Three Days

I wonder how Abraham felt as he was walking up that mountain with Isaac? God had spoken directly with him and told him to go, but the Bible never says that God kept speaking to him all the way up there. It was a pretty incredible thing that God had asked Abraham to do; I can't imagine him not having a doubt or two along the way in a journey of over three days. Then again, just because I can't imagine it doesn't mean it's not true; the Bible doesn't often tell us the internal dialogue of the characters like modern fiction often does. Usually the Bible reports events as a third person observer.

So we don't really know what Abraham was thinking; we only know that when Isaac asked him what was going on, Abraham said something that was actually a little different from what God had said. Whether he was saying that to deceive Isaac, or whether he had deceived himself, or whether he actually had some revelation from God about the situation over the course of those 3+ days, we don't know. What we do know is that what actually happened in the end resembled what Abraham had said more than what God had said! Figure that one out!

So did Abraham feel some deep-down inner confidence every step of the way? Maybe. The Bible certainly sets him up as a giant of faith, so maybe his confidence was different from mine. But what I know from how my life generally works is that I hear from God, I believe God's words and choose to follow His instructions, but then things don't happen immediately. Things in this lifetime take time. For Abraham it took three days and a little more; often in our lives things can take weeks, months, or even years. And I'll freely admit that during my "three days" (however long those "days" may be), I don't always feel the power of God's instructions and/or promises about my situation. Sometimes I just feel sort of... indifferent.

Does that mean I'm not in faith? You know, I don't think so. I think that as long as I am still on track to do what God has instructed me to do, I'm still acting in faith. Maybe Abraham said what he did to Isaac in order to try to convince himself that everything was going to be okay. After all, all of his hopes and dreams were hinging on Isaac as his only legitimate son. Who knows? What we do know is that Abraham continued to put one foot in front of the other foot, all the way to the mountain where he had been commanded to put all of his dreams for the future to death. And when he got there, God made a way for him.

So maybe I'll just keep walking!

Orange Sherbet and Rams in Bushes

photo © 2010 theimpulsivebuy | more info (via: Wylio)"Can I have your ice cream?" Meme said to her granddaughter.

It was one Wednesday night after church, and my mom and dad had suggested that we stop and get some ice cream on the way home. My not-quite-three-year-old daughter always gets orange sherbet, but "ice cream" is a little easier to pronounce. She was eating it when Mom asked her to give it away.

Keep in mind that Hannah LOVES this orange sherbet. I really have no idea why she's such a sherbet fan, but she always chooses it, and she usually finishes it. And she was clearly far from finished when she was asked to make the sacrifice and let Meme eat the rest. But you know what she did? After a very brief pause to think it over, she held out the spoon, already loaded up with sherbet, to her meme. Meme laughed about it, gave her a hug, and said, "I don't want your ice cream! I just wanted to see if you loved me enough to give it to me!"

Does that sound like a mean trick to pull? If it does, you might take a quick look at Genesis 22, where God does something very similar. The same kind of faithful, giving heart that knows that someone who loves you would never take something away without giving it or something better back (Hebrews 11:17-19) was returned to us later when God gave us the most valuable gift of all! (Romans 8:32)

Making God Sad

"Long ago people were mean to each other," I read to my 2-year-old daughter this morning. "They hated God. This made God sad. So God said he would destroy the world with a flood because the people were so mean and sinful."

Wow! That's what God does when he gets sad? I'd hate to see what He does when He gets totally cheesed off!

OK, seriously... I was reading from a children's Bible story book designed for very, very young children, and the story is highly oversimplified (it's the book pictured at right, by the way.) But it highlights something people think about God: they think God had an emotional reaction to the sin in the world, whether it be "sad" or "angry" or whatever, and He flew off the handle and decided that the world was no good and needed to be destroyed. But when God spoke to Noah, He sounded extremely calculated and un-emotional:

Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight, and the earth was filled with violence. And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth. And God said to Noah, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence through them. Behold, I will destroy them with the earth...” (Genesis 6:11-13 ESV)

Here's the thing. Anyone who's had The Romans Road explained to them knows that "...all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God..." and "...the wages of sin is death...". So if we have all sinned, and our paycheck is death, then outside of God's mercy and grace, we all deserve to die. All of us. That fact turns the whole story of Noah on its head, because it no longer is a story about an angry God killing off everybody, but it is a story of a loving God preserving the human race by saving the lives of a family who, as part of the "all" who had "sinned," certainly deserved death like the rest of humanity. God wasn't angry at the people of the world, but God is just, and He ultimately won't stop us from receiving what we have earned if we insist on receiving payment. God made a way for Noah's family to escape (through his obedience to God's ark-building commandment), and God has made a way for us to escape death too, through receiving Jesus as our savior!

God's not mad at you; He just wants a relationship with you. God wants to love you. If you don't know him, seek Him out today!

I learned the wrong thing

My pastor started his message this morning with Genesis 3:1-6. He went on to compare the first half of verse 6 to 1 John 2:16, which was an awesome point, but he had already lost me; I was seeing something in the conversation between Eve and the serpent that I hadn't seen before.

Okay, so in verse 1 of Genesis 3, the serpent asks Eve if God really said she couldn't eat from the tree in the center of the garden, right?

Wrong.

Look back at it. "He [the serpent] said to the woman, 'Did God actually say, "You shall not eat of any tree in the garden"?'" (my italics). God had simply said they couldn't eat from the one tree in the center of the garden, not any tree at all. But the serpent misquotes God on purpose, as though he had misheard a rumor through the grapevine. Why do you suppose the serpent did that? I think the serpent (who, we find out later in the Bible, is actually the Devil) understood human nature and knew that if he could just get her into a conversation, that was half the battle. Lesson #1 to learn from this passage: don't try to correct Satan's theology. Don't have a conversation with him. Shut him down, because nothing good will come of having a battle of wits with the Devil. You'll see why in a minute.

Eve doesn't know that the serpent isn't simply misinformed, so she tries to correct the "misunderstanding." But does she correct it? No she doesn't! She messes it up worse! "We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, 'You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.'" (again, my italics). What's with the "touch it" part? That's not what God had said either! God just said not to eat it. God didn't say a thing about touching it. Someone had added something to God's word. Was it Eve? Was it Adam, adding some extra insurance when he told Eve what God had said? We don't know, but it apparently happened somewhere along the line, and maybe when Eve was starting to wonder about things, she touched the fruit and nothing bad happened, and that made her feel bolder about actually taking a taste. Lesson #2 to learn from this passage: don't add things to God's commands that don't belong. God's Word can take care of itself.

Anyway, I was sitting there, lost in this conversation, actually giving Satan some props, because he knew how to play this woman. He had the psychology down. He got her talking, defending her faith. He waited until she twisted it herself and he saw the chink in her armor. Then he contradicted God outright ("...the serpent said to the woman, 'You will not surely die...'") and told her a half-truth ("...God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."), distracting her from God's warnings and getting her attention on something that seemed like a better idea than following God's instructions. Come to think of it, it reminds me of how Satan tried to confuse and persuade Jesus Himself in Luke chapter 4 (which my pastor read later in his message) by quoting from Psalms. Oddly enough, Eve only had a few sentences of God's Word (that we know of, anyway) and Satan managed to twist it for her enough that she did exactly what God had said not to do. Jesus, on the other hand, had hundreds of years of God's word to deal with, and Satan actually quoted God's word correctly, but Jesus managed to see right through Satan's argument and avoid the sin Satan was trying to trick Him into.

And that's why we need the Holy Spirit. Even when the human race was only two people old, the Deceiver knew human psychology well enough that he was able to trick them. What chance to you and I have against an intellect like that, one which has debated with millions of the greatest minds humanity has ever produced and beat all of them but One, without the help of the One Who wasn't tricked? Don't go it alone today. Let the Spirit of God guide you, and you won't be deceived, even by The Deceiver.

And the next time you're sitting in church, don't worry about it too much if the Holy Spirit takes you on a quick rabbit trail. I didn't miss anything from the message that was coming from the pulpit, and as you can see, I seem to have received a bonus message that was mine alone... well, okay, mine and now yours! The Word of God is amazing and multifaceted, and sometimes it's just a rollicking read (think about the intrigue in that brief exchange between one seemingly naïve and clueless woman, and the enemy of all mankind! Now that's suspenseful writing!) The Bible isn't just a Theology text. The thing that caught my attention was the drama of the story itself. Enjoy the Bible for what it is, whether you're reading narrative or poetry or a vision of the future or a letter written from an evangelist to one of the churches he had visited... take it on its own terms and enjoy it as a book. And then when God has something to teach you, you'll already be listening, and it will be easy for Him to make the revelation clear.



Here's a link to the message I was listening to.

Prequel

It was spring of 2005, and we were planning my son's fifth birthday party.

He (and every other little boy, apparently) was "into" Star Wars that year, so we were planning a knock-down-drag-out Star Wars party for him. And it also turned out that he was the luckiest kid alive that year, because his birthday happened roughly a month before the final prequel movie, Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, was coming out. Why did that make him lucky? Because a week or so before his birthday, which we had themed around the movies, the new toy line based on Sith came out! By the end of the day he was absolutely drowning in Star Wars toys. I even dressed up like a Wookiee for one part of the party. It was epic!

But we weren't quite sure if we would be able to let him see the movie itself at his age. We knew that at some point, Anakin, who we had watched grow from an innocent little boy into an angsty, troubled teenager in the other movies, was going to get burned beyond recognition, and we weren't sure how violent those images were going to be. So when the movie came out, my wife and I left him with Grandma and went to see it without him to preview it.

My reaction to the movie was unexpected. I knew basically what was going to happen. Anakin was turning bad... really bad. He was going to turn against the Jedi order and have the Jedi all executed. He was going to battle with Obi-Wan and lose. He was going to catch on fire somehow and be left for dead. Then, of course, Palpatine was going to somehow install him into that iconic black suit by the end of the movie. What I was unprepared for was the rush of genuine emotion that was going to occur in me as the movie filled in some of the blanks that had been left by the original trilogy, finally connecting the dots. So this is what turned Anakin into Darth Vader. This is how innocence is twisted into evil... by tainting genuine love with selfishness. Many fans of the original trilogy dislike the prequels very much, but I was genuinely moved by the final chapter in the story of Anakin Skywalker.

That's how I've felt at several times this year as I've been reading straight through the Old Testament for the first time. I already knew the main stories, of course... Adam & Eve, Noah's Ark, David & Goliath, Samson & Delilah, Ruth, Esther, Jonah, and dozens more. I've even read considerable portions of the Old Testament before, including all of Genesis and Exodus, Psalms & Proverbs, and big hunks of other books like Joshua and Judges. What I didn't know was how it all fit together. I had no concept of the length of time between, say, Moses and David, or what exactly happened to make it so that Daniel was in Babylon. The full arc of Old Testament Israelite history had eluded me. The dots weren't connected.

But now many of them are! I understand things about the Old Testament that I never understood before. I understand things about familiar Bible characters that I never understood before. I'm still a long way from being finished, but I'm through the historical books and I think I've got a basic grasp of how the ancient history of the Hebrew people goes.

But the most important part of this whole exercise is that it's not just the history of the Hebrew people... it's the history of God's people. People of faith. Christianity, after all, did spring from the Jewish religion. Jesus and His disciples were all Jewish, as were most everybody around them. And the people of Jesus' day, as I understand it, had a knowledge of the Scriptures that today would be considered quite scholarly. How can we even begin to understand the things that those people said or did in the New Testament without the context of the Old Testament? How can we have a genuine understanding of Jesus' teachings unless we understand the teachings of Moses? When Jesus in the Gospels says "it is written" or even "you have heard that it is said," or when Paul quotes from Psalms or Isaiah, unless you understand something about the way they understood those passages, you can't fully understand the New Testament passage, either.

Now when I watch Darth Vader die in Return of the Jedi, I understand something I didn't before. I understand his love for his wife and family, masked for all those years by rage and hatred. I understand that Darth Vader is a tragic figure, a victim, although he has also been a perpetrator of evil all those years. When the original movies came out, seeing Darth Vader without his helmet was a shock. There really was a human man in there all along! The Anakin that we saw in that brief death scene is actually the return of the Anakin we later met in the prequels. Now we know that. And now that I've gotten familiar with the beginning of the story that is completed in the Gospels, I understand all kinds of things about Jesus' life and death, and the behavior of His followers during His life and after His resurrection.

Until you've read the "prequel," don't assume you understand the "movie"!

The Bible speaks in many books about wives submitting to their husbands. Isn't marriage supposed to be an equal partnership? Where does this state this in the Bible?

Marriage on Earth is a picture of Christ and the Church. The Word says that the wife is to submit to her husband as the church is to submit to Christ: see http://esv.to/Eph5:22-33. This does not mean that the wife is inferior to the husband in any way; in fact, Christ cherished His bride (the Church) so much that He gave His very life for her! And it doesn't take a whole lot of searching in the world around us to find a woman who is successfully leading a business or corporation or other organization; women are perfectly capable of leadership. It's not a matter of whether women are able to make wise decisions and lead. It's about roles, and of obedience to God.

Each of us is created in the image of God (http://esv.to/Gen1:27). The roles within the marriage relationship are not a function of the importance of the individual to God (see http://esv.to/1Pet3:1-7, especially verse 7, which affirms the equality of husband and wife before God). So God is not trying to illustrate anything about the eternal value of men and women; he values each of us equally. In fact, Jesus seemed to indicate that the institution of marriage is not even something that will carry forward from this life into the next one (http://esv.to/Mat22:30). It seems that women submitting to men in a marriage relationship may be something that only occurs in this lifetime.

So if it's not a matter of the capabilities of the individual, the whole "submission" thing must purely be a matter of roles. In general, the wife and husband should find a place of agreement on decisions, but in (hopefully rare) cases where agreement is impossible, a Godly wife will defer to her husband's judgment, not because he is superior or even right, but because it is God's command that she do so. She should of course pray for her husband so that God can change the husband's mind if need be! By remaining within the role God has set out for her as the wife, she remains within God's will and is able to receive God's blessings. Notice that it does not say that the wife should "obey" her husband, but to "submit." "Obey" would mean that the wife has no choice but to do as she was told; "submit" indicates that she is willingly yielding her will to her husband's, not because he is someone more powerful but because it is the role she chooses to live within.

That said, remember that the husband also has a responsibility to fulfill. The wife is to "submit" to her husband, but the husband is to "love" the wife, and Paul also adds "do not be harsh to them" - http://esv.to/Col3:18-19. A husband who is truly loving his wife in the active sense of the word (not just emotionally feeling love for her, but showing his love through his actions) will not ignore her advice, will not steamroll over her feelings; he will value what she has to say, and take her advice when he can see the wisdom in it. So in the proper marriage relationship, the wife does not have an inferior role; her role is just as important as that of the husband. Her thoughts are taken into account and treated with respect. Her husband has no authority in the home unless she gives it to him by "submitting" her will to his. She chooses to give him that authority not only because she loves him, but because she loves God and wants to remain within God's will for her.

I strongly believe that the marriage relationship is the most potent picture of God's love for us and desire for relationship with us that exists. When someone looks at your or my Godly marriage, they should see past it to the relationship between God and His people. Even if they don't realize that's what they're seeing, they should be able to see that there is more going on there than just two people who like to live in the same house and have sex. God has painted a picture for us. He has written a play, and we are the actors. A participant in a dramatic presentation has not given up her free will in order to be in the play; she chooses to play the role in a certain way in order to tell the story that needs to be told. Even so, different actresses will play the same role in slightly different ways, even when they are given the same lines and directions. At any point they could quit playing the role they were presented with, but they choose of their own free will to play the part as written, injecting a little bit of their own personalities and life into the character but always trying to stay on-script. Godly husbands and wives have been given the task and the opportunity to demonstrate Christ's sacrifice, His love, and the Church's submission and devotion in the world. It's not a matter of who is the more important partner in the partnership; it's a matter of voluntarily living within the confines of the role we have been presented with, and by doing so, demonstrating Christ's love to the world.

Ask me anything

how to live holy in youth days..how to serve lord jesus in youth days.what god is accepting from my youth life?

I received the above question on Formspring, a site that allows people to ask questions of others. You may have heard about it on the news; in some places teenagers are using it to heckle other teenagers. I'm not using it for that, as you can see below.

The book of Ecclesiastes says "Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say, 'I have no pleasure in them' " (http://esv.to/Eccl 12/). The writer of Ecclesiastes tried everything he could think of to make himself happy - entertainment, money, superior knowledge, sex, everything. What he discovered was that anything you do in your life apart from God is meaningless. The point of the book of Ecclesiastes is to start out early, when you are a young person, following after God's will for you... and then when you get older, you won't have to look back and say, "Well, THAT was a waste of time!"

Now, as to "how" to follow God so that you don't one day look back and say that... I'm afraid that's not a question that can really be answered for you by somebody else. You probably know some of the key things you can do: learn everything you can about God's Word, spend time praying and worshiping God, that sort of thing. Another key is found in 2 Timothy 2:22 - "So flee youthful passions and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace, along with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart." (http://esv.to/2 Tim 2:22/ ) By "youthful passions" Paul wasn't just talking about sexual passion (although that certainly qualifies) but he meant that you should remain cool-headed and not make big decisions based on the emotion of the moment. Check every decision against the Word of God and the voice of the Holy Spirit within you (meaning, pray about it and then listen to what God says back) and you won't spend your life messing up.

It also means that there are times when you literally should "flee" something that you know better than to get mixed up in. Recently a woman was telling my wife and me about how proud she is of her teen-aged daughters, who have a habit of calling or texting their mom when they are with friends and it looks like things might go in the wrong direction. "Mom, call me and tell me I have to come home right now!" is a text message she's received several times from her girls. They are fleeing from a situation they know they don't want to be in. A famous example of this "get out of there!" strategy is found in Genesis 39:1-23. (http://esv.to/Gen 39:1-23/ )

I would advise you to read that passage in Genesis, and also take a look at Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes can seem quite depressing (because the author was kind of down when he wrote it), but you need to look at it as an example of what will happen if you do not choose to follow God. I can't tell you step by step exactly what to do to serve Jesus - I don't know your situation (where you live, what needs might be around you that God might call on you to fill, what your gifts and talents might be, etc.) but I do know that young people face temptation (old people do too!) and need to resist it. And I do know that God had something in mind for you when He placed you on Earth, and He has no intention of keeping it a secret from you. Hook up to him - plug in like plugging lamp into a wall socket - by getting your mind filled with what the Bible says and by spending time in His presence in prayer and worship, and when the time comes for you to make a decision about what to do with yourself, make your decision based on God's counsel and not your own "youthful passions" and you will do just fine.

Ask me anything

Pentateuch

Last night my Read the Bible in a Year reading took me through the last chapters of Deuteronomy, which means that for the first time in my life, I have now read all the way straight through the first five books of the Bible! I can't say there was anything there that I wasn't aware of already... decades of reading the books in pieces and sitting through church services and Sunday school classes took care of that... but I can say I did take away some valuable things from the experience.

• I gained an understanding of and new appreciation for the structure and artistry of the Pentateuch. I already knew that the first five books of the Bible were considered sort of a unit or collection, and I already knew that scholars generally consider them to have been written almost entirely by Moses (it's unlikely, for example, that Moses penned the sentence "So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the Lord", but he probably wrote almost all of the rest of it!), but I never understood just how important the five books are to each other. Basically, they are the story of the birth of the nation of Israel; all five of them relate to that.
  
  Genesis is like a prequel; it tells not only how humans got here in the first place, but why a "set apart" nation was required (rampant sin which kept messing everything up), how that nation got started (one guy, Abram/Abraham, who trusted God), and how they wound up in Egypt in slavery when God had promised them their own land (the story of Joseph).
  
  Exodus is where the rubber meets the road; Moses is born in the initial chapters (I learned something quite interesting when reading this part!) and we see the new displaced nation of Israel, born in slavery (just like every member of the human race is born in slavery) freed from bondage to Egypt and released by God to travel to their own country. It's an epic story that has inspired people throughout history. It is also the book where Moses first finds out how to build the tent version of the Tabernacle, which later was built in a permanent form as the Jerusalem Temple.
  
  Leviticus is where God first gives the new nation of Israel the bulk of its laws. The Ten Commandments have already been given for the first time in Exodus 20, but the bulk of the laws about sacrifices, feasts, and basic human conduct are given here. This makes for dry reading at times, but it is critical to the overall story.
  
  Numbers starts out with a census right after Israel leaves Egypt, tells the story of how they did not make it into the Promised Land because they did not trust God, tells us about their wandering in the wilderness, and ends with another census, right before the second generation enters the Promised Land. A perfect demonstration of how distrusting what God says, what His Word says, can leave you spinning your wheels for a lifetime.
  
  Deuteronomy is largely Moses' final address of Israel before he dies and they enter the Promised Land without him (I had some interesting thoughts about this part, too). Interestingly, a big hunk of what Moses told them was the same laws that were already detailed in Leviticus! Some of them have a slightly different nuance in this version, but it's a lot of the same stuff. Lesson learned: we need to hear God's Word over and over, and each generation needs to hear from God for themselves.
  
  
• I gained a much greater respect for the person Moses. I don't think I ever truly grasped how amazing a man he really was. How would you like to try to lead two million griping, complaining people around a desert for forty years? The guy must have been made of some good stuff! He has got to be one of the most influential figures in history; the laws he received from God and recorded, and his story, are known just about everywhere, because he somehow made the time, in the middle of leading all of those people, to write the whole thing down. Amazing!
  
  
• I learned how important these five books are to Jewish culture. Almost everything they did and still do from a ceremonial standpoint comes from these books. The major festivals, the sacrifices, even the construction of the temple and their eventual geographical locations within the Promised Land all comes back to these books. Without them, the Old Testament doesn't even make sense. With them, sometimes you understand things in the Old Testament that didn't make sense before... an easy example would be that until you understand the Mosaic laws they were operating under, the situation between Ruth and Boaz in the book of Ruth doesn't make any sense. I ran across several moments like that during my read-through. For example, Gideon sending home men in his army who were afraid makes a lot more sense when you realize that God had codified this as standard practice in the book of Deuteronomy.
  
  
• I realized how important the Pentateuch is to the New Testament. If you know your New Testament well (or if you have a good commentary or study Bible) you will recognize many, many times where the Pentateuch is quoted in the New Testament. In particular I was struck with how many times Jesus quoted from Deuteronomy, but there are references to it all over the New Testament, and I'm not only talking about the obvious ones like the discussion about Abraham in Romans 4. These five books form the bedrock of the Jewish religion, and thus of Christianity as well.

I was actually quite surprised at how much I got out of reading the Pentateuch. I learned, I was often entertained - sometimes even laughing out loud at the funny parts - and yes, occasionally I came across parts that left me collossally bored. Would I recommend reading this to any adult Christian? Yes. There are some parts that are frankly a little bit racy for very young children (!), but Christians need to have the knowledge they can gain from these books. If you don't have a good commentary or reference book or software, may I recommend the ESV Study Bible? It can help you get through the weird parts, and it will help you spot things that you might not notice on your own. You can get a pretty good deal on one at ChristianBook.com, or check at your favorite Bible store.

I wouldn't trade this trip through the Bible for anything!

Moses Said So

"Behold," said Moses to the children of Israel, "you are today as numerous as the stars of heaven."

This is what I read in Deuteronomy chapter one last night as I continued in my Read the Bible in a Year program. Most of Deuteronomy is a series of long speeches Moses delivered to the Israelites just before Moses died and Israel began in earnest their conquest of the Promised Land.

When I read that sentence last night, I automatically did some quick calculations. So far I've read everything in the Bible up to that point, and my razor-sharp brain reminded me that the people of Israel were actually counted twice in the book of Numbers, or at least the number of able-bodied warriors were counted. The first time there were 603,550 warriors (a number which was also mentioned in Exodus before that), and the second time there were 601,730 warriors. Commentators estimate that if you add in women, children, and men who were unable to fight, the nation of Israel at that time must have consisted of something like two million people total.

A quick Google search reveals that modern scientists, on the other hand, estimate that there are in the neighborhood of 100 thousand million stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone. Seems like Moses maybe estimated things a little bit short.

Then something else caught my eye. Moses was relating story points that had occurred back in Exodus, and kept referring to the people as "you". "You" were delivered from Egypt, "you" received the Law from Sinai, "you" were too frightened to enter and take the Promised Land. In fact, in one place Moses takes pains to let them know he is talking about those in his presence as he was speaking: "Not with our fathers did the Lord make this covenant, but with us, who are all of us here alive today." The only problem is that none of that had happened to the people he was addressing! All of those events had happened 40 years before, to their parents, who at this point were all dead. Again, Moses loses points for accuracy.

Or does he? Moses was giving a passionate motivational speech, alternately reminding Israel to live according to God's laws and reminding them of God's promises, and certainly Moses was alluding to God's promise to Abraham, not actually counting stars. He wanted the people he had been leading all of those years to be emotionally prepared to fearlessly do what God had called them to do: enter the land promised to them by God, and take it. Reminding them of God's promises, remembering what God had done for them as a nation, those were part of him emphasizing to them that as a nation, God had been with them. His "you" was referring to the nation of Israel. The current batch of persons had inherited the promises given to their forefathers, but they had inherited the character flaws as well, and Moses wanted to remind them of both facts.

But why did Moses choose to use untruth to do so? The fact is, the Bible is truth, and Moses' speeches were also truth, but Moses wasn't speaking as a scientist... he was speaking as a passionate encourager, as a poet. "As numerous as the stars of heaven" is hyperbole meant to indicate that they were a vast nation. "You" repeated over and over in a history lesson about parents and forefathers is meant to identify them with their own history. A scientist might say that Moses' speech had elements of fiction or exaggeration in it, and so it was not entirely true. A poet would say that his speech had elements of hyperbole and identification with history in it, and thus it was transcendent and more true than plain vanilla facts would be.

Now, let's rewind a little. Okay, let's rewind a lot. Most Bible scholars believe that Moses was the author of almost every word of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. That means that Moses wrote the book of Genesis, right? Now, we've determined that Moses was predisposed to mold the historical facts a little bit to make a spiritual point. Let's think about some of the things Moses reported in the book of Genesis that seem amazing to us today:

1. The entire universe created in six morning-to-evening days
2. Water covering the entire surface of the world, including the highest mountain peaks
3. People thinking they could build a building so high that they could reach God with it (and God being nervous that they would succeed)
4. A city destroyed by a rainstorm of fire, and a woman's body changed instantly to salt

Now, I am of the opinion that things in the Bible should be taken at face value unless there is evidence that they are intended to be taken figuratively, and in my opinion, it's entirely possible that those things could have happened exactly as reported. But knowing Moses for the poet he was, I think we should also remain open to people who think that some of his writing may have a figurative element to it. That would not make the Bible any less truth; in some ways, it would add to the truth by inspiring in us the emotional reaction to God, the sense of wonder and awe, that we should have anyway. And in a story that is ultimately about God's relationship to us, that would be an even greater truth.

Jesus' Debating Technique - Part 2 of 2

Yesterday I started talking about Jesus' debating techniques in Luke 20. This is the other half of that... if you missed it yesterday, you might want to read that first!

Second question: Those same scribes and Pharisees sent flunkies to first butter Jesus up, and then to ask Him, "Is it lawful for us to give tribute to Caesar, or not?" They must have figured that either Jesus would answer that Caesar should get tribute, thus angering the crowd, or that he shouldn't get tribute, thus opening the door for them to have him arrested. Instead, Jesus knew they were trying to trap him and answered in a way that not only demonstrated that the people should follow the law, but also taught them that whatever has an "image" of someone belongs to that someone. Although Jesus did not explicitly mention this verse, it is the logical basis for His answer; whatever has God's image belongs to God. What has God's image? You fill in the blank! The answer was so perfect that it literally shut up the people who were trying to trick him.

Third question: Some people brought a complicated story based on a rule from Deuteronomy to Jesus, trying to trick Him into being on their side on the subject of life after death. It's not really clear to be if they were trying to do away with Jesus, but they were clearly trying to trick Him. The final question they asked, "In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had her as wife" was apparently meant to allow only the answer "None of them will be her wife, because after people die they are dead and gone and it doesn't matter any more." The unexpected answer, that marriage is not an issue in the afterlife, was so clear and such a good explanation that even the people who had been trying to trick Jesus commended Him on His answer and "...no longer dared to ask him any question." Once again, Jesus shuts the mouths of His opponents.

Did Jesus stop there? No, He did not. He continued by asking His own Theological question, on that from the perspective of a Christian is simple to answer, but from the perspective of one of those religious leaders must have seemed like an insoluble riddle. Anyone who still had any idea of trying to outfox Jesus by that point must have been too scared to speak another word to Him!

The whole exchange ends with Jesus cautioning His disciples to be careful around people who are always looking for approval and financial gain at the expense of others, and making a comparison with someone who was somewhere close to the bottom of the social food chain, a widow with almost no money to live on. He basically said that she was closer to God's will than rich people, obviously referring to the scribes, Pharisees, and Saducees He had been verbally sparring with.

In the course of one chapter, maybe 15-20 minutes' worth of dialogue containing three questions and answers, not only had Jesus silenced his critics and made them afraid to say another word, but He had managed to teach several critical kingdom principles to His disciples. He never stopped teaching them, even in the middle of a heated theological debate, and kept turning things around to exactly what He wanted to talk about! Is that some great debating technique, or what?

I've got my new ESV Study Bible!

Yesterday at lunchtime I did something not characteristic of me... I actually left my office and drove down to Mardel to pick up the ESV Study Bible I had preordered! It came shrink-wrapped, not in a box, although that matters very little (I guess it's that much less trash to carry out to the curb on Friday). The dust jacket and cover are beautiful... the dust jacket even has the ESV starburst logo (see it at the top of this page) embossed into the paper!

I got the hardback version. At first the pages seemed a little wrinkly right next to the binding, but after using it for a while they seemed to smooth out. The pages smelled all "new-booky"; I lvoe that smell. I was sniffing it all afternoon! There was an insert inside the back cover which had a scratch-off box with a code that gave me access to the online version, which is really cool although as a Web programmer and experienced Web user myself there are a few things about the online interface that I might change. Not unusable, but I think the number of clicks it takes to get to your information could be reduced. But that's material for another post, maybe!

The content itself is awesome. The colors in the pictures aren't as brilliant as they are in, say, The Holman Illustrated Study Bible, but they are still beautiful and very useful (see some samples here, but the online examples actually look more brilliant than they do in the book... maybe because of the thin Bible paper or the print process). I brought it with me to church last night and enjoyed using it during the message, although as with any study Bible, the temptation is to get absorbed with the study notes and miss part of the message!

I read some of the supplementary material too; I had already read "Introduction: A User's Guide to the ESV Study Bible" in the Book of Luke sample I got at Mardel several weeks ago, and I really am interested in the "Reading the Bible" series of articles (you can read it in the free online samples), but I didn't have time last night or this morning to read that. I did enjoy the "God's Plan of Salvation" article, which is kind of wordy and pretty detailed but ultimately a simple (and complete) overview of The Gospel. Last night before choir practice I enjoyed showing some friends the illustrations in Exodus of the Tabernacle in the wilderness, along with illustrations of the various pieces of furniture (golden lampstand, Ark of the Covenant, bronze altar, etc.) and did my best to impress a writer friend with the way the study notes and the book outlines are visually connected to help you see where you are in the overall structure of the books.

I'll probably lug the thing to church again Sunday to show a few more friends, but overall it's so thick and heavy that I'll probably mostly use it at home. Besides, like I mentioned before, I wouldn't want to get distracted from the message by the study notes! I'm seriously considering just starting from Genesis 1:1 and trying to make my way all the way through it. It'll take a while, but if my study of Luke in my sample copy has been any indication, it will be very much worth it!

First Adam

For some reason, this morning I've been thinking about Adam. You know, the Adam. The First Adam. I won't tell you exactly where I was when I first started to think of Adam this morning, but I was wondering if Adam ever had to... you know, CLEAN himself. Like, if his body fully processed every part of his food and thus there was never a not-fresh moment for Adam before the fall. Presumably God created Adam and Eve perfect; if Jesus' resurrection body was basically a return to Adam's pre-fall state... but we don't really know for sure from the Word if Jesus' resurrection body needed food (although we know He could and did eat, we don't know if He had to) and likewise we don't know for sure whether Adam's pre-fall body needed food, although clearly he was able to eat. Maybe eating was for enjoyment only. At any rate, even if he had to eat, maybe the pre-fall body was so efficient and/or the food was so pure that there was no waste product.

The reason I was wondering this was because if that indeed was the case... if the pre-fall body did not produce waste... then either God gave us those body parts that expel waste afterward, or God in His mercy thought ahead and gave us the proper plumbing before we need it. Wouldn't that be just like the love and grace and care of God for us?

But on to my second musing about Adam, which occurred in a less sensitive location (whew!). I was thinking about things that make me feel sad... loss of loved ones, social injustices that occur daily across the globe, children being abused and taken advantage of. All those terrible things that we all know about but try not to think about very often because if we do, we make ourselves miserable. And it occurred to me how true it was that Adam's sin would bring death on mankind. Although Adam kept breathing and walking around, in truth he had experienced a death. And a tinge of that death touches each of us every time we encounter tragedy or evil. Thank God that Jesus has brought LIFE back for us! Just like that first Adam's heart was still beating even though death was present, those who have accepted the free gift of the Second Adam still live in a world being consumed by death even though the life of God is present inside of them. It doesn't make it easier to experience those things that were born when sin entered the world, but it does mean that we can rise above death and experience life in the middle of it!

Incantations

I attend a church that believes, and I believe myself, that prayer actually causes things to happen, not by making God do something or by changing Him, but by giving Him free rein to act in a realm where mankind has been given authority (Luke 10:19) and dominion (Genesis 1:26). Anyway, we believe that Christians can pray for sick people and God will heal them. Lately, though, something has been eating at me a little bit. I hear things in people's prayers like describing to God what He needs to do ("God, just open those arteries and clean them out, flush the crud out that's clogging them up, cause the blood to flow freely!" "Lord, just make that cold go away, clear out the phlegm and inflammation, cause that cold bug to just die!" etc.) It's almost like we think God doesn't really know what's wrong with the person's body... like he's a first-year med student who needs a guidebook or something. Even worse, I hear phrases like "from the top of her head to the soles of her feet" that really add nothing to the prayer but words. And then I think about Matthew 6:7-8 and wonder if we are not sometimes in danger of going where those Gentiles of yesteryear went.

I guess in a sense we pray hoping to build up the faith of the person we are praying for... intending somehow to show that we empathize with them. Or maybe we have heard prayers like that which contained genuine words of prophetic knowledge from God where the person praying speaks details he could not possibly know without a word from the Holy Spirit, and we subconsciously try to emulate that. Or, sadly, maybe we as the praying persons are trying to kind of rev ourselves up so we feel like our prayers are getting traction somehow. I don't know why the tendency is there... I've fallen victim to it myself... but it seems to me that the work is God's and the faith is ours. A prayer of "God, heal him!" that has behind it the understanding and faith that God can and wants to heal that person, likely will work better than all the top of the heads and soles of feet we can muster.

Reading The Bible To Children

I ran across this blog post via this post on the ESV blog. This paragraph caught my attention:

Obviously you’re not going to read the first chapter of Matthew (a long list of “begats”) in family worship time. And you’re probably not going to read the Song of Solomon (at least not until they’re a bit older). But the narrative sections of the Old Testament and the parables in the Gospels are excellent sources for family worship and they’re short enough to keep even the shortest attention spans engaged.

I have a 7-year-old and we started off this year with the intention of trying to make our way through the Bible using The NIV Narrated Bible. Now, keep in mind that I've READ the Pentateuch. Unlike some people who maybe haven't spent a lot of time in the Scriptures, I knew the steamy stuff that was in there. Heck, we well-informed Christdot regulars know that there have even been efforts to classify the Bible as pornographic in some countries. So maybe I should have been prepared a little better for questions about those "narrative sections of the Old Testament." I would encourage parents who are thinking about reading the actual Bible to their children... and I am not trying to discourage that by any means... to read ahead. Know the maturity level of your kids and especially how much about sex you are willing to explain to them. If you've read the whole book of Genesis, you know what I mean. If you haven't, now's the time! At least do it before you read it out loud to children. You might save yourself some embarrassment!

This Little Light Of Mine

I've posted a new document at Scripture Menu, and I'd love to get some feedback on it. Take a look:

The Light of the Lamp

Please post any comments here on Christdot! That is, post comments here if you LIKED it. If you didn't like it, here's something that may put you back in a good mood:

IIIIIIII.com

"You are the same, You never change..."

How could it possibly be that God never changes, when there are actually areas in Scripture where it is said that He changed his mind about something when approached in prayer? (Genesis 18:20-26 and Exodus 32:7-14, for example) Sunday evening we were singing a song in church about how God never changes, and I was wondering how that could be and how Jesus could have been "slain from the foundation of the world (Revelation 13:8 in many translations; ESV renders it differently), and a theory came to me.

A CAT scan is made up of a series of 2-dimensional cross-sections (x-rays) of whatever is being scanned (usually a human). Imagine for a second that there was a being that existed in only two dimensions. His experience of what a human being is would likely be something like one cross-section from a CAT scan. Now remember that God exists in all of time at once, but we humans only perceive a single point in time at once. Maybe the reason we perceive what seems like "changes" in God is that we can only see one snapshot of the CAT scan at once. As we travel through time, we come to different parts of the landscape of what God is. It's like our 2-dimensional guy is traveling slowly across someone's body, just like the CT machine. The body may be lying perfectly still, not moving or changing in position at all, but in the perception of the 2D man, the body looks like a circle which slowly expands and then contracts in size (the head), then an oval (the shoulders), and so on, ending in two circles (the legs) and then two ovals (the feet). The body is not changing at all in ultimate reality, but the way the 2D man experiences it change dramatically.

The analogy breaks down at several points (for example, the body in the CAT scan analogy is inert, and God is characterized in the Bible as very active), but I think it's conceptually useful. We just have to remember that there is far more to God than our human brains are likely to be able to totally comprehend this side of Heaven (maybe even on that side!)