Shackled Thoughts

Best Poem Ever.

2010-07-02T05:44:00.000-07:00

What difference does eternal life make? Why does knowing Jesus transform the (often) difficult drudgery of this lifetime? How does the hope of the resurrection comfort? Read this and then enjoy this most excellent poem, and be comforted.
(Oh, and don't mind GMH; he makes up words. Extremely cool words. My advice is to say them out loud if you don't 'get' them).

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection

Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows ' flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-

built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs ' they throng;
they glitter in marches.

Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, '

wherever an elm arches,

Shivelights and shadowtackle in long '

lashes lace, lance, and pair.

Delightfully the bright wind boisterous '

ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest’s creases; in pool and rut peel parches

Squandering ooze to squeezed '

dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches

Squadroned masks and manmarks '

treadmire toil there

Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, '

nature’s bonfire burns on.

But quench her bonniest, dearest '

to her, her clearest-selvèd spark

Man, how fast his firedint, '

his mark on mind, is gone!

Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark

Drowned. O pity and indig '

nation! Manshape, that shone

Sheer off, disseveral, a star, '

death blots black out; nor mark

Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time '

beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,

A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, joyless days, dejection.

Across my foundering deck shone

A beacon, an eternal beam.

Flesh fade, and mortal trash

Fall to the residuary worm; world’s wildfire, leave but ash:

In a flash, at a trumpet crash,I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.

(Gerard Manley Hopkins)

(My apologies for multiple postings... I hope I've gotten the formatting right this time!)

An attempted collect on the regulation of bodily functions

2010-06-13T00:00:00.000-07:00

This is published over here, at my husband's suggestion. Here's the unedited 'original' with photos. Enjoy.

Why?

Because people like me do actually pray, often with some fervour, about the bodily functions of children for whom they are responsible. That's right. We pray about the absence, presence, frequency, infrequency, texture, colour and quantity of poo. Mostly because such things can flag a problem in young children, especially when they are only a few weeks old; at least that's why I pray about such things. Others may have different reasons.

Because praying about such things is completely natural for a Christian. Not only is God interested in the 'small' things in our lives, but he is eminently competent to resolve such issues, having made us and therefore capable of 'regulating' us, and/or of giving us wisdom to know when to go for medical help. Unlike some medical professionals, he never communicates that we've wasted his precious time by mentioning to him our concerns. Even about poo.

Because collects rock and I would love to be able to write them.

Because if Cranmer had had the leisure, and wasn't busy trying to manage a certain megalomaniac monarch in amongst reforming England, he may well have extended his prayer book to include miscellaneous prayers for more occasions. And maybe he'd have included a prayer about such matters.

Because Cranmer's collects always seem to both demonstrate the utter validity of our prayers for earthly concerns, and yet prompt us to think too about things from an eternal perspective. So, even though I haven't really prayed the collect below, the exercise of writing it has helped me to remember there are more significant things to desire and pray for in my boys than merely the regulation of their bodily functions, as important as that might be for their health. More significant are the kind of people they are and are becoming and that they so 'pass through things temporal that they finally lose not things eternal'.

Because when I'm sleep deprived I become (even more) eccentric.

Almighty God, the giver of all life, who has formed and known us from our our earliest moment, grant we beseech thee, the proper regulation of bodily functions in this thy little one. In your mercy, so prosper his life that he may grow in strength and wisdom and may by your grace know you, whom to know is life eternal, through Christ Jesus our Lord and for his glory.

Collect for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity

2010-06-07T05:56:00.000-07:00

O God, who hast prepared for those who love thee such good things as pass man's understanding; Pour into our hearts such love toward thee, that we, loving thee above all things, may obtain promises, which exceed all that we can desire; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The superiority of black puddings to speech

2010-04-29T11:16:00.000-07:00

'I suppose one reason why we are seldom able to comfort our neighbours with our words is that our goodwill gets adulterated, in spite of ourselves, before it can pass out lips. We can send black puddings and pettitoes without giving them a flavour of our own egoism: but language is a stream that is is almost sure to smack of a mingled soil. There was a fair proportion of kindness in Raveloe; but it was often of a beery and bungling sort...'

(from Chapter 10, Silas Marner by George Eliot)

Feminism and Motherhood

2008-11-17T12:55:00.001-08:00

One of the things I realised as I was reading Mary Kassian's The Feminist Mistake is the tortured relationship the feminist movement has with motherhood. On the one hand, the potential for bearing children is viewed as the basis for women's superiority: their ability to nurture arising from their ability to bear children, would for example, lead to a peaceful world in a matriarchy (as opposed to our war-filled world, dominated as it is by men who cannot bear children and so do not have this nurturing ability). On the other hand, the actual decision to bear children is viewed in a very different light. In the ideal feminist world, women would only bear children if and when they wanted to and would have the right to change their decision at any point in time. In the eyes of some feminists, bearing children is always the wrong decision and leads to enslavement.

This is further evidence that feminism is not 'pro-woman' but 'pro-feminist', excluding all but those committed to its ideals into its sisterhood.

Why is this important?

First, it is worth noticing that feminism has had a profound affect on families over the last few decades. No-fault divorce, abortion, and other initiatives have not had a good effect on families. It is good that the Victorian era legislation has been overturned, enshrining as it did, the man's right to do whatever he liked in marriage and still have legal access to children in a post-divorce settlement, despite evidence of domestice abuse. But far from the nurturing, peace-filled world envisaged by some feminists, the result of feminist initiatives have been seen in painful, dysfunctional family situation. Men have contributed to this of course. But so have women. Given the same kind of freedom as men in the Victorian era, women have used it with the same kind of selfish abandon as men did and do. It manifests differently, but the ability to have children does not appear to seriously reign in the instincts of women to get what they can for themselves. Feminism has proven the Bible right in its assertion that both men and women are sinners. Women are not somehow better because they can give birth (or for any other reason).

The other thing which I found interesting was how close our society is to the feminist ideal for giving birth. If we hear of someone who is going to give birth either against their will or is going ahead with an unplanned pregnancy despite financial or other difficulties, we consider it a tragedy. While there is much to mourn in these situations, and much support to offer the mother in question, we need to question whether we consider this a tragedy because the woman's choice was not the driving force behind the birth of the child. I think many of us have moved to that mindset without realising it. This isn't too surprising when we realise that the feminist ideal of childbearing and raising is closer to being realised that many other aspects of their agenda. Abortion on demand, at any point in the pregnancy for any reason without financial cost or social reprisal is slowly arriving and will be difficult to dislodge. Women who disagree with this, refuse to avail themselves of the system and discourage others from this choice are outrageous.

But even for those of us who reject abortion, it is worth asking ourselves whether we reject 'choice' as the first and highest priority when it comes to childbearing and raising. Do we automatically count up the number of children someone has and wonder why they 'chose' to have that many children? Do we assume that someone or other has chosen their career over children? Do we disdain women who need to work and can't look after their children at home because of their financial situation? Do we tend to look down on those we hear of or those we know who fall pregnant out of marriage or who can't look after their children?

Choice in childbearing isn't our goal, because our God is sovereign. He chooses for us, even as our actions have certain consequences. The goal is to do everything with a willing heart in gratitude to him, and to encourage each other to live for him. (Colossians 3). Choice can give us power and freedom and it is a good gift from God when we can choose. But choice can also deceive us into thinking we can be and do anything and that that might be a good thing. If we pursue our own selves, we move in a direction away from the Lord Jesus, who calls us to give up our lives, our choices, our selves and find life in dying to ourselves in his service and the service of others. Which includes childbearing or raising - whatever the situation (wish I could, didn't have to, could work, stay home, have more, have less...)

It would be unfortunate to have the mindset which supports abortion while rejecting it utterly! But it is possible, because as Kassian observes feminism has become so influential in our society, there is a sense in which we are all feminists to one degree or another. A warning like that is really useful as we try and think and live and speak counter-culturally. If it applies to us at all, it is likely that it applies to us as we think about motherhood and raising children, so it is worth asking ourselves whether we think:

women are less selfish and less destructive than men (because women bear children);

women choose their childbirth and childrearing situations and should always have that freedom.

Bringing every though captive to Christ is hard work, particularly when we are trying to out-think our own culture.

Jesus is Faithful

2008-10-01T17:52:00.000-07:00

I have been greatly encouraged by the first chapter of Revelation.

I think the opening sets the scene for the entire book and shows that the book is meant to encourage us (rather than baffle us!). In the first chapter we are flooded with reminders of who Jesus is and how much he has done for us. John lists them off at breakneck speed:

Jesus is:

unquestionably faithful,
the resurrected one who guarantees our resurrection,
the ruler of all rulers,
the one who loves us,
the Saviour who gave himself for us so that we could be free from sin, and
the one who made us genuine servants of God.

These few verses contain so many descriptions of who Jesus is and what he has done and will do that it is no wonder that John then turns to immediately praise our Lord and Saviour.

Then, without pausing for breath, John reminds us that this same Jesus will appear as the supreme ruler and every single person will see him.

By listing what Jesus has already done for us as well as reminding us that he is faithful in the here and now, John shows us that we can trust Jesus with the future also. Jesus has said he would return and he will keep his word. His return is absolutely certain.

Many things will discourage us while we wait for Jesus to return. Sometimes we may feel that he will never return: it has been so long! Yet John helps us to realize that just as we trust Jesus to save us from our sins, we can trust him to be true to his word and return and rule in righteousness. The King of kings, our loving Saviour, will return. We can depend on Jesus to keep his promises.

Sex and Ministry

2008-09-17T05:59:00.000-07:00

I had a conversation recently with someone who had received advice about sex at a ministry-wives type event several years ago. As her husband was in ministry, she was advised to make it a priority to have sex with him frequently in order to increase the effectiveness of his ministry. This disturbed me.

I think this is ill-advised for three reasons.

First, it cuts against the self-giving we find in 1 Corinthians 7. One gives oneself to one's husband (or oneself to one's wife), for the other person. Not for their ministry or any other reason. Adding a reason, like bolstering one's husband's ministry makes it less a self-giving and more a transaction. The ministry of the husband (or the wife for that matter), will be best built up because of the strength of the marriage relationship. Engaging in sex and thereby releasing happy chemicals, or adding to a person's sense of significance is all well and good, but for some people this will happen more when they undertake intense physical activity or play a super-charged computer game or some such. I am not certain that the people who pedal this advice would be happy to advise people who aren't invigorated by sex to give it up and go do whatever it is that does make their brains work well. If they did, it would be very disturbing indeed and I would not expect that any Christian would advise other Christians against having sex within a marriage relationship under normal circumstances. It simply cuts against Scripture. Sex isn't for ministry. Sex is for marriage. (And that means marriage isn't for ministry either. Should be obvious, but sometimes it doesn't hurt to make sure.)

Second, the passage in 1 Corinthians specifically allows for the prayer to be the one exception which interrupts a married couple's sex life. But I am reasonably certain that the people who give the advice about sex for ministry would not say that a couple's sex life should be interrupted; indeed, what would logically follow from their argument is that if things are getting rocky in ministry, then more sex is in order. But surely, at least from time to time, prayer might be considered to be beneficial to one's ministry. If the argument is to run consistently, then the advice must also include times where prayer supersedes sex in the relationship. Otherwise it is hard to see how this advice has any relationship with Scripture. But that would seem to cut right against the overweighting of sex that is implied in this advice.

Third, it isn't hard to think of individuals who have not had sex either ever in their entire lives or have ceased to have sex, and who have had what would normally be considered successful ministries. Paul the Apostle springs to mind. He doesn't even see fit to include deprivation of this kind in his list of sufferings in 2 Corinthians (though he does include the anxiety he bears for the churches he knew). Indeed, he argues that singleness (an aspect of which is an absence of sex) benefits ministry in 1 Corinthians 7. We can observe that through church history those without opportunity for sex can have successful ministries, under God. So, Calvin's ministry didn't seriously decline after his wife died. The long list of missionaries in the 19th century who never married, yet faithfully proclaimed the gospel, and saw the impact on many lives. And so on. Sex just isn't necessary for a good ministry.

I don't object to sex. I object to advice about sex that sends women whirling away in despair, trying to figure out how to jump through yet another hoop in order to live the godly Christian life they genuinely want to live. And advice that seems to send them away from their husbands in an area such as sex seems even less palatable.

The Reformers blazed loud and angrily against rules about sex within marriage. Their statement that 'nothing is immoral within marriage' was designed to fend off the interference of the priests who, in the Roman Catholic system, had a huge list of rules about what was right and wrong about marital sex. This would come out in the confessional, where the husband or wife would have to answer quite specific questions about when they had engaged in sex, how they had had sex, for what purpose, and what they had been thinking about at the time. Ultimately there was a third person in every marriage, which helped no-one and was, as the Reformers rightly pointed out, contrary to Scripture.

No, this advice is not going that far down this line, but it is precariously close to drawing up prescriptives which determine when and how sex is part of a marriage and that begins to sound as though it is in the same kind of category in which sat the situation to which the Reformers objected. Sex is something for husbands and wives to talk about together. The wife shouldn't have to feel obligated to fill a particular quota imposed upon her by an external source.

Sex within marriage is not for ministry. Sex within marriage is for the husband and wife of that marriage. Just as I do not listen to my husband for the benefit of his ministry but for his benefit, and as I do not teach our child how to pray for the benefit of my husband's ministry but for the child's benefit - though both activities may well benefit my husband's ministry - so I do not have sex for my husband's ministry, but for and with my husband. I expect it will benefit his ministry because it is a good gift from God and if all is well it should help rather than hinder. But that's true of a very, very large number of things.

Marriage is made for men and women, not for ministry. Ministry is what men and women do, and they do it out of the relational capital in their lives, to which their marriage relationships contribute. It is disappointing to find such a theory, which reflects the concerns of our 21st century sex-addicted society rather than the richer, more substantial relationship concerns of Scripture. Thankfully, Scripture does not have such a mercenary, mechanical and withered view of sex and nor for that matter, of women.

Preaching: Why it Rocks

2008-09-05T00:32:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of reasons why preaching is good for us. I have been thinking about this a little bit lately, particularly with regard to discipline of listening to a sermon. I know there are heaps of good defences of preaching, but I'm just focusing on two aspects here.

The first is that preaching makes us listen. It is faster and more efficient for some of us to read. Some people actually enjoy the activity of reading. But preaching is all aural, and as any educationalist will tell you: most people are not aural learners. Which begs the question: isn't preaching obsolete now that we've discovered educational theory and realise that the whole enterprise is inefficient?

No. I don't think so.

The very fact of its inefficiency makes preaching worthwhile. You have to work at listening to a sermon. There are very few preachers who are easy to listen to and accessible, and interesting all at once. Of course, some are. But the chances of only ever hearing sermons from such individuals is fairly low. And then of course, what works for you doesn't work for me. A preacher can only really grab a certain number of people in his congregation: the rest have to work a bit.

That said, I'm not a fan of boring sermons. I hate sermons that use the text flippantly, sentimentally or just badly. I cannot stand long sermons with eternal anecdotes and so many pointless illustrations that one begins to like the idea of stained glass windows because at least they are self contained. If you preach, you should I believe put the time and energy into being faithful and interesting, using words aurally (not writing but speaking language), and put some energy into finding words that work for people who need pictures. (Words like 'fingerprints', 'sauntering', and so forth usually conjure up pictures and make it easier for people to listen). It's hard work, but anything that helps people listen is worth the investment. Because we need to listen to sermons.

We need to listen because the sermon is God's word to us, and we need to consciously stand under it. It's really easy to become a sermon critiquer if you hear heaps of sermons, but that is to miss the point of the entire exercise. If we find ourselves in the presence of a sermon, our job is to listen to that sermon. Not, as I often find myself doing, rewriting the sermon in my head, working out what my main point would be. Or working out the six reasons why that illustration the preacher used just didn't work.

Sometimes I find listening to a sermon tough going. The preacher is having a bad day, doesn't project well, is just too smarmy, hasn't done the work on the text, is very young and angry, hasn't thought through the implications of the application... any number of issues. It is useful, I think to realise that whenever we hear a sermon, we'll always find any number of good reasons not to listen. So, that means we need to make a conscious effort to listen and overcome the temptation to stand above the sermon and effectively to have a hard heart towards God's word.

This is good for us. It makes us stop. It makes us humble. It makes us care about God's word. It makes us remember that we need to know more of God, and more about God, and that he can speak through the worst of preachers. It makes us hear things we might not choose to hear, and ask ourselves questions we might not choose to ask ourselves. It is something outside of us coming to us, and however weak it may seem, through God's grace it does us good. God feeds us through his word.

Our mighty God takes the often feeble work of a preacher with his Word and infuses it with his Spirit and feeds his church. Grace at work.

The second reason is a little odd. We need to learn how to live and how to die and so we need sermons.

Sermons are educational: we learn things about God, his Word and his salvation and work in our lives through sermons. And we need this: we need to know things about God as part of knowing God. But sermons are also occasions of remembering. We hear things we already knew and knew well and we consciously remember them.

Some of these are things we need to hear to live. The fruit of the Spirit, for example, is a set of virtues that many of us may have learned before we were ten years old. But they apply to us differently today compared with when we were 10, or 20 or whatever age. We constantly need to go back to Scripture and think about how it applies to us. Listening to sermons is one of the ways we do this and it is particularly useful because we tend to think we know something and don't need to revisit it only to find that we actually do. Even if the preacher doesn't apply the passage well or properly, we've still had to think about this thing we thought we knew and may quickly pass over if we were reading.

But sometimes we hear things in sermons which will help us die. The Puritans would always say that we need to learn to die, because it is hard, hard work. And I think they were onto something. When we have 15 minutes left to live, the devil working overtime to get his last temptations in and pain and fear jockeying for our attention: what will we think? What will we believe? What will we pray?

And this is a category which catches up the hard times of life into itself. The gloom cast by the valley of the shadow of death resembles that cast by most suffering, and threatens to steal our joy and our souls. Whatever the suffering, whether it is visible or not, what will we do then? What will we think? What will we believe? What will we pray?

It is often too late to figure it out then. There may be time to do the thinking, but grief and sorrow addle the brain and warp our ability to think clearly. We have to work hard at this before the bell tolls for us, so that we aren't having to think things through from scratch, and therefore, often improperly.

Listening to good sermons helps us keep our faith strong. Sermons which remind us that we have a God who is completely trustworthy, for example, build up our confidence in him. Sermons on the death and resurrection of the Christ Jesus for us call us to remember and take strength and joy from knowing our sins are forgiven. And so on. We might walk away wondering why we needed to hear that, because we already knew it, but it builds us up and strengthens our faith.

We don't know how we will die, but we know that it is rarely easy. Listening to good sermons is one way to prepare for that day.

I've said 'good' sermons. I don't mean fancy. I mean sermons that are based off the Bible. I mean sermons that teach us to read the Bible for ourselves and keep leading us back to its truths. Other talks are fine as far as they go. But we need biblical preaching though if we are going to have this feeding that God does for us, and if we are going to have something substantial enough to fall back on the day we die.

So, bring on preaching.

The interesting, the ipoded, the feeble, the really boring, the scintillating, the over illustrated: it comes in many guises. Bible-based teaching calls for our attention, asking us to stop and listen. And when we do we get stronger and by the grace of God grow to be more like our Saviour.

Of the Writing of Parenting Books, There is No End.

2008-08-31T11:42:00.001-07:00

There really isn't. They just keep multiplying. Not unlike rabbits.

Jean has a great post here, where she discusses parenting books and how to read them.

I read parenting books every other week. The nice thing about them is that they are quick (most aren't all that profound), they have mostly one idea and they keep me thinking about what I am doing as a parent.

The downside of course, as Jean points out, they come with a huge amount of guilt attached. My favourite is the book which implies on the first page that if you don't follow their exact method your children will be drug dealers. Thanks. Very much.

But aside from that, they often have good ideas and useful insights.

Ultimately though, like marriage books, they tell you more about the person who is writing the book than they do about the subject itself.

I was slumming it this week with The Yummy Mummy's Family Handbook. Such a great title! I came across it at the library. It has been absolutely fascinating because it is written by someone from my generation, who is not even remotely Christian and who essentially spends the book unpacking her values and worldviews.

A full review would be fun, but I really don't have time. So two comments will do instead.

The first is that she has no absolutes in her world. Nothing is just 'wrong' (except smacking your kids), but she still has really strong values and beliefs. An affair, for example, is not on as far as she is concerned. Why? Because commitment builds stronger relationships and is far more rewarding long term. So having an affair might seem like a good idea, but it really is just a mirage. There is nothing wrong with having one, in her mind, but it would just be stupid to throw away all that you have worked for in this relationship and have to face divorce. (Interestingly she assumes that very few people can cope with adultery in marriage, though she doesn't explain why). Unlike our parents' generation, she states baldly that divorce is just bad for children (ours is after all the generation that got to test that one out for ourselves), and you need to minimise it as much as possible, if after all you decide to go ahead with you affair, or your partner has one. It's a 1950's view of marriage with no basis but with a strong sense of conviction.

This book has helped me realise that my generation is far more 'moral' in one sense than the previous generation, but just as selfish and self-interested. Affairs might be frowned on and spoken against (as opposed to the self-expression, love-must-have-its-way kind of 'open-mindedness' of the previous generation). But only because of the damage it does to what might otherwise be a rewarding relationship. There is nothing inherently wrong with having sex outside marriage. You don't even do it for the sake of other people, but for your own sake. Your happiness is best served by faithfulness in marriage.

Selfishness springs eternal in the human heart. And sometimes it can even prompt people to make good decisions.

The second thought I had was that this book reflects the kind of nervousness I have noticed in many of my generation. When it comes to the big things of life, like getting married, raising children and so forth, we seem to become quite anxious. How do we do it properly? The number and level of dysfunctional families in the previous generation has scared many off the whole family thing permanently. This creates a level of anxiety about doing the thing properly and not ending up with a wreckage at the end. The way some of my generation do this is to find the Right Method and stick to it, believing that this will guarantee a good outcome. I think this might be why whole groups of people in my generation have split over whether or not controlled crying is the best way to get babies to sleep. (Please feel free to comment passionately about this subject on this blog; I will feel free to not publish your comments because I am only using the issue of controlled crying as an example. When I post about controlled crying, then I will publish your comments if you care to make them. Just so we understand each other).

This tendency to needing the answers is illustrated in The Yummy Mummy's Guide in that for a relatively short book most things are covered and dealt with in a paragraph or a few pages. The writer has an audience who wants to know the answer. And she provides answers. What to say if your child complains of boredom; what kinds of toys to buy; how to manage 'play-dates'; how many times per week post-children married people have sex (I am not kidding); how long to let children surf the internet at which age, how long a child should be allowed to have the door to his or her room closed per day, at what age children are allowed to swear and which words at which age (again, not kidding) and so on and on.

I think it is true of my generation that we do want answers to the minutiae of life. Of course, what we'll do is take a few from her book, another lot of answers from another book and so on until we have a unique pastiche that we are fairly committed to. And that way, life is kind of under control. We base our fragile confidence in doing an OK job of raising our children in a bundle of answers other people have given us. I think this is true of non-Christians, but I also think it equally true of most Christian families I know in my age-group.

I like the determination that many in my generation has to get it right. We take it seriously and we don't want to mess up the lives of our children and realise that we can't just take this for granted: we have to think about this and act deliberately. We realise that we will make mistakes and want to avoid that as much as possible. Our actions and speech affect our children. It is good to take responsibility for that.

But as always, we have to take our attitudes and thinking from God: because he is our Creator and is where wisdom lies for all our lives, and because he is our Judge and will ultimately assess our lives to his standard. God's central command pivots on love: to him and to others. So when we think about being faithful in marriage, we don't think about our own fulfillment and reward, but about the person we are married to, and we follow God's instructions about marriage, thereby loving God and our neighbour in the one action. And simultaneously, we say 'no' to selfishness. The only way we can do this is by God's Spirit working in our lives, transforming us into people who delight to do his will and enjoy serving others. It's not something we slip into. It takes the salvation of God, through the death of his Son on a cross to enable ourselves to be put to one side.

Similarly, when we feel our shortcomings and weaknesses, we don't resolve them by arming ourselves with all the answers, and place our confidence in those answers, or in ourselves for having come up with the answers. We place our confidence in God: asking him for his mercy and wisdom in our lives, and for his blessing and kindness to our children. And, most difficult for my generation I am beginning to think, trusting God to act in their lives as he will, recognising God will act according to his Word as he thinks best. We want guarantees, I think, and will do anything to get them. But we don't get them. God doesn't guarantee us a spouse that won't stray, or children who won't rebel. We have to trust God in the face of the uncertainty that comes with life in this world and we find it very difficult, as all generations have found it. The only way we can trust God is to be certain of his kindness towards us, which we see in the salvation he provides for us in Jesus. There we have unarguable love, demonstrated, making it possible to trust God beyond today with ourselves and our children.

God's kindness to us in revealing himself to us in Scripture and coming to us in his Son overflows into all of our lives, and because of that, into our children's lives. This is a great place of confidence and grace, and is the wellspring for a life of service to our families. Reading Yummy Mummy drove this home to me, from another angle.

(Photos brought to you courtesy of Scotland; a very photogenic place!)

Remembering the Brave

2008-08-21T12:42:00.000-07:00

So you want to know who the Covenanters were and why you should care?

The Covenanters were a group of mostly ordinary people who lived in Scotland in the mid to late 1600's. The simple version goes like this: The English King was a tyrant and insisted on a kind of obedience that would make Saddam Hussein look cuddly. He made it illegal not to go to church (which a lot of people weren't doing because the King had changed the way church was run so that they were really uncomfortable participating in it). He not only made it illegal, but made it treason, which meant people could be arrested, tortured and exiled, transported or executed, or a special package deal, which included several of those options. So enthusiastically was this policy pursued that special tortures were invented for the Covenanters.

Opposition to the King's decrees was expressed through the signing of a Covenant or 'National Covenant' in 1638 in which those who signed promised to keep the Scottish church faithful to the Gospel, and not let the King interfere. It all becomes very complex politically as the next 50 years unfold, but that is roughly what is at the heart of it all. It is mostly influential or official people who sign the Covenant, but is adopted by many Scots, who are keen to see Scotland as a land where people can love and follow Jesus without needing go through priests and so forth.

The villain of the piece was a guy called Sergeant Claverhouse who is always depicted as having neither fellow feeling nor conscience. He comes to notice particularly in the martyrdom of John Brown of Priesthill, one of the more famous Covenanters, who was shot without a trial by Claverhouse in front of his wife and two children. His wife is similarly remembered for her great bravery in the face of this.

Many ordinary people were killed: men and women, elderly through to children. One of the more famous tales includes the execution of two women: one young (about 16) and one elderly (about 70?), who were taken by the soldiers and tied to post in the sea. They died as the tide came in. The older was tied further out in the hope that the younger might lose courage and recant. She did not. They both died.

A memorial to these two women in a graveyard just beneath Stirling castle. It is rather idealised, with an odd emphasis on the younger woman's virginity, which I frankly I find somewhat alarming. It really isn't relevant.

It was no less devastating when the clergy died. They had left the church, their livelihood and were often hunted by the soldiers. They held services on the moors for their people, and lived in hiding, going from place to place. One memorable tale involves the execution of a faithful preacher, whose head was put on a pike and displayed outside the city gates. His little boy was hidden in the attic at the time, but somehow got out of the house (as is the way of little boys), and sadly, saw his father's head. He came back to his aunt's house in tears and wouldn't say anything except "I saw my father's head" again and again. (I believe he grew up and become a clergyman himself, but died young from fever, I think).

This time was known as the "Killing Years" in Scotland.

There was much bloodshed. There was little mercy. Ordinary life for these folk was put on hold. Some never knew 'ordinary life' at all.

Why didn't they just go to church??

They didn't go to church because they knew that their only Lord was Jesus. No-one else could save them, and no-one else should have first claim on their lives.

It's a difficult movement in some ways because it is Scottish, and so necessarily tied up with Scottish nationalism (as with all things Scottish). As you read accounts (many have been 'polished up' since the 1600's), it is sometimes hard to distinguish what it is that people are dying for. But it clear that for many of them, it wasn't about Scotland the Brave so much as their commitment to the Lord Jesus.

For those folk, they didn't go to church because they believed that Jesus was their Lord. He had died to make them right with God and so they both loved and followed him, trying to imitate his love and loyalty to them. Jesus was their Lord, so Jesus had the final say in all of their life: the way they lived in everyday life, the way they spoke when they went to church, and the way they thought and the way they prayed for the King of England. They did pray for him, often as they were dying, but refused to acknowledge that he was in charge of the church. Jesus was true Lord.

Jesus had to come first for these Scottish Christians because he is true Lord and king of Kings. Not just that they thought he was, but that he is. So, you can't play around with that. If you have to suffer because of it, you have to suffer. You can't change true things just because other people tell you to. And while this is true of many people all over the world: political activists and so forth, what sets Christians apart is the assurance we have that Jesus is with us where and when we suffer, that it doesn't go unnoticed and that he warned us this would happen if we followed him.

So when we hear the tales of the brave Covenanters, standing firm in the face of fire, ocean, hunger, cold, torture and other such situations, we need to remember that they weren't bravely standing up for their beliefs all alone. They were standing with their Saviour, being loyal to him and he was with them, comforting them and infusing bravery into worn out hearts for one last stand.

Their martyrs deaths may seem remote and distant to us, here in the relative comfort of the 21st century. But their readiness to put all their hopes and dreams for this life aside and endure pain, hardship and ridicule should remind us that the Lord they died for is the same Lord whom we know, if we are Christians, and who will comfort us and make us brave in the face of persecution.

These battered, faithful Christians found him a faithful Saviour in the cold, bleak days of the seventeenth century. In our day, here and now, let us look to him and find him faithful for all our trials and in all our suffering.

Motherhood (II) Scandalous Things

2008-05-21T08:39:00.000-07:00

So we have been telling Jonathan about Jesus. A story at night before we pray with him and put him to bed. (Notice I said 'put him to bed' and didn't make any outrageous claims about sleep. Honesty is important).

And we've done Jesus' birth and lots of the teaching and healing stories, some other miracles. Each time we talk about Jesus we try and tell Jonathan why Jesus is special and different, and particularly that Jesus is the only way to God.

And then we got to the crucifixion. I was suddenly very glad that we've started this early. It is hard to know exactly what Jonathan genuinely understands, though Mark and I have agreed that we want him to always hear us talking about Jesus, so we're not going to hang about until we're sure he'll understand.

I was glad we started early in this situation because the scandal of it really hit me. Here we are talking about Jesus to Jonathan every night and showing how fantastic he is, how he rescues people who don't deserve it. And suddenly we're explaining that Jesus died.

Not just that he died, but that he was executed by humanity. Our whole response to being rescued was to insist that we didn't need it and were offended by the very suggestion. And this person who did nothing but good was suddenly killed.

It was hard work. Not hard to recite the well-known facts, but hard to face again the utter sinfulness of humanity. We're wicked. Scandalously wicked.

And over and against that you have Jesus. Dying for his enemies. Determined in the face of rejection to do a work of mercy so extraordinary that it cannot be described. Scandalous love.

It was difficult partly because we know that Jonathan hasn't heard this before. And it's so hard to explain to a new human being that this is the species he's joined: we are all wicked like this. And difficult because it highlights what we know to be true about Jonathan: he's going to do wicked things. He'll live his entire life needing this death that Jesus died for him, while he was his enemy.

So.

We do the resurrection next. I'm looking forward to that.

Motherhood (I) Suffer the Little Children

2008-02-20T07:52:00.001-08:00

This is a 'series' suggested by Karen. Now I have a little more time to write I thought I'd throw together a collection of thoughts I've had over the last few weeks. In no particular order. One thought per post. You never know. I might even have more in my series than my esteemed husband!

One important thing which I realised soon after Jonathan was born was the complexity of his relationship with God. Like all of us, Jonathan is called on by God to repent and believe in the Lord Jesus, but unlike us grown ups, the dynamic is different for him as an 8 week old baby.

Before he was born I had thought a lot about the relationship that children have with God and how it is different to and yet similar to that between adults and God. We always need God to know and love us, and to come towards us in his Son: but while adults can consciously repent, articulate their loyalty to Jesus and understand something of the complexity of his death and resurrection for us, children cannot.

Yet, Jesus calls the children to come to him as they are, not when they have grown up. It occured to me that God doesn't twitch back the veil that seems to cover the details of how he relates to young children, but that there are several key categories that are established by Scripture. First, God knows all those he has made. Second, knowledge of God is relational and so open to all human persons in Christ. Third, nothing except sin was a barrier to Jesus' relating to people when he was on earth; age, gender, social class, etc. Fourth, God calls on us to change and rattles our understanding of ourselves, but he does so in terms we can understand and in language which makes sense. Of course, we cannot accept his good news unless he opens our eyes to it, but that is a spiritual rather than intellectual revelation. This is evidenced in the number of people who can articulate the Gospel but utterly reject it. God can communicate to us at our level, because of his knowledge of us.

So, I had concluded that children can know God in Christ, though how this is achieved I could not explain. And I had concluded that Jesus can relate to young children and they respond to this in ways appropriate to their age. They may never even remember it, but that does not make it unreal or unimportant. And because a relationship with the Lord Jesus is a genuine relationship, the knowledge the child gains is not incidental but can be built upon as the relationship grows. In that way it is like Jonathan's knowledge of Mark or me at this age: he can't say who we are and might not even 'know' who we are but he does know us and this will be fleshed out as he grows older and continues to relate to us.* It isn't too surprising to come across people who state that they cannot remember a time when they didn't know and love Jesus.

It is at odds with the curious 'age-of-understanding' which is often wheeled out in the debate on children and salvation. While there is content to the Gospel and an intellectual component which cannot be dismissed, the idea that a person must therefore be of a particular age in order to be saved doesn't seem to be particularly based in Scripture. So, I think it is hard to maintain from Scripture that there is an 'age-of-understanding', where children are OK with God to a particular age and then suddenly they are not. As far as I have been able to discover, this idea of 'age-of-understanding' was generated in the early 1800's. That in itself doesn't mean that it is wrong, but it fits suspiciously well with the culture of the age and has no real basis in Scripture as far as I can see. Therefore, I am not convinced that 'age of understanding' is a good category.

At the end of my reflections I had pretty much come to the conclusion that children could be Christian from a very young age, and that their understanding of this was developed as they grew. I was confident that there would be no way of knowing this for any child with any precision, but that it was best to treat them as Christians and show them how to live lives pleasing to Jesus, all the while calling them to faith. Because no Christian needs to stop hearing the call to faith, and this is part of what it would mean for them to grow in their knowledge and love of Jesus.

I was glad that I had the opportunity to do this thinking.

I could pray with absolute confidence that Jesus would comfort Jonathan as he was wheeled away to have a lumbar puncture at 5 days old. I knew that God was capable of communicating his comfort to someone as young as Jonathan. It was good to have this confidence and not to have to try and think through the whole issue when my emotions were ragged.

And later that night when I told Jonathan his first Bible story (because we were finally in our own room at the hospital and we could have conversations at 4am rather than hushed urgent whispers), I knew that even if he understood none of the words, it was still important for him to hear about Jesus. Not that he'll respond to any one Bible story by itself necessarily, but that it is important for him to hear constantly about the Lord Jesus, who he is and what he has done, in order for him to understand his God and respond in faith, whatever the status of his relationship with God might be.

So, when I think about Jonathan and his relationship with God, I pray that he will respond in faith and that God will open his eyes. But I do so confident that God might not wait till Jonathan is old enough to speak to do so, and that God will save beyond the bounds of what we think is possible or are even able to understand.

(I told Jonathan the story of Jesus saving Zacchaeus, for those who are interested. It seemed appropriate as his name before he was born was 'Tiny'.)

*Our relationship with Jonathan isn't the same as his relationship with God however; the problem of Jonathan's sin is going to affect us in a completely different way compared with the way his sin has affected his relationship with God.

The Surprising Locations of Grace

2007-12-17T09:06:00.000-08:00

I don't think many people would disagree that Ahab, King of Israel in 1 Kings, was a thoroughly unpleasant individual. He was, in many ways, the ultimate wicked character in a fairy tale.

[Digression: You can be fairly certain that Ahab would have been ugly and without any fashion sense, or had some serious physical defect because, as Disney teaches us, you can't be a wicked prince unless you are disagreeable to look at. It just doesn't work. Surely the reason why he's wicked is that he tries to impose his ugliness on the beautiful princess?* Thankfully there is no beautiful princess in the Ahab story (because Jezebel has to be ugly as well because she too is wicked!), so we are saved from such a difficult dilemma. Which is just as well, because this post is really not about fairytales at all].
*Despite attempts to reverse this in Shrek, it is remarkable that 'unattractive' Shrek and Fiona both look a whole lot more attractive than the prince, etc.

To get back to Ahab - he really is a dreadful king. The heart sinks as he is introduced, not just because we know him by reputation as evil and we know it won't be good. But also because of the narration: "Ahab the son of Omri did evil in the sight of the Lord more than all who were before him." (16:30) The exile looms. And yes, we always knew it was coming, but it's a bit like Frodo's movement up to Mordor in the Lord of the Rings - the closer he gets the more your dread grows. Yes, you know he'll defeat the odds and all that (oh, come on, if you don't know how it ends now, you never will). But the process is so excruciating, you can't help wishing that it could be avoided, that in fact Ahab could be avoided.

But having introduced Ahab as the evil king par excellence, he then becomes almost comic. He is there when Elijah triumphs in the name of the Lord over Ba'al with fire sweeping down from heaven and demonstrating the Lord's greatness. And what does he do? He runs back home to Jezebel and dobs on Elijah. It is Jezebel who then threatens Elijah and sends him running into the wilderness. Ahab is standing there watching the whole scene unfold and does nothing. His silence does not give consent however, as his interaction with Jezebel shows: he is just too spineless to do anything himself.

Similarly, when he defies God by making a covenant with his enemy and hears God's judgment against him, his response is to be 'sullen and vexed' (20:43). In the next chapter, he tries to get Naboth to give him his vineyard, which would mean that Naboth would have to break God's laws of inheritance. He is again so 'sullen and vexed' when Naboth won't do this that he actually 'lay down on his bed and turned away his face and ate no food.' (21:4) I know 6 year olds who have more emotional maturity. Again, it is Jezebel who sorts it out for him, and if we thought going to bed and refusing to eat was an overreaction from a grown man, we get the female version from Jezebel. Not only does she murder Naboth but destroys his reputation in the process, (like using a rocket launcher to take out a rabbit really). So Ahab looks like a joke: a dangerous joke because he will get his own way, even if he can't do it himself and needs his wife to use her rather terrifying imagination to carry out his whims.

It is no surprise to then find the comedy of errors which happens at the end of Ahab's life in I Kings 22. Here Ahab is so certain that a particular prophet will prophesy against him that he refuses to hear him. When the king of Judah insists that this prophet be heard, he actually prophesies in Ahab's favour. Ahab doesn't believe him and insists that he tell the truth. Whereupon the prophet does tell the truth: he tells Ahab that in the council of God, his demise has been determined through the deception of all his prophets (who are prophesying positively about the upcomign battle), but that defeat is certain. So, Ahab will be deceived. Ahab's response? "Did I not tell you that he would not prophesy good concerning me, but evil?" (22:18) You can almost see his lower lip protruding, complete with tremor. And he throws the prophet into prison, making his (Ahab's) return from battle the condition of his release, which of course the prophet already knows will not come about.

He is told he is deceived and he is deceived.

[This would deserve its own chapter in the Biblical Theology of Deception: it is so full of issues - God deceiving, but is it deception when God actually tells you the truth about the deception? Because you can't say that God hasn't been absolutely honest with Ahab (and Jehoshaphat for that matter). So is it still deception?]

Ahab feels like a joke: the kind of king who is so inept that he needs his wife to come up with the wicked plans: weak, dithering, childish - someone to make Macbeth look decisive and malevolent.

Which is why the two twists in the Ahab story stand out so much.

The first is the rescue of Israel back in chapter 20. This is standard, run of the mill stuff for the OT, in which the army threatens God's people, God reassures the rulers that he will deliver and then he does, miraculously. God fights for his people. God rescues his people from threats. And he does it all twice.

It's just that you don't expect God to do it for Israel (who are steeped in idolatry). And you really don't expect God to do it while Ahab is on the throne. Surely God can only use willing, obedient people who love him? Surely God would only be committed to his people when they aren't caught up in idolatry and when they aren't split into two 'nations', and even then, surely he would be more interested in Judah?

But God is not so neat! And his mercy is extraordinary, and nowhere seen more explicitly and more extravagantly than when it is poured out on his people. So, at precisely the place where most of us would turn from such a messy situation and wait for a better king with a more obedient people, God steps in and rescues. He demonstrates again that despite everything these are his people and he will not be deterred from their salvation. And he will not be deterred from demonstrating his love and kindness in whichever context he chooses. It takes the idea that God can only use the obedient and holy and turns it on its head. God will use whom he will to accomplish his purposes, and this is seen dramatically and frequently in God's decision to save the unworthy.

The second twist is in Ahab's reaction to God's judgment in the wake of Naboth's death. There is a long prophecy against Ahab from 21:20-24, which is really quite awful: there's blood, dogs, birds involved, the end of a dynasty and the gory death of his wife. Not what anyone wants to hear. The narrator interrupts here, and just in case we had forgotten reminds us that 'there was no one like Ahab who sold himself to do evil in the sight of the Lord...' and goes on to list some of those things for two verses (vv25-26).

Then we get Ahab's reaction, which is deeply surprising. No pouting or holding of his breath, but repentance, of all things. And this is not about God's people now, but about this individual. Surely after all he's done, God will get the dogs and birds ready and ignore this petty repentance?

Yet, we are left with the impression that his repentance was serious and God took it seriously, and so God was gracious. So his repentance was no momentary regret but a genuine recognition that he had done the wrong thing. We only know this because of God's words to Elijah (seriously - Ahab could have gone 'about despondently' and we'd just think he was sulking again; we only know it is serious because of what God says to Elijah). (21:29) God tells Elijah that Ahab's death scene is mitigated - it happens to his sons instead (which to us seems unfair but that is something for another day). We are never left with the impression that Ahab's repentance 'made up for' his wickedness.

And it is an interesting display of his mercy. God comments to Elijah but interestingly not to Ahab. Does Ahab ever know? It is not in the passage or anywhere else and Ahab goes to his grave without the dogs or the birds - but given that he dies slowly in the field of battle, does his heart chill at the cawing of the carrion?
(An argument from silence of course, but I always find an argument from silence is good for the imagination, if not the soul; and it can keep one's mind occupied at 2am, so it's not all bad).

But this reaction of grace by God is the most unexpected of reactions: the entire rest of the passage has set us up for the justice of God's condemnation of Ahab. There is no way, if we are paying attention that we can want Ahab to get away with the awful things he has done. He has stumbled the entire nation of Israel and moved the exile event that much closer. Terrible things will happen to people and in the narrative have already happened to people because of Ahab. Worst of all, he has led the people into idolatry and scores of people are facing God's anger because of their worship of other gods. All because of Ahab. He's not just a weak idiot who affects no-one; he is king over God's people and he has devoured them. Even though he is a joke, his evil is no laughing matter.

Why should he receive any mercy? And here I think we find grace again nestled in a most scandalous place.

God shows mercy to Ahab.

It reminds me of Jonah - God showing mercy to a group of the most bloodthirsty and wicked of nations, all because it repents. It feels so easy. Why should someone have their curse removed or mitigated because they were genuinely sorry? Why should they 'get away' with such wickedness?

There is no easy answer to such a question. Indeed, there is no way of really understanding the way God's grace works. But it does demonstrate again that God will 'show mercy to whom he will show mercy' and will expect his people to rejoice in the face of the repentance of the wicked. God does not delight in the death of a sinner, but in salvation, where he declares and reveals himself.

And it implicitly calls on us to rejoice that God has been gracious to another sinner, because that is always the reaction of the people of God to the grace of God being shown, in however small or however strange a way. I think that is why God told Elijah: so he could rejoice as well as to understand that when Ahab died it would not be as previously prophesied. Ahab did repent, if only once and we are to be glad. Not just because we too were God's enemies and at that moment Jesus died for us, and so in one sense we are no better than Ahab. But because of who God is - he is the God who will be merciful, even in the grimmest, grimiest of situations, even to the most unexpected and unworthy of sinners.

God saves and saves and saves again. That is the story of the Bible. It's a scandalous story but one which rejoices the hearts of those whose lives depend on just that kind of God and his salvation in life and death.

Knowing, Believing and John's Gospel

2007-11-30T06:37:00.000-08:00

I read again during the week that 'knowledge about God is insufficient compared with knowledge of God'. The writer was trying to show that a personal relationship with God can't be generated by knowing a lot of facts about God.

I have no quarrel with this per se. But it tends towards the view that ignorance is an excellent way to know God, and that knowledge about God gets in the way of knowing God. And I know more than one person who exults in their limited knowledge as a kind of badge of spiritual honour. It's a cute position because there is no argument against it. You can't even engage with it; if you do, you demonstrate knowledge and so are obviously spiritually inferior and not worth listening to.

Having spent a chunk of time this week looking at how knowledge functions in John's Gospel, I am more convinced that ever that this view is neither helpful nor particularly Christian. In fact, I'm beginning to think its sheer laziness masquerading as spiritual righteousness. I have long thought that the self-righteousness produced by this position is an indication that it can't be a good position to hold, but saw it more as a means of self-protection by those who held it. I am beginning to discard this caveat, however. And I'm beginning to discard it because of how knowledge seems to work in John's Gospel.

Knowledge is of vital importance in John's Gospel. I think we see it most clearly in the way it works in people's lives throughout the Gospel. There are two key groups who give us a good indication of the importance of knowledge. There are those with some knowledge, and those whose knowledge grows before our eyes as the Gospel unfolds. In both cases, knowledge is of critical importance to how a person responds to Jesus. And so, knowledge is critical to a person's salvation. It doesn't get more significant than that.

In the first case, where there is some knowledge, that knowledge is used and filled out by Jesus to demonstrate who he is and generate belief. I think we see this most clearly in the woman at the well (ch 4) and in Martha's confession (ch 11). Both the woman at the well and Martha say "I know that..." and then include a piece of important, genuine knowledge about God. With the woman at the well, it is that the Messiah is coming and will reveal all; with Martha it is that God will give to Jesus all that he asks and that the dead will be raised on the last day. In both cases, Jesus then takes the important information they have provided and shows how he fits and exceeds the category. With the woman at the well, he so fulfills the category of Messiah (revealing all) that she runs off to bear witness to him to her township; with Martha, Jesus shows her that the knowledge she has of God as the God who will resurrect and who knows and honours Jesus, his Son is true to an extent that she hadn't imagined prior to this. So, she learns that Jesus is not merely an agent of the resurrection, but is himself both life and resurrection. He embodies it, showing that he is the true God of life with the power to resurrect: the God of the last day standing before her.

In both cases, knowledge which is genuine and valid is used to reveal Jesus to these women. He does not negate their knowledge. Their knowledge is not an impediment to belief but has established good and right categories in their thinking which Jesus enlightens. Knowledge is good for these women in their relationship with Jesus.

On the contrary, the prolonged argument with the Jewish leaders which peppers the entire book continually brings up the issue of their knowledge (and lack of it). So, they don't know where Jesus is from (9:29) and this impedes their ability to listen to him, let alone believe what he is saying. Or they know that salvation is found in the Scriptures but don't know that Jesus fulfills the Scriptures and so don't believe. Their lack of knowledge (and incorrect knowledge in other places) stumbles them to the extent that they reject Jesus completely and teach others to do likewise. Their lack of knowledge cuts them off from believing in Jesus.

The other group who show us the importance of knowledge are the disciples. Their growth in knowledge is important in their relationship with Jesus. From their earliest confessions in chapter 1, through to their post-resurrection realisations (for example: 2: 21-22), their knowledge of who Jesus is continues to grow. The critical moments seem to be in Simon Peter's confession (6:68-69), where Peter confesses not only that Jesus is the Holy One of God but that he alone has words of eternal life. The second moment seems to be the disciples' realisation in the Farewell Discourse (16:30), where they state that they now know that Jesus has come from God. This is particularly significant because in the following chapter Jesus uses this confession as proof of their genuine belief in his prayer (17:8). This is not their position at the beginning of the Gospel, but one which they have reached on the basis of hearing and watching Jesus. They believe because they know.

Far from knowledge stunting their growth as followers of Jesus, it is on the basis of knowledge that the disciples come to a fuller, deeper trust of Jesus and a belief that is not even toppled by the crucifixion event. They believe in Jesus, because they have remained with him (as he invited them to do in chapter 1), and so have seen for themselves who he is and what he has done. Certainly, part of this knowledge is relational kind of knowledge, but that is not the knowledge they speak of when writing their Gospels. In the Gospels they report what happened: what Jesus did, what he said, how he responded to things and so forth. This is the kind of knowledge that they provide us with in order for us to believe, which is their goal in writing their Gospels. The relational knowledge is no doubt there and no doubt significant, but the basis for the belief they call us to is found in the actions and words of Jesus: 'factual' knowledge.

In John's Gospel, Jesus is establishing them as witnesses, not only to those in their generation, but even to us today. And they would be useless witnesses if their belief was based on a sentimental attachment to Jesus which had no solid basis. We rely on their testimony: on what they saw and handled and touched. Our knowledge is dependent on their knowledge. If all they had to report was a collection of vague notions or feelings which could not be known, their witness would be severely limited. Instead, they tell us what they know to be true: what happened, what was said, what is meant by what was said and the reactions of others (good and bad).

It is on the basis of this knowledge that we believe that the Lord Jesus Christ is the Son of God, sent by God to redeem the world. We need a rock-solid knowledge base to believe something as grand as that. We need knowledge that is based in historical activity and speech, that is based on reliable and trustworthy sources. Only this is substantial enough to stand the test of life, with all its difficulties and with all its transient emotions. Believing because we know takes the limelight away from us (our knowledge is outside ourselves after all), and demonstrates that we depend on God and his word to know him through his Son. There is no room for the swollen pride of the ignoramus here.

God's Justice and Our Self-Deception

2007-11-23T16:04:00.001-08:00

One of the most striking things about the passage in I Kings 13 is the way the younger and older prophets are treated by God.

It seems so unfair! The older prophet deliberately deceives the younger prophet in order to tell whether the prophecy he brings will come about. The younger prophet, with a good Israelite sense of respect for his elders believes the older prophet, and so is deceived. God speaks to him and tells him that he will surely die for his disobedience. Sure enough, on the way home the younger prophet dies: he is mauled by a lion who does not seem to be all that hungry: it neither eats him nor it seems does it even have an appetite for his donkey (who is no doubt traumatized by the event, though the passage is strangely unconcerned with the donkey’s state of mind). The older prophet hears nothing and is not punished at all.

God speaks clearly to the younger prophet, who is concerned to obey God in all the detail he is given. The relationship is obviously one of a God-fearing, bold prophet with a God who makes his purposes and desires known and is utterly faithful to those purposes he’s made known. On the other hand, the older prophet has no such relationship with God. By the end of the chapter we doubt that he is even a ‘prophet’. God never speaks to him (even when God tells the younger prophet he will die, no word is given to the older prophet who has masterminded this situation to the detriment of the younger prophet). The old prophet does not trust God’s word: God has already given a sign that the events the young prophet speaks of will come about in the destruction of Jeroboam’s altar. Yet the older prophet sets up the younger prophet for death in order to check whether he is genuinely a prophet, which he himself appears not to be. It would hard to argue that he feared God. God certainly doesn’t seem to have much to do with him. The closest he gets to any kind of relationship with God is to be buried with the bones of the younger prophet. He rejects God’s word to cultivate for himself a sign which satisfies him, and in doing so rejects God.

Yet, it is by no means certain that he thinks he rejects God. He doesn’t have contempt for the younger prophet when he finds out that he is a genuine prophet. Instead, he wants to be connected with him: he gathers up his bones and insists on being buried with them, which demonstrates a real respect for and desire for kinship with this younger prophet. It matters to him that this prophet was a genuine prophet and as he grieves he identifies with him as ‘brother’. If you’d said to the prophet: “Are you a prophet of God?” I think he would have answered, “Yes”.

And God seems to reject him. One of the most terrifying aspects of the narrative is that God does not say a word to this ‘prophet’. God is completely silent. He is a ‘prophet’ who has no access to the Word of God. The best he can do is trick a real prophet into having tea with him, and then plead to be buried with his bones. That is the closest he gets to God. God has nothing to do with him.

That is far, far worse than the fate of the younger prophet. The younger prophet hears the Word of God and then is tricked into disobeying. God then tells him that he’s going to die because of it, and sure enough he does. The young prophet has a relationship with God. God is completely faithful to his word, from first to last, and he speaks to this prophet. There are no games, no tricks as far as God is concerned.

This is God’s justice. There is nothing unjust about God’s treatment of either prophet. It probably makes most of us feel uncomfortable, but that says more about us, I think at this point. Two thoughts:

(a) We confuse ‘fairness’ with ‘justice’. We think that something is only just if it is ‘fair’, and we have incorporated into our view of ‘fair’ the idea of things being the same for everyone. This is a nifty invention of the Enlightenment, and from time to time is helpful for us. But on the whole it doesn’t help us deal with reality. Life is not fair. A cursory look at the water situation in the first world, compared with that in the third world should make it obvious that life is not fair. Even if we like to think of ourselves as scrupulously fair, we may not be ‘just’ or ‘righteous’. We might, for example, dispense our affection evenly throughout our family or friends, not taking in account that some might need more of it than others. We could congratulate ourselves on our ‘fairness’, but have we actually done the right thing?
And God is not ‘fair’. He is certainly ‘just’, but he doesn’t treat everyone the same. He gives gifts to those whom he will. He gives different life spans to people. And so it goes on. It is true that he doesn’t play favourites: he remains unimpressed with the beautiful, the intelligent, the wealthy, the highly talented, etc. Instead, he chooses for his family those who demonstrate that he is God and will be glorified through the weak, pathetic things of the world. All this should show us that God’s justice is beyond us. We can’t fathom it. We simply don’t have the wit to understand the wideness and complexity of it. And part of the reason is that our view of justice is stubbornly encrusted in the small, recently invented category of ‘fair’. God is far bigger than ‘fair’ and won’t be constrained by it. He is working with a far greater, more complex entity: Justice.

(b) One of the other issues raised by this narrative is the question of deception. How is it that God allows the younger prophet to be deceived by the older prophet? Why doesn’t he jump in and stop it? The assumption behind this is the idea lurking in our minds that God owes people who follow and trust him. He is obliged to smooth the path, at least partly, for those who take him seriously. After all, they are on his side.
But God doesn’t do this for the younger prophet. And this raises for us the disturbing possibility that God allows us to be deceived and even to deceive ourselves. Of course, this must be self-evident if we reflect on the number of Christians who disagree about important matters. We can’t all be right in everything. It is likely that we are all wrong in something, and that this ‘wrongness’ isn’t just a flaw in our logic. We get in the way of our own logic and believe things we want to believe: about ourselves, about God, about life, about other people. None of us understand the depth of our own sinfulness, so why should we have a handle on anything else in the world? We can’t function in the grip of such skepticism, and so, as Luther put it, we go and ‘sin boldly’, knowing that none of our actions are ever completely pure. But in knowing this, we must always know ourselves to be capable of self-deception and of being deceived by others. When we pray “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil”, we are not praying about a hypothetical possibility, but about a real situation. The Bible does not stress that we are to be alert and pay attention to what we think and believe for no good reason. We readily and easily deceive ourselves and are deceived by others, often because we want to be.
In the end, if God does not open our eyes when we are deceived, we are hopelessly enmeshed in delusion. There is nothing we can do to cut the net.

This is scary, because we can’t ensure that we won’t be deceived. And we can’t be sure we won’t be deceived about something that really matters with significant consequences (like disobeying the word of God and being eaten by a lion, for example). How do we live with this? We live with it by realizing that we are only like this because we are sinners. This is not someone else’s fault. This is not God’s fault. This is not the ‘older prophet’s’ fault (whoever that might be in our lives). It is because we are sinful that we can’t see clearly. And the only thing left for sinners to do is to throw themselves on the mercy of God and pray for deliverance. Sinners can’t save themselves from their sin nor from anything else. They can only depend on God for salvation, and for clarity of mind and thought (and everything else they need for that matter). Pretending that we can work things ourselves on our own terms only binds the net more tightly around us and incapacitates us more. If we stop thinking we can be deceived, either by ourselves or others, we ensure we are deceived.
Depending on God is not a guarantee that we will not be self-deceived (or deceived by anyone else). God may allow us to be deceived (as he allowed the younger prophet to be deceived and to die for it). It is wise therefore to be suspicious of oneself and know that we are likely to be deceived. That’s why humility is so important: not some kind of ham-fisted attempt to pretend we have faults, but a genuine realization that we aren’t self-sufficient and aren’t on a level with God. We stand under his rule. When we say he is ‘all-wise’ we don’t mean that he is slightly more wise than we are, but that he is wise in a way we know nothing about.
So, we trust what he says because we know that he always tells us the truth about everything, including ourselves. A true understanding of ourselves as sinners capable of self-deception – probably engaged in it at this very moment – helps us depend on and be grateful to our only wise, faithful, true God who has promised wisdom to those who ask for it.

1 Kings 13 helps us to realise the kind of God we are dealing with: one whose Justice is beyond us. And it helps us realise who we are: the kind of people who are not self-sufficient and who can't trust ourselves to even think clearly. This is where 'trusting God' moves from a pious phrase to a living reality, as we say 'yes' to his justice and wisdom, acknowledging that both are out of our league.

Don't Feed the Messenger!

2007-11-23T15:42:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking recently about what I consider to be one of the oddest chapters in the Bible. 1 Kings 13 gives us a narrative of the prophet who condemns Jeroboam, and is then deceived by another older prophet on his way home so that he falls under God’s judgment and is killed by a lion.

Leaving to one side the issue of 'fairness' (which will be dealt with in the following post), the passage calls up the importance of the message and the messenger and how the two are linked in a fairly vivid way. We see this in a few ways.

The first is in the odd instructions God gives to the prophet. He is not allowed to eat or drink on his way home. We could come up with all kinds of reasons why this might be the case, and sometimes God gives instructions to prophets which have a symbolic meaning. But in this case simply don’t know and we’d only be guessing. The narrative goes out of its way to show us (through repetition) that this is a clear, explicit command given by God and understood by the prophet.
And it demonstrates in a concrete way that the prophet belongs to God. He not only brings God’s message, but he has no independent existence apart from God. God literally controls his life: what he will say, to whom, and even when he will eat and drink. The prophet does not say his two cents worth and then go back to being a private citizen. He can’t divorce himself from his job or from his message. He is the prophet, not just the guy who sometimes prophecies.

The second thing is that others relate to him on the basis of his message. The older prophet wants him to come back with him because of his message, not because he wants to spend quality time with him as a person. We see this when he finally concedes that his prophecy was genuine in light of the younger prophet’s death. The (ironic, offensive and pathetic) outpouring of grief he has on the death of the younger prophet comes about only after he is convinced that this is a genuine prophet: he doesn’t grieve for the prophet as a man he had tea with, but as a prophet.

The young prophet dies because he is a prophet. God holds him accountable to his word in a public way because he is a prophet; the older prophet deceives him because he is a prophet.

It’s a great passage for bringing home the point that God’s word is not a neutral thing. It isn’t like any other word, and this raises a variety of issues. Here, one of the key issues is that the relationship between the messenger of God’s word and the word or message are strongly linked. The younger prophet doesn’t stop being a prophet – even his bones are the bones of a prophet (and so come to have value to the older prophet).

We see this most clearly in Jesus, who is both the great and final message and the last and ultimate messenger. The two ‘roles’ cannot be cut off from one another, effectively tying who he is with what he does and demonstrating his relationship with God and with humanity. You can only relate to Jesus on the basis of what you think of his message, because he is the messenger. Being messenger for Jesus meant dying for our sins and rising again and that is precisely the core of the message he brings. The Lord Jesus is not a private citizen but one who puts aside any private preference he might have and in order to welcome us to God embodies the message even as through his Spirit he speaks the message of forgiveness of sins through his cross. It’s no great surprise that the writer of Hebrews contrasts Jesus first with ‘messengers’ (angels) in Hebrews 1 as he shows that Jesus is superior, not only in bringing God’s message but in being the message. In Jesus, messenger and message come together.

And the warning for us lies in how we treat the messenger and his message. We can’t pretend to accept the message and deny the messenger; we can’t pretend to like the messenger and reject the message. The two are intertwined. This pushes us into understanding ourselves as always under the message or word in our relationship with Jesus, striving for an attitude of submission to him, by being ruled by his word through his Spirit.

Thoughts about Childbirth

2007-11-02T10:51:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about childbirth recently. Not too surprising really, given that hopefully I'll be doing this in about 7 weeks, depending on when Tiny decides he's had enough and wants to come out and play. I've got the skeleton of a 'birthplan', so that everyone does what I want them to do while I'm busy screaming. And we've gone and inspected the hospital, which looked sane and sanitized and an easy place to be while everything is happening. We only own a car seat for this poor child so far (which is sad given that we don't have a car), but slowly I am getting my act together and hopefully in the next two weeks will buy many infant related products.

There are two major things that have been buzzing around my mind in all of this, though. The first is the great category Luther gave to us. The feminists all hate Luther for his bombastic sexist remarks, which are often quite funny (I think they're funny - feminists do not find them amusing at all). I can't quote it verbatim (our boxes still haven't turned up with all our stuff in them), but one of my favourite quotes from Luther is found in Luther on Women: A Sourcebook By Susan C. Karant-Nunn (which I strongly recommend), and goes something like this:

Childbirth is a good work, to be embraced by all women as a privilege and a God-given task, which would could even cause men to want to be women so that they too could do this good thing. Will you die in childbirth? So, good for you, pass on over. You have died doing a good and worthy task.

You can see why feminists don't like this! It's typical, cringeworthy, over the top Luther at his most passionate. I am quite attracted to it though because it isn't being painfully careful and allows you to see behind what he is saying to the larger categories, which are quite useful I think.

The category I most appreciate is that Luther has moved childbirth from a demonstration that women are under the curse and are somehow cursed in and by childbirth (the medieval Roman Catholic view), to childbirth being one of those good works which God has prepared for us in advance to do (Ephesians 2). In other words, redemption really does roll back the curse in a genuine way for Christians this side of heaven.
It doesn't completely remove the curse and leave us 'bearing children, while contemplating God calmly and peacefully' as Luther argues would have happened prior to the Fall. The pain and the 'toil' of it is still very much present. But the context is so completely different. Far from being merely the frustrating, meaningless pain of futility tied up with the curse, when we know Christ we move to understanding that all we do for others is part of these good things that God has planned for us to do. Whether it is changing nappies (Luther again - referring to men here), doing great and wonderful things, doing menial tasks or doing something as difficult as childbirth - it is caught up in this extraordinary category of things God plans for us to do and gives us the opportunity to do as an expression of love. We don't need to be sentimental in the doing of them, but we are given a rock-solid reason based on who we know God to be, which doesn't remove the pain, but which dissolves the futility of the situation. Going through childbirth isn't just a necessary evil to be endured and detested, but something one does for someone else, with the blessing of God, knowing that this is part of the work he has given us to do.

I'm grateful to Luther for pulling things together like this. We tend not to speak publically about childbirth, so you kind of have to rattle around and do your own thinking about it and I think that can be a bit tricky sometimes. It's good to have some sturdy categories in which to rest your thinking with something like this.

The second thing I've been thinking about is death. Our baby has now got about 90% chance of surviving even at this 'early' stage if the birth was to take place now (which is quite amazing I think). I have an excellent chance of survival. In fact, no medical professional has even mentioned to me that I might die. I know it worries Mark, but I don't think most people really think about it.

Yet 100 years ago, and more so 200 years ago, it would have been a strong possibility. There is a service in the Anglican Prayerbook of thanks to God for mercy in childbirth. Bach came back from a months-long gig to find that his wife and child were dead and buried (and because of communication problems back then he found out when walked in the door). Just two reminders of childbirth going horribly, tragically wrong.
I'd be quite surprised if I died, and I'm not really worried about it, though of course it is possible; I worry more about Tiny dying. But this is the nexus of life and death: here where life is made possible (because Tiny cannot live indefinitely in my womb: trust me - there simply isn't room for a lot more growing to happen), but made possible only in the face of potential death.

I've heard that many people faced with the whole experience of childbirth are amazed and start to wonder whether there is something more to life than the merely material. It makes a lot of sense to think that because we recognise that we can't really control life. And it makes a lot of sense, not just in our day, where the focus is only on life, but in the past where death and life dwelt together during childbirth and the outcome was by no means certain.

I hope I remember somewhere in the chaos of it all, of this new mercy of a lowered death rate that God has showered on the human race, particularly if it applies to Tiny and to me and we are both alive at the end of it. I hope I remember it because it is an extraordinary blessing not to be contemplating and actively preparing for the possible death of myself or my baby at this point, but smiling to myself at the thought of a new life. And running around buying cot sheets and doing other trivial things.

Because life is always a blessing from God: none of us can make it happen. None of us can so much as add an extra hour to our lives. Life is a gift God gives and it is good for us to appreciate it and give thanks.

Author, Canon, Inspiration

2007-10-28T11:50:00.000-07:00

The idea that a book of the Bible is actually written by the guy who says he is writing it (like Paul writing the letters of Paul, or Peter for Peter's letters or John for the three letters of John, for example), is fairly old-fashioned. Modern wisdom has it that the early church was fairly relaxed over the whole issue of people writing as a famous person and really had no problem with the average John Smith adopting the pseudonym of Paul, Peter or John. From here it is then suggested that therefore we shouldn't get too strung up over the issue and just accept that they probably didn't write the books they seem to have written. Some magnanimous souls allow a several books to be accepted as having been written by the person who states they wrote the book, but many allow only a few.

So old fashioned creatures such as I are fairly rare. I think it is actually a fairly important issue and I'm not convinced that the early church was as relaxed about it as modern scholars would want to argue.

This conviction was heightened during the week as I continued to read some introductory material regarding the book of Revelation. I discovered that while the book was readily accepted throughout the early church as Scripture (not the case with all the books of the NT), there was an exception to this. A bishop, Dionysius of Alexandria, wanted to argue that the book of Revelation was not in the canon (in order to stifle a heresy he was battling in his part of the world that appealed to material in Revelation for support). So he set about trying to prove that while the book was inspired it was not written by the Apostle John, and therefore could not be included in the NT. Subsequently, several other bishops around Alexandria rejected the canonicity of Revelation and it wasn't until some time later that it was accepted in that part of the world.

It is important to remember in all of this that Dionysius was not just an ordinary church goer with some funny ideas. He was a bishop. In our day that doesn't mean much. Bishops wear strange clothes and appear to be either trouble makers or completely useless, or earnest men, who might be able to make a difference but on the whole don't. Actually this is probably just a post-60's thing to a certain extent, where yet another authority figure is rejected for no other reason than their being an authority figure.

But in different places Bishops are still remarkably important. In a hostile zone in Africa, I heard of how during a recent civil war the Bishop of the area gathered up his congregations and hid them in the jungle until it was safe to come out. And now that the war has ceased, he is rebuilding the church, physically as well as spiritually. And this fits with how Bishops were in the early church: it was the Bishop who met the barbarians at the gates of Rome, for example, and managed to sue for a limited peace which protected the bulk of the people. Bishops were not just strange people wearing odd hats (in fact, they probably had the good sense not to wear bizzare 'religious' garb), but were (and are) real community leaders and real religious leaders. When a bishop made a decision, it had a serious impact on the people under his care. It doesn't mean they were all good, by any means, but it does mean that they had genuine influence in the life of the church in ways we don't always notice now.

So, a bishop in Alexandria is not to be quickly disregarded. And if, as is the case, his ruling leads to a group of bishops in his area also insisting that the Apostle John did not write Revelation and it is therefore non-cannonical, I think we have reason to question the generally accepted position that the question of who the authors of NT books were did not matter much to the early church. Even if it only mattered to this group of bishops (which I find hard to believe), it renders the accepted position suspect. It means that more needs to be said to confirm this favoured position than a mere assertion. And simply showing that some secular writers thought that pseudonymity was fine is not enough here because church leaders do not necessarily go along with their culture (even today!). Some serious primary source evidence from key church leaders would be a great start. I shall have to go and read more on the issue.

One of the interesting things in the whole discussion with Dionysius was that authorship was elevated even over inspiration. Dionysius was unwilling to dismiss Revelation as not genuinely inspired. Instead, it was on the grounds of questioning whether it was written by the Apostle John that he 'removed' Revelation from the canon. I'm not sure I agree with his ruling (God has been known to use donkeys!), but it does show that he (and his fellow bishops) took authorship seriously. It wasn't enough for a book to be the Word of God to be authorative--it had to be written by a ridgey-didge apostle!

It does give people like me, who are suspicious of this apparent ease the early church had regarding authorship, a growing confidence that the easy dismissal of my position by much of the scholarly world is not based on the substantial and rigorous evidence often assumed in the literature.

Rewards

2007-10-21T07:49:00.000-07:00

Among the things which sit less comfortably with me about the Bible is the emphasis it places on rewards. You notice this in the Sermon on the Mount, where the reward you look for is from God the Father and not from those around you, when you pray, give alms, etc (Matt 6); it pops up in places like 1 Peter 5:4 as the motivation for being a good leader (and follower; 5:6) and so forth.

There are many reasons to live a life of obedience to God:
because he is good,
because Jesus died for us and calls us to such a life,
because he is God,
because Jesus modelled for us a life of obedience,
because it is good for those around us,
because God is transforming us by his Spirit to seek out this life... and so on.

'Reward' later for living this kind of life seems ignoble and small compared to these reasons. And the triumphalism which has sometimes accompanied Christians crowing about their heavenly reward as though it is their right (as history records), is further disincentive to focus on this aspect of Scripture.

But there has to be a legitimate Christian way of being motivated by heavenly reward and not sinking into the pious but possibly un-Biblical practice of asking, "Why would I need a reward? Just knowing God is reward enough." Surely we can be genuinely satisfied with God in a deep and real way, and look forward to a reward, at the same time if both are elements of how the Bible paints the redeemed life.

In the past, I have noticed from time to time our habit of passing over the reward passages as though they aren't there to legitimately motivate us, but never put serious thought into it. Which meant that as I read through Revelation I became increasingly uncomfortable. Rewards are promised throughout the book. But more than that, the Christians in heaven seem openly keen to get them. There is no demure: "I couldn't possibly...!" but an eager recognition that their reward is important to them.

One of the places this is seen is in the climatic scene in Revelation 11, where finally the 7th angel blows his trumpet unleashing the 3rd woe. Uncharacteristically, the 'woe' seems to be the handing over of the kingdom of the world to Christ, which hardly seems a tragedy. This fits with the disorientation that has been building in the letter, in which patterns are established and then broken. The worst offending (up to this point), is the pattern of the angels and their trumpets. Here, in chapter 11 the entire pattern is turned upside down and the reader (naturally) wonders where the 'woe' is. Has it happened yet?

And then the 24 elders, who seem to symbolise believers (not sure of that), explain it in their response to God:
"We give you thanks, O Lord God, the Almighty, who are and who were, because you have taken your great power and have begun to reign. And the nations were enraged, and your wrath came, and the time came for the dead to be judged, and the time to reward your bond-servants the prophets and the saints and those who fear your name, the small and the great, and to destroy those who destroy the earth." (11:17-18)

The woe is two-edged. Those who stand with God are rewarded; those who stand against God are judged. It is part of the Bible's ongoing theme of judgment and salvation being accomplished by God in a simultaneous action.

But the reward is not incidental to the 24 elders' understanding. They don't seem to hold with the view that insists that we glorify God as the goal of our lives, even if he damns us in the end. When I came across that idea, it seemed brave and noble, but the more I think about it, it really doesn't square with the Bible. Wanting the reward of salvation in all its fullness, which includes but is not limited to enjoying a relationship with God, seems to be part of what it means to be in relationship with God. There is no sense in which the rewards promised in Revelation can be separated from a relationship with God or with his salvation. (So even the slightly odd rewards in the letters at the beginning of the book, including my personal favourite: "I will give him a white stone and a new name written on the stone which no one knows but he who receives it" - all have to do with a relationship with Jesus and the salvation he offers).

In fact, it would not surprise me if wanting the reward God offers us is a result of his work in us, transforming us by his Spirit, so that far from dismissing his rewards, we strive harder to achieve them. They become things of worth and immensely valuable to us, not separate from our relationship with him, but precisely because of our relationship with him. Wanting our reward is the work of the Spirit as we come to understand through God's word the immense reward he holds out to us.

Wanting God's rewards then, not dismissing them as being unnecessary; trying to figure out what they are and what they mean and actively using them on ourselves as incentive to live a life which pleases God - all seem to be legitimate (and praiseworthy) responses in the NT to God's promises of reward. Of course, it would be ridiculous to put 'reward' at centre stage, eclipsing God's salvation as God's work from first to last, thoroughly embedded in grace and his kindness to us who have no 'right' to a reward. But this awareness should not so swing back our pendulums that we shy away from cultivating an eagerness to receive our reward from God. Just more of the freedom we have in Christ to be genuinely human!

Revelation: A Narrative?

2007-10-12T00:58:00.001-07:00

I have spent some time in the final book of the Bible over the past week. I am doing a master’s research project on this, which means I need to seriously increase my knowledge of the book!

Finally, here, I’ve had some free time to actually start grappling with it. I’ve discovered a number of things, but on my initial read through (which is still in progress) the narrative structure of the book is really impressing me.

I wouldn’t have said that Revelation had a narrative structure. I’d have thought it was too apocalyptic for that. Instead I find some of the best dramatic tension, a whole series of offline/online switches and other narrative techniques. The ‘plot’ slows down so much in places that there are whole chapters where the narrative doesn’t so much as move forward a single inch. There are even weird sort of Brecht-ian moments where John reappears in the narrative to remind you of his all-important witness to these events. I’m sure there are other reasons which I just don’t see at the moment for his reappearance as these precise moments. All very clever, but who really cares?

I care.

Because I think this demonstrates that John the Apostle is the author of Revelation. I know this is hopelessly old fashioned, because after all that is the tradition of the church and the evidence of the text, so it must be wrong. But I really don’t care. John the Apostle (whom I also think wrote John’s Gospel, demonstrating that I am lost cause on the issue) is remarkably clever at story telling. He arranges his Gospel with all the artistry and scientific precision of a da Vinci, incorporating different genres (narrative and teaching) to breathtaking effect. This is precisely what I see happening in Revelation: a blending of genres, (letter, apocalyptic, narrative) which dovetail and create a meaning more substantial than is possible with any one genre. John seems to be a master craftsman when it comes to shaping content using form, in which the form is more than the packaging but adds meaning to the content. Revelation, although it has different stylistic features and uses different language, feels Johannine in this way.

But John is doing more than merely being clever. At this stage in my thinking, I would say that the overarching theme of Revelation is the sovereignty of God. God owns all people, all creatures, all of history and he will bring it to an end and rearrange everything. Those who love him will be recognized by him, and will themselves recognize and applaud his work. Those who hate him will be compelled to recognize and submit to his rule, despite his rejection of them. It is a stark message. The focus from the beginning is the rule of God in this, seen in the content of the various chapters.
However, the form adds to this content in several ways: (in no particularly order)
• Worship completely slows down proceedings. The action completely stops while various groups cry out to God about how extraordinary he is and praise him for what he has done. Nothing can happen for an entire chapter, twice between chapters 4-11 because of the worship. It could have been written as a less detailed narrative: “And all the angels, creatures and believers worshipped God in various ways.” But instead the detail is given: who is speaking, what they are saying, what they are doing and in what order. The effect is to show us that responding to God is not incidental. God is not merely acting without any interest in the response of his creation: their response is important. The reader’s response is also important. And the effect is also to model a response. Some of the things happening in the book are unusual to say the least and it is hard to know what is going on, let alone how one should respond. The detailed responses help orientate the reader as to his or her response: the book is not intended as a showpiece of apocalyptic literature but to call from us faith and love. These scenes also show that there are definite groupings (each grouping has a different level of intimacy: believers almost exclusively are the group which use ‘you’ to address God; the whole of creation (and presumably those who hate God) only speak of God in the third person). This too is to help us respond appropriately now and learn to love God before finding ourselves hating him, we are cut off from him forever.
• Everything is numbered. Yes, the numbers are very interesting and you can add them up and do all sorts of things with them. But when someone numbers something, then you can tell they are in full control of it. The seven angels with seven trumpets, for example, show that the woes visited on the earth are under the precise management of God himself. They are unleashed at precisely the right time in precisely the right order, with lots of narrative clues along the way that this is the case. The end of the world does not happen because God loses control of the cosmos even momentarily and it unravels accidentally. The end of the world happens because and as God chooses. The form and the content make that crystal clear.
• The narrative focuses our attention on the critical moments by drawing out the action and creating dramatic tension. There is a major interruption between the sixth and seventh angel, creating substantial dramatic tension in the narrative. Not only that but the fifth and sixth angels have between them completely broken the pattern of the angels with their trumpets, so that the reader is completely disoriented and remains disoriented as a strong angel (who fits no pattern) pops up and proceeds to push the narrative in a different direction with John re-emerging into the narrative once again. The effect is to highlight the seventh angel and his ‘woe’, which is nothing less than everything being handed over to Jesus as true Lord of all lords. The narrative is structured to focus all of our attention on it.
• God is introduced, seated on a throne. He is surrounded by colour, movement, noise (presumably melodious but that is simply not in the text; the various creatures may be singing off key for all we know) and various responses to him. God says and does nothing. That is a rather unfashionable observation because it sounds like the ‘unmovable mover’, but I think it is done deliberately to set the context for the rest of the book. God isn’t frantic. He isn’t busy. This is not one of the Parthenon of gods, restless and ill at ease, planning things. God is utterly in control. The proper response to this God is to worship him and acknowledge his rule.
So John isn’t just being clever with his design of this immensely complex book, but is carefully helping us wade through complicated apocalyptic things and see the real message of the book: God is utterly sovereign; Jesus is Lord. He wants to help us see and say these things now and live in light of them (rather than be condemned by saying them against our desires in the final day), and so he does that in various ways. One of those ways is through the actual design of Revelation.

Disappointment with David

2007-09-29T14:10:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I preached a series of sermons on I Samuel. It was the first time I have really preached on OT narrative (although I’d wanted to for a long time) and I thoroughly enjoyed it. One of the key things I spent time on was unpacking how Saul tragically and unequivocally disobeyed God’s word and was unrepentant in the wake of this. I contrasted this with David in I Samuel as he struggles to live as the Chosen One in exile and in uncertainty, sometimes making good choices, sometimes bad choices, sometimes confusing choices. But always David seems to orbit his life around God’s word in a genuine if imperfect way. He takes the brave, defiant trust in God displayed against Goliath and lives this out in the difficult, unsettled life he is called to lead after God anoints him the leader of his people.

Of course, I never had a rosy-eyed view of David. The callous Bathsheba incident, the clueless, disinterested father of II Samuel, the misguided devotion to Absalom (however commendable to see David exhibiting some paternal emotion) and so forth demonstrate a less than perfect king with some truly deplorable weaknesses. But the Bible never shows us perfect people, but people who encounter God and are transformed in the core of their being through his word and by his Spirit.

The depressing thing about David is his deathbed. I Kings 1 shows an ailing king without a sense of what is going on around him. He appears to be at the mercy of his advisors and sons as to the succession. But so much worse than this is his sudden rallying just prior to his death and his instructions to Solomon in the following chapter. Two ‘acts of mercy’ (the Joab incident never appears to be mercy but calculated self-interest) are overturned. David hasn’t carried out vengeance because he hasn’t worked out how to get away with it. He’s been waiting for a successor who will be wiser than he and will know how to carry out his vengeance for him without getting into trouble. This is the David of the Nabal/Abigail incident: you have to make it worth his while to engage with you; if you treat him rudely he won’t overlook it, he’ll wreak bloody vengeance with all his resources. Abigail of course, cuts this short with her words: “When the LORD has done for my master every good thing he promised concerning him and has appointed him leader over Israel, my master will not have on his conscience the staggering burden of needless bloodshed or of having avenged himself.” She and David both recognise the providential nature of her words and David repents and turns away from vengeance.

David of course, inhabits the world of ‘eye-for-eye and tooth-for-tooth’ where vengeance is limited by God’s Law but still allowed. At his deathbed, it isn’t so much that David seeks vengeance that is so reprehensible. It is that he has appeared to show mercy, but has not in fact offered mercy. He has simply delayed vengeance.
And he has made the first acts of his son’s reign the carrying out of these measures. This is not a good legacy. It is not what you would expect from someone who had heard from God that though he (David) was a man of blood, his son would not be and so his son would build God a temple. David thrusts a bloody sword into his son’s hands even as he seats him on a colt and declares him king.
We can be broadly sympathetic with David: all three situations are ones in which he had a serious case against the individuals involved. But it appears that he is using the kingship precisely the way that Saul used the kingship: as a personal possession to settle his own scores. Possibly my 21st century sensibilities intrude here and I think the king of Israel can and should make a distinction between who he is as an individual and as a king.

David’s deathbed is a disappointment. There is always something disconcerting about someone dying uncharacteristically. One wonders whether their true character is revealed at the last and whether they have been overestimated in life. But perhaps it is not too surprising in David’s case. He always needed counsellors: those who stood beside him and whispered wisdom into his tempestuous mind. He could withstand foolishness (as the suggestions to kill Saul in the cave and elsewhere show in I Samuel), but the wisest moments of his life are often those moments when someone brings to bear the word of God into his situation. The absence of such a counsellor at his deathbed, pointing him to a better mind may account for his disappointing decision. In any case, David demonstrates what the Puritans maintained: it is a hard thing to die well.