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Gleanings from the Bible: Psalms 1, 8, 12 and 19

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The Psalms are numbered amongst the wisdom literature in that they stand outside of the biblical narrative of salvation. Like other wisdom literature they sometimes speak in generalisations. They tend to be personal in that they reflect the fears, failings and feelings of the individuals who have penned them. They reflect the emotions of praise and the passions of love and hate. They often express the way we feel and amongst them there seems always to be at least one that mirrors are situation at any given time.

As you might expect (given that many were written by the warrior king, David), there is a predominance of prayers for deliverance from one’s enemies, often starting with despondency and finishing with trust in God after bringing to mind all that he has done and reflecting on his power and mercy.

The following are a few verses that stood out for me as I have read them through on this occasion:-

Psalm 1

It starts with “Blessed is the one,” (singular) who stands in contrast with “sinners” (plural). The people of God have always been encouraged to pursue godliness even when they may have to stand alone. They are the ones who are well grounded and they prosper in God’s sight. They recall the sentiments of Psalm 18:29 By you I can crush a troop, and by my God I can leap over a wall.

 Psalm 8

The other day I watched a TV program on the Cosmos. It ended with the camera on a virtual spacecraft zooming out from earth. As it travelled the voice-over commented on all the conflicts, hopes and aspirations that had taken place, bound on an ever-diminishing blue dot that eventually became invisible. It powerfully put our greatest fears and triumphs into perspective! In the past I have looked into the night sky, while taking the garbage out along the track from our rectory. All the things I worried about and hassled over receded when I realised with the author of this Psalm, “…what is humankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?” And yet…

And yet, we do not simply curl up and die from insignificance, for God has crowned us with glory and honour. In parts of our western world, which is rejecting God and condemning itself to irrelevancy, the Biblical message offers meaning and hope.

I wonder if the phrase, “LORD, our Lord” at the beginning and end is meant to reflect and contrast the immeasurably powerful transcendence of Yahweh (LORD, The One who Is) with our Adonai (Lord), who draws close to us and offers a relationship with him, through his Son, Jesus Christ? LORD, our Lord, shows us the one who is well able to help us and the one who already helps us.

Psalm 12

7     You, O Lord, will protect us;
you will guard us from this generation forever.
8     On every side the wicked prowl,
as vileness is exalted among humankind. (NRSV)

I have watched the world change over my 66 years. Things which were deemed shameful in my youth are now celebrated. People who would have been shunned, are now regarded as celebrities. We tend to reward and honour the talented, the beautiful, the wealthy and the intelligent – the things we mostly inherit rather than work for. As someone commented, “It can be like looking into a shop window, where someone has mixed up all the price tags.” It’s not all bad of course. We often do show more love and consideration to those who might once have been ostracised without help or mercy (at least superficially). But sometimes I think we may have abandoned standards which have fallen like dominoes in an effort to justify our fallen race (Psalm 14:3). Perhaps it is time to remind ourselves of Psalm 1 and also address the balance between justice and mercy.

Psalm 19

There are similarities with Psalm 8 here, and the sentiments are reflected later in Romans chapter one. Psalm 14 reads that “The fool says in his heart. There is no God.” Romans states that people are without excuse. The writer of Psalm 19 confirms that God can be seen in the things that he has created, “their voice goes out into all the earth…”

So many have tried to reduce the creative activity of God to the happenings of chance. The odds against life occurring as it does, by chance, are stupendously large, as science keeps reminding us. And yet it has become easier to accept the idea of an amazingly complex world, with even more amazingly complex human life occurring this way, and without any purpose, than to accommodate a Creator, who gives us a reason to live and thrive.

To do the latter makes sense of God’s law (not just a set of rules but a way of relating to our Creator). The Psalmist says that it is refreshing, trustworthy, making wise, giving joy, giving light, enduring and righteous (and more). He finishes with the prayer that could well form on all our lips,

May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart
be pleasing in your sight,
Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer

Gleanings from the Bible: Job

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I am so glad that the book of Job is included in the Bible for a number of reasons.

It is great literature.
It helps people understand why there is suffering and how to deal with it.
It warns us not to jump to conclusions about those who do suffer.
It provides an example of faith in the face of suffering.
It helps us to get our relationship to God in perspective.

GREAT LITERATURE

The book of Job is part of a body of Wisdom Literature, which falls outside of the timeline of the biblical plan of salvation for all the nations. Job has a literary structure, which sets the scene and then open up into a dialogue between Job and his “Comforters” (who actually offer no comfort at all!) God speaks into the situation and the writer adds a conclusion. The dialogue is in moving poetic form, which, if it is impressive in English must be even more so in the Hebrew.

It strikes me that if students and educators could get past the paranoia about it being religious writing and appreciate it for its literary merit, it could be more regularly  included in curricula at high schools and universities. In fact the Bible as a whole is rich in its structure, storylines, allegories, allusions, idioms and vocabulary. It has contributed in often unrecognised ways to our language and common wisdom and has been regularly mined for its plots even in modern films and TV programs. In short, it is integrated into our culture, and for the better!

SUFFERING

Through the replies given by Job’s friends the book of Job answers part of the question about why people suffer. Their arguments amount to this:  All people have done something wrong and Job is suffering because he has sinned against God and needs to confess it. They are, of course, right that suffering exists because of sin, but the story makes it plain from the start that Job is a very righteous man and is suffering in spite of it. He is not suffering because he has sinned!

The reader already knows why Job is suffering. It’s something going on in heaven between God and Satan, but Job doesn’t know – and never finds out! It is at this point that faith is called for, both in Job and in the our contemporary world, where people suffer inexplicably.

Now saying, “We don’t know why you are suffering but you just have to trust God,” may sound both glib and a cop-out. But when you read God’s address to Job in chapters 38-41 and let the truth of it sink in, you cannot help but realise that the Creator knows immeasurably more than we do, and has the complete trillion-piece jigsaw of humanity, as we stand puzzling over a handful of pieces. There will, inevitably, be parts of that puzzle that we could not understand, even if they were explained to us. (I should note at this point that the reason given – almost a wager between God and Satan – would to me be most unsatisfactory if I were Job and God had explained it to me. It is why I think that this is just an example, serving the purpose to illustrate that we don’t know much of what goes on in the spirit world, as it affects our physical world.)

A WARNING

Too often we can be like Job’s friends, looking for someone to blame for why people suffer. Indeed sin may, alongside other explanations, be the reason. But the story of Job prompts caution. We cannot always know the real reason and should not jump to conclusions.

AN EXAMPLE OF FAITH

In the extremities of suffering Job is not entirely without fault. He is accused of discrediting God’s justice (40:8) and he admits to speaking of things he didn’t understand (40:3), but they were not the causes of his suffering. Job never turns his back on God. He never gives away his faith. He persists and argues and challenges God to front up and at least present the charges. He continues to engage with God, even while God appears to be totally absent!

In a world where many abandon their faith, blaming God, when something goes badly wrong, the story of Job informs and challenges us to hang in there.

But it’s not a blind faith. In fact blind faith is somewhat foolish. Faith depends on knowledge of the person in whom you place your faith and an understanding that they are indeed trustworthy. God has not left us without evidence of his character and faithfulness both in the things he has made and in the revelation of his dealings with humankind throughout history, recorded in the Scriptures. God has revealed himself most clearly in Jesus Christ, and his love for humanity is demonstrated in Jesus’ death on the cross for the sins of the World. It is the weight of this witness and the evidence in the lives of believers through the centuries, which provide the foundation for entrusting ourselves to the God who is trustworthy.

GETTING GOD IN PERSPECTIVE

To be true to the text of Job it would be better to consider ourselves in perspective. The thrust of Job’s and God’s statements lead us to see that God is so unimaginably great that he is unchallengeable.  His knowledge, wisdom and insight, his power and creativity leave us looking very, very small by comparison. I think of this when I hear people railing at God for one thing or another, confident that they have somehow, through their own philosophy, reduced The Creator to a figment of the imagination or at best a morally inferior failure. The book of Job teaches that we know hardly anything. And in fact scientists today tend to concur (to date we’ve only explored about 5% of the oceans and Caleb Scharf in an article called ‘This is what we don’t know about the Universe’ -Scientific American, 4th March 2014,- concluded, There’s an awful lot we don’t know (far more than just the examples here). But the point is not to get despondent, because this ignorance is a beautiful thing. It’s what ultimately drives science, and it’s what makes the universe truly awe-inspiring. After the hundreds of thousands of years that Homo sapiens has loped around, the cosmos can still elude our fidgety, inquisitive minds, easily outracing our considerable imaginations. How wonderful.

Wonderful indeed!

Gleanings from the Bible: Esther

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Esther must be the most entertaining book in the Bible. It has it all: intrigue, conflict, racism, courage, irony, dark humour, coincidence and even a little gore (for those who like that sort of thing), all set against the background of the Persian Empire, during the Exile of the Jews from their homeland. I can imagine it being performed as an onstage melodrama. Cheers as Esther and Mordecai enter and boos for the evil Haman.

The overall purpose of the book seems to lie in explaining how the Jewish Festival of Purim came into being but it has often been noted that nowhere is God explicitly  mentioned. At the same time there is a request for fasting and throughout the coincidences are so remarkable that we should obviously understand that God is at work engineering events in the background.

There are films about Esther, but I recommend reading the book in one sitting. I’m not going to recount the whole story here, but there are some highlights which I must mention.

The first is Queen Vashti’s refusal to be at the beck and call of her husband, Xerxes. Could this be an early form of women’s lib unwittingly serving God’s purpose to have Esther in the right place at the right time?

Then there is the challenge of Mordecai as he enlists Esther’s help in approaching the king: “… and who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?” Would that we could all find the purpose God has for our lives and have the courage to follow it. Using our gifts for others rather than simply basking in the blessings that have come our way.

The third highlight is simply the delight in seeing events escalate and unravel to reveal the villain and see him get his just desserts.

Finally, when Haman’s edict was overturned and the Jews were given permission to defend themselves and plunder their enemies, the author notes, almost in passing, that many people of other nationalities became Jews. As you would!

As we admire the strength and courage of Esther and Mordecai, we also acknowledge that, as in the rest of the Bible, it is God who is the ultimate hero. As ever, he gives courage, turns the hearts of kings and weaves a rich tapestry of events that reveal his constant faithfulness and love for those who will rely on him.  

Gleanings from the Bible: Exodus

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The greatest leaders in the Bible were those who were chosen by God and  they were often reluctant starters. They contrast with those, past and present, who trample on the bodies of others in their scramble to the top.

Moses takes a lot of persuading to confront the Pharaoh and lead the Hebrew slaves to freedom. “Slow of speech and tongue,” by his own confession, he’s not slow with excuses! And yet he emerges as a nation-maker in God’s hands and it is said of him that Yahweh (the LORD) would “speak to him face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (33:11). No bypassing the conscious mind required there!

It is stories like that which prompted me to state last year, at an Anglican high school prize-giving evening,  that you cannot always be what you want to be, but you can be anything that God wants you to be. It seems to be abundantly true in my own experience of life as well!

I notice that through Exodus the Covenant promises to Abraham are still on show (2:24, 3:15, 6:8, 19:5 and so on). The book another step in the continued outworking (particularly with the Law given at Sinai) of those promises and the establishment of Israel asa she was to relate to Yahweh and the world.

The book also begins to touch on things that we may find difficult to stomach in our relatively stable and peaceful Western culture:-

1 The death of the firstborn at the Passover, the final Plague, can only be understood in the light of the continued stubbornness and arrogance of the Pharaoh, standing in the way of God. The Plagues assert that Yahweh is greater than any Egyptian god but the Pharaoh fails to be convinced. Yes, I know that it says that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart but (briefly) this can be seen as part of a recurring theme, where human responsibility meets God’s firming of people’s choices, turning their evil intent to his own will and purposes. God is ultimately in control as he weaves his pattern from circumscribed human free will.

2 Sacrifice was common amongst the nations of those days but in Israel’s case it was not a matter of God needing human praise but rather a provision by which people could be alleviated of the guilt of their sins. It was a constant reminder that Yahweh was not to be manipulated or devalued in any way. God would always be God, but Israel needed to know that God is great for her own spiritual health and because it was only when they acknowledged that fact in word and deed (by giving of the best and consecrating the firstborn) that they could take their proper place in the world as an example and instrument of salvation for the whole world. When sacrifice is understood along with the idea of redemption (13:11-13) we begin to see the significance of Christ’s, the “firstborn’s,” death and the talk of redemption in the New Testament.

3 An appreciation of the enormity of the plan for Israel and for the salvation of the World may also help us to somewhat understand the severity of the penalties for stepping out of line. The laws were given to Moses at a time when Israel’s future was precarious. We see a lot of people living day to day in the wilderness, having left the secure (if enslaved) existence in Egypt, led by God, whom they could not clearly see, but mediated through Moses, threatened by enemies and scrounging for food and water. It was a recipe for rebellion and it jeopardised the whole future of Israel and the reason for her existence. Any deviation at this stage had to be dealt with decisively, and it was! If the death penalty seems severe then bear in mind that there were no prisons in the wilderness. Harsh measures for harsh times! Notice, too, that this was not a dictatorship imposed on Israel against her will. Exodus 24:7 shows that Israel clearly agreed to the terms of the Covenant.

Further observations in Exodus include instructions for the construction of the Ark of the Covenant and the Tabernacle, which would in turn provide a blueprint for the Temple. The intermediary role of the priesthood is also outlined and each of these provide a rich background against which the reader can appreciate the New Testament references to Christ as both High Priest and Temple.

Gleanings From the Bible: Genesis 3-11

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Whether you believe in in a literal talking snake, a tree that conveys a sense of guilt and another that allows you to live for ever, the point of the story of The Fall is to confirm that humankind at some early stage stepped out from under God’s rule and deliberately and knowingly decided to go its own way. The Hebrew writer is less concerned about whether God could see it coming, how the “snake” got to be evil in the first place, and why God allowed it all to happen, than he is to graphically illustrate what is wrong with the world.

Of course we can philosophise about such questions, which is fine, as long as we don’t lose sight of the proposition that when we step away from our intended purpose and place under God, things rapidly fall apart.

For Adam and Eve it involved guilt and fear (3:7-10), blame (3:12-13), alienation from the Creator (3:10), pain (3:16), damage to the environment (3:18) and loss of Eternal Life (3:24, which I take to mean the rich quality of life lived in harmony with God which goes on for ever.) We don’t have to look far to see that this has been the human condition for every age and race ever since.

The clue that God would do something about it is found in the last part of 3:15 as God addresses the snake. An offspring of a woman would crush its head, which we take in retrospect to be a reference to what Jesus Christ achieved in his death and resurrection.

What follows chapter three is the spread of evil.

I recently played the rather addictive video game, Candy Crush. Yes, trivial I know but it’s light entertainment rather like completing a puzzle, but more colourful. At one level there are squares occupied by chocolate. Each time you fail to eliminate a chocolate square, it increases its occupation by one square. The result can be that the whole screen becomes gradually and insidiously occupied by chocolate, swallowing up all hope of completing the level and moving on to the next. You have to start the level again. Now I like chocolate, but not in this game!

As I read the chapters up to the flood, that’s what it seems like, only absolutely miserable and deadly. Cain and Abel, the vengeful Lamech, and the statement of 6:5 “…and every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time”  lay out the insidious occupation of evil over the minds of humankind.

Even then God has not entirely abandoned people. Enoch is a brief bright spot (5:21-24) and the genealogies placed through the chapters serve to show that God blesses humanity with children. But it is not without The Flood.

Once again we could argue about whether this terrible story is to be taken as a literal world-wide flood, or a more local devastation (hyperbole – exaggeration is not unknown either in the Bible or in everyday speech, there are millions of examples!). The point is that evil could not be allowed to prevail or there would be no hope for a humanity finding its way back to its intended relationship to God the Creator.

That last point cannot be over-emphasised, but is often lost in the cutesy renderings of Noah’s Ark with giraffes heads sticking out of windows in the roof. It is an horrific disaster laying out the fatal and pervading results of evil, and yet holding out the mercy of  God for those who avail themselves of the way of escape.

In that story the future of God’s Kingdom for humanity was enclosed and preserved in that floating space and the Covenant of Creation (the conditions laid down by God for the first people) was refreshed and renewed with Noah, and signed off with a rainbow.

Again the genealogies show the blessings of God, in the subsequent multiplication of people, but have they changed? No, they have not! The Knowledge of Good and Evil was carried in the Ark by the eight people who are said to have repopulated the earth, leading us to the Tower of Babel (Chapter 11).

I often wondered, even in my more Fundamentalist days, whether this story might have been a representation of the loss of something like a telepathic ability to communicate, the remnants of which are said to exist amongst some indigenous people. It’s a speculation that has some problems in trying to marry it to this story. The underlying message, however, seems similar to Genesis 3. When people disobey God (here, by failing to fill the earth and stopping in one place) then the result is scattering and disunity.

Chapters 1-11 of Genesis outline pre-history. Despite the genealogies, it is hard to know the length of time involved, because we don’t know whether they are complete – that was not the purpose of their inclusion. The chapters do establish a warning and a foundation introducing us to the need of someone to save us, since humanity is obviously unable to save itself!

And that is where Abraham comes into the picture.

 

Gleanings from the Bible: Genesis 1-2

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In the Beginning God created a way of identifying Fundamentalists, Conservatives and Liberals.

Well you’d sometimes think so!

A lot of ink has been spilled over whether we are to take the six days of Creation literally, whether it is a fairly irrelevant borrowed myth from another Ancient Near Eastern culture, or whether it is a theological statement not intended to have any scientific veracity. Then there is a range of views between.

In most Christian circles we can agree on one thing: that God is the Creator, and perhaps that is where we should start – rather than our disagreements. The second thing we can glean from these two accounts of creation is the existence and almighty power of God. We notice that God creates humanity in his image, capable of relating to and understanding him, at least to an extent. I assume this also has to do with our moral character – our sense of right and wrong, good and bad, justice and mercy and so on. We may also note that God created everything “good” and that in completing the creation with humanity, God declared it, “very good”.

Chapter two, verse 4 then becomes more personal. It hones in on Adam and Eve. And what I see here is God’s desire to provide bountifully for humanity, to set boundaries for their protection and well-being and to give them the freedom of the garden, even to the extent of being free to step over the boundaries. After all a relationship without freedom is no real relationship at all!

Now there are probably some people thinking at this point, “What sort of freedom do we really have if rejecting God leads to judgement and ultimately, hell, the loss of Eternal Life? Isn’t God just holding a big stick over us all the time? Love me or else!”

But in fact that is why these opening chapters are so important. They tell us what God’s wants for us. We have Paradise, the opening bracket which will close with Paradise reclaimed in the final chapters of Revelation, at the other end of the Bible. Paradise is God’s intention for human beings enjoying the Tree of Life, the symbol of Eternal Life enriched by the presence and glory of God. In the intervening time God’s provision still exists for those who accept and those who reject his love toward them. The rain falls on the just and the unjust.

Imagine that one holiday you and your significant other arrive at a mountain retreat with a collection of chalets built into the hillside. The place is almost empty and the host is able to give you a choice of several places of accommodation. “You can stay in any one of them,” she says. “The first three, near to my own house, have superb views, and enjoy the best facilities, further down the mountain are pleasant but there is one that is quite unsafe and the foundations have been damaged by a boulder. It stands on the edge of a ravine. In the near future it will be demolished but in the meantime there are warnings around it and you must stay away for your own safety.”

You could exercise your freedom and sneak into the condemned chalet. So is the owner forcing you or warning you of the consequences.

When God talks about eating of the Tree, symbolising the knowledge of good and evil, it seems to me that he is warning about the consequences. And when evil is committed it would be a poor judge who did not administer justice. Just watch the news. People are outraged when the criminal receives too light a sentence for his or her crimes.

No, Genesis one and two paint a beautiful picture of all that humanity was meant to enjoy and the boundaries are significant but comparatively few.

But why should we believe these accounts anyway? Who was there to see it all? How can we know?

Traditionally the accounts have been ascribed to Moses, who is recorded as seeing God face to face and communicating with a transparency not seen anywhere else in the Hebrew Scriptures (In other words, God told him what happened). Others argue that the first five books of the Bible (The Pentateuch) were penned much later after Israel’s return from Exile, around four hundred years before Christ to re-establish Israel’s identity. Others would be happy to settle with Moses with later editorial alterations. There are arguments for various views, but in my experience the arguments themselves don’t provide fruitful insights.

It seems helpful to me to begin with the assumption that, whatever the date and however many human authors, these chapters are inspired by God to help us to understand some foundational truths about our existence – the most fundamental being that we are created to relate to our Creator as responsible and responsive human beings, made in his image. The truth within the chapters, lies not in the dating, or scientific argument, but in how it is borne out by the rest of Scripture and is consistent with what we know, principally about Jesus Christ. But that is for another blog.

Next: Genesis 3-11