The Old Testament and Some Other Stuff

I’ve developed a habit of reading the Bible when I get up in the morning. When I was young and zealous, I would read 3 chapters in the Old Testament, and 2 in the New. That way I would cover the Old Testament in a year, and the New two and a half times a year. Today I pretty much read one chapter in each Testament, and often not even that, because my mind goes up a rabbit trail before I get to the New Testament reading. I’ve fixed that by occasionally starting with the New Testament and wandering off before getting to the Old.

My point, from which I have already wandered, is that the Old Testament habitually frustrates me. That’s because I grew up sitting in a circle with a teacher holding up pictures of the Red Sea parting, or David holding Goliath’s head (the boys loved that, especially because the girls were grossed out). We learned that those Old Testament characters were super heroes who always obeyed God and dwelt in a supernatural realm that we would experience if we obeyed God too.

But my reading of the Old Testament as an adult has violated my expectations. Every page is filled with moral failures, rebellion, and unbelief. Adam falls. Abraham begets Ishmael. Jacob connives. Moses strikes the rock. The people indulge in pagan idolatry even before they get to the promised land. For four hundred years the nation shifts from idolatry to conquest to repentance and back again. Saul completely fails. David is a murderer and an adulterer. Solomon begins well but condones idolatry to keep his harem happy. The northern kingdom goes completely pagan. Its prophets whine and complain. Judah’s religious preferences depend on who’s on the throne at the time. And even after deportation and restoration, Nehemiah has to slap people around because of lapses against the Mosaic law. I’ve come to believe that Old Testament Judaism was definitely ordained by God simply because no one trying to manufacture a religion would portray its adherents in such a negative light. A charlatan would have given us the Sunday School Old Testament.

My frustration with the Old Testament is of course based on faulty expectations from my childhood. Let me suggest some other perceptions that have been a help to me. The first I gleaned from a former pastor who pointed out that the Old Testament (duh) is about God. He is the hero, and the only hero. Against a background of human depravity and failure he keeps showing up with unmerited grace and deliverance, for his own purposes. He pours out this grace on the nation, but also on individuals. Adam is clothed. Abraham receives the promise for his descendants. Jacob is humbled and becomes a prince of God. Moses sees God face to face. Israel enters the land under Joshua. God raises up deliverers in the period of the Judges. David becomes an example of humility and gives us the penitential Psalms. Solomon is given insights that passed to us through the Wisdom Literature. God does miracles in the lives of common people through the prophets of the northern kingdom. God moves a pagan ruler to bring Israel back from captivity and reestablishes his law through Ezra and Nehemiah.

The Old Testament is about extremes: darkness and light, life and death, depravity and mercy, sin and grace. I don’t like it, because I prefer the mediocrity of a sweet and predictable God with easy morals who tolerates about everything and kills giants. I would like to be Daniel without spending time in the lion’s den. The Old Testament tells me that God by definition is God, and he is an extremist. Extreme sin, extreme guilt, extreme failure on the human side; and extreme grace, forgiveness, and acceptance on his side. Without that perception, the Old Testament constantly frustrates my expectations.

Another concept that I bring to my understanding of the Old Testament is that of the Remnant. Paul states in 1 Corinthians 1 and 2 that God makes “foolish the wisdom of the world,” and that God has chosen “what is foolish in the world to shame the wise,” and “what is weak in the world to shame the strong.” God in building his kingdom by-passes what would be my obvious choices and calls out those least likely to be noticed as kingdom material at all. This was a pattern in the Old Testament. Israel is called out of the world. Judah is called out of Israel. David’s line is called out of Judah. At one point the prophet Elijah complained that he was the only faithful follower of God in the northern kingdom. God reminded him that there were still “seven thousand who had not bowed the knee to Baal.” There is no indication that these seven thousand came from a particular class (prophets, priests), but were common folks scattered throughout Israel and known only to God. These unknowns apparently were in existence through Old Testament history, so that when we open the New Testament we find some of their spiritual descendants. After three hundred years of Greek and Roman influence, after all the corruption and intrigues of the Hasmonean period, we find some common folks who would argue with angels, but not for a moment question their existence (see Luke 1 and 2). These were salt of the earth, down to earth, maybe naïve, but stubborn believers in God. They represented the faithful Remnant.

I hope it is helpful for my reader to apply these presuppositions to his reading of the Old Testament. Now I’m faced with another question: do these presuppositions apply only to the Old Testament? It is common to blame the failures of its characters on incomplete revelation; that is, they behaved badly because they only knew types of shadows that pointed to the fullness that the New Testament revealed. By that argument, those who believed the gospel of Jesus lived instantly on a higher moral ground. I’m not so sure about that. Before the death of its first leaders, the church was dealing with moral depravity, heresy, infighting, struggles for power, legalism, mysticism, Gnosticism, pride of gifting and ministry, and party spirit. This seems a bit familiar.

Church history fairs no better: heresy, divisions, diverse traditions, powerful movements of God that hardened into monuments to the past, inquisitions, auto de fes, the Great Schism, the wars following the Reformation, my own English ancestors who slaughtered each other for forty years in a religious frenzy, and then sat down, had a cup of tea, and decided to all get along. It’s a bit embarrassing. Not to mention the American church, carrying the same divisions, but eschewing slaughter, limits itself to irritating one another on Facebook.

To be fair, there may be a deeper reason for this, perhaps locked in the New Testament itself. The gospel is so counter-intuitive, so alarming, so expansive, that no one human mind can take it all in. Hence, varieties of interpretations arise based on what part of the gospel one is focused upon. I have no idea what has happened to Bruce McLaren and Emergence (I feel no obligation to keep informed), but I do know that his A Generous Orthodoxy had an impact on me. In it he analyzed the strengths of the seven or eight major divisions of Christendom. When I finished, I realized that his outline was based on the whole Christ event—incarnation, life, death, resurrection, ascension, second coming. Each division of the church focused on no more than two of these, but usually just one; the point being that there is a fullness of Christ expressed by the church universal, but compartmentalized.

But it is simply impossible to take all of Christendom into one’s heart and experience. The best we can do is to be faithful in our own tradition, but keep its walls porous. I grew up Presbyterian, and spent thirty years in the charismatic movement. That means that I am most comfortable with an esoteric group of charismatic Calvinists. Yes, they really are out there, under the suspicion of both charismatics and Calvinists: God’s tongue-speaking elect. I’ve tried other avenues, especially Anglicanism, which I dearly love. But I never could get the nuances, the inside humor, or the via media. I was outside looking in, hoping to find CS Lewis. So I’m back to the Puritans, although I will read Athanasius and St. John of the Cross out of reverence for traditions outside my own. (I do draw the line at Word of Faith books. I am not that porous.)

Thank God for blogging, which allows us to say whatever we want without documentation or the rigidity of a formal essay. I say that because I am aware that I am off my initial subject, and will now try to wander back.

Let’s go back to the alarming notion that God is God. History is exactly where he wants it, and it is moving according to his purposes. I am having trouble finding the exact word to describe how I think he works. “Sneaky” is not bad, “stealthy” might be better, but both are a bit pejorative. I prefer something more like “counter-intuitive” even though it is becoming a cliché. God seems to enjoy moving outside our boxes and definitions and structures. For instance, I have read, but not confirmed, that numbers of Moslems in the heart of the Middle East have had direct encounters with Isa through dreams and visions. As jihad expands, something unpredictable is going on at its center. Even if these reports are overstated, they are still a good example of not only God’s sovereignty, but of his sense of humor. As in the Old Testament, there is still in the world this contrast of sin, heresy, depravity, etc., and unmerited grace, mercy, deliverance working in the world, unexpected, unearned, and based solely on God’s desire to show off.

Likewise, the concept of the Remnant is equally valid in the New Testament age. While structures and confessions are absolutely necessary for the purity and continuation of the visible church, there is still a company within it who are united in love to Christ, and who are known only to Christ. They include a babushka before her icon, a nun with her rosary, a Pentecostal gentleman waving his handkerchief in the aisle, a Presbyterian seminary student struggling with Hebrew verbs, and a host more. These love God and leave a residue of love in the lives of others. They form the Kingdom of God. God sees them. They are the church. The external structures they represent, while necessary, are shadows to God. As in the Old Testament, God still has a remnant.

In summary: God is not worried. Everything is OK.

Grace and Offense

“Then David comforted his wife, Bathsheba, and went in to her, and lay with her; and she bore a son, and called his name Solomon. And the Lord loved him, and sent a message to Nathan the prophet; so he called his name Jedidiah, because of the Lord.”

-2 Samuel 12: 24-25

Church folks are familiar with this story. David has firmly taken the throne of Israel and is expanding the kingdom, and is concluding a war with Ammon. While walking on the roof of the palace, he sees a woman bathing on a rooftop below. In an act of lust and power, he has her brought to his bed. She conceives a child, and in desperation, David recalls her husband Uriah from the war, hoping that he will sleep with his wife, and the child can be passed off as his. Uriah as an honorable man refuses to take advantage of the amenities of home while his fellow soldiers are in the field. David has him killed in the subsequent battle and takes Bathsheba into the palace.

Nathan the prophet confronts David (who repents) and predicts the death of the child and a season of discipline at the hand of God. The child dies, and a series of disasters fall on David’s family and the kingdom: rape, fratricide, an attempted coup and the death of Absalom, and recurring rebellion and tension between Judah and the other tribes of Israel. David bears with all this patiently. But the innocence of the “sweet psalmist” and the humility he manifested during Saul’s reign are sullied.

In the middle of the author’s narrative comes the passage I quoted above. It is counter-intuitive and breaks the logical flow of the story. Bathsheba is called David’s “wife,” indicating that both God and the prophet accepted her new status. Bathsheba becomes queen (earlier wives are not mentioned), and becomes an influence at court in David’s latter reign and the beginning of Solomon’s. In addition, her second “legal” child is special to God and called Jedidiah (“beloved of God”) by the prophet, and is heir apparent to the throne. If we were to “type” this passage, we would say that God is comforting David with a coming day of peace (“Solomon” is a derivative of shalom), pointing to the final eschatological kingdom of the Messiah, and a promise that David’s line would continue forever.

My teachers of old told me to never to preach a sermon or do a Bible study without a practical application. OK. But at that point we run into several dangers. One of the most common ways to apply the gritty stories of the Old Testament is to moralize, to look for some timeless (but trite) truth that we can apply to our own lives. Sunday School teachers of small children have reinforced this approach for decades. The moral of the story of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar is that we should never run ahead of God. David and Goliath teach us that even the weakest person can overcome huge obstacles. Daniel in the lions’ den warns us to be faithful to God no matter what (I never heard the part about the children of Daniel’s persecutors whose bone were broken before they hit the floor). The moral point of the passage we are considering is that no matter how tough times get, there is a bright future.

Moralising is a shallow way to deal with earthy biblical passages, and can be found in any secular self-help literature. A much safer and rewarding approach to Old Testament interpretation is to see God, not the human characters, as the central actor in the biblical narrative. Since the Bible declares itself to be the Word of God, it only makes sense to look for what it tells us about Him. And since Jesus is declared to be the living Word, it is correct exegesis to look for Him through its pages, including the old covenant. I have already alluded to the fact that Christ is revealed through the reign of the “king of peace,” and that there is a hint of the coming of Messiah in the propagation of David’s line. In addition, David himself is a representation of a coming Priest-King. There is also a fresh revelation of the grace of God manifested in the midst of human sin. One might even make reference to the doctrine of election.

All these theological points exceed moralizing, but I want to suggest that while they satisfy the intellect, the Word of God has not yet reached the heart. There is still one more interpretive step. The next question is not “What do I think?” but “How do I engage personally with Christ in the text?” At this point I have to ask how I really feel when I read 2 Samuel 12:24-25. And I have to answer: I feel irritated. I know it is politically incorrect to quote Gone with the Wind, but my response at first is, “It ain’t fittin’, it ain’t fittin’, it just ain’t fittin'." It is not just right of God to exalt the child of a relationship that began in murder and adultery. It is not right to raise the woman involved into a place of preeminence. It is not right for David not to be impeached, deposed, or stoned. It is obviously not right for God to bring such grace into the midst of such wickedness. Every time I read this passage, the Pharisee in me rises up not only in indignation, but with anger at God. Now I am getting somewhere. The Word of God has backed me in to corner and said, “Gotcha!” Now the Word has exposed my heart.

I also feel surprised; surprised by an unwarranted, unmerited, bright and shining grace that obliterates all the darkness of lust and evil intent. I am consequently forced to back off and sulk, or accept the impossible reality that you and I are Jedidiah, beloved in spite of and far beyond our dark histories, because a greater than Solomon has come.

Tributes

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. -John Adams (Works)

I never wanted to watch the Hunger Games movies. They sounded too brutal. But after some friends assured us that the series contained some redemptive themes, we borrowed the first release from the library, and of course got hooked. In a futuristic setting, an oppressive regime punishes a past rebellion by selecting citizens at random to fight one another to the death in a controlled arena. These citizen warriors are called "Tributes." The victor is lauded and rewarded, and the public is treated to the annual spectacle with its attendant celebrations. Of course the series ends with a long expected revolution.

HG Wells wrote The Time Machine in 1895. His protagonist travels thousands of years into earth’s future, where he finds the Eloi, a naïve race of pleasure seekers who live off ample vegetation and have a remarkable lack of curiosity or intellectual ability. The hero eventually finds that there is a race of underground troglodytes (Morlochs) who capture and feed on the Eloi like cattle. In some movie versions, the Traveler leads a rebellion, and everyone (except the Morlochs) lives happily ever after. But the book sees the Traveler flee in his machine without a resolution.

I loved Watership Down (Richard Adams, 1972). I read it several times. In it a small group of discontented rabbits escape a warren that is run like a fascist police state, and set out on their quest for freedom and security. On their way they stop over at a warren of very friendly rabbits, well fed, and given to poetry and philosophical speculation, with just a hint of resignation and fatalism. The bubble bursts, however, when a random rabbit, feeding in the field, is caught in a snare, and is ignored by his fellow philosophers. Turns out, the local farmer who owns the land keeps the warren fed on fresh vegetables, and harvests it according to his need. Our heroes beg their new friends to leave, to no avail. The warren is willing to pay the price for its prosperity.

These communities I described are diverse: a dystopia, a utopia, a cornucopia. So, what do they have in common? They are willing to pay the price, not just to maintain the status quo, but to protect their underlying worldviews. Some things are apparently worth the sacrifice.

Western liberal democracies are committed to compassion, love, openness, welcome for the oppressed and disenfranchised. They also have great faith in the innate goodness of man. I am writing this a couple of days after Brussels (March 2016). I have not heard any rhetoric from western leaders that varies from these themes. There are flowers and notes and burning candles in public places, just as in Paris, New York, San Bernardino, Boston, London, Madrid, Turkey, and places we have already forgotten. The Eiffel Tower is tri-colored again, and I keep hearing the word “solidarity.”

Worldview? Solidarity? I keep thinking about the victims, which is too weak a term. Let’s call them what they are: sacrifices, collateral damage, the acceptable statistical price to pay for the western view of mankind. But could we please recognize that fact, and honor the dead and wounded with something more than candles and flowers. A memorial in national capitals would be nice, with room for additional names. And let’s dump “victims.” “Heroes of the Republic” would be nice. How about “Random Citizen Soldiers,” “Keepers of the Flame.”

But I prefer “Tributes.”

Boredom

“But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.” -GK Chesterton

Blogging is difficult these days because I find that have become boring. Not that I find that a bad thing. Boring is peaceful. Boring is the result of tasting what the author of Hebrews called “entering the rest.” Boring is drinking the same cup of coffee and praying the same prayers in the morning before Anne stirs. Boring is hearing the Canadian geese honking over the house at 7:14 AM, every day. Nevertheless, it is hard to communicate when one is boring. I have no great revelations or 6 steps to a deeper walk with God. There is nothing exciting or even disconcerting in me right now.

Boring, by the way, is not the result of getting older. “Older” simply means settling down into what I knew in the beginning before I discovered passion and excitement. It is the essence of what youth would be if youth were stable. I know that the ups and downs of amplitude waves, when averaged out, produce a straight line. It’s that line beginning in youth that is the sum of our lives, the thing that holds it all together, or in my case, since I am a Christian, the Person who holds it all together.

The Song of Songs is the story of the beloved learning to trust her lover. In the beginning she sums up her love like this: “My beloved is mine, and I am his.” Her place in the relationship comes first. She could have easily written a book on “how to make your man stay at home.” After several cycles of embraces and separations, she utters one of the most beautiful confessions in the Bible: “I am my beloved’s, and his desire is toward me.” He is all. She is at peace in the security of his love. The book ends with the pair going out, arm in arm, to see if the vineyards are ready for harvest. That, my friends, is boring.

Here are some boring things I have rediscovered. First, the whole of Christianity can be summed up in the phrase, “Repent, and believe the gospel.” Simply put, (1) I am not God; (2) He is.

Second, God without my permission has given me four things that are essential to my well-being. They are not my doing; they are his gifts. The New Testament church found them after Pentecost, lying at their feet, tenderly wrapped and addressed to them. They are (1) the preached word, which I need because I forget the truth at least weekly; (2) the Lord’s Supper, the visible word, a pledge of Christ’s sacrifice and of his union with me; (3) fellowship with other believers, whose gifts complement mine, and whose perceptions correct my warped ones; (4) prayer, both corporate and personal.

My suspicion is that these things are boring. They are not exhilarating, relevant, subjective, moralistic, individualistic, and contain no clue as to which current presidential candidate will usher in the Second Coming. They are repetitive, like eating.

(At this point I lost my thread of thought, and began to stare out the window, munching on cheese crackers and thinking about whether or not to weed the fescue in my Bermuda grass, or just hope it’s all the same color green eventually. I’m remembering people I have loved and still love, thinking I may go sit next to Anne on the couch and fall asleep. It’s quiet in the house. May the Lord bless us and Bore us all to Death.)

Advances in the Study of Greek

Review of Constantine Campbell's Advances in the Study of Greek: New Insights for Reading the New Testament (Zondervan, Grand Rapids, 2015)

I am beginning this blog with a deceptive title, but I had to name it something. This is not a review. Reviews are written by peers who are qualified intellectually to take on a discussion of something like Campbell's work. I am not. Neither is this a response or a reply, for the same reason. This blog is at a much more emotional level, like the reaction of a man who finds after 40 years that he has been using the wrong grade motor oil in his cars and wondering why his engines failed, or like that of a man who has been driving to work for twenty minutes over the years only to find out that an unknown shortcut would have lowered it to fifteen, if only he had known about it.

I also need to tell the reader that this blog is esoteric. It is aimed at pastors and teachers who remember "lego, -eis, -ei, -omen, ete, and -ousi" and who parsed and declined faithfully in pursuit of the deeper meanings of the very words of God. Anyone else is certainly welcome to come along.

Advances in the Study of Greek is an examination of the recent impact of both secular and Christian studies in linguistic theory on our understanding of New Testament (Koine) Greek. Readers may recognize names like Chomsky and Nida, but the other scholars mentioned in Advances will probably not be well known to the average pastor. More recent studies (meaning from the late 1800's to the present) are challenging the way Greek has been taught in Christian colleges and seminaries. At present there is overlap between the old and newer methods. But the times they are a'changing. Here are some major points:

(1) New Testament Greek needs to be de-Latinized. I took two years of Latin in high school (back when a foreign language was required!). When I took classical Greek in college, I found it relatively easy, because we squeezed Greek into the Latin system of conjugations and declensions. That worked fine until we came to those weird moods (optative) and voices (middle), and a host of deponent verbs (passive forms translated as active). I was taught that those forms were, well, weird, and I should accept that fact and move on. That was the result of insisting that Greek follow a Latin paradigm. There is of course a historic reason for this. While there were a number of Greek scholars during the Middle Ages, the fall of Constantinople and the rise of Protestantism @1500 meant a wider audience for Greek studies. And since the West had preserved Latin in the church and university, it was natural to use a Western approach to Greek, which to my understanding included Eastern concepts such as complete/incomplete action (difficult for the Western mind to grasp).

At any rate, breaking the Latin mold freed Koine Greek to be itself. Some modern scholars are questioning whether there is any such thing as deponent verbs, and are looking at the middle voice as something more than an unexplainable half breed between the active and passive forms. In fact, the middle (in which the subject participates in the action of the verb) may be a “normal” voice, and the passive an extension of it. Scholars are also questioning whether the perfect tense is really perfect, and whether the aorist is merely punctiliar in time. OK. I’m now over my head. The point is that de-Latinizing Koine Greek has allowed the language to speak on its own terms and a newer method of teaching and learning is developing.

(2) Koine Greek needs to be put into its context historically and grammatically. Prior to the late 19th Century, New Testament Greek was considered a “Holy Ghost” language. But the discovery of “everyday” documents on papyrus and clay show that the same Greek was the lingua franca of the Roman world, and the New Testament was written in a totally comprehensible common language. It was also a language that had evolved over time. That means that my practice of reaching for Liddell and Scott’s classical Greek lexicon (the Greek of Plato and the dramatists) when preparing a sermon was a major no-no.

Likewise, grammatical context is important. Any word can have multiple meanings, but it does not have all those meanings in every context. When I used to do exegesis I developed the habit of listing all possible meanings in the lexicon and reading them into a word in the text without considering the context, or transposing the meaning from the same word in another verse. That too is a no-no. This is common sense, but the practice is an indication of too loose an approach to biblical language, a type of linguistic mysticism.

(3) Pronunciation has evolved over time. This was a real shocker to me. I was taught to use classic Latin pronunciation of the Greek text. (I once took a class with Phillip Hughes, an Australian who used a different system that made the dative singular of “pas” sound like the English “panty,” a bit disconcerting. He always read the Greek text out loud himself before we translated, because he couldn’t handle our barbarisms.) But I digress. According to Campbell, there was a radical shift in pronunciation between the Homeric/classical periods and the rise of the Koine. Spelling errors on papyrus and clay receipts, invoices, and personal letters show that vowel sounds were overlapping and merging. Campbell believes that Koine was pronounced much more like modern Greek than classical.

Using modern pronunciation means that most vowels and diphthongs (except a, e, ei, and ou) sound like the letter “i” in “pin.” Delta sounds phonetically like “dh” (th as in “then”), and initial gamma before some vowels is like the consonant “y.” Beta is pronounced like “v,” as it is in the Cyrillic alphabet. So “boulomai” is “voolomi,” “ginomai” becomes “yinomi,” and “didomi’” is “dhidhomi.” Of course this means that all my years of dazzling parishioners and students with high sounding Greek words were filled with inaccuracies.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The fact is that most of us who took courses in biblical languages simply learned how to use resources that told us in our own language what term meant in another. We learned to use lexicons and word study books that translated meanings into our own language. What Campbell and others are trying to do is to get us into the heart of another language and (if even briefly) allow us to see reality through those thought forms. Anyone who has taken Koine Greek in the past and is committed both to biblical inerrancy and precise exegesis needs to read Campbell’s book.

Keep Yourselves in the Love of God

-But you, beloved, building up yourselves in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life. -Jude 20-21 ESV

In recent days I have found myself coming back to this phrase in Jude: "Keep yourselves in the love of God." This certainly does not mean that God's love for me is variable or that I have to earn it. God's love is a burning light around me at my best and at my worst. Jude must mean that I have a responsibility to line up my subjective inner response to God with the objective reality, so that I walk in spiritual health. I, like many, have been beset during my Christian journey with the distractions of the world, the flesh, and the devil, that breed fear and disappointment and unreal expectations that have kept me from resting in the truth of the love of God consistently. The Bible describes the Christian life as warfare, and this struggle, this "striving to enter the rest," is the front line. I don't think my experience is unique.

Somewhere I have a plaque that says, "We crucify ourselves between two thieves: regret for the past and fear for the future." These are two of the enemy's weapons, and they are useful to him as I age, because I have more of a history to regret, and more infirmity to fear. Knowledge of God's love is their only antidote, a love which turns regret into strengthened character, and fear into hope.

Jude gives some practical ways to keep ourselves in the love of God, in a string of participial phrases. Let's take a look at them.

"... building yourselves up in your most holy faith..." I do not think Jude is primarily referring to my own inner faith here. That would be a redundancy. Inner faith only increases as it contemplates that which is other. The subjective responds to the objective. So I take "faith" here in the sense of "the faith," the body of truth that Paul refers to in 1 Corinthians 16:13 and "the faith" encompassed in Jesus' initial message: "Repent and believe the gospel." To repent means I assent to my own depravity; it means I assent to God's right to be offended by it. To repent means that I accept the immutability of God and his unbending unwillingness to grade on a curve or be the tolerant old grandfather of popular theology.

But then I am called upon to "believe the gospel." There I discover a wonder that far outshines mere tolerance: GOD MEETS HIS OWN DEMAND. God becomes incarnate. God dies. God assumes the judgment. God buries judgment in the tomb. God comes to life with his arms opened wide. That is the gospel, and in it I find the love of God of which Jude speaks. This is what I am called to contemplate over and over. Here is freedom. Everyday I am called to again "repent and believe the gospel." And when I do I am kept in the love of God.

"...praying in the Holy Spirit..." Some may limit this phrase to praying in tongues, and while that has value, I would not limit it to that. I find that when I pray my mind is constantly chattering; in fact, I talk to myself far too much. To pray in the Spirit is to enter a place of quiet in which I can hear him speak. I have found recently, and far too late in my life, that if I quit reasoning and ask God for a solution to a problem or a question, he really does answer (we don’t receive because we don’t ask). My responsibility is to be quiet enough to hear the Spirit’s voice. And when I do hear, his reply is always related to the gospel and the love of God. Ultimately, that love is the answer.

“...waiting for the mercy of the Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life...” This of course does not mean that God’s mercy is only in the future, or that his mercy towards us increases over time. It does mean that God’s mercy will never fail, and that the mercy we receive in the gospel will reach its objective in our perfection and freedom from sin. The present mercy of God is eschatological. A perfect ending leads to hope, and hope verifies that “God’s love has been poured into our hearts” (Romans 5:5).

Summary: Jude exhorted us to keep ourselves in the love of God because he understood the nature of the Christian’s battle against our regrets and fears that cause us to doubt that love. We can do so by meditating on both our own inability and the power of the gospel. Quietly hearing the Spirit’s voice and waiting patiently for the gospel’s consummation keep us focused on God’s love for us.

**May God’s Christmas blessing rest on those of you that read this. Let’s continue to pray for one another. This has been an eventful year for us--sold our house in Kodak, lived in an apartment for 6 months, moved to Charlotte on the tail end of hurricane Joaquin, jumped through all the usual hoops: tags, address changes, hanging pictures, finding places to shop, new church, new friends. You may not know that we are in a mixed community on the east side. Making friends and praying for an inlet for the gospel through real relationships. The job at the Billy Graham Library (part time) is one of the best I’ve had, but I am having some difficulty staying on my feet for long periods. More a matter of dizziness than pain. Anne is still doing her insurance business, keeping up with TN clients and a few new ones here. She is playing some tennis, but looking for permanent courts. We have found the parks in Mint Hill and walk a lot. David and Channon are in San Pedro, CA. They are doing great. Good job and location. Beth is likewise, and only 9 miles away. Blessing to everybody, Rick**

Immensity

O God, thou art terrible out of thy holy places. -Psalm 68:35

I glean most of my knowledge of science in waiting rooms. At a doctor's office last week I picked up a copy of the Smithsonian and tried to work my way through a description of post-Einstein physics, which I can summarize hazily in purely layman's terms. Like Charlie Brown, I can only see a chickie and a duckie. According to this article, Einstein's discovery that gravity bends light opened the door to the fact that gravity also bends space itself, and (this is very simplistic) "waves" of space are created by the gravitational influence of objects light years away, which we have the capacity to measure. I also read somewhere that space not only "bends," it is expanding. Let me say that again. Material objects are not just moving out from a central point in space; the universe, space itself, is expanding. My mind, which dwells in time and space, asks, though I try to prevent it, "into what?" Whoa.

In a National Geographic that I picked up in the barber shop I found an article about the opposite: inner or atomic space. This article reported that if the nucleus of an average atom were the size of a beach ball perched in New York City, the nearest electron would be in Philadelphia. That's a lot of empty space. What keeps my posterior from sinking into my chair is not matter at all; it is energy. This has something to do with E=MC squared. Again, whoa.

Now I believe these discoveries are manifestations of the work of God. I know the materialist will argue the opposite, and I do not have the skill for that debate. Creationist Ken Ham once pointed out that every time we push the majesty of God out to its limits in our minds, God ups the ante. That is certainly happening rapidly in our shifting understanding of the universe. As a Christian, I take the existence of such a God on faith (Hebrews 11:3), defining faith here not as mindless credulity, but as the power of truth that breaks through my sinful desire to have a meaningless universe so I can be God. Sorry that is pejorative to the materialist. But sin is a darkness that pervades everything. Faith is a gift that turns on the light.

I said my purpose here is not to enter into the creation debate. My purpose is to remind the Christian with just Whom he is in relationship. CS Lewis commented once that we should not be intimidated with mere immensity. I agree to a point, but sometimes contemplating God's immensity helps. I find it comforting, when I awaken early in the morning wondering if Social Security is about to mess up my Medicare D billing, to remember that the God who finds great joy in the Horsehead Nebula can most likely deliver me from my fear of bureaucracy. We give Him too little credit for His ability to carry out His preordained and loving purpose in our lives.

So far I have been speaking of what theologians call the economic nature of God--that which we know of Him based on nature and on revelation. But there is a deeper reality in God ( the "essential" nature), the reality that God only knows within Himself, and which we will begin to taste when death has purified us. We do not touch that reality well with our reason. We come closer to sensing His essence when we experience Love or Joy. There we sense an Immensity beyond comprehension.

I said earlier that my purpose is to remind Christians with Whom they are in relationship. For those of us who are believers, a reminder of the immensity and power of God is a comfort. But that is not all the story. That same God is as morally perfect as He is omnipotent. That means that flippancy and presumption have no place in our approach to Him. When, in His incarnation, He said "Repent and believe the gospel," that is what He meant. We are called upon to do both repeatedly. Repentance means to change one's mind, and is related to confession, which means to agree with God. It is the end of resistance and subterfuge, and is a great relief because it brings us into the stream of what God knows about us already. To believe the gospel means that everything necessary to our salvation and well being rests upon Christ and Christ alone.

Repentance and belief rely upon on each other. Repentance forces us to Christ, and the grace of Christ working through the gospel reveals the depravity that leads to repentance. Both are great and Immense works within us, comparable to death and resurrection. Repentance without the gospel produces melancholy and legalism; the gospel without deep repentance produces easy believism and a Jesus who is more like a cosmic Dr. Phil who exists to get us good parking places.

We never outgrow the cycle of repentance and belief. All our attempts to find other "lifes" beyond that cycle (deeper life, higher life, union life, the Spirit filled life, etc.) lead at least to disappointment and at most to idolatry. The all powerful God of Immensity uses repentance and belief to work Immense change in us. "For God, who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."