Too Marvelous for Me

Some thoughts about the Bible

2025-05-20T13:02:00.000-07:00

(written in May 2024 and not published until May 2025!) The Bible is my favorite book. I read a lot, I always have, and I love many books. As I've grown older (and mostly wiser), I've lost my tolerance for bad books - this is subjective, as our opinions always are, but for me "bad books" can be badly-written books, simply mediocre books, or books that I find poisonous in their outlook and subject matter. I don't waste my time reading bad books - life is too short and there are too many wonderful books waiting to be read (or re-read).

I recognize that, for some people at least, the Bible would fall into their "bad books" category, although I expect most of them have never read the entire Bible and many of them are responding to a mental stereotype of what the Bible is.

It brings us to that interesting question: how do we know what we know?

The Bible wasn't always my favorite book-- I grew up in a Methodist church in Los Feliz (east Hollywood) because my parents were Methodists from Iowa and it never occurred to them that a post-WWII California Methodist church was appreciably different than their Depression-era midwest rural Methodist church. My father observed, decades later, that when he heard our pastor saying non-normative things (e.g., questioning the virgin birth, questioning the physical resurrection of Jesus) he thought the pastor was simply trying to be provocative, to cause the parishioners to think. So I assumed I was a Christian - after all, I attended Sunday School and church every week, unless I was running a fever (this is the equivalent of believing yourself to be a car because you live in the garage), and as a child I would try to read the Bible ...and it was like eating sawdust.

When I actually became a Christian at the age of 18 (the intentional transaction of giving my life to Jesus and accepting His death on the cross in my place), the experience of reading the Bible changed: it started to come alive, it was no longer sawdust. But there were other factors in my life that interfered with and slowed the process of maturing as a Christian that went on for decades (I don't want to derail this post with that stuff); it wasn't until I was blindsided by my ex-husband's abandonment that the Bible became my essential lifeline

So, for about 30 years now, the Bible has been my favorite book and stands head-and-shoulders above any other in terms of importance and significance. I've approached daily reading in a variety of ways: one of the fun things was reading all of Psalms and Proverbs every month (this is easily done; Proverbs has 31 chapters so you read the chapter which corresponds to the day of the month and chapter 31 simply isn't read every month. The book of Psalms has 150 chapters (the Coptic church includes Psalm 151, as do most Catholic Bibles) so my preferred method is to read the psalm which corresponds to the day of the month, plus 30, 60, 90, and 120. So on the first, I read Psalm 1, Psalm 31, Psalm 61, Psalm 91, and Psalm 121. I save Psalm 119 (all 176 verses!) for the 31st of the month.) - I did that for about 6 or 7 years but it tends to trigger a kind of 'legalism' in me and if I missed a day or two, I felt compelled to read ALL the chapters I'd missed. That was my "devotional" reading, and my "study" reading would be working through a specific book, often from the Hebrew scriptures.

A better approach for me has turned out to be listening to the Bible (first thing most mornings); this started as my eyes developed cataracts and reading a physical Bible became a challenge for me. I start with Genesis 1 and continue through the end of Revelation and then I start over again. I listen to the Bible, "cover to cover," about three times each year, and have done for more than a decade now. I've used various recorded versions, including once a chronological Bible (scriptures ordered by historic age, so various prophets are interwoven with the history books - this wasn't entirely satisfying for me), but I'm just starting another trip through the Bible and I find I'm excited as I think about what's coming up ("this is when THAT happens!").

I'm not advocating this approach for everyone, although I do think it's worthwhile at least once to read the whole Bible, cover-to-cover, quickly, as if you were reading a novel - the benefit is that you can see the arc of the story God is presenting, and we miss that arc when we read it slowly and in small pieces.

Mostly I want to share some essential elements about the Bible that I think most people miss - sometimes for lack of exposure, sometimes because they've never thought it through, sometimes because they've been given bad information.

1. A LOT of the Bible is reportage: it's telling us what happened and it doesn't editorialize. We're now so used to biased news that we don't recognize straightforward reporting. So when we start reading the Bible, we come across horrific stuff and the Bible doesn't always say, "and this was BAD"... for me, an essential point of growth was asking the LORD to show me His heart - and it's there, in the Bible, a generally consistent presentation with a few points of real tension. The Torah, the Prophets, and the Gospels are the most explicit presentations of the heart of God. The history books are less explicit and fall into the largest sections of reportage.

2. The Bible is NOT exhaustive. It doesn't tell us everything and it doesn't try to tell us everything. I've had a few scientist friends dismiss the Bible because it's not a science text - right, it's not a science text and it's not meant to be.

3. It's much easier to see and understand the prophetic from the post-fulfillment position. It's pretty easy to see Jesus fulfilling assorted old testament prophecies, now that He's come (...for the first time!); it's important to remember that the Jews were actively looking for the Messiah at the time of His coming and most of them missed Him. There remains a great deal of Messianic prophecy yet to be fulfilled in the Hebrew scriptures, as well as statements made by Jesus about the coming end of the age, and prophecies within the new testament epistles, not to mention Revelation, so....

4. Don't try to nail down future fulfillment of prophecy; instead hold it with an open hand. As you weave together the fabric of "what is yet to come" in your mind, drawing from all over the Bible, there are certain positions that have become quite fixed among various streams of Christianity. I can almost guarantee that nobody has got it completely right and we're all going to be surprised by something!

Good Friday in Isolation

2020-04-10T19:32:00.002-07:00

One of the things that has struck me this year, considering the oddity which is much of the world self-isolating to "flatten the curve" of the COVID-19 pandemic, is that we have a rare opportunity to relate to the disciples of Jesus that first year: the Shepherd was struck and the sheep were scattered.* Only John was present at the crucifixion - the disciples and followers were afraid, very understandably, and wouldn't have gone to the Temple or any synagogue that Sabbath day, for fear of the powers-that-be, the same powers that coerced Pilate to crucify Jesus after he found him innocent of the charges brought against him.

His followers were afraid and isolated and the world seemed very dark and hopeless.

We have an advantage over them - we know what they wouldn't know until after sunrise on the first day of the week: the tomb in which He had been laid was empty.

Now after the Sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to look at the grave. And behold, a severe earthquake had occurred, for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled away the stone and sat upon it. And his appearance was like lightning, and his clothing as white as snow. The guards shook for fear of him and became like dead men. The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid; for I know that you are looking for Jesus who has been crucified. He is not here, for He has risen, just as He said. Come, see the place where He was lying. Go quickly and tell His disciples that He has risen from the dead; and behold, He is going ahead of you into Galilee, there you will see Him; behold, I have told you.” (Matthew 28:1-7)

And we have enjoyed centuries of gathering together as communities of believers, remembering the Passion of our Lord and Savior, observing Maundy Thursday, walking through the Stations of the Cross and grieving the extraordinary act of love that He committed upon the Cross "...for God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life." (John 3:16).

In the midst of our tears, we have been together in the remembrance of His great sacrifice.

But this year, we have the unique opportunity to experience something more like the very first year, in a different emotional state, a profound lack of physically-present community. And maybe we ought to lean-into that a little bit and feel the isolation which has been imposed upon us, let it be part of Good Friday and Holy Saturday.

Our Jewish friends are celebrating Passover this week and it's a very odd Pesach for them, too - instead of larger family gatherings going through a seder together they are hunkered down in households, sometimes alone. There's a way in which that first Passover started a season in which the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were isolated from the rest of the world ...for forty years, as it turned out, since they refused the invitation to enter the land after two years (Numbers 13 & 14).

Steve Bell is a Christian singer-songwriter and a number of years ago I had the opportunity to see him live and hear, for the first time, the following pair of songs - and I was destroyed, I just wept and wept. The first, Big Mistake, is Israel as the betrothed of God, and the second is the response of the Lord in Lenten Lands - I commend them both to you for your edification. God bless you and yours.

https://soundcloud.com/pilgrimage-steve-bell/a-big-mistake
https://soundcloud.com/pilgrimage-steve-bell/lenten-lands

You can buy the album from which these two songs come here.

*Jesus says this in Matthew 26:31, referencing a prophetic word in Zechariah 13:7

Breaking Silence, Losing Weight

2020-01-02T18:49:00.000-08:00

January 2nd is my grandmother's birthday; I always figured it's the WORST day for a birthday: people are exhausted from all the gifts and celebrations and just want to climb into a cave for a few days. But J.R.R. Tolkien's birthday is January 3rd, by which point folks are willing to remember enough to raise a toast to "The Professor!"

I'm sharing this now because a lot of people start the year with a resolution and, for many, that resolution is often to lose weight.

In this past year (just over a year, I'd started changing the way I eat in mid-December of 2018) I've lost a bit over 50 pounds and, having been seriously obese for most of my adult life and continuously for the last 40-plus years, that's kind of a big deal.

What I've learned --and the reason for this post is to share what I've learned-- is that we have LOTS of bad information about how to lose weight and surprisingly little good information about how our bodies work and process food and regulate fat.

So, after years of blithely saying, "I gave up sex and drugs and rock'n'roll, I'm not giving up chocolate," I was assigned a new doctor by Kaiser and she was simply the right person at the right time with a message I could actually hear: she said, "you're really healthy but you've been obese a long time and it's going to eventually catch up with you. Read this book."

I was grudgingly listening, trying to avoid my knee-jerk response, and then I saw the cover of the book on her computer and I realized, "I already OWN that book!"

The book is The Obesity Code and I'd bought the audiobook from Audible (it was probably the Daily Deal one day... and I hadn't listened to it yet) - so I went home and started listening to it, as I worked around the house, as I drove up to Los Angeles, etcetera.

There are a number of things which I found challenging to wrap my brain around: calories aren't the issue, dietary fat is not the issue, and we don't get fat because we overeat: we overeat because we've gotten fat...

That's still hard to wrap my brain around, and sometimes it has more to do with the way an author expresses himself (or herself, as the case may be). A second book that has been very beneficial is Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It; both books are complementary and present a compelling and, for me, effective argument for eating very differently from what the U.S. government food pyramid advocates.

In a nutshell:
1) Sugar is the primary enemy and refined carbohydrates aren't far behind. Both books advocate removing added sugars (and not replacing them with artificial sweeteners as they don't really help and simply prolong the craving and taste for sweets - over time my sense of what is "sweet" has radically changed);
2) Don't "graze" - it's better to eat a few large meals than continually nibble and thus keep the blood insulin elevated;
3) Only eat when you're hungry;
4) Eat whole dairy - whole milk, butter, eggs with the yolks, etcetera;

I was leery of not starting my day with breakfast, in order to tell my body, "it's okay, we're going to eat today, you don't have to go into starvation mode!" since, sadly, I'd put my body into starvation mode in my early 20s, trying to take off the last 20 pounds that I'd gained after having my son (and falling into a pattern of eating from boredom) - I was eating one small meal a day and not losing weight. When I started eating like my boyfriend (breakfast, lunch, early dinner, no evening snacks) I lost weight, despite eating easily three or four times more food.

But, after a year of allowing myself not to eat until I felt hungry, it's working. Some days I have only one meal, some days I have three, most days I have two. It turns out that giving your body a nice long fast overnight is very good for your metabolism and gives the insulin system a rest.

So I've changed the way I eat and, since I didn't completely cut sugars out of my diet, I never had the killer sugar withdrawal headache, and my taste for sugary things has pretty much gradually disappeared. I feel free to eat whatever I want, I just think about it first - so I'll have a little corner of this or a small piece of that, if I want - but I don't have to and THAT freedom is really nice. I'm not thinking of this as a "diet," like I'll go back to the way I used to eat, once I get down to my desired weight. In fact, I don't have a "desired weight" other than to be on the 'under' side of 200 lbs. I figure my body will stabilize at a certain point and I won't be losing weight.

My doctor is very pleased, as you can imagine, and my blood work is happy (it wasn't bad before but it's better now). I feel good and have a lot more energy than I did in the past and THAT is a very nice thing, as an aging human! I haven't weighed this little since some point in the 1980s - and that's a very good thing.

So I encourage you, if you're resolving to lose weight in 2020, consider reading one or both of these books - and may they serve you as well as they've served me.*

*if you follow the link to Amazon and buy the books there, I may earn a few pennies in the process.

Christmas, day seven

2017-12-31T21:53:00.000-08:00

Every year I am more struck by the HUGENESS of the Incarnation, God taking on flesh.

YHWH, the creator of the Universe and everything which has been created, chooses to enter His own creation, and He does it in the most intimate and humble of ways: He enters as a zygote, exactly like every other human being (excepting Adam & Eve) ...barring the fact that the sperm wasn't delivered in the usual manner, by a human father, which would pass along the sin nature common to all humanity. Whatever the specific physiological details of the quickening of the Messiah in the womb of the Virgin Mary (in Luke 1:35, the angel Gabriel says, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; and for that reason the holy Child shall be called the Son of God.”), this particular miracle is small, compared to all of Yahweh's amazing miracles of creation; after all, there's no reason the Maker of the Universe can't essentially snap His fingers and say, "Boom, you're pregnant."

But it's shocking that such a Being would humble Himself in such a way, submitting to the complete human experience from the inside. It's kind of like doing open heart surgery in utero, except the extremes of size and concept are even bigger.

And this year, as we sang Away in a Manger, I was staggered by the reality that no palace on earth would be sufficiently glorious for the Person of Jesus - yet He embraced the discomfort and the poverty and the risk that Mary accepted, and Joseph along with her, once he'd been directed not to divorce her quietly, on account of this surprising and embarrassing pregnancy. How many slurs and whispers did they all endure, through the years? We get the scribes and Pharisees' clear accusation in John 8:41 ("we are not born of fornication"). Yeshua was literally born in a barn, to a couple in duress and distress, a forced migration in order to comply with a Roman census (I submit this "cartoon"; it does a great job of reminding us of what it might be like, if it happened here and now).

So how do we celebrate and remember this most stunning and contradictory of miracles?

We spend nearly two months working ourselves into a frenzy of spending and fretting over obligations of frantic gift-giving and all the gift-buying, gift-wrapping, gift-mailing, and gift-receiving entailed, not to mention sending out the only snail-mail correspondence we may do all year. We decorate our homes and our pets. We travel great distances to spend the holiday with family or friends that we might not otherwise see and may not actually like; we overeat, indulging in special holiday meals, foods, and a plethora of seasonal cookies, cakes, pies, and candies. We feel huge pressure to deliver at an impossibly high standard - and many folks who are alone during the holidays battle the great black dog of depression.

And I can't help but wonder, is this really a response to the miracle of God physically entering His creation? And I can't help but think the answer is no.

It's sort of like misdirection, "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain," sleight of hand... and even for those of us who believe the miracle and choose to worship the Incarnate Messiah, it's really hard to stay in the place of wonder, to not grow a callous over the nerves which otherwise scream, "God did WHAT?! Are you kidding me?!"

And I remember Him exhorting us to circumcise our hearts - and how often He instructs us to do it; clearly we need to be reminded. I need to be reminded. I hope somewhere in this season you've had the opportunity to just stand in awe of the great mystery which is the incarnation of Christ, God enrobed in flesh.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Here's a song I wrote nearly 40 years which tries to capture a little of that amazement
Can You Imagine That Night?" (live room sound, 2004 recording. Please visit the Moonbird Music Can You Imagine That Night? page for lyrics and link to the 1980s recorded pop version.

Today, if you hear His voice...

2017-04-04T15:58:00.000-07:00

This year Bible Study Fellowship has been studying the gospel of John and I always think of John's gospel as a knife-edge, a blade which becomes sharper and sharper until finally it's a scalpel, impossible to sit-the-fence or stand on that surface: you are going to come down on one side or the other. John himself is explicit about this: in the penultimate chapter of his gospel he writes, "Therefore many other signs Jesus also performed in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing you may have life in His name." (John 20:30-31)

I'm seeing that God has a pattern of giving opportunities to hear, to engage with Him, to turn from our natural ways, to repent and be saved - but when we reject what He says, what He's showing us, He stops there. Jesus speaks of this dynamic when He instructs the disciples, sent to preach that the kingdom of heaven is at hand throughout Judea, "Whoever does not receive you, nor heed your words, as you go out of that house or that city, shake the dust off your feet. Truly I say to you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city." (Interesting that Sodom and Gomorrah, although physically destroyed by the LORD, have not yet experienced the day of judgment - wow).

Jesus said, "He who is not with Me is against Me; and he who does not gather with Me scatters. Therefore I say to you, any sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven people, but blasphemy against the Spirit shall not be forgiven. Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, either in this age or in the age to come." (Matthew 12:30-31).

Salvation is of the Jews (John 4:22) and Jesus came specifically to the Jews, teaching and healing, fulfilling the scriptures about His coming to them, but their religious leaders rejected Him and most of the common people, while fascinated by Him and eager to see the miracles He performed or eat the food He multiplied to feed them, didn't recognize Him as Messiah. The crowds, gathered for the Passover feast in Jerusalem, met Him as He entered the city riding on a donkey's colt, waved palm branches, threw down their coats, and cried "Hosanna! Blessed is He who comes in the Name of the LORD, even the King of Israel." (Matthew 21, Mark 11, Luke 19, John 12) but the Pharisees were horrified, knowing it was a messianic proclamation and calling upon Jesus to rebuke the people and His disciples. Instead Jesus laments over the city, saying, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were unwilling. Behold, your house is being left to you desolate! For I say to you, from now on you will not see Me until you say, ‘BLESSED IS HE WHO COMES IN THE NAME OF THE LORD!’” (Matthew 23:37).

A few days later the crowds would cry out, "crucify Him!" and the religious leaders would get their way, eliminating this trouble-maker with the help of Pilate, who condemns a man he knows to be innocent to an horrific death, in an attempt to keep peace in Jerusalem. Yet within 40 years the Romans would flatten the city and destroy the temple and the Jews would not have their own nation again until 1948.

We know that Jesus came with the express purpose of dying on the cross: He was not a victim and had the power to stop it, at any point; instead He perfectly submitted to the will of His Father. But could things have gone differently for the Jews? Instead of crying out, "we have no king but Caesar!" (John 19:15) or “His blood shall be on us and on our children!” (Matthew 27:25), the Jews might have embraced Him as Messiah and King, putting the onus on Rome to crucify Jesus. We saw that Jesus even gave Judas every opportunity to turn away from his plan to betray Jesus (for a lousy 30 pieces of silver!). But for the first time I'm seeing that Jesus also gave Pilate opportunities to be a just judge and not be the person responsible for crucifying Jesus.

John 18:28 begins the interaction between Jesus and Pilate, as recorded by John (all of the gospels have different details, each one focusing on specific elements and based on various accounts, but they harmonize beautifully), and we see Pilate consistently trying to hand this prisoner back to the Jews: "see to it yourselves!" and later, "I find no guilt in Him" as Pilate tries to use Jesus for the Passover prison release - but the Jews cry out for Barabbas: a thief, a murderer, an insurrectionist.

He passes Jesus off to King Herod, who is in Jerusalem at that time, but Herod also finds no cause to detain Jesus and throws the hot potato back to Pilate.

Perhaps it's in the misguided and cruel hope that the Jews will be satisfied with seeing Jesus suffering and bleeding that Pilate orders Him flogged (a punishment so brutal that it could not be done to a Roman citizen) and after that, presenting Him to the crowd with, "Behold the man!" as if to say, "this pitiful creature? What harm can He do you?" Yet what really disturbs Pilate is when the crowd still insists he crucify Jesus, saying “We have a law, and by that law He ought to die because He made Himself out to be the Son of God.”

Pilate was Roman and whether he was a religious Roman or not, his culture believed in many gods and goddesses and believed they did sometimes father children with humans-- what if this strange man really is the son of a god? But Jesus hasn't answered Pilate since Pilate's cynical response, "what is truth?" so Pilate is now almost desperate in his interaction with Jesus: “You do not speak to me? Do You not know that I have authority to release You, and I have authority to crucify You?” so Jesus clarifies the situation: “You would have no authority over Me, unless it had been given you from above; for this reason he who delivered Me to you has the greater sin.”

But ultimately Pilate, like Caiaphas the high priest, decides it's more expedient for one man to die than to have a riot with much bloodshed (and dire political and personal consequences for himself) so, while attempting to wash his hands of responsibility, he turns Jesus over to be crucified.

What if Pilate had refused to crucify Jesus? I dare say that he would have been deposed and some ambitious Roman soldier, to stop the threatened upheaval in Jerusalem, would have done the job. Jesus was going to be crucified, raised up like the serpent on the pole in the wilderness (Numbers 21:8-9), so that anyone who might look upon Him for healing might be saved --but it didn't have to be at the hands of Pilate.

For He is our God, And we are the people of His pasture and the sheep of His hand. Today, if you would hear His voice, do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as in the day of Massah in the wilderness... (Psalm 95:7-8).

Pilate heard the voice of God that day: literally in Jesus; internally in his distressed reactions; externally in the warnings of his wife (Matthew 27:19) - but he ignored all of them, suppressing and denying the knowledge that something extraordinary was going on, that this Man was truly innocent, and opting instead to be Rome's appointee, sacrificing the innocent to keep an illusory peace and avoid charges that he allowed a threat to Caesar's rule to live.

What's a Child of God to do?

2016-02-11T16:46:00.000-08:00

It's been awhile since I've written here, because life intervenes and, this year, those interruptions were pretty extreme. But, entering 2016, I've seen a lot of different elements coalescing into patterns. I see the fragility of individual lives and the power of hate, the fury of the devil and his cohorts; I've seen some devilish assignments against godly people and his vengeful attempt to "poison the ground", to destroy reputations and undermine the life-work of some people close to me who are dedicated to Jesus Christ. I see the ongoing rise of terrorism and, as the world contorts itself more and more into the twisted shape which Jesus describes as "the end of the age," I think it's obvious we're closer than we've ever been.

Well, duh - of course we're closer than we've ever been. Ironically, there are those who fall into the "everything will continue as it has" camp; they're the ones who will be most surprised by the end of the age; this is effectively described by Peter in the third chapter of his second letter, particularly verses 3 & 4:

Know this first of all, that in the last days mockers will come with their mocking, following after their own lusts, 4 and saying, “Where is the promise of His coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all continues just as it was from the beginning of creation.” (2 Peter 3:3-4)

I appreciated a blogpost, "Why Pray About Terrorism?" by Doug TenNapel, written shortly after the December 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, in reaction to the cover of the New York Daily News screaming, "God Isn't Fixing This" and likewise another blog by Ken Ham - both ultimately shake their heads at 21st century American culture which, when it embraces God at all, too often embraces a God of its own manufacture, cobbled together out of carefully chosen nice-feeling snippets of scripture ("God is love"!) and pop-gospel and prosperity-gospel teachings which present God-as-Vending-Machine who will give you what you want if you pray enough, pray the right way, use the right scriptural phrases to demand this god do your will, etc.

But clearly that isn't the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of whom Jesus identified Himself as being uniquely the Son. Jesus not only knew the Hebrew scriptures, He embraced them and defended them. “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished." (Matthew 5:17-18) Yes, Jesus was highly critical of the scribes and pharisees - because these were the men educated in the Law and responsible for rightly teaching others, but instead they'd revised it to suit their own purposes; look at the exchange between Jesus and the pharisees and scribes in Mark 7 for several examples.

It seems pretty clear to me that either God (YHWH as presented in the Hebrew scriptures and worshipped by Jesus) is Who He Says He Is and we'd best come into a healthy, wholesome "fear of the LORD," or we've been unraveling a theological sweater since "The Age of Reason" and soon it will just be a whole lot of yarn. So what do we do? If you claim to believe in God, consider carefully the nature of the God in whom you believe — if the words, "the God of the Old Testament" or "the God I believe in" ever come out of your mouth, go back to the source material, the basis for your belief and examine yourself carefully to see if you are in the faith (2 Corinthians 13:5 - and if your faith doesn't conform to the gospel preached by the Apostles in the New Testament, on what basis do you believe what you choose to believe?

Because the God of the Bible has already "fixed" this, none of this is a surprise to Him and frankly shouldn't be much of a surprise to us. Oh, the details may be quite different from what we imagined but the core reality: a fallen world in the hands of a very powerful fallen creature, thrashing about in his last acts of rage and fury — that reality is recognizable. The days are shorter than they've ever been... so, people, get ready!

Death: It Could Be Worse!

2015-05-25T16:45:00.002-07:00

Death isn't the worst thing that can happen to us—

Until we figure this out, God will appear cruel and mean. Unless we believe Jesus when He says that He goes to prepare a place for us, we will have only this life to "look forward to" and thus cling to it with desperation and, if we are disappointed in this life, we are tempted to become bitter toward God.

If we're going to wrestle with this idea, we have to go back to Genesis 3 and the introduction of death. Years ago I wrote a short story about the Fall (you can read it here) - how could Adam and Eve be so tempted? How could Adam and Eve, experiencing direct contact with the Creator, end up doubting Him and listening to the deceiver?

You realize how easy it is for us to read Genesis 3 in punitive terms: and God said, "If you disobey me, I'll kill you!" and it's completely over-the-top, an out-of-proportion overreaction.

But that's not what God said:

Then the LORD God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. The LORD God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.” (Genesis 2:15-17)

Adam heard this directly from YHWH; Eve had not yet been created. So Eve heard it second-hand from Adam and he inflated the restriction: "The woman said to the serpent, “From the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat; but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat from it or touch it, or you will die.’" (Genesis 3:2-3). Why? Who knows! Maybe Eve was very curious and Adam just wanted to keep her away from the tree of the-knowledge-of-good-and-evil and this seemed like the easiest way to do it. But for now we're going to avoid that rabbit-trail.

Unlike God, we don't know the end from the beginning but, unlike Adam, we've lived through a lot more of human experience on this planet and know a good deal about God's interaction with humanity and the pinnacle is the fact that God Himself took on human flesh and walked among us in the Person of Jesus, so thoroughly identifying with us and our problem that He "became sin" for us and suffered the wrath of God in our place. So we know that God loves His creation, and specifically humanity, to an almost incomprehensible degree.

Would that God, loving us that way, say to Adam, "If you disobey me, I'll kill you!"?

No, of course not. So what was that about? I think it's spiritual physics, simply the way Creation works — it is orderly and follows physical laws and, I believe, spiritual laws: we will reap what we sow; it is mored blessed to give than to receive; the soul that sins must die, etcetera.

Suppose you live in New York city, in a high rise apartment building, and you have children. One of the things you must do is protect them from accidentally falling to their death on the sidewalk, 23 stories below. When they are very young you provide physical barriers but, as they grow older, you also have to teach them that heights are dangerous and falling can kill you, because they're going to go out into a world which doesn't always have physical barriers to protect them from the risk of falling to their death. At a certain point, your child becomes responsible for his or her own life. You are not saying to your child, "if you fall out the window, I will kill you!" You are saying to your child, "the natural consequence of falling out the window from this height is the death of your body." You are not being punitive; you are being factual.

Was it the fruit itself or the rebellion which set sin-and-death in motion? I don't know— we certainly weren't ready for the knowledge of good and evil. In an unfallen world, would God have one day said, "Alright, now you are ready - come and eat"? I don't know that, either.

But I do know that it was God's mercy which drove Adam and Eve out of the garden, lest they should stretch out their hands, and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever in that fallen condition. Because Jesus came and died for us in order that we might live forever, but forever in a different condition, a redeemed condition.

Most of us already know that sometimes living can be worse than death: we've seen a very old and sick family member, suffering, in pain, waiting to die. Some of us have thought, "Lord, take him already! Why are You letting him suffer this way?" and that sentiment is evidence that we know the man's death will bring release from a used-up or too-damaged body. Why doesn't God always answer that prayer quickly? I suspect there is soul-work which the Spirit of God is doing with the spirit of that man (or woman). I remember grieving Princess Diana's death in 1997; I felt like she hadn't yet figured out some critical spiritual truths, that she needed more time on this earth to come into agreement with God. My father, the physicist, said to me, "Lynn, Jesus had all the time He needed; we have no idea how much 'time' He spent with her in those few minutes between the car accident and her death." Yes. True.

But if that's the case, why does anyone ever experience a long, drawn-out death, in pain? Why doesn't God simply deal with them on the elastic edges of the time domain? Perhaps they're not yet willing or receptive. Maybe "suffering" serves a purpose in breaking down our stubbornness and dissolving our hard hearts. I wouldn't ever want to make a judgment though, when I see someone suffering in a hospital bed and I'm tempted to wonder why haven't died yet, because maybe it's not for their sake they suffer— maybe it's for the benefit of a friend or family member or even, God help me, for me. This has taught me to pray that God will do everything which He purposes in the life of that person and their family, that God will use and redeem their suffering.

The hardest kind of death, however, is death "before its time" - the death of a child, a teenager, a parent in their prime with young children. Death by accident or sudden illness. How often do we hear of someone dying after the age of 100 and we say, "well, they had a good long run"—? There is indeed an inherent sense of "wrongness" with those early deaths and I wonder if God didn't feel something like that for Adam and Eve, after the fall. There is no easy comfort for such deaths; they feel "wrong" and yet, in this fallen world, they are permitted.

On this Memorial Day observed, it's good to remember this is part of the power of the death of a soldier, especially in a military filled by volunteers, not conscripts. "Greater love has no man (or woman) than this: that he should lay down his life for his friends." (John 15:13) May they rest in peace and rise in glory.

“Do you own or rent?”

2015-04-29T19:13:00.002-07:00

So today I was asked one of those financial questions, "do you own or rent?" and, as we spent an hour this morning at my church studying Leviticus 25, I answered by the criteria the world uses but acknowledged, inwardly at least, that this is not how YHWH views the matter. Leviticus 25 is one of my favorite "law" chapters: it's about sabbath years and the year of jubilee, the "sabbath of sabbaths" as it were, and it contains some wonderful principles about restoration and redemption.

Apparently the rabbis still argue about exactly how and when to apply the sabbath years but, from my perspective as a gentile and only an amateur student of the Bible, it's pretty simple: you grow your crops and harvest for six years and the seventh year you allow the land itself to enjoy a sabbath rest. In the close reading we've been doing in our Wednesday morning class, I came to realize that the people could walk into the field and eat the produce of the field - but they couldn't do a full-on harvest and they couldn't prune the vines, etc. — the land needed to be allowed to entirely rest but the product of the land could be consumed (the grapes didn't have to fall to the ground and become compost, at least *not all of them*). God promised His people Israel that He would provide for them in the keeping of this commandment:

‘You shall thus observe My statutes and keep My judgments, so as to carry them out, that you may live securely on the land. Then the land will yield its produce, so that you can eat your fill and live securely on it. But if you say, “What are we going to eat on the seventh year if we do not sow or gather in our crops?” then I will so order My blessing for you in the sixth year that it will bring forth the crop for three years. When you are sowing the eighth year, you can still eat old things from the crop, eating the old until the ninth year when its crop comes in. (Leviticus 25:18-22)

This resonates with the dream the Lord sent to Pharaoh and Joseph interpreted, by the grace of God (Exodus 41), enabling Egypt to become a storehouse of plenty during a tremendous region-wide famine, doesn't it?

But sadly, the Jews didn't give the land its sabbath rest, as God instructed them — and the land enjoying its rest was so important to God that He sent Judah (the southern kingdom, when the kingdom split into two different nations after the death of King Solomon; ) into exile in Babylon for seventy years, collecting the sabbaths due the land over the passage of 490 years:

Those who had escaped from the sword he carried away to Babylon; and they were servants to him and to his sons until the rule of the kingdom of Persia, to fulfill the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed its sabbaths. All the days of its desolation it kept sabbath until seventy years were complete. (2 Chronicles 36:20-21)

The earth is the LORD’S, and its fullness, the world, and those who dwell in it. (Psalm 24:1) — but that's surely not the way we think about it in our natural human state; it's one of so many things with which we must grapple in order to come into agreement with God!

In my humanity, I think I'm important (and, on one hand, I am important: humans are precious to God and He values us to a staggering degree). The error I fall into is to under-appreciate how much God values the rest of His creation. Yes, we're special (Narcissistic Dust!) - but we're not the only special thing. YHWH values the land and doesn't want it polluted (we naturally think of physical pollution, and God certainly doesn't want that, but mostly He doesn't want the land polluted spiritually — and that's a discussion for another day). He wants it treated with respect and care, including giving it the same proportion of rest (one of seven) that we are meant to enjoy on a weekly basis; the land is to enjoy it on a “week of years” basis.

So here's the verse that jumped out at me today in Bible study and made me pause before I blithely answered the “own or rent” question:

‘The land, moreover, shall not be sold permanently, for the land is Mine; for you are but aliens and sojourners with Me.’ (Leviticus 25:23)

The New Living Translation really drives it home: “The land must never be sold on a permanent basis, for the land belongs to me. You are only foreigners and tenant farmers working for me.” *Gulp*. No wonder the scribes and pharisees took such offense when Jesus told this parable:

And He began to tell the people this parable: “A man planted a vineyard and rented it out to vine-growers, and went on a journey for a long time. At the harvest time he sent a slave to the vine-growers, so that they would give him some of the produce of the vineyard; but the vine-growers beat him and sent him away empty-handed. And he proceeded to send another slave; and they beat him also and treated him shamefully and sent him away empty-handed. And he proceeded to send a third; and this one also they wounded and cast out. The owner of the vineyard said, ‘What shall I do? I will send my beloved son; perhaps they will respect him.’ But when the vine-growers saw him, they reasoned with one another, saying, ‘This is the heir; let us kill him so that the inheritance will be ours.’ So they threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. What, then, will the owner of the vineyard do to them? He will come and destroy these vine-growers and will give the vineyard to others.”

When they heard it, they said, “May it never be!” But Jesus looked at them and said, “What then is this that is written: ‘THE STONE WHICH THE BUILDERS REJECTED, THIS BECAME THE CHIEF CORNER stone’? Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces; but on whomever it falls, it will scatter him like dust.”

The scribes and the chief priests tried to lay hands on Him that very hour, and they feared the people; for they understood that He spoke this parable against them. (Luke 20:9-19)

How then do I live as an alien and sojourner on this earth, on the land which my society says I “own”?
At the very least I'd better be sure I'm giving my Land-LORD the fruit which is legitimately His own!

Reframing God in Our Image—

2015-04-17T16:13:00.000-07:00

There's this interesting contrast between humanity, created in the image of God, and how humanity then turns around and recreates God in our image.

When you consider the pantheon of gods in the Greek, Roman, and Norse mythologies, you see that the nature of these gods tends to be "humanity writ large," like a human, only with more power and fewer consequences. For example, Zeus was forever seducing women, usually human women (shades of Genesis 6:1-2,4?), and his wife-and-sister Hera was jealous and vengeful toward these women. Zeus could get away with his behavior but his lovers usually suffered, and sometimes his children. In reading these mythologies, the gods often take on qualities almost soap opera-esque in their scheming and pettiness.

Within the Biblical mythos, sometimes we fall into a form of reversed causality: we read in Genesis that God created humanity in His own image:

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. (Gensis 1:26-27)*

and we assume that means that God Himself is, in essence, a bigger, better human. We don't generally attribute the petty or wicked qualities to God, as the Greek/Roman and Norse myths did with their gods, but sometimes even that happens. I cringe when I hear Christians refer to "the God of the Old Testament" as if YHWH had somehow changed between Malachi and Matthew. Christians are called to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God Who identifies Himself in a singular plurality ("let us create man..."), hinted at within the Shema ("Hear, O Israel, The LORD is our God, the LORD is one!" (Deuteronomy 6:4)) and who took on human flesh in the Person of Jesus, Yeshua, the Messiah, who walked on the face of the earth and prayed to His heavenly Father. We're not good at grasping the idea of the Trinity (3 Persons, one God) and, personally, I don't think we really can:

“For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways,” declares the LORD. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways And My thoughts than your thoughts." (Isaiah 55:8-9)

If we can't grasp His thoughts and His ways, we can't grasp the full reality of Who He Is, either. So we inadvertently make God smaller than He is when we project ourselves up onto Him.

This plays out in a lot of different ways: the view of God as an indulgent grandfather who will give you all the goodies you want, if you can just ingratiate yourself and ask him the right way, and the corresponding confusion that God ought to be treating us in that manner; or perhaps the view of God as vengeful, "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," not recognizing that God was placing a limitation on vengeance:

Lamech said to his wives, “Adah and Zillah, Listen to my voice, You wives of Lamech, Give heed to my speech, For I have killed a man for wounding me; And a boy for striking me; If Cain is avenged sevenfold, Then Lamech seventy-sevenfold.” (Genesis 4:23-24)

The question of why YHWH said that Cain would be avenged sevenfold is an interesting question, but not one I'm pondering this day ('So the LORD said to him, “Therefore whoever kills Cain, vengeance will be taken on him sevenfold.” And the LORD fnappointed a sign for Cain, so that no one finding him would slay him.' - Genesis 4:15); I rest in the knowledge that God has His reasons (and they may well be beyond me!).

We also err when we assume that God's version of an emotion is the same as our version. For instance, when God says that He is a jealous God, we think of the way we see jealousy exhibited on earth. When a man or woman is jealous, it is usually rooted in possessiveness and inappropriate sense of ownership ("you belong to me!") or the desire to have ownership over someone, like the high school girl who is consumed with an unrequited love and becomes spiteful toward the girl(s) she sees as being the potential object of her object's affections (!! - is that sufficiently convoluted?) or the abusive husband who tells his wife, "if I can't have you, no one can."

‘They have made Me jealous with what is not God; They have provoked Me to anger with their idols. So I will make them jealous with those who are not a people; I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation...' (Deuteronomy 32:21)

The jealousy of YHWH is quite a different thing than that of a possessive spouse: it is the jealousy of the Creator for His creature and His desire to see His creature in right relationship with its Creator. Having made us for Himself, He has a righteous and legitimate call upon us, a hope and an expectation. God has a vision of each of us which He longs to see fulfilled. Your husband or wife may have certain legitimate expectations of you, that you don't play the harlot or engage with prostitutes - these are based upon the marital contract ("forsaking all others, keep yourself only unto her") and a reasonable expectation of faithfulness and loyalty. Even a boyfriend or girlfriend may have a minimal-but-reasonable expectation of faithfulness in a relationship - so how much more might God reasonably expect from His covenant people and His own creation?

Another projection of humanity onto God is when we apply human standards to God. Just as with God's jealousy—that we have no other gods before Him, or with Him or in place of Him, because He made us for Himself and He's actually interested in our well-being—sometimes people think the glory and praise we give Him is a form of self-aggrandizement or egotism on God's part.

God is not up in heaven saying, "C'mon, everybody, look at me! Aren't I pretty wonderful and even AWESOME?! Yeah, well, tell me so! Do it more, make it louder... I can't hear you!"

Consider scripture—there are many instances of people praising God because they find Him praiseworthy; it happens hundreds of times in the Bible. There are even times when God Himself instructs people to praise Him. But what about Isaiah 6, when Isaiah sees the Lord, high and lifted up, and he sees seraphim in the Lord's presence who fly and continually cry out, "Holy, Holy, Holy, is the LORD of hosts, the whole earth is full of His glory.” Are they doing this because God told them to do it?

I don't think so. I suspect it's more like this: the closer one gets to God, the more one is overwhelmed by His glory, so that those beings which are immediately in His presence are so saturated they can only speak of His glory: "Holy, Holy, Holy, is the LORD of hosts, the whole earth is full of His glory!”

Isaiah's response in chapter 6 is, "woe is me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts.” Isn't that an interesting response? He doesn't think, "wow, how cool, I see God!" but rather he is struck by how far short of reasonable righteousness he falls, and all his nation with him. There are other scriptural examples of this profound sense of falling short; for instance, at the giving of the Ten Commandments:

"All the people perceived the thunder and the lightning flashes and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw it, they trembled and stood at a distance. Then they said to Moses, 'Speak to us yourself and we will listen; but let not God speak to us, or we will die.'” (Exodus 20:18-19)

And 1 Kings 18:10-11, the dedication of Solomon's temple: "It happened that when the priests came from the holy place, the cloud filled the house of the LORD, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud, for the glory of the LORD filled the house of the LORD."

Or consider the day of Pentecost, the feast of Weeks, when the Holy Spirit comes to inhabit the believers:

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a noise like a violent rushing wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire distributing themselves, and they rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit was giving them utterance.

Now there were Jews living in Jerusalem, devout men from every nation under heaven. And when this sound occurred, the crowd came together, and were bewildered because each one of them was hearing them speak in his own language. They were amazed and astonished, saying, “Why, are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we each hear them in our own language to which we were born? Parthians and Medes and Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the districts of Libya around Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—we hear them in our own tongues speaking of the mighty deeds of God.” And they all continued in amazement and great perplexity, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” But others were mocking and saying, “They are full of sweet wine.” (Acts 2:1-13)

The response of the first Christians to the presence of the Holy Spirit was so powerful that the crowd around them was truly amazed and a few assumed they were drunk. That's not even happening in heaven; that's here on this earth, among people who listened to Jesus, walked with Him, knew Him. I suspect we get close enough to the glory of God and all thoughts other than an awareness of His staggering glory are driven out of our little heads.

At least we know what to do, in such circumstances: give Him praise! Holy, Holy, Holy—

Were this any being other than God Himself, the King of the Universe, it would be vain and egotistical (and wicked) to receive such glory, much less encourage it. But this is YHWH and He is *glorious* and it is right to express it; we are coming into alignment with the underlying reality of Creation when we cry Holy, Holy, Holy. Not a bigger, better human but something quite different, Someone else entirely—

*From these two verses we see that God created humanity to have dominion over the earth and its creatures and that God didn't create "man" as in "male" in His image but rather "man" as in "humanity, both male and female" in His image. Arguably it requires both male and female to reflect the image of God; we do not reflect God alone.

Narcissistic Dust

2015-04-08T15:53:00.000-07:00

So we've agreed: I'm not big, we're not big. But we are special. We are not merely the most advanced member of the animal kingdom; we are a very particular, peculiar part of creation, made in the image of YHWH.

The number of ways we can misunderstand what that means is vast. And, frankly, I think the number of ways we can rightly understand it is not singular: God teaches us different things at different times and He often uses the same scriptures to teach different lessons - it's fascinating!

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Genesis 1:26-28)

Dorothy L. Sayers, brilliant woman, friend of the Inklings, creator of Lord Peter Wimsey, and wonderful lay theologian, observed that when God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness," the only thing we know about God is that He is creative, He has the desire and the ability to make things:

"Is it his immortal soul, his rationality, his self-consciousness, his free will, or what, that gives him a claim to this rather startling distinction? A case may be argued for all these elements in the complex nature of man. But had the author of Genesis anything particular in his mind when he wrote? It is observable that in the passage leading up to the statement about man, he has given no detailed information about God. Looking at man, he sees in him something essentially divine, but when we turn back to see what he says about the original upon which the "image" of God was modeled, we find only the single assertion, "God created." The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make things." (Dorothy L. Sayers, in The Mind of the Maker)

So here we are, small beings on an odd planet circling a rather small star located in one of the spiral arms of a galaxy we've come to call the Milky Way because, when we look up into the night sky, undimmed by our little attempts to illuminate darkness and thus see where we're going or discourage dark deeds, we see stars and constellations scattered across the heavens but we also see a band, a dense collection of stars—we are looking along that spiral arm, looking across at our galactic neighbors.

Humanity has been given stewardship over the planet (and we are accountable to God for that; it is just and right to treat our resources as the gift from God which they are, entrusted to us not simply for our lifetimes but for the lifetime of the planet, or as long as He leaves us here) as well as authority over other forms of life on this planet. So how do we exercise that? On a very basic level, we are called to learn, to grow, to make good decisions. Proverbs 25:2 says, "It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, But the glory of kings is to search out a matter." God conceals things, placing them in such a way that the noble, the diligent and the curious may find them, might figure them out, might see the hand of God in His creation and learn more about His character.

YHWH's handiwork, the space-time continuum, is big - we're just beginning to suspect how immense it is. Our galaxy is one of billions within this expanding universe. Our sun isn't very large, our planet isn't very big (but it's distinctive in some interesting ways), and we are small creatures living and moving on the surface of this sphere, spinning in space, orbiting our sun, moving along within this spiral arm of the Milky Way, one galaxy of billions, the scope of which we cannot grasp—and yet, "what is man that You take thought of him, And the son of man that You care for him?"

When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
The moon and the stars, which You have ordained;
What is man that You take thought of him,
And the son of man that You care for him?
Yet You have made him a little lower than the angels,
And You crown him with glory and majesty!
You make him to rule over the works of Your hands;
You have put all things under his feet,
All sheep and oxen, And also the beasts of the field,
The birds of the heavens and the fish of the sea,
Whatever passes through the paths of the seas.
O YHWH, our Lord, How majestic is Your name in all the earth! (Psalm 8:3-9)

For reasons beyond our capacity to comprehend, God loves us and chooses to interact with us, to an extraordinary degree. I can understand why atheists think Christians and Jews are deluded, why they think we suffer from a strange kind of narcissism: "even if God existed, why would He care about you, about us, about any of us? We're specks of dust." We are dust; God says so in Genesis 3, "For you are dust, And to dust you shall return.” But we are dust known and loved by the Maker of the Universe, dust with which He identifies to the point of incarnation - how it boggles the mind! For those of us who have responded to the call of Jesus, Yeshua, we cannot deny the reality of God's interest in us, His amazing love for us, even if it makes us sound like narcissistic dust.

Photograph of the Milky Way from Joshua Tree by Rogelio Bernal Andreo at Deep Sky Colors.

God is Big, I am not

2015-04-06T13:15:00.000-07:00

That sounds really simple but it took me a very long time to "get it", that I am not big. I think it's part of why I love Psalm 131:

A Song of Ascents, of David.
1 O LORD, my heart is not proud, nor my eyes haughty; Nor do I involve myself in great matters, Or in things too difficult for me.
2 Surely I have composed and quieted my soul; Like a weaned child rests against his mother, My soul is like a weaned child within me.
3 O Israel, hope in the LORD From this time forth and forever

Jesus says, in Luke 18:16-17 (and elsewhere), “Permit the children to come to Me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it at all.”

So, if I want to enter the kingdom of God, I must receive it like a child... so... how does a child receive it?

When I remember back to my childhood, there was simplicity: my parents said it, I believed it. I had not yet learned to question what they said or think they might be wrong. My parents were a 'model' of God and I remember the almost-unswerving obedience I had, in early childhood. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom - and we learn to obey and respect authorities over us by an appropriate fear of our first authorities, of parental displeasure. Truly, it was a terrible thing when I learned I could deceive them, that I could often "get away with" forbidden behaviors and make acceptable excuses for my lack of obedience.

I remember being kind of shocked when Mike Flynn, our priest when I first came to St. Jude's in Burbank, shared how he prayed that God wouldn't let his sons (and he had four of 'em) get away with sin. But, as I considered my own life, I realized how destructive it was that I learned to deceive, to sneak out, and that I got away with it for so many years.

When you get away with things, it makes you feel secretly "big"—you are internally enthroned in the center of your own life. “Stolen water is sweet; And bread eaten in secret is pleasant” (Proverbs 9:17, part of the call of 'the woman folly', in contrast with the woman Wisdom) - you are getting away with something and it makes you feel powerful.

But to receive the kingdom of God like a child requires that I repent of the exaltation of myself, that I repent of "getting away with" things in the past and repent of my pride over having gotten away with things. Sin is kind of like baklava (!!): there are many, many layers, all held together, sweet and sticky, and while I can enter into it with one big bite, consuming all those layers at once, repenting of the sin requires a closer self-examination. The Holy Spirit regularly brings to mind new layers and inviting me to come into agreement with God about that which is good and that which falls short of the mark.

My personal shorthand for this is simply that God is big and I am not.

I've focused here on the negative, the appropriate fear of (respect for) authority, but there is also the liberating side of it: because I am small and I am a child, I don't have to know everything—I'm not expected to. I have tremendous freedom to say, "I don't know," in response to all sorts of questions! It becomes much easier to be teachable and restores the joy of learning. I'm not "bad" because I don't know a particular thing already; I'm a child and I simply haven't learned it yet.

Now, here in this life, we're all children of various ages and assorted degrees of maturity and I might compare myself to some other human and, if I choose the right one, I can feel quite puffed up at "the wonderfulness of Lynn" (my mocking self-description) - but it doesn't take long before I bump into a massive wall and come to recognize, "Oh—that's God's toe."

Oh yeah, that's right: He's big, I'm not.

In the beginning was the Word—

2015-04-04T14:31:00.000-07:00

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

The first five verses of the gospel written by John the beloved, majestic and mystical. He continues:

There came a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness, to testify about the Light, so that all might believe through him. He was not the Light, but he came to testify about the Light.
There was the true Light which, coming into the world, enlightens every man. He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him. He came to His own, and those who were His own did not receive Him. But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

There is great beauty and elegance in these words and, at least if we've grown up in the church, we've heard them so often we tend to gloss over them and not really stop to ponder them. But, if we do-- there is so much present: unity with the Father, from before creation began, and the full attribution of Author of all that exists; the distinction of Light from darkness and the fact that darkness does not comprehend Light. That explains a lot, actually.

And in the second block of scripture, verses 6-13, we see the true Light, coming into the world, enlightening humanity, and the world is basically oblivious: it doesn't know the Light. The King James Version says, "He came unto his own, and his own received him not," one of the most poignant phrases in all of literature. Jesus, Yeshua, suffered rejection and profound misunderstanding - and He felt it, as any human, and He bore it, as perfected humanity.

We also see that the popular phrase "brotherhood of Man under the Fatherhood of God" isn't scriptural. Verse 12 says explicitly, "But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name". In other words, there is a selective "brotherhood of man under the Fatherhood of God" which is those who believe in Jesus: we are made brothers and sisters in Him and He prays that we will "be one" just as He and the Father are one.

That is a prayer realized in heaven but not yet here on earth; look at the schisms and divisions in Christendom and clearly we are not yet enjoying that holy unity which one day we will enjoy.

And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Jesus, Yeshua, pitched His tent among us - He "tabernacled" among us. The Greek word is σκηνόω and what an evocative word-picture it is, what a great description of the Incarnation: the Creator before-space-and-time-existed steps inside His own creation and becomes a part of it, subjects Himself to its constraints and the vagaries of humanity (not to mention the harassment of fallen angelic beings)—how extraordinary! (the Greek word skēnoō).

For a long time I've thought that John's gospel is like a knife-edge, growing ever-sharper until finally you must come down on one side or the other: either you come into agreement with John that Jesus, Yeshua, is God Incarnate and died in our place—or you don't. It's not a fence upon which you can sit.