In defense of the Baptist
Posted: May 29th, 2009 | Author: James Duncan | Tags: Bible, Leadership | 4 Comments »Yesterday I tried to defend Simeon against a slander from the pulpit that he was a crazy old man. In response, I see a few folk are also aiming at John the Baptist, suggesting that if God could use crazies like him in the Bible, he can use crazies in the pulpit today.
One commentator on Simeon said:
Look at John the Baptist, he was a loon by the standards of the day yet he Baptisted Jesus.
Another defended Perry Noble’s embarrassing Twitter posts by comparing his behavior to John.
john (who prepared the way for Jesus) ate bugs. you can’t really get any weirder than that.
Baloney. John was no crazy loon. Here’s why you shouldn’t think of him as some redneck idiot.
- There is nothing in Scripture that suggests he was crazy or weird. He was an intimate of Jesus; he was much sought after for his astute preaching; he was a priest. What’s loony about that? My only guess is that his attire and diet seem weird. They weren’t.
- He wore clothes made of camel hair. To our modern senses this seems foreign, though I thought it was well established among NSers that we don’t judge people according to what they wear to church. More seriously, he lived in the desert because he was fulfilling a prophecy that that’s where he would be found (Matthew 3:3). He’s not likely to be discovered there wearing a Brooks Brothers suit.
- He ate locusts. Again, he lived in the desert. He didn’t have the luxury of dining at Fogos whenever he felt the urge. Also, there was nothing at all strange about it. Leviticus 11:21-22 tells God’s people that they are fine to eat.
There are, however, some winged creatures that walk on all fours that you may eat: those that have jointed legs for hopping on the ground. Of these you may eat any kind of locust, katydid, cricket or grasshopper.
- He was Jesus’ priest. John was the son of a priest, was a priest himself, and consecrated Jesus as a priest. That’s a big-time resume.
- He was respected by the chief priests. When Jesus was questioned after cleaning out the Temple, he appealed to the fact that John had baptized him (Matthew 21:23-27). It was a winning argument for Jesus and quieted his accusers. John the Baptist was a daunting, well-known and respected figure.
So, on what account can we say that John the Baptist was weird or loony? Are we not perhaps just re-imagining the intelligence and behavior of godly men like Simeon and John to justify the lesser intelligence and boorish behavior of more questionable modern leaders?
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“Yesterday I tried to defend Simeon against a slander from the pulpit that he was a crazy old man.”
Have we reached our hyperbole quota for the day yet? For us today, John the Baptist looks strange, but I wholeheartedly agree that in his time, he wasn’t all that weird at all. So in a sense, the argument there was grasping for straws.
On Simeon being a priest, if we step back a moment from your and Seth’s argument, I’m kinda wondering where Perry says he is not? I guess you can infer that from what he was saying if you want too, but there is nothing explicitly there. From the first paragraph of the transcript, Perry is joking around about the whole crazy old man bit. I don’t think Perry believes that…it was just a funny illustration(and sometimes the jokes just aren’t funny to everybody). For the second paragraph, I agree that he stretched the Biblical story to fit the moral of the message he was preaching. The moral was fine in itself, but the Bible story he chose did not quite fit with it.
Where does that leave us? There have been past issues with NS that I have disagreed with, but here, there is a valid point. Perry and the staff need to be vigilant to keeping correctly to Scripture and not mold the Word for the message(no matter how positive that message is). It’s a tough balance. I would be willing to guess that NS isn’t the only church that has ever made this kind of mistake. NewSpring takes Scripture extremely seriously as any church should, but they did not examine all sides of the Simeon illustration carefully enough. That’s one mistake, but I have seen NS preach the Word so effectively the other 99.9%. What’s happening at NewSpring with so many changed lives is something I have never seen in the church. I think that’s why me and some of the other commenters are willing to give NS the benefit of the doubt over your words. It’s nothing personal, but I see something that looks like an obvious move of God…and I see some blog posts, and I kinda side with the former. But that’s just my thoughts for today.
Thank you, B.Rink. It’s nice to know you don’t think I’m (always) a crazy old man too.
Just to clarify though, I didn’t intend the first line as hyperbole. Noble didn’t explicitly say that Simeon wasn’t a priest, but his whole “joke” depended on the libel that he was out of place and out of control. It also depended on Mary and Joseph not knowing who he was or what he was doing.
I think you’re generous to dismiss it as a joke. He drew a moral lesson from it. It was a planned point in the message (unlike the smoking bit). I don’t think that the fact that he taught a moral lesson from it excuses him. As I’ve tried to point out, false teachers never sound like false teachers. Their lessons will always appear moral, but like Albert said about visions, it is essentially legalism: Teaching people to follow manmade morality and rules. If you let this go, where and how do you draw the line on what Noble morality you’ll accept and what Noble morality you’ll reject?
As for John the Baptist, our modern impressions of him being weird are completely irrelevant. We must interpret John’s actions according to the standards of the Bible, not the standards of 2009 America. If we do think it’s weird, we need to adjust our thinking.
Let the Bible interpret the Bible. That’s all that should matter.
hahaha, wow. i never “compared his (perry’s) behavior to john.” i don’t even go to newspring or particularly care for it. john is a great guy in the bible. i don’t think he was a crazy loon or some “redneck idiot” as you so lovingly twisted my words to say. the parallel i was trying to make is that john was a good guy, prepared the way for Jesus, and introduced people to Christ. you would have to be crazy to question his credibility or authority as a spiritual leader based ONLY on certain oddities such as eating bugs (which i believe is one of the points you were trying ot make, and a point you assummed i disagreed with). in the same way, i think it is illogical to criticize a pastor’s (ANY pastor, if you wrote about someone besides perry i would be saying the same thing)authority or ability to lead based on an oddity such as an off-putting sense of humor in twittering about his bladder problems.
like i have commented before, if you want to defend theology and truth and compare your beliefs with another church’s based on what is in the Bible, and not just your snarky opinions, then go for it. but to pick apart people for what they twitter or the outlandish things they say (i’m talking about things that are not your style, not heresy or something serious)would be the same as writing off john as just a crazy, bug-eating man. i do not question john’s spiritual credibility like your blog suggests i do. and if we can agree on this point, i hope we could agree that a pastor should not be picked on about such small things as what he twitters or how far he drives to eat. there are bigger fish to fry.
Sorry. I didn’t think I was twisting your words (I wasn’t characterizing your words alone).
I looked again at your original comment. You go on to suggest that John and Perry are unusual, unprofessional, or “crazy” people.
Did I miss something in the context?
(BTW, I’m not criticizing PN with the Baptist post. I don’t have any idea how he characterizes him. All I saw were two very similar ideas in the comments.)