on coping with the Bible

I’ve just started the “Introduction to the Hebrew Bible” course from the BibleProject (it’s completely free, and extremely high quality in both content and production, if you are interested in taking it!), and I decided that as a verbal/written processor, my best bet for retaining what I learn in the course will be to write something about it as often as I can. So here’s a scribbling of thoughts from Session 1, titled, “What on earth is the Hebrew Bible?”

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I’ve been talking to an old friend and longtime spiritual mentor about various theological and Biblical questions lately, and one idea that he raised—and I keep thinking about—is that so much of pastoral ministry can often be spent “undoing” what adults were taught about God, Jesus, and/or the Bible as children. Wouldn’t it be amazing if that were not the case? What would it look like to teach children who God is and how to handle His Word in a way that wouldn’t need to be deconstructed later?

Tim Mackie echoed the sentiment in Session 1 of the class and I liked the way he put it: Christian children’s media is often the clearest revelation of the “coping strategies” we use to deal with our discomfort around the hard parts of the Bible. We rewrite Old Testament narratives as hero-villain stories or moralistic tales, or we turn the Bible into a theological encyclopedia, or we use it to proof-text doctrines we’ve already decided are correct, or we cherrypick the inspirational bits to put on calendars and coffee mugs—all to avoid dealing with the actual text as a whole.

Why? Because the text as a whole is incredibly complex, uncomfortable, difficult, and often not safe for work. Why would God choose to reveal Himself through a Bible like that?

But He does. And when we don’t accept that—and Him—on His terms, we inadvertently produce a lot of Christians who know Bible stories, understand morality, and can bend any passage into a personal application, but who don’t know God or understand His purpose for humanity.

Let me speak for myself: By all the typical metrics, I had the ideal upbringing to produce a Biblically-literate, faithful Christian adult. My parents are both born again, our family attended church very regularly and was extensively involved in church ministry, I went to Sunday school and AWANA every week from toddlerhood on, and I even chose to go to Bible school for a year after high school. I do not remember a time before I started following Jesus. And for all of this, I am so grateful (though still probably not half as grateful as I should be, since we all tend to take our upbringings for granted as “normal,” having known no different).

At the same time, I can look back and admit, with some embarrassment, that there were/are still some enormous gaps in my true knowledge of who God is and what He has done. Being able to pass the test isn’t always the same as understanding the material.

For example, four or five years ago I went through a dark and difficult period of time involving a lot of fear, loss, and grief. In that shadowy valley, I discovered for the first time that I had been leaning on the heresy of “prosperity theology”—and I didn’t even realize it until it gave way! I would have sworn up and down that I didn’t subscribe to any kind of prosperity doctrine, but the truth was, I had internalized years of learning Bible stories as moral tales, ultimately leading me to subconsciously believe that if I was a good enough Christian, God would protect me from pain.

The catastrophic loss of that core belief, even though it was one I had never formally acknowledged, utterly rocked my relationship with God for a time.

The good news is, I do see strides being made toward the creation of better Bible resources for children. Clara has a book that attempts to encompass the story of the Bible in a short, easy-to-grasp form, which is something I don’t remember having at her age—although it skips straight from the exodus to Bethlehem, which leaves out a whole lot of material that it would seem God considers important. Kevin DeYoung’s “The Biggest Story” Bible Storybook is thorough, beautifully illustrated, and fun to read, if a bit episodic in nature. I haven’t yet read his other book, The Biggest Story: How the Snake Crusher Brings Us Back to the Garden, but I’m hoping to give that one a try soon.

And as I contemplate the Herculean task of trying to teach my own child about God and the Bible, I can see why it’s so difficult. Kids are rather black-and-white thinkers, and it’s hard to imagine trying to teach them nuanced concepts that even adults struggle with. Even with all the caveats and disclaimers and shades of gray in the world, we tend to categorize information in pretty simple mental boxes—agree/disagree, safe/unsafe, good/bad, right/wrong.

The longer I study the Bible, the more inadequate those dichotomies seem. A mammoth collection of ancient, divinely-inspired texts that reveals a peephole view of God’s incomprehensible nature and His plan to rescue Creation just doesn’t fit into something as banal as “good/bad.”

And maybe that’s what it takes: Time, and repetitive, fearless exposure to the whole Bible. A ruthless rejection of the coping strategies we use to keep ourselves comfortable with (and protected from) the Word of God.

We all have to face the hard parts eventually. What if, instead of trying to turn the Bible into a safe book, we made our homes and churches into places that are safe to confront potentially threatening questions?

choice

Freedom of choice.

These are words I hear a lot. In this country, we think of liberty as the freedom to choose just about anything: our vocation, our spouse, our gender, our politicians and leaders, our family makeup, the course of our lives. From innocuous choices like the food we choose to eat or the clothes we choose to wear all the way to something as heavy as the fate we choose for our unborn children, it often feels like the single highest value that all Americans still share—as divided as we are on the particulars—is freedom of personal choice. Whatever side you’re arguing of whatever issue, chances are, the core of your perspective is shaped primarily by a concern for the freedom of someone in the scenario to exercise their freewill.

And, of course, I believe that our prioritization of personal autonomy is a good thing that has made our nation great. But the more heavily “freedom of choice” colors every single headline and issue, the more convinced I am that a society which values choice above all is an empty one. In the words of the Preacher, “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2b).

Paradoxically, it’s the death of Queen Elizabeth II—not any particular event in my own nation—which has brought this to a head for me. David French wrote a poignant piece this week on how decidedly apolitical she was; in it, he quoted another tribute to Her Majesty written by Andrew Sullivan, which I will also quote here:

[Queen Elizabeth] was tasked as a twenty-something with a job that required her to say or do nothing that could be misconstrued, controversial, or even interestingly human—for the rest of her life.

Our American media, pop culture, and borderline-obsessiveness with all things monarchy (particularly the British crown) would have us believe that a king or queen is some kind of all-powerful but mostly-benevolent dictator, who enjoys all the best that wealth and fame can offer. We tell fairy tales about princes who can summon every woman in the kingdom and pick a wife from among them like he’s shopping at the grocery store. Consciously or not, we often paint our mental pictures of monarchs as a blend of all the most desirable colors: someone who is beloved, famous, rich, and both free and able to do whatever they want with it all.

But we know that’s not the story of Queen Elizabeth II.

In fact, it would appear that the longest-reigning royal of the United Kingdom had very little freedom of choice in her position at all.

She didn’t choose to be born into the House of Windsor; God made that decision for her. For that matter, she had no say in the fact that her father’s elder brother King Edward VIII had no children, which could have precluded her from ever acceding to the throne. She was not even given an opinion on when she would take up the highest role in the land, and I’m sure that if she had been, she would have chosen to spend more years with her father—not take his place at the young age of 26.

And once she did take up that role? It required her “to say or do nothing that could be misconstrued, controversial, or even interestingly human—for the rest of her life.”

In other words, she had to set aside her personal interests, opinions, passions, and freedoms in order to fulfill the high duty of being more symbol than soul. Sure, she had the resources and the platform we so idolize, but—if she were to care about her people more than herself—she had no freedom whatsoever with how she chose to use it.

We don’t remember her for her hot takes or her activism or her flaunting of power, but for her steadiness and service across seven decades of tumultuous history.

Of course, not every ruler—not even most rulers—have reflected the same kind of sacred self-denial. I just finished reading through the book of I Kings, and was struck by the following passages:

 Jeroboam said to himself, “The kingdom might now return to the house of David. If these people regularly go to offer sacrifices in the Lord’s temple in Jerusalem, the heart of these people will return to their lord, King Rehoboam of Judah. They will kill me and go back to the king of Judah.” So the king sought advice.

Then he made two golden calves, and he said to the people, “Going to Jerusalem is too difficult for you. Israel, here are your gods who brought you up from the land of Egypt.” He set up one in Bethel, and put the other in Dan. This led to sin; the people walked in procession before one of the calves all the way to Dan.

- I Kings 12:26-30

Even after this, Jeroboam did not repent of his evil way but again made priests for the high places from the ranks of the people. He ordained whoever so desired it, and they became priests of the high places. This was the sin that caused the house of Jeroboam to be cut off and obliterated from the face of the earth.

- I Kings 13:33-34

Earlier in I Kings, we learn that Jeroboam was not destined to be king over Israel by right of birth; he actually worked his way up in the ranks of King Solomon’s officials and then rebelled against the king (see 1 Kings 11). When God officially appointed Jeroboam as Solomon’s successor over the ten northern tribes, He gave the soon-to-be king a key choice:

I will appoint you, and you will reign as king over all you want, and you will be king over Israel. After that, if you obey all I command you, walk in my ways, and do what is right in my sight in order to keep my statutes and my commands as my servant David did, I will be with you. I will build you a lasting dynasty just as I built for David, and I will give you Israel.

- I Kings 11:37-38

From these three passages we can piece together the stakes of the decision God placed before Jeroboam.

• Option 1: Obey God as King, and Jeroboam and his kingdom would enjoy the blessings of God’s presence and a lasting dynasty.

• Option 2: Set up self as king, and Jeroboam and his dynasty would be obliterated from the face of the earth.

Clinging to power, afraid of losing his grip on the kingdom, Jeroboam commissioned carved images to represent Yahweh and directed his subjects to sacrifice in places other than the Temple where God’s presence dwelt. Wielding his position as ruler, he did away with God’s strict requirement for only Levites to serve Him, and gave anyone who desired it the right to become a priest. Jeroboam chose Option 2 and damned his family and his nation to bear the consequences of his sin.

Perhaps choice is not the highest good we have been led to believe it is. Perhaps true greatness is revealed when someone sets aside their rights in favor of doing what is right. After all, having the right to do wrong will never make doing wrong right.

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We are born.

We are born male or female.

We are born to a set of parents and, often, siblings.

We are born in a location on the globe.

In these things, we have no input. They are what they are. We can kick and scream until we collapse from exhaustion but they will never, ever change. We don’t get to choose.

Sometimes, we are born with sexual propensities we didn’t choose, and the choice now before us is whether we will bear the responsibility of living in opposition to them.

Sometimes, we conceive a child we didn’t choose, and the choice now before us is whether we will bear the responsibility to care well for that child anyway.

Sometimes, we even find ourselves in circumstances we did choose—a marriage, perhaps—but at a level of difficulty we didn’t sign up for, and the choice now before us is whether we will persevere when it would be within our rights to give up.

The freedom to choose is a wonderful thing, but the denial of that freedom in favor of righteousness is far better. We don’t reach our highest potential by continuously reaching for the next thing our eyes and hearts desire, but by disciplining our minds and bodies to prioritize what is good over what feels good.

For Queen Elizabeth II, a commitment to duty superseded her personal desires and ambitions and opinions; for King Jeroboam, an addiction to power superseded his opportunity to steward Israel with God’s blessing. One chose what was good, and one chose what merely felt good. Each is remembered accordingly.

Likewise, Eve plucked a beautiful fruit off a beautiful tree and with it, banished the entire human race from God’s presence (Genesis 3:6, 24). That was her choice, and God gave her the freewill to make it.

But the Son of God Himself relinquished all His rights and was obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross (Philippians 2:8)—and when He bowed His head and gave up His Spirit, He gave us all the right to become children of God (John 1:12).

We may hate the way God created us, or that He created us at all. We may despise Him for having the audacity to tell us what is good and what is evil. But until we give up our liberty to live in whatever sin we choose—until we let go of being our own rulers and submit to the rightful authority of our Author—we will not know true freedom, only the counterfeit version that kills people and families and nations.

incomprehensible

Last week in Bible study we covered this rather-difficult-to-put-in-a-nutshell truth: God is incomprehensible.

Several times while I was reading the material, I caught myself thinking, Duh. Of course God is incomprehensible. This is obvious. Why do I need to read about it?

Oh, the irony of thinking Duh in response to the words “God is incomprehensible.” That reaction is exactly why I needed to read about it.

If you know me or are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I have made it my life’s work not only to know God as He has revealed Himself in His Word, but also to make His Word accessible to others so they can know Him, too. But God is incomprehensible—and that makes this whole errand seem, at face value, rather foolish. I can know God in a measure sufficient to walk in relationship with Him and to whet my appetite to know Him more, but I will never know Him entirely, even with an eternity ahead of me to try (let alone in this life).

The more I meditated on God’s incomprehensibility over the last week or so, the more I noticed two internal reactions surfacing: first, frustration; then, humility.

Frustration that I have read the Bible front to back many times over, and still barely skimmed the top off its riches of wisdom. That I’ve studied under scholars, both formally and informally, and can’t even hold all of that information in my mind at once—when there is infinitely more out there to learn. That I—a person who finds great security in facts and knowledge, turning every anxiety into a deep-dive of research and logic to soothe my fears—will never know God fully. Not in this life and not in the next. Never.

I know Him enough to know that this isn’t a frightening truth. But it is a frustrating one. I can imagine myself sometime in eternity future, still trying to plumb the depths of His character, and the deeper I go the deeper He gets. I suppose it will be something like trying to travel to the edge of an ever-expanding universe.

But after the hot swell of frustration came that gentle friend, Humility.

The incomprehensibility of God has humbled me to the point of wondering how I have ever made any but the most basic and absolute claims about who God is and what He is like. How we could ever try to color Him inside any lines—denominational, political, cultural—or stuff Him inside any box? I keep thinking of the entire book of Job, in which Job and four secular philosophers wax eloquent on how God would definitely do this and never do that, and God’s response is, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?”

What if my denomination isn’t the one doing it “right”—it’s just doing it right in one small way, while the others do it right in other ways, together forming a kaleidoscope of glimpses of God’s glory? What if my political values aren’t “right”—they are just one valid way of looking at many complicated issues, and there is more than one way to love my neighbor with my vote? What if my cultural blinders keep me from seeing and accepting and celebrating how differently God might be working in people and places who are very much unlike me?

If I have learned anything by meditating on God’s incomprehensible nature, it’s that I know far less than I think I do about God. I don’t know which church He’d go to, which style of worship He’d choose, which candidate He would vote for, or whether He really still calls people to obedience through dreams and visions. What I do know is that He is good, and that He is King, and that all of us are probably wrong about a humbling portion of the rest of our most-cherished beliefs.