Word of God Part 3

What if the Bible isn’t enough?  What if God desires us to have more of a relationship with Him than a hermeneutical understanding of morality and doctrine?  And isn’t that what the Bible teaches: walk in the Spirit, walk by faith, the Spirit will guide us into all truth, despise not prophesying? 

If you’re anything like me, first you rejected these speculations.  Then you couldn’t stop thinking about them, and started reading the Bible in a new light, considering the possibilities.  And now that you’re seriously tempted to believe in continuing revelation, you’re scared.  I’m not very good at explaining this fear.  I think about how I have relied on the Bible so much.  How do I appeal to fellow believers about their belief and practice except on a universally accepted standard?  How do I witness to nonbelievers except by demonstrating the inerrancy (internal consistency and outward truth) of the Bible?  Can I claim that internal consistency proves anything when that was a test for which books made it into the Canon or not?  Supposing God does speak to me, how will I know it’s Him?  What if He speaks to someone else?  Why should I submit to what He speaks through them?  How will believers be on the same page, with each one (or at least each congregation) receiving his own revelation? 

Maybe I’m scared because I never dreamed I would be here, believing these things.  And where else will it lead?  Maybe if I need to hear from God today, or in the future, I have to trust that He will speak; I can’t just sit comfortably holding in my hand all He was ever going to say.  I have to believe in a God who is able to communicate not just to me, but to people around me.  I have to believe in a God whose mercy is so great that even when I’m sinfully not listening, He’ll cushion me from making mistakes too terrible.  But I need His mercy every time, because whenever I’m not listening to Him, I’m doing my own thing.  So maybe I don’t like this belief because it puts me out of control.  I can’t force revelation from God by being smarter or studying longer or even by asking the right teacher. 

On the other hand, I like it.  The God of the universe is speaking to real live people today.  He has designed a community for His people that is interdependent.  We get to be a part of His ministry both to those who have believed and to those who have not.  God has not left us alone to make up our own decisions.  

To God be all glory.

Resurrection Part 1: Michael Card’s "Luke: A World Turned Upside Down"

Michael Card has a new album out, all from the Gospel of Luke.  The subtitle is “A World Turned Upside Down” and the corresponding book is “Gospel of Amazement.”  The two songs I like the best are “What Sort of Song?” and “A Breath of a Prayer.”  Another song, “Pain and Persistence of Doubt,” accuses the characters in the gospel, and those who hear the song, of clinging to doubt and rejecting hope.  Quoting the angels at the tomb, Michael Card sings: “Why search for the living here among the dead; can’t you see that He’s simply not here?”  I want to defend myself, defend them.  Jesus was dead.  Crucified.  Dead seems pretty hopeless.  And you’re condemning us for not hoping?  Hope is one thing when we’re wishing, when something is going wrong, when someone is just sick.  But shall we believe delusions and run and tell everyone and pray for things that are impossible? 

Hope hurts.  Resurrection is only amazing because death is real.  When you hope for another outcome, especially after death already

is

the

outcome,

you’re setting yourself up for painful disappointment.  Who can be blamed for accepting reality?  Building a life on what happened before instead of on what might happen, on cryptic words and promises? 

In Jesus’ case, it didn’t matter that no one was hoping for His resurrection.  He had it taken care of, and would raise Himself from the dead because He had promised it;  because His resurrection proved He had conquered sin and death.  When Jesus raised Lazarus, and the few other people during His earthly ministry, He surprised believers with His choice to wait, to not grieve, to touch and command the dead.  None of the outcomes were dependent on human faith.  Whether the family or disciples hoped or not, Jesus was going to act. 

To God be all glory. 

Capital Security

Today I was having a gyro near the Colorado capitol in downtown Denver, and a policeman all in black with “HOMELAND SECURITY” written across his chest in grayish white was wandering around our restaurant.  I didn’t think much of it until I realized he was carrying a little black box the size of a deck of cards that was ticking erratically.  My friend I was with said he was looking for something, investigating.  And I’m a little silly, but I didn’t think so, and I ignored it.  My friend, she has more experience than I do.  She was right.  A little later he explained to the owner - a round-headed short man with silver hair and kind eyes and an apron - that the radiation levels weren't high enough to be anything serious (a bomb like those in nightmares).

I suppose the owner was worried that there was something wrong with his shop, or that someone was plotting terror from one of his tables, and he hovered just behind the officer’s shoulders.  The all in black man was very calm, telling the man that his sensor had sounded an alarm as he drove by…  My friend asked people if they’d recently been though those out of control full body scanners at the airports.  Probably someone eating there must have had something medical done that day, said the man with the little black ticking box. And he didn’t ask all of us sitting there, but he also didn’t look like he was going away.  So the lady in the corner raised her hand half way and confessed to having had a PET scan that morning. And apologetically, "My doctor said I should be fine to go out." People look around kind of nervously. Some joke. Some are puzzled. Ms. Radiating wants to know if he really could sense her from all the way outside.  The officer (who was probably wearing a lead vest, himself) reassured the rest of us that we weren't in danger.  Then he shows the woman his Geiger counter (how frightening) to prove to her that yes, the numbers were quite high enough for him to have detected. 

The officer was DRIVING BY and his radiation detector picked up the woman's aftereffects of the PET scan. (I always wondered what our law enforcement actually did to try to keep dirty bombs from going off.)  Most likely following protocol, he reported the mildly increased radiation. The report went straight to Washington, DC. We're talking Pentagon and Homeland Security. Probably not Obama, since he has much more important things to worry about than nuclear scares at home and abroad.  The woman cooperatively provided the officer with her name and contact info in case anyone needed to follow up on his report and confirm that she wasn't a terrorist, just a patient in the tech-y US of A.

 Publish Post

True story. 

To God be all glory.   

Hebrews, Hearts, Bodies, and Manichaeanism

I was reading Hebrews today, and this verse:

Hebrews 10:22, "Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water."

made me think of something. 

I’m not going to even start to say I know exactly what it means.  But what it made me think of was Manichaeanism.  I know that most of my readers are very intelligent scholars who know terms for ancient heresies.  And if they’re not they are the independent learners who stopped to Google the word before reading another sentence.  And if they’re not, they’re wondering why I bothered using a word that my audience doesn’t know, and hoping that I mean to tell them more about it.  I do mean to.  That ancient heresy was related to Gnosticism, but specifically it taught that salvation came by escaping the flesh.  Flesh – body – material things, they were bad.  And yeah, if you want to know about it, I find Wikipedia an exciting source of information about theology.  (I’m not kidding!) 

The verse in Hebrews has to do with that in that it mentions our hearts sprinkled (by the blood of Christ, metaphorically) accomplishing spiritual purification: regeneration (Titus 3:5 anyone?) and forgiveness (1 John 1:9 - all these “clean” words).  But it doesn’t ONLY mention that spiritual thing; it mentions having our bodies washed.  And that’s weird.  The rest of the chapter and the one before it were talking about how under the Old Covenant things were sprinkled with mortal blood; that blood was a picture of Christ’s blood, and our things down here: temple, book, priest are pictures or shadows of the original things, the eternal things, the spiritual things.  (Things that are seen are temporal, but the unseen last – and last goes on and on because there is nothing coming after to displace it – I’ve been reading Pilgrim’s Progress, too.)  All of a sudden in verse 22 he says something not about sprinkling with blood, but about washing with pure water. 

Now, I’ve been doing a ton of thinking about baptism lately, and studying it too, and discussing it even, so my brain sort of goes that way when anything like baptism is mentioned.  I’m not going to say that the author of Hebrews was talking about baptism.  I don’t know if he was.  And I’m not going to say that baptism, the kind where you’re washed with water, saves you.  (This is because I don’t really believe that, even though, um, some parts of the Bible kind of say that baptism has to do with salvation, like Mark 16 and Acts 2.)  But if we keep with the flesh and earthly things being shadows of the eternal, like Hebrews is teaching, then salvation isn’t escape from the body.  Rather, we use our bodies to picture eternal spiritual realities.  And we make it real in the flesh. 

I liked this thought – and really for me it was only one quick thought because all the other things I added in for your sake had already been founded for me over the past few weeks – so I decided to share it.  And I know that it confused a bunch of you readers, so I’m sorry.  I can’t say that I totally get my thought anyway; it’s more like a door into lots of thoughts that, if you are ever in the same room with me, I’d be happy to discuss, especially if we are eating at the time.  I’m not a Manichaenist.  (How many syllables do you need in one name for a cult, anyway?)

To God be all glory.

Flowers Unseen

Why are there flowers on the tops of mountains?

No one sees them.  They grow and live and bloom and seed and die.

I can imagine why God would want to bless us with beauty by putting pretty things in our paths.  Did His beauty-bucket just spill?

How do we know there are flowers on some peaks?  Every once in a while an adventurer makes it to the top, and stands in a field of wild blooms.  He tells people.  He takes pictures.  And he never goes there again.  Seasons, generations of flowers, pass before anyone else catches their breath at the sight of them again.

Without those unseen seasons, that one moment would be impossible.

To God be all glory,
Lisa of Longbourn

Word of God Part 2

Did God speak outside of Scripture?  Does He still?  Can we speak His (new) words? 

Speaking is a big focus of the New Testament, though I think we have overlooked it.  Many of the spiritual gifts have to do with verbal communication.  Are those gifts supernatural (spiritual) or not?  Can speaking gifts come from God, but not the words?  What about this verse from Peter?  “If any man speak, let him speak as the oracles of God…”  Have you ever thought about Paul’s admonition to take up the “sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God”?  Did you know that Paul follows with a request that his friends pray that “utterance may be given unto [him]”? 

Maybe you’re like me, fascinated by how casually the Old Testament refers to God speaking to men.  God spoke to Cain.  God told Noah.  God visited Abraham.  He interrogated Job.  Was it like in the movies, where light streamed from heaven and men heard a voice?  How often did men have experiences like Abraham, who entertained God and a couple of angels in his tent?  Was the voice audible or not?  Did God come in dreams like He did for Joseph, instructing him to go ahead with his marriage to Mary?  Why doesn’t the Bible go into more detail about these fantastic communications?  Why do the authors seem to think we know what they mean when they simply say, “God spoke”?  Did they expect us to have similar experiences?  Does God still speak? 

Did you know that the Bible never says anything about the end of the writing of Scripture?  Did you know there is no biblical instruction for determining a Canon? 

Catholics ascribe authority to the words of the Pope (when he is speaking as Pope).  That way they have one universal authority to which all members of the church must submit.  Protestants rejected the Pope because they observed the fruit of his edicts, in the sixteenth century and before, that they were worldly.  Perhaps they also claim that the New Testament does not teach apostolic succession or the spiritual authority of popes. 

But Protestants claim similar things about the Bible.  We use it as the universal and exclusive authority over the Church.  Now, the Bible does mention authority.  It says that men will live by the words of God, and I am fairly certain that the writings of the Bible fit into that category.  All Scripture, Paul wrote, is profitable for doctrine and rebuke and instruction in righteousness.  I’m willing to at least suggest that he had the Old Testament in mind. 

The problem is that the Bible itself also teaches about the Church, and who has authority over it.  What it says is that Jesus Christ is the head of the Church.  He is its authority, to which every member must submit. 

To God be all glory. 

What if Daniel had an Aching Back?

What if Daniel had an aching back?  I tend to forget that the characters in the Bible were normal human beings.  They had to eat.  Sitting and rising may have been sore activities for a man who’d lived as long and seen as much as Daniel.  By the time he was cast into the lion’s den, he was quite old.  This man saw miracles.  He prayed and interpreted dreams.  But what if his back ached?  What painful human experiences did he have to face?  What things did he pray for during his customary times of devotion, but that didn’t make it into the Bible?  Do we only see him in the answer-times, and forget the decades of patient petitioning?  Did he ask the questions David asked, faced with kings so powerful they practically ruled the world, kings who displayed their might, and wonder why the King of Kings did not come in awesome terror against His enemies?  The God of Abraham can produce a hand alone, writing words on the walls of Babylon, but He chooses to use the armies of the Medes and Persians to actually smite the wicked prince?  Running an empire is hard work, and for sometime Daniel was the king’s right hand man; what was that like?  Didn’t it wear him out?  Did he get frustrated?  Did he cry with friends for their sorrows? 

To God be all glory. 

"Word of God" Part 1

Once upon a time I went through and underlined every time “word of God” was used in the book of Acts.  The phrase occurred quite often in passages about evangelism, which of course is a theme of Acts. At the time I was accumulating evidence that if we wanted to be effective at converting the lost, we needed to use actual Scripture instead of our emotional phrases and cute metaphors.   A passage in 2 Timothy inspired me: “And that from Childhood you have known the Holy Scriptures of God, which are able to make you wise for salvation…” 

Having been raised in the evangelical church, I didn’t at that time ask an obvious question.  When the apostles, Paul, the deacons, and all those famous evangelists spoke “the word of God,” to what did that refer?  Did they stand up in front of masses of Greeks and compile quotations from Exodus, Psalms, and Habakkuk to call men to faith in Jesus?  Obviously they did not yet have the New Testament written.  We do have some examples of the apostles quoting the Old Testament to people while preaching.  And there’s the story of Philip, who found the Ethiopian Eunuch reading Isaiah, so he explained how what we know as chapter 53 was a prophecy fulfilled by Jesus, and led him to salvation from there. 

I’m skeptical that “the word of God” could have been referring to the Old Testament.  There are words to refer to those writings: Scripture, Prophets, Law, Moses, Isaiah, “as it is written.”  But Acts didn’t use those to describe the apostles’ preaching. 

Ok, Jesus when He was being tempted quoted to the Devil that man lives by “every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”  Jesus Himself was using Scripture, so we usually interpret this as an exemplary double-punch.  I don’t need bread; I need exactly what I’m using now: Scripture.  Except, well, what did the original author mean, the one whom Jesus was quoting? 

If you go to the Psalms, all over the place you find references to the “word of the LORD.”  David says he delights in “Your word.”  Does he mean only that he delights in the Law of Moses?  Why do we think of something different when we read, “The word of the LORD came to…” the prophets? 

When Jesus reaffirmed that man lives by “every word that proceeds from the mouth of God,” was He including the words God would speak during His earthly ministry?  Did He mean also those words that He heard from the Father and spoke obediently?  What about the New Testament, which we are today taught is God-breathed just like the Old Testament?  Are we to live by any other “words from God?”  I mean, if the apostles were preaching the “word of God” in Acts, and that didn’t just refer to what had been previously expressed in the Scripture or by Jesus, why don’t we have those preached words recorded?  Do we need them?  John supposes that if everything Jesus said and did were recorded there wouldn’t be books enough to contain them; why don’t we need all the words that Jesus spoke? 

To God be all glory. 

Salad Saga

I've been having salad a lot lately.  I bought the romaine lettuce and spinach and red pepper when I was trying not to eat simple sugars and other refined carbohydrates to keep my cold from getting too bad.  (Don't know if that worked; I'm still sick and have been rather miserable.)  The rest of the fixings I had on hand for the occasional salad.  When I came home last week with my treasure, Mom told me she'd bought some too.  It's in a package, and mine was from the produce trays that get sprayed by grocery store rain, so we're using mine first.  I'm proud to say we've used most of mine up.  But the double purchase was the first of the "whoops" in my salad saga.

The rest are all tonight.  And I'd rather have them sprinkled across the days like croutons over the greens.  Oh well.  I was shredding carrot and one end of the carrot broke off into the bucket that was balanced on the edge of the sink, only then it wasn't; it was in the sink, and had thrown a handful of salad onto the dishes therein.  I rescued a few pieces from a plate I knew to be mostly clean.  Hey!  I rinsed them!

Next I was separating the salad into two bowls, one for me and one for my brother.  A bite hit the floor at my feet.  I warned my cat against eating it, as I don't know the effects of spinach on felines.

After adding the croutons and sunflower seeds and raisins and craisins - I know they're sweetened; I've given up on the anti-sugar diet - I handed my brother his dressing.  Then his bowl.  Then I asked him whether he wanted a small (technically, a "salad") fork, and I had it in my hand already when he said no, he wanted a big one.

Then I went to sit on the stool lining the not-really-a-wall of our kitchen so I could eat in the same room with him and see him over the drink jug like you use at picnics and potlucks that is sitting on our table.  But the fork in my bowl flipped out and brought a piece of my salad with it.  I put the bowl down next to the fork, which had landed on a chair nearby, and picked up the romaine from the floor (it landed dressing-side down) to throw away.

When I got back I grabbed a napkin to remove the dressing, but had to use it to catch a sneeze instead.  After finishing that chore and washing my hands (it's all I do anymore!) I finally came back, and was about to retrieve my salad when I saw my cat licking it.  Straight from the bowl!  I assumed she had only licked that particular spot, so I grabbed my meal away from her and yelled at her to lick the dressing off the floor, and took that piece of lettuce out and remembered this time to bring my bowl and fork with me.  The fork went into the sink, and I got another, that one my brother hadn't wanted.

I gave up on sitting in the kitchen with my brother.  In the living room on the coach, cozy between puffs plus/hand sanitizer and my laptop, I finally ate my salad.  And it was great.  Until I tried to stab a crouton.  The  creamy Italian had not soaked into it enough to make it pierce-able.  Instead the crunchy bread flipped, somehow bringing with it some raisins and some red peppers and dressing.  It stuck to my white dress where it landed.  But I picked it up and put it back in my bowl and ate it anyway.  My dress will wash.

What remained of my salad I ate in peace.

To God be all glory.

PS: I went to wipe the dressing off the floor, but I think my cat followed orders.  I wonder what are the effects of Creamy Italian Dressing on felines?

Surprised.

Are all my posts the same?  All this wrestling with change?

"Why am I not the same as I used to be?  How have I changed?  What shall I hold on to?  Who am I becoming?  Does anyone else notice?"

I don't know where I'm going.  I never have.  When I graduated and people asked what next, even if I thought of a polite and normal-sounding answer, inside I thought of that verse in John 3, that the wind blows here and there and people born of the Spirit are like that.  Except, well, some Spirit-born people aren't like that.  They make plans.  Plans may not come about, but if nothing gets in their way they know what they'll do and choose and who they'll be.  I like surprises and spontaneity, though.

In my life I have been surprised by:
What I believe.
Who becomes a friend.
Who fades from my life.
Length of time.
My own unkindness.
Grace.
The taste of green peppers.
Winning.
Losing.
Being known.
Quitting.
Where I find my socks.
What doesn't work.
Word origins.
What I look like in the mirror.

To God be all glory.