sparks flying upward

As a result of the fall we read about in Genesis 3, the curses were laid, the consequences were spelled out, the garden was closed down, and mankind was consigned to a life of toil and trouble. Thus it can seem that we are just sparks flying upward, born to trouble (Job 5:7). But because God is on the move, we are not doomed to such a fate. Even in the midst of the curses, God plants a seed of hope, that the offspring of woman will crush the head of the serpent. Even as he bars them from Eden, God makes clothes to cover the nakedness Adam and Eve longed to hide.

Job is a sobering, sad book. It describes the reality of human suffering poignantly. Yet I take great hope in its many passages that point beyond themselves to a greater reality that was at that point still yet to come. Those that follow are my favorites so far.

If only you would hide me in Sheol and conceal me until Your anger passes. 

If only You would appoint a time for me and then remember me.

When a man dies, will he come back to life?

If so, I would wait all the days of my struggle until my relief comes. 

You would call, and I would answer you.

You would long for the work of your hands.

- Job 14:13-15

Earth, do not cover my blood;
may my cry for help find  no resting place.
Even now my witness is in heaven,
and my advocate is in the heights! ...
I wish that someone might arbitrate between a man and God
just as a man pleads for his friend.
- Job 16:18, 19, 21

But I know my living Redeemer,

And He will stand on the dust at last.

Even after my skin has been destroyed,

Yet I will see God in my flesh.

I will see Him myself;

my eyes will look at Him, and not as a stranger.

- Job 19:25-27

Yet he knows the way I have taken;
when He has tested me,
I will emerge as pure gold.
- Job 23:10

I love these verses because they yearn and hope for an advocate who would mediate between humankind and God, for a resurrection in the life beyond this present one. They capture the human longing for life and life abundant. We all long for life to be free and full and boundless, and yet we often find the opposite to be our reality - for now. I find it so powerful to see glimpses of God's future plans even here in this very early book of the Bible. For he will send a mediator; and after he has been overwhelmed by suffering and death, God will restore his flesh even though it has been destroyed; God will long for the work of his hands, and God will once breathe into it and give it new life.

Second String Saints

As I've said multiple times now, Reading God's Story moves from Genesis to Job. When trying to highlight the big story of the Bible, it makes sense to move Job directly after Genesis is because Job is clearly set in a similar time and culture as Abraham's. Job's wealth is counted by his many animals; he makes sacrifices for his family himself (rather than going through a religious authority); and he lives in Uz, a place named after one of the ancestors of Shem. Its exact location is unclear, indicating that this book is situated in a time prior to the period when we can date and locate people and places in more precise ways.

One of the downsides of moving Job to immediately after Genesis is that it may give the impression that the narrative of Job is of the same genre as Genesis; it is not. Genesis traces the story of the lineage of blessing that has come to the people of Israel as God's chosen people; Job is a book of wisdom literature that explores the mysteries of God. The original ordering of Scripture highlights this by placing Job just before Psalms and Proverbs. In our reading elsewhere, it is quite common to accept that there are different genres of literature and that we will read each genre in a particular way. For instance, we do not read the newspaper and a children's book in the same way. Yet sometimes we can struggle with the question of genre when it comes to the Bible, because it might suggest that we consider some books better or truer than others. I will say more about genre as we move along in the Bible, but for now, just keep in mind that Job is wisdom literature. To learn more about the genre of wisdom literature, see this article from The Voice.

I have never read Job and Genesis alongside each other, and I've found some of the following connections between the two:

1. Genesis described God as Creator who intentionally made a good world. It is vital to keep in mind that God's original plans for the world did not include a place full of suffering and misery. We see throughout Genesis that God loves to and longs to bless creation and humankind, and God does so both before and after the dislocation of the fall. I see Job and all of his questions and sorrows as describing humankind's vantage point after the fall, when they are alienated from God and trying to make sense of their situation.

2. Note that the "satan" (which simply means accuser) in Job takes on a similar role here to the snake in the garden. In both stories, the snake and the satan seek to pull apart God and humankind. The NIV Study Bible gives an apt description of this role: "As tempter he seeks to alienate man from God... as accuser... he seeks to alienate God from man" (pg. 723, emphasis mine.) God allows the satan to assail Job with all manner of suffering in order to test his character. I don't think, however, that the descriptions in Job 1 and 2 of the arrangements between God and the satan are normative descriptions of how God acts on a regular basis. For instance, I would not recommend telling a friend of yours going through horrific suffering that God has clearly handed him or her over to Satan to test their righteousness.

3. The theme of Job's righteousness echoes the story of Noah, who was also known as a righteous man and was chosen on that basis to continue the human race after the flood.  After Noah, Genesis no longer says that God chooses people to be his chosen vessel of blessing for the world based on their righteousness. The people God chooses are clearly flawed, usually not first-string recruits (to get back to a football analogy). In fact, God seems intent on choosing people who are unlikely stars, such as second-born sons.
Even in the choosing of Abraham, the father of the people of Israel, there is no mention of Abraham's merit as the basis for God's initial call on his life. When Genesis does speak of Abraham's righteousness, it describes how God credits Abraham's faith as righteousness. (Gen 15:16) Abraham's standing before God is not dependent on Abraham being a perfect saint, but on Abraham's trust that God will be faithful and will keep his promises to him. This is illustrated in a graphic way when God makes a covenant with Abraham at the end of Genesis 15 by cutting animals in half and walking between the parts. This is not some crazy ritual that God invented; when two parties made a covenant, they would butcher some animals, cut them in two, and then walk through the separated parts as a sign that they are agreeing, "Let the same thing be done to me if I do not uphold this covenant." God, symbolized by the smoking firepot, passes between the carcasses but does not ask Abraham to do the same. That is huge! God is the powerful one in this agreement; God could demand just about anything from Abraham, and yet God takes all the conditions of the covenant upon himself. This is a foreshadowing of the way that God takes the punishment of the world upon himself in the person of Christ... but we'll get to that :)

To get back to Job, the book of Job breaks down the idea that the righteous will be blessed by God and the unrighteous will be punished by God, which is the vantage point of Job's friends. Job's example shows that life - and God - are much more complicated than that, because though he is probably a first-string pick for sainthood due to his righteousness and his devotion to God, he encounters massive suffering. We have seen the flipside of this in Genesis, where God chooses Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob by his own wisdom and in order to show his grace in their lives, not because they are already the holiest people on earth.  The blessing that they receive is not due to their righteousness but simply to God's choosing them. Both Genesis and Job subvert the simplistic equation of righteousness with physical blessing in this life.

Next time I'll write some more about how the book of Job looks ahead to the person of Christ.

John Madden and Job

I'm now reading Job. This book is definitely in the "deep end" of the Bible; I find it to be one of the more challenging books of the Bible to read, for a few reasons:

First, it's written in the form of long poetic dialogues that don't necessarily cover lots of new ground with every verse. I find myself asking, "What exactly is the point of that long rambling monologue Job just gave?" It can be hard to see where the conversation is heading when Job has said for the millionth time that he'd be better off dead.

Second, it's dealing with big questions of the nature of evil and the goodness of God. Are righteous people always spared from evil? Are the unrighteous always punished for their misdeeds? Does God cause suffering? Does God care about the plight of people who are suffering? Does God let Satan mess with people and their children and their health on a regular basis? Facing those questions head-on, as the book of Job does, is not provide a comfy, cozy reading experience. It demands a lot of us and can stir up troubling questions.

Third, what are we supposed to think about who's right here? Job and his friends do not see the situation the same way. Job keeps asking God, "Why have you done this to me?" And his friends reply, "You must have done something wrong to deserve this." Is Job still righteous or has he lapsed into unfair accusations against God? As I've been reading Job, I've been reminded that reading the Bible is not a flat experience, in which we easily figure out what the Bible wants me to think or do about x, y, or z. Have you ever heard the Bible characterized as a "rulebook for life" or as "God's playbook"? Those descriptions suggest that we can go to the Bible and find a simple, straightforward set of instructions about how to live the way God wants us to live. There are some texts in the Bible that fit that description better than others; the 10 Commandments are pretty straightforward, aren't they? But on the whole, the Bible is so much more complicated and complex than a John Madden football diagram. With a book like Job, you can't just lift any old verse and put it on a plaque, let alone conclude that that verse is the Bible's final word on suffering. Job has to be read from beginning to end in order to discover its overall point, and even then it provides much subtler and mysterious "answers" to those deep questions than most of us would like.

As the book goes on, I will write some more about what we might conclude or learn from Job, but for now I want to affirm that reading Job may seem complicated and troubling, especially compared to Genesis, which, while it wasn't all sweetness and light, was a more straightforward narrative compared with Job. Tomorrow I'll share some thoughts on how our reading of Genesis might help us read Job.

A classic John Madden diagram

Marc Chagall's Job in Despair

Sorry, John, I'm afraid reading the Bible is not always as easy as coming up with a winning play... Meet your new BFF, Job. He looks like a barrel of laughs, right? Just don't try to cheer him up; he hates it when his friends do that.

from Genesis to - Job?

As Week 3 ends, we finish the book of Genesis, which has set much of the groundwork for the Bible has been set. What are some of the major themes that you've noticed so far? Identifying themes can be as simple as looking for key words that are repeated frequently. One of the key words I've noticed is "blessing." God and humans are blessing/getting blessed left and right in Genesis. Blessing is connected to life and its goodness at creation, and with the call of Abraham, it gets connected to covenant. God makes covenant with particular people in Genesis, but he makes it clear that he isn't playing favorites, nor is he choosing the most righteous individuals on earth. He makes a covenant with Abraham and his descendants as a vehicle of blessing, not only for them but for all peoples. The scope of the covenant will continue to broaden as the story unfolds, until it reaches out to all people - but we'll get there in time.

After all of Jacob's conniving and reluctance to trust God, I was struck by his son Joseph's faith in God and in God's plan for his life and for his family. Joseph could have chosen to become bitter and hardened against his brothers because of the way they betrayed him, but instead he responds to them by saying:

Do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you. For two years now there has been famine in the land, and for the next five years there will be no plowing and reaping. But God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance. So then, it was not you who sent me here, but God... You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives. (Genesis 45:5-8, 50:20)

Joseph sees God at work through the evil that his brothers intended. This is an extremely important theme that we have already seen in Genesis. In Genesis 3, we saw how humans used their God-given freedom to do the very thing God asked them not to do. Consequences and curses come from their disobedience - and yet that is not the end of the story, because God is in the business of redemption. And so God does not give up on them; he is so powerful and wise that he can work even human failure and sin into his plan. The story of Joseph highlights the way that God can turn what people intend for evil into good.

Normally we would head into Exodus after Genesis - but Reading God's Story takes us down a very different path for now. Instead we will read the book of Job next, because the story of Job is set in the time period of the patriarchs. We are about to wrestle with some deep questions of the nature of evil and of God's goodness. As you read it, keep in mind what we have just learned about goodness and evil in the stories of Genesis. One of the benefits of reading the Bible in this way is that hopefully we will see connections between different books that we wouldn't have noticed otherwise. I don't think I've ever read Job alongside Genesis, but I hope it will result in some new insights.

If you're looking for a brief overview of the story of Job, check out the recent episode of Adventures in Odyssey called "Bernard and Job." Odyssey is a radio show for youth that does a wonderful job (no pun intended) of telling stories that show how faith applies to daily life. In this episode, Bernard the local window washer, tells the story of Job to a young girl who is struggling with several different disappointments at the same time. Click the link below and click on "Listen Now!" button and the player will pop up. Look for the episode called "Bernard and Job."



http://www.whitsend.org/

How God Woos Jacob

I am finding Genesis totally fascinating, so much so that I want to stop and reflect more, and yet I need to keep moving. I love the stories of Jacob and the way that God seeks him out and appears to him in such personal and profound ways, about which I'll say more below.

One way to read Genesis is to look at the curses that follow the snake's deception and human disobedience and then see how the consequences play out. Here in the stories of Jacob, I see those consequences in the ongoing acts of deception that he and Laban carry out. (Seems like they took a parseltongue lesson from the snake :)) I see them in Leah's "desire for her husband" (Gen. 3:16b), which is so sadly obvious in the way she names her sons (Gen 29:32, 34). I see them in Jacob's fear about meeting his brother Esau - once again brothers divided, as with Cain and Abel, and Ishmael and Isaac.

The story of Jacob and Esau's reunion just about killed me, it was so touching. For the first time I noticed echoes of Jesus' parable of the prodigal son.  Jacob comes humbling himself, saying he will be Esau's servant, and instead Esau "ran to meet him, hugged him, threw his arms around him, and kissed him. Then they wept." (Gen 33:4) The angry and shortsighted young man we knew Esau to be has now become generous and open-hearted. When Esau says in response to Jacob's offer of gifts, "I have enough, my brother," I just about fell out of my chair. Is this not the answer to so many of the problems in Genesis and in our world today, that we feel we do not have enough - enough power, enough money, enough blessing - and so we feel we need to take it from others? If Adam and Eve had stopped and said this to each other before eating from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, how differently this story would have turned out. Esau seems to have stumbled upon some font of wisdom down there in Seir.

As we trace the consequences of sin, we also trace the ongoing faithfulness of God to redeem the mess. If there's one thing these stories of Genesis make clear, it is that God's presence and work does not mean that all problems are instantly resolved. (On the flip side, it also means that just because everything isn't perfect and hunky-dory does not mean that God doesn't exist or is powerless to fix things. God takes the long view on this whole redemption business.) God really is writing an ongoing story, and he's going to work with the characters as they are and yet also transform them. Jacob is not a saint by any definition, and yet God pursues Jacob until God can be known as Jacob's God.

I've been noticing how God's faithfulness shows up in his persistence to claim the next generation as his own when the older generation of covenant-partners dies. The transition from Abraham to Isaac goes pretty smoothly; God shows up to Isaac twice in Genesis 26 telling him he will make the same covenant with him that he made with Isaac's father Abraham, and Isaac is down with that. He builds an altar, calls on the name of Yahweh in 26:25, and things are good. Jacob, however, is a trickier case. It takes Jacob 20 years from his encounter with God at Bethel before he will claim God as "his God." At Bethel Jacob, ever the bargainer, says,

“IF God will be with me and watch over me on this journey, if He provides me with food to eat and clothing to wear, and if I return safely to my father’s house, THEN the LORD will be my God." (Gen 28:20)

Jacob tells God that if God fulfills all of these conditions, then Jacob will enter into a full covenant with God. This is completely backwards from the way covenants were made in that time - Jacob is definitely the vassal party here, not the feudal lord! Yet he is defining his participation in the covenant according to God's faithfulness to the conditions Jacob has set forth. This is pretty obnoxious negotiating on Jacob's part. But what does God do? God does not pull rank on Jacob, though he has every right to do so. instead God sets out to "woo" Jacob and to prove his faithfulness to him by doing exactly what Jacob asks - keeping him safe, blessing him with wives and children and livestock, and bringing him back safely to his father's house. Despite this, for years Jacob refers to God as his father's god, not his own. In Genesis 31:5, at the end of his 20 years with Laban, Jacob is still saying to his wives, "the God of my father has been with me." Note then the importance of Genesis 33:18-20:

After Jacob came from Paddan-aram, he arrived safely at Shechem in the land of Canaan and camped in front of the city. He purchased a section of the field where he had pitched his tent from the sons of Hamor, Shechem’s father, for 100 qesitahs. And he set up an altar there and called it “God, the God of Israel.”

Jacob is a changed man after his wrestling with God by the river Jabbok, and this change is memorialized in his new name, Israel. This is the first time that we see Jacob making an altar. Earlier at Bethel he set up a stone as a marker of the place where God appeared to him. Here he sets up an altar as an an act of worship, acknowledging God as his own God, "the God of Israel."

I truly believe that God is still in the same line of work, claiming the next generation as his own. God is not content to have grandchildren :) We learn from our parents' faith in God, but then we must have our own encounters with God, so that we can respond along with Jacob: "Surely God is in this place; surely God wants to be my God."

Gustave Dore's "Jacob Wrestling with The Angel"

End of Week 2

Two weeks of reading the Bible have now ended. I have really appreciated the notes that are included in Reading God's Story, framing each scene and wrapping things up at the end of each week. However, you may find yourself asking questions about the historical or cultural background of something in the text, and this Bible isn't going to supply those kind of answers. To supplement my reading, I've kept my NIV Study Bible by my side and turned to its notes when I had a question about something. For instance, today when reading about Jacob's dream, I was wondering about the "ladder" that he saw. The study notes told me that what Jacob saw was not a ladder with rungs but a stairway, the kind you have probably seen in pictures of the ziggurats, the pagan temples of the Ancient Near East. In the time of the patriarchs, ziggurats were seen as the link between heaven and earth and were given names like "The House of the Link Between Heaven and Earth" or "The House of the Foundation-Platform of Heaven and Earth." That's quite a different image from the ladder I've usually pictured. It says in Genesis that Jacob saw "a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it." Learning about cultural background like this doesn't make what God does here any less special; hopefully it enriches our understanding of the text and the time in which Jacob lived. This becomes a major milestone for Jacob; in the previous chapter Isaac transfers his covenant status to Jacob by blessing him, but here God himself confirms that he will continue his covenant with Isaac with this second born son Jacob. It's important to note the link here between covenant and blessing - that will continue throughout the story and will take on greater meaning as we begin to read about the people of Israel and the covenant God makes with them at Sinai.

Also, I have noticed that the Holman Christian Standard version (the version in RGS) does not include footnotes about the meaning of people's names in the way that the NIV does. In Genesis (and elsewhere in the Bible) each person's name has significance about their identity or origin. For instance, Jacob means "grasper of the heel" or "deceiver," which is helpful to know as we see Jacob persuade his brother out of his birthright and trick his father into giving him the blessing of the firstborn. It also highlights the irony of Jacob being tricked by Laban into marrying Leah first before Rachel. Again, having another resource at hand can be helpful. On the other hand, if you're trying to read through the Bible in a year along with me, there may be things that you decide to leave for now and return to in greater detail once the year is over.

If you're following along with me, you've now read 40 pages of the Bible. How is it going? What has been surprising for you? Do you have a different study Bible that you would suggest? I invite your comments.

The Most Frequently Asked Question in Genesis

Week 2 focuses on the stories of Abraham and Sarah.

Have you noticed that in Genesis God keeps asking people where they are? 

• Gen. 3:9 The LORD God called out to the man and said to him, "Where are you?"

• Gen. 4:9 Then the LORD said to Cain, "Where is your brother Abel?"

• Gen. 16:8 The Angel of the LORD said, "Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?"

• Gen. 18:9 The three visitors to Abraham ask, "Where is Sarah your wife?"

Asking where someone is is a very basic question that we would expect to show up in just about any book. But here in Genesis God asks where someone is 4 times. Surely God does know where they are! Perhaps in the case of Adam and Eve, it is an early indication of the breach made in their relationship with God. I find it poignant to think of the Creator coming down to the garden to walk with man and woman, and he finds that things have gone horribly wrong and his beloved creation has gone missing.

In the case of Cain, God's "where" question gives Cain the opportunity to confess his sin, which he shrugs off with a defiant "Am I my brother's keeper?"

In the case of Hagar, the question seems to me a gentle one, an invitation for her to tell her story. This is a beautiful story of the angel of God pursuing a runaway servant girl into the desert and urging her to return home. Hagar herself is floored that the angel of the Lord should appear to her. This is not the only time Hagar will encounter the angel in the desert.

And in the case of Sarah, I think it is a simple question that highlights that Sarah is listening to their conversation from the tent. That these divine visitors should ask about her indicates her importance to the story that is unfolding.

To me, these questions suggest that God is pursuing humanity, sometimes to seek justice, sometimes to seek their truthful confession, sometimes to give them a promise, sometimes to bring them home. God truly has not washed his hands of humanity; he is seeking them out to involve them in his plan. Even back in the day of Adam and Abraham, we see that God was then, as now, the Hound of Heaven.

If you have an idea about why God asks these questions, I'd love to hear them in the comments section.

-----------


As we read these stories about Abraham and Sarah, I keep thinking of this song by Andrew Peterson, "Canaan Bound."

God's Purposes with an Unlikely Character

Week 2 in Reading God's Story has begun and with it Act 2 of God's story, according to George Guthrie's schema of dividing the entire Bible up into 3 acts:

Act 1: God's Plan for All People (which is finished in the first week of reading)
Act 2: God's Covenant People (the story of Israel)
Act 3: God's New Covenant People (the New Testament)

Reading the Bible as one large, cohesive story helps us to become more familiar with the larger purposes of God. (remember our key line from Gregory the Great about learning the heart of God.) We see that God's actions as recorded in Scripture aren't random; they have a purpose behind them. The major purpose of God in creation was to enjoy and bless his creation and to give it freedom to grow and multiply and fill the earth. God has a fundamental appreciation for life and for abundance. In fact, the late theologian Colin Gunton says that if there is "one single leading idea in Scripture," it is probably the word LIFE.  I love that, because I think that is so unexpected, so counter to the common idea that the Bible is an old musty book or is focused on sin and judgment. It's about LIFE! And yet as we saw on Week 1, Day 2 of our reading, death crept in so quickly. We don't have a crystal clear explanation for this in Scripture; we still have questions about reading Genesis 2, like: If God made his world good, where did evil come from? Where did the serpent's wily attitude come from? Why didn't God prevent things from going wrong? None of those questions are answered fully by the text itself, though we can speculate on that based on other aspects of Scripture or theology (such as that creation needed to have freedom to turn away from God in order for abiding by God's ways to have any meaning). (Plus I would also say, keep in mind that in Genesis 1, God said his creation was "good", not "perfect.")

Last week, we saw how God's grief over the corruption of his creation resulted in the flood. After the flood, though, God committed to never destroy his creation on that level again. Now God's major purpose is to find another means to deal with that corruption. If we think of God as the author of the grand story of the Scripture, this means that he won't try to scrap the story again; he won't crumple the papers up, toss them in the wastebasket and start with a clean sheet of paper. Instead, God will keep writing the story until it comes to a satisfying conclusion. Here at the beginning of Act 2, God's efforts to redeem his work turn to Abram. It is so interesting to me how God chooses to redeem his creation. He doesn't snap his fingers and just fix everything. Perhaps that would dishonor the integrity and reality of his creation, which is more than just a puppet he is manipulating. Instead, he chooses one man and calls him out "to a land that I will show you" (Gen 12:1). God starts really small. And as Genesis 12 unfolds, we see that God picked an unlikely character to star in his play. He picked a guy who in verse 4 is gutsy enough to leave his city and home and go to an unknown land, and yet by verse 11 is wimpy enough to throw his wife and her honor under the bus to escape Pharaoh's envy (which, by the way, is entirely imagined by Abram! When Pharaoh discovers Abram's lie, he gives Sarah back to him with a touch of righteous disgust. The pagan ruler is shown to have character here where Abram does not. Keep an eye out for that theme; it'll crop up again). Whereas before God chose a righteous man Noah, immediately after being chosen, Abram strikes out big time. Plus, as we have already discovered, Abram and his wife have no children, and Sarai is barren. This ought to rule them out from being the progenitors of anything, and yet they are God's choice to be father and mother of his people.

I think this is an important and encouraging detail for us. God doesn't choose Abram because of his virtue or his righteousness. In fact, God's reason for choosing Abram is a mystery. There is no hint given in the text for why God chooses him. Perhaps it's because God knew that Abram would say yes to packing up and leaving Ur, but again, the text doesn't say that explicitly. As you read the Bible, keep an eye out for this theme of God giving unlikely characters a chance to star in his play. God loves to surprise us  and to overthrow our expectations of who's righteous and who's not, who's in and who's out. Abram will not be the last unlikely character!

__________
Sadly, there is no way to do footnotes in blogger, so I'm just going to include references at the bottom of my posts:

> Colin Gunton writes about life as the central idea of Scripture in his book The Christian Faith in the "Front Matter" (ie Introduction).

___________

Bonus Material!

For those who are interested, here are a few other schemas for dividing up Scripture...

1. John Stott's fourfold scheme of biblical history that outlines 4 major events in the Bible, each of which reveal an important reality:
Creation ("the good")
Fall ("the evil")
Redemption ("the new")
Consummation ("the perfect")

Stott says that "this fourfold biblical reality enables Christians to survey the historical landscape within its proper horizons." This can be found in Stott's book Issues Facing Christians Today, starting on page 62.

2. NT Wright's analogy of the Bible being like a 5 Act Play:
Act 1: Creation
Act 2: Fall
Act 3: Israel
Act 4: Jesus
Act 5: Church (this act is unfinished and is still being written in the world today)

This is from a lecture Wright gave in 1989, which is happily available online here. Scroll down until you see the heading "The Authority of a Story."

3. And then, to go all patristic on you, Augustine's 4 fold description of the state of humankind in the 4 phases of Scripture:
(a) at Creation: humankind is able to sin, able not to sin (posse peccare, posse non peccare)
(b) after the Fall: humankind is not able not to sin (non posse non peccare)
(c) through Christ: humankind is able not to sin (posse non peccare)
(d) in heaven: humankind is unable to sin (non posse peccare)

Good times, huh? I love Latin!

Noah & A New Beginning

Today on Week 1 Day 5, I finished the story of Noah. I have often marveled that children's books tell the story of Noah as though it were perfect reading material for children. I think the reason it gets told to children is that it features lots of animals! When we read the story as adults, however, we find that it is a story of destruction and judgment. It is sobering and even disturbing to think of God bringing about such widespread destruction. God was grieved that his creation - the creation he had made so lovingly, the creation in which he took so much delight, the creation to which he had given freedom - had gone so awry. God had placed humans in 3 fundamental relationships - 1) God to human, 2) human to human, 3) human to earth/animals - and as Genesis 3-5 illustrates, brokenness had pervaded all three of them.

Creation had gone so wrong that God decided he needed to wipe it out and start again. But God didn't entirely give up on his creation. God chose one family, the family of Noah, as the remnant who would find safety in the ark until the flood was ended and then repopulate the earth.

After the flood water recedes, something amazing happens that seals the fate of God's creation forever. God decides to never do something like this again. Rather than giving up on his creation gone awry, God recommits himself to it forever:

"Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done." (Genesis 8:21)

Genesis 9 describes this commitment on God's part as a covenant. A covenant is a promise between two parties to commit to an ongoing relationship with one another. (It can be a little more complex than that, which I'll get into later, but that's the basic idea.) God makes a covenant with Noah, his descendants, and with every living thing, including the animals:

"I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth. I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth." (Genesis 9:9-11)

God promises to be creation's God forever. God is promising to protect it and never give up on it, no matter how bad things get. No matter how grieved or angry God gets about what happens on the earth, he will not use his divine power to simply snap his fingers and destroy all life again. Instead, God will find a way to redeem creation from the brokenness that has pervaded it on every level.

A covenant always has a sign as a reminder to its two parties of their commitment to one another. God sets the rainbow in the sky as the sign of this covenant that he makes with Noah and creation. Some say that God is setting his warrior's bow in the sky, indicating that he will not use violence against creation anymore.

I ran into a rainbow recently in a very special place. When I was in Israel in November, we visited Mt Tabor, the place of the transfiguration, where Jesus' glory was revealed to the disciples. When we drove up the mountain, it was rainy and foggy and just miserable out. We gratefully went inside the church to get out of the weather. Fr. Kamal, our guide, showed us a window with 2 peacocks, which he said were symbols of the resurrection, because when they lose a feather another grows back in its place, and because their feathers form the shape of a rainbow. Between the peacocks was a chalice with a brilliant sunburst behind it, complete with a tiny rainbow. Fr. Kamal said that when the sun is setting, the sunbeams stream through the western windows and light up this window, which faces east.

I was kind of disappointed that we wouldn't get to see the window that way due to the weather. When we left the church, though, the clouds had broken, and the sun was shining brilliantly through them. As we turned and looked back at the church, we saw a glorious double rainbow off to the north, glowing on a background of dark clouds. I felt as though the story of the transfiguration had been brought to life - this gray cold day had been completely transformed into the most beautiful days I had ever seen. And the rainbow served as a reminder to us, yet again, that God keeps his promises. God has still to this day honored his commitment to his creation and is still, after all these millennia, at work redeeming it. Thanks be to God. 

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Resources:
I have gained more sensitivity to the themes of Covenant and Kingdom in the Bible through the teaching of Mike Breen, who leads 3dm, a movement of churches that are seeking to focus on discipleship and mission as their core purpose. Mike calls Covenant and Kingdom the two "DNA strands" of the Bible. One of my goals in reading the Bible this time around is to be alert to how both of those strands weave their way through the Bible. I also like the analogy that Covenant and Kingdom are like two lenses of a pair of glasses that we put on when we read the Bible. I want to learn to read the Bible with my Covenant and Kingdom glasses on during this year. I will blog about both of these themes and where I see them crop up in the text.

Mike has written a book called Covenant and Kingdom, in which he works his way through the Bible pointing out where these strands show up. The book has been so popular that it is currently out of print. 3dm will be printing more, but in the meantime there is an e-book edition at the link above.

Love Came Down at Creation

Today I continued in Genesis with the story of Noah. I have been noticing the repetition of the phrase, "So and so walked with God."

It is first said of Enoch: "Enoch walked with God." 

Then it is said of Noah: "Noah walked with God." 

When I read those verses, I thought of Genesis 3:8, when Adam and Eve heard the "sound of the LORD God walking in the garden at the cool of the day." Rather than going out to join God, they "hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden."

This is one of the very first pictures of God's relationship to humankind, one from before the fall, so it calls for some close attention. It is common to think of God as the watchmaker who got everything going but then withdrew to a distance to see how this "earth project" of his would play out. That is not the picture given in the Bible! God is already, here in the first chapter of the Bible, coming down to earth to be with his people. Coming to walk in the garden with Adam and Eve is a sign of friendship between God and humanity. I find confirmation of God's desire to be friends with humankind in a phrase that is repeated over and over in the Bible: "They will be my people, and I will be their God" (Exodus 6:7, Jeremiah 31:33, Revelation 21:3 to name a few). As the story of Adam and Eve shows, that relationship gets mightily complicated by the introduction of sin into the world, and humans begin to turn away from God's presence, but the bottom line is that God desires relationship with humanity and is willing to go to the greatest of lengths to restore that relationship. The whole story of the Bible is about just how far God will go to win humanity back to himself.

In this Christmas season (we still have one more day!), when we focus on Christ's coming to earth, I am now reminded that God has been coming to earth since the beginning. Christina Rossetti wrote that "Love came down at Christmas" - and Love came down at Creation as well.

P.S. I learned about how "friendship" defines our relationship with God through the book God's Companions, by Sam Wells, in which he describes how "God gives his people everything they need to worship him, be his friends, and eat with him." I recommend it.

Reading God's Story gives a few pages of reading a day - so far only 2 or 3 pages. It's very doable! I am on page 12 as of today. If you're interested in reading the Bible this year, consider buying a copy of RGS - it's available on Amazon in print or as an e-book.

In the Big Inning

Did you ever hear that joke? You may have if you grew up in church with a kind but cheesy Sunday School teacher...

"Where is baseball first mentioned in the Bible?"

"Genesis 1 - in the big inning!"

[dead silence]

Moving on...

Most people find it difficult to start the new year and keep a resolution perfectly from beginning to end, all 365 days. Most people also find it difficult to start with Genesis 1 and read straight through all 1000+ pages to the final chapter of Revelation 22. Take it from me - I've tried it before myself many times. It's common to get bogged down in the middle of Leviticus, if you make it that far. If you're reading a Bible with little or no notes or commentary, it can be confusing to figure out what's really going on or what is the significance of the passage you're reading. On the flip side, some study Bibles give so much information that you spend half your time reading the notes at the bottom of the page, which can also sidetrack you from keeping focused on the story at hand.

This time around I'm reading a Bible with a twist - it's called Reading God's Story. (Just for the record, my recommendation for this Bible is entirely my own idea and was not solicited by anyone.) RGS starts with Genesis 1, but the text of the Bible has been rearranged to make clear the "grand story of the Bible." This raises the question - how is the Holy Bible you might have on your shelf structured?

In its standard order the Bible is *roughly* chronological, in that it starts at creation, moves through the history of the people of Israel and on to Jesus and the church. However, there are several books that are very much not in order. Ezra/Nehemiah are the stories of God's people returning to their land after exile - but those books come long before the prophets, who write about the exile itself. Job is a very ancient book that belongs somewhere around the time of Abraham, but it's sandwiched between Esther and the Psalms. This can make it confusing for readers trying to work their way from cover to cover, because the timeline jumps around.

What Christians call the Old Testament is known in the Jewish tradition as the Tanakh, which is actually an acronym (TaNaKh) for the major categories of writings that it contains:

1. Torah - teaching
Torah includes Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

2. Nevi'im - prophets
Nevi'im includes both the classic prophets, both major (like Isaiah and Jeremiah) and minor (like Zechariah and Hosea) and historical books like Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings.

3. Ketuvim - writings
Ketuvim is everything else - poetry, like Psalms and Job, and wisdom literature, like Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. It also (for some reason - anyone know why?) includes Ezra/Nehemiah and Chronicles.

The ordering of the Old Testament therefore follows more closely these 3 categories (with the Ketuvim placed between sections of the Nevi'im) than a strict timeline. Reading God's Story reorders the Bible so that it flows a little better and helps the reader stay on track with one timeline, rather than having to decipher how what they're reading fits in with the big picture.

For example, when I began yesterday, I found that the Week 1 Day 1 reading is - you guessed it - Genesis 1 and 2, the account of creation. On Week 1 Day 2, however, I read the first few verses of John 1, which like Genesis 1 also starts with "In the beginning" and describes Christ's presence at creation as the second member of the Trinity. I also read two beautiful creation psalms, Psalm 8 and 104, that describe God's work in making the world and all its creatures. It was refreshing to find passages from other parts of the Bible set alongside Genesis 1 to give a fuller picture of what was going on at creation. I think reading RGS will be intriguing, because each day I will be interested in finding out which readings have been chosen to complement each other.

If you're following along in Reading God's Story, today is Week 1, Day 2. Remember that the RGS reading plan only gives 6 readings per week, so you get one day off this week! If you're thinking about following along, you can buy Reading God's Story at a Christian bookstore or on Amazon from the link above. There is also an e-book version available.