Parking Holiness

Not the sign that got me, but a typical example.

One of the complaints people level against God is the strict arbitrariness of His law—one strike and you’re punished for eternity. There is a modern day equivalent…of the stereotype.

Right outside my office window is a service drive, with several signs predicting Armageddon if you park there. I do from time to time if I simply have to run to my office and pick up or drop off something, and no more. This past Saturday afternoon, I needed to get my laptop on my way out of town for a family birthday. While in my office, nature called on the red phone, and in fear and trembling I hurried to the little chemist’s room. Sure enough, when I returned to my vehicle, the service drive was flowing with the blood of the damned, a $75 parking citation. On campus!

In my opinion, the Uni’s Parking and Transportation Services (PTS) is aptly named, if you understand “service” in the context of a farmer servicing his bull and herd. The rules are without mercy, and if you are caught, the penalty is severe. They are completely self-funded—based on citation revenue, $500 annual parking permits, plus other fees and costs recovery. Thus, it is in their best interest to fine first and laugh at appeals. Yes, I am bitter and frustrated, not the most Biblical of attitudes.

Yet, it captures the way many people view God and His holiness:  arbitrary, on a power trip, a killjoy, no mercy, delighting in the pain, suffering and frustration of basically good people. Many are embittered and frustrated, believing God can’t be a God of love if He’ll punish people all out of proportion when the smallest toe creeps the narrowest nanometer over a line even thinner and maybe in motion.

Except…

Holiness versus Legalism

If you’ve been reading TSR for very long at all, one of the themes I often come to is that of God’s holiness, goodness, and righteousness, and how they are surprisingly dynamic, unpredictable and even in some ways, wild. I also explored the idea that God interacts with humanity as a single organism, growing to maturity as a race, not just with individuals. Under this paradigm, the Old Testament, with its Mosaic Law, is essentially God’s version of “don’t play in the street,” “don’t stick things in the electrical socket,” “clean your room,” “don’t color on the walls,” “eat your vegetables,” “mind your manners, please, thank you,” and so on.

I proposed that Christ’s incarnation and the birth of the church was in some ways, our bar mitzvah, or ‘coming of age.’ The rules are lessened and independence increased. This has lead to a wide range of approaches by Christians, from those that largely ignore the Old Testament and the Law to those who largely follow its dictates, well, ok, religiously.

I am currently following a reading plan that will allow me to read the entire Bible in a year. (I’ve done this sort of thing several times over the years, and this is the second year in a row in recent history.) It is good for me because I do get to read the whole thing, and it helps me be disciplined to do so daily. Currently, I am in Leviticus, the third book of the Mosaic Law, and where most of the minutiae are given. So it has been interesting to read it in light of the above perspectives.

Much of the Law we now know is for their protection—the dietary restrictions, the health and safety rules about various diseases and unhealthy situations, and so on. It led to the Jews being healthier, safer, and therefore easier to prosper. Other laws are moral, but even there, most are meant as protection from threats that would not be obvious to people back then. Then there are the ceremonial laws on how to do sacrifices, what the priests’ tasks were, and so on. I know that many of them functioned to keep them aware of their sin nature and the need for a redeemer. As such, they point to Christ’s coming and Redemption (one of the other major TSR themes). Fine.

But there are still some doozies. I know many of those are given with reasons along the lines of ‘because I am a holy God,’ so I conclude that they created a hyper awareness in some way that as God’s people, the Jews were to be different than the other nations, to be separate, called to something higher, even if they didn’t make much sense. There are other laws that I simply don’t get. Why is it that a woman is unclean for a week after giving birth to a boy, but two weeks after a girl?

The idea of uncleanness after birth makes some amount of sense—it gives the woman a chance to heal up before her husband has sex with her again—being told that he’ll be ceremonially unclean if he does, when you live in a deeply religious society like that, and that you’ll have to sacrifice the finest in your flock to atone for it, can be a good motivator to keep the hormones in check for a few days. I also suspect there is something deeper than merely giving the mother a break during a stressful and busy time, but I haven’t studied what that might be.

However, why the gender difference? Given that there are so many GOOD reasons for most of the other laws, leads me to conclude there must be one here too. I just don’t get it. Similarly, most sacrifices must be a male, but some are specified to be a female. Why? The males I interpret to point to Christ, so what about the females? Again, I am fully confident that it is far from arbitrary, and I look forward to learning someday. (Maybe you know and can educate us all—leave a comment!)

So, what? As Christians, we have been given freedom to live in a relationship with God in and through Christ. He calls us friends, and His bride. Yet, that is not done in a vacuum, but in the very context of the Law that Christ fulfilled on the cross. The purpose of the Law was to train us in God’s character, just as our parents raised us in a certain way as children, so that when we have the freedom to act, we do so within the context of our upbringing. If we individually are not taught those ways, then it is difficult to live in a manner consistent with God’s character.

Thus, learning and studying and understanding the Law is a healthy thing for those free from it by the blood of Christ. On the other hand, hopefully we have moved past the stage where we need to be reminded not to write on the walls or clean up our room, and we have the maturity and collective wisdom to apply those principles in a more sophisticated way to other problems and issues that arise in our new-found freedom.

But we cannot apply knowledge and wisdom we do not have.

SDG

Dominion versus Stewardship

“So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’”                                  Genesis 1:27-28

I, and many contemporary Christians have interpreted the ‘dominion passage’ as to basically refer to the idea of good stewardship, that the harsh ruling connotation of the words was just that, modern connotations of a more pastoral intention by God.

A Christian colleague of mine in the biological sciences has been studying the original Hebrew of Genesis, in preparation for a book he’s writing. He presented some of his thoughts to our faculty group recently. I learned from him that in fact, the original Hebrew is correctly translated, connotations and all.

According to him, the word for subdue is kabash. Yes, in the sense of putting the kabash on an idea. It does mean subdue as in putting down an enemy or a rebellion. This has an even more profound implication:  that Creation is harsh and an enemy in need of being subdued. But wait, it gets better—God declares that this harsh, untamed Creation is good, and that humanity’s charge to tame it is very good!

This awareness of the Hebrew has rocked my image of God. If you’ve read this blog for very long, I have often commented that our definitions of the words ‘goodness,’ ‘holiness,’ and ‘righteousness’ are far too tame. Yet here again is another indication that God is no mere benevolent grandfather in the sky, but something far wilder, far more…, well more, than we can possibly imagine. He is no urbane metrosexual, but a living Being of Power, who demands we conform to His image, refusing to conform to ours, even delighting in shattering our views of Him because they are too small.

Then the word for rule (‘rule over the fish in the sea…”) is radah. This means to rule as a king. It has a royal connotation to it. In order to interpret it properly, we need to look at what God demanded of kings. Look up all of Psalm 72 on your own (homework), but here are the first seven verses:

Endow the king with your justice, O God,

   the royal son with your righteousness.

May he judge your people in righteousness,

   your afflicted ones with justice.

May the mountains bring prosperity to the people,

   the hills the fruit of righteousness.

May he defend the afflicted among the people

   and save the children of the needy;

   may he crush the oppressor.

May he endure as long as the sun,

   as long as the moon, through all generations.

May he be like rain falling on a mown field,

   like showers watering the earth.

In his days may the righteous flourish

   and prosperity abound till the moon is no more.

If this is indeed the kind of behaviour God expects from a king, then radah in Genesis 1:28 does convey the idea of lifting up, taming for better use, almost in the sense of bringing out the perfect gem hidden in the rough stone. Therefore, taken together, God’s commands for us to kabash and radah the Creation form a vastly richer picture of what our work on Earth is meant to be. It is no mere idyllic scene, neither is it merely survival of the fittest, but a great work, with meaning, purpose and reward.

{For a more thorough article on the Hebrew words, read this.}

As Christians, we need to stop making apologies for God as if He’s some quirky or misunderstood uncle. We need to understand what He says about Himself and get to know Him, proclaiming rightly all of His character. He says that He will offend people, that they will stumble over Him, and consequently set themselves over against Him.

But how can we give them the opportunity to make that choice in an informed manner if we ourselves don’t know Him? He is not a tame God. He commanded us to tame nature, and that He would tame us. Yet, instead we often try to have nature tame us (i.e. radical environmentalism) and then we try to tame God. That is the heart of paganism.

SDG

Hard Questions

A reader commented on last week’s post about ‘American Foreign Policy and Islam’ with “Ummmm....ouch?” I emailed her for clarification. Essentially, she was acknowledging the truth of the idea that the truth does hurt sometimes. Our conversation resulted in the following thoughts.

There were some squishy spots for me as I wrote that post. I want to believe that we usually do the right thing as a nation. I am convinced we do a better job than most other super powers in history, but not as good as we would like. It is strange that no matter how paradisaical a human institution is, there is a dark underbelly to it that supports and sustains the alabaster beneficence. That's one reason why we long for heaven, because we cannot create it here.

The more difficult question is--the people that do the work in the underbelly do things that most people find reprehensible. Are they bad people? Are they good people doing bad things for the greater good? Does that last question even make sense morally? Should we support a system that requires those choices be made? When the actions of these people are brought to light, how do we and, separately, how should we, handle them? Are they heroes, or villains, or something in-between--servants who carry out disagreeable work and made the mistake of allowing their work to be seen by the wrong people? At what point do they bear moral responsibility of their actions and at what point are they given a pass for following orders? Where should the buck stop? Especially in a nation "of the people, by the people and for the people."

What do we as a people need to sacrifice in order to have a morally consistent government? Are we willing to give those things up? It is easy to get outraged, for example, when a group of soldiers torture a prisoner, but is it justifiable to prevent further attacks? What if you found out YOU were the one who would have been killed had that attack been done? Does that change your view of torture? If it does, how do you respond to those who would have been safe anyway when they condemn the soldiers who saved your life? How do we even define torture?

I'm not asking or grilling you--these are what float through my head. I picked torture as a flashpoint issue more than as a personal one, but pick your favorite abuse of power or morality. I don't have an answer for these questions. I believe I am fairly wise for my age, but many of these are beyond me. This is why we need to let God be judge.

What guidance do we see from Scripture? Off the top of my head, Paul explains that government wields the sword by God's authority, so some things are 'ok' for government that aren't ok for individuals, apparently. Jesus and John the Baptist did not condemn soldiers for their profession, and mostly gave them restrictions on abusing their authority over civilians. When we look at the warfare in the Bible, we see Israel using spies, covert operations, and many different things at which we squirm today. Does that make those actions right? In some cases, God told them to. In others, there is no comment, for or against, so it is hard to discern.

Let’s raise the stakes even higher. God is judged by us humans for a large number of things we view as atrocities. A short list:

·         The Indonesian tidal wave that killed hundreds of thousands

·         The Haitian earthquake 1 year ago

·         Disease

·         Killing His own Son on a cross

·         Asking Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, then condemning people who do it as pagans, saying, “Such things never even occurred to me.”

·         Putting Job through hell on earth, destroying his wealth, killing his 10 grown children all at once and giving him disease, all as some sort of celestial bet with Satan. Yeah, sure, he gave it all back to Job including 10 new kids, but that doesn’t help the first ten all that much.

·         Commanding the Hebrews as they invade Canaan to kill every human, even women, infants, children and the old. (and even in some cases, the livestock!)

·         And so on.

Ultimately, God's moral perfection is more real, wilder, and not as clean cut as we would like it. Once again, He blows our expectations out of the water. We equate goodness with naïveté, with niceness, and so on, and God is anything but. As Western Christians, we seem to spend a lot of time defending strange actions and words by God to non-believers. Maybe we should spend that time trying to understand why He does them and conform our image to His rather than His to ours.

Then Job replied to the LORD:

“I know that you can do all things;

no purpose of yours can be thwarted.

You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?’

Surely I spoke of things I did not understand,

things too wonderful for me to know.

“You said, ‘Listen now, and I will speak;

I will question you,

and you shall answer me.’

My ears had heard of you

but now my eyes have seen you.

Therefore I despise myself

and repent in dust and ashes.”

                                                Job 42:1-6

“He is not a tame Lion.”

                                C.S. Lewis

SDG