It's easy to read through the first half of Exodus like a storybook. And then comes the latter half - covenants and law, rules and instruction. It seems so antiquated. What are we to make of all this?

A church’s entrance isn’t just a functional space for people coming to and from church. It’s a vital social space where gospel friendships begin and where visitors and regulars alike are made to feel not just welcome but known and loved. A key dynamic in a church’s social fabric is the greetings. The greetings given at the door by the “welcoming team” are important, but also consider the assortment given by brothers and sisters in Christ to one another, Sunday after Sunday. What should these look like? Paul’s personal greetings in Romans 16 provide a helpful model. His 27 (or so) greetings at the end of his letter to the first-century church in Rome exemplify how he lived the good news in Romans 1–15 and still provide guidance for how to build a gospel-centered church culture today. Here’s how (and why) to greet like Paul. 1. Greet one another by name. Paul took the time to transcribe 27 greetings by name at the end of his letter. This shouldn’t be overlooked or underestimated. His greetings by name show his desire to let these people know specifically how he “longed to see” them (1:11) and that they were in his prayers (v. 10). Paul wasn’t an armchair theologian or an aloof apostle. He loved people. He desperately wanted to be with them in person, which is why he lamented in the beginning of the letter, “I have often intended to come to you (but thus far have been prevented)” (v. 13). His affection was evident. Paul referred to Epaenetus, Ampliatus, Stachys, and Persis as “beloved” (16:5, 8, 9, 12); Phoebe as “sister” (v. 1); Herodion, Andronicus, and Junia as “kinsmen” (vv. 7, 11); and Rufus’s mother as a “mother to [Paul] as well” (v. 13). He also greeted individuals including Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermes, Patrobas, Hermas, “and the brothers who are with them” (v. 4). His affection exemplifies the gospel’s power to transform believers. Paul went from “breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord” (Acts 9:1) to lovingly writing 27 familial greetings to his brothers and sisters in Christ in a far outpost church in Rome. Likewise, our greetings in the church lobby or sanctuary, or in a home small group, should display how the gospel forges us as beloved family in Christ. Take time to greet your Christian brothers and sisters by name—a practice also commended by John (3 John:15)—especially those outside your immediate friend circle. Challenge yourself to learn at least one new name each Sunday and greet that brother or sister by name the following Sunday. As a member of my church’s greeting team, I notice that visitors greeted by name on their second and third times at church often return. Everyone responds well to hearing his or her name, and we all want to go to a place where our name is known. 2. Honor one another. Paul honored Prisca and Aquila, who had “risked their necks” for him (v. 4), and honored Mary for her hard work (v. 6), as he did Tryphaena, Tryphosa, and Persis (v. 12). He honored Phoebe, who carried the letter from Corinth to Rome, as “a patron of many and of [himself] as well” (v. 2). Everyone responds well to hearing his or her name, and we all want to go to a place where our name is known. By honoring specific people in specific ways, Paul showed his personal gratitude and encouraged each person to see how his or her service, hospitality, or friendship advanced the gospel. Those being honored likely felt greatly encouraged. That’s why Paul commonly exhorted many churches to build a culture of honor where all members encourage one another regularly (Rom. 12:10; 1 Cor. 12:16; 1 Thess. 5:11; Eph. 4:29). Likewise, be quick and generous in your honoring: “Outdo one another in showing honor” (Rom. 12:10). Encourage the person who faithfully serves in the media booth or the person who stayed after church to pray for someone. Everyone is worthy of—and in need of—honor. You don’t need to be a leader, nor do you need a mic, to honor a brother or sister in the faith. Often the most meaningful moments of honoring are in the children’s ministry classrooms, the church lobby, or a small group living room. We need to practice honoring one another because it isn’t always a natural practice. Recently at our church, we paired up to honor one another in a preservice serve team huddle. A man who was new to the church and serving on the logistics team said he’d never been honored. A tragedy. After receiving encouragement from a brother in the faith that Sunday morning, he was more open to the love of God and more open to community. God is honored when we honor one another. 3. Greet with (an appropriate version of) a ‘holy kiss’ (Rom. 16:16). Paul concluded his greetings to the Roman Christians with a charge to “greet one another with a holy kiss” (16:16). Robert J. Banks explains that kisses were “a regular part of everyday life among the Greeks and in Eastern societies, especially among relatives, friends and those giving and receiving hospitality.” By charging them to kiss one another on greeting, Paul exhorted the Roman church to give familial greetings because they were a family in Christ. The 27 names in Paul’s greeting reflect who was part of the church: men and women, Jews and Gentiles, slaves and freemen, apostles and deacons, the rich and the poor, those mature in the faith and recent converts. Prior to Christian churches, Jews and Gentiles didn’t mix in a social community. Neither did slaves and those who were free, nor the rich and poor. The gospel radically transforms relationships. A kiss is most likely not appropriate today (unless you’re in a culture like France where kisses on the cheek are normal). But give a family-style greeting because you are family. Always look people in the eye and smile. If appropriate, shake their hand, bump their fist, or give a “Christian side hug.” To greet someone who’s in a wheelchair, pull up a chair and speak to your brother at his eye level. To greet a child, kneel to look her in the eye if you’re able and ask her name. Go out of your way to greet those new to the church and those standing or sitting by themselves. Greet one another as a family, because in Christ you are family. Imagine a Future Greeting After years of longing to see the saints in the Roman church, Paul arrived and gave his greetings in person, likely with many holy kisses. Imagine that greeting. Greet one another as a family, because in Christ you are family. Imagine Paul arriving at the home of Aquila and Prisca as the church gathered. Imagine when he saw Rufus’s mother again and they shared a meal. Imagine Phoebe telling Paul about the boat journey to Rome and how she kept the letter safe. Imagine Paul honoring Epaenetus for his growth in the faith. Imagine the family of Narcissus reading his letter aloud and asking Paul questions about justification by faith. Now imagine the greeting we all long for. Imagine when Jesus Christ will greet you by name. Imagine being greeted by all the brothers and sisters named in Romans 16 and by every disciple from every generation and every nation. What a greeting it will be! Let your longing for that greeting motivate how (and why) you greet your brothers and sisters this Sunday, and every Sunday.

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Politics Why Is the Government Still Paying for Covid Tests? There is something sinister about state-sponsored hypochondria. Credit: image via Shutterstock Four years ago, during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. public-health establishment set the conditions for a panic unlike anything witnessed in our lifetimes. Through an unholy combination of social-distancing edicts, stay-at-home orders, and vaccine mandates, the establishment induced a state of over-the-top alarm among millions of Americans. These days, the most the bureaucrats can hope to provoke in the population is not compulsory panic but something like officially-sanctioned hypochondria. Last week, I read that the U.S. government had resuscitated its pandemic-era initiative of flooding the country with free Covid tests. According to the Associated Press, the government will again provide families with as many as four tests “on the house,” so to speak—an act of would-be charity that loses some of its punch after the AP notes that the average cost of an over-the-counter test amounts to a whopping $11.  Among other things, here we have a particularly pitiful example of a nanny state that condescendingly assumes that its subjects cannot even pull together the equivalent of the cost of a Big Mac, a medium French fries, and some pop. “Insurers are no longer required to cover the cost of the tests,” the AP glumly notes. (Two cheers for insurers!) My objection to the reconstitution of the Covid test giveaway program, however, has relatively little to do with the tests being made available for free. Instead, I reserve my greatest disapproval for the assumption implicit in the proposition: That the public should be encouraged to monitor the nature and severity of their upper-respiratory symptoms to such an extent that it is worth distinguishing Covid from influenza, the common cold, hay fever, or a bad case of “I’ve been cleaning the attic and kicked up a lot of dust.” This amounts to a normalization of the unnatural obsessing over germs. If the government ever makes public the number of people who have signed up to receive the new free Covid tests, the figure might give us a clue about just how many of our fellow citizens can be led by the government to become as neurotic as Woody Allen in Hannah and Her Sisters. (Allen, in that movie, mistook a stain on his shirt for skin cancer.)  To the best of my recollection, I have made use of a Covid test exactly once in my life—something I admit with a fair degree of sheepishness if not genuine repentance. Although I instantly viewed with intense skepticism the pandemic-excused shutdown of civilization as we knew it, I was not exempt from worrying about catching the virus. In my defense, my single use of a Covid test came early in the pandemic, and its negative result—the fact that I had bought a silly test when there was nothing wrong with me at all!—taught me a lesson: Catching a case of hypochondria is far worse than catching a case of the sniffles. I also concluded that to test oneself for Covid encouraged the spurious thinking that catching Covid was itself a rare, notable, or, indeed, avoidable occurrence. The logic went something like this: Covid was singularly strange and scary, and so testing for it—something we do not do for more innocuous infections like the common cold—was called for. But the opposite was plainly true: Covid would eventually become so ubiquitous as to render testing for it decidedly anticlimactic. Therefore, to cease testing for Covid was to accept the inevitability of Covid—a healthy affirmation of reality. And Covid did come for your faithful correspondent: Over the last few years, I have caught an upper-respiratory virus on at least three occasions, and the odds are likely that each time I had Covid. Yet I did not test myself once, so who knows? As I was sidelined with a fever, headache, and sore throat, I was more concerned with attempting to write and file my deeply engaging opinion journalism than I was with confirming that I had this virus rather than that virus. Actually, the fact that I can readily recall the number of times I have had Covid or some Covid-like condition must in and of itself be counted as a personal failing: We all get colds—stop keeping count! The return of the free Covid tests might appear to be just another example of pandemic-era detritus. Perhaps it is no more significant than encountering the occasional discarded mask in a parking lot. Indeed, it is hard not to chuckle when standing in line at a store and looking down to find the scuffed-up stickers that once attempted to demarcate 6-foot social distancing; these are artifacts as surely as a book of S&H Green Stamps.  Yet I maintain that the resuscitation of the Covid test handout scheme amounts to something more ominous: an attempt to convert panic into hypochondria, and thus free-thinking, otherwise sensible-minded citizens into permanent worrywarts.  The post Why Is the Government Still Paying for Covid Tests? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Education It’s Time for the GOP to Play Hardball With Public Universities Red-state tax dollars should not fund hostile institutions. Credit: Martin Pope/Getty Images It’s old news that universities are not particularly friendly grounds for conservatives. Every so often, a new study looks at the partisan affiliation of professors in various academic disciplines, and it’s never pretty. Business, economics, and the hard sciences are always home court for Republicans, but at the average college, no academic department comes close to parity. On the other hand, conservatism in some academic departments is utterly extinct or even unimaginable: In sociology and communications, the odds of finding a conservative prof are literally 100:1, or, in some places, worse. Conservatives have been complaining about universities since before conservatism was even a coherent movement, but nothing much has been accomplished. Bill Buckley rose to prominence after publishing God and Man at Yale in 1951, but despite his needling of the professorial class, the dregs of ’60s radicalism ended up filling the ranks of the academy (bombing American military bases is apparently an excellent qualification for teaching college students). The results have been disastrous. The left has consolidated its position into complete dominance of higher education, which serves as the principal apparatus of elite production in postindustrial society. This provides it with enormous cultural and political influence, while slowly choking conservative political possibilities by depriving the Republican Party of the expertise and trained personnel necessary to effectively exert political power in the modern state. The result is Republican administrations that are barely able to staff their own bureaucracies: They appoint twice as many Democrats to executive branch positions as Democratic presidents appoint Republicans. Republicans at all levels had decades to deal with what has been an obvious issue since the genesis of modern conservatism; why the inertia? Some of it, it seems, was because Republicans naively didn’t take universities seriously. Campus problems, surely, would remain confined to campuses—students would come out, wise up to the world, and leave radicalism on the quad. But much seems to have been a reverence for the founding mythology of academia: the sacred rights of faculty self-governance and academic freedom. It’s time to put old illusions aside and recognize what universities have become: a patronage system for the left and a political machine for Democrats. Colleges and universities systematically discriminate against conservative professors and students. Hundreds of billions of dollars of state and federal funds go to establish professors of critical gender studies and fund research projects whose sole purpose is to decry America as an evil and oppressive state. Republicans are hardly helpless in the face of this onslaught. Red states control vast swathes of the American public university system, and billions of dollars of state funds flow into their coffers. Republicans at the national level can levy strikes against the excesses of federal grant and loan funding. With some imagination, and more importantly, political will, universities can be brought to heel and made to represent the priorities of the citizens that fund them, rather than the left-wing professors who have stacked their own ranks.  The first step is for state governors to take seriously their power to appoint university governing boards. Currently, it is common to appoint donors and local business leaders to governing boards, but these appointees are usually unengaged and ineffective; many are happy to get their free football tickets and leave the university administrators to their own devices. Their lack of experience with academic governance and university administration means they usually do not have a solid grasp of the problems facing universities or the actions that need to be taken to effectively exercise power in higher education. Replacing apathetic boards with experienced activists will allow them to properly exercise their oversight functions, appoint effective conservative university presidents, rein in university spending on frivolous projects, shutter useless and hostile degree programs, veto tenure applications for unqualified ideologues, and mandate changes in university policy. The DeSantis administration in Florida is an excellent example of conservative leadership taking higher education seriously. New boards have begun a complete transformation of both the flagship University of Florida and smaller colleges like New College of Florida and Florida International University, while the legislature has put significant money into the state scholarship program to ensure that education is affordable and the state university system retains as much talent as possible. State legislatures can also play a major role by being aggressive with their oversight of university budgets. Universities must be hit where it hurts, in their pocketbooks. Any university that does not shut down hostile patronage programs like various grievance studies departments and adjust its hiring practices to bring its professoriate in line with state public opinion should have its funding pared dramatically. University administrators who fear for their budgets will quickly move to curtail left-wing excesses on campus; if they don’t, their mandates can be reduced to provide only the most basic degree programs, without amenities. Legislatures can also reward universities for playing nice, and appropriate funds for colleges to build out independent conservative centers that will provide jobs and training for future conservative academics, like the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida and the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University. At the federal level, reform is more difficult, due to the constraints on congressional legislation and the partisan lean of the administrative state. But Republican presidents can certainly staff up organs like the Department of Education, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation with appointees that will dispense with absurdities like awarding the University of Texas at Arlington $5 million to better integrate equity into mathematics education. Congress, on the other hand, can take direct aim at the overstuffed budgets of grant-giving agencies and, ideally, cut them down to a much more reasonable, even to a rather minuscule, size: “Give grants appropriately or don’t give them at all” should be the message. Of course, there will be outcry from leftists, academics, Democratic party hacks in general, and squeamish Republicans about “politicizing education.” But no one should be fooled: education has already been politicized—anyone can watch the Claudine Gay depositions if they dare to dispute the fact. Conservatives must respond in kind. The post It’s Time for the GOP to Play Hardball With Public Universities appeared first on The American Conservative.