Thoughts on Lamentations 2

Today’s reading: Lamentations 2; 2 Corinthians 9-10

There are two things Lamentations has gotten me thinking about this morning: (1) the nature of God’s judgement, and (2) the danger of spiritual authorities being unwilling to stand on the truth.

The nature of God’s judgement

On the first side of it, in terms of God’s judgement, this book has been highlighting to me how much of God’s judgement is carried out as “giving over” to the natural course of things rather than being an active inflicting of some punishment. I don’t know that I would have noticed this before, but an episode of The Bible Project Podcast I listened to recently was on the topic of God’s judgement, and Tim Mackie pointed out that this is how it generally works. He pointed out that for all the times that God or the prophets point to His judgement of His people, it’s almost always some “natural” event (e.g. famine, conquest, etc.) that God then takes credit for. I tend to think of God’s judgement as Him actively doing things to people, but it more so seems like His judgement is primarily in the form of stopping protecting people from the natural consequences of their actions.

Jeremiah juggles these two ways of thinking about God’s judgement constantly in Lamentations. On the one hand, he keeps recognizing and calling out the nature of their suffering for its more natural causes, but then, in the next verse, he will attribute it to the Lord.

The way I’ve come to start thinking about it is that God’s blessing is to protect His people from the natural course of things. Sometimes that is in the form of ensuring their rains always come in their seasons and their crops always have a good yield, sometimes it is in the form of turning away foreign armies, sometimes it is in the form of giving them undue favor in trading agreements, etc. But the natural course of natural and global affairs will sometimes be favorable and sometimes unfavorable, and the blessing of God seems to be the active bolstering of the favorable and protecting from the unfavorable. God’s judgement then, at least at the start, looks to be mostly withholding the blessing, letting things go back over to their more natural state. The furthering of His judgement then, at times, is clearly bolstering the unfavorable and/or blocking them from experiencing the favorable as they would “naturally.” But in both cases, His judgement is giving the people over to the natural consequences of their actions rather than supernaturally striking people down or something like that.

The danger of spiritual authorities not standing on truth

In the midst of lamenting the state of his people, Jeremiah says this about how they got to this place:

Your prophets have seen for you
false and deceptive visions;
they have not exposed your iniquity
to restore your fortunes,
but have seen for you oracles
that are false and misleading.

The prophets were supposed to be the voice of the Lord, calling the people to turn from their faithlessness to the Lord, but clearly they were doing no such thing. Rather than performing their God-given function in speaking truth to the people, the prophets were more concerned with being liked and well regarded by the people, so they gladly gave them false and deceptive visions.

I worry about this for the church today. How many churches, pastors, or teachers are unwilling to speak boldly about things that might cost them attendance numbers, donation dollars, or book sales? How much sin is left unchecked because to address it would be unpopular or uncomfortable? Even worse, how much sin is actively accepted and affirmed by those in positions of spiritual authority in the name of “loving everyone”?

God did not give the prophets to His people to make them feel good about themselves, but to tell them what they really needed to hear, even (and especially) when they didn’t want to hear it. Jeremiah even says, if they had been willing to expose the people’s iniquity, it would have meant the restoration of their blessings, so it was to their great detriment and harm that the prophets were unwilling to speak a difficult word or experience the discomfort of unpopularity for declaring God’s truth.

So when a church refuses to call sin what the Lord calls sin, trying to protect their attendance records, claiming that, “It’s better for people to be here and be exposed to the Bible at all, and if we addressed their sin too directly, or took a biblical stand on hot-button issues they would leave,” they are acting exactly like Israel’s worthless prophets, putting a veneer of spirituality over blatant sin and rebellion. And will this ever produce fruit? Will this ever make a lasting impact for the Kingdom of God? Never! It may fill churches on Sunday mornings and fill bank accounts the rest of the week, but none of it will last because it is nothing but false and deceptive visions intended to placate the multitude.

We have to do better than that…

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Thoughts on Ruth 4

Today’s reading: Ruth 3-4; 2 Corinthians 7

I’m not going to write a whole new post this morning because I have already written my thoughts about this when we were reading through Deuteronomy. Instead of a new post, I’m just going to point you to that post I wrote before about Ruth and Deuteronomy 23: https://www.thoughtsontheword.com/2023/06/thoughts-on-deuteronomy-23.html

Cheers!

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Thoughts on Ruth 1

Today’s reading: Ruth 1; 2 Corinthians 5

I really love the book of Ruth. There are other stories that are definitely up there for me as well, like the story of Joseph, but as far as whole books go, Ruth might be my favorite. I have always enjoyed it, but I feel like the more I have learned of the broader biblical story, the more I have come to love this book and the picture it presents of the amazing, compassionate, merciful, gracious love of God.

The first chapter of Ruth sets up an ironic contrast. The very first thing we are told in the book is that this happened in the days of the judges, during a famine in Israel. God had promised His people that they would not suffer famines or military oppression as long as they stayed faithful to Him, and the book of Judges tells us the increasingly damning cyclical story of Israel’s spiritual rebellion, resulting in invasion and/or famine, and them only turning back to God when things get too bad for them. So the fact that there is a famine in the land tells us this story took place during one of those spiritually rebellious times in Israel. But then, on top of the people being rebellious as a whole, the family we are following is clearly no standout example of faithfulness. Far from trusting God to provide despite the famine, they pack up and journey to Moab, a land of their spiritual enemies, and then the sons of the family even marry Moabite women, which was expressly forbidden by God!

So we start the story with a faithless family fleeing the promised land because of a famine brought about by Israel’s faithlessness, but then we end the first chapter with something entirely different. When Naomi decides to return to Israel, it’s not because she had a crisis of conscious and wants to try to be faithful to Yahweh, it’s because every man in her family is dead and she has no other option. But then, when Ruth refuses to stay behind, what does she say to Naomi? “For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” Then she even invokes the name of Naomi’s God declaring, “May Yahweh do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from you.” So while Naomi’s family, Israelites, a family from God’s chosen people, have turned from His presence and from faithfulness to Him, this Moabite, a woman from a cursed people who are expressly disallowed from being part of God’s covenant people (Deuteronomy 23), is ready to leave her people and her gods to follow Naomi to the promised land and declare Yahweh to be her God.

What an amazing and ironic contrast!

And this sets the tone for the entire story, as Ruth shows herself, time and time again, to be the faithful one, even as Naomi tries to scheme and connive her way to what she thinks, in her own wisdom, is best.

It’s short, but man this book is incredible!

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Thoughts on The Song of Solomon

Today’s reading: Song of Solomon 3-4, 2 Corinthians 1

I have a very difficult time with Biblical poetry…

In all reality, it would be more accurate to say I have a difficult time with poetry in general, and that that difficulty is compounded when it comes to Biblical poetry, but either way, I have such a hard time feeling like I understand much of anything happening in The Song of Solomon.

I don’t know if this is the reason for it or not, but I generally assume the reason I struggle with poetry is Aphantasia (the inability to visualize things in your head). I only recently learned that this was a thing, and it made so much more sense of the world, since I’ve never understood why people tell you to close your eyes and visualize things when doing that has never shown me anything other than nothing. But it turns out that some people (myself included) simply lack the ability to visualize things mentally. This includes when I’m reading, that I can think about characters and scenes, but I can never visualize them. My theory is that this is why poetry is so hard for me, because it relies so much on evoking meaning and emotion through imagery.

But whatever the reason, I struggle with regular poetry, but then Biblical poetry tends to be an extra level of difficult. Biblical poetry is written differently, employing parallelism as the primary poetic device rather than rhyme or meter, and the imagery is much more foreign to me than contemporary poetry. I just have a much harder time imagining a herd of goats descending Mt. Gilead because I’ve never seen a heard of goats descending any mountain before.

But the wonderful thing is that, for as much as I struggle with Biblical poetry, I know people who absolutely love Biblical poetry, and feel drawn incredibly close to the Lord through it, but who really struggle with other parts of the Bible that I find fascinating. It’s almost as though God, having created us, knows that different people enjoy and need different things, and so has revealed Himself to us in various ways so that He might draw all of us to Himself in individual ways!

So I don’t really worry about how much I struggle with Biblical poetry. I want to understand it better, and I can lean on the people who do love and understand it well to help me understand it, but it doesn’t bother me to have parts of the Bible that I struggle with.

I guess that’s really the point of this post, to encourage anybody who feels like they have things in the Bible they struggle to understand or that they struggle to even read because they find them so boring, that that is perfectly okay! You don’t need to love and understand the whole Bible equally. We should continue to learn and grow in our understanding of it, but if/when there are areas we struggle, we should never let God’s enemies use that to whisper in our ears that it’s not worth it, we can’t do it, and we should just give up trying. God is so much bigger and wiser than that, and in His infinite wisdom He has revealed Himself to all of us in incredible ways.

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Thoughts on 1 Corinthians 15

Today’s reading: Job 42; 1 Corinthians 15

Reading 1 Cor. 15 this morning sparked a conversation with my kids about whether we “go to heaven” when we die, or whether we are “asleep in Christ” until we are resurrected to a renewed life on the Earth.

Until recently, I would have read right past the “sleep” language and assumed some kind of disembodied “spiritual” state of existence in heaven while we are awaiting the resurrection. When I was younger I learned and believed that we, after dying, would eternally be in that spiritual state with God “in heaven.” Then, as an adult, I learned that the Bible speaks of our eternity, not as a disembodied spiritual existence, but as a physical existence on a remade Earth, but even then I learned that we “go to Heaven” when we die to await our ultimate resurrection.

But then, not long ago, I was listening to an episode of The Bible Project Podcast that has made me fully reconsider these categories. I will try to find the link to the episode and add it in later, but it was an episode about the use of the word for “spirit,” and in that conversation, Tim Mackie pointed out that the Biblical conception of a human is as a physical/spiritual being, and that the common notion today of a “soul” that is purely spiritual, separated from our physical nature, isn’t actually found in the Bible. Likewise, there is no notion of “going to Heaven” when we die in the Bible, but the hope is always found in the resurrection of the physical body to eternal (and embodied) life. Mackie also pointed out that very little at all is said of the state between death and the resurrection of the body on the last day, and most of the time it is talked about the language used is being asleep. In that sense, when you go to sleep and wake up, it feels like no time has passed at all, so it would seem more likely then, from the Biblical language, that when we die we are not floating around in a conscious, disembodied state in Heaven, but are unaware of the passage of time, and will awaken, seemingly immediately after “falling asleep,” to our resurrection.

The only passages that might contradict that understanding are when Jesus, talking to the criminal on the cross, told him that he would be with Him in paradise that day and when Paul says that to be apart from the body is to be at home with Christ. That said, I do think both of those still fit with this concept in that, from the individual’s perspective, they die and, that same moment, awake to eternal resurrection life with Christ. This understanding might actually be more likely too in that when Jesus says “paradise,” He is saying “the garden,” which is the language used for the Earth renewed to God’s intended state. There is also the mention in The Revelation of the souls of the martyrs crying out for vengeance, but I would actually argue today that John is much more likely being shown a vision, rather than being shown actual, true future events (i.e. John is not transported to the future or seeing a film of things to come, but a vision filled with OT imagery that is looking forward to what God will accomplish), so that vision can’t necessarily be used as evidence either way.

When I really think about the Biblical language used for it, I have to admit I think it is probably more likely that we die and then “wake up” to the resurrection on the last day, rather than any sort of “going to heaven” in the interim (though, if I’m wrong about that, that’s fine by me…). The bigger thing this has made me realize though is just how much we take what we are taught for granted and then filter everything else through that lens. Had I read the Bible as a completely blank slate, would I have ever come to the understanding that when we die we “go to heaven”? I doubt it, and yet, I have never questioned it at all until recently.

I want to be more aware of these kinds of things…

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Thoughts on Job 39-40

Today’s reading: Job 39-40; 1 Corinthians 13

I used to have a much more simplistic understanding of God’s response to Job, but the more I’ve understood where Job and his friends are coming from in their view of God, the more I’ve seen of what God is really getting at with Job.

In the past, I saw God’s words to Job almost like a parent telling their child that they don’t know enough to question them, but without giving them any reason or answer for it. On one level, there is some of that, and it’s not illegitimate. As a child is often missing the larger context for their parents’ decisions and/or lacks the maturity to understand, even if they do have the context, that reality is infinitely more applicable in our relationship with God. His knowledge, wisdom, and power are so far beyond our own, categorically different in many ways, that we could never reasonably expect to truly understand a single decision made by the Lord, let alone the sum total of them. And there is undoubtedly a decent bit of, “Given who I am, who are you to question and accuse me?” But there’s also more going on.

The thing I have missed in the past is how much explanation God is actually giving Job in His response to Him. He doesn’t explain to Job why he is suffering as he is, but He does pull back the curtain a bit to allow Job to see that his simplistic view of the world is inadequate.

Like we’ve talked about numerous times, Job and his friends believe God runs the world according to a strict principle of just retribution. Put glibly, good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. This understanding has been the entire basis for the conversation in the book so far. Job’s friends see his suffering and know he must have committed some incredibly heinous act to be deserving of such severe suffering, and for Job’s part, knowing he has done nothing so heinous, he has essentially accused God of getting this one wrong.

So one of the big things God accomplishes in His response to Job is to show Job how much that simplistic view of the world falls short. How much of the natural world is beyond Job’s consideration? And even if he tried to consider those aspects, how much of it is beyond his understanding? How do the wild donkeys and the pregnant does fit into Job’s categories of everything operating according to just retribution? If there is a drought in the wilderness, beyond the reach of man, whose sin caused that drought? And if there is abundant rain and vegetation growing for the wild animals outside of human visibility, whose good works brought about that blessing? God’s governance of the universe is not limited to Job, his understanding, and his perception, but extends from the grand working of the heavens to the maintenance of the most insignificant flora and fauna that Job doesn’t even know exists. Given all that, how could the world possibly operate and Job and his friends believe? And the reality is that, if the world does not operate this way, then Job’s declarations that God is wrong in his case are baseless because they assume a mode of operation that God has never claimed nor promised.

All that said, while God is certainly also telling Job, in this, that he really has no place question God’s decisions, and especially of accusing Him of mishandling things, He is also helping Job understand where his worldview needs to be reassessed if he is going to rightly regard the Lord. 

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Thoughts on 1 Corinthians 11

Today’s reading: Job 36-37; 1 Corinthians 11

I’m pretty sure I’ve brought this up before, but when I read about the Lord’s supper, I can’t help but think we have something wrong when it comes to how we celebrate Communion today.

On the one hand, I’ve wondered before if Jesus, in using bread and wine, was not so much intending to institute a Christian ceremony as He was taking something mundane, a constant in everyone’s lives, eating and drinking, and saying, “Let these mundane things, as often as you do them, remind you of what I’ve done for you.” This would be a lot like how God took the regular appearance of a rainbow and added significance to it in His promise to Noah saying, “Now whenever you see a rainbow, remember that I will never again flood the whole earth to destroy all life on it.”

However, this is clearly not how Jesus’ earliest followers understood His words (or at least not solely), because we have passages, like our passage today in 1 Corinthians 11, where it is clear they had some kind of event or ceremony tied to it, and were not just thinking in terms of eating and drinking generally. I do have a category for this being a “both and” kind of situation, where they did take it as a regular sign to remember Jesus’ sacrifice for them every time they ate and drank, but then also had a communal celebration of the same, but, however else they took it, they clearly held to some sort of communal celebration of the Lord’s supper.

But what did that communal celebration look like? Was it once a month, or once a week, everyone getting a small half-bite of bread, and a half-sip of wine while they solemnly and quietly spent a minute or two in private prayer or singing a hymn? It sure doesn’t seem that way from the Bible…

Paul condemns the Corinthians for their practice in that one person goes hungry and another gets drunk. This clearly means people were drinking enough wine to be able to get drunk (definitely more than a sip from a communal cup), and that there was enough food that people shouldn’t have been going hungry. It really seems like the Lord’s supper was, for them, celebrated in the context of a larger shared meal. And it probably wasn’t just a quiet time of prayer and reflection. The fact that some were getting drunk while others were hungry likely has to do with when people showed up. The rich would have been able to get there earlier, but the poor, the laborers or slaves, would only be able to come after a longer day of work, but then there was nothing left of the meal when this group arrived. If the entire time was supposed to be spent quietly contemplating the crucifixion and resurrection, as many churches teach it today, then this would have meant likely and hour or more of people sitting in quiet reflection while waiting for others to arrive, and especially if some were getting drunk during that time, I have a hard time believing that was the point of the time.

But then Paul also talks about taking the bread and the cup in an unworthy manner, which would further point to there being something distinct about their communal celebration over against their daily eating, if indeed they did take Jesus’ words as giving them a mundane sign to remind them constantly of what He did for them.

So what should our celebration of the Lord’s supper look like? I don’t feel like I have a good answer to that, but I am pretty sure it doesn’t look like quietly filing up the aisles of a church to get a small piece of bread and a sip of wine or juice before quietly shuffling back to our seats and waiting for the next hymn to start…

There was one time that my friends and I accidentally celebrated what seems to me to much more closely reflect the Lord’s supper in the Bible. In that church, we very seldom celebrated any sort of communion, but when we did, it was generally in our small groups and we would have bread and wine and pray together. There were about a dozen of us there that night and we had a couple bottles of wine and a couple loaves of bread, intending to celebrate communion in our normal fashion. As we were getting the wine and bread out, and asking if there was anything specific we wanted to be praying about that day, one of the women started telling us about some really difficult things she had been going through lately. As she was talking, we all just started drinking the wine and eating the bread, and when she was done, we prayed for her, but then just started talking about our lives. People told us about their struggles, and we prayed for them, and people told us about their victories and we praised the Lord with them, and people told us about their embarrassing failures and we laughed with them. We spent a couple hours, sitting around that table, eating and drinking, and talking more openly and intimately about our lives with one another than I have ever seen a group like that do before. It was incredible, and the presence of God was there with us in an incredibly palpable way.

I don’t pretend or assume that there is some magic formula for recreating that time around the table, but it honestly seems so much closer to the Biblical picture of the Lord’s supper than anything else I have ever experienced in a church setting that I can’t help but wonder if that’s really the kind of experience Jesus intends for us. And I also can’t help but wonder what our church communities would look like if what we experienced that night was much more the normative Christian experience…

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