David Vogel, Author at DavidVogel.net

What Uzzah can teach us about religious exclusivism

July 1, 2015July 1, 2015 by David Vogel

One of the most important mindsets we can cultivate as Christians is the ability to see the full picture. The world loves to highlight some little part of what the Bible teaches and shout, “Hey, this is wrong and ugly!” Sometimes it even looks like they’re right, but that’s because we aren’t seeing the whole picture. If I tell you that a man hit a little kid, that sounds cruel and wicked–unless you know the child was choking and the man was pounding her back to clear an airway. It is easy to misunderstand a little snippet of a larger scene, and it is especially easy to do that with the Bible, because it is a huge book that is full of stories and teachings which sometimes make no sense until we step back and look at the full picture.

Today I want to consider two things the Bible tells us which look unpleasant by themselves but which make much more sense, and even combine into something beautiful, when we view them together.

The first piece is the strange story of Uzzah and the ark of the covenant. When King David was bringing the ark back to Jerusalem, II Samuel 6 records,

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A brief programming note

July 1, 2015 by David Vogel

As you may have noticed, I’ve got a lot going on here at DavidVogel.net! I’m going to be posting articles much more regularly, and I am excited to have begun the Answers for Ambassadors podcast and published The Truth with Love: A Christian’s Guide to Talking About Homosexuality and Gay Marriage. I wanted to give you a quick summary of what to expect in terms of content in coming months.

Here on the blog, I will be posting regular articles on Wednesday afternoons. I will also occasionally add shorter posts during the rest of the week, like yesterday’s advice for maintaining a good testimony on social media.

New podcast episodes will be added on Monday afternoons, hopefully in time for the evening commute! If you subscribe via iTunes or another podcast player, the new episodes will automatically appear as soon as I post them on SoundCloud.

And there’s always the Facebook page too…

Toward not despising the day of small things*

July 16, 2015June 24, 2015 by David Vogel

I was on the mock trials team in college, but I was not very good at it. Well, I actually was pretty good when I was playing the role of a witness, but when I competed as a lawyer, I just couldn’t seem to get it right. This was a bit demoralizing for someone who, at the time, thought he wanted to go to law school. It was also odd, because I had done well in high school debate. I could not figure out why mock trials lawyering did not “click” for me, but in hindsight I think I know. Unlike debate, mock trials is a team event. There are three “lawyers” and three “witnesses” on each team, and you are judged as a group. It is literally impossible for one person to win it or lose it, and everyone has to do their part. When I was playing a witness it was easier to just focus on my piece and let the lawyers manage the big picture, but when I was a lawyer my debate instincts and competitiveness kicked in and I was always looking for the one killer argument or perfect point that would win the case for us all–and therefore I wasn’t a very good lawyer, because I was trying so hard to do our job that I wasn’t focused on my job.

Is there anything that the people who made Just Do It one of the most successful advertising slogans in history hate more than outcomes that are in someone else’s hands? It’s part of what makes marriage and parenting so hard; the fact that you are making something with someone else, like two pianists sharing one instrument. We cannot stand the feeling of responsibility without control.

I think a lot of Christians are feeling that way about our culture. We know all the Bible verses about evangelizing the nations, about being ambassadors for God in a lost world, and we realize they are talking to us. Meanwhile, we see our country falling away from any sort of Christian identity and enthusiastically and publicly embracing every flavor of sin, and we think, hey, the church needs to do something about that; I need to do something about that. But what can you do about a problem made up of hundreds of millions of people, most of whom have already heard the gospel and consciously rejected it?

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I don’t need to talk about Bruce Jenner, and you probably don’t either

June 11, 2015June 5, 2015 by David Vogel

Surely, what the world needs right now is yet another article talking about Bruce Jenner’s decision to begin identifying as a woman. Well, fear not, because this post really isn’t about the Vanity Fair unveiling of “Caitlyn” at all. In fact, I’d rather not talk about it–and that actually is what this article is about.

By now pretty nearly everyone on the planet knows about the former Olympian’s announcement that he is a woman, complete with hormone treatment and eventual surgery. The story is dramatic, it is tragic, and it is almost certainly none of your business.

With a sensational, controversial issue like this, the temptation to jump into the discussion and offer one’s own two cents is almost overpowering. And certainly, if someone asks for a biblical perspective on transexuality, we should be prepared to give them a good answer. But if you feel the urge to share your opinion about Bruce Jenner, it’s worth pausing to ask yourself why. I Timothy has a searching warning for those who “go around from house to house… gossips and busybodies, talking about things not proper to mention” (5:13). Are your words going to do someone some good, or are they just an expression of that driving American need to be part of the story, if only by talking about it?

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Free Choices, God’s Sovereignty, and Apparent Contradictions

February 25, 2017April 4, 2015 by David Vogel

I was talking with a group of high school students last year about making wise decisions as a Christian. As I planned what I would say, I kept wanting to discuss how our ability to make meaningful choices can coexist with God’s control over all things, but I suppressed the urge to wander off into philosophical weeds that the audience would find boring and abstract. The evening of the event, I spoke briefly and then opened things up for discussion. One of the first questions was about how our ability to make meaningful choices can coexist with God’s control over all things. As was the next question. And the next. Apparently, there are a lot of us poking around in this particular clump of philosophical weeds.

Thoughtful Christians throughout history have struggled to reconcile these two plain yet paradoxical teachings of Scripture. First, the Bible is quite clear that God controls all things. Proverbs 21:1 says, “The king’s heart is like channels of water in the hand of the Lord; He turns it wherever He wishes.” In Daniel 4:35b, Nebuchadnezzar confesses, “He does according to His will in the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of earth; and no one can ward off His hand or say to Him, ‘What have You done?'” Or consider the many detailed prophecies that were fulfilled centuries later. Why do God’s “best laid schemes” enjoy somewhat greater certainty than those of mice and men? One hundred percent accuracy in predicting the future is only possible for One who controls all the variables necessary to ensure the outcome He promised.

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Sinners in the hands of an angry mob

May 29, 2015December 17, 2014 by David Vogel

“I’m going to grant your greatest wish… I’m going to show you a world without sin.” With this line, the science fiction film Serenity introduces an ugly story: a planet on which a biochemical cure for aggression, administered globally with the very best intentions, left the inhabitants dead–or worse. The ruling, meddling Alliance was determined to root out the vices that are part of our humanity, and the result was a dead planet. A world without sin.

It is no news that in Hollywood, concern for public morality is merely the first step onto a slippery slope that ends in fascist dystopia, so I have always chalked up this theme from Serenity alongside plenty of other, similar cautionary tales, like V for Vendetta‘s thuggishly tyrannical government which apparently has no larger purpose than the jackbooted suppression of gay pornography.

But I have been reminded of the quote, and its dark connotations, as I follow the debate over sexual assault policies on college campuses. For those who may not be up to date on the latest developments, California recently passed, and other states are considering, a “yes means yes” affirmative consent law which requires each participant to gain explicit consent for every stage of every sexual encounter. Failure to do so, or to prove having done so, can bring charges of rape. If that seems like it’s creating an environment in which false accusations could be frequent and unfalsifiable, well, yes.

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Comparing religions? Scriptures matter, even if nobody follows them perfectly

May 29, 2015December 13, 2014 by David Vogel

I was reading a book on presuppositional apologetics the other day. It started, as such books usually do, by differentiating between classical and presuppositional apologetics and arguing in favor of the latter. It was a thoughtful book and a good argument. However, as the author mapped out the parameters of his presuppositional apologetic, I was struck by how close his approach was to what I have read from my favorite classical apologists. In fact, the best presuppositional apologists end up sounding surprisingly similar to the best classical apologists, and vice versa. There are important differences between the two perspectives, but it seems as if some sort of metaphysical gravity draws both camps back from the extremes to which they might otherwise fly: presuppositionalists blindly ignoring any extrabibical evidence, or classical apologists attempting salvation by logic rather than Jesus Christ.

In a world where ideologies are always slippery-sloping away to their worst extremes, it is striking how, if we look at the history of the Church, this “gravity” seems to be constantly at work. It pulled the martial impulse of the Crusades back to earth, so today no part of the Church seeks to spread our faith by the sword. It checked the burgeoning ecclesiastical authority of Medieval Catholicism by restoring the solas of the Reformation. Today, it keeps Calvinists from losing human responsibility and Arminians from losing divine sovereignty.

It is, in a word, the Bible.

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Serving God in a world full of needs

June 24, 2015August 23, 2014 by David Vogel

Let us not lose heart in doing good, for in due time we will reap if we do not grow weary. So then, while we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, and especially to those who are of the household of the faith. –Galatians 6:9-10

We all know Christians are called to serve. In fact, loving service is so integral to the Christian walk that James said “Faith without works is dead,” and Jesus declared that the distinguishing characteristic of His people in the day of judgment would be that “I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me.” If you are a Christian, if you have the Holy Spirit living within you, then you have felt the urge to “do good to all people, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.” But here’s the thing: all people is a lot. Anyone who takes the time to look will find needs and opportunities for service stretching far beyond our ability to help and give. It is quite simply overwhelming.

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Learning to wait in an efficient world

August 23, 2014August 9, 2014 by David Vogel

Earlier today, I had a few minutes free so I decided to run out to make a deposit at my bank, which is located across town. Twenty minutes later, on the way home, I realized I might have made a mistake with the deposit slip. I was at a long traffic light so I whipped out my smartphone and checked to make sure it went through properly. Sigh of relief. Then I wondered if I’d gotten any new emails, so I checked, because why not?

It’s become a commonplace to observe that technology has practically removed time and space from our calculations. You can be there and have that, right now. You want to be in Virginia by lunchtime? Sure, hop in the car. You want to be in Tokyo by tomorrow? Sure, hop on the airplane; you can save time by buying the tickets with your phone on the way to the airport. We live in the age of instant gratification, when, if you feel a sudden hankering to watch SportsCenter and you don’t happen to be near the television in your living room or the television in your bedroom or the television in your kitchen, you can just whip out your iPhone to enjoy live streaming straight to the palm of your hand. Amazon Prime rakes in millions of dollars by getting Season 4 of Downton Abbey to you three days sooner. We have learned to expect everything to be here and ready with an urgency that rivals a nicotine addict reaching for his next cigarette.

Now, it’s true that all that speed and convenience aren’t necessarily bad. Time is limited, and tools that help us invest it well can be a good thing. But it’s worth considering how living with our own, personal technological genie in a bottle affects us. Among other things, it has made simply waiting feel strange and almost wrong. One of the great lessons of Scripture is to wait on the Lord; and waiting on Him is a lot harder when He’s just about the only thing left that expects us to.

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