Love Letters

Your word holds so much, God, that parts of it get lost sometimes. It's easy to remember the big stuff--the ten commandments with their shalts and shalt-nots, the blessings of the sermon on the mount, Moses and the ten plagues, Your tragic and triumphant walk to Calvary, but some parts of the Bible are almost embarrassing:

I will betroth you to me forever. I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion. I will betroth you in faithfulness and you will acknowledge the Lord.--Hosea 2: 19-20

For your Maker is your husband. The Lord Almighty is His Name. The Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer. He is called the God of all the Earth.--Isaiah 54:51

These declarations of love come down from heaven, from You. Hosea married a harlot and made these statements to her as an example of your promise and bond with me, and a good example it is. I am as unfaithful as she, but You are not. Yet You declare Yourself as my husband, close as flesh, intimate as an embrace.

In saying this to me, You inspire shame, but I cannot shrink from You, because You also offer an irresistible hope, and a compelling exultation at the same time. You have written an instruction book, but You have also written a love letter. I cannot part one from the other, and I will gladly take the correction if I can cling to Your perfect faithfulness and Your everlasting love. I run to You, arms wide, not because I am free of care, but because only You know who I am and still receive me. Only You stand glorified before all creation and still cast kind eyes on me. I cannot resist You.

Who have I in heaven but You? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.--Psalm 73: 25-26

Sinking Feelings

I don't think it says anywhere in the Bible that I am supposed to feel my way to You. You want me to know You, to love You, to obey You, to follow You, to fear You, but how I feel will not lead me to You. Yet, my feelings seem so urgent when they arise in force. When I feel something powerful, like joy or hurt or anger, those feelings stand up front and center, demanding notice. "Pay attention," they cry, and then grab hold of my actions with both hands and drag me down into the quicksand they have prepared for me.

You say that You are a solid rock, a firm place to stand. You have led me to a safe pasture, to a secure, fenced area where you stand near and on guard. The quicksand of feelings lies outside that place, and I keep running to it.

Lord, You have assigned me my portion and my cup. You have made my lot secure. The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places.--Psalm 16: 5-6

Wherever I am, You either put me here or allowed me to come here on my own. Either way, you effectively assigned me to this place, and it is safe because You stand beside me. You erected a fence around it to keep me in not because you restrict me, but because this place guarantees my well being, and this place holds me up on the firm ground of truth.

Every time I begin a thought or a statement with "I feel...", I charge those fences. When I act on feelings, I break through into unsafe ground. No wonder they are called sinking feelings.

Becoming the Hammer

Last week, my husband taught three six and seven-year-old boys how to use a maul for chopping wood. The tool they attempted to lift weighed around twelve pounds and they weighed only forty or fifty, so they struggled through their task, but they also gloried in the result--a satisfying crack, then the clatter as the wood parted, and they stood tall in its aftermath. They had mastered a powerful tool and done something worthwhile with it. Had my husband given them a small axe, they would have eventually achieved the same practical result, but not the same satisfaction and accomplishment.

Tools figure large in most of our lives. Almost anything I put in my hand to accomplish a task is a tool--a pen, a can opener, a paintbrush, a broom, a hammer. Almost everyone uses a succession of them every day. They make our lives if not easier, then more efficient and, the more well designed and manufactured the tool, the better it can accomplish the task. As I use a tool, it becomes an extension of my own hands, acting at my will as a means to an end I have chosen.

God wants to use me as His tool:

Commit your way to the Lord. Trust Him and He will do this: He will make your righteousness shine like the dawn, the justice of your cause like the noonday sun. Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for Him.--Psalm 37:5-6

God wants me to give my ways to Him, to trust Him to use me for His own purposes. The Bible bursts with examples of how God did that with other men, from Moses and Abraham and David to the apostles and Paul. They placed themselves in God's hand and let Him wield them. Sometimes God wielded gently, administering succor and gentle healing. Sometimes, God wielded boldly, cutting down and weeding out, but both accomplished His purpose.

As sons and daughters of the New Testament, we tend to see our purpose most readily as mild tools, feeding and washing and administering sweet help to sad souls, and indeed, that is part of what we are called to do. However, there are times when God requires that we be used for harder work. He gave us armor for that, both offensive and defensive weapons, so that we are not ourselves destroyed in the process because these occasions tax us more heavily, but we cannot shrink from these uses, either.

As I step out, I need to know that God will use me today. I must feel the hand of the Master at my controls, and subordinate my power to His. I settle my will and it begins. He holds me in His hand and raises it. Only He knows whether it will soothe or correct. I can feel the backswing. I am ready.

The Logic of Faith

God makes sense. Philosophy, and even sometimes theology, contend that God defies logic, that miracles operate against the laws of nature, that God functions outside of reason. They are all wrong. God, if He is who He says who He is, who He must be, transcends the laws of nature that bind both the earth and the humans who live on it. God invented reason because only He has ever seen chaos. He constructed His earth to operate according to logical demands, and therefore epitomizes it. God is logic.

No one denies that our world operates according to logical systems: physics, chemistry, biology all specify cohesive systems that are detailed, varied, and consistent. We depend on them so heavily that none of us could conceive of any kind of world without them. I won't even entertain the idea that all this complexity evolved by accident. I know this instinctively--when I dump out my puzzle box, not one piece ever falls perfectly into place with its intended neighbor. I have tried this hundreds of times over the years. It never happens. Never. To conceive that such a chemical or physical event occurred millions of times to create our perfectly ordered world is ridiculous. It violates reason, the same reason God planted in human beings to understand. God wants us to use the reason He gave us and says so:

Come now, let us reason together...Isaiah 1:18

This is a sublime invitation. The Lord of the universe wants us to think. And He has something important for us to think about. This passage in Isaiah has God reminding us of the mess we have made:

Ah, a sinful nation, a people loaded with guilt, a brood of evildoers, children given to corruptions! v. 4
Why should you be beaten anymore? Why do you persist in rebellion? v. 5
Stop bringing your meaningless offerings! v. 13
Your hands are full of blood; wash and make yourselves clean. v. 16
If you are willing and obedient, you will eat the best of the land; but if you resist and rebel, you will be devoured by the sword. v. 19-20

This passage is supremely logical. Stop doing what causes you misery and start doing what will result in your benefit. This is God's reasoning. He has the plan that results in our benefit. He begs us to see take advantage of it.

But there is one thing missing from all this. Feelings. God did not ask how anyone feels about any of this. He did not say He wants to make anyone happy nor does He show any concern for whether this plan brings anyone pleasure. He says to do it because it make sense.

Logic goes hand in hand with faith. Reason points directly to God. Feelings work contrary to both.

The Squiggles of Fate

A few years ago, when I was still teaching English, I always wanted a good example of punctuation's importance in the grand scheme of life. After all, using a comma rather than a semicolon to join a two sentences into one, or adding an erroneous apostrophe to the possessive pronoun 'its' just didn't seem very important to students. I knew, though, that I could prove punctuation's grave implications with the right example, if I could ever find one. Eventually, I did.

To my delight, the example in question involved one of the most memorable of Bible verses:

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And He will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.--Isaiah 9:6, Thompson Chain Reference NIV

These words bring with them some of the most beautiful truths of Christianity: the existence of the Trinity as three distinctive parts of one almighty entity, and the prediction of Savior and Christ born as a baby human being. They exalt God with both their meaning and their beauty.

I also have a Hebrew Tanach that I often read and I find the same passage there with essentially only three differences: changed tenses of two verbs and the location of three, and.....wait for it.....punctuation. These almost inconsequential changes transform this verse from prophetic to historic.

For a child has been born to us, a son has been given to us, and the dominion will rest on his shoulder; the Wondrous Adviser, Mighty God, Eternal Father, called his name Prince of Peace.--Isaiah 9:6, Stone Tanach

The punctuation change occurs after the word 'shoulder' where the translators replace a period with a semicolon, turning the phrase that follows into a corollary of the first rather than a continuation. The effect is that the four titles no longer belong to the same almighty being, but the Wondrous Advisor, Mighty God, and Eternal Father refer to God, and Prince of Peace refers to a man, in this case according to the commentary, Hezekiah, whom God will some day honor with dominion. Suddenly, the Messiah whom the NIV's Isaiah so clearly prophesied vanishes like smoke.

Neither translator erred regarding the original punctuation; Hebrew has none. Each, therefore, brought prejudice along with expertise to their table in this work. I will not argue which is right and which wrong, but at least allow that those little punctuation marks can carry momentous worldviews on their small shoulders.

A Rock and a Hard Place

Therefore, as we have the opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers--Matthew 22:39

I do so want to get along with everyone, to be kind and considerate, to put others' needs before my own. But, darn, why is it so HARD? I have good intentions every day. Part of my morning prayer is to find a way to bless someone else, and I rise from it with hope and a smile, and then something happens. The phone rings. The cat throws up. The first person I contact has a burr under their saddle. Either my mood erodes or theirs does. Somebody asks me to do something that I didn't plan for or, worse yet, something that I shouldn't do. I want to live in friendly communion and end up in conflict. I don't like it one bit. Then I remember the part of the Lord's Prayer I just said:

Love your neighbor as yourself.--Matthew 22:39

This helps. Whether I delight in God's assignment, or disagree, or am unprepared, or tired, or compromised, this covers everything. With this in mind, I can always act correctly. I can welcome a situation with joy and open arms or I can disagree with the kind of love that comes with plain speaking. Either way, if I handle a situation with as much care as I would like to be dealt, I am safe.

The brotherhood I share with others is a gift from God just as much as practical gifts like preaching and teaching and evangelizing. My ability to walk alongside my brothers and sisters in Christ without punching or poking them builds us all up. We will have disagreements, of course, because everybody goes off course once in a while, but I can exhort, correct, even argue in the interest of defending God's holy Word as long as I do it with the same love with which I would like to be exhorted, corrected, and argued.

Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God lives in us and His love is made complete in us.--John 4:11-12
How good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity.--Psalm 133:1

We can live in unity even when we do not agree as long as our differences recall our common ground, our own sins, and the hope we share.

Bread in the Desert

The desert. Hot, dry, desolate, stretching in seemingly endless, shifting dunes. Hunger and thirst in a sad place offering neither food nor water. A metaphor for times of trouble, but how much of a metaphor is it really?

It is true that, when life takes a difficult turn, when problems or illness or disappointment loom large, I feel like I am alone in a vast place of desolation, a place much like I imagine the Sahara. My throat dries, my skin burns, and panic can begin to descend. You call these times of testing.

Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the desert these forty years to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep His commands.--Deuteronomy 8:2

But then You did something else...

He humbled you, causing you to hunger, then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.--Deuteronomy 8:3

You fed your children. You rained down food they had never seen, sweet flakes of bread like honey. You took them to a place that bore no food of its own and gave them food they could not mistake for something they had made themselves. No sweat from their own brows planted or gathered it. No scythe reaped it and no mill ground it. Manna just fell and lay there for them. And you didn't drop it in great hunks, to pick up in a moment, but tiny flakes, like snow, so that the gathering took time, time to think about its source. Manna was food, but it also brought humility.

And all of this happened in the desert. Flakes fell like sweet words from Your mouth. "Gather me," You were telling them. "Eat and know that I am God." The heat and desolation never relented, but You came as morsels of sustenance every day. The desert magnified Your people's perpetual condition, a condition I share. The unadorned landscapes of desert or strife bring you into crisp focus. They hold nothing beautiful but You, no comfort but Your company.

My sustenance still falls from heaven. When I prop up my world with what I seem to have made or have done, it falls onto hot sand and disintegrates. Then You again drop your perfect manna. The bread is real. I eat it I am humbled, but restored.