There are two basic types of posts in this blog:
1) For those who have ears to hear: prophetic ramblings aimed at purifying the church (a prophet's main job-incidentally, i would contend that a prophet's main job is not to tell the future--t's to tell the present, and what bearing the past and future have on the present vice versa)
2) Reveling in what Scripture Reveals: an informal walk through Scripture particularly for those who have been intimidated by the task of 'getting' the Old Testament
For Those Who Have Ears to Hear*:
(*you know, as opposed to those have them as mere visual accessories (: )
Mad at God for letting your loved ones die? A letter
What's Your REAL Name?
Who CARES whether God created the earth?
Despise child molesters? The bitch of Christianity
Can I actually sin by quoting scripture?
Think you are too skanky for God? Let's talk.
Hearing God's call on your life-a letter
To the Spirit-filled English Majors and Wordmiths at Heart A letter
What sucks about the cradle up Christian predicament
Can I actually sin by ministering to others?
and what does the Lord your God require of you?
Does God have a crush on me? He's definitely crushing me
a famine of purpose
Don't be dissin' My Name. . .
What you take in vain
Children of the Light. . . I hope you dance.
Jesus was not a "nice" man-you shouldn't be either
Christians are the Ultimate Hedonists-and yet He loves us
Are you authorized to use My Name?
Taking off from Rousseau on Inequality
On Top of the Globe
Reveling in What Scripture Reveals:
Items marked with *** are new, even though they're placed in the order of the biblical books
Some Notes on Genesis and Reading the Whole Bible Through
Genesis: Leah's Growing Pains. . .
Genesis: Rachel's Quest for Wholeness
Genesis: Joseph's Family Transformed Through Suffering
Genesis: Reframing the Joseph Narratives- Putting Some Stuff in Perspective
Exodus: First Born Sons, Crown Princes, and God's Favor
Exodus: Entering Exodus-The Great Exit
Exodus: Moses, Man of the Millennia, Mouthpiece of God
Exodus: Who Gets a Birth Narrative and Why?
Exodus etc: Embryonic Thought about Birth Narratives After Jesus
Leviticus: Book of Fire (under construction)
Numbers: Just What the Title Suggests?
Dude-eronomy (Deuteronomy): Jesus' Favorite Book?
Joshua: Just a MicroBlurb
Judges: Aka Tribal Leaders-The First Five
Judges: Six Through Ten***
Judges: Shechem and the Richness of Reference
Judges: Samson-Personification of the Apostasy of the Age***
Judges: A Beautiful Flower in the Samson Narratives-His Mother***
Judges: The Ghastly End of the Age of Judges***
Ruth: OT Chick Flick? A Nobody Who Chose and Was Chosen
I Samuel: One Day Hannah Stood Up!
I Samuel: A Note About Samuel and God's Involvement with Man
Friday, September 4, 2009
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Mad at God for letting your loved ones die? A letter...
You know, honey, we humans are so bizarre. We know in our heart of hearts that only Good comes from God. We know He created everything beautiful and glorious and loving and safe, and that evil comes from two places- Satan, and Mankind. Death came to us because Mankind made an unsavory deal with Satan one day in the Garden, electing to believe the devil over the Divine and to trust in himself rather than the One in Whose image he was created. God's heart almost exploded when we brought Death into the world by choosing to cut off our umbilical cord with Him and go float with the other Self-Worshipers in the ‘we can make ourselves good without your help God thank you very much” club.
Satan managed to make us believe that God was the selfish one who was trying to keep something good from us, rather than the reverse, which was true, that choosing to trust in ourselves would ultimately mean we couldn’t sustain Life—you can’t cut yourself off from the Giver of Life and expect to not also cut yourself off from Life-not rocket science and yet, that urge to put oneself in God’s place is strong in human kind…we brought death to earth when we chose to believe that God was holding out on us and we broke the rules He had put in place to keep us safe.
I’ve heard it explained that the reason God banished Adam and Eve from the Garden after they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was that they would then most certainly also eat from the tree of life and if they ate from that tree before they got redeemed, they would be stuck eternally in their state of damnation, cut off from God. He banished us to save us again. The way we put fences around our yards to keep our children from walking under trucks.
When shit happens to us we shake our fists at God. It’s so amazing. We ALL do it (or at least, have done it at some point in our lives). It’s an interesting proclivity that we see in people who have been molested as children by someone other than their father. Though their father was innocent, they are often unbelievably angry at their fathers! Why? He didn’t molest them! But he didn’t protect them either. In our minds we are angry at the one who is supposed to protect us. You always hear people talking about how angry they are at God. I have often felt that way myself. Trust me, way toooo often. And yet you never hear people saying that they are so mad at Satan, from whom all the crap comes. From Satan and our own fallen selves, that is. It’s a bit like getting furious at your mom because you got burned by the stove which she told you to stay away from for precisely that reason.
Well, it is and it isn’t. You didn’t specifically do something evil to make the people you love die. (Even though sometimes you doubt this because of the normal processes of grief, I understand). But you’re a part of the human family and we share in the inheritance of the sins of our fathers. And we do choose ourselves on a daily basis. So we do participate in the chain of self-worship and stubborn heartedness against God. We do know that we desperately need a Savior to make us good and to redeem us in all our ugliness. . .
Now, I don’t want you to feel even crappier about what’s happening right now than you already did, which you may be doubting based on my comments so far, but hear me out! (: God’s heart breaks when yours does! And He’s not the heart breaker! It’s just that He has all the power and we think He should whip it out to protect us whenever bad stuff starts happening. It’s a natural human response. Unfortunately, His power is under man made constrictions for this era in history--this was the grand experiment of letting man be in charge. Adam made that choice for us by choosing to live by his own rules rather than God's. I believe that it is man's prayer and faith and collaboration with God that releases Him to act on our behalves even though He hasn't resumed His full reign on earth yet because the time has not yet come.
However, the weird thing is…it’s actually very logical. Basically since the world got f’ed up, the only way for us to get un f’ed up is to go through a kind of reverse f’ing. If you get shot with a bullet you can only get well by having the bullet dug out of you the reverse of the way it got there. Which is going to hurt just as much as getting it in there in the first place did. Get your arm pulled out of socket, the only way to fix it is to pop it back in, which is going to hurt like hell, but that’s the way it works. Jesus made the reversibility stuff possible. He paid the ultimate price so that we wouldn’t get stuck with eternal death. So that we would get a second chance to make that choice about Whose/whose laws we wanted to honor and thus which kind of universe we want to live in.
All we have to endure is temporary death. Which in our finite little minds feels pretty permanent. But you have to read the end of the Book-WE WIN!!! Everybody that chooses to get back with God after the Great Divorce, gets to be Raised from the Dead. I mean holy crap! How awesome is that! And here is the big paradox and part of the reason theologians often refer to the Fall of Man as the Fortunate Fall— If nobody ever died, we’d never get to see anybody raised back to life! If nobody was blind, we wouldn’t get our breath taken away when God made them see again. God didn’t create the Fall and didn’t plan it; there is no way we can pin it on Him. However, the glorious thing about His redemption plan is that He can make all these amazing miracles happen that could never have happened without our grand F-Up in the grand garden at the grand entrance to humanity’s grand story.
Because here’s the thing. If you don’t know ugly, you can’t know beauty. If you’ve never been lied to, you can’t fully appreciate the precious gift of honesty and transparency in others. If you’ve never felt agony, you won’t really know Joy even if it tap dances right across your nose! The big mystery: the degree of joy and ecstasy you are able to experience is directly proportionate to the degree of agony you are also able to experience. . . and thus you have James urging us to consider it pure joy when we encounter hardship...
English speakers are fond of citing the shortest verse in the bible as the one in John11:35 that says, Jesus wept. (I'm not sure what the shortest verses are in Hebrew and Greek). If you look it up in context you see that it is His response to the death of Lazarus when He finally gets to the tomb (after deliberately waiting a couple of days after receiving news that Lazarus was deathly ill) and He sees Mary and Martha absolutely beside themselves with grief. Jesus loved those two women. And He loved Lazarus as one of His close friends. But Jesus also knew that He was about to raise Lazarus from the dead! Why did He weep if He knew how Very Temporary this state of affairs was going to be for this family for at least another decade or two?? Why would God weep when He knows the happy ending?
Apparently the Greek word that gets translated “wept” is only used like twice in the whole Bible and gets translated with some other much stronger word in the other use-of course I can’t remember it right now. . .but Tim Keller is a pastor who says that the word we translate as ‘wept’ here is more like ‘snorted with fury!’ It’s a word for a grief that is so angry it makes you want to explode! Jesus’ heart was breaking with Mary and Martha because theirs were breaking and He loved them so much. He didn’t want them to be in this horrible suffocating gut wrenching agonizing pain.
But He was also about to perform His greatest miracle yet, only surpassed when He would do it Himself 3 days after the crucifixion. Jesus was letting Lazarus’ story be a foreshadowing of His own story—He was giving everyone a sneak preview. And a preview that was probably necessary so they could get their heads around His own resurrection later on—how could they believe He would be raised from the dead if they’ve never seen that happen before? He was preparing them to hope and believe and experience the joy rather than feel lied to and stolen from when His body went missing!
Still, He knew about the happy endings for both 3 day stints in a smelly tomb…why did He weep/snort with furious grief??!! Keller suggests that He was taking in the whole picture of ALL the death of ALL the humans from the beginning of time till the end of the Age, He was taking in that picture of all the mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and husbands and wives and friends throughout time whose hearts would be stabbed again and again with the horrific power of suffering and death—Jesus was feeling all humanity’s pain at once—He was furious at Satan and sin and death for wreaking this agony on His beloved humanity.
And then He put some teeth in His anger and He ordered Lazarus to come forth!!! He was screaming it because He was screaming against death and giving us that preview of how He was going to kick sin & death’s ass in the end and rescue us all, resurrect us all, every last one who reaches out to Him and asks for it—And then we can rock out and sing with Petra, Tell me death, where is your victory, where is your sting? When the Grave Robber comes and death finally DIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?????????????????
So you feel like God doesn't know how weak you are. But you really know He knows just exactly what you can and cannot bear. Not like He wants to rub our face in it, but every time we get to the end of ourselves, we have to reach up and take His hand and let Him carry us...every time we fall and skin our knees or whatever, we are reminded that we are weak and He is strong, that we cannot save ourselves from suffering, but He is always right there ready and willing to get us through it. Moreover, every time we experience weakness is an opportunity for His power to be displayed in our lives...
Our whole lives are theses series of painful reminders that we are not all that after all-we were dead wrong in the garden of Eden and are dead wrong now when we think we can just go our own way...there is a way that seems right to a man but the end thereof is death and destruction...each time we feel overwhelmed it is a reminder that we were never intended to fly solo and constantly crash--we were intended to fly on His strong and perfect wings...and never crash. But since the crashes are here now, He's going to make beautiful things come out of them. He's going to use the fire to refine us into the purest gold. He is, as my mother likes to say, an economical God--He will not waste a single tear or trial--He will use absolutely every crappy thing that ever happens to us to grow beautiful flowers in our hearts and lives if we'll just surrender the crap to Him.
Humans are amazing at attributing their own successes to their own hard work and awesomeness, and the crap in their lives they blame on God. That is why we desperately need to fail with some regularity so we don't get confused about Who has all the power and who is frail and fragile and fraught with flaws and fears and failure...and James, who may have sounded like he was on crack to the first century Christians who were getting tortured and killed for following Jesus...James said consider it pure joy when you encounter trials of many kinds....because when these are allowed to do their work they will make you perfect and complete...
If you want to be like Jesus, you have to suffer. You have to go through all kinds of trials and tests. But that means that every trial and test is a gift-it's a promise. It's an opportunity. It's a door behind which is more of Him, more beauty, more Love, more Power, more of you, lost (and found!) in more of Him.
Death sucks, no two ways about it. But it ain't God's gig!! And it's ok to be angry at death, God is angry about it, too. But for all who choose to be redeemed, it's only temporary. And God can use the suffering to make us strong and beautiful, children He can be proud to call His own. (:
Satan managed to make us believe that God was the selfish one who was trying to keep something good from us, rather than the reverse, which was true, that choosing to trust in ourselves would ultimately mean we couldn’t sustain Life—you can’t cut yourself off from the Giver of Life and expect to not also cut yourself off from Life-not rocket science and yet, that urge to put oneself in God’s place is strong in human kind…we brought death to earth when we chose to believe that God was holding out on us and we broke the rules He had put in place to keep us safe.
I’ve heard it explained that the reason God banished Adam and Eve from the Garden after they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was that they would then most certainly also eat from the tree of life and if they ate from that tree before they got redeemed, they would be stuck eternally in their state of damnation, cut off from God. He banished us to save us again. The way we put fences around our yards to keep our children from walking under trucks.
When shit happens to us we shake our fists at God. It’s so amazing. We ALL do it (or at least, have done it at some point in our lives). It’s an interesting proclivity that we see in people who have been molested as children by someone other than their father. Though their father was innocent, they are often unbelievably angry at their fathers! Why? He didn’t molest them! But he didn’t protect them either. In our minds we are angry at the one who is supposed to protect us. You always hear people talking about how angry they are at God. I have often felt that way myself. Trust me, way toooo often. And yet you never hear people saying that they are so mad at Satan, from whom all the crap comes. From Satan and our own fallen selves, that is. It’s a bit like getting furious at your mom because you got burned by the stove which she told you to stay away from for precisely that reason.
Well, it is and it isn’t. You didn’t specifically do something evil to make the people you love die. (Even though sometimes you doubt this because of the normal processes of grief, I understand). But you’re a part of the human family and we share in the inheritance of the sins of our fathers. And we do choose ourselves on a daily basis. So we do participate in the chain of self-worship and stubborn heartedness against God. We do know that we desperately need a Savior to make us good and to redeem us in all our ugliness. . .
Now, I don’t want you to feel even crappier about what’s happening right now than you already did, which you may be doubting based on my comments so far, but hear me out! (: God’s heart breaks when yours does! And He’s not the heart breaker! It’s just that He has all the power and we think He should whip it out to protect us whenever bad stuff starts happening. It’s a natural human response. Unfortunately, His power is under man made constrictions for this era in history--this was the grand experiment of letting man be in charge. Adam made that choice for us by choosing to live by his own rules rather than God's. I believe that it is man's prayer and faith and collaboration with God that releases Him to act on our behalves even though He hasn't resumed His full reign on earth yet because the time has not yet come.
However, the weird thing is…it’s actually very logical. Basically since the world got f’ed up, the only way for us to get un f’ed up is to go through a kind of reverse f’ing. If you get shot with a bullet you can only get well by having the bullet dug out of you the reverse of the way it got there. Which is going to hurt just as much as getting it in there in the first place did. Get your arm pulled out of socket, the only way to fix it is to pop it back in, which is going to hurt like hell, but that’s the way it works. Jesus made the reversibility stuff possible. He paid the ultimate price so that we wouldn’t get stuck with eternal death. So that we would get a second chance to make that choice about Whose/whose laws we wanted to honor and thus which kind of universe we want to live in.
All we have to endure is temporary death. Which in our finite little minds feels pretty permanent. But you have to read the end of the Book-WE WIN!!! Everybody that chooses to get back with God after the Great Divorce, gets to be Raised from the Dead. I mean holy crap! How awesome is that! And here is the big paradox and part of the reason theologians often refer to the Fall of Man as the Fortunate Fall— If nobody ever died, we’d never get to see anybody raised back to life! If nobody was blind, we wouldn’t get our breath taken away when God made them see again. God didn’t create the Fall and didn’t plan it; there is no way we can pin it on Him. However, the glorious thing about His redemption plan is that He can make all these amazing miracles happen that could never have happened without our grand F-Up in the grand garden at the grand entrance to humanity’s grand story.
Because here’s the thing. If you don’t know ugly, you can’t know beauty. If you’ve never been lied to, you can’t fully appreciate the precious gift of honesty and transparency in others. If you’ve never felt agony, you won’t really know Joy even if it tap dances right across your nose! The big mystery: the degree of joy and ecstasy you are able to experience is directly proportionate to the degree of agony you are also able to experience. . . and thus you have James urging us to consider it pure joy when we encounter hardship...
English speakers are fond of citing the shortest verse in the bible as the one in John11:35 that says, Jesus wept. (I'm not sure what the shortest verses are in Hebrew and Greek). If you look it up in context you see that it is His response to the death of Lazarus when He finally gets to the tomb (after deliberately waiting a couple of days after receiving news that Lazarus was deathly ill) and He sees Mary and Martha absolutely beside themselves with grief. Jesus loved those two women. And He loved Lazarus as one of His close friends. But Jesus also knew that He was about to raise Lazarus from the dead! Why did He weep if He knew how Very Temporary this state of affairs was going to be for this family for at least another decade or two?? Why would God weep when He knows the happy ending?
Apparently the Greek word that gets translated “wept” is only used like twice in the whole Bible and gets translated with some other much stronger word in the other use-of course I can’t remember it right now. . .but Tim Keller is a pastor who says that the word we translate as ‘wept’ here is more like ‘snorted with fury!’ It’s a word for a grief that is so angry it makes you want to explode! Jesus’ heart was breaking with Mary and Martha because theirs were breaking and He loved them so much. He didn’t want them to be in this horrible suffocating gut wrenching agonizing pain.
But He was also about to perform His greatest miracle yet, only surpassed when He would do it Himself 3 days after the crucifixion. Jesus was letting Lazarus’ story be a foreshadowing of His own story—He was giving everyone a sneak preview. And a preview that was probably necessary so they could get their heads around His own resurrection later on—how could they believe He would be raised from the dead if they’ve never seen that happen before? He was preparing them to hope and believe and experience the joy rather than feel lied to and stolen from when His body went missing!
Still, He knew about the happy endings for both 3 day stints in a smelly tomb…why did He weep/snort with furious grief??!! Keller suggests that He was taking in the whole picture of ALL the death of ALL the humans from the beginning of time till the end of the Age, He was taking in that picture of all the mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and husbands and wives and friends throughout time whose hearts would be stabbed again and again with the horrific power of suffering and death—Jesus was feeling all humanity’s pain at once—He was furious at Satan and sin and death for wreaking this agony on His beloved humanity.
And then He put some teeth in His anger and He ordered Lazarus to come forth!!! He was screaming it because He was screaming against death and giving us that preview of how He was going to kick sin & death’s ass in the end and rescue us all, resurrect us all, every last one who reaches out to Him and asks for it—And then we can rock out and sing with Petra, Tell me death, where is your victory, where is your sting? When the Grave Robber comes and death finally DIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?????????????????
So you feel like God doesn't know how weak you are. But you really know He knows just exactly what you can and cannot bear. Not like He wants to rub our face in it, but every time we get to the end of ourselves, we have to reach up and take His hand and let Him carry us...every time we fall and skin our knees or whatever, we are reminded that we are weak and He is strong, that we cannot save ourselves from suffering, but He is always right there ready and willing to get us through it. Moreover, every time we experience weakness is an opportunity for His power to be displayed in our lives...
Our whole lives are theses series of painful reminders that we are not all that after all-we were dead wrong in the garden of Eden and are dead wrong now when we think we can just go our own way...there is a way that seems right to a man but the end thereof is death and destruction...each time we feel overwhelmed it is a reminder that we were never intended to fly solo and constantly crash--we were intended to fly on His strong and perfect wings...and never crash. But since the crashes are here now, He's going to make beautiful things come out of them. He's going to use the fire to refine us into the purest gold. He is, as my mother likes to say, an economical God--He will not waste a single tear or trial--He will use absolutely every crappy thing that ever happens to us to grow beautiful flowers in our hearts and lives if we'll just surrender the crap to Him.
Humans are amazing at attributing their own successes to their own hard work and awesomeness, and the crap in their lives they blame on God. That is why we desperately need to fail with some regularity so we don't get confused about Who has all the power and who is frail and fragile and fraught with flaws and fears and failure...and James, who may have sounded like he was on crack to the first century Christians who were getting tortured and killed for following Jesus...James said consider it pure joy when you encounter trials of many kinds....because when these are allowed to do their work they will make you perfect and complete...
If you want to be like Jesus, you have to suffer. You have to go through all kinds of trials and tests. But that means that every trial and test is a gift-it's a promise. It's an opportunity. It's a door behind which is more of Him, more beauty, more Love, more Power, more of you, lost (and found!) in more of Him.
Death sucks, no two ways about it. But it ain't God's gig!! And it's ok to be angry at death, God is angry about it, too. But for all who choose to be redeemed, it's only temporary. And God can use the suffering to make us strong and beautiful, children He can be proud to call His own. (:
Monday, August 31, 2009
Ruth-a story about a nobody who chose and was chosen...
Ruth was neither a prophet nor a princess. She was not a judge. She performed no miracles and wielded no power. She didn't win any beauty contests. SHE WASN'T EVEN A JEW!!! And yet, in a period in history when women had no rights and were rarely even mentioned in any kind of literature or public discourse, this woman had an entire Old Testament book dedicated to her story. Who was she? Why does her story matter?This story comes after the book of Judges in our current arrangement of OT books, but it actually occurred during the time of the Judges. Interestingly, there are no judges mentioned in it-you might expect there to be some judge who was instrumental in God's work in Ruth's family, but no. The judges from that period were so hit and miss...
Ruth's story can stand alone, but should be seen against the backdrop of apostasy that was that whole dark period of the judges (read in the voice of a monotonous chorus: when everyone did as he saw fit). Because that makes this little diamond that much more glorious. And it's nice, after finishing that ghastly story at the end of Judges, to come up for sweet, fresh air and see into the hearts and lives of a couple of godly women, struggling through very hard times globally and personally, who cling to their faith and become a beautiful part of God's salvation history.
There are three heroes in this story, Naomi, Ruth, and Boaz. And there are really three stories here. One is the story of two women who love each other and whose relationship is centered on their commitment to the same God. Another is the story of an older woman who has lost her children and seemingly has no way of ever having another child or grandchild. The other is the story of providence, a romance, between Ruth and an older man of means, Boaz, also committed to God's laws and to social justice.
Ruth converted to Judaism when she married her first husband, Naomi's son, as did her sister-in-law, Orpah. During a horrible regional depression all three of these women lose their husbands. They are destitute and childless. Orpah decides to go back to her people. But Ruth decides to stay with Naomi and Naomi's God. The most quoted bit of dialogue from Ruth and one of the most quoted scriptures ever comes after Naomi's selfless (and maybe just a tad pessimistic) directive to her daughters in law that they go back to their families, to which Ruth replies (chapter 1:16-18),
Don't urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me , be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.
This was a commitment the woman was making to her mother-in-law! Till death do us part...beautiful, beautiful scene, as chick flicky as they get. (:
I'm sure these words and this act meant the world to Naomi, but the fact remains that they are both widows with no income, practically destitute, and, understandably, she is still just a little pissed at God. What was our first clue? When they get to Bethlehem, she says (1:20-21), Don't call me Naomi anymore. (Naomi means pleasant and agreeable) I'm changing my name because I'm somebody else now--my story has given me a different identity. Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life Bitter. I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi? The Lord has afflicted me, the Almighty has brought misfortune upon me. Now there's a pleasantry to start a conversation with!
And there too, is our age old response to the crap that happens to us--God does not create crap, no evil comes from Him. It clearly comes from our sin, from the natural evil that our sin has wreaked on the earth, and from Satan, too often glorified as God's opposite- he's way too finite to be God's opposite. But if you wanted to point your finger at someone other-worldly and blame them for the tragedy in your life, it would be more theologically correct to point it at him or back at mankind. But no, when crap happens who do we blame? We blame God! It's just a fascinating little dysfunction we have going and it is so dyed into the wool of our human worldviews.
Naomi may still have her faith, and she may even have discipled someone else who converted to her faith through the course of their relationship, but she's still pissed.
Even if the Israelites never actually followed the law of jubilee and took care of the poor in the grand way God had intended them to every 50 years (we have no evidence that they ever actually did), they still maintained some customs that followed the law that was intended to protect the poor--land owners would routinely leave some of the crops along the way as they harvested and would let poorer people follow behind and glean from these, a kind of pro bono, I guess.
Naomi happens to have a relative who is just such a land owner and when Ruth decides to go out and gather grain from someone's fields, apparently by coincidence, she winds up in Boaz's fields. And she catches his eye. And he asks around. And he learns of her story about being a foreigner and being devoted to Naomi and her God. And he shows her favor in providing food and water and protection (from leering male workers). And when she expresses her surprise and gratitude for his kindness, he replies, May the Lord repay you for what you have done, May you be richly rewarded by the Lord the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge. (2:12) Clearly Boaz is acting as a co-laborer with the God of Israel in providing this refuge beneath his wings. He understands how God uses him--uses His people-- to achieve His purposes.
We should also note here that, according to Matthew 1:5, Boaz was actually the son of Rahab (and by son it could mean descendant of several generations) and some Jewish dude named Salmon. Rahab, of course, was not only a non-Jew, she was a prostitute at the time when her city, Jericho, was overtaken by the Israelites and she helped hide the Hebrew spies who had come to canvass the situation. Because she helped them they basically brought her and her family in to a witness protection program outside the city until the invasion, and after that, she ended up becoming a God-fearing Jew...and an ancestor of Boaz...so Boaz had some converted foreigner blood in him too...he wasn't a purely 100% homogeneous Jew.
This gratitude and mutual admiration turns into something more and, after making sure he isn't breaking any laws and clearing it with anyone else who might lay claim, he goes before the council and asks to become her kinsman-redeemer according to the law by marrying her. Remember, Ruth is not a virgin, she is a widow. Besides being destitute, she could be considered leftovers. MOREOVER, according to the law, Boaz marries Ruth in order to maintain the name of the dead (her husband) with his property, so that his name will not disappear from the family or the town records. It is a selfless act. In this Boaz is a type, a foreshadowing, of Christ, towards Ruth and Naomi.
The council responds favorably with a blessing that says, among other things, may you have standing...and be famous in Bethlehem, through the offspring the Lord gives you by this young woman...
And not only do our leading lady and landlord live happily ever after, critical to the goal of not letting Naomi's son's line die on the vine, they produced a child, Obed, who would become the father of Jesse, the father of David...they become the great grandparents of the king who leads Israel's Golden Age (and remember how at Christmas they're always saying, Bethlehem, the city of David) (Places have stories and if we will seek them we will often find them).
And not only that, this romance that blossoms in Bethlehem leads, through the lineage of David, 1100 years later, to Jesus Christ being born in Bethlehem...the great great great great (to whatever exponent) grandson of a foreign woman who became a devout Israelite, and a goodly godly selfless Jew who had descended from Rahab, another redeemed pagan whose life was transformed by contact with God's people! Ancestors of a Messiah for all nations!!! Famous in Bethlehem? Yes, I should say so! (:
As for Naomi, it is worth noting that her biographer ignores her declaration that she was changing her name from Pleasant (Naomi) to Bitter (Mara) because he continues to call her Naomi throughout the book. And as Ruth continues to be gracious and selfless in her love for Naomi, she brings the baby to her, to be cared for and counted not as Naomi's grandson, but as her son. And all the women around her are like, Guess what? God didn't abandon you! He came through and He has made you a mother--this child will make you feel young again (4:15 renew your life) and will care for you when you get old. And BTW, FYI, that girl of yours is better than seven sons!
And they (usually it says she, the mother of the baby, when a birth quote and name are recounted, so it's unclear here whether they means Naomi and Ruth, Ruth and Boaz, the three of them, or Naomi and the women of the town, at any rate...) name him Obed, meaning Servant-Worshiper. Now pleasant, agreeable Naomi had much to worship God for.
Ruth, who was a Moabite, was born neither a princess nor a Jew, and yet she chose God and He chose her to become this beautiful glorious thread in the tapestry of the genealogy of Christ, a matriarch of eternal significance. After that horrific drama at the end of Judges where everyone did whatever they felt like doing, you get an inspirational romantic movie script about 3 people who made sacrifices to do the right thing according to the law of Moses and the law of Love and are richly blessed by God as a result! (:
Sunday, August 23, 2009
What's Your REAL Name?
At the end of Alias Season 4, and the beginning of Season 5 , Michael Vaughn reveals to Sidney (to whom he has recently become engaged after 6 years of being in love) that for starters, Michael Vaughan is not his real name … and then naturally, in the next breath they are in a head on collision before he can explain … No more spoilers from me on that point. But this really made me think about what a real name is. He'd been using that name for at least 10 years or so… he had been that person for all that time, what's not real about that?
They asked me what my Real Name was. Is that the name on my birth certificate? Why should that name be more real than one I may have acquired later? Does being prior make my latter self a liar? The name my parents gave me before they really knew me, why should that be more real? The names I gave myself when I sought to follow the injunction on a pagan temple in Turkey to know myself." The names my friends have given me over the years ... The new identity I was given when I was resurrected…Which one is my real name?
Abram became Abraham and Jacob became Israel. It's real. How much more real could it get?
Simon became Peter when the Lord looked into his heart and into his future, into his destiny, and pronounced him a rock. His new name not only caught up with his new self, the self he was becoming. It framed his future for him, reminded him every time he was called, what his God given destiny was. His new name defined him-gave him clarity when he doubted his purpose. The real name of his old self was Simon. His real name after he met the Master was definitely Peter. And when everything has been fulfilled, he will receive yet another name, a secret name on a little white stone, a new name in glory, one that defines his unique relationship with his Creator. As will you and as will I.
They asked me what my Real Name was. Is that the name on my birth certificate? Why should that name be more real than one I may have acquired later? Does being prior make my latter self a liar? The name my parents gave me before they really knew me, why should that be more real? The names I gave myself when I sought to follow the injunction on a pagan temple in Turkey to know myself." The names my friends have given me over the years ... The new identity I was given when I was resurrected…Which one is my real name?
Abram became Abraham and Jacob became Israel. It's real. How much more real could it get?
Simon became Peter when the Lord looked into his heart and into his future, into his destiny, and pronounced him a rock. His new name not only caught up with his new self, the self he was becoming. It framed his future for him, reminded him every time he was called, what his God given destiny was. His new name defined him-gave him clarity when he doubted his purpose. The real name of his old self was Simon. His real name after he met the Master was definitely Peter. And when everything has been fulfilled, he will receive yet another name, a secret name on a little white stone, a new name in glory, one that defines his unique relationship with his Creator. As will you and as will I.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Who cares whether God created the Earth? Whose Endgame is this?
The creation/intelligent design vs. evolution debate is one that rages on and gets all kinds of people hot under the collar shouting at each other --and I have serious doubts that most people are really hearing over the shouts what this debate is really about. And as for the idea that you can change people's hearts and minds by outshouting them... dang humans are dumb.
It seems like many Christians are under the impression that the point of this debate is to answer the question, Where does the earth come from, where did man come from? This is not the real point of the debate because once you say, Ok God created the earth, the next question is, Ok where did God come from? People seem to think that they can prove the existence of God by reasoning that the earth is too complicated to have evolved out of thin non-air, as it were, through pure unmediated evolution. This is a circular argument that ends with the question of where God comes from, proving nothing, changing nothing, convicting no one. It does tend to alienate people we profess to care about though. We are so good at alienating all those people to whom we are supposed to be the fragrance of the knowledge of Him...
The reason it matters whether or not God created the earth and mankind is that if their is a Creator, if WE were created by Someone, then there is a plausible chance that we might owe Him something. There might be a higher Authority in the universe than humankind! We might be accountable to Someone. There might be rules made up by someone other than ourselves that matter. E-gads! The universe might not be a pure democracy! And if we break those higher laws, there might be consequences...
If intelligent design is True... then maybe not ALL reality and morality is purely the result of cultural construction. There might be an Architect-Developer to whom all cultural construction workers must report...
If this is True, mankind might not be God. And every moment, thought and action must be evaluated through this lens. His lens.
Oh, it's a game changer. Believe you me.
It seems like many Christians are under the impression that the point of this debate is to answer the question, Where does the earth come from, where did man come from? This is not the real point of the debate because once you say, Ok God created the earth, the next question is, Ok where did God come from? People seem to think that they can prove the existence of God by reasoning that the earth is too complicated to have evolved out of thin non-air, as it were, through pure unmediated evolution. This is a circular argument that ends with the question of where God comes from, proving nothing, changing nothing, convicting no one. It does tend to alienate people we profess to care about though. We are so good at alienating all those people to whom we are supposed to be the fragrance of the knowledge of Him...
The reason it matters whether or not God created the earth and mankind is that if their is a Creator, if WE were created by Someone, then there is a plausible chance that we might owe Him something. There might be a higher Authority in the universe than humankind! We might be accountable to Someone. There might be rules made up by someone other than ourselves that matter. E-gads! The universe might not be a pure democracy! And if we break those higher laws, there might be consequences...
If intelligent design is True... then maybe not ALL reality and morality is purely the result of cultural construction. There might be an Architect-Developer to whom all cultural construction workers must report...
If this is True, mankind might not be God. And every moment, thought and action must be evaluated through this lens. His lens.
Oh, it's a game changer. Believe you me.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Despise child molesters? The bitch of Christianity...
Even murderers and rapists think child predators are worse than scum under their toe nails. Of COURSE you and I are far better people; heaven was made for good people like us, wasn't it. Naturally. People whose sins are relatively white. Oh that opens up a can of racist worms I won't tackle today...But I mean, our sins aren't really quite as dirty as theirs... right?
And child molesters. There's a special place in hell for them. I mean that's what we think, right. That's what we hope in the dark corners of our minds...the corners we thought were all bright and shiny but which in Truth are little bastions of fallenness, the dark 'kingdom' of self righteousness.
I currently live in a fairly small and very conservative town in the south. There is a lovely hair stylist I go to who is a transvestite. I don't have a safe pronoun to refer to this person in a way that's neutral and doesn't plant myself firmly in one view or the other of their (there's the pronoun we settle for in the abstract, but it's hard to get by with when you're talking to an acquaintance of the person in point) current gender. This person was male and is transitioning into a female identity, which is pretty persuasive, and has chosen a genderless name, but I'm going to use Valentine as a pseudonym.
In a town this size that's overrun with the most self righteous God squads you could find anywhere in the U.S., people gawk and judge. That's what we humans do. It's like we think it's our birthright. After talking to this gentle, wounded soul, I learned that all of their 3 siblings died in separate incidents the same week! Their father was never present and rejected his child because of their gender issues...and this year their mother died too. My heart broke for Valentine. Eventually I would hear people talking about Valentine the transvestite, people who liked V. But amazingly it seemed that all anyone really knew was the transvestite part. I didn't meet anyone who knew about him but who also knew the horrible, horrible pain and brokenness Valentine was dealing with.
I was so struck by how mesmerized people are with the tawdry side of one person's biography, so much so that they were totally oblivious to the gaping wounds that beg for salve and bandages. We are gawkers who want to see some gore, who find some sick attraction to knowing about people's sin, but who allow ourselves to be completely distracted by the sin and completely sidetracked from the mission of saving and healing people--bringing them rescue... we don't come with a stretcher and a first aid kit. We come with hand cuffs and a big stick. And a video camera. And we often come disguised as vigilantes when in our sick, not yet fully sanctified minds, we are really voyeurs.
Jesus never approached people and said, Hey, you suck and you're going to hell. Wait, Jesus never did that to 'sinners.' Meaning He never did it to people who knew how lost they were. He only did it to the Pharisees and the teachers of the law... and boy did He have some choice insults for them.
You want to talk about the emperor's new clothes? I give you religious people.
But to those who were not wrapped up in their own so called 'holiness'. . . With everyone who knew that they were not righteous in themselves, Jesus did not begin with their sin. He always began with their wounds. He saw their pain and He spoke healing into their pain and THEN after healing them, He would say, Go and sin no more. The fact is that we don't have the power not to sin until He heals us. Nobody does. Not one stinking human. First He has to heal us, then we can be made whole, and then we can be made holy.
I can't believe how many American evangelicals seem to think that the Good News they're supposed to be sharing with the 'lost' is that they are vile and filthy and fall short of the glory of God, "but if they repent and put their faith in the blood of Jesus and His sacrifice, AND you follow this list of 300 rules about what you can say and wear and eat and drink and speak and think, THEN you can join our group and get into heaven (maybe, if you don't f up along the way, depends on how many points you rack up and how recently you confessed your sins when the rapture strikes)'. They seem to think that the good news is Hey we've got even more rules you have no hope of following on your own--come feel even crappier about yourself than you already do, and that is the road to salvation.
It is like they are finding a person being chased by wild animals at the foot of a cliff and saying, Good news, climb this 1 mile sheer cliff and when you get to the top you'll find someone there to help you climb it. We make people get holy before we'll talk to them or welcome them among us. That's not what Jesus did. That's not what the good news is. When you are Jesus to people, you come to that person and you say, 'Get on my back and I'll carry you to the top (because somebody carried me, and now I have the grace to help you too) and then we'll work on your wounds and I'll introduce you to this Person who took away my sin and set me free...'
When I heard that Michael Jackson died last night I was shocked. They had just taken him to the hospital, and then he just... died. That's not the script. He gets sick but he recovers...He's too young, he's too famous...I wanted him to recover so he could have more time to find healing for all the wounds in his heart. I was talking to my transvestite friend and was amazed to hear Valentine dismiss Jackson as a child molester and express his preferred sympathy for Farah Faucet (who had better hair). It seems that no matter how marginalized you are in a society, you can still hate and despise someone else, usually the child molesters. (And I am reporting what someone said about MJ, I'm not professing to know what he did or did not do) Because their sin doesn't emerge from holes in their hearts that they are trying desperately to fill to deaden the horrifying pain??? Sin is people trying to meet legitimate needs through illegitimate means. Putting the wrong things in the holes in your heart to try to fill the gaping wound, and wounding others in the process, and widening the holes in your own heart, too.
Every American Christian I think knows/believes/has heard that if they had been the only person on earth Jesus would have died for them.
Here's the bitch. Jesus loves the person whose entire identity you are summing up as 'child molester' enough to die on the cross for him or her even if s/he had been the only person on earth, too. He would have died for him. The bitch is that Jesus loves the child molester just as much as He loves you! The bitch is that you stand at exactly the same place at the foot of the cross, right beside the child molester and the serial killer and the rapist...
Again, for those who have ears to hear, Here's the bitch. Yes, Jesus would have died for you had you been the only human on earth. But guess what? Your sin (and mine) is so filthy and despicable next to the holiness of God that YOUR SIN would have REQUIRED that Jesus die for you to save your sorry ass even if you had been the only person on earth. Put that on a T-shirt and tell them I sent you. I crucified Jesus. With my own self absorption. With all the messes I've made in my life and those of everyone connected to me, whether it was my express intention to do so or not.
I'm so glad that God has the same mercy for me that He has for Michael Jackson. Who may not have committed all deeds attributed to him. But even if he did, I'm so glad that Jesus looks at him and looks at me and sees our brokenness and our wounds and is able to let His compassion overrule His wrath as long as we but humble ourselves and acknowledge that whatever our sins are/were, they are/were black enough to require the ultimate sacrifice from the one perfectly beautiful innocent loving Person who ever lived.
How dismaying that at our core, we almost always want mercy for ourselves, but justice for others.
Oh that He would transform our hearts and we would wish the same mercy we have received on even our greatest enemies. Here is the test of how much Jesus there is in you. Thankfully, His mercies are new every morning and His compassion never ceases- all we have to do is cry out for mercy and throw ourselves on His, and He will give us Jesus' righteousness to wear straight into the Holy of Holies. Right after the child molester in front of us, who has found grace.
I hope that something happened in Michael's heart in a realm we could not see that enabled him to surrender to God's grace before he died.
There are so many people who really do not want a part of any God who could forgive a child molester or some other low life, say hanging on a cross next to Him, where there was obviously not going to be any opportunity for him to 'redeem himself' by his good deeds after getting sanctified.
How critical that event in the life of Jesus-that it was recorded for us--that we see Him promise paradise to a person who had no way in this life of deceiving himself that the real redemption was in what he achieved after he became a Christian. The beautiful deeds He does through us as He transforms us after the salvation experience are evidence of His glory and His love and His amazing power. How easily we think them evidence that we are redeeming ourselves. That we were really pretty good after all and deserved saving.
Thank God for the thief on the cross. Thank God for every repentant child molester and murderer He has had compassion on and sanctified with the same blood of the Lamb that sanctifies you. Thank God that He has the same mercy for me that He has for them. Thank God for His mercies which are new every morning! Thank God, Thank God, Thank God, Thank God! Glory to God in the highest! Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah. Holy Holy Holy.
And child molesters. There's a special place in hell for them. I mean that's what we think, right. That's what we hope in the dark corners of our minds...the corners we thought were all bright and shiny but which in Truth are little bastions of fallenness, the dark 'kingdom' of self righteousness.
I currently live in a fairly small and very conservative town in the south. There is a lovely hair stylist I go to who is a transvestite. I don't have a safe pronoun to refer to this person in a way that's neutral and doesn't plant myself firmly in one view or the other of their (there's the pronoun we settle for in the abstract, but it's hard to get by with when you're talking to an acquaintance of the person in point) current gender. This person was male and is transitioning into a female identity, which is pretty persuasive, and has chosen a genderless name, but I'm going to use Valentine as a pseudonym.
In a town this size that's overrun with the most self righteous God squads you could find anywhere in the U.S., people gawk and judge. That's what we humans do. It's like we think it's our birthright. After talking to this gentle, wounded soul, I learned that all of their 3 siblings died in separate incidents the same week! Their father was never present and rejected his child because of their gender issues...and this year their mother died too. My heart broke for Valentine. Eventually I would hear people talking about Valentine the transvestite, people who liked V. But amazingly it seemed that all anyone really knew was the transvestite part. I didn't meet anyone who knew about him but who also knew the horrible, horrible pain and brokenness Valentine was dealing with.
I was so struck by how mesmerized people are with the tawdry side of one person's biography, so much so that they were totally oblivious to the gaping wounds that beg for salve and bandages. We are gawkers who want to see some gore, who find some sick attraction to knowing about people's sin, but who allow ourselves to be completely distracted by the sin and completely sidetracked from the mission of saving and healing people--bringing them rescue... we don't come with a stretcher and a first aid kit. We come with hand cuffs and a big stick. And a video camera. And we often come disguised as vigilantes when in our sick, not yet fully sanctified minds, we are really voyeurs.
Jesus never approached people and said, Hey, you suck and you're going to hell. Wait, Jesus never did that to 'sinners.' Meaning He never did it to people who knew how lost they were. He only did it to the Pharisees and the teachers of the law... and boy did He have some choice insults for them.
You want to talk about the emperor's new clothes? I give you religious people.
But to those who were not wrapped up in their own so called 'holiness'. . . With everyone who knew that they were not righteous in themselves, Jesus did not begin with their sin. He always began with their wounds. He saw their pain and He spoke healing into their pain and THEN after healing them, He would say, Go and sin no more. The fact is that we don't have the power not to sin until He heals us. Nobody does. Not one stinking human. First He has to heal us, then we can be made whole, and then we can be made holy.
I can't believe how many American evangelicals seem to think that the Good News they're supposed to be sharing with the 'lost' is that they are vile and filthy and fall short of the glory of God, "but if they repent and put their faith in the blood of Jesus and His sacrifice, AND you follow this list of 300 rules about what you can say and wear and eat and drink and speak and think, THEN you can join our group and get into heaven (maybe, if you don't f up along the way, depends on how many points you rack up and how recently you confessed your sins when the rapture strikes)'. They seem to think that the good news is Hey we've got even more rules you have no hope of following on your own--come feel even crappier about yourself than you already do, and that is the road to salvation.
It is like they are finding a person being chased by wild animals at the foot of a cliff and saying, Good news, climb this 1 mile sheer cliff and when you get to the top you'll find someone there to help you climb it. We make people get holy before we'll talk to them or welcome them among us. That's not what Jesus did. That's not what the good news is. When you are Jesus to people, you come to that person and you say, 'Get on my back and I'll carry you to the top (because somebody carried me, and now I have the grace to help you too) and then we'll work on your wounds and I'll introduce you to this Person who took away my sin and set me free...'
When I heard that Michael Jackson died last night I was shocked. They had just taken him to the hospital, and then he just... died. That's not the script. He gets sick but he recovers...He's too young, he's too famous...I wanted him to recover so he could have more time to find healing for all the wounds in his heart. I was talking to my transvestite friend and was amazed to hear Valentine dismiss Jackson as a child molester and express his preferred sympathy for Farah Faucet (who had better hair). It seems that no matter how marginalized you are in a society, you can still hate and despise someone else, usually the child molesters. (And I am reporting what someone said about MJ, I'm not professing to know what he did or did not do) Because their sin doesn't emerge from holes in their hearts that they are trying desperately to fill to deaden the horrifying pain??? Sin is people trying to meet legitimate needs through illegitimate means. Putting the wrong things in the holes in your heart to try to fill the gaping wound, and wounding others in the process, and widening the holes in your own heart, too.
Every American Christian I think knows/believes/has heard that if they had been the only person on earth Jesus would have died for them.
Here's the bitch. Jesus loves the person whose entire identity you are summing up as 'child molester' enough to die on the cross for him or her even if s/he had been the only person on earth, too. He would have died for him. The bitch is that Jesus loves the child molester just as much as He loves you! The bitch is that you stand at exactly the same place at the foot of the cross, right beside the child molester and the serial killer and the rapist...
Again, for those who have ears to hear, Here's the bitch. Yes, Jesus would have died for you had you been the only human on earth. But guess what? Your sin (and mine) is so filthy and despicable next to the holiness of God that YOUR SIN would have REQUIRED that Jesus die for you to save your sorry ass even if you had been the only person on earth. Put that on a T-shirt and tell them I sent you. I crucified Jesus. With my own self absorption. With all the messes I've made in my life and those of everyone connected to me, whether it was my express intention to do so or not.
I'm so glad that God has the same mercy for me that He has for Michael Jackson. Who may not have committed all deeds attributed to him. But even if he did, I'm so glad that Jesus looks at him and looks at me and sees our brokenness and our wounds and is able to let His compassion overrule His wrath as long as we but humble ourselves and acknowledge that whatever our sins are/were, they are/were black enough to require the ultimate sacrifice from the one perfectly beautiful innocent loving Person who ever lived.
How dismaying that at our core, we almost always want mercy for ourselves, but justice for others.
Oh that He would transform our hearts and we would wish the same mercy we have received on even our greatest enemies. Here is the test of how much Jesus there is in you. Thankfully, His mercies are new every morning and His compassion never ceases- all we have to do is cry out for mercy and throw ourselves on His, and He will give us Jesus' righteousness to wear straight into the Holy of Holies. Right after the child molester in front of us, who has found grace.
I hope that something happened in Michael's heart in a realm we could not see that enabled him to surrender to God's grace before he died.
There are so many people who really do not want a part of any God who could forgive a child molester or some other low life, say hanging on a cross next to Him, where there was obviously not going to be any opportunity for him to 'redeem himself' by his good deeds after getting sanctified.
How critical that event in the life of Jesus-that it was recorded for us--that we see Him promise paradise to a person who had no way in this life of deceiving himself that the real redemption was in what he achieved after he became a Christian. The beautiful deeds He does through us as He transforms us after the salvation experience are evidence of His glory and His love and His amazing power. How easily we think them evidence that we are redeeming ourselves. That we were really pretty good after all and deserved saving.
Thank God for the thief on the cross. Thank God for every repentant child molester and murderer He has had compassion on and sanctified with the same blood of the Lamb that sanctifies you. Thank God that He has the same mercy for me that He has for them. Thank God for His mercies which are new every morning! Thank God, Thank God, Thank God, Thank God! Glory to God in the highest! Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah. Holy Holy Holy.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Judges: The Last Ghastly Gasp at the end of the age of the judges
Samson (#13 in the list of judges, hm....) is the last judge chronicled in this book. Samson seems to have ushered in even more darkness and there are no more Judges left to chronicle...just depravity of unspeakable dimensions.
We then have a case of individual idolatry (Micah the Ephraimite) and corporate idolatry when the Danites install an unnamed Levite (who had served Micah in his home shrine with is idols) as their priest and continue to use the stolen idols that Micah had made. (18:31)
Finally, the horrible nightmare of a story about gang rape and the dismemberment of the Levite's concubine. The sacredness of hospitality in that culture is something I think the western mind cannot fathom. The host offers his own daughter to be raped rather than his guest. Ironically, the Levite had passed up spending the night in Jebus because he wouldn't stay in a non-Israelite town. Looking for greater safety among their own people, they were victims of the most heinous crime. After he sends his gory message around Israel, Israel goes to war against the Benjamites, the ones who committed the crime.
They also make an oath at Mizpah that not one of them would give their daughter in marriage to a Benjamite. Since no representatives from Jabesh Gilead show up for the sacred assembly--now think about this, their punishment sounds extreme, but look at it in this light-they receive a body part testifying to the crime of the Benjamites and they don't show enough concern about- or even interest in--this horrendous breach of justice to even to send a representative-- their whole community is put to the sword including women and children(21:10), except for the virgins. These are given to the Benjamites, but there are still not enough to go around.
And so the people actually grieve for the tribe of Benjamin because it appears there would be this big gap in the tribes of Israel. So the elders get creative and decide to let the Benjamites "seize" a girl from the dancing at the annual festival of the Lord at Shiloh, and that way their fathers cannot be guilty of giving them up willingly, but the line of Benjamin is preserved. So there is punishment and purging, but not annihilation.
The book ends with its main point:
In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit. 21:25
We then have a case of individual idolatry (Micah the Ephraimite) and corporate idolatry when the Danites install an unnamed Levite (who had served Micah in his home shrine with is idols) as their priest and continue to use the stolen idols that Micah had made. (18:31)
Finally, the horrible nightmare of a story about gang rape and the dismemberment of the Levite's concubine. The sacredness of hospitality in that culture is something I think the western mind cannot fathom. The host offers his own daughter to be raped rather than his guest. Ironically, the Levite had passed up spending the night in Jebus because he wouldn't stay in a non-Israelite town. Looking for greater safety among their own people, they were victims of the most heinous crime. After he sends his gory message around Israel, Israel goes to war against the Benjamites, the ones who committed the crime.
They also make an oath at Mizpah that not one of them would give their daughter in marriage to a Benjamite. Since no representatives from Jabesh Gilead show up for the sacred assembly--now think about this, their punishment sounds extreme, but look at it in this light-they receive a body part testifying to the crime of the Benjamites and they don't show enough concern about- or even interest in--this horrendous breach of justice to even to send a representative-- their whole community is put to the sword including women and children(21:10), except for the virgins. These are given to the Benjamites, but there are still not enough to go around.
And so the people actually grieve for the tribe of Benjamin because it appears there would be this big gap in the tribes of Israel. So the elders get creative and decide to let the Benjamites "seize" a girl from the dancing at the annual festival of the Lord at Shiloh, and that way their fathers cannot be guilty of giving them up willingly, but the line of Benjamin is preserved. So there is punishment and purging, but not annihilation.
The book ends with its main point:
In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit. 21:25
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
