Wonders For Oyarsa

The Kings of the Earth and the Lord's Annointed (Revelation 2-5)

2008-11-06T10:51:00.008-05:00

The church in John’s day is not unlike the church in many countries of the world today, and throughout history. Christians exist in empires who unashamedly trumpet their authority to rule the world as they see fit. When the church is not being actively persecuted, it is marginalized. They simply don’t matter. It is this church – the suffering and insignificant church of the first century – who first receives John’s vision of Jesus, “the ruler of kings on earth.”

To these churches, John transcribes seven letters with one message. Some are sterner than others, but the thrust is the same. Here’s the letter to Thyatira:

I know your works, your love and faith and service and patient endurance, and that your latter works exceed the first. But I have this against you, that you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and is teaching and seducing my servants to practice sexual immorality and to eat food sacrificed to idols. I gave her time to repent, but she refuses to repent of her sexual immorality. Behold, I will throw her onto a sickbed, and those who commit adultery with her I will throw into great tribulation, unless they repent of her works, and I will strike her children dead. And all the churches will know that I am he who searches mind and heart, and I will give to each of you according to your works. But to the rest of you in Thyatira, who do not hold this teaching, who have not learned what some call the deep things of Satan, to you I say, I do not lay on you any other burden. Only hold fast what you have until I come. The one who conquers and who keeps my works until the end, to him I will give authority over the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron, as when earthen pots are broken in pieces, even as I myself have received authority from my Father. And I will give him the morning star. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.’

There’s recognition of their works and perseverance, and stern warnings against their complacency and compromise. The church is implored to stick it out under pain just a little longer until the Lord comes. The church that conquers will be given authority over the very nations where it now suffers – to smash them into bits.

The number seven is the number of creation. It is used in scripture to imply “fullness” and “completion”, and so I think it no stretch whatsoever to understand this urgent message sent to “seven churches” as meant for the entire church. If we mean to take John’s unmistakable urgency seriously, then let it be clear - these letters are to us. It is we who must persevere amidst empires who are glad to run the world in rebellion against God and oppression of man. It is we who are tempted to compromise and collude with the destructive idolatry that we find ourselves in. It is we who are urged to conquer, and dash the nations into pieces with a rod of iron.

So, what are we waiting for? Time to strap on our swords and crush our enemies for the kingdom of God! But not so fast. Unless we are to make the same mistake as the Jews in Jesus’ day, we need to be careful to understand that the ruler of kings on earth whom we serve has radically redefined what it means to conquer and wield authority, and given us very counter-intuitive stories about how his kingdom comes.

The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you. Rather, let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves. For who is the greater, one who reclines at table or one who serves? Is it not the one who reclines at table? But I am among you as the one who serves.

And again:

He said therefore, “What is the kingdom of God like? And to what shall I compare it? It is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his garden, and it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches.” And again he said, “To what shall I compare the kingdom of God? It is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, until it was all leavened.”

And again:

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.

Lest we have any doubt of the means to the end, John gives us a vivid glimpse into the heavenly reality behind the world. He sees a scroll of the purposes of God sealed up, with none worthy to take and reveal. It is then announced that the “lion” of the tribe of Judah has conquered and is worthy. But John sees not a lion, but a slaughtered lamb standing there. And then he hears the chorus:

Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth.

The lamb has conquered by being slaughtered. Jesus disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, triumphing over them by his cross. The church in John’s day conquered the greatest empire in the world has ever seen, dashing its power to pieces by their patient and loving endurance to suffering and death and their willingness to forgive their enemies. And we are called to do likewise with an urgency that cannot be exaggerated.

Our king is coming, even as we speak.

The Glory of Jesus (Revelation 1)

2008-11-02T21:21:00.005-05:00

Revelation has an unmistakable air of both urgency and timelessness to it. Everything mentioned is said to be immanent. John is writing about “the things that must soon take place” and we are exhorted to heed his words “for the time is near.” The reader gets this sense that he will hardly have time to hear the message before it all comes to pass. And yet the message is as timeless and all encompassing as its source. The alpha and omega, the one who was, is, and is to come, tells John to “write therefore the things that you have seen, those that are and those that are to take place after this.”

This must surely challenge some common evangelical attitudes towards Revelation. On the one hand, the book is thought to be written for people a long time ago – these seven churches in the early days. On the other hand, the book is thought to be about the things that will happen at the end of time, and of use largely in preparing us in the event that we are living in the last days. Yet the book itself seems to make very little distinction between what was, what is, and what is to come. It is, after all, the same Jesus who is the center of all these things.

The book begins with a stunning vision of Jesus himself, speaking to John:

I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet saying, “Write what you see in a book and send it to the seven churches, to Ephesus and to Smyrna and to Pergamum and to Thyatira and to Sardis and to Philadelphia and to Laodicea.”

Then I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me, and on turning I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the lampstands one like a son of man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash around his chest. The hairs of his head were white, like white wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the roar of many waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, from his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength.

When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand on me, saying, “Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades.

Depending on who you ask, there are anywhere from 300 to 600 specific Old Testament allusions in the 403 verses of Revelation. Let’s see what looking for some does for our understanding of the passage above.

A loud voice like a trumpet
Cry aloud; do not hold back; lift up your voice like a trumpet; declare to my people their transgression, to the house of Jacob their sins.

I saw seven golden lampstands,
And he said to me, “What do you see?” I said, “I see, and behold, a lampstand all of gold, with a bowl on the top of it, and seven lamps on it, with seven lips on each of the lamps that are on the top of it. And there are two olive trees by it, one on the right of the bowl and the other on its left.” “These seven are the eyes of the Lord, which range through the whole earth. These are the two anointed ones who stand by the Lord of the whole earth.”

And in the midst of the lampstands one like a son of man
Behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him

Clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash around his chest
I will clothe him with your robe, and will bind your sash on him, and will commit your authority to his hand. And he shall be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and to the house of Judah.

The hairs of his head were white, like white wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire
As I looked, thrones were placed, and the Ancient of Days took his seat; his clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool; His throne was fiery flames; its wheels were burning fire. A stream of fire issued and came out from before him; a thousand thousands served him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him; the court sat in judgment, and the books were opened.

His feet were like burnished bronze, refined in a furnace
His body was like beryl, his face like the appearance of lightning, his eyes like flaming torches, his arms and legs like the gleam of burnished bronze, and the sound of his words like the sound of a multitude.

His voice was like the roar of many waters
Ah, the thunder of many peoples; they thunder like the thundering of the sea! Ah, the roar of nations; they roar like the roaring of mighty waters!

From his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword
For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

His face was like the sun shining in full strength
And after six days Jesus took with him Peter and James, and John his brother, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light.

When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand on me, saying, “Fear not”
When the disciples heard this, they fell on their faces and were terrified. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Rise, and have no fear.”

I am the first and the last
Thus says the Lord, the King of Israel and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts: “I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god.”

The living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore
But the Lord is the true God; he is the living God and the everlasting King.

I have the keys of Death and Hades
Shall I ransom them from the power of Sheol? Shall I redeem them from Death? O Death, where are your plagues? O Sheol, where is your sting?

OK, so they’re not all Old Testament. But it does amaze me how so much is evoked by symbols which first seemed merely strange. John looks at the man Jesus, and sees the fulfillment of all of Israel’s hopes.

It is Jesus who declares to Jacob the message of the prophets. It is him who holds together the faithful of Israel in his hands. He is the one worthy to be presented to the ancient of days. In his authority he holds Jerusalem in his hands like a father. When we look on his face, we see nothing less than the ineffable glory of the invisible God. He is the shining man Daniel saw crossing the river, while in captivity in Babylon. His voice drowns out the clamor of nations who assert their own power to rule the Earth. From his mouth comes the very word of God, piercing the heart and soul of man. In him the fullness of the glory of God lives, and shines brighter than we can look at. And yet he is compassionate, and elevates us with him in his glory. Jesus is to be seen as nothing less than the God who was and is – by his resurrection he proves that he has life in himself, and will endure forever just as we know God does. He is the conqueror of Death, and the plunderer of Hades who have hitherto held his people in captivity.

Behold, the man.

Blogging Through Revelation

2008-10-27T23:24:00.004-04:00

In a rather sharp break from the momentum of this project, I’m going to blog through the book of Revelation. It’s a less than ideal time to do it, since I’m only now about to reach some of the key Old Testament books that Revelation most often alludes to (Zechariah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Daniel). The book is deeply symbolic and very complex, and I had thought to wait until I had gone through the entire Bible to sum it all up in this last majestic volume.

However, I’m teaching a study on the book in our church small group, so now is the time that I have it on my mind. If I wait 'til I finish the rest of the Bible, I may wait forever - especially at my current rate of an utter standstill. I don't want the imagined best to become the enemy of actual good.

In a study our group did on Genesis a while back, there were a few principles we tried to adhere to:

1. Use the questions of the text. Let the text set its own agenda. Rather than bringing our questions to the text, try to pick up on what questions the text itself is seeking to answer, and ask those.

2. Speak the language of the text. Suspend the need to fit every detail into a preconceived theological framework, and allow yourself to be caught up in the story, interpreting the details in its light.

This is certainly not the only way to study the Bible - or even necessarily the best way, but I think it's a particularly neglected way in evangelical Bible studies. Things seemed to work particularly well for Genesis.

Revelation is a little trickier, because its imagery depends so heavily on the rest of the Bible. But I'm offering the group a few tips that seem helpful, most of which I've shamelessly stolen from a list I found on the internet that seemed wise.

1. The book of Revelation was written to the church in its infancy which was facing a great deal of persecution. We may not be persecuted for our faith, but St. John’s church was, as have been many since, as many are today. How does this speak to a suffering and powerless people?

2. Revelation is deeply symbolic, and though the symbolism is vivid and colorful, it isn’t primarily visual. Numbers, for instance, are almost always meant to convey meaning rather than a sense of how many objects we should be picturing in our heads. What are the symbols pointing us to?

3. The more of the Old Testament you know, the better you’ll get on with Revelation. Almost 600 OT references have been picked up, most of them probably unconscious. John is just so steeped in the language of scripture that it forms a natural part of his language. What OT themes are being invoked?

4. Notice how central ‘worship’ is to this book. The heart of Revelation’s message is the victory of Christ and the sovereignty of God over all the powers of the earth. Though this was written immediately to a church facing the might of the Roman Empire, it still speaks to us because those powers still trumpet their sovereignty in our world. How are we to worship?

Here we go!

My Presence Will Go With You (Haggai 1-2)

2008-09-23T23:40:00.003-04:00

I admit that it’s hard to have much perspective on the book of Haggai, having not yet gone through the return from exile in Ezra and Nehemiah. My goal in reading the prophets has been to gain perspective on the exile itself before moving on to the return, and so Haggai doesn’t exactly fit in that well at first glance. But let’s see what we can find.

The book is short and to the point. Some of the people have returned from exile back to Judah, and are managing to scratch out a meager existence for themselves in their ancestral homeland. But their thoughts are only on their own concerns. They have little energy for the things of God. And so the prophet speaks:

Is it a time for you yourselves to dwell in your paneled houses, while this house lies in ruins? Now, therefore, thus says the Lord of hosts: Consider your ways. You have sown much, and harvested little. You eat, but you never have enough; you drink, but you never have your fill. You clothe yourselves, but no one is warm. And he who earns wages does so to put them into a bag with holes . . . Go up to the hills and bring wood and build the house, that I may take pleasure in it and that I may be glorified, says the Lord.

I think back to Moses pleading with the Lord to travel alongside his people:

If your presence will not go with me, do not bring us up from here. For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people? Is it not in your going with us, so that we are distinct, I and your people, from every other people on the face of the earth?

There is no life for the people of Israel without the abiding presence of God alongside them. There is no glory for them as a nation if they do not radiate with the glory of God. They were exiled from his presence for disobedience; how can they return and build houses for themselves if God is not to dwell once again in their midst?

Here again I’m struck with the nature of the God of Israel. This is a God who wants to live with man. He wants to elevate man to himself, and to condescend to live among them. The anger and frustration at their faithlessness is just another angle on that intense longing of God for his son to share his glory.

Esau Have I Hated (Obadiah)

2008-07-15T01:38:00.002-04:00

I apologize again for the lack of posts. I'm working on a really neat side project right now that's taking up most of my spare time. But I'm not abandoning the blog.

The vision of Obadiah is a short but fierce proclamation of Edom’s destruction. The justification seems simple enough. During the fall of Jerusalem, Edom sided with Judah’s enemies, going so far as to hunt down fugitives to turn over to the Babylonians. It’s wounds from a brother that bite deepest.

On the day that you stood aloof,
on the day that strangers carried off his wealth
and foreigners entered his gates
and cast lots for Jerusalem,
you were like one of them.

The Lord announces his verdict, in a terrifying variation of the golden rule:

As you have done, it shall be done to you;
your deeds shall return on your own head.

In the end, even though Jerusalem has been plundered and Judah taken off to Israel, the Lord’s judgment will be in their favor:

But in Mount Zion there shall be those who escape,
and it shall be holy,
and the house of Jacob shall possess their own possessions.

The house of Jacob shall be a fire,
and the house of Joseph a flame,
and the house of Esau stubble;
they shall burn them and consume them,
and there shall be no survivor for the house of Esau,
for the Lord has spoken.

That certainly settles the matter. Cain who murdered his brother was exiled. Esau who despised his birthright will now be dispossessed. Such is God’s faithfulness to the younger brother Israel.

But what about Israel’s redemption? Is Israel being restored simply to gloat over those who were happy to see her down? What about Esau embracing Jacob and Jacob seeing the face of God? What about Joseph saying “you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good?”

Right now it looks to be forgotten. God’s verdict for their destruction is final and all encompassing. Unless, of course, someone with the authority to represent the people might look upon those who cast lots for his clothing and pray “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

The Audacity of Hope (Habakkuk 1-3)

2008-06-25T01:10:00.004-04:00

Wow, it’s been a while since my last post here. I suppose I’m doing what many readers of the Old Testament have done before me: I’ve gotten bogged down in the prophets. And these are just the “minor” prophets at that! Anyway, sorry about the title. I know it's a shameless ripoff, but it just so happens to also be a perfect title.

Hope seems to be one of the strongest themes in the Old Testament. Not optimism, mind you. Things don’t ever seem to go all that well for the people of Israel, and even the most glorious moment of their story, the exodus from Egypt, is filled with failure and judgment so severe it almost ended the story before it began. Yet every page is bursting at the seams with an unshakable hope in the goodness of God.

It is common indeed for people today to ask “where was God” when a tragedy strikes. It is even more common for eggheads like me to do so in a detached and cynical fashion about tragedy in the abstract (the problem of evil). But it makes every difference in the world whether the question is asked out of despair or hope. Indeed, those who hope can scream for God with a volume scarcely reachable by more tepid and bitter voices:

O Lord, how long shall I cry for help,
and you will not hear?
Or cry to you “Violence!”
and you will not save?
Why do you make me see iniquity,
and why do you idly look at wrong?

Thus says the prophet Habakkuk, in the face of the idolatry and injustice of Israel. God responds by bringing the Chaldeans (or Babylonians) to be the great equalizers of a corrupt and haughty civilization. But even this “salvation” is ambiguous. The Chaldeans exploit and abuse every kingdom known to man. It is true that the poor now see the rich getting their comeuppance, but the people of Israel as a whole must struggle under their yoke. Rich and poor suffer alike.

So Habakkuk asks again:

O Lord, you have ordained them as a judgment,
and you, O Rock, have established them for reproof.

Is he then to keep on emptying his net
and mercilessly killing nations forever?

The Chaldeans may be God’s way of judging the people of Israel, but they themselves are calling down judgment on their own heads:

Woe to him who builds a town with blood
and founds a city on iniquity!
Behold, is it not from the Lord of hosts
that peoples labor merely for fire,
and nations weary themselves for nothing?
For the earth will be filled
with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.

The wrath of man doesn’t achieve the justice of God, and so even man as God’s instrument stands condemned. Israel has failed his task of upholding the law as a light to the nations, and instead has fallen into idolatry and injustice. Babylon has failed in her task of punishing Israel justly, and instead arrogantly assumes the entire world will be her prey. This is what the Lord saw when, before the flood, the Earth was filled with violence and the intentions of man’s heart were only evil continually. No wonder the Bible speaks of God being tempted to destroy man for good.

This is all hardly grounds for optimism. So the prophet leaves optimism behind, and clings to hope instead:

Though the fig tree should not blossom,
nor fruit be on the vines,
the produce of the olive fail
and the fields yield no food,
the flock be cut off from the fold
and there be no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord;
I will take joy in the God of my salvation.
God, the Lord, is my strength;
he makes my feet like the deer's;
he makes me tread on my high places.

Hope looks into the blackness of utter despair and total ruin and says, with defiance, “yet I will rejoice.” Such hope isn’t sentimentality or wishful thinking. It refuses to submit to the dark facts of reality, and so changes that reality by bringing the rule of God to bear.

Thus Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. Thus Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness. Thus Moses turned the face of God back towards his rebellious people. Thus David established an everlasting kingdom. And thus the tomb of the son of David was found empty, for hope does not disappoint.

In Wrath, Remember Mercy (Jonah 1-4)

2008-05-30T01:14:00.003-04:00

I don’t know how I could possibly do the book of Jonah justice. It seems I ought to devote three or four posts at least to this tiny little book (though I’ll never get through the whole Bible that way). For those of you who don’t remember much besides the whale (and please don’t tell me that 20th century animal naming schemes do not classify whales as “fish” and so the fish couldn’t be a whale), I cannot recommend rereading it highly enough. Heck, go ahead and do it now – it’ll only take 2 minutes.

The message of Jonah is among the most important of the prophets, as it speaks to the heart of Israel’s story. Jonah may very well be Israel himself.

Here we have a man given a vocation by God to proclaim a message before the nations, who then flees to a far country rather than obey the voice of the Lord. When the Lord sends the enveloping waters over him, Jonah thinks it is the end, but then he is saved by being swallowed up by a whale. Once he is vomited up on the shore, Jonah is once again tasked to do his duty, and this time he obeys. It’s the familiar picture of exile and return; judgment and salvation.

But what is really fascinating about Jonah is what happens next. The city in question is Nineveh, and the message he bears might just as well be verbatim from the book of Nahum. It’s a message of unconditional and unavoidable wrath and destruction. It’s a courtesy really – like having the death sentence formally read to the defendant right before carrying it out.

The citizens of Nineveh know what it’s like dealing with wrathful gods. I remember a similar incident in Homer’s Iliad, where Hector urges the women of Troy to pray to Pallas Athena to stay her wrath. They do so:

“Blessed Athena, sacred goddess … pity our city, with the wives and little ones of the Trojans.”

The women prayed. But Pallas Athena refused their prayer

I doubt the citizens of Nineveh expect any different. But apparently it’s worth a try:

Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands. Who knows? God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish.

There goes nothing. And then, surprisingly, against all expectation, God actually forgives them. He relents from his promised disaster. The only person not surprised is Jonah:

O Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster. Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.

Jonah was in on the secret: the Lord loves mankind! He doesn’t want even the wicked to perish, but prefers instead that they repent and be made whole. He is slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and kindness. He’s such a sap that it’s sickening. God’s response is telling:

Do you do well to be angry?

It’s the same thing he said to Cain when he fumed with jealous anger over the Lord’s acceptance of his younger brother Abel’s sacrifice. Here again is the perennial choice – to “do well”.

Jonah doesn’t want Nineveh to be forgiven. These are the people who have visited cruelty upon the entire world – not the least of which Israel themselves. The salvation Jonah wants is the total destruction of the Assyrians and the triumph and dominion of Israel as God’s chosen and holy people.

When Jonah then complains about the death of a vine which shielded him from the sun, the Lord sets him straight:

You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?

One thing that amazes me is how thoroughly the roles have been reversed. Abraham pleaded with God to save Sodom, Moses begged him not to destroy the Israelites, and David implored him to take his plague out on his house and not the people as a whole. But here it is Jonah, not God, who needs convincing.

Jonah can’t see past his own interests, while the Lord is concerned even about the cows in Nineveh. But it goes deeper than that. Jonah’s vocation was to be a light for the nations, and instead he shrunk from the task. After being forgiven and restored against all odds, he resigned himself to his vocation, but was still convinced that the Lord had chosen him for his own benefit and exaltation. Rather than see a younger brother like Nineveh offer an acceptable sacrifice, Jonah would see him dead – and if this isn’t possible, he’d prefer to die himself.

What a picture of self-righteous Israel! This is precisely what Jesus faults them for – thinking that God gave them the law so that they could look down on all the other nations. Thus the wayward prophet cannot bear to see a people forgiven for their waywardness. The sulking elder brother would rather stay outside than see his younger brother restored to the family. The forgiven adulteress picks up stones to stone another woman caught in the same sin. And the Lord lays upon his Christ the iniquity of them all.

The Wrath of God (Nahum 1-3)

2008-05-20T01:57:00.007-04:00

“The Lord is a jealous and avenging God,” begins the prophet Nahum in his oracle against Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian empire. This short book is a treatise against the city which calls down utter destruction on its walls. The prophet does not urge the city to repentance. He only informs them that they will shortly meet their maker and that there will be Hell to pay.

The judgment of God. The ancient Jews longed for it, because they suffered under the weight of powerful empires. The medieval Christians dreaded it, because they feared condemnation for the evil of their own hearts. We are mostly confused and even embarrassed by it, because we are not generally oppressed and think ourselves to be fairly good people. And yet the moment a calamity comes to shake us out of our complacency, we begin suddenly to sound like the ancients towards God. Why isn’t he doing something? Why doesn’t he come and judge the Earth?

Well, in Nineveh’s case, it is time for this long anticipated judgment. News of their crimes has reached to high Heaven:

Woe to the bloody city,
all full of lies and plunder—
no end to the prey!
The crack of the whip, and rumble of the wheel,
galloping horse and bounding chariot!
Horsemen charging,
flashing sword and glittering spear,
hosts of slain,
heaps of corpses,
dead bodies without end—
they stumble over the bodies!
And all for the countless whorings of the prostitute,
graceful and of deadly charms,
who betrays nations with her whorings,
and peoples with her charms.

They are a ruthless people who crush other nations without giving it a second thought. Like hungry lions they rip the flesh off kingdoms and drink the blood of their slain armies. But their time has come:

There is no easing your hurt;
your wound is grievous.
All who hear the news about you
clap their hands over you.
For upon whom has not come
your unceasing evil?

When disaster comes, few indeed will pity them. It’s good riddance. The people of the world will cheer and jeer as the hated city is pounded into dust.

So much for Nineveh. But what can be said for the judgment of God? I’m reminded of a major theme from the book on evil I just finished: The Doors of the Sea by David Hart. Rather than affirming all things as somehow fitting into God’s perfect plan, Hart reminds us that some things truly are meaningless:

Simply said, there is no more liberating knowledge given us by the gospel—and none in which we should find more comfort—than the knowledge that suffering and death, considered in themselves, have no ultimate meaning at all.

Now we are able to rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history's many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that he will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes.

Though it may sound strange to us, the fiery judgment of God is one of the most hopeful and freeing truths in all of scripture. If God himself, the all-powerful and infinitely wise creator, finds much of our world’s present state worthy of damnation, then it frees us from having to reconcile ourselves to “the way things are.”

This is the vision that will sustain Israel through the exile. If the people of God were mere pragmatists finding a niche for themselves in the world, then this would be the end of the story. But instead they can hope in a wrathful God who will soon storm down from his Heaven and shatter the kingdoms of the world. The nations may rage, but the kingdom of God is at hand.

The Doors of the Sea

2008-05-19T01:25:00.004-04:00

I’ve just finished what is probably the best thing I’ve ever read on the problem of evil: David Bentley Hart’s The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami. It’s a tiny little book, with a cover that suggested to me Max Lucado feel-good sentimentality rather than one of the most profound and beautiful theological books I’ve come across. This Eastern Orthodox theologian rips to shreds many of the standard theistic theodocies as well as atheist straw men, and proclaims in their place the Christian gospel. He does this with beautiful writing that verges on poetry, all in a mere 100 pages. Don’t judge a book by its cover.

Rather than attempt to review Hart’s book, and thus summarize it, I thought I’d key in on a theme I found particularly striking. In dealing with deistic theodocies of the watchmaker God, Hart talks in great length something that most of us who have pondered the beauty and savagery of nature know:

The natural world overwhelms us with its splendor, its beauty, its immensities and fragilities, its incalculable diversity, its endless combinations of the colossal and the delicate, sweetness and glory, minute intricacies and immeasurable grandeurs. It is easy, and among the most spontaneous movements of the soul, to revere the God glimpsed in the iridescence of flowered meadows, the emerald light of the deep forest, the soft, immaculate blue of distant mountains, the shining volubility of the sunlit sea, the pale, cold glitter of the stars. This is a perfectly wise and even holy impulse.

But, at the same time, all the splendid loveliness of the natural world is everywhere attended – and, indeed, preserved – by death. All life feeds on life, each creature must yield its place in time to another, and at the heart of nature is a perpetual struggle to survive and increase at the expense of other beings. It is as if the entire cosmos were somehow predatory, a single great organism nourishing itself upon the death of everything to which it gives birth, creating and devouring all things with a terrible and impassive majesty. Nature squanders us with such magnificent prodigality that it is hard not to think that something enduringly hideous and abysmal must abide in the depths of life.

Considered “from below,” from within the system of nature, the force that drives and animates and shapes the whole of the organic world seems to achieve an almost perfectly transparent epitome of itself in those lavishly floriferous but parasitic vines that – urged always upward by a blind, thrusting, idiotic heliotropism – climb toward the light of the sun by choking the life from the trees around which they grow, constantly struggling out of the shadows in their thirst for the light, extending one tenuous tendril after another toward the sun to swell and slowly suffocate the boughs they entwine, until they burgeon forth at the last in such gorgeous and copious flowers that one might forget what had to perish to make such a triumph possible.

Put quite simply, the world is clearly the beautiful, glorious creation of God, but it is bound inextricably to the forces of death and decay – so much so that we can’t even imagine a world without such ruthlessness. And here the deist theodicy says that this is as good as it gets. If you want the glory, you have to endure all the death and decay that makes it possible. True paradise is a logical impossibility, and you must simply resign yourself that this is as good as it can get – the best of all possible worlds. Take it or leave it.

Hart then takes from the pragmatic theodicy of the deist into the gloriously non-empirical vision of the Christian. He quotes Thomas Traherne, saying:

You never enjoy the world aright, till you see how a sand exhibiteth the wisdom and power of God; and prize in everything the service which they do you, by manifesting His glory and goodness to your soul. Wine quencheth my thirst, but to see it flowing from his love who give it unto man quencheth the thrist even of the holy angels. Your enjoyment of the world is never right till every morning you awake in Heaven: see yourself in your Father’s palace; and look upon the skies and the earth and the air, as celestial joys. You never enjoy the world aright till the sea floweth in your veins; till your spirit filleth the whole world, and the starts are your jewels; till you love men so as to desire their happiness, with a thirst equal to the zeal of your own; till you delight in God for being good to all. The world is a mirror of inifinite beauty, yet no man sees it. It is a temple of majesty, yet no man regards it. It is a region of light and peace, did not men disquiet it. It is the paradise of God.

Hart concludes:

To see the world as it should be seen, and so to see the true glory of God reflected in it, requires the cultivation of charity, of an eye rendered limpid by love.

I can’t easily express how deeply this moves my soul. So much could be said, and so much more had probably better be left unsaid. But one thing that really stands out to me is something that puzzles a great many people: the virtue of faith.

The saints Hart refers to seem to inhabit a different world than the one full of death and decay that we are familiar with. They straddle the line between Heaven and Earth, and walk in Paradise under our sky. And so they see the world not through the spectacles of empiricism but the eyes of faith. This really is virtuous, for acting in such faith causes a little bit of that reality break in to our lives.

Rejoice Over Me With Singing (Zephaniah 1-3)

2008-04-21T01:38:00.009-04:00

Back in the days of my High School youth group, there was a praise song we used to sing called “Zephaniah 3:17”. The chorus (adopted from that passage) implored the Lord to “quiet me with your holy love, and rejoice over me with singing.” It was a cheesy but sweet song, especially when sung with dozens of young people around a campfire with a lone acoustic guitar leading the way – sort of an evangelical Christian “let it be”.

Though I mean no disrespect for campfire praise songs (which have probably done my soul more good than I know), I can’t imagine that this was really the tone the prophet Zephaniah had in mind.

The book of Zephaniah opens with this:

“I will utterly sweep away everything from the face of the earth,” declares the Lord.

“I will sweep away man and beast; I will sweep away the birds of the heavens and the fish of the sea, and the rubble with the wicked. I will cut off mankind from the face of the earth,” declares the Lord.

Here God is bringing back the imagery of the Flood in Genesis. I really can’t get over the horror of that story. Many today dismiss it as a wrathful and unjust picture of God, but this misses the real tragedy – that man has made himself a cancer on creation that it warrants the destruction of the entire project.

Only here God is talking specifically about Judah:

I will stretch out my hand against Judah and against all the inhabitants of Jerusalem; and I will cut off from this place the remnant of Baal and the name of the idolatrous priests along with the priests, those who bow down on the roofs
to the host of the heavens, those who bow down and swear to the Lord and yet swear by Milcom, those who have turned back from following the Lord, who do not seek the Lord or inquire of him.

Zephaniah goes on to talk about the terrible the day of the Lord. The judgment will come on Judah, and upon all the surrounding nations. Egypt, Assyria, Moab, and the land of the Philistines will all be swept away by his fierce anger:

In the fire of his jealousy,
all the earth shall be consumed;
for a full and sudden end
he will make of all the inhabitants of the earth.

I think this is a perfect example of the pitfalls of reading the Bible with either wooden literalism or dismissive allegorization. Clearly the Babylonian scourge didn’t actually wipe out all the inhabitants of the Earth. Clearly the birds, fish, beasts, and people lived to see another day. But it is every bit as clear that a cheap spiritualization does violence to the text. Like in the Genesis story itself, you miss the point if you see these events in anything less than cosmic terms.

The exile of Israel isn’t just something that feels like the end of the world – it really is the end of the world. Israel is man’s representative and the platform for the world’s redemption. If the light of the world is darkness, then the darkness is great indeed!

It is here, at the end of all things, while peering into the abyss, that we hear the words which inspired the praise song:

Sing aloud, O daughter of Zion;
shout, O Israel!
Rejoice and exult with all your heart,
O daughter of Jerusalem!

The Lord your God is in your midst,
a mighty one who will save;
he will rejoice over you with gladness;
he will quiet you by his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing.

At that time I will bring you in,
at the time when I gather you together;
for I will make you renowned and praised
among all the peoples of the earth,
when I restore your fortunes
before your eyes.

Though their evil is such as to render the goodness of creation forfeit, there is no pit so deep that Israel’s God is not deeper still. There are no lengths to which he will not go to save them. Though they see the world crashing down around them for their faithlessness to God, it is God’s faithfulness to man that will be the final word.

However, unlike the sentimentality of the praise song, this salvation isn’t something that can be focused on apart from the terrifying judgment of God. As we saw with some frustration earlier, Josiah’s reforms were not enough to stay his anger. On the contrary: the salvation of God is found in enduring the curse for the joy set before them.

The Method to the Madness (Micah 1-7)

2008-04-15T01:28:00.002-04:00

The book of Micah begins with the classic prophetic judgment on Israel and Judah. God makes his case against them clear: they have not loved him with their whole heart; they have not loved their neighbors as their selves. But Micah has a distinctly different tone from the two other prophets I have read. While Amos and Hosea show us the Lord’s wrath and fury, Micah shows us his grief.

Of course there is plenty of prophetic anger in the book, but the picture is, more than anything, that of a stern parent in the hour of discipline. He is resolute to punish his people for their sins, and so he must deafen his ears to their cries. Yet, the goal is not destruction but purification. His eyes are always towards the goal – that of Israel’s vocation as the instrument of the salvation of the world.

Here, in one of the most memorable passages in all the prophets, we see a vision of what God intends for man:

It shall come to pass in the latter days
that the mountain of the house of the Lord
shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
and it shall be lifted up above the hills;
and peoples shall flow to it,
and many nations shall come, and say:

“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob,
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.”

For out of Zion shall go forth the law,
and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

He shall judge between many peoples,
and shall decide for strong nations far away;
and they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war anymore;
but they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree,
and no one shall make them afraid,
for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken.

They were meant to be the light for the world, and right now they stumble in darkness. God had shown them what is good – to act justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with him – but they continually chose the evil. This has been the story from the beginning.

Not entirely though. The prophet remembers the great king David, whose faithfulness brought Israel closer than ever to that central vision. Now he points forward to another David, who will complete this task:

But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah,
who are too little to be among the clans of Judah,
from you shall come forth for me
one who is to be ruler in Israel,
whose coming forth is from of old,
from ancient days.

Therefore he shall give them up until the time
when she who is in labor has given birth;
then the rest of his brothers shall return
to the people of Israel.

And he shall stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord,
in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God.
And they shall dwell secure, for now he shall be great
to the ends of the earth.

And he shall be their peace.

At this moment his decision is to send them into exile. This suffering, however, is that of the birth pains of a woman; it is for a purpose. The Lord is not rejecting them utterly. Though their intentions of their hearts are evil from their youth, he will never again set out to destroy them.

In the concluding chapters, Micah offers up a model prayer which both acknowledges the sin of Israel and the fact that God intends to glorify them in the end:

Rejoice not over me, O my enemy;
when I fall, I shall rise;
when I sit in darkness,
the Lord will be a light to me.

I will bear the indignation of the Lord
because I have sinned against him,
until he pleads my cause
and executes judgment for me.
He will bring me out to the light;
I shall look upon his vindication.

He will again have compassion on us;
he will tread our iniquities underfoot.
You will cast all our sins
into the depths of the sea.

The pattern of redemption continues to unfold. Through exile will come restoration. Through punishment will come purification. Through death will come resurrection.

The Act of Adultery (Hosea 1-14)

2008-04-10T01:03:00.007-04:00

The prophet Hosea has one of the most outrageous callings in all of scripture: marrying a whore. The Lord instructs him to take Gomer as his wife, and to let her adultery be an incarnation of the idolatry of Israel.

What follows is some of the most passionate and anguished oracles in all of scripture.

The book of Hosea is a veritable whirlwind. The Lord doubles over with rage at their continual prostitution with other gods. Hell hath no fury like a lover scorned:

Now I will uncover her lewdness
in the sight of her lovers,
and no one shall rescue her out of my hand.

I will fall upon them like a bear robbed of her cubs;
I will tear open their breast,
and there I will devour them like a lion,
as a wild beast would rip them open.

Shall I ransom them from the power of Sheol?
Shall I redeem them from Death?
O Death, where are your plagues?
O Sheol, where is your sting?
Compassion is hidden from my eyes.

Such murderous fury features throughout the oracles. Yet for each violent rant there is a pensive memory where the Lord recalls his love for Israel. Like a parent of an impossible teenager pausing to remember the sweet moments of childhood, God finds his wrath slowly melting away:

In the womb he took his brother by the heel,
and in his manhood he strove with God.
He strove with the angel and prevailed;
he wept and sought his favor.

When Israel was a child, I loved him,
and out of Egypt I called my son.

It was I who taught Ephraim to walk;
I took them up by their arms

How can I give you up, O Ephraim?
How can I hand you over, O Israel?

My heart recoils within me;
my compassion grows warm and tender.

The Lord fumes back and forth – one moment declaring that he will destroy them altogether, and the next moment revealing that all this suffering was only an effort to call them back to himself. I really don’t know if there is a god in all of the religions and myths of man that comes even close to the intensity of love that the Lord has for Israel. He aches for mankind so strongly that nothing short of the furious anger and desperate longing of a faithful husband seeing his wife pursue another man will suffice as a prophetic symbol.

This all reminds me of the incident in the book of John where the Pharisees bring to Jesus a woman caught in adultery. Echoing his own sermon on the mount, where he declared “you have heard it said, but I say,” they ask him:

In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?

Jesus tells them that the one without sin may throw the first stone. It’s a classic exposure of hypocrisy, but I can’t help but think of Hosea and Gomer. For Israel has the Law of Moses, and, far from giving them cause for pride, it only exposes their shame. Their idolatrous and unrighteous hearts should have taught them to identify with the whore, not look down on her. In telling the woman to go and sin no more, Jesus proves himself to be the fulfillment of the law and the prophets. His love for Israel is the love of their God – the love that calls the wayward adulterous home again.

Hosea captures this beautifully:

Come, let us return to the Lord;
for he has torn us, that he may heal us;
he has struck us down, and he will bind us up.
After two days he will revive us;
on the third day he will raise us up,
that we may live before him.

Follow your king, oh Israel. The path lies through the wrath of God and out the other side.

On This Mountain or in Jerusalem (Amos 1-9)

2008-04-08T00:11:00.002-04:00

Having finished the book of Kings, I now turn to Amos, the earliest of the prophetic books. He writes during the reign of Jeroboam II, the king of Israel, who was one of the milder evil kings.

I’m struck almost immediately of the difference in focus between the author of Kings and the prophet Amos. The book of Kings is almost entirely concerned with two things – idolatry and worship at the high places. All kings and eras are judged against this standard, and the exile and judgment is said to be due to these sins.

What a contrast to the message of Amos!

Oh, it’s not like Amos commends idolatry or worship on the high places. Nor am I suggesting that there isn’t a connection implied in the scriptures. But listen to the reasons Amos gives for the roaring fury of the Lord:

because they have threshed Gilead
with threshing sledges of iron.

because they delivered up a whole people to Edom,
and did not remember the covenant of brotherhood.

because he pursued his brother with the sword
and cast off all pity,
and his anger tore perpetually,
and he kept his wrath forever.

because they have ripped open pregnant women in Gilead,
that they might enlarge their border.

because he burned to lime
the bones of the king of Edom.

because they sell the righteous for silver,
and the needy for a pair of sandals—
those who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth
and turn aside the way of the afflicted;

The Lord is angry because he wants to see justice done by man, and instead sees the earth filled with violence and the intentions of man’s heart evil continually. The nations stand condemned for their cruelty. The people of God stand condemned for their oppression of the poor.

It is here that we see the effects of each man doing what is right in his own eyes. Here we see the true fruit of the sin of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat. The high places and the altar at Bethel are more than just an arbitrary breach of protocol. It is the difference between worshipping what they do not know, and knowing the Lord. As in Genesis, estrangement from God leads to enmity among brothers. Upon cutting himself off from Jerusalem and the temple of the Lord, Israel quickly falls into injustice and makes his worship an abomination:

I hate, I despise your feasts,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them;
and the peace offerings of your fattened animals,
I will not look upon them.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
to the melody of your harps I will not listen.

But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

The oracles of Amos are a whirlwind of anger, threats, grief, pleading, and hope. The Lord is absolutely livid at the wickedness and unfaithfulness of Israel. He promises to grind them into the dust with relentless fury. And yet he longs for it to be otherwise. If only they would turn to him, all would be well. Finally, he points forward to the restoration of David, in whom all Israel will be saved.

The Book of Kings

2008-04-06T21:06:00.004-04:00

Having been established on the firm foundation of the house of David, the nation of Israel acts out the tragic fall of man in its national history. Having fallen into disobedience, the family of Israel is split into two kingdoms at enmity with each other. The court history of each kingdom (Israel especially) is a bloody mess of coups and horrific purges. Despite the warnings and witness of the great prophets, Israel and Judah fall into idolatry, and are driven by God into exile from the paradise of the land of promise.

Volume One

Volume Two

The Necessary Suffering (II Kings 21-25)

2008-04-06T00:45:00.009-04:00

The book of Kings concludes with Judah’s worst idolatry, sincerest repentance, and most catastrophic disaster. It begins with Hezekiah’s son Manasseh. Though Hezekiah was characterized as a good king in the mold of David, his son is a different story:

Manasseh led them astray to do more evil than the nations had done whom the Lord destroyed before the people of Israel.

It is the last straw.

The prophets announce the judgment of the Lord:

Because Manasseh king of Judah has committed these abominations and has done things more evil than all that the Amorites did, who were before him, and has made Judah also to sin with his idols, therefore thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Behold, I am bringing upon Jerusalem and Judah such disaster that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle. And I will stretch over Jerusalem the measuring line of Samaria, and the plumb line of the house of Ahab, and I will wipe Jerusalem as one wipes a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down. And I will forsake the remnant of my heritage and give them into the hand of their enemies, and they shall become a prey and a spoil to all their enemies, because they have done what is evil in my sight and have provoked me to anger, since the day their fathers came out of Egypt, even to this day.

In this final rebellion, the people of Judah are taking upon themselves all the sins of their fathers. Judgment hangs over them. But then, it also seems we’ve seen this all before. When the Lord was ready to destroy all creation, Noah found favor in his sight. When he planned to wipe out Sodom, Abraham pleaded for the city. When he was ready to annihilate Israel in the wilderness, Moses interceded on their behalf. When the angel of the Lord prepared to strike Jerusalem with the plague, David called judgment on his house alone. When the kingdom of Israel was deep in idolatry, Elisha arose and brought rain to a parched land. I cannot help but expect the hero to arrive at the last minute and save the day.

And so he does. King Josiah institutes reforms on a scale the nation had never seen. He destroys all the idols. He abolishes the worship on the high places. He restores the Passover, which apparently had not been practiced since the days of the Judges. He calls an assembly of the people and renews the covenant with the Lord.

The book of Kings writes of Josiah:

Before him there was no king like him, who turned to the Lord with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might, according to all the Law of Moses, nor did any like him arise after him.

Time and time again the Lord has proven himself slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression. In situations like this, I’ve grown to expect forgiveness and restoration. So it’s with shock that I read this:

Still the Lord did not turn from the burning of his great wrath, by which his anger was kindled against Judah, because of all the provocations with which Manasseh had provoked him. And the Lord said, “I will remove Judah also out of my sight, as I have removed Israel, and I will cast off this city that I have chosen, Jerusalem, and the house of which I said, My name shall be there.”

Because of Josiah’s faithfulness, the Lord is willing to stall his great judgment until the king himself has died. But even this faithful king cannot secure forgiveness for Judah. After Josiah’s death the Babylonians finally come crashing down on the poor kingdom like a sledge hammer. An oppressed Judah foolishly tries to gain independence, which provokes them to burn the temple and the city, tear down their walls, kill King Zedekiah’s sons in front of him before stabbing his eyes out, and drag the people into exile in chains.

This ending has always been very troubling to me. I understand that Judah deserves punishment, but why now? Why immediately following Josiah – a king mighty in deed and word before God and all the people? Surely they had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Isn’t this ruin and exile exact opposite of what we’ve grown to expect in the face of a righteous man interceding for the people of God?

It’s all very perplexing, and the author of Kings doesn't seem to have a coherent explanation. So let’s turn now to the prophets, and listen to what they have to say.

Salvation Belongs To Our God (II Kings 18-20)

2008-03-25T01:53:00.004-04:00

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’ve found the book of Kings rather grueling. Sometimes reading the Bible is just plain work, like hiking up a steep mountain where trees and brush obscure any view. I slog through pages I’d quickly skim over if they were in any other book, and it is all I can do to keep one foot moving forward after another. Then, when I least expect it, I come across a vision of such grandeur and glory that it simply takes my breath away.

Hezekiah and Sennacherib may as well be David and Goliath.

The story begins with the aftermath of the fall of the northern kingdom. Judah is quaking at the might of the mighty empire of Assyria at her gates. Pacified for a moment by tribute, new envoys soon arrive with a fell message for the terrified officials of Jerusalem.

Say to Hezekiah, ‘Thus says the great king, the king of Assyria: On what do you rest this trust of yours? Do you think that mere words are strategy and power for war? In whom do you now trust, that you have rebelled against me? Behold, you are trusting now in Egypt, that broken reed of a staff, which will pierce the hand of any man who leans on it. … Come now, make a wager with my master the king of Assyria: I will give you two thousand horses, if you are able on your part to set riders on them. How then can you repulse a single captain among the least of my master's servants, when you trust in Egypt for chariots and for horsemen?

The officials beg the envoy to speak in Aramaic, rather than a language that the people standing on the wall to understand. The emissary responds:

Has my master sent me to speak these words to your master and to you, and not to the men sitting on the wall, who are doomed with you to eat their own dung and to drink their own urine?

He then shouts up to the people of Jerusalem:

Hear the word of the great king, the king of Assyria! Thus says the king: ‘Do not let Hezekiah deceive you, for he will not be able to deliver you out of my hand. Do not let Hezekiah make you trust in the Lord by saying, The Lord will surely deliver us, and this city will not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria. … Has any of the gods of the nations ever delivered his land out of the hand of the king of Assyria?

The terrifying bluster is met with stone silence. Not a single word is spoken. Deep in the citadel, King Hezekiah reacts to the news with a desparate plea to the Lord:

Incline your ear, O Lord, and hear; open your eyes, O Lord, and see; and hear the words of Sennacherib, which he has sent to mock the living God. Truly, O Lord, the kings of Assyria have laid waste the nations and their lands and have cast their gods into the fire, for they were not gods, but the work of men's hands, wood and stone. Therefore they were destroyed. So now, O Lord our God, save us, please, from his hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you, O Lord, are God alone.

The prophet Isaiah brings the Lord’s answer:

Whom have you mocked and reviled? Against whom have you raised your voice and lifted your eyes to the heights? Against the Holy One of Israel! By your messengers you have mocked the Lord, and you have said, “With my many chariots I have gone up the heights of the mountains, to the far recesses of Lebanon; I felled its tallest cedars, its choicest cypresses; I entered its farthest lodging place, its most fruitful forest. I dug wells and drank foreign waters, and I dried up with the sole of my foot all the streams of Egypt.”

Have you not heard that I determined it long ago? I planned from days of old what now I bring to pass, that you should turn fortified cities into heaps of ruins, while their inhabitants, shorn of strength, are dismayed and confounded, and have become like plants of the field and like tender grass, like grass on the housetops, blighted before it is grown.

But I know your sitting down and your going out and coming in, and your raging against me. Because you have raged against me and your complacency has come into my ears, I will put my hook in your nose and my bit in your mouth, and I will turn you back on the way by which you came.

That very night the angel of the Lord kills over a hundred thousand Assyrian soldiers. Sennacherib is forced to return to Nineveh, where he is assassinated by his own sons. Because of David, God once again saves Jerusalem from destruction. Judah comes within an inch of his life, but the Lord has gives him a breath of hope.

Later, Isaiah tells King Hezekiah that he will die of an illness. When the desperate King implores the Lord to change his mind and spare his life, God changes his mind and grants him another fifteen years. Like his kingdom, the king himself has been granted life in the face of the grave.

But Hezekiah is no David. At the end of his life he fathers Manasseh, the most infamously idolatrous King in all the history of Judah. He also exposes all of his palaces and goods to impress ambassadors from Babylon. After the prophet Isaiah warns him that this very country will one day take all of these goods for themselves, Hezekiah is shockingly apathetic:

Then said Hezekiah to Isaiah, “The word of the Lord that you have spoken is good.” For he thought, “Why not, if there will be peace and security in my days?”

No tears were spared grieving the impending loss of his own life, but the prophecy of Judah’s fall produces not a sniffle. Where is the compassion of Abraham, who will plead with God for the city of Sodom? Where is the tenacity of Jacob who will hold fast to the Lord until he secures a blessing for him and his offspring? Where is the mercy of Moses who told God that if he wants to reject Israel, he must reject him as well? Where is the agonized cry of David, telling the Lord to spare the sheep and punish his house alone? Hezekiah may have done “what was right in the eyes of the Lord”, but the salvation of the people of God lies in the faithfulness of a greater King.

The Sum of All Fears (II Kings 14-17)

2008-03-18T00:44:00.003-04:00

I told you so. That is the tone of the book of Kings’ account of the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel:

Yet the Lord warned Israel and Judah by every prophet and every seer, saying, “Turn from your evil ways and keep my commandments and my statutes, in accordance with all the Law that I commanded your fathers, and that I sent to you by my servants the prophets.”

There really seems little to say about it. The people are guilty. They repeatedly thumb their noses at their God. They insist on worshipping him on their terms on the high places. They don’t think twice about bringing in foreign idols. Except for one bloody regime under Jehu, they persecute the prophets. King after king after king is described concisely as “doing evil in the sight of the Lord.” They’ve become every bit as wicked as the former inhabitants. What more can He do but hurl them out of the land?

What more indeed. The tragedy and futility is overwhelming. Israel is expelled from the land, like Adam from Eden. The Lord is finally giving up on them – as he nearly did in the flood and threatened to do so many times with Moses. But what of his plan, his promises, and his purposes? As with Job, is not the creator implicated in the failure of his creation? What hope is there that any other people will succeed where Israel failed? Shall not the clay say to the potter, “why did you make me like this”?

When the king of Assyria (not to be confused with Syria) carries off the Israelites, he also moves in many of his own people to colonize the newly conquered land. They quickly learn, through a series of lion attacks, that the local god is a feisty one that demands their respect. And so they keep a few priests around to teach them how to worship the Lord. All in all, the new Samaritans aren’t really any worse than the Israelites – and they at least can plead ignorance.

This is what St. Paul was talking about in the book of Romans. Though they possess the law, it doesn’t really seem to do the Israelites much good. The great story of Exodus from Egypt, the sublime customs and worship outlined in the Torah, and the righteous laws they are given to live by all only serve to condemn them as unworthy of such blessings. In the end, what has God accomplished other than to show them how wretched they are?

All hope rests on Judah – the one tribe that remains standing against the juggernaut of Assyria.

Driving Like Jehu (II Kings 8-13)

2008-03-11T02:02:00.008-04:00

Bishop Ulfilas, in the fourth century, undertook the task of translating the Bible into the Gothic language with a curious omission: he left out the book of Kings. The Goths, in his opinion, were already too fond of fighting, and “needed in that matter the bit, rather than the spur.” I can’t say that I blame him.

An unfortunate theme that we encounter again and again in reading the Bible is the pervasive cruelty of the ancient world. I’ve written before that this is perhaps the biggest stumbling block to the modern reader. Though the passages where God’s justice is portrayed in terms of genocidal fury and collective punishment disturbs today’s devout Christians, I get the distinct impression that the ancient reader hardly batted an eyelash. Elisha’s conversation with Hazael, the future king of Syria, is a case in point:

And he fixed his gaze and stared at him, until he was ashamed. And the man of God wept. And Hazael said, “Why does my lord weep?” He answered, “Because I know the evil that you will do to the people of Israel. You will set on fire their fortresses, and you will kill their young men with the sword and dash in pieces their little ones and rip open their pregnant women.” And Hazael said, “What is your servant, who is but a dog, that he should do this great thing?” Elisha answered, “The Lord has shown me that you are to be king over Syria.”

Catch that? It’s not, “what kind of a monster do you take me for?” but rather, “do you really think I could pull something like that off?”

It is this unstated assumption – that might made right; that the sheer power to conquer settled all question of legitimacy – that hits us full in the face when our form-fitting athletic shoes walk the dusty roads of the ancient near-east. “New Atheists”, like Richard Dawkins, use this disorientation to great rhetorical effect in their hateful crusade against Christianity – stating that “the God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of literature: cruel, capricious, jealous, vindictive and unjust.” But I am more convinced than ever that, on this point, Dawkins is wrong – blinded by his own prejudice.

I will never forget the reaction of a college agnostic upon reading Genesis seriously for the first time in an undergraduate literature class. Having been immersed in all of the tragic brutality and futility of Gilgamesh, Homer and the Greeks, he was moved almost to tears at the passionate love of the God of the Bible. By learning to read with ancient eyes, he was able to see what the Bible was longing to tell him: that the Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin.

Yet the Old Testament was written first to the ancients, and lest they mistake his love for apathy, they need to know him also as one who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation. And so, with Ahab’s son on the throne, Elisha has his servant anoint Jehu the scourge as king of Israel.

Jehu is a general fighting the Syrians when he is spontaneously anointed by the rogue prophet. Wasting no time, he rides quickly to Jezreel and stages a coup. He kills Joram, the son of Ahab, and throws his body into the field of Naboth (whom Ahab had murdered). He has Jezebel thrown down from the palace to her death below, where roving dogs eat her body. He orders the death of all seventy of Ahab’s sons.

Jehu continues:

And when he departed from there, he met Jehonadab the son of Rechab coming to meet him…And he said, “Come with me, and see my zeal for the Lord.” So he had him ride in his chariot. And when he came to Samaria, he struck down all who remained to Ahab in Samaria, till he had wiped them out, according to the word of the Lord that he spoke to Elijah.

Then Jehu stages this brilliant bit of treachery:

And Jehu ordered, “Sanctify a solemn assembly for Baal.” So they proclaimed it. And Jehu sent throughout all Israel, and all the worshipers of Baal came, so that there was not a man left who did not come. And they entered the house of Baal, and the house of Baal was filled from one end to the other. …So as soon as he had made an end of offering the burnt offering, Jehu said to the guard and to the officers, “Go in and strike them down; let not a man escape.” So when they put them to the sword, the guard and the officers cast them out and went into the inner room of the house of Baal, and they brought out the pillar that was in the house of Baal and burned it. And they demolished the pillar of Baal, and demolished the house of Baal, and made it a latrine to this day.

It is the final ruin of Ahab and Jezebel and the avenging of the blood of the prophets and of Naboth. The land is cleansed of idolatry. Jehu sits victoriously on Israel’s throne. His bloody zeal for the Lord is certainly relentless. A happy ending, then?

And the Lord said to Jehu, “Because you have done well in carrying out what is right in my eyes, and have done to the house of Ahab according to all that was in my heart, your sons of the fourth generation shall sit on the throne of Israel.” But Jehu was not careful to walk in the law of the Lord, the God of Israel, with all his heart.

Despite Ahab's house being destined for ruin by the justice of God, we are told that this is the beginning of the end for the northern kingdom of Israel. On his deathbed, Elisha laments that Jehu’s descendent Joash will only temporarily delay the Syrians. Though the legacy of David sustains Judah for generation after generation, there is something that Jehu lacks. For all the raging fury of the ancients running through his veins, Jehu knows precious little of the God of Israel. Later on, his taste for blood is specifically condemned by the prophet Hosea, who reflects on behalf of the Lord:

I desire mercy and not sacrifice,
the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.

Chariots of Fire (II Kings 1-7)

2008-03-07T00:29:00.002-05:00

With apologies to Gustave Dore (and every other biblical illustrator), Elijah did not ride a chariot of fire into Heaven. Yup, you heard that right.

The story begins with him and his apprentice, Elisha, travelling together. Elisha knows somehow that this is the day that the Lord will take his master away, and so takes special care to remain by his side (despite Elijah’s hints to let him go on alone). Elisha asks to be his heir – his first born – receiving a double portion of his spirit. The apprentice will not let go of his master until he blesses him.

Suddenly a furious detachment of fiery chariots roar between the two of them. From the other side of the train, Elisha watches helplessly as his master is taken up to Heaven in a whirlwind. Looking up, he cries:

My father, my father! The chariots of Israel and its horsemen!

I’m no Old-Testament scholar, but these chariot-drivers seem like the same warriors that guarded Eden with the flaming sword. The cherubim are the gatekeepers of the throne of the Almighty, who firmly decide that Elisha may go no farther. After picking up his master’s fallen cloak, the grim apprentice heads back across the Jordan to Israel.

Thus begins the ministry of Elisha. His wondrous acts are reminiscent of those of Elijah, and are perhaps even greater. He brings water to a parched army dying of thirst; he supplies oil to a widow about to lose everything to a creditor, he provides a son to a barren woman and later raises him from the dead; he cures a Syrian general from his leprosy; he even causes an axe head to float so that the man can return it to the one who lent it to him; he announces God’s rescue of starving Samaria from a deadly siege. These are more than mere marvels; they are prophetic symbols of the God who intends to bring hope to the hopeless.

One day, the king of Syria sends an army to apprehend Elisha.

When the servant of the man of God rose early in the morning and went out, behold, an army with horses and chariots was all around the city. And the servant said, “Alas, my master! What shall we do?” He said, “Do not be afraid, for those who are with us are more than those who are with them.” Then Elisha prayed and said, “O Lord, please open his eyes that he may see.” So the Lord opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw, and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.

He makes his messengers winds, and his ministers a flaming fire. The chariots of Israel and its horsemen are not a taxi service to Heaven. The Lord is acting here, now, on this Earth, through his prophet, to topple those tyrants who would aggrandize themselves, and to bring relief to a famished people who have forgotten how to hope.

Folly from God (I Kings 20-22)

2008-02-07T01:41:00.000-05:00

I can’t think of very many figures in the Bible more fitting for a Shakespeare adaptation than King Ahab. The character of Macbeth may very well have been inspired by him. Here we have an evil, ambitious man, who becomes just conscious enough that he is in the wrong to have regrets, but isn’t able to truly repent. Ahab, thy name is tragic.

His downfall begins with a war against king Ben-hadad of Syria. The Syrian king, sensing weakness, bullies Ahab into a political corner. The desperate and terrified king is forced into open war. Ben-hadad is assured by his servants that Israel’s god is a hill deity, and will therefore be unable to defeat them in the open plain. The Lord decides that it is time for a little object lesson for the Syrians, to teach them just who they are dealing with.

The Israelites crush the Syrian army. After the battle, Ben-hadad comes crawling to Ahab begging for mercy. After agreeing to reparations and treaties favorable to Israel, Ahab lets Ben-hadad go free. Big mistake. A prophet quickly confronts Ahab for his fundamental misunderstanding of the source of his victory. The Lord didn’t defeat the Syrians so that Ahab could increase his political mojo; Ben-hadad was not his to show mercy to.

And he said to him, “Thus says the Lord, ‘Because you have let go out of your hand the man whom I had devoted to destruction, therefore your life shall be for his life, and your people for his people.’” And the king of Israel went to his house vexed and sullen and came to Samaria.

Ahab then has his wife Jezebel condemn a man named Naboth to death on trumped up charges of cursing the Lord so that he can confiscate his property. In response to this deceptive murder for gain, Elijah prophesies that Ahab and his house will die off and be eaten by dogs. This, coming from the prophet who beat 400 others in the showdown on Mt. Carmel, makes quite an impression:

And when Ahab heard those words, he tore his clothes and put sackcloth on his flesh and fasted and lay in sackcloth and went about dejectedly. And the word of the Lord came to Elijah the Tishbite, saying, “Have you seen how Ahab has humbled himself before me? Because he has humbled himself before me, I will not bring the disaster in his days; but in his son's days I will bring the disaster upon his house.”

Ultimately the king of Israel is doomed by his own blind ambition. After three years of peace, Ahab conspires with Jehoshaphat, the king of Judah, to take the city of Ramoth-Gilead from the Syrians in a surprise attack. Ahab has the prophets of the Lord inquire for him. They all return with promises of success – some even taking the time to bring iron horns into the throne room as a visual aid. When Jehoshaphat asks Ahab if all the prophets are accounted for, he responds that the one absent is the distasteful Micaiah, who never says anything good about him.

So Micaiah is summoned. He initially repeats the positive words of his contemporaries, but Ahab will have none of that:

How many times shall I make you swear that you speak to me nothing but the truth in the name of the Lord?

Touché. “Truth” is indeed the theme here. Micaiah explains that he saw a vision of the heavenly council, with the Lord asking for suggestions as to the most appropriate way to entice greedy Ahab to go and get himself killed in battle against Syria. An enthusiastic spirit stands up and volunteers to be “a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.” The Lord agrees that this is just the sort of thing Ahab would fall for, and grants his permission. Micaiah then summarizes Ahab’s situation:

Now therefore behold, the Lord has put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets; the Lord has declared disaster for you.

Ahab’s response is classic:

And the king of Israel said to Jehoshaphat, “Did I not tell you that he would not prophesy good concerning me, but evil?”

Nope – there’s no getting one past clever Ahab. He sees right through the old lying spirit trick. With this knowledge, he then rides off into battle disguised as a common general, and is promptly shot dead by a stray arrow. To top off this cup of poetic justice, his servants end up washing the royal chariot at the exact same spot where poor Naboth was executed, and a pack of dogs lap up the king's blood.

I have a lot of trouble with this story. It just doesn’t sit with me that the source of all truth is said to be employing the father of lies in his service. But it is reminiscent of the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart, and of Paul’s letter to the Thesselonians:

Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false, in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

Ahab had a chance to honor the truth, but has chosen to consistently pursue his own political ambition rather than the heart of God. Hence he is given over to deception, and becomes a willing accomplice in his own destruction.

A Dry and Weary Land (I Kings 15-19)

2008-01-21T01:49:00.000-05:00

While Asa, the great-grandson of Solomon, leads Judah into a long reign of relative peace and prosperity, Israel spirals into a frightful series of coups, purges, and civil wars. Jeroboam’s entire family is annihilated by Baasha, whose family is then slaughtered by his general Zimri, who is himself burned alive with his family in a siege by the commander Omri. This sets the stage for the reign of the infamous king Ahab:

Ahab the son of Omri did evil in the sight of the Lord, more than all who were before him. And as if it had been a light thing for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, he took for his wife Jezebel the daughter of Ethbaal king of the Sidonians, and went and served Baal and worshiped him. …Ahab did more to provoke the Lord, the God of Israel, to anger than all the kings of Israel who were before him.

Including, it seems, approving of his queen’s wholesale slaughter of the prophets of God. It is in these dark times that the prophet Elijah announces a drought throughout the land.

Elijah then escapes across the Jordan and finds refuge with a starving widow and her son. Though they have almost nothing, the Lord miraculously extends their food supply to sustain them. Later on the widow’s son slips into a coma. After the prophet prays over him three times, the boy recovers his life.

It’s a preview of things to come. Israel is starving under three years of drought and near death when Elijah suddenly returns to challenge Ahab. The king brings his 450 prophets of Baal to Mount Carmel, where they engage in a contest of strength between their gods.

The rules are simple and scientific: kill two bulls on two different altars, and have both sides pray to their god. The altar that is lit with fire from heaven is that of the true god. Elijah lets the prophets of Baal go first. Though they pray, scream, chant, and mutilate themselves for hours, nothing happens. Then it’s Elijah’s turn.

Elijah the prophet came near and said, “O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that you are God in Israel, and that I am your servant, and that I have done all these things at your word. Answer me, O Lord, answer me, that this people may know that you, O Lord, are God, and that you have turned their hearts back.” Then the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt offering and the wood and the stones and the dust… And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces and said, “The Lord, he is God; the Lord, he is God.”

After Elijah and the indignant mob kill all 450 of the prophets of Baal, rain finally thunders down from heaven. But Jezebel soon hears of it, and Elijah must once again run for his life. Feeling depressed and defeated, Elijah asks the Lord to take away his life. What follows is a classic and memorable conversation between God and one his prophets:

And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind tore the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire the sound of a low whisper. And when Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.

And behold, there came a voice to him and said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”

He said, “I have been very jealous for the Lord, the God of hosts. For the people of Israel have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword, and I, even I only, am left, and they seek my life, to take it away.”

And the Lord said to him, “Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus. And when you arrive, you shall anoint Hazael to be king over Syria. And Jehu the son of Nimshi you shall anoint to be king over Israel, and Elisha the son of Shaphat of Abel-meholah you shall anoint to be prophet in your place. And the one who escapes from the sword of Hazael shall Jehu put to death, and the one who escapes from the sword of Jehu shall Elisha put to death. Yet I will leave seven thousand in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth that has not kissed him.”

Look not to the great wind, or the earthquake, or the fire, but to the sound of a low whisper. Look to the still body of a widow’s dying son. Look to the landscape that is dry and lifeless. Look to the nation that has proved itself violently idolatrous. It is here that the Lord of Israel will come – pouring life on the unconscious child, water on the thirsty land, and his spirit on the people’s rebellious hearts.

Salvation is of the Jews (I Kings 13)

2007-12-28T00:19:00.001-05:00

In my last post on I Kings 11-14, I skipped one of the stranger and more troubling stories I have come across in the Bible so far. For days it baffled me, and yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that it had the mark of something important. I couldn’t leave the story behind.

It begins with a “man of God” leaving his home in Judah to confront king Jeroboam in Bethel for his idolatry. He offers a dismal prophecy of a king of David’s line burning the dead bodies of the priests there on their own alter. After pacifying the initially furious Jeroboam with a demonstration of God’s power, the king begs the man to dine with him. The man of God refuses, saying:

If you give me half your house, I will not go in with you. And I will not eat bread or drink water in this place, for so was it commanded me by the word of the Lord, saying, ‘You shall neither eat bread nor drink water nor return by the way that you came.’

So the man of God departs. However, on his way, he is intercepted by a local prophet who also asks him to stay for dinner. The man of God refuses, but the deceitful prophet insists that the Lord himself commanded him to issue the invitation. So the man of God stays the night.

As they sit together, the same prophet who lied to him is suddenly overcome by the Spirit of the Lord, and pronounces a message of judgment against the man of God for disobeying his explicit orders. After he leaves, the man of God is killed by a lion on the road who leaves his body uneaten.

And the prophet took up the body of the man of God and laid it on the donkey and brought it back to the city to mourn and to bury him. And he laid the body in his own grave. And they mourned over him, saying, “Alas, my brother!” And after he had buried him, he said to his sons, “When I die, bury me in the grave in which the man of God is buried; lay my bones beside his bones. For the saying that he called out by the word of the Lord against the altar in Bethel and against all the houses of the high places that are in the cities of Samaria shall surely come to pass.”

The story concludes with a statement that Jeroboam would continue with his idolatry, leading to the total annihilation of his house.

I honestly had the hardest time making heads or tails of this incident. On the face of it, it seems horribly harsh for the Lord to kill the man of God from Judah for what appears to be an honest mistake. And the behavior of the prophet in Bethel just doesn’t make sense. Most commentaries I turned to weren’t terribly helpful. I was assured that obeying God is good, that lying to people about God is bad, that falling for lies about God is bad, and that repenting of lying to people about God is good.

Yet the whole thing has the subtle feel of national allegory: prophets acting out the fate of the people before the Lord. Finally, I stumbled across a treatment by Karl Barth that helped get me on the right track. Barth saw the two men as representing the two kingdoms – Judah and Israel – with their interactions foreshadowing the rest of the story of the book of Kings (and ultimately the story of Jesus).

In this light, we see Judah as the faithful bearer of the word of the Lord. The hammer of God’s judgment is to fall most heavy and decisively against Israel for the sin of Jeroboam. It is the role of Judah to stand as a witness against the house of Israel and demand harsh unconditional repentance. Israel, on the other hand, will continually tempt Judah toward the more friendly and congenial way of compromise.

In the end, Israel will drag Judah down into his sin, for which Judah will face the judgment of God. Judah will lie desolate and be cut off from his ancestral homeland. But compare the unmolested body of the man of God with the burned bones of the idolatrous prophets (or the promise that Jeroboam’s offspring will be eaten by dogs and birds). Burial symbolizes hope – hope that though a man die in exile, his bones may once again be taken back to the land of promise.

If Israel is to be saved, despite his multitude of sins, it will be by clinging to this lifeless but somehow preserved corpse of Judah. It is in being buried with the son of David, who brought Israel’s sin upon himself after pronouncing God’s judgment, that Israel will ultimately find redemption. Salvation is of the Jews, and from the king of the Jews it will come.

The Design Matrix

2007-12-20T00:41:00.001-05:00

Mike Gene, of Telic Thoughts, has just finished a fascinating new book on Intelligent Design called The Design Matrix: A Consilience of Clues (the promotional animation was done by yours truly). After becoming a little disillusioned with the ID movement a couple of years ago, I stumbled across Mike’s site and found his unique approach refreshing and constructive. So, without further ado, here is Wonders for Oyarsa’s first book review!

A New Look

The ID debate is one of the most polarized and ugly fights you’ll ever come across, and Mike is well aware of the difficulty he faces even being heard. He makes it clear from the beginning that he does not believe Intelligent Design is science, does not think it should be taught in the public schools, and does not deny evolution. He simply has no interest in the political side of ID. Rather, he is interested in the insights that telic thinking may bring to looking at the origin of life. He is interested in the beginnings of an investigation.

Mike deftly reframes the debate away from the traditional template, which focuses on either disproving evolution (thus establishing design) or showing evolution to be possible (thus removing the need for design). The origin of life, after all, is not a matter of absolute certainty or mathematical law, but of history. We are not ultimately interested in what could have happened, but what we think actually did happen. Thus Mike suggests we eschew dogmatic absolutes for the attitude of a private investigator. It is certainly possible that life was designed, but what sort of clues might make us think it plausible? What sort of evidence and confirmation would convince us that it is not only plausible, but probable?

It’s interesting how far meekness can go in a polarized debate – be it over science, politics, philosophy, or religion. There’s no shortage of bombastic apologists for both sides, railing about how only a total fool could fail to see the rightness of their position. When one person confidently boasts that the evidence for design is overwhelming and another loudly screams that it is nonexistent, most folks are inclined to avoid the whole discussion. But when Mike says the idea is interesting and invites us to take a closer look, we want to join him.

Curiouser and Curiouser

Having established a tone of curiosity, Mike considers the clues. At the most basic level of the cell, life looks like sophisticated nanotechnology. Though we once considered it little more than a sac of chemicals, it turns out that biology at this scale has a great deal in common with engineering, to the point where biology journals sound more like engineering publications than those of other physical sciences. Calling multiple-protein complexes “molecular machines” is more than mere metaphor. To get a faint glimpse of what he’s talking about, take a look at this computer animated journey into the cell created by the Harvard Biovisions group. The core architecture of life has the complexity and organization of a modern city, all easily resting on the point of a pin.

The grandeur and majesty of life on this scale never ceases to amaze me. To think of it as a bunch of chemical reactions is as misleading as considering Mont St. Michel a stack of stones, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel a series of brush strokes, or Google’s search database a series of ones and zeroes. When biologists fail to develop the discipline and intuition of engineers who actually build things, I suspect they risk giving hostages to fortune. The stuff has to work, after all, and that's a pretty harsh requirement for any system – be it constructed out of molecules or metal.

Mike, of course, finds this all very suggestive. William Paley once argued that one may reasonably infer life to be designed in the same way you assume a watch on the beach is not a natural phenomenon. David Hume countered that, though life might appear to be in the same category as the watch, the similarities are superficial and the analogy weak. But, while Hume may have been right about human organs like the eye, the recently discovered and unexpected echoes of technology in the most basic unit of life are another matter entirely. Mike then turns to Darwin’s theory of Evolution – which has some much more challenging observations for any design inference.

Front Loading Evolution

Darwin showed how systems which may appear designed from the outset may nevertheless have evolved over time through purely natural processes. Natural selection is a fact of life. It is what happens to any flexible self-replicating system over time or in a changing environment. Mike recognizes the power of natural selection to act as a designer-mimic, but he doesn’t abandon his suspicion of design in the face of evolution. Instead, he suggests a way where Darwinian evolution might actually be employed in the service of intelligent design.

And so he offers his front-loading hypothesis. Since the basic architecture of life seems to be the most difficult thing to explain by modern origin of life theories – the characteristics of the genetic code, the modularity of proteins, and the interdependency of DNA, RNA, and molecular machines – he suggests we envision a human-like intelligence designing a single cell as a seed for life on Earth. Would it be possible to employ Darwinian evolution to unfold a carefully-packaged design?

Mike looks at the clues that make such an idea seem plausible. Every life form on earth shares a huge proportion of the same DNA. Evolution, on the genetic level, seems to operate mostly by tinkering with copies of genes. Mike goes into great technical detail to show how key templates for advanced organisms could be encoded into the core functions of the cell, ready to pop into use as soon as there is a need. It is the very blindness and short-sightedness of Natural Selection that would make it exploitable by careful foresight. According to Mike’s hypothesis, if we were to obliterate all life on Earth and replace it with the same seed cell it started with, we would see it unfold in much the same way as it did billions of years ago, and eventually find creatures not all that different from the ones we have today.

Those who create computer programs, which eventually crash due to unforeseen bugs, will appreciate front-loading as a huge challenge, one which is solvable only by the most brilliant of minds. For those who believe on different grounds that there is a mind ultimately responsible for the creation of the world, the picture Mike paints evokes wonder and awe at the glory and wisdom of God. If this is the mode of creation, it also raises some fascinating philosophical and theological questions, which I may explore elsewhere.

The Matrix

The presence of a front-loaded current running through evolution poses a unique problem for detecting design. How do you distinguish between the core design and the jerry rigged solutions of natural selection? True to his modest methodology, Mike eschews black-and-white certainty for his design matrix: a subjective (but useful) scoring system to gauge our confidence in a design inference.

The matrix score is based on four parameters: analogy, discontinuity, rationality, and foresight. Analogy looks at how closely the solution matches something we ourselves have designed. Discontinuity looks at irreducible complexity, and how difficult it would be for natural selection alone to arrive at the solution by cooption. Rationality looks at the elegance and quality of the design based on its assumed purpose. Finally, foresight judges the design based on any long-term planning present. If a solution only scores high in one area, we wouldn’t have conclusive evidence for design, but if it gets high marks in all four, we may conclude that intelligent design is indeed a probable explanation.

Mike ends the book with an invitation to join him on his quest. Having established his theory and methodology, the next step will be to explore the living world in more detail – and see just how well his hypothesis holds up. If he’s right, this approach may turn out to be a fantastic research guide, yielding bold new insights and discoveries about the living world.

I, for one, am intrigued by the possibilities, and I hope you are as well. My recommendation is that everyone go and buy all their friends a copy of his book so that he’ll have the money to publish volume II!

Unless the Lord Build the House (I Kings 11-14)

2007-12-11T23:46:00.000-05:00

Israel is firmly planted in the land. The kingdom is established. God dwells along side them in his glorious holy temple. The nations are flocking to them to receive the blessings of the Lord. And then things all go to Hell.

Solomon arranges the downfall of the kingdom of David by marrying foreign women - one of the cardinal pitfalls warned against in the books of the law. From there his wives turn away his heart and seduce him into building idols to Ashtoreth, Milcom, Chemosh, and Molech.

The Lord pronounces judgment:

Since… you have not kept my covenant and my statutes that I have commanded you, I will surely tear the kingdom from you and will give it to your servant. Yet for the sake of David your father I will not do it in your days, but I will tear it out of the hand of your son. However, I will not tear away all the kingdom, but I will give one tribe to your son, for the sake of David my servant and for the sake of Jerusalem that I have chosen.

Gone are the former threats of annihilating the people and starting from scratch. David and his wholehearted faithfulness really has changed things. Even Solomon’s idolatry is not enough to counter the blessings and promises toward the house of that great king – he will die a wealthy old man despite his sin.

The hammer instead falls upon Rehoboam, Solomon’s son. One of the ongoing themes of the Old Testament that I am slowly growing to appreciate is the connection between generations in sharing blessings and curses, righteousness and sin. Rehoboam is being punished for the sin of Solomon, and it’s every bit his own fault. After ignoring the advice of his older officials, he arrogantly insults the other tribes, which then incites a revolt. As in the garden, rebellion against the Lord is soon followed by enmity among brothers.

The Lord then raises up Jeroboam, who unites the ten northern tribes against the house of David in Judah. He is promised blessings from the Lord equal to David, if only he will be faithful in the same way David was. But Jeroboam is far too practical for such idealism. Knowing that constant pilgrimages to Jerusalem for worship might turn the people back toward union with Judah, he decides to create his own religion:

So the king took counsel and made two calves of gold. And he said to the people, “You have gone up to Jerusalem long enough. Behold your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.” He also made temples on high places and appointed priests from among all the people, who were not of the Levites. … He went up to the altar that he had made in Bethel on the fifteenth day in the eighth month, in the month that he had devised from his own heart.

This is bad…really bad. Jeroboam is Aaron, Korah, and Absalom all wrapped into one. He had a chance to be another great stone upon which he would build the kingdom of Israel, and instead he becomes the mother of all stumbling blocks. I don’t know if I recall seeing the Lord so mad at an individual person before. His pronouncement, when Jeroboam’s wife goes to inquire about a sick child, is shocking, even for the Old Testament:

Behold, I will bring harm upon the house of Jeroboam and will cut off from Jeroboam every male, both bond and free in Israel, and will burn up the house of Jeroboam, as a man burns up dung until it is all gone. Anyone belonging to Jeroboam who dies in the city the dogs shall eat, and anyone who dies in the open country the birds of the heavens shall eat, for the Lord has spoken it… Arise therefore, go to your house. When your feet enter the city, the child shall die. And all Israel shall mourn for him and bury him, for he only of Jeroboam shall come to the grave, because in him there is found something pleasing to the Lord, the God of Israel, in the house of Jeroboam.

In other words, dying of sickness is a blessing for a son of Jeroboam. God sees something worth salvaging in the child, and death and burial is preferable for the utter ruin that he’s about to bring on Jeroboam’s house.

The wrath of God is proportional to the potential of man. I get the impression that Jeroboam really did have the potential to be another David. The promises were all there. David proved it could be done. And though Jeroboam fails, David's house will continue on. God's purposes will be fulfilled no matter what - but it is for man to choose what part he will play in fulfilling them.

In All of His Splendor (I Kings 4-10)

2007-11-19T20:43:00.000-05:00

We have arrived to the high point of Israel’s story. Through the kingdom of David the Lord has finally brought Israel to the fulfillment of all of his great promises:

Judah and Israel were as many as the sand by the sea. They ate and drank and were happy. Solomon ruled over all the kingdoms from the Euphrates to the land of the Philistines and to the border of Egypt. They brought tribute and served Solomon all the days of his life...And he had peace on all sides around him. And Judah and Israel lived in safety, from Dan even to Beersheba, every man under his vine and under his fig tree, all the days of Solomon.

I simply cannot overstate the magnificence of these passages. Never since the creation of the world have the scriptures spoken of such glory poured out on man. This is no less than a glimpse of the restoration of all things. Indeed, what began in the garden is now blossoming into fullness.

Consider the wisdom of the son of David:

And God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding beyond measure, and breadth of mind like the sand on the seashore, so that Solomon's wisdom surpassed the wisdom of all the people of the east and all the wisdom of Egypt...He spoke of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of the wall. He spoke also of beasts, and of birds, and of reptiles, and of fish. And people of all nations came to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and from all the kings of the earth, who had heard of his wisdom.

Man was given dominion over the creatures of Earth, and the king here is the paragon of this mastery. As the animals came before Adam to hear its name, so the nations come before Israel to receive wisdom.

The great Temple itself is built to be a picture of Eden. Woven all through the architecture are motifs of lilies, gourds, palm trees, open flowers, and pomegranates. Oxen and lions – beasts both tame and wild – feature throughout. And at the center of it all are the cherubim. The heavenly beings once guarding the garden from man’s touch now feature as the centerpiece in the heart of Jerusalem.

There is no symbol for the Lord himself – no idol. The Lord, dwelling in clouds of thick darkness, has not shown them his form. But now the cloud that terrified the people on Sinai and travelled with them with intolerable fury in the wilderness comes and fills the Temple with glory. Solomon gasps in wonder and prays:

I have indeed built you an exalted house, a place for you to dwell in forever...But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built! Yet have regard to the prayer of your servant and to his plea...and listen to the plea of your servant and of your people Israel, when they pray toward this place. And listen in heaven your dwelling place, and when you hear, forgive.

Likewise, when a foreigner…comes from a far country for your name's sake… and prays toward this house, hear in heaven your dwelling place and do according to all for which the foreigner calls to you, in order that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you, as do your people Israel.

The unimaginable is happening – God himself, who walked with Adam in the cool of the day, is again dwelling on Earth with his people. Everything is rich, full, and bursting at the seams. The people sacrifice and feast for seven days, as indeed they should: it is like new creation.

The Lord’s presence is filling them with glory and drawing the nations to Israel for blessing to spill out. Solomon grants the Queen of Sheba a grand audience. When she is given all the wisdom she seeks, and when she sees the splendid worship at the house of the Lord, we are told that “there was no more breath in her.”

Thus King Solomon excelled all the kings of the earth in riches and in wisdom. And the whole earth sought the presence of Solomon to hear his wisdom, which God had put into his mind.

In Abraham all the nations are blessed. For one sublime moment, we see a vision of the Earth full of the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, like the waters covering the sea. If God can take an impotent old man, a barren woman, a sniveling mass of pathetic slaves, and a shepherd boy, and mold them into this golden city to enlighten the nations, how will he not also, along with them, restore and renew all things?