Category: Christian

Who Were the Sons of Issachar? And What Might They Mean for Us Today?

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A friend of mine referred to the “sons of Issachar… who understood the times” recently when speaking of the evangelical support for Donald Trump.  The reference comes from 1 Chronicles 12:32 where the “sons of Issachar” (descendants of the 9th son of Jacob) were described as men “who understood the times and knew what Israel should do”.

As I drifted near consciousness in my sleep last night, the phrase came back to me and ran through my head. I roused myself from a semi-conscious state and gave myself a reminder to look up the reference.

I followed up the next day. What does it mean? What does it mean for me? What does it mean in these times?

These were men who apparently understood the changing times in some unique way in a particular point in the history of Israel. The historical context was during the reign of King Saul when he became jealous of David and sought to kill him. David fled into the wilderness, taking with him other men who were loyal to him. As the various tribes learned of David’s plight and flight, they began to join David, including the sons of Issachar.  

Whether they were in tune with God’s purposes or simply saw that Saul was loosing stature in their society, while David was gaining in influence, we don’t know. My friend assumed the former meaning.

God was in the process of rejecting Saul and announced (at least to David) that He was making David king. Saul pursued David to kill him. Instead of confronting Saul, the man God chose as King of Israel, David went into hiding. David could have rallied the men who joined him to form a coup and dethrone Saul, but he would not do that.

The initial surge of supporters who joined David included warriors from the tribe of Benjamin, Saul’s own relatives. (1 Ch. 12:2) Members of the tribe of Manasseh joined David even though their desertion of Saul could cost them their heads. (1 Ch. 12:19) Day after day, men came to David’s aid at a place called Ziklag. (1 Ch. 12:20-22)

If the sons of Issachar knew the times, one might assume that they were among the first to join David, but that assumption would be wrong. They were not the first. They weren’t even in the first wave. The 200 sons of Issachar joined David at Hebron, after many others already joined David.

God had rejected Saul as king, and it was only a matter of time for Saul’s demise. God was making a change, and David was the one God chose to replace Saul. We know today that David was also the man through whom God planned, eventually, to raise up the Messiah – the root of Jesse’s seed – Jesus. (Jesse was the father of David, and Jesus is from the line of David and Jesse.)

Saul’s reign had run its course. Saul was out of touch with God. His head had gotten too big. Pride had taken over, and he no longer bowed to God in his heart. He was losing his grip on reality and the kingdom God had given him.

We know the rest of the story, but the men who joined David surely didn’t. Maybe they just believed it was time for a change. How much they knew of or perceived of God’s role in this story is just conjecture. I think we might take for granted that they did, but we have the benefit of hindsight memorialized in Scripture. They lived it in real time. 

As I read the story when I woke up in the morning, the number of the sons of Issachar who joined David struck me: 200 “chiefs” from the tribe of Issachar and all their kinsmen at their command. And, then I noticed something else.

Men from all twelve tribes of Israel joined David at Hebron, but only 200 “chiefs” from the tribe of Issachar were among them. Only 200 sons of Issachar actually joined David (though, perhaps, they represented all their kinsmen who were at their command). 

The number of men identified from the other tribes were far greater in number, including 120,0000 men from Reuben, Gad and the half-tribe of Manasseh; 50,000 men from Zebulun; 40,000 from Asher; 1000 “captains” and 37,000 men “with shield and spear” from Naphtali; and 28,600 from Dan.

So, what’s the big deal about only 200 men from Issachar? Why does Scripture say of them (and not of anyone else) that they were men who understood the times and knew what Israel should do?

One answer that occurs to me is that the rest of the “sons of Issachar” were not men who understood the times and did not know what Israel should do. Maybe only the chiefs of that tribe understood the times. In contrast, 1000 captains were accompanied by 37,000 warriors from the tribe of Naphtali! It seems none of the warriors of Issachar were willing to join the 200 chiefs of Issachar.

Were the 200 chiefs of the sons of Issachar the only people from all the tribes who understood the times? It seems not. In 1 Chronicles 12:32, it states, “And of the children of Issachar, which were men that had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do; the heads of them were two hundred; and all their brethren were at their commandment.”

Of all the tribes of Israel, the men of the tribe of Issachar who came to David’s rescue were the least in number. Only the leaders were mentioned (who understood the times). Does that mean that they were least in tune with God’s plan and purposes? I don’t know. (I should acknowledge that God often works through the least, the smallest, the most unlikely.)

The backstory to all of this is that Saul was chosen (by God) as king, but God only chose a king for the people because they wanted “a king like the other nations”. In demanding a king, the people were actually rejecting God. They were putting their trust in a king, rather than trusting God to be all they needed. (1 Samuel 8:6-9)

So how does all this inform me and other Christians today?

Continue reading “Who Were the Sons of Issachar? And What Might They Mean for Us Today?” →

Loneliness, Singleness and the Church Family

Some values evident in the original church family have been lost over the years in western culture

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Rebecca McLaughlin, in her book, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion, made an observation that inspires my article today. I am indebted to Rebecca McLaughlin and to the many serious Christian thinkers who have plowed ground that make it easy for me to walk the paths after them.

In this book, about a third of the way into the ninth chapter (Isn’t Christianity Homophobic?), McLaughlin talks about loneliness and singleness in the church. She digs up some nuggets that seem to have gotten lost in our modern culture.

She observes that western traditions have developed over the years that have plowed under values that once informed the early church. A tradition of rugged individualism and self-determination that is, perhaps, unrivaled anywhere in the world, is inbred into our American culture. Our suburban lifestyle is uniquely American, with our manicured lawns separated from our neighbors by fences and hedges. These are, perhaps, the gentrified remnants of farmstead claims staked by American pioneers against predators, weather, enemies and neighbors alike.

We circle the wagons today around the family unit that has come under “attack” from secular constructs of village-raised children and re-imagined family structures designed to fit societal mores that clash with us. These changes have caused conservatives and Christians to double down on the traditional, American family construct.

Traditional, though, is normative, and norms change. Not more than 150 years ago families looked different than they do today. In fact, they looked a little more like the modern family than the average person might realize.

Not long after the first generations of immigrants reached the shore of the New World, families and communities of families began to migrate across the country, south, west and sometimes north, clearing areas for homesteads. The fluidity of family compositions can be traced from one decennial census to the next. Not may households remained static from one 10-year census to the next.

My father, who researches genealogies, shines some historical light on the norms of the frontier movement in writing books about those migrations. From census to census to census, stories are told of dynamic changes in family structures.

Family units were ever changing in the combination of husbands, wives, children (both minors and adults), extended family and sometimes even strangers. Family often included a grandparent, niece or nephew, neighbor or border.

Children were born; children died; children moved away and moved back. Spouses died. New spouses moved in, or neighbors moved in who helped with the children and then became spouses… or not. Extended family members, neighbors and strangers, too, moved in and out of family units.

Census records reveal the consistency of flux as frontiers were blazed across this country. One of the many challenges of doing genealogical research through the 19th Century is determining the relationships of the people in those households from one decennial census to another and tracing the changes from decade to decade. 

The end of trailblazing and the Industrial Revolution, however, began to affect the composition of family units. Trailblazing gave way to communities, and factories grew up in those communities.

Workers migrated to the fixed location of a factory, and they became grounded and less mobile in their vocations. Family structures became more static and defined in the process. These and other influences formed the mold of the “traditional” American family.

What we assume to be the traditional family unit today is of relatively recent vintage. The Little House on the Prairie is more of a sentimental, re-imagining of the way it was than raw history reveals.

Even then, we get a hint of an interdependence of community that was much more intimate in generations past than our anemic sense of community today. This is true even with more distance separating homesteads than a thin veil of fences and hedges separating suburban lots.

The distance that separates people in modern western life, however, might as well be miles. We live as if we don’t need our neighbors, and we largely don’t even know them. Those fences and hedges might as well be walls.

In that sense, McLaughlin digs up the back-filled soil of modern western culture to uncover an ancient value that has been plowed under by the progress of western development. When St. Paul spoke about the virtue of singleness, he did so in a culture and time when family and community were quite unlike our own – values that we have relatively recently lost.

Continue reading “Loneliness, Singleness and the Church Family” →

What Does God Want from Us?

This question gets at the whole point of Scripture….

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If God is the creator of the universe, of everything seen and unseen, as the Bible says, if God was intentional in His creation and made us in His image as the centerpiece of His creation, what was His intention for us? What does He want from us?

This question gets at the whole point of Scripture, but I think we miss the point among all the words sometimes.

Even people who believe that God exists and acknowledge God made us get lost in the words sometimes. We see in Scripture lists of “do’s and don’ts” and rules and warnings, and we fail to see the big picture, the purpose of God. We fail to see God’s character and heart.

The Law was intended by God to show us what is right and, more importantly, to reveal to us that we are incapable of doing what is right in and of ourselves. (Rom. 7:7-25) We all fall short (Rom. 3:23), and we fail to do what we know we ought to do. (Rom. 7:18-19)

Anyone who depends on doing right to make themselves right with God are cursed (Gal. 3:10). If they fail at one point, they fail at everything. If a person refrains from killing anyone his entire life except for one time, he is still a murderer – not because of all the people he didn’t kill, but because of the one person he did kill. If a person lies only once, he is a liar.

If you sin once, you are sinner. “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.” (1 John 1:8)

The point of the law is to help us understand that we can’t achieve righteousness by our own efforts. It’s impossible for us. We must depend on God for it. The Law was given alongside the promise of God to show people their sins to that we would receive the grace that God offers us through Jesus. (Gal. 3:19)

Salvation (from sin and death) is a gift God gives us by His grace; God gives us salvation by grace so that none of us can boast about having earned it. (Eph. 2:8-9)

But is this all God expects from us? Is this all God wants from us – to be saved from sin and death? If salvation from sin and death was all God wanted for us, He could have made us without the capability of sinning, and He could have made us eternal from the beginning.

Continue reading “What Does God Want from Us?” →

The Counter Culture of Gentleness in an Angry World

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The Bible verse of the day today in the YouVersion app is from Proverbs 15:1:

“A soft [gentle] answer turns away wrath.[1]”

I try to read Scripture every day. I have a reading plan (reading through the Bible chronologically this year), and I usually read the Scripture of the day. Every once in a while, the Scripture I am reading for the day comes up that day in another context.

Today is Sunday, and the sermon I listened to today by Jeff Frazier at Chapelstreet Church in Batavia, IL was about the misconception that we should not judge. I would post the message (because it’s a good one), but it isn’t on the Internet yet for viewing. The message was somewhat along the lines of an article I wrote, 8 Important Points About Judging and Judgment.

Keys points are that God didn’t tell us to judge; he told us to judge others with the same measure we judge ourselves; we need to take the logs out of our own eyes before we can take the specks out of our brothers’ eyes; we are not instructed to judge the world (God is their judge), but we are to judge those in the church; we need each other’s righteous judgment and gentle help in dealing with sin (speaking the truth in love to one another).

Jeff said something about removing specks from brothers’ eyes that I hadn’t thought about before. I note that we must be close to our brothers to remove specks from their eyes, and that requires close, intimate relationship. He added that we don’t go about removing objects in our loved ones’ eyes with a screwdriver and a pliers! We do it gently, carefully with a delicate touch.

The real take away for me in his message, and the reason that I write is not about relationships in the body of Christ among the brothers and sisters in the faith, but our relationship to the world with people who do not subscribe to the faith. This is where he used the statement in proverbs – a gentle answer turns away wrath – and it couldn’t be more relevant to the times.

Continue reading “The Counter Culture of Gentleness in an Angry World” →

Voting Christian: What Does Your Faith Allow?

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I have to admit that I don’t look forward to the days ahead: the “election season”. I likely be “snoozing” quite a few people in the coming months. Voting, of course, is a protected right and a privilege in a free society, as is the freedom to speak our minds.

Still, I approach the inevitable increase in exercise of that freedom that will certainly escalate as we get closer to November with no small amount of angst. Daily reminders of the polarized, schizophrenic nature of our society with so many voices, each speaking with near absolute certainty, their diametrically opposing opinions is not my idea of fun or meaningful discourse.

That our voices in the church, the body of Christ collective, are no less disparate is downright disconcerting.

Of course, it’s always been that way. Even in the New Testament, even among the apostles, we find disagreement: Paul and Apollos, Peter and Paul, the Jewish and gentile converts, Gnostics and others. Having spent an entire Sunday exploring the early church fathers in North Africa last week, I waded through one example of disagreement after another.

Many of those disagreements at that time led to the formation and establishment of the fundamentals of orthodox belief: original sin, the Trinity, the nature of Jesus, how the church should deal with “lapsed” believers in times of persecution and the authority of the church.

Some, like Cyprian and Augustine, were sainted by the established church for their positions that became the accepted stance of a majority of the church leaders at the time. Others, like Clement of Alexandria, Origen and Tertullian, despite their significant contribution to early Christian thought, were excluded from sainthood because they took positions that did not line up exactly with the majority (even if many of their other positions did).

We tend to view church history in the west through a decidedly western lens. We forget that those early expressions of Christianity took different tracks: Eastern Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Coptic and others. Some of those early leaders are viewed as saints by some of those “churches” and not by others.

Western Christianity has had its own splinters: Catholic, Protestant, Anglican, Anabaptist and others. I found the Charismatic movement in the early 1900’s fascinating as a young Christian for the way it moved through the various denominations at once and brought people together through the collective experience of the Holy Spirit. It too, though, resulted in new divisions: the Pentecostal and “independent” charismatic churches.

Thus, when I think about how Christians should vote in the next election, I find no solace in a clear direction. Christians are torn and divided. Continue reading “Voting Christian: What Does Your Faith Allow?” →