God is in the Details

Our pastor’s message theme for this year is The Bible in a Year. In keeping with that, he challenged us to read the Bible in a year. I have read it through a number of times in different translations but my wife and I decided it was a good idea to go along with this. Then she discovered a website, one of many actually, Biblica, where you could listen to it being read aloud, and we have generally been doing that at our breakfast times. We also have a tape-recorded version we can listen to.

There is something to be said for listening to the word, rather than reading it silently. Indeed, references to approaching The Word in The Bible generally refer to hearing it and that was the way much of it existed before it ever did get written down. We also know now from science that information received through the ears is processed differently than information received through the eyes. There is a different impact to something being heard, the way were originally created to receive information. Having said that, we should not underestimate the place of writing in ancient times. Moses is generally regarded as the first person to start to put things down in writing, and we know he was brought up in the courts of Egypt, so he may well have learned to write. Certainly, there are a number of references to writing things down in the Pentateuch, the first 5 books of the Bible, sometimes also called The Books of Moses.

Some of this material is probably the least read of all the Bible content. When you get past mid-Exodus, past the giving of the 10 Commandments, you start to encounter what seems to be endless detail and even repetition. Particularly for us as Christians, knowing that this is all generally referred to as The Law, given to the Jews, which we understand from the New Testament do not need to follow to the letter anymore, this material is often passed over.

You may be familiar with the saying, “the devil is in the details.” My understanding of this is that it often refers to 2 areas where we get caught, i.e., ignoring something which then results in a rather unfortunate outcome. Sometimes this is when we neglect to execute or carry out “the details”; at other times it is when we fail to do something like read “the small print.”

Well, if you listen to these generally un-read books of the Bible, certain themes begin to arise from the details. I believe there is much we can learn about God from these details and the resultant themes.

In the first place, I think it reinforces our understanding of God as perfect and just as our Creator. If we believe these qualities about God, we would not expect him to not care about details. We would not expect him to not to leave things to chance. Yet, that is what people who believe in evolution do, but that is another topic. Here we have God basically doing 2 things: the first is giving the people the law, which he goes into great detail to spell out to make sure everything is understood. The 2nd is giving instructions on how to make some of the accoutrements that go with worship, such as the "tent of meeting" and all that goes in it. Along with that, are all the instructions about worship, which includes a lot of detail about the number of kinds of gifts and sacrifices.

There is also a sense here that God wants his people to give their best and to make their best. Given the circumstances, ostensibly roaming through the desert having just escaped from Egypt, there is a lot of gold, silver, brass, spices, fine linen/cloth and leather to be gathered and used. Nowadays, with Jesus' teachings about simplicity ringing in our Anabaptist ears, we sometimes question this, comparing it to the exorbitant resources that were put into building cathedrals in Europe in days gone by Christianity before our spiritual forefathers got into the Reformation. Perhaps the point here is this: in God's perfect and ideal world, which he originally created, there would be nothing but the best. However, as we know too well, we do not live in that world. Indeed, many of us become too preoccupied with collecting and building up our approximation of the best or the ideal, to the neglect of what God also considers important, looking after one another, particularly the needy. No doubt Jesus had to keep speaking against riches because of how they do sidetrack us from our tasks of ourselves trying to keep our focus on God and bring others to the same place.

Another aspect of God, that is somewhat unique to Judeo-Christian religions, is the concept of God loving us and wanting a relationship with us. Indeed, that is how we understand God creating us in the first place. To put it simply, he had so much love, he needed a lot of people to share it with. Sometimes it doesn't seem like this is coming through in many of these chapters where people seem to be dealt with harshly and with all this emphasis on following so much detail. However, I think there is still the underlying idea that God cares about everything and wants us to be part of the Kingdom where everything is good.

Part of this that struck me is how God tells Moses in great detail who is to oversee making all of the things for which he has given Moses the instructions, who are the craftsman that he has gifted. When it comes to appointing leaders of the tribes in the census in Numbers, God knows the names of all of those he wants to be the heads of the tribes and their clans. Now, I know full well, having myself studied for 3 years at a theological institute and doing a lot of learning since, that there are many who study the Old Testament who dismiss much of what we read at face value as content that was written much later by people who had the records of those who performed these tasks. However, the more the Bible has been studied and archaeology and other disciplines have also added their understanding of the distant past, the more the literal content of the Bible stands up to examination, so I will take some of this as it is read. The take-home message here is that the Creator God of the universe at the same time knows and cares for each one of us individually by name. Of course, there are many other stories in the Bible where people are called by God by their names.

I will also briefly address this issue of those who want to refer to what some see as God being violent in these accounts. Now we know from the biblical record, that there was a previous time, in fact a couple of times, that God was very upset in his holy and just righteousness at what his creatures had chosen to do in terms of evil. In the story of Noah, he destroyed all but that family because of the wickedness at that time. Not much later, when people's pride was again getting the better of them, he scattered them abroad from their efforts to build what we refer to as The Tower of Babel.

Indeed, it is recorded that when God spoke to the patriarch Jacob, telling him it was all right to go to Egypt during the famine where his son Joseph was in charge, he was told that his people would be brought back to the land promised to his grandfather Abraham, because God was not yet "done with the Amorites." This suggests that these people were possibly already then becoming quite wicked in God's eyes. We know from the Bible that God was very upset with the Canaanite tribes' offering of infants and children in sacrificial fire to their gods. He was also upset with their distortion of the gift of sex by how they incorporated it in worship-related prostitution.

We are not God. We do not know when it is the right time to bring about a final punishment on an individual or group for their wickedness. However, again, if we believe that God is all-knowing and all-powerful, he would know when people are past the point of no return, as had happened before. I believe that was the case with those many tribes that at that time inhabited the Land of Canaan. They were just too wicked to be allowed to continue. Therefore, to some extent, God used the return of the Children of Israel to punish them with his commands of driving them out of the land and keeping so very separate from them. At the same time, we read of numerous times through Israel's history of how God carry out these acts himself and did not require his people to be violent. I think that goes along with how we understand Jesus teaching us in the New Testament. We are told that vengeance belongs to God, he will repeat. We are not to take things into our own hands. Again, this is something you may understand with hindsight, but I don't think it justifies us in our current attempts to say that war or capital punishment is right at times. In keeping with the latter I always keep in mind that God did not even kill Cain, the first murderer. He just banished him.

God was trying very hard to keep his people from falling prey to the wiles of the tribes around them, and we know how many times they failed as we read through the books of the Old Testament leading up to The Exile. No wonder he had to give such strict laws about their purity and sometimes exacts such strict judgments against them for failing him and not recognizing his awesome holiness and righteousness. To be sure, Jesus, in his relationships with individuals, and his teaching, really drove home the point that God wants to be in a relationship with us. However, I think sometimes nowadays we have overdone that friend aspect to the point where we sometimes forget about the Holiness, the Justice and the Righteousness of our mighty God. God is all of these things, and it is all for our good. We may not ever understand it all; our calling is to faith.

The Big Comma

This morning the biblical passage for our denominational devotional book, Rejoice, referenced the beginning of John chapter 17, verses 1-5. My custom is to read the passage before I read the written devotional material. When I did so this morning, it struck me that Jesus stated in verse 4 that he had glorified his heavenly Father on earth by finishing the work that the Father had given him to do.

I was somewhat disappointed then when I turn to the actual writing of the devotional and found that the writer jumped right to the interpretation of verse 4 as being a reference to Jesus' death. I really do not think we have to come to or perhaps even can come to that conclusion. Let me explain.

Jesus was ostensibly praying this at the end of his Last Supper with his, by then 11, followers. To be sure, his death was imminent, and he is asking his Father to glorify his Son [in his death], but he is already saying that he had glorified the Father by "finishing the work that you gave me to do." It seems to me he is talking about work that was completed before he died.

It, therefore seems evident that the work that he was referring to was the preaching, teaching and healing that he had done over the previous years. This made me think of the remark made in a plenary session of our Mennonite Church British Columbia Annual Conference in 2013 by Anabaptist writer David Augsburger, professor of pastoral care and counselling in the School of Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary in California in reference to what is generally known as the Apostle's Creed. As many of us know, it begins as follows:

I believe in God,

the Father almighty,

Creator of heaven and earth,

and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,

who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,

born of the Virgin Mary,

suffered under Pontius Pilate,

was crucified, died and was buried;

The Apostle's Creed is an item that is generally more known by the so-called mainline churches, in which it is often recited, as opposed to other more post-Reformation Protestant churches. One of the criticisms that these latter churches had of the mainline denominations, which led to the Reformation, that they did not put enough emphasis on what Jesus taught and also showed by his life's example how we ought to live. For over a millennia it had been by and large seen as sufficient to be baptized at birth, to attend mass and donate to the church. When the reformers, particularly our Anabaptist spiritual forebears, got their hands on the Bible and began to read it for themselves, their eyes were opened to how much was missing in what the church was teaching about Jesus.

Indeed, if all that was expected was to believe what the apostle's Creed states, it includes no mention of the importance of Jesus's whole life and practice. As you can see, it goes right from "born of the Virgin Mary," to "suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried." It is that comma, after the word Mary, that was referred to as "What a comma!" It covers the whole life of Jesus: all that he taught about how we are to live as his disciples and followers. As Augsburger stated, “The comma is where it’s at! It’s that comma that you and I live by as disciples. It’s that comma that contains all the healing. And oh what a comma!” Let's give more credit to that, and pay more attention to what it hides for too many.