Mysteries In Scripture

There are a lot of mysteries in the Bible: What did Jesus write on the ground? What happened to Jesus in between ages 12 and 30? What in the world does the Book of Revelation actually mean?
Personally, I think that if these things were truly important, they would have been written down. Some people get very bothered about those things, and I can somewhat understand, but I think too often we get sidetracked by things that might not have any real significance, and we miss the things that are truly important. The disciples asked Jesus why He taught in parables. A lot of Bible scholars will tell you that He was trying to relate things in such a way that people would understand them. In an agrarian culture, it made sense to relate the Kingdom of Heaven to farming (even though sometimes the characters in His parables did things that wouldn’t make sense to a farmer, He managed to get His point across). There is a great deal of truth to that, and yet, the answer that Jesus gave was, so that seeing they might see, and yet not understand. Why would He not want people to understand? Didn’t He come to earth to teach us what we needed to know? Isn’t that what the parables were all about?
The point is, Jesus wanted people who were willing to put forth a little effort into understanding His teachings to be able to, but He also wanted people that had no interest in truth to be able to walk away with whatever ideas that they brought with them. He wasn’t trying to force people to believe, but He was making the Gospel message attainable.
When I was younger, I wondered why it was that God led the Children of Israel into the Promised Land, but then made them exterminate the Canaanites that lived there. Couldn’t God have wiped out the inhabitants, or convinced them to move? Of course He could have, but what they obtained too easily, the Israelites would have esteemed too lightly. The same thing holds true for us, today. If all the knowledge of God were simply handed to us, it would mean very little to us; we would probably take it for granted. So, God gave it to us in a form that needs to be studied to be understood, and even then, to get a true understanding, one would need to spend a considerable amount of time in prayer, asking God to help us to understand.
Alternatively, if we did what we did only because we knew that it was required of us (and there was no question about what was required), then there wouldn’t be much (if any) reward for that. I’ve heard people make the statement that you just can’t legislate morality. In the sense that no framework of laws can exist that will force people to be moral, that is a true statement. We have had people that tried to be thought-police, but you really can’t be sure that another human being is thinking the right things, or acting out of the right motives. If I do all the right things for all the wrong reasons, I may convince most of my neighbors that I am a terrific guy, but God is not fooled. God wants us to do the right things for the right reasons, so He gives us wiggle-room in the commandments. Does this mean this, or does it mean that? What if I misinterpret what God wants? If the motivation is right, then God will understand, and forgive, an honest mistake. If one is just trying to see how much one can get away with, though, that’s not going to fly. If one gets caught up in trying to understand all of the intricacies of things that don’t really even pertain to them, then it becomes very easy to lose focus on what things are truly important. Don’t allow yourself to become sidetracked; seek the face of God, and allow Him to direct your paths.

A Christmas Story About Birds

I was reminded of an old story this past weekend, one that I have heard before: There was a man who was an agnostic, but his wife and daughter were Christian. One Christmas Eve, the wife and daughter were going to a candlelight service at the church, and the wife asked him, “Are you sure that you don’t want to come?” He smiled and said, “No, the idea that God would become a man to come down to save us from our sins just doesn’t make since to me, but you go ahead.” He kissed his wife and daughter goodbye, and they went on to church. Sometime after they left, he noticed some birds fluttering around in the snow in his yard. He became concerned, because these birds should have flown south for the winter, and were not prepared to survive the cold. He was a compassionate man, and realized that his barn was heated; if he could just the birds into the barn, then they would live. He bundled up and went outside, opened the barn doors, and started trying to shoo the birds into the barn. No matter what he did, though, every time he came close to the birds, they scattered. He tried coming from different angles, but it didn’t matter. His efforts were thwarted because the birds couldn’t understand that he was trying to help them, no matter how non-threatening he tried to be. Finally, in frustration, he cried out, “It’s no use! I would have to become a bird in order to save these birds!” Just then, he heard the church bells ring in the distance, and his earlier words rang in his ears: “The idea that God would become a man to come down and save us…” He fell to his knees in the snow, and cried out to God, “Now I understand!”
I think that a lot of times, things happen that we don’t understand. We ask the question, “Why would God do that?” or “Why did God allow that to happen?” We ask, because we don’t understand. Part of the problem is that our own understanding of the world around us is very limited. Meteorologists have an expression: “A butterfly flapping its wings in Kansas today can cause a tornado in Japan tomorrow,” which really just means that the planetary atmospheric system is too complex to be analyzed. There are many, many variables, from insects to sunspots, even if we knew exactly, every contributing factor to tomorrow’s weather, we still wouldn’t be able to calculate accurate predictions 100% of the time. And that’s just the weather. Can you imagine the complexities of a global socio-economic system? My decisions may very well impact what kind of day you have (and not just because you are reading what I am writing), just as other people’s choices impact my life. God understands all of that. Sometimes He will allow things to happen to us, just so that someone else will be able to see, “Oh, that’s how a Christian reacts to something like that.” Unfortunately, sometimes all they really see is just how human we really are (well, that’s not always unfortunate). We are human, none of us are perfect, but we know the One who is perfect. It’s important that we trust Him, allow Him to guide our steps, and let Him work out the good in things.

Are You Taking That Literally?

I have heard some people say that the Bible is the literal Word of God, and I agree with that, but then I have also heard people say that they take the Word of God literally. That's not the same thing, although it sounds very similar. The thing to remember is that, even though the Bible is the literal Word of God, that doesn't mean that there are not figures of speech in it.

Do you think that when Jesus said, "Ye are the salt of the earth," that we were immediately transubstantiated into salt? (wasn't that the punishment for Lot's wife?) Or was He merely stating that, just as salt can be used as a preservative to keep certain foods from going bad, that it is only because there are some people left on earth that God thinks are worth saving, that He hasn't gone ahead and destroyed the whole planet (in other words, we are the preservative for the earth). Unfortunately, sometimes it takes a lot of prayer to understand exactly what is meant by some of the passages in the Bible. Fortunately, God wants us to understand, so He will give us understanding, if we ask for it.

One of the most amusing arguments that I have heard, as far as not believing the Bible, is, "Do you have a paddle strapped to your weapon?" This is not so much a figure of speech as just an anachronism. God was trying to teach Israel a little something about sanitary hygiene, without getting into the explanation of why it's a bad idea to just provide a place for flies to gather and spread germs. I think most of us know, these days, that if you aren't where you can flush it, you should bury it. Besides, that is Old Testament law, and we are not under the law, but under grace.

By the way, while I am on the subject, I have heard a lot of people (many of whom should have known better) say the 'The Law' is the Old Testament. The Jews divide up what we call the Old Testament (what they call the Tanakh) into three parts: The Torah, the Neviim, and the Ketuvim. By the way, they don't arrange the books in quite the same order that we do, either. It starts out the same: The Torah contains Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy (although those books are called Bereshit, Shemot, VaYikra, BaMidar, and Devarim, respectively). The Neviim contains Joshua, Judges, First Samuel, Second Samuel, First Kings, Second Kings, but then goes to Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Minor Prophets (Yehoshua, Shoftim, Shmuel A, Shmuel B, Melachim A, Melachim B, Yisheyah, Yermiyah, Yechezchial, and Treisar). Ketuvim contains everything else. My point is this: Ketuvim is the Hebrew word for writings, basically, this is the poetry of the Tanakh; Neviim is the Hebrew word for Prophets, so all the books written by prophets are included in the Neviim; Torah is the Hebrew word for law, so all the books of the law are in the Torah, or the books of Moses--also known as the Pentateuch (although Pentateuch comes from the Greek, so I guess it would be improper to refer to those books as the Pentateuch unless you were also using the Greek names Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy). Did you catch what 'The Law' actually is? The five books of Moses--which would explain why the Law is sometimes referred to as the Law of Moses.

In summary, the Bible should be taken to be the literal Word of God, but not everything in it should be taken literally, and 'The Law' refers to the five books of Moses.

Babel

In the book of Genesis, there is a story about the tower of Babel, and where God confounded man's language, to make it harder for us to work together against His purpose. Some people question the veracity of the account, but certainly language is often a barrier to communication. This is not only true of people that don't speak the same language, it is often true of people that speak the same language, but in different ways.

It's been said that the United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language. We say that we speak English, but there are many differences between the English spoken in the Untied States and the English spoken by the English people. Some of things that have evolved since the US gained its independence, some are things that simply were not standardized until after the split, still other things were adopted by one country or the other as a result of immigration. Automobile terminology provides several examples: What we in the US call the trunk (of the car), the Brits call the boot; what we call gas, they call petrol; our bonnet is their hood; etc. We still use the same units of measure, although the EU has tried to get the UK to adapt metric units.

It's also true that specialists in a particular field have a tendency to develop their own jargon. This is not always an attempt to be exclusionary, but it does work out that way sometimes. Jargon can make people within a certain specialty communicate more effectively with each other, but make it harder to communicate with 'outsiders' who are not familiar with the jargon. One individual I know has told me many times that PhD really stands for "Please Have Dictionary." If you've ever taken a college course taught by a PhD, you probably know exactly what he means. It isn't that they are trying to obfuscate the learning environment, however, the tendency to eschew technical terminology amongst individuals being indoctrinated into the profession isn't always what it should be. Sometimes the terms used within a profession become so ingrained that the professional doesn't stop to think that he or she needs to simplify the terminology when speaking to trainees, customers, or anyone else that wouldn't be familiar with the jargon.

Another thing that I have run across on occasion is that journalists are experts in researching things and expressing those things in such a way that the average person can understand. Journalists spend a lot of years in college learning the skills necessary to accomplish this. Unfortunately, they learn about writing, but they don't learn very much about the subject matter that they are supposed to be writing about. Frequently newspaper or magazine articles appear that have been considerably 'dumbed-down,' either as a result of the reporter's limited knowledge of the subject matter, or the reporter's belief that the average person knows even less than the reporter. Occasionally this happens simply because the publication isn't willing to let the article take up enough space in order for it to contain a thorough explanation of the subject. I get irritated sometimes when something happens, but when I read the local coverage of the event, I find myself still unsure of what actually happened. Doing a little research, I find another account of the same event, only to find that it's pretty much word-for-word the same account. Why? because both articles came off of the AP newswire, and the AP reporter didn't get the details that I was looking for. In those instances, I really wish that I could talk to somebody who has first hand knowledge.

One of the things that disturbed me the most is that a lot of people read books about what the Bible says, but don't ever actually read the Bible itself--not even to check the passages referred to in the book. Even if the author is legitimately trying to make scripture easier to understand, at best, you are limiting yourself to his understanding. I don't mean to suggest that such books are bad, or that reading those books won't help (sometimes they will, but sometimes they won't), but I will say that if you read the scripture for yourself, you may gain a greater understanding.