The Blessed Hope Podcast -- with Dr. Kim Riddlebarger

Episode Synopsis:If someone walked up to you and asked, “What is the gospel?, what would you say?  If you cannot come up with the answer immediately, then please carefully consider what follows.  The definition is given us in a concise form by the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:3–5.  The gospel is called “good news” because it is the proclamation of a set of particular historical facts—Jesus suffered on a Roman cross, died as a payment for our sins, was buried, and then was raised from the dead by God after three days as proof that his death turned aside God’s wrath toward sinners.  And all this, Paul says, is in accordance with the Scriptures (the Old Testament).  The gospel is a nonnegotiable and fundamental article of the Christian faith.  To deny it is to reject the Christian faith.When Easter rolls around, I often look at the flyers and social media from neighborhood churches to examine the sermon topics for Easter Sunday.  I am amazed and saddened by how many local churches virtually ignore the biblical emphasis on the empty tomb and the bodily resurrection of Jesus, which is both a fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith and an objective fact of history.  Instead, many churches focus on the so-called “Easter experience” of the apostles.  If the meaning of Easter is the experience and change of heart felt by Jesus’s apostles—who at first did not believe, but then later did so—then Easter is yet another experience that we can share with the early followers of Jesus.  For these folks, Easter is a time of new beginnings, a time to change our life’s course.  Sadly, it is not the account of a crucified savior raised from the dead who came to save us from our sins. But to remove the resurrection from ordinary history and proclaim it as an example to follow, or to downplay or ignore the fact that Jesus was crucified, dead, buried, and was then raised bodily to life for the forgiveness of our sins, robs the resurrection of any redemptive-historical and biblical significance.  The first Easter is not about an experience the apostles had in which we can share; rather, it is the apostles’s account of Jesus being raised bodily from the dead.  The empty tomb tells us that Jesus’s death was the payment for our sins, the new creation has dawned, and God has conquered our greatest enemy, death, by overturning the curse.  Easter is not an experience in which we share; the bodily resurrection of Jesus is both a fact of history and a biblical doctrine that we must believe.For show notes and other recommended materials located at the Riddleblog as mentioned during the Blessed Hope Podcast, click here:  https://www.kimriddlebarger.com/

Episode Synopsis:My first exposure to tongue-speaking did not go well.  In an “afterglow” service which followed a mid-week Bible study at an Orange County megachurch, a large number of the faithful remained after the study to “experience” the gifts of the Spirit, including the “gift of tongues.”  A young pastor took over from the Bible teacher and explained how to begin speaking in tongues.  He read several passages from Acts 2 and from 1 Corinthians 12-14 and told us that these verses were proof that the gift is “biblical,” “for today,” and enabled you to by-pass the clutter of the mind to commune with God “in the Spirit.”  He then told us, if you’d like to speak in tongues here’s what you do.  You start by saying “kitty, kitty, kitty,” until the Spirit took over and gave you your prayer language.  The room was suddenly filled with people speaking gibberish, swaying, acting as though under the influence, crying, and making contorted faces as they spoke.  I wasn’t having it, and quietly slipped out. Years later, after my biblical knowledge increased, I realized that the “afterglow” I witnessed that night was very much like what Paul was instructing the Corinthians not to do in the last half of 1 Corinthians 14.  There was no interpretation of any of these tongues, though several attendees did offer exhortations of their own utterances, but which very much sounded like Christianese made up on the fly.  Everyone spoke at once, and the whole room was filled with tongue-speakers, not merely two or three in order.  I was a Christian and still thought these people were crazy.  I can only imagine what an unbeliever would think.Once TBN graced the airwaves (emanating from Orange County) tongue-speaking was now televised.  This time, tongue-speaking was not done in a worship service but was part of the regular programming and often conflated with predictive prophesy– “the Lord will do this or that, and heal this one or that one.”  The interpretation was almost always supplied by the tongue-speaker.  The low point came during a televised “anointing service” held at Oral Roberts University in which three older Word-Faith evangelists (Oral Roberts, Kenneth Hagin Sr. and T. L. Osbourn) anointed three younger Word-Faith evangelists (Kenneth Hagin Jr, Kenneth Copeland, and Richard Roberts).  Once anointed, the men acted as though in a drunken stupor, spoke in tongues (one of which sounded like the Cab Calloway’s riff from the Blues Brothers–scubity-do, scubity-do--scubity-do).  Not a known language.  A VHS recording of this made the rounds and to no one’s surprise, the universal assessment was “these people are crazy.”This is why a study of Paul’s instructions to the churches on 1 Corinthians 14:20-40 about the proper use of prophesy and tongue-speaking is about as practical a matter as one can find.  Paul would have none of this.  Neither should we.For show notes and other recommended materials located at the Riddleblog as mentioned during the Blessed Hope Podcast, click here:  https://www.kimriddlebarger.com/

Episode Synopsis:Speaking in tongues was causing chaos in the Corinthian church.  Tongue-speakers were speaking at the same time, and their tongues were not always interpreted as required by Paul.  Some acted as though tongues was the greatest of the gifts of the Spirit and were lording it over others who did not possess the gift.  Paul is also writing to correct the misguided (and pagan notion) that tongue-speaking was the manifestation of ecstatic religious experiences from which tongues spontaneously came forth.  Much of what he has written in chapters 12-14 has been to correct false Corinthian notions about the “spiritual,” informing the Corinthians that gifts of the Holy Spirit are not for the benefit of the recipient, but for the strengthening of the church.  These gifts enabled Christians to love one another, and equip officers and others in the church for the building up of the body of Christ.  Chapter 14 is the conclusion to Paul’s extended instructions about these matters.But what exactly is “speaking in tongues?”  Is it a language known or unknown to the speaker?  Is it a heavenly or angelic language?  Paul disabused the Corinthians of that notion in chapter 13.  Is it some sort of ecstatic speech?  Are tongues an untranslatable utterance (divine gibberish) which must be interpreted by someone with the Spirit enabled gift of interpretation?  Given the inability of commentators across time to agree on just what exactly Paul is describing, we cannot be certain as to how the gift operated in the Corinthian church–especially since tongue speaking ceased in the churches by the mid-second century.  There are plausible theories, but I am not confident anyone really knows.  But then Paul does say, “I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you.  Nevertheless, in church I would rather speak five words with my mind in order to instruct others, than ten thousand words in a tongue.”  So the matter cannot be dismissed.What we can say for sure is that when someone has a private, subjective, religious experience and speaks forth an ecstatic utterance, that person cannot then appeal to the New Testament and claim that what they are doing is what Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 14.  Nor can they claim that their experience is how we ought to practice tongue-speaking today.  Instead, we work from biblical teaching about tongues to explain what tongue-speaking is and how we ought to utilize the gift in both public and private settings.  Paul assumes the Corinthians know what tongues is–they’ve seen it.  But since he does not explain in detail what this gift is, we should be cautious and charitable in our assessments. For show notes and other recommended materials located at the Riddleblog as mentioned during the Blessed Hope Podcast, click here:  https://www.kimriddlebarger.com/

Episode Synopsis:What the Bible says about love, and the way most Americans think about love, are usually two vastly different things.  Our contemporaries tend to think of love as a powerful emotion, most often associated with romance and intimacy.  Images of hearts and cupids on Valentine’s Day are ingrained in us from an early age.  Love is also tied to a utopian dream when people experience a powerful sense of brotherhood and unity when they join together for a worthwhile cause.  Sadly, these images are far from the biblical meaning of love (agape)–an emotion which issues forth in action.  Agape arises in our hearts not from romantic or sentimental feelings, but from reflecting upon the bloody cross of Good Friday through which God redeems unlovable sinners–people like us who are anything but worthy of the love which God showers upon us in Christ’s work of redemption.Paul will make the case that love (agape) is the glue which holds the divided Corinthian congregation together during their current time of distress.  Despite all the tensions present in the Corinthian congregation, the church’s members are the temple of the living God, indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and given gifts of the Spirit to equip them for service, and to enable them to properly and faithfully love one another.  This type of love, Paul says, will continue on in Christ’s church until the perfect comes.  Paul is not a cessationist–the gifts of the Spirit no longer manifest themselves in the church when the New Testament is completed, or after God’s people reach a certain level of spiritual maturity.  Those gifts enumerated by Paul in chapters 12-13 remain active in the church until Jesus returns.  Granted, there are no more apostles (and those gifts associated with that office, miracles and healing, have ordinarily ceased), but there are ministers, elders, and deacons, who are equipped through the various gifts of the Spirit to rule and serve in Christ’s church until the Lord of the church returns.Meanwhile, Christ’s church is to be a body of redeemed saints, who are to grow strong together and serve one another in love as equipped by the gifts of the Holy Spirit.  Tongues, prophecy, and knowledge will all pass away when the Lord returns (i.e., the coming of the perfect).  Until then, faith, hope, and love will abide, but the greatest of these is love.For show notes and other recommended materials located at the Riddleblog as mentioned during the Blessed Hope Podcast, click here:  https://www.kimriddlebarger.com/

Episode Synopsis:Almost all peoples and cultures seem to have some sort of utopian dream–a world of universal peace, prosperity, and harmony.  John Lennon’s Imagine anyone?  The problem with all utopian visions is that ours is a fallen race.  Because we are a fallen race we all too often find ourselves divided along racial, socioeconomic, political, and theological lines.  Much like the citizens of first century Corinth, we too struggle to find true unity in a world rife with division of all sorts.  Because of human sin, the only way unity can be obtained is through force or coercion (“agree or else”), deception (like that of a false religion), or through a “kumbaya” unity (a superficial sentimentalism).  The bad news is there will be no earthly utopia this side of Christ’s second advent.  The good news is that God does provide us with a true unity based upon our common faith in Jesus Christ realized in the church through the person and work of the Holy Spirit.  And while this unity is imperfectly realized in this life, nevertheless, in Christ’s church, God takes a whole host of diverse and different people and baptizes them in the Holy Spirit into one body, the church of Jesus Christ.The root problem in the Corinthian church is that although many have come to confess that “Jesus is Lord,” they struggle to stop thinking and acting like the pagans they once were.  Because factions have formed in the church, Paul must address the question of unity (that the body of Christ is one) while pointing out that the Holy Spirit gives a variety of gifts of the Spirit to the church’s members according to the will of God.  God creates both unity and diversity by baptizing his people in the Holy Spirit when they confess that Jesus is Lord.  He then signs and seals that baptism to believers and their children in Christian baptism.  Where the sign is present (water), so too we believe the reality is present (union with Christ through the work of the Holy Spirit).Paul also must deal with the fact that many of the Corinthians thought possessing certain gifts of the Spirit was a sign of their own importance and status.  Paul corrects this misguided notion by connecting the “higher gifts” to God’s call of certain men to the offices of minister, elder, and deacon.  He must also remind them that all of the members of the church are given at least one gift, making the least of them (in the eyes of others) an essential member of the congregation with gifts which are important to the whole.  Every member and every gift they’ve been given is vital to Christ’s church.There may be no utopia this side of the Lord’s return, but Jesus does establish a new society in his church–one in which there is both unity (their confession that Jesus is Lord) and diversity (each possesses gifts of the Spirit).For show notes and other recommended materials located at the Riddleblog as mentioned during the Blessed Hope Podcast, click here:  https://www.kimriddlebarger.com/

A historical tour of the charismatic controversy and why it once split churches. A close reading of 1 Corinthians 12 that explains how spiritual gifts function to build up the church. A clear distinction between sensational sign gifts tied to apostolic mission and everyday gifts for service. Practical guidance on identifying and using gifts for the common good.

A study of how the Lord’s Supper in Corinth had become divisive and exploitative, harming the vulnerable. Discussion of Greco-Roman meal practices and how apostolic worship restored a proclamation-plus-supper pattern. Exploration of the words of institution, the Supper’s Passover and covenant roots, and why it must undo social divisions. Practical remedies like waiting for one another and confessing before partaking are highlighted.

Discussion centers on first-century Corinthian fashion and why loose hair and pagan styles caused scandal in worship. The speaker explores Paul’s instructions on head coverings, creation-based arguments about gender roles, and how modesty and avoiding pagan identification should shape worship dress. Practical guidance emphasizes preserving church order, gender distinctions, and decorum in public worship.

Paul’s stern call to abandon idolatry and why you cannot mix Christian communion with pagan sacrifices. A look at the Lord’s Supper as participation in Christ’s body and blood and its role in church unity. Practical guidance on eating meat linked to pagan rituals and when to abstain for conscience’s sake. A closing appeal to choose love and glorify God over personal liberty.

A deep look at Paul’s use of Israel’s Exodus as a pattern and warning for believers. Discussion of baptismal typology in the Red Sea, the manna and the rock as signs pointing to Christ, and Israel’s failures as cautionary examples. Attention to idolatry, sexual immorality tied to pagan rites, testing God by grumbling, and God’s faithfulness in temptation.