is it wicked not to care?
i go to a Bible college. let's just get that out there. hopefully that doesn't add any negative connotations to your view of my posts / me; if it does, hopefully you can fight them off since connotation does not necessarily equate with reality (let's be poetic and call reality "concrete denotation"). i go to a really good Bible college where i'm learning more than i could have ever have hoped to learn about anything. i came here prideful and worried that i would spend 75% of my time rolling my eyes at everything, but instead i have been humbled and stood in awe of all that goes on here actively and academically. nonetheless, i'm going to use a complaint about this same Bible college as an introduction to this post.
the problem with going to a Bible college is that a good number of the students here are missionary or homeschool kids who have read the Bible back and forth like 89 times and have competed in Bible-verse-memorizing contests at high, high levels etc etc etc in the same way that i spent all my afternoons and saturdays at sports practices.
the only time i ever read the Bible all the way through, i am now realizing, was in my youth when i read a comic book Bible that i now can't find in print (really unfortunately because it was a high quality and incredible comic, not one of those cheesy ones). i read it around the same time i downed library copies of Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes, and Foxtrot (don't get the cartoon style confused; my Bible comic book was like... intense Fantastic Four-style art and not flat Foxtrot illustration. i'm not making a value statement here but a stylistic distinction, just to help you picture this Bible comic book). the Bible comic book, however, isn't really the point, here; the fact that i have never actually read a text-based Bible all the way through is.
this occurred to me most strikingly at my final last spring (finals, for the honors program i'm in, involve an Oxford-style thirty-minute "interrogation" session, where you bring in all your books and all your notes and dress really nice and the professors can ask you anything they want about the semester, and you dialogue with them to prove what you know), when my professor kept pushing for some section in the Bible regarding miracles with food or something. i kept pulling out sections from the New Testament that we'd just read (i.e. Jesus feeds the five thousand with two loaves and five fish, Jesus turns water into wine, etc, etc, etc), and those obviously aren't what he's looking for since he keeps pushing. i finally say, "i have no idea what you're trying to get at," and he pulls up this reference to like..... Hezekiah or Obadiah or something that i obviously haven't read and i stop, in the middle of my final, and say, "well, i haven't ever read those books, since they have not yet been part of our curriculum and i came to a Bible college so i could learn the Bible...."
but the issue keeps resurfacing, not ever directly, but indirectly, in terms of background information it's just "assumed" i know and have read. this isn't a bad thing or a problem with any of my professors; if i was going to drastically complain about something i would say that they should be clear about whether or not complete knowledge of the Bible is a standard for entering the institution and then make their teaching consistent with that. i don't think that's necessary; it's not hurting my grade or performance or anything and nobody gets mad if you don't know what isn't required, it's just that i'm learning it all at a different time and pace than a lot of the kids here have. it's more a lesson in patience with myself, it also helps me not be an obnoxiously arrogant know-it-all, which i tend to become whenever i know 51% of the information at hand.
all this to say: i've finally decided to read the Bible all the way through. i've got one of those daily-Bible-for-a-year dealies, which is really convenient because it's sorted out in days so you don't have to flip to different sections all the time. for anything besides daily Bible reading, though, it's completely useless.
catching up to the homeschool Bible kids is like 506th on the list of the reasons why i'm reading the Bible all the way through, and even farther on the list of benefits i'm experience from of reading the Bible all the way through. these reasons and experiences are all things like "getting a good sense of history" or "being in The Word habitually every day," etc, etc, etc.
one specifically cool thing i've been seeing, in reading through the Old Testament (i'm up to the end of 1 Samuel now) - the thing i originally started this blog post for but got all distracted and ranted in a way that might have bored you before you got here, or might have diluted this... i don't know - is the way God handles bad people in the Old Testament.
the Old Testament contains a lot of gore. a lot of people, Christians and non-Christians alike, complain about this, or abuse it. people wonder how a God that's supposed to bring peace not only let but at times commanded people to slaughter each other; other people use the fact that God did let and command violence as an excuse to do so now. both of these are separate discussions which i have strong opinions about; for now i'll just state my position as: i do think that the Biblical history of violence, if understood contextually as it should be, doesn't contradict the nature of a good God; and i don't think violence is excusable in any form now. if you're curious about my reasons for either or both of these, let me know, and i'll explain. or let Matt Timms know, and he'll explain better. since i haven't read the whole Bible yet and all.
before i felt like i had even semi-viable academic reasons to back my opinion about violence, i never intuitively saw it as good or justified to be mean to people (though there were many an instance, ex: biting my brother Luke in the back, where my actions didn't reflect this; please forgive my sinfulness and hypocrisy). i never knew what to do about people like Adolf Hitler, Osama Bin Laden, Fidel Castro, the Green River Killer, or abortion doctors (my oh my what a loaded array of people). of course i wanted someone to take all things sharp, hard, and painful and slice/slash/smash/torment them until they died (or, in the case of Hitler, bring him back to life and then do all that until he died again), but i wasn't about to do it, and i wasn't entirely sure that i would really be comfortable with someone else doing it. these guys deserve a million deaths.... right? but maybe you could send them to therapy until they're bawling like a baby in a psychiatrist's ofice? maybe they'd change? and if they did, would that free them or excuse them of all the wrong they did? if we saw them truly sad and repentant, would we actually not want to give them the punishment they deserve? how would we know if they were truly sad and repentant? was it even their fault they did wrong? did they get molested as children? were they brainwashed into religious or political extremism? do they just have some problem with their chemical makeup that predisposed them, without their actual volition of will, to do what they did? if any of these were the case, did they have opportunities to deal with or overcome it? did they act on those opportunites? if they didn't have opportunities, would they have acted on one if they did? are they to blame for not seeking out opportunities to deal with any of their issues? the list of questions goes on and on, gets broader and deeper simultaneously, expands like a marshmallow in the microwave. i finally have to throw up my hands in intellectual defeat, because i just don't know. i don't know if it's right or not. and i don't know what to do about them. or anyone who ever did anything wrong (i.e. all of us). but in the case of people like this, i decided just to pray that they'd die of cancer, or something. Hitler committed suicide, and that feels kind of fitting, even though i still, in some weird corner of my heart, see the sadness and irony of it. suicide just adds one more murder to his list... there's no balance, no vindication. he dies a murderer.
so as i'm going through the Old Testament, i've noticed this trend of people dying "randomly." it's just nuts. i suppose it's typical for people to drop like flies in the Old Testament, what with the power of God and extreme old age and the constantly fighting and law-breaking nations, but more than once these individual occurrences of death by unfortunate natural causes has caught my attention. two specific instances in 1 Samuel in particular stand out:
1. "When the messenger mentioned what had happened to the Ark of God, Eli fell backward from his seat beside the gate. He broke his neck and died, for he was old and overweight." (1 Samuel 4:18)
this passage mentions Eli's obesity as a reason for his death (heed this, all ye Supersize-Me Americans!). now, Eli wasn't that bad of a guy or anything, but he had these awful sons and this was dishonoring, since he was a priest, and earlier, God tells Eli off for raising a family that didn't focus on serving Him. so Eli deserves punishment in the sense that God is ultra-holy and Eli hasn't been respecting this all the way, but i don't think any of us would say Eli should be killed or anything, and Eli still tries to listen to what God asks him to do, etc. so he kind of dies out of awe for the Ark of the Covenant, and kind of because he was too fat to survive his fall (i can't help but laugh at this). fatness might represent gluttony, which might represent self-glorification over God-glorification. the point: his sinful nature affects his body which leads him to a justified unfortunate-natural death. it's totally natural that he die, given his state (age + obesity) (i say this in the same way that i understand it would seem natural for someone with cancer to die before someone not with cancer to die).
2. "In the morning when Nabal was sober, his wife told him what had happened. As a result he had a stroke, and he lay paralyzed on his bed like a stone. About ten days later, the Lord struck him, and he died." (1 Samuel 25:36)
in this instance, Nabal, this angry, drunk, high-stress, high-temper guy dies of a stroke. i think that's fitting, because high blood pressure (caused by both stress and drinking) is the most significant risk factor for strokes. i also think it's fitting within biblical context, because Nabal's wife had just asked David, who was coming to kill Nabal because Nabal had been all rude and yelling at David, to not kill her husband. so: David doesn't kill Nabal (even though Nabal did wrong), which prevents David from doing wrong (which is actually the focus of the story), and Nabal still dies because of his own wrong-ness. it's just great. sucks for Nabal and all, but fitting, right? his sinful character affects his body.
takeaway points from all of this:
1. there is a natural body-spirit connection evident in these, which applies to all of us. this shows just how complex we are as humans; this also shows that we need to pay attention to our mental/spiritual/emotional states if we intend to live healthily. in the same light, if you obsess about being fit in hopes of living longer, you might actually be lacking some spiritual/mental/emotional fitness (i.e. Nabal's stroke. emotional stress is a greater force than stress-relieving exercise; it's even more ironic if you stress out a lot about needing to exercise so you can relieve stress).
2. natural selection in and as part of God's will - think the Darwin Awards. stupidity, to some extent, equates with ignorance, which following God in a real sense demands that you avoid. a person should not only aim to be spiritually/emotionally/mentally and physically fit, but also recognize the connection between them so as to avoid this embarassing stupidity and the death that potentially comes with it.
3. justice is enacted through natural, reasonable, instances. i think there's some element of cause-and-effect here, i think there's some element of divine command + human obedience/disobedience here, i think that the latter and the former reflect and parallel each other, largely because i think that God who is Christ who is the logos incarnate is in control of all creation. there's a lot of theological/philosophical/ethical reasoning that could be discussed and used here, but really what it comes down to is saying, "of course Nabal would die of a stroke because he was an angry jerk because God asks that we don't be angry jerks and God created all the natural chemical processes that work in your body so if we are angry jerks it naturally negatively affects us physically."
now there is stuff like cancer which just sucks. there is a real risk of me overstepping in talking about this. i'm almost scared to post this in fear that i'm ignoring things like that, or that i might be seen as lumping that in with things like obesity and strokes, or that i'm ignoring things like accidental strokes or freak accidents or flukes or good people who did nothing wrong and then just up and got sick really bad or died. i think these sort of things are unfortunate, unfair and unavoidable results of the fall of man. this shows just how deeply rooted our physicality and spirituality is in a common history - we all experience the natural effects of each other's actions and decisions on levels material and immaterial over and through all time. we suffer in our individual bodies, and in our body as the human race.
thank God for grace. thank God that he sees the heart of all men and women - the innocent child cancer patient and the massacring tyrant - and executes justice and mercy fairly in all cases, because He is good. thank God that the justice and redemption of our hearts, souls, bodies, and minds is out of our hands and in His.
the problem with going to a Bible college is that a good number of the students here are missionary or homeschool kids who have read the Bible back and forth like 89 times and have competed in Bible-verse-memorizing contests at high, high levels etc etc etc in the same way that i spent all my afternoons and saturdays at sports practices.
the only time i ever read the Bible all the way through, i am now realizing, was in my youth when i read a comic book Bible that i now can't find in print (really unfortunately because it was a high quality and incredible comic, not one of those cheesy ones). i read it around the same time i downed library copies of Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes, and Foxtrot (don't get the cartoon style confused; my Bible comic book was like... intense Fantastic Four-style art and not flat Foxtrot illustration. i'm not making a value statement here but a stylistic distinction, just to help you picture this Bible comic book). the Bible comic book, however, isn't really the point, here; the fact that i have never actually read a text-based Bible all the way through is.
this occurred to me most strikingly at my final last spring (finals, for the honors program i'm in, involve an Oxford-style thirty-minute "interrogation" session, where you bring in all your books and all your notes and dress really nice and the professors can ask you anything they want about the semester, and you dialogue with them to prove what you know), when my professor kept pushing for some section in the Bible regarding miracles with food or something. i kept pulling out sections from the New Testament that we'd just read (i.e. Jesus feeds the five thousand with two loaves and five fish, Jesus turns water into wine, etc, etc, etc), and those obviously aren't what he's looking for since he keeps pushing. i finally say, "i have no idea what you're trying to get at," and he pulls up this reference to like..... Hezekiah or Obadiah or something that i obviously haven't read and i stop, in the middle of my final, and say, "well, i haven't ever read those books, since they have not yet been part of our curriculum and i came to a Bible college so i could learn the Bible...."
but the issue keeps resurfacing, not ever directly, but indirectly, in terms of background information it's just "assumed" i know and have read. this isn't a bad thing or a problem with any of my professors; if i was going to drastically complain about something i would say that they should be clear about whether or not complete knowledge of the Bible is a standard for entering the institution and then make their teaching consistent with that. i don't think that's necessary; it's not hurting my grade or performance or anything and nobody gets mad if you don't know what isn't required, it's just that i'm learning it all at a different time and pace than a lot of the kids here have. it's more a lesson in patience with myself, it also helps me not be an obnoxiously arrogant know-it-all, which i tend to become whenever i know 51% of the information at hand.
all this to say: i've finally decided to read the Bible all the way through. i've got one of those daily-Bible-for-a-year dealies, which is really convenient because it's sorted out in days so you don't have to flip to different sections all the time. for anything besides daily Bible reading, though, it's completely useless.
catching up to the homeschool Bible kids is like 506th on the list of the reasons why i'm reading the Bible all the way through, and even farther on the list of benefits i'm experience from of reading the Bible all the way through. these reasons and experiences are all things like "getting a good sense of history" or "being in The Word habitually every day," etc, etc, etc.
one specifically cool thing i've been seeing, in reading through the Old Testament (i'm up to the end of 1 Samuel now) - the thing i originally started this blog post for but got all distracted and ranted in a way that might have bored you before you got here, or might have diluted this... i don't know - is the way God handles bad people in the Old Testament.
the Old Testament contains a lot of gore. a lot of people, Christians and non-Christians alike, complain about this, or abuse it. people wonder how a God that's supposed to bring peace not only let but at times commanded people to slaughter each other; other people use the fact that God did let and command violence as an excuse to do so now. both of these are separate discussions which i have strong opinions about; for now i'll just state my position as: i do think that the Biblical history of violence, if understood contextually as it should be, doesn't contradict the nature of a good God; and i don't think violence is excusable in any form now. if you're curious about my reasons for either or both of these, let me know, and i'll explain. or let Matt Timms know, and he'll explain better. since i haven't read the whole Bible yet and all.
before i felt like i had even semi-viable academic reasons to back my opinion about violence, i never intuitively saw it as good or justified to be mean to people (though there were many an instance, ex: biting my brother Luke in the back, where my actions didn't reflect this; please forgive my sinfulness and hypocrisy). i never knew what to do about people like Adolf Hitler, Osama Bin Laden, Fidel Castro, the Green River Killer, or abortion doctors (my oh my what a loaded array of people). of course i wanted someone to take all things sharp, hard, and painful and slice/slash/smash/torment them until they died (or, in the case of Hitler, bring him back to life and then do all that until he died again), but i wasn't about to do it, and i wasn't entirely sure that i would really be comfortable with someone else doing it. these guys deserve a million deaths.... right? but maybe you could send them to therapy until they're bawling like a baby in a psychiatrist's ofice? maybe they'd change? and if they did, would that free them or excuse them of all the wrong they did? if we saw them truly sad and repentant, would we actually not want to give them the punishment they deserve? how would we know if they were truly sad and repentant? was it even their fault they did wrong? did they get molested as children? were they brainwashed into religious or political extremism? do they just have some problem with their chemical makeup that predisposed them, without their actual volition of will, to do what they did? if any of these were the case, did they have opportunities to deal with or overcome it? did they act on those opportunites? if they didn't have opportunities, would they have acted on one if they did? are they to blame for not seeking out opportunities to deal with any of their issues? the list of questions goes on and on, gets broader and deeper simultaneously, expands like a marshmallow in the microwave. i finally have to throw up my hands in intellectual defeat, because i just don't know. i don't know if it's right or not. and i don't know what to do about them. or anyone who ever did anything wrong (i.e. all of us). but in the case of people like this, i decided just to pray that they'd die of cancer, or something. Hitler committed suicide, and that feels kind of fitting, even though i still, in some weird corner of my heart, see the sadness and irony of it. suicide just adds one more murder to his list... there's no balance, no vindication. he dies a murderer.
so as i'm going through the Old Testament, i've noticed this trend of people dying "randomly." it's just nuts. i suppose it's typical for people to drop like flies in the Old Testament, what with the power of God and extreme old age and the constantly fighting and law-breaking nations, but more than once these individual occurrences of death by unfortunate natural causes has caught my attention. two specific instances in 1 Samuel in particular stand out:
1. "When the messenger mentioned what had happened to the Ark of God, Eli fell backward from his seat beside the gate. He broke his neck and died, for he was old and overweight." (1 Samuel 4:18)
this passage mentions Eli's obesity as a reason for his death (heed this, all ye Supersize-Me Americans!). now, Eli wasn't that bad of a guy or anything, but he had these awful sons and this was dishonoring, since he was a priest, and earlier, God tells Eli off for raising a family that didn't focus on serving Him. so Eli deserves punishment in the sense that God is ultra-holy and Eli hasn't been respecting this all the way, but i don't think any of us would say Eli should be killed or anything, and Eli still tries to listen to what God asks him to do, etc. so he kind of dies out of awe for the Ark of the Covenant, and kind of because he was too fat to survive his fall (i can't help but laugh at this). fatness might represent gluttony, which might represent self-glorification over God-glorification. the point: his sinful nature affects his body which leads him to a justified unfortunate-natural death. it's totally natural that he die, given his state (age + obesity) (i say this in the same way that i understand it would seem natural for someone with cancer to die before someone not with cancer to die).
2. "In the morning when Nabal was sober, his wife told him what had happened. As a result he had a stroke, and he lay paralyzed on his bed like a stone. About ten days later, the Lord struck him, and he died." (1 Samuel 25:36)
in this instance, Nabal, this angry, drunk, high-stress, high-temper guy dies of a stroke. i think that's fitting, because high blood pressure (caused by both stress and drinking) is the most significant risk factor for strokes. i also think it's fitting within biblical context, because Nabal's wife had just asked David, who was coming to kill Nabal because Nabal had been all rude and yelling at David, to not kill her husband. so: David doesn't kill Nabal (even though Nabal did wrong), which prevents David from doing wrong (which is actually the focus of the story), and Nabal still dies because of his own wrong-ness. it's just great. sucks for Nabal and all, but fitting, right? his sinful character affects his body.
takeaway points from all of this:
1. there is a natural body-spirit connection evident in these, which applies to all of us. this shows just how complex we are as humans; this also shows that we need to pay attention to our mental/spiritual/emotional states if we intend to live healthily. in the same light, if you obsess about being fit in hopes of living longer, you might actually be lacking some spiritual/mental/emotional fitness (i.e. Nabal's stroke. emotional stress is a greater force than stress-relieving exercise; it's even more ironic if you stress out a lot about needing to exercise so you can relieve stress).
2. natural selection in and as part of God's will - think the Darwin Awards. stupidity, to some extent, equates with ignorance, which following God in a real sense demands that you avoid. a person should not only aim to be spiritually/emotionally/mentally and physically fit, but also recognize the connection between them so as to avoid this embarassing stupidity and the death that potentially comes with it.
3. justice is enacted through natural, reasonable, instances. i think there's some element of cause-and-effect here, i think there's some element of divine command + human obedience/disobedience here, i think that the latter and the former reflect and parallel each other, largely because i think that God who is Christ who is the logos incarnate is in control of all creation. there's a lot of theological/philosophical/ethical reasoning that could be discussed and used here, but really what it comes down to is saying, "of course Nabal would die of a stroke because he was an angry jerk because God asks that we don't be angry jerks and God created all the natural chemical processes that work in your body so if we are angry jerks it naturally negatively affects us physically."
now there is stuff like cancer which just sucks. there is a real risk of me overstepping in talking about this. i'm almost scared to post this in fear that i'm ignoring things like that, or that i might be seen as lumping that in with things like obesity and strokes, or that i'm ignoring things like accidental strokes or freak accidents or flukes or good people who did nothing wrong and then just up and got sick really bad or died. i think these sort of things are unfortunate, unfair and unavoidable results of the fall of man. this shows just how deeply rooted our physicality and spirituality is in a common history - we all experience the natural effects of each other's actions and decisions on levels material and immaterial over and through all time. we suffer in our individual bodies, and in our body as the human race.
thank God for grace. thank God that he sees the heart of all men and women - the innocent child cancer patient and the massacring tyrant - and executes justice and mercy fairly in all cases, because He is good. thank God that the justice and redemption of our hearts, souls, bodies, and minds is out of our hands and in His.
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