Monthly Archives: October 2021
“On Tying My Shoes for Me”
Joel, your mom and dad are encouraging us to write you a brief note with some word of encouragement and/or a verse of Scripture as a way of celebrating your twelfth birthday. At age twelve—or at any age, for that matter—encouraging words and Scripture are helpful. I wasn’t sure what to write until last night when you helped me on with my shoes.
I was dizzy and not feeling well. My wife and I were getting ready to leave the party, and I was struggling to put on my shoes. You saw that I was having trouble, and you came over to help me get my foot in my right shoe. Then you asked, “Would you like me to tie your shoes for you?”
“Yes,” I replied. “that would be very helpful!”
My heart was deeply touched by your practical kindness. Seeing what needs to be done and doing it for ourselves and others is most of what life is about. That you would be so observant and so kind at the age of twelve is an amazing testimony to who you already are and to the person you are becoming.
In Matthew 25:31-40, the LORD Jesus Christ speaks of serving him by serving others. The righteous ones didn’t even realize that they were serving Christ by serving “the least of these, my brothers”, as Jesus calls them. But they were serving Christ. I am most certainly one of the least, and you served me. And by serving me, you served Christ as well.
But your not-so-little kindness didn’t just tie my shoes and touch my heart. It also awakened and strengthened my desire to be more attentive to others and their needs. All my life I’ve struggled with selfishness. Your thoughtful attention to an uncomfortable detail of my life makes me want to be a more thoughtful person toward others.
The best deeds are those which both serve others and inspire them to serve others. Well done, my young shoe-tier! Well done!
“God’s Gift of Water in the Wilderness: Of Digging Wells and Singing Songs”
There is a very strange story in a very strange part of a very strange book, the Bible. I love the Bible, but sometimes it just seems weird. The story is found in Numbers 21:16-18.
But first, some context! I had a professor at Hebrew Union College, Dr. Isaac Jerusalmi, who used to say to his Hebrew classes, “C.I.E.” This stood for “Context is Everything!” Well, maybe context isn’t everything, but it is quite helpful.
So, this poem occurs in the midst of a list of place names where the Israelites had camped on their journey from slavery in Egypt on their way to the Promised Land. It is a Bible passage almost as dry as the Sinai through which Israel had passed. By way of comparison, Trip Tiks from A.A.A. are racy documents.
And in the midst of this list is set a gem: a little poem about digging a well. What?! A poem about digging a well?!
Yep. And it is quite a provocative poem at that. Here it is:
16 “And from there they continued to Beer; that is the well of which the LORD said to Moses, ‘Gather the people together, so that I may give them water.’ 17 Then Israel sang this song:
‘Spring up, O well!—Sing to it!—
18 the well that the princes made,
that the nobles of the people dug,
with the scepter and with their staffs.’”
First, a clarification is necessary. The word “Beer” does not represent an alcoholic beverage. Rather, it is a transliteration of a Hebrew word that means “a well”. (You know—one of those holes in the ground that people used to dig or drill in order to tap into underground water. Many people in the world still depend upon wells, and they are vitally important.)
Verse 16 is not poetry in Hebrew, but the second half of verse 17 and all of verse18 is poetry. And like most poetry, the language is dense and evocative.
The LORD, the God of Israel, promises to give the people water. But notice that this is not a gift without some work on the part of the people. Apparently, the people still have to work in order to receive God’s gift of water.
And that is probably true of most of God’s gifts. Gifts they are! Yet they also require some work on our part to really experience these divine gifts. The Apostle Paul writes a letter to some Christ-followers in Philippi in ancient Macedonia, in which he tells them “. . . work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you both to will and to do what pleases God.” (Philippians 2:12-13, my translation) God is working in them (gift), but they must continually work out what God is working in them.
Indeed, it is that way with all the really profound gifts. I have a friend in England who is a fine pianist. She is “gifted”. However, I have frequently been a houseguest with her and her husband, the vicar, and I can tell you that her giftedness doesn’t mean that she doesn’t need to practice. In fact, she practices for many hours a day. (Of course, even her practice is beautiful.)
And then there is marriage. My wife is a profoundly wonderful gift to me. I certainly didn’t and don’t deserve her. Still, I need to work at the marriage, even with a wonderful woman. And she has to work really hard. I am not an easy person with whom to live. I know; I’ve been trying to learn how to live with me for a very long time.
The poem says that the nobles dug the well with their own scepters and staff. Perhaps this is to be taken literally, but I doubt it. Certainly, it could mean that Israel’s leaders used their symbols of leadership to actually do the work. However, that is not the usual way with leaders. Most likely, this is a poetic way of saying that the leaders used their symbols of leadership to delegate (or command?) others to do the work. That is the way that leaders usually work. Probably very few of our presidents have ever actually done much of the work for which they receive credit or blame. Generally speaking, leaders do not get their hands dirty.
Finally, the workers composed a song that likely helped them as they were digging the well. Music usually helps work to go better. My mom used to sing or hum as she worked in the garden or kitchen. “Whistle While You Work” is more than a song from Disney’s “Snow White”. People have been singing while they work from time immemorial.
So, while I don’t know everything about this poem, I take from it the following rather mundane truths:
- Gifts—even God’s gifts—demand our work.
- Some do the work, but the leaders get the credit.
- Everybody benefits from the water, though.
- Work can be, and probably should be, accompanied by singing.
However, the poem says it much better than that.
“On the Living the Scalary Life”
Sometimes, I learn things on purpose. At other times, purpose doesn’t even come into the educational process.
I was dictating a text to an accountability friend of mine and didn’t proof the text before I sent it. After I sent it, I noticed that “scholarly” was spelled “scalary”. I had never heard of such a word, so I just had to look it up. (I guess some purpose did come into this matter after all.)
One website had the following definition of scalary: “resembling a ladder; formed with steps”, https://www.definitions.net/definition/scalary, accessed 10-22-2021.
Most of life is a scalary affair. That is, life resembles a ladder. We may wish for an express elevator to where we want to go and who we want to be, but there isn’t one, just lots of steps.
We were talking last night about transformation at my Christian community group. The leader pointed out that we have come-to-Jesus-moments, but we also need to put together a lot of stay-with-Jesus-moments. Yes indeed!
So, dear reader, my prayer for you and for myself today is that you and I will have a good, scalary day. May we take a few determined steps in the direction of being and becoming the people we need to be today.
Lets be scalary!
“God in All His Puzzlingness”
“Is. 45:15 Truly, you are a God who hides himself,
O God of Israel, the Savior.”
I was doing my gratitude list this morning, and I finished my list with the words “God in all his puzzlingness.”
I was puzzled by this. And, yes, I know that “puzzlingness” is not a real word, but perhaps it should be. Frankly, there are a lot of things about God that puzzle me.
I am somewhat comforted by the struggles of others with the puzzling nature of God. For example, Christopher J. H. Wright—in a book appropriately entitled, “The God i Don’t Understand [1]—acknowledges, “I live daily with the grateful joy of knowing and trusting God. But knowing and trusting does not necessarily add up to understanding. Even knowing somebody very well is not the same as understanding them fully, as the most happily married couples will readily testify.”[2]
I am also comforted by something my systematic theology professor said many years ago: “If you’ve got a god you can get your mind around, you’ve got an idol just as sure as shootin’!” Thank you, Dr. Tom Parker!
In twelve-step programs, we talk a lot about “the God of our understanding.” This is pretty generic, but perhaps it should be even more generic. How about “the God of our puzzlement”?
Now, don’t get me wrong. There are some things that I think can indeed be known about God. However, as I get older, I am more and more tolerant, even appreciative, of the unknown aspects of God.
Of course, many (probably even most) of my puzzlements are due to my own willingly chosen confusion. The truth is that I don’t always want to understand God as God is. I would much rather have a god who is made in my image.
Also, I confess that I’m not particularly good at understanding my fellow-humans as they are. I find them recalcitrantly puzzling. Why should I expect God not to be puzzling, really?
But perhaps the puzzling nature of God is not a problem, but a blessing. Perhaps “puzzling” is another name for “Mystery”. And the word “Mystery” is capitalized for a reason. Maybe I should give thanks for God’s puzzlingness more often.
[1] Christopher J. H. Wright, The God i Don’t Understand: Reflections on Tough Questions of Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008). And yes: The “i” is lower case in the title of the book. Wright seems to be trying to wrestle with his reflections with the attitude of a little “i”, rather than a big I.
[2] Ibid., 13.
“Help: Leaping Beyond the Universe”
The YouVersion verse of the day is Psalm 121:2.
“My help comes from the LORD,
who made heaven and earth.”
I love this verse, so I decided to read it in context. Many verses in the Bible can sing solos, but the melodies are even richer when you hear them as part of a choir of verses. The entire psalm in which this verse occurs is short, so I thought I would read the whole thing.
“Psa. 121:0 A Song of Ascents.
Psa. 121:1 I lift up my eyes to the hills.
From where does my help come?
2 My help comes from the LORD,
who made heaven and earth.
Psa. 121:3 He will not let your foot be moved;
he who keeps you will not slumber.
4 Behold, he who keeps Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.
Psa. 121:5 The LORD is your keeper;
the LORD is your shade on your right hand.
6 The sun shall not strike you by day,
nor the moon by night.
Psa. 121:7 The LORD will keep you from all evil;
he will keep your life.
8 The LORD will keep
your going out and your coming in
from this time forth and forevermore.”
In the Bible, Psalms 120-134 are classified as “Songs of Ascent”. Scholars aren’t sure exactly what that means. I think that the most likely theory is that these psalms were used when people were on pilgrimage (going up) to Jerusalem.
I was especially struck by Derek Kidner’s comments on this psalm in the Tyndale Commentary Series.
“1. The hills are enigmatic: does the opening line show an impulse to take refuge in them, like the urge that came to David in Psalm 11:1, to ‘flee like a bird to the mountains’? Or are the hills themselves a menace, the haunt of robbers?
2. Either way, he knows something better. The thought of this verse leaps beyond the hills to the universe; beyond the universe to its Maker. Here is living help: primary, personal, wise, immeasurable.
3, 4. The rest of the psalm leads into an ever expanding circle of promise, all in terms of ‘he’ and ‘you’ (the ‘you’ is singular). Another voice seems to answer the first speaker at this point in the pilgrims’ singing, and yet another in verse 4; or else the whole song is an individual utterance, and the dialogue internal, as in, e.g., Psalm 42:5.
In verse 3 the word for not is the one used normally for requests and commands. So this verse should be taken, not as a statement which verse 4 will virtually repeat, but as a wish or prayer (cf. TEV60), to be answered by the ringing confidence of 4 and of all that follows. I.e. ‘May he not let your foot be moved, may he … not slumber!’ – followed by the answer, ‘Look, he who keeps Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps.’
[Vol 16: Psa, p. 468]
5, 6. Now Israel’s privilege is made sure to the single Israelite: a protection as individual as he himself. It starts where he is now, out on his journey, looking at the hills. The Lord is closer than they (5c), and his protection as refreshing as it is complete. It avails against the known and the unknown; perils of day and night; the most overpowering of forces and the most insidious.61
7, 8. The promise moves on from the pilgrim’s immediate preoccupations to cover the whole of existence. In the light of other scriptures, to be kept from all evil does not imply a cushioned life, but a well-armed one. Cf. Psalm 23:4, which expects the dark valley but can face it. The two halves of verse 7 can be compared with Luke 21:18f., where God’s minutest care (‘not a hair of your head will perish’) and his servants’ deepest fulfilment (‘you will win true life’, NEB) are promised in the same breath as the prospect of hounding and martyrdom (Luke 21:16f.). Your life, in the present passage (7), is as many-sided a word as in Luke; it means the whole living person. Our Lord enriched the concept of keeping or losing this by his teaching on self-giving and self-love (e.g. John 12:24f.).
The psalm ends with a pledge which could hardly be stronger or more sweeping. Your going out and your coming in is not only a way of saying ‘everything’ (cf. the footnote to verse 6): in closer detail it draws attention to one’s ventures and enterprises (cf. Ps. 126:6), and to the home which remains one’s base; again, to pilgrimage and return; perhaps even (by another association of this pair of verbs) to the dawn and sunset of one’s days. But the last line takes good care of this journey; and it would be hard to decide which half of it is the more encouraging: the fact that it starts ‘from now’, or that it runs on, not to the end of time but without end; like God himself who is (cf. Ps. 73:26) ‘my portion for ever’.”
[Vol 16: Psa, p. 469]
I was especially struck by Kidner’s comments on the verse of the day, “The thought of this verse leaps beyond the hills to the universe; beyond the universe to its Maker. Here is living help: primary, personal, wise, immeasurable.”
Leaping from the hills to the universe to the maker of the universe—yes! Unfortunately, I get stuck on the hills.
What are my hills? Daily circumstances, daily problems, daily tasks. Then there is getting older and the aches and pains that go with that process. Past regrets and future fears may be hills that seem like mountains. Yes, I know: I tend to make mountains out of molehills. They still look and feel like mountains to me.
What are your hills? More importantly, do you let your mind make the leap to the Maker of the universe? Perhaps we have such (seemingly) big problems because we have such a small view of God.
“Of Mistakes and Integrity: Jeff”
“May integrity and uprightness preserve me, for I wait for you.” (Proverbs 25:21, English Standard Version)
As a recovering addict, I use daily affirmations in order to keep myself more or less on track. My affirmation yesterday was as follows:
“Today, by God’s grace, I am expecting to make mistakes, and expecting others to make mistakes too. Neither my mistakes nor those of others define who we are in God’s eyes.”
Little did I know how that affirmation would play out during the day!
In the afternoon, my wife and I heard a strange rattling sound outside. The trash collectors and recycling team had already come and gone, so we weren’t sure what had happened. A couple of minutes later, the answer rang our doorbell. And the answer had a name: Jeff.
It seems that Jeff had knocked over our mailbox. That happened a few years ago, and the driver drove on. I had to replace the mailbox at my own expense. In view of how narrow the road is and how close to the road the mailbox is, the surprising thing is that the mailbox has only been hit twice in the seventeen plus years that we’ve lived here.
Mistakes happen. Mine, yours, everybody’s. Most of the time, we just keep going. Jeff didn’t. Why? Because that was the way his dad had raised him.
Integrity doesn’t mean not making mistakes. Integrity means having the courage to admit them and, as best you can, making things right. In this case, “Jeff” was another name for integrity.
Eighteen years ago, I came clean with people I had harmed with my addiction. It was and is a costly process. There are people whom I love who no longer speak to me. There are people who believe that I have not come clean about everything. That is an understandable belief. It is also wrong.
But here is the conclusion I’ve come to: Integrity—at any price—is a bargain. The opposite of integrity (or wholeness) is scatteredness. And who wants to be scattered and blowing in the wind? We need more Jeffs in the world. We need to make sure we are being more like Jeff.
“Shaping Up My Thinking”
My thinking of late has become very flabby. The mind, like the muscles, can get out of shape in a hurry. It takes days for muscles to begin to show that they are atrophying, though I suppose the process is going on when we don’t use our muscles. Flabby thinking can manifest itself in three seconds.
So, it is the first day of October. I am determined to shape up my thinking by reading five psalms in the Book of Psalms each day and one chapter of Proverbs each day. I also plan to marinate in at least one verse of what I am reading. The word “marinate” is used to express two things. The first aspect of marinating is that I need to season my reading with humility, openness, and the willingness to act on whatever God is saying to me by the means of these writings. Second, I need to spend time soaking in God’s Word. Marinating a steak or a mind for a few brief moments is not all that helpful.
In my mental marination, I decided to stir in some Derek Kidner, regarding Psalm 1.
I was struck by his comments on Psalm 1:1-3. I quote them in their entirety, in order to cement them in my own mind as well as for your mental (and behavioral) marination.
“The way of life
Preferable to Blessed, for which a separate word exists, is ‘Happy’, or ‘The happiness of …!’. Such was the Queen of Sheba’s exclamation in 1 Kings 10:8, and it is heard twenty-six times in the Psalter.1 This psalm goes on to show the sober choice that is its basis. The Sermon on the Mount, using the corresponding word in Greek, will go on to expound it still more radically.
Counsel, way and seat (or ‘assembly’, or ‘dwelling’) draw attention to the realms of thinking, behaving and belonging, in which a person’s fundamental choice of allegiance is made and carried through; and this is borne out by a hint of decisiveness in the tense of the Hebrew verbs (the perfect). It would be reading too much into these verbs to draw a moral from the apparent process of slowing down from walking to sitting, since the journey was in the wrong direction for a start. Yet certainly the three complete phrases show three aspects, indeed three degrees, of departure from God, by portraying conformity to this world at three different levels: accepting its advice, being party to its ways, and adopting the most fatal of its attitudes – for the scoffers, if not the most scandalous of sinners, are the farthest from repentance (Prov. 3:34).
2. The three negatives have cleared the way for what is positive, which is their true function and the value of their hard cutting edge. (Even in Eden God gave man a negative, to allow him the privilege of decisive choice.) The mind was the first bastion to defend, in verse 1, and is treated as the key to the whole man. The law of the Lord stands opposed to ‘the counsel of the wicked’ (1), to which it is ultimately the only answer. The psalm is content to develop this one theme, implying that whatever really shapes a man’s thinking shapes his life. This is conveniently illustrated also by the next psalm, where the word for ‘plot’ (2:1b) is the same as for meditates here, with results that follow from the very different thoughts that are entertained there. In our verse, the deliberate echo of the charge to Joshua reminds the man of action that the call to think hard about the will of God is not merely for the recluse, but is the secret of [Vol 15: Psa, p. 65] achieving anything worthwhile (cf. prospers, here, with Josh. 1:8). Law (tôrâ) basically means ‘direction’ or ‘instruction’; it can be confined to a single command, or can extend, as here, to Scripture as a whole.
3. With this attractive picture, forming with verse 4 the centrepiece of the psalm, cf. the more elaborate passage, Jeremiah 17:5–8. The phrase its fruit in its season emphasizes both the distinctiveness and the quiet growth of the product; for the tree is no mere channel, piping the water unchanged from one place to another, but a living organism which absorbs it, to produce in due course something new and delightful, proper to its kind and to its time. The promised immunity of the leaf from withering is not independence of the rhythm of the seasons (cf. the preceding line, and see on 31:15), but freedom from the crippling damage of drought (cf. Jer. 17:8b).”[1]
I was especially struck by Kidner’s comment that “. . . whatever really shapes a man’s thinking shapes his life.”
What is shaping my life these days? Playing chess? Eating? Lazy thinking because I’m retired? Selfishness in the form of thinking only about what I want?
And, of course, this is an unwelcome question that you might need to be asking yourself as well. What is shaping your thinking these days?
[1]Derek Kidner, Psalms 1–72: An Introduction and Commentary, TOTC 15; IVP/Accordance electronic ed. (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1973), 64-65.
https://accordance.bible/link/read/Tyndale_Commentary#21798, accessed 10-01-2021)
DOWN TO EARTH BELIEVER
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