Wide Angle: The Line Begins

Posted on November 24, 2021 by salooper57

We’ve been using the image of a panoramic picture to help us in thinking about the coherence of the larger story of what God is doing in the world. But it may also be helpful to think of the biblical story the way one thinks of a movie. A movie has heroes and villains, themes and characters and plot, and the biblical story about God has all these things as well.

Another similarity: both movies and the biblical narrative have key scenes – scenes that are so important that if you miss one of them, it is hard to understand what is happening in the rest of the story. In the movies, those key scenes may be long and rich and layered with meaning. But not always: Sometimes the key scene takes less than a minute and contains very little dialogue, and yet provides the hinge on which the whole movie turns. Every word of the dialogue during that one minute is significant. The way the scene is framed is crucial. When the director wins awards for his movie, and is asked which scenes he likes best, he does not mention the big chase scene or the masterful special effects. He thinks of the one-minute scene that made the movie. And he knows it was a masterpiece.

We have such a scene in Genesis 12. It is short, but it is critical. Miss this, and it is hard to understand the rest of the story. We are looking at the call of Abraham, which happens in a few verses, but impacts the rest of the biblical story, from Genesis to Revelation. The Old Testament scholar Gerhard Von Rad called this passage “One of the most important places in the entire Old Testament.” Someone has said that this passage is the hinge upon which the door swings opens to God’s future blessings on all humanity.

How a passage is framed is as critical to understanding the Scriptures as it is to appraising a film. To see how this passage is framed, we need to look at three other passages, one in the New Testament, and two in the Old. In the New Testament, the apostle Paul writes, “. . . just as sin entered the world through one man [Adam], and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned – for before the law was given, sin was in the world. But sin is not taken into account when there is no law. Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses. . .”1

Paul is telling us that the sin of the original man had spread all through humanity. There are many symptoms that demonstrate the presence of the disease – fear, selfishness, shame, hatred, blaming, lying – but the telltale symptom of sin is death, and death spread to everyone on the earth. Paul says that the later method for diagnosing sin – the law – had not yet been developed, but the evidence of sin’s presence was nonetheless irrefutable: everyone died.

God made man in such a way that, if he sinned, he would die. We think of that as a punishment, but don’t miss the fact that it was also a safety protocol. Because sin, by its nature, multiplies – sort of like compound interest – God in his mercy imposed death on his creatures. Without death, evil would accrue indefinitely, it would multiply geometrically; life would be unbearable, and the earth would soon be uninhabitable.

Between Adam in chapter 3 and Abram in chapter 12, the disease of sin spread, and its symptoms intensified. We see that in the second of those passages that helps frame our text, Genesis 6:5-6. There we read “The LORD saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain.” God’s creation had become bad. Death was – and is – everywhere. As Paul put it, death reigned.

1 Romans 5:12-13

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Consider Yourself a Disciple of Jesus? Don’t Make This Mistake

Posted on November 21, 2021 by salooper57

My wife and I had a week off and we weren’t sure where we wanted to go. I looked at cheap flights but couldn’t find any that were cheap enough to suit me. So, we looked closer to a home, something within a three or four hundred miles radius, a place where we could get outdoors and do some hiking.

We finally settled on a place in the Appalachians, a university town with state parks surrounding it. Then I looked at the weather forecast: five straight days of rain. So, we started looking again.

On the day we were set to leave, we still had “no particular place to go.” (You need to be at least as old as me for that line to resonate. If it’s like, “ringing a bell” with you, let me know.) We followed the better weather, started south, and spent the night outside of Louisville.

We ended up hiking in Cumberland Gap National Historical Park and in various state parks around Kentucky. But that meant we moved from place to place, staying in hotels that were near to hikes.

We weren’t staying in the Hyatt Regency either, but in Comfort Suites or the like. That meant there was free breakfast (did I mention that I am cheap), and each morning in the breakfast room FOX news was playing. I have seen very little cable news in my life, but for fifteen minutes each day I sat ten feet from a TV and couldn’t help but hear the broadcast.

A disclaimer: I characterize myself as a conservative (though I realize that not everyone would), but I was aghast by what I saw. The morning “news” was not news in any real sense; it was propaganda. A statistic or fact would be stated (for example, the number of would-be immigrants at the border) followed by five minutes or more that were dedicated to the goal of making the current administration look bad and hurt its party’s prospects in the next election cycle.

I said that I have spent very little time watching cable news, but five years ago I was in cardiac rehab and spent time on a treadmill in front of a television on which MSNBC “news” was always playing. It was the same kind of thing – propaganda – for the same kind of purpose.

I am telling all you this because of how much it disturbed me. I know that there are followers of Jesus who spend more time with FOX News and MSNBC than they do listening to the words of Jesus and his apostles. They are choosing to be discipled by the wrong master.

I said that I characterize myself as a conservative, but I know and love Christians who would characterize themselves as liberals, and I am saying this to anyone, conservative or liberal, who will listen: It is a mistake to spend more time with “news” media – FOX, MSNBS, PBS, NPR, CNN or whatever – than you spend with your Bible. If you are going to be discipled, be discipled to Jesus (Matthew 28:18-20), not to people who want to use you for their own ends.

If you spend five minutes a day with your Bible, spend less than five minutes with news media. If you spend an hour a day with your Bible, spend less than that – half of that – with news media. Mind your mind and the information you take into it. Otherwise, you will never “have this mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 2:5).

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Is the Bible Relevant to Your Life? Maybe Not

Posted on November 20, 2021 by salooper57

It was years after I became a Christian before I heard the word “catechism.” It was not used in the church where I landed. We had Sunday School and Bible studies; we did not have catechism.

When I went off to college, I met Christians from other traditions and was first exposed to the idea of catechism. From what I could tell, it was a class that people in liturgical churches needed to complete before they were allowed to take communion and become members.

I though catechism was for Christians of another stripe, but I was wrong. Everyone, whatever their stripe, goes through some form of catechesis. The word, I discovered, is a biblical one, used eight times in the New Testament, conveying the idea of receiving instruction.

Everyone gets instructed. Whether the instruction comes through a series of questions and answers or through Sunday School and Bible study is not the issue. The issue is whether the instruction is consistent with the teaching of Jesus and the apostles.

In Peter Wehner’s disturbing Atlantic article, “The Evangelical Church is Breaking Apart,” Alan Jacobs of Baylor University is quoted as saying: “People come to believe what they are most thoroughly and intensively catechized to believe…” As such, it is not the context of catechesis – whether catechism class or Sunday School – but its content and thoroughness that is important.

Jacobs is worried about the content. He claims that today’s Christians are being thoroughly and intensively catechized not by the church but by “the media they consume, or rather the media that consume them.”

The fact that Christians are being catechized in a worldview that has nothing to do with the Bible is troubling. It explains why many Christians struggle to understand the Bible and see its relevance to their lives.

My son Kevin says that many people use the Bible like the box top to a jig saw puzzle. They look at it, then try to order the pieces of their lives according to what they see. The trouble is that the pieces they are working with came from a different box. They try to use those pieces to construct the picture of peace and joy as it is presented in sermons, but no matter what they do, they cannot make the pieces go together.

A person may pursue a life for which the Bible is not relevant. Take, for example, someone whose life is all about the accumulation of possessions – a house, a car, clothes, a second car, a boat, a second house, and so on. They go to work so they can purchase these things. They buy lottery tickets for the same reason. It is the motive power that drives their lives.

They hear the pastor claim the Bible is relevant to their lives, but this is misleading, as their lives now stand. It’s not that the Bible has nothing to do with life but that their lives have nothing to do with the Bible.

The Bible cannot be used as a self-improvement tool by people whose lives are organized around a different reality from the one the Bible itself presents. How can a person whose thoughts and concerns are completely foreign to those of Jesus and the apostles possibly understand them? The history of Israel, the commands of Jesus, the destiny of the church, the final judgment – all subjects the Bible addresses – have absolutely no relation to what that person’s life is about.

The Bible is not relevant to our lives when our lives are not relevant to God and his purpose. But when they are, we can finally escape the gravity of our own self-centeredness. And then Jesus’s teaching about God, his kingdom, and human life flash with insight and promise. As people experience this conversion, Scripture comes alive. Emotions are stirred, faith grows, and hope becomes indestructible. It is no longer necessary to fit the Bible into our lives; it has become the story of our lives. Then we understand what Dietrich Bonhoeffer meant when he said, “Only in the Holy Scriptures do we learn to know our own story.”

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Wide Angle: Fallen (and Still Falling)

Posted on November 16, 2021 by salooper57

When Adam and Eve rebelled against God in the Garden, humanity’s authority over creation was ripped from them. They were divided from God, divided from their inner selves, divided from each other. God had warned them, “In the day you eat the forbidden fruit, you will surely die.” And they did. They experienced an immediate death in their spirits; it was now only a matter of time before their bodies would succumb to the death that had claimed their souls.

This is what it means to reject God’s authority. It means hiding, blaming, fearing, distorting, hurting. It means division between people, even husband and wife. Look at verse 17: “To the woman he said, ‘I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.’” The word translated desire is used in the next chapter of the desire to control a person. Pain and division came pouring into the most intimate relationship on earth like a flood. Husbands ruling over wives, wives trying to control husbands, and marriages cracking under the weight of sin.

Work, which had been given to man as a blessing, now became a pain and a drudgery. Verse 18: “Through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.” When Adam and Eve disobeyed God, humankind stepped off a cliff. When theologians talk about Genesis three, they often describe Adam and Eve’s sin as The Fall. But I believe what happened in the garden was only the initial tumble down a long, steep hill. Humanity is still falling. Our downward progression has not stopped.

The would-be ruler of creation has become the subject of pain and sorrow. In the next chapter we learn that sin was passed on from parent to child. Sin is the ultimate pandemic; it has infected us all. The story of the first sin does not end with man banished from the garden because sin does not end. It continues.

Humankind has fallen, and is still falling, and who can stop our plunge? But the Creator is faithful to his creation. The psalmist says, “he will not harbor his anger forever; he does not treat us as our sins deserve . . . ”6 He will stretch out his arm and rescue us.

I said that humanity is still falling, but in our headlong plunge toward fear and hiding and blame – towards hell itself – a hand is stretched out toward us. It is a scarred hand, and your name is engraved on its palm. He alone can break our fall, but he can only do so by gathering all the force of the fall into himself.

This was God’s plan all along. He who was at the beginning and is already at the end foresaw this. You see, history does not stretch out like a line – a timeline, as we say; rather the line has not just width, but height and depth, and it towers up, like some great cathedral spire, to the cross. It is in view in the beginning – in creation: Jesus is the Lamb slain before the foundation of the earth.9 And it is in view at the end: at the judgment and beyond: the new song of heaven is: “You are worthy . . . because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation. You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God, and they will reign on the earth.”10

Man will again rule on the earth – when he comes back under the authority of God. Despite the fall, the story goes on, but from wherever one stands, in the chaos of the early earth or the worship of the glorified in heaven, one sees towering above history the cross and, reaching into history, the outstretched, scarred palms of Jesus Christ our Lord.

6             Psalm 103:9-10

9             Revelation 13:8

10            Revelation 5:9-10

(You can read previous posts in the Wide Angle series by typing “wide angle” in the search box on the top right of this page.)

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Evangelicalism Commandeered: A Cause for Concern

Posted on November 13, 2021 by salooper57

Six years ago, I wrote an article on why I am still an Evangelical. I admitted then that there were things about Evangelicalism that made me uncomfortable. That discomfort has grown. But when I wrote that article, I assumed I knew what an Evangelical was. Now I am not so sure.

The word “evangelical” is a transliteration into English of a Greek term meaning “good news”. Evangelicals are good news people. They have good news about God and his kingdom to tell, news that is all wrapped up in Jesus.

Evangelicals have always been marked by a few key indicators. They have, for example, been people of the book. Evangelicals love the Bible. They consider it a revelation from God and authoritative on all matters of faith and practice.

As people of the book, Evangelicals have emphasized the necessity of making a decision to follow Christ. Going with the flow, even in a powerful religious current, is not enough. A personal decision is required. Because of this emphasis, Evangelicals often think of themselves as people who have a “personal relationship with Christ.”

They have also emphasized the necessity of “living out” one’s faith. This emphasis has led Evangelicals to spend more of their own time and money to keep people fed and cared for than anyone else.

These were some of the traditional markers that identified Evangelicals. The question is whether these markers still mean anything. That’s not because traditional Evangelicals have renounced these ideas. Any who have did not intend to remain Evangelical. It is because people are now self-identifying as Evangelical who do not share the movement’s traditional beliefs.

For example, 17 percent of American Muslims who attend mosque at least once a week now identify as Evangelicals. Despite the Evangelical label, they would not say the Bible is authoritative on all matters of faith and practice, nor would they insist on a decision for Christ.

The fact that so many American Muslims are now identifying as Evangelical is not the only surprise. The number of Catholics who identify as Evangelical has more than doubled in the past decade. Certainly, many Catholics share Evangelical-like views of the Bible and the need for a personal decision, but a theological shift alone cannot account for this large, unexpected change.

Ryan Burge, who teaches political science at Eastern Illinois University, adds that “there’s evidence that the share of Orthodox Christians, Hindus, and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who identify as evangelical is larger today than it was just a decade ago.” Evangelical Mormons? Evangelical Hindus?

A recent Pew study revealed that the number of white Americans who identify as Evangelical has increased. This contrasts sharply with the mainline churches, which have been hemorrhaging members for decades. While some Evangelicals’ attribute this phenomenon to their theological convictions, the facts point in another direction.

For example, the number of self-identified Evangelicals who admit that they never attend church has risen nearly 50 percent over the last decade. Those numbers were undoubtedly skewed by COVID, but what kind of Evangelical never goes to church, not even online?

Evangelicalism is undergoing a change. However necessary that might be – and revelations about Evangelicalism suggest that it has been necessary for a long time – it is not in this case good news. The movement is not so much being transformed as commandeered. Many newly minted Evangelicals are missing the chief component of Evangelicalism: the good news that God has come to earth in Jesus Christ.

But why are so many people, including non-Protestants and even non-Christians, now identifying as Evangelicals? Ryan Burge believes that in the circles in which these non-Protestant Evangelicals move, “Evangelical” is simply another way of saying, “conservative, religious Republican.” This represents a significant change. In the 1970s, fewer than half of church-attending white Evangelicals were Republicans. That number has now risen to 70 percent.

However highly one thinks of conservative Republicans and their policies, they cannot take the place of Jesus as the centerpiece of Evangelicalism. “Conservative” does not equal “Christian” and “Republican” does not equal “Evangelical”.  Without Jesus, the church ceases to be the church and the good news of the gospel is lost.

(First published by Gannett.)

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Proof of … Faith (1 Peter 1:6-7)

Posted on November 7, 2021 by salooper57
Viewing Time: Approximately 25 minutes

I don’t know what you think about proof of vaccine (and I hope you won’t feel the need to tell me), but the Bible reveals that God also has a “proof of” requirement—and no one is going to pass legislation that will force him to drop it. You can try to forge a “proof of” card, but it won’t work. Not that there haven’t been forgers – there have been many – and they might fool me, but they will not fool God.

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What to Do When the Bible Bothers You

Posted on November 6, 2021 by salooper57

I recently read a biblical passage that has always bothered me. Not bothered me like a slap in the face but bothered me like a painting that is hanging crooked on someone else’s wall. I cannot straighten it, but I sure wish someone would.

Some form of the passage is included in all four Gospels, which suggests it is particularly important. Jesus is asked why he teaches in parables (instead of in propositional truth statements). He answers: “This is why I speak to them in parables: “Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand.”

He goes on to quote the Old Testament prophet Isaiah, through whom God said, “You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving. For this people’s heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.”

Why has this bothered me? Because it sounds as if Isaiah – and worse, Jesus – is saying that God doesn’t want people to hear or to see and so to turn to him and be healed. Such a calloused deity seems incompatible with the God I have known in Jesus, who loves even messy people and offers them his blessing. Nor does it fit with other passages in the Bible that unambiguously state that God wants all people to come to repentance and to be saved.

Photo on unsplash.com

What should a person do who, coming to passages like this in the Bible, experiences a kind of cognitive dissonance, accompanied by questions they cannot answer? I have found it best to acknowledge the discomfort and admit that I don’t have the answers. It is equally important to remember that my lack of answers does not mean there are no answers.

When a biblical text seems to suggest that God is unloving, unmerciful, or heartless, it helps to remember that the rest of the Bible portrays a God who is “gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love.” Clearly, this troubling passage is not the entire story. It may seem to contradict other biblical passages, but this is because I cannot yet see how it all fits together.

Once I’ve acknowledged my discomfort, admitted my ignorance, and remembered the larger picture, I can without worry wait for more light on the subject. It is wise to pray for such light.

I did that this past week with the passage above. When I then read the text in the original language, I discovered some things I had missed in English translations. For example, the NIV (quoted above) leaves untranslated the key conjunction “because.” Jesus explains that he teaches in parables “because hearing, they will hear and not understand.” Apparently, parables are more effective than propositional truth with people who hear but do not understand.

Further, the reason people cannot hear and understand or see and perceive is clearly stated: “For the heart of this people has grown fat” (literal translation). That is, they have grown comfortable and lazy. Listening is a burden. They have closed their eyes because they don’t want to see.

So, God has not withheld truth from people. Rather, they have put themselves in a place where they can barely hear truth. Parables were Jesus’s way of waking them up.

It seems clear to me now that the problem is not a God who does not want to reveal himself and his ways, but a people who would rather not be bothered. Jesus does not speak in parables to hide the truth, but to reveal it to people who would rather not know it.

I can’t agree with Mark Twain, who wrote, “It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.” The parts I can’t understand do bother me. Yet I am confident that their true meaning will not in any way detract from the fact, revealed in Jesus Christ, that God is love.  

Meanwhile, what I do understand keeps me plenty busy.

(First published by Gannett.)

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Wide Angle: Presenting God as a “Cosmic Spoilsport”

Posted on November 5, 2021 by salooper57

As Genesis three opens, we find man, male and female, living in perfect harmony with one another, with creation, and with God. But remember that man, sub-creator and ruler – the image of God – has been endowed with the ability to choose his own path. And in today’s text, the path forks, and man must choose which way he will take.

Consider verse 1: “Now the serpent was more crafty [the Hebrew word does not connote malice like the English word, though there is malice aplenty in this story] than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?””

We are not told where this serpent came from, why it could talk, or why it was tempting the woman to do what God commanded her not to do. The text doesn’t even take up those questions. But later in the Bible, we find that “serpent” is another name for the satan, a spiritual being, who previously chose to reject God’s way.

I have always assumed, when I read this passage, that the entire temptation took place in a day, even in a few moments. But the text does not really say this, and I suspect that it is not so. Perhaps this temptation continued at intervals for days, or weeks, or even months.

The serpent began by asking a question—not that he cared how the woman answered the question. It was not an answer he was after. He only asked the question to prepare the ground of her mind for the seed of doubt he intended to plant. By prefacing his question with the words, “Did God really say,” he introduced uncertainty into the situation and into her mind.

Notice also the little word any. God, of course, did tell Adam and Eve not to eat from one special tree, the one known as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But by inserting the word any, the tempter slyly implies that God is, as Vaughan Roberts put it, “a cosmic spoilsport.”[1]

The woman, coming to God’s defense, hardly noticed the effect those words were having on her thinking. She said (verse 2), “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden [to this point, the woman was exactly right, but notice what she says next], and you must not touch it, or you will [or, lest you] die.’”

I think the insinuation that God was a spoilsport had already begun working on the woman’s thinking: something caused her to add the words, “You must not touch it.” That was not something God had said. She was distorting his words. She also changed something else. God told Adam and Eve that if they ate the fruit of this tree, on that day they would surely die. But when the woman repeated that, she says merely “you will die” or, as other translations have, “lest you die.” The reality of God’s word had given away to uncertainty.

By misstating what God said, the woman made herself vulnerable to what the tempter was about to say. At first, he only dared to question God’s word, but after his initial success he was able to flatly contradict it (verse 4): “You will not surely die.”

At this point the soil had been plowed, and it was time to plant the seed. The tempter bluntly called God’s character into question (verse five): “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

At this point the soil had been plowed, and it was time to plant the seed.  The tempter bluntly called God’s character into question (verse five): “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Look at that verse again. “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened [this part was true], and you will be like God [this part was not], knowing good and evil.” That last part was true and false. Yes, they would know evil: They would know it as their children have known it ever since: in fear, hiding, blaming, lying, hating, longing, and despair. But they would not know evil and good as God does. Their choice to disobey made that impossible.

[1] Vaughn Roberts, God’s Big Picture, Downers Grove: IVP, 202.  p. 38

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Wide Angle: The Story’s Told that Adam Jumped (But I’m Thinking that He Fell)

Posted on November 3, 2021 by salooper57

In a previous Wide Angle Post, we saw dazzling nebulae and listened to the ravishing symphony of streams and winds and waterfalls. We saw the pinnacle of creation – not a towering Mount Everest, not even a vast, trillion-starred galaxy – but man, male and female. Man, the sub-creator, the commissioned ruler, the caretaker and love-giver of creation. And we heard, like a refrain reaching its crescendo, “It was good, it was good, it was very good.”

And it is good: The beauty, the freshness, the fertility of the earth; the love and heroism and passion of mankind. It is very good.

And it is very bad. Nature revolts. Tsunamis wipe out tens of thousands of people. Earthquakes crush and destroy. Hurricanes sweep away entire cities. Draught and disease kill untold millions.

But the harm caused by nature pales before the harm caused by her supposed caretaker and love-giver. It is man who crashes jet airplanes into buildings filled with other men. Man, who packs his fellow-man into cattle cars and ships them off to gas chambers. Man, who tortures and controls and hates; who brutalizes, degrades and destroys.

Listen to how Dostoevski’s character, Ivan, in The Brother’s Karamazov, described it over a century ago: “A Bulgarian I met. . . was telling me all about the atrocities being committed. . . they set fire to homes and property, they cut people’s throats, they rape women and children, they nail prisoners to the palisades by their ears and leave them there till the morning and then hang them, and so on; it really defies the imagination. We often talk of man’s ‘bestial’ cruelty, but that is. . . insulting to beasts. . .”1

What Ivan was describing in the 1870s has happened countless times before and since. He could have been talking about Germany in the 1940s, or Cambodia in the 1970s or Rwanda in the 1990s or Liberia and Sierra Leone at the millennium or Syria today, or some other place tomorrow. It goes on and on and on.

We have beauty and cruelty, hand in hand; wisdom and insanity, side by side. We have the glory of Bach coming out of Weimar, and the barbarity of Hitler coming out of the Weimar Republic. There is a little Bach in Hitler, and a little Hitler in Bach, and a little of both of them in all of us.

What can explain these extremes: goodness and depravity, love and hatred, stunning beauty and appalling ugliness? Western man often tells the story of humanity in terms of progression, evolution, and growth. The plot follows crude and simple man as he plods, and occasionally jumps, forward. From stone to iron, from iron to refined metals, and from metals to polymers. He goes from fingers to abacus to supercomputer. Up he goes, always up.

But part of the story is left out. It is not just from stone to iron, but from stone-headed axe to iron-tipped spear, from iron-tipped spear to lead bullet, from lead bullet to atom bomb. We jump, but we usually land further down, not further up. The story of man’s progress has been one of technological advance and spiritual decline. As the songwriter Jackson Browne once put it: “Now the story’s told that Adam jumped, but I’m thinking that he fell.”

1             Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Karamazov Brothers. Oxford University Press, 1994

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Wide Angle Series: It Was [Not] So

Posted on November 1, 2021 by salooper57

In ancient times leaders would place images of themselves throughout their kingdoms. (And they do it today, too – one need only think of Kim Il Jong, the North Korean head of state or, previously, Saddam Hussein.) Such images served to remind their subjects of their ruler.

When God made the earth, he intended to place his image everywhere, a constant reminder that he rules the world.  Humans were intended to be the living image of God, ruling creation (Genesis 1: 28) as God’s representatives, with his love and wisdom flowing through them to all creation.  Everywhere one looked, or so it was intended, one would find the image of the gracious and benevolent king acting with grace and benevolence towards his creation.

When God created stars that manufacture nuclear energy on levels that we cannot even imagine, he was running no risk.  When he made dinosaurs the size of buildings, they posed no threat.  When he sent the earth spinning at nineteen thousand miles per hour and flicked it with his finger so that it sailed through space at 67,000 miles per hour, it was safer than a Sunday afternoon drive.  But when he made man, he created the potential for catastrophe—and he knew it.

Do you remember?  When God created the universe, everything he said happened just as he said.  Remember the refrain: “He said . . . and it was so.”  What could resist his will?  When God said, “Let there be light,” it was so.  When he said, “Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water … it was so.” When he said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear … it was so.”

But man, made in God’s image, was given his own will.  When God said to man, “you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,”8 it was not so.

Man was the X-factor; he was (from our perspective) creation’s biggest risk, and its biggest reward.  No one can fault God for thinking small.  He had great plans for humans – for us – and he still does.  The story is still unfolding, and we have a part to play.  Because people bear the image of God, they are tremendously valuable.  The potential for humans –whether newborn child, world’s oldest man, or inmate serving a life sentence – is inestimable.  Every person you know is priceless: the phone solicitor who calls at dinner time, the dentist, the restaurant server, the genius and the mentally handicapped, all are infinitely worthwhile.  Worthwhile, however, is not the same thing as worthy. But that is another part of the picture, and it will have to wait for another time.

For now, learn this: God, who made everything by speaking it into existence; who holds all things – the four universal forces – together by his word; who holds you together by his word; is creative, remarkable, glorious, joyful, powerful and loving.  He is someone you really should get to know.

     8 Genesis 2:17

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