aspects of a good motive, good works, and effective style to work. If it is the gospel, the gospel is the power of God unto salvation.
Every professing Christian at times thinks of himself or feels he is not worthy to preach the gospel. He could not possibly represent it with his life. That is not to say he should not strive to live a life that matches or correlates with a true gospel that he preaches.
I’m saying that a weak confidence due to personal struggle with the flesh should not impede or stop gospel preaching. This is one reason why someone puts on the helmet of salvation before he picks up the sword of the Spirit in Ephesians 6. The helmet protects the head, the source of thoughts that debilitate spiritual warfare, using the Word of God.
More to Come
A Personal Financial Advisor to Invest with Biblical Values?
What can a Christian do when he wishes to honor the Lord with his investments? Can he use a personal financial advisor who is a Christian? I have written in the past, and highly commended, the Eventide family of mutual funds.
Their fund family includes the Eventide Gilead Fund (ETILX), Eventide Healthcare and Life Sciences Fund (ETIHX), Eventide Exponential Technologies Fund (ETIEX), Eventide Large Cap Focus Fund (ETLIX), Eventide Dividend Opportunities Fund (ETIDX), Eventide Multi-Asset Income Fund (ETIMX), Eventide Limited Term Bond Fund (ETIBX), and Eventide Core Bond Fund (ETIRX). (They also have class N, A, and C shares as well as class I shares, but I utilized the ticker symbols for the class I shares here.) When one invests with Eventide, he avoids companies that support wickedness like abortion, tobacco, cannabis, pornography, violent media, and so on. In addition, their investment philosophy goes one step further to ask important questions about integrity, business practice, and value-creation. I was very excited to find out about Eventide years ago, and still believe they are the best option for practicing Bible-based values in investing, for the reasons explained in my review of the Eventide family of funds and their second-best competitor, the Timothy Plan family of funds.
Are your investments clean, or at least as clean as the Timothy Plan–which is in many ways good, although at a lower standard of Biblical conformity than Eventide–would view it? You can get a complementary moral audit from them of what you own at a link on the page here. Why not find out? Are you afraid of what you will discover? Would you rather find out now, or at the judgment seat of Christ?
One might suppose that he could have a personal financial advisor assist him in investing in a clean, God-honoring way. Is having an actively (or passively) managed account with a personal financial advisor an option? Fidelity, Schwab, Merrill Edge, and many other investment firms provide the option of a personal financial advisor who will seek to follow your investment directions for a fee. On multiple occasions, when I have discussed Biblical, Christian values with such people, they have said that they could follow our virtuous, godly directives and set up something that was acceptable. Does this work? I recently tried it. How did it go?
As is common knowledge, in the San Francisco Bay Area homes and condominiums are very expensive. I would like to be able to buy a residence close to Bethel Baptist Church that fits our ministry goals and family needs. I have prayerfully formulated a plan to get there that also dealt with other financial goals. Because Scripture affirms the value of a “multitude of counsellors” for safety and being established in one’s purposes (Proverbs 11:14; 15:22; 24:6), I wanted to run my plan by more than one financial advisor. I got a complementary meeting with one from Schwab, while with an organization called Personal Capital, part of Empower, I scheduled a meeting because they had promised one would get $100 for meeting with a financial advisor and getting a proposal. I was willing to hear what the Personal Capital person had to say about my investment plan, and that they would give me $100 for meeting with him made it better.
Over the course of three meetings, I explained my Christian, Bible-based values and what I viewed as acceptable for investments. The financial advisor with Personal Capital said something like that he was a devout Christian himself. He said he managed the assets for numbers of Christians and others who, for example, did not want to invest in abortion. Now that sounded good, no? Surely if one can get one’s investments personally under the care of a financial advisor who is himself a Christian, and who manages the assets of numbers of Christians, one can invest cleanly, like one can with Eventide. The financial advisor provided a variety of reasons why he thought what he would offer would outperform an investment strategy that held strictly to a number of Eventide funds. (This post is not about the performance side of the question, but I am actually skeptical of his claim that his mix of investments would outperform what I was doing with Eventide. For example, since inception on 7/8/2008, the Eventide Gilead Fund has grown at an annualized 12.99%, and class I shares since inception on 2/2/2010 have grown at 13.60%. That is a long time for them to outperform by several percentage points what the Personal Capital gentleman said I could expect what he was offering me would probably earn on average.) His company has a section on its website promoting the option of socially responsible investing, which they advertise as a way “to align [one’s] investments with [his] personal values and beliefs.” In any case, for investing in a righteous way, he is certainly a better option. Right?
Unfortunately, no–wrong. First, he said that he did not have the ability to actually determine whether individual companies were actually engaging in evil behaviors, or actively seeking to do good, the way that Eventide would do. Trying to make investments clean would just be, with him, taking a base strategy that did NOT evaluate things from the perspective of the kingdom of God, and simply attempting to improve it a bit. What he could do was take out some notorious companies such as a casino here and there. Would the personalization he offered be clean, according to the complementary moral audit mentioned earlier in this post? Highly unlikely.
Furthermore, he also wanted to diversify into foreign companies (a reasonable idea; nothing wrong with that). But for the foreign investments, he would simply have me get ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds) that had no moral or Christian component whatsoever. So domestically, I could be part-owner (through ETFs or other investments) of companies that were engaged in evil, although not as notoriously. Outside of the USA, I could own companies that were chopping up little babies in the womb, selling abortion drugs, or marketing cigarettes and booze to twelve-year-olds. No filters whatsoever. Problem.
After the third meeting, when I got his actual proposal, I looked over the companies that he wanted me to invest in. I cannot share on this blog post what they were, because it is proprietary information with them. However, without even doing a complementary moral audit, I knew that many of them would fail, and that a Christian had no business owning them. It would be a tremendous step backward were I to join the Christian clients of this professedly devout Christian financial advisor. My investments would not be clean, much less focused on companies that are positively doing good. It would be a bad choice.
If blog readers assume that their investments are clean because they have a financial advisor who goes to church, reads the Bible, and even possibly is a truly born-again Christian, they should make very, very sure about it. At least with my situation, the fact that this advisor told me that he was committed to Christian doctrine and managed the money of a good number of Christians, and could personalize investments to avoid what is bad turned out not to mean a whole lot. It meant we could take a framework focused solely on gaining filthy lucre and could clean up bits and pieces of it. With Eventide, everything is built around a Biblical framework of investing. What a difference–and what a blessing! Eventide won hands-down over the professedly devout Christian financial advisor who said he could personalize investments to be suitable for Bible-believers.
Naturally, I did not sell my Eventide investments and move over to Personal Capital with Empower. Personal Capital would not have allowed me to invest in a way that glorifies and pleases the Lord.
Other reasons why I did not move over to them–such as that Empower had poor customer service when they were the 401K company for one of my jobs in Wisconsin (I was able to invest in Eventide through them, and that’s all I did), that what the financial advisor said would be their likely performance is lower than how Eventide has performed since their Gilead Fund and other funds started, that Empower / Personal Capital never even gave me the $100 for spending a lot of time with them and having several meetings, that they did not have a phone number for me to call to get help with this, but only an email, and that their customer service here in California seemed to have even more room for improvement than they did in Wisconsin, were less important, although they were not very promising. These all could have been reasons for me not to go with them. That I could not invest cleanly was necessarily a reason not to go with them, but stick with Eventide.
What about you? Do you have confidence that what you invest in pleases the Lord, and will be something you can be happy about when you stand before Christ on judgment day? Don’t assume that you do, just because you have a financial advisor who claims to be a Christian and who says he can personalize your investments.
–TDR
The Gospel Is the Power of God Unto Salvation, pt. 2
The gospel is the power of God unto salvation (Romans 1:16). The gospel is a message. The power of God is in the message of the gospel. The power occurs only when someone delivers the message.
“Power” in Romans 1:16 is the Greek word, dunamis. Dunamis is ability. People will make the point of the English word dynamite, but God gave and gives the gospel, His message, the ability to save. That surpasses dynamite, even though it’s true that the English word came from dunamis. God provides more than dynamite. It’s His ability. He created with His ability all space and matter with His spoken word.
The problem of sin and death goes beyond human ability. The gospel goes beyond human ability because it goes with the ability of God. God saves people with and through the gospel. They are not able to save themselves. No one else can save them, but God is able (Hebrews 7:25).
If the gospel was an antidote for a sure death, undoing a deadly poison, you’d want someone to get it. The poisoned person and the antidote must come together. That means someone must deliver the antidote to the poisoned person. Sin subjects man to sure death. The gospel is the antidote. Someone must deliver that antidote in the one delivery system, communicating the message.
The sinful, dead and dying people need the gospel. However, they don’t know that or receive that reality. That’s different than a deadly poison and an antidote. When people know that, most would want that antidote. They don’t look at the gospel the same. The gospel to them is like the poison rather than the remedy for the poison. A majority won’t want to hear it.
Perhaps the delivery of the gospel fails most, not because of people not wanting to hear it, but because Christians won’t deliver it. They don’t know the gospel themselves well enough to preach it. Professing believers are afraid of the reaction they will get. They are not convinced to deliver it.
More to Come
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