“ . . . AND TEN”

“The days of our years are threescore years reason of strength they be fourscore years. and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years.”—Ps. 90:10

Today, December 11, 1978, I pass a significant milestone in one’s life, threescore years. We have a way of saying that it is unbelievable that we can grow old so quickly, but I have no problem in believing it, for a lot has happened to me. Too, we have a way of being sensitive about our age, but I don’t feel that way about it. Our heavenly Father set boundaries to a person’s life. It is not intended that we be in this world indefinitely, even if our behavior often belies that fact. Why should we want to be younger if we really believe that “unutterable joy” awaits us once the years have all rolled by? God is up to something in regard to His adopted children, but this calls for them to live out their years in devoted service and be done with this world. Old age is therefore part of His plan for us, and we may be less than faithful if we eschew it as if it were a plague.

My only sister called me on this particular birthday anniversary to wish me well, but she could not restrain the comment that “the 60th” is the worst of all. Even though she was born a few years before I, she is now younger, for she has for sometime been 59 and holding. One of my older brothers had a hard time of it on his sixtieth. It really tore him up, and I’m guessing that that is not unusual, for we live in a world that insists that we must remain young. But this is wrong, as is so many things that the world would impose upon us. Youth is not necessarily better. If life is a race to be run, and if a glorious prize awaits us, is it not better to be near the finish line? The world grieves over old age because it has no hope. It shall not be so among us. As I told my dear Ouida, the threescore milestone marks the beginning of the end. In another decade or so, more or less, I will be going home, and I will no longer have to look through a glass darkly. What can possibly be better than that? Then what can possibly be wrong with growing old? This means that when a young believer meets an old veteran who has lived to the very brink of the great divide, instead of feeling sorry for her, he should realize how blessed she is. Blessed are the aged, for they will soon get to go home.

I began the day inauspiciously, by being wet on. Ouida allows our three-year old grandson to sleep with us when he stays at our house, even when we did not allow our own children to do so. She thinks our king-size bed is big enough for just one more little fellow, especially that little fellow, who really has her conned. But I argue, rather lamely, that in our bed, king-size or no, three is always a crowd. If ever we divorce, which is still improbable, you’ll know the reason why.

Anointed by the little one or not, it has been a good day. I began by jogging down Windsor Dr. to the end, which is exactly one mile and then one-fourth of the way back. Each time I go a bit farther with hopes of building up to two miles, to the end and back. I’ve been at it for years, five days a week, and would have reached my goal long since except for being away from home. When I miss a few days I drop back part of the way and start over. It was still dark when I got back to the house. While the family still slept I prepared my breakfast, watching the early a.m. news on TV at the same time. Before going to my study I usually call one or two in our congregation to assure them of my love and/or to give them a gem of truth to ponder on as they go to work. It is always a pleasant little ministry. I especially remember our widows on these occasions.

Once at my desk I read lessons from both Testaments, this time from Ezekiel and Mark. I am now reading through the Jerusalem Bible, including the copious footnotes by remarkably objective Roman Catholic scholars. This a.m. I was impressed by Ez. 43:10 “Son of man, described this Temple to the House of Israel, to shame them out of their filthy practices.” The idea of the holy should motivate one to rise above a shameful life. No one seems to know how Ezekiel’s vision of the temple is to be applied. If it means that the temple he idealizes is yet to be built in Israel, one is left to wonder how the likes of Prime Minister Begin would ever agree to the way Ezekiel parcels out the land, such as allotting the priests and the prince the central part of the country. Begin had better bargain with Sadat rather than with Ezekiel!

In reading Mark 3, I was reminded of how the Pharisees, who began as a sincere effort to restore piety to Israel, got so caught up in loyalty to their party that they could not accept goodness when they saw it. They would not accept what was all too clear even to the demons, that Jesus was indeed the Son of God. Jesus couldn’t get the Pharisees to confess him and he couldn’t get the demons to quit confessing him! The Pharisees sat in the synagogue and watched Jesus heal a man with a withered hand. The Lord had the man position himself right in front of the Pharisees to make sure they would not miss anything. That twisted, grotesque hand was transformed right before their eyes. Being the righteous souls that they were, did they rejoice with their brother in his good fortune or praise God for what their eyes had seen? No. They could see what heaven had sent only as a threat to what they loved most. They turned from that glorious scene to connive and plot as to how God’s greatest gift to the world might be destroyed. Their partyism had brought them to the place that they were willing to murder the best man they had ever met. Partyism always has that ingredient: in desperation it will destroy goodness, if it can, to preserve itself.

I then turned to correspondence, which always takes a portion of the morning, and I never catch up since I try to answer every letter that comes that even remotely calls for a response. While I did this there were some phone calls, one of them long distance. Then came the postman with a new batch of stuff, and we have to give him a quarter for each subscriber that moves without informing us. We are his best customer in this whole end of town!

On this particular day Ouida is in another part of the house typing. She “takes in typing” like some women take in washing in order to help pay the bills. Graduate students from our two universities bring their manuscripts to her, and she sometimes finds herself an interpreter and revisionist as well as a typist, especially for the foreign students. We get to meet some interesting people. The other night we got to visit with a couple from Iran, who revealed their moderately anti-Shah sentiments at the very time the tragedy in Iran was so much in the news. They told us that when they call their parents in Tehran it is they that tell their parents what is going on in their city rather than the other way around. Their parents are very fearful that they will not live through this coup.

She types for a woman who is a new Ph.D. and going into a career on her own, leaving her husband who is also a Ph.D. She told Ouida how she and her children sit around and weep over her leaving him, but leave she must for the sake of her career, she concludes. Is that what “education” does to folk?

Ouida does her thing in style, on a new IBM Selectric, a machine that performs miracles. If you have any idea of hiring her out for a thesis, you are to be warned that she is not inexpensive. She belongs to a typing club that lays down strict limitations on who can belong so as to insure its standing with the universities. I think they have themselves a monopoly going.

A bonus feature is that she gets interested in some of the papers she types, such as the one on juvenile alcoholism in our country. It told of how one teenager explained to his father why he had broken off with a girl friend. She had become a drunkard! The paper concluded that alcoholism among the youth has reached epidemic proportions. There are 30,000 alcoholics under 14 years of age in Houston alone.

So you can see that even though we are tucked away in a small city in faraway Texas we have a window that opens to the world. We have another one that opens to heaven, and in that we rejoice, for otherwise the one that opens to the world would make no sense.

Our boy Ben, who is in school at NTSU and who has decided he is going to make a preacher (presumedly a Church of Christ preacher!), usually joins us for lunch, as he did today. I am always laying on him something from our pioneers, such as how Moses E. Lard insisted that if a preacher will study till his head hurts and his spirit is on fire he can preach without notes, which Lard always did, and he was one of our two greatest preachers of the second generation, W. H. Hopson being the other one. Ben does not yet study till his head hurts, or, if so, it doesn’t take much study to make his head hurt!

After lunch I lie down on the living room floor for sundry reading, and usually go to sleep. In the winter I use a blanket as well as a pillow. When Ben sees me making my way through the house with my special blanket for the occasion he teases me for being like Linus with his security blanket. Today I read from what I consider the greatest theological journal in the world, The Expository Times, which comes to me from Scotland, as it has for many years. There is an article on the problem the Church of England is having on whether it should ordain women as priests. It is an Anglican tradition to appeal to Scripture for such decisions, but they largely agree that the Scriptures are ambiguous on this matter. One bishop argues that only men should be priests since Jesus selected only men to be his special envoys, but others note that Jesus may have been influenced by his times. He might have selected some women had he been in present-day London society.

Both Anglicans and Roman Catholics are under lots of pressure to make women priests too. In England the Baptist, Methodist, and United Reformed Churches already ordain women. One point in the report especially interested me since it reminded me of attitudes among our own folk. The Anglicans who oppose the ordination of women accuse the others of not respecting the authority of the Scriptures, which led one bishop to say: “It is not that the authority of the Scripture is questioned by those who find no clear guidance there; rather it is uncertainty as to wherein the authoritative teaching consists.”

That relates to the chapter I am now working on in my proposed book The Stone-Campbell Movement, An Anecdotal History of Three Churches (tentative title), on which I had time to do but little work today. It is the chapter dealing with the instrumental music controversy, which became a hot issue following the Civil War. One Church of Christ historian, writing on the organ controversy, explains that back in those days when the instrument became an issue that it was really a difference in attitude toward the Scriptures, with the anti-instrumentalists recognizing the authority of the Scriptures while the others did not!

What I am now learning about J. W. McGarvey, the leading antagonist against the organ, does not justify such a conclusion. He was the first, in 1864, to object to the instrument on scriptural grounds, basing his argument upon the silence of the New Testament, and thus the first to contend that it was actually sinful and not simply inexpedient. Most of his brethren, including those who opposed the organ, did not agree with his argument. He preached off and on for the Bethlehem church out of Lexington for nineteen years, and though they understood his position they nonetheless installed an organ, not using it, however, when he was present, in deference to him. He was both elder and preacher at the Broadway church in Lexington for upwards of forty years. Even though he was very highly regarded, the church finally introduced an organ by majority vote. McGarvey quietly moved his membership to the Chestnut St. church, which did not have an instrument.

It is difficult to conclude that McGarvey respected the authority of the Scriptures while the majority of his brethren did not. It is more reasonable to conclude, as per the Anglican bishop, that they differed on how the Scriptures are to be interpreted, in this case the silence of Scripture. Despite his stand against the organ, I am afraid McGarvey would not pass the test today for loyalty at our preacher schools. As an elder, for instance, he allowed the Sunday School at Broadway to have pianos—so long as one was not used in the “worship” service! And he continued to enjoy fellowship with “organ” churches, including Broadway, where he often returned to preach, and he insisted that they not silence the instrument just for him. And as fate would have it, the organ played gently over his dead body when his funeral was conducted at the old Broadway church.

The plurality of cups for the Supper were also introduced in McGarvey’s time, which he opposed like he did the organ. Most of his brethren did not accept his conclusions here either. I doubt if the Church of Christ historian would say that this was really a matter of how one views the authority of Scripture. But McGarvey was right from his perspective. It says that Jesus took “the cup,” and nothing is said anywhere about cups.

This evening I drove over to Richland College in Dallas to teach a Logics class, which I do twice a week. Tonight I warned them of “the gambler’s fallacy,” which is part of our study of probability. The gambler assumes that the roulette wheel has “memory” and thus supposes that a number is “due” if it has not come up in awhile. We noted that if one should toss a coin ten times and get “tails” each time that on the next toss the chance of getting “heads” would be no greater than before. The dice (if not loaded) are never “hot” since that can refer only to what has already happened. At each roll of the dice the probability is the same—and that is that the one who bets on them will lose!

We also looked at the meaning of evidence, circumstantial and testimonial, noting still another fallacy, that most folk suppose that testimonial evidence is better than circumstantial. I gave them a list of the evidence against Bruno Hauptmann, who was executed for the kidnap and murder of the Lindberg baby back in 1935, all circumstantial. They all agreed that he must have been guilty, as did the jury, though no one saw him commit the crime. On the other hand, two other men, Sacco and Vanzetti, were executed for robbery and murder, back in the 1920’s on the basis of testimonial evidence, for there was an eyewitness to the crime. But the class agreed that the evidence was weak and that the two men might well have been innocent, as they insisted they were. So, it is the quality of the evidence that counts, not the kind of evidence. In the case of the resurrection of our Lord we have both kinds of evidence, and it was and is so overpowering that millions believe that he lives, and untold numbers have died for their faith.

My neighbor, a Swedish gentleman who has long since retired but who is sensitive about revealing his age, rode along with me to the college as he often does. He not only likes to get away for awhile but revels in mixing with college youth. Since his family was one of the oldest in Sweden and of the nobility, he makes very interesting company, so the students really take him in. His mother, whose memory he almost worships was lady-in-waiting to the crown princess of Sweden, who never became queen due to a premature death. My friend tells of the royalty of the various countries he has met through his family. Tonight as we discussed the problems the Shah of Iran is having, he revealed that he once met him at a royal affair back in his native land when the Shah was a young man.

Back home and at table with Ouida I was reminded once more how wonderfully blessed I am to have such a good wife. That I turned sixty today appeared to be no big deal to her either way. We were both too busy living to pay it much mind.

But I did remind the Lord that I have now reached threescore years, and then He adds to that and ten. I take it, all things being equal, that I have ten more years, and “if by reason of strength” twenty more, though of course the Ruler of the universe is not necessarily bound by such figures. But they remain suggestive and make it appropriate to add: “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”

Today I did not ask the Lord to give me ten more years with this journal, but I did assure him that if He wants me in this ministry for ten more years that I am available. In any event, Ouida and I hope that you ,our readers and friends all over the world, many of whom we love having never seen and can hardly hope to see in this world, will stay with us until the end, however long that is, which will really be, as we all know, but the beginning.—the Editor