Tag: Sarcasm

Digging in Deeper: Amos 4:4-5

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“Come to Bethel and rebel; rebel even more at Gilgal! Bring your sacrifices every morning, your tenths every three days. Offer leavened bread as a thanksgiving sacrifice, and loudly proclaim your freewill offerings, for that is what you Israelites love to do! This is the declaration of the Lord God.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

On occasion I’ve heard a popular Christian speaker joke that he has the spiritual gift of sarcasm. Formally defined, sarcasm is “the use of irony to mock or express contempt.” Irony, of course, is expressing one thing by saying it’s opposite as a means of drawing attention to it. The speaker’s point is that he’s got a knack for poking fun at things that don’t fit with his worldview framework. Sarcasm can be funny, but it can also be pretty mean-spirited. Either way, it can be an effective way of expressing a point in a certain context in fairly unmistakable terms. One of the places we wouldn’t normally expect sarcasm, but in which we nonetheless find it remarkably often, is the Scriptures. Here is a perfect example. Let’s talk this morning about why God is being sarcastic and what we should do with it.

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Morning Musing: Micah 6:6-7

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“What should I bring before the Lord when I come to bow before God on high? Should I come before him with burnt offerings, with year-old calves? Would the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams or with ten thousand streams of oil? Should I give my firstborn for my transgression, the offspring of my body for my own sin?”
— ‭‭Micah‬ ‭6:6-7‬‬ (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the drawbacks of written words is that they don’t always convey the full nuance of the speaker. They can, to be sure, but in order to convey that nuance, you sometimes have to explain it ahead of time which, in some cases, takes a bit of the punch from the intended message just like explaining a joke strips away all its humor. What we see here in Micah is a great example of this drawback in action.

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Digging in Deeper: Amos 4:4-5

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“Come to Bethel and rebel; rebel even more at Gilgal! Bring your sacrifices every morning, your tenths every three days. Offer leavened bread as a thank offering, and loudly proclaim your freewill offerings, for that is what you Israelites love to do! This is the declaration of the Lord God.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Have you ever done the right thing in the wrong place? I was watching one of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid movies with my boys the other day. In one scene, the main character was at a hotel with his family. After a misadventure out in the parking lot late one night, he went back to his room and crawled in bed with his parents only to discover the next morning that it wasn’t his room at all. He had spent the night with another family. That was a pretty funny episode, but as Israel reminds us here, doing things that look right in the wrong places can actually be a pretty dangerous thing as well.

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Digging in Deeper: Hosea 13:10

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“Where now is your king, that he may save you in all your cities, and the rulers you demanded, saying, “Give me a king and leaders”?”‬‬ (CSB – Read the chapter)

I am not a perfect parent. I am a human one, though. On occasion, one of my boys will want to do something a certain way that I know will not be wise. On these occasion I tell them it won’t be wise. Sometimes, though, they are insistent they want to do it that way. So, I let them. Do you know what happens next? It proves to be unwise. Guess what I say then? Kind of the same thing God says here.

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