Tag Christian

Tuning in to Wisdom

Todd R 2 Comments

“But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared.” – Psalm 130:4
“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.” – Proverbs 9:10

So far, I’ve written about Jesus as the only Answer to our need for purpose.  He is the only one qualified to be the Truth we can rely on, the Way to our salvation, and the Life that can restore us to what we are intended to be.  Jesus is the cornerstone upon which we must build our lives and impact the world around us, as a witness to the God who loves us and offers us a new heaven and new earth where His purpose and our purpose are perfectly aligned.

God’s “perfect system” exists only in heaven, but in this world, He calls His people to do His work, pointing the way to His kingdom. But if we are to create for His glory, we require His wisdom, which I briefly mentioned last time as “set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth”, and there, “like a master workman”[1] To all the people and kingdoms of the world, His call is to repentance. If you want utopia, you need to go through Him.

Now we come down from the almost cosmic level of the prior posts to the level of the individual.

Learning Fear

What follows started with me pondering Psalm 130:4: “But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared.”  I read this a few weeks ago and initially thought it was backwards: why does knowing that God forgives make us fear Him more?  Shouldn’t we fear Him less when forgiven?  Also, if “the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom”[2] then to find purpose we need wisdom, and to have wisdom we need fear.

Getting Psalm 130:4 to make sense with the order of forgiveness, fear, and then wisdom required a re-thinking of repentance.  My conclusion was: the one who has not been forgiven has not repented, and the reason they did not repent was that they did not fear God.  They did not understand Him properly.

But the one who has been forgiven has repented, and they repented because they understood that was the best thing for them to do.  A proper understanding and respect for God’s character makes us turn to Him with our guilt, rather than run away from Him.  We should not be afraid of God, where we are motivated to passivity – avoiding mistakes that would anger the one we fear.  We fear God in that we revere Him and respect His authority, thus actively seeking to please Him.  When we pray and ask for forgiveness, it’s often a simple prayer made with the proverbial faith of a child, but if you unpack the implications, prayers of repentance acknowledge:

1) Him as the source of the law, the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong
2) Him as the righteous judge who is personally offended by our sin
3) His omniscience, knowing we cannot hide our sin
4) His uniqueness, as there is no other God to turn to
5) His steadfast love for us, knowing He bore the cost of our sin, and therefore we can approach Him
6) His compassion since He lived as a man
7) His power and willingness to heal us
8) His consistency of character: that He is not arbitrary
9) …and more

If we don’t implicitly or explicitly believe these things, then why repent and ask forgiveness from God?  Why expect to get it?  Exploring that set of statements could fill multiple volumes of theology books, but we don’t need that knowledge.  Fortunately, in His grace, He honors our heartfelt confessions.  He paid the price for all our inadequacies – even when we don’t fully understand our own prayers or who we’re praying to.  The Spirit pleads with the Father on our behalf[3].  Without His inexhaustible grace, our doubt on any one of these points might prevent us from repentance.  Mercifully, our forgiveness is based on His faithfulness to us: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” – 1 John 1:9

The righteous must live by faith because otherwise God would be playing whack-a-mole with our doubts for eternity.  Faith – our trust in God – is imperfect but it is the only thing that can bridge the gap between the faith of a child and the omniscience of God, who knows all our doubts and all their answers.  We come as we are.

In pondering Psalm 130:4, I better appreciate how complex, and in fact, miraculous, repentance really is.  Genuine repentance leads to forgiveness, which gives us a better appreciation of who God is.  We will have lived Psalm 34:8 for ourselves:

“Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good!
Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!”

Only through your acceptance of the cross, where Christ’s atoning blood was shed for you, can God in His Holiness commune with you.  Only through forgiveness will the Holy Spirit come and live in you – the indwelling referred to last time.  Only by tasting of His goodness do we really know what He is like.  It requires participation on our part.  If you never repent, you don’t know what it tastes like, only what you’ve been told.  And you might not have been told the truth.

So, forgiveness enables proper fear of the Lord, and the fear of the Lord enables wisdom, but what’s wisdom?

Upgrading Wisdom

I’ve had some sort of working definition of “wisdom” for most of my life.  As a teenager, I remember joking that it was the ability to learn from other people’s mistakes.  Sounded teenager-wise, but how do I know what’s a mistake?  Later, I read somewhere about wisdom being “skill at living life”.  Also sounds useful, but perhaps vague and worldly feeling.  Even later in life, I started thinking of it as “being able to make decisions based on facts, instead of wishful thinking.”  This has been even more useful, but which facts do you follow?  How do you choose between two “true” options?

Now I have a new definition: Wisdom is the ability to choose between the path of righteousness and the path of the wicked.  Reading the Psalms and Proverbs specifically, there is a contrast between these “paths”, and an idea that moral decisions are like a route between places.  You can be on one path or the other, and with wisdom, “you will understand righteousness and justice and equity, every good path”[4]

You may be thinking: “that sounds like a moral compass!”  I’ll respond with: “you need to upgrade your technology.  We use GPS now!”  Let me explain.

A compass is too simple a metaphor.  Wisdom is usually not like a clear sign pointing the way, although God can use whatever means He chooses.  In our experience, wisdom is more like one voice among many on a broken Moral GPS system, that speaks about all “political, social, cultural, personal, moral, religious and spiritual”[5] factors in our environment and from our experience.  It tells us to go places we shouldn’t and not to go places we should, weighing pros and cons in multiple voices.

A pre-Christian GPS considers all these factors, and a person makes decisions as they see fit to prioritize among them.  Salvation requires realizing the GPS is broken, trusting someone who knows how to fix it, and then striving to follow the new instructions.  When this happens, a Christian gets an added feature in their Moral GPS, a “Holy Spirit download” that adds one more (heavenly, loving) voice to the cacophony.  The Spirit speaks of the justice and righteousness referred to in both Proverbs 2:9 and in Isaiah 28:17. The Spirit speaks with the wisdom needed to measure from the cornerstone and fulfill our purpose as individuals in God’s image.

As we make decisions in the world, they reflect an inner decision, as we consult our Moral GPS, but remembering that it’s still a broken system.  Proverbs 1 contains an interesting parable.  As we walk down the streets of our inner map, Wisdom calls out and raises her voice in the markets (Pr. 1:20): “If you turn at my reproof, behold, I will pour out my spirit to you; I will make my words known to you” (Pr. 1:23).  But the streets are noisy (also Pr. 1:20) and you continue down the wrong street (perhaps to take shelter from the voices in your head).  Wisdom refuses to answer when you discover your mistake too late.  If you respond to wisdom, you get more wisdom.

A funnier example is in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”, where Lancelot is rescuing Galahad from the Castle Anthrax.  The women of the castle live alone without men and when the knights stumble by (fooled by a false Holy Grail), the women try to seduce them into staying.  Galahad should know the right thing to do, because 1) he is nicknamed “the Chaste”, and 2) the castle is named Anthrax. However, the lure of Zoot and the other women is so strong that Lancelot must forcefully drag him away.  They argue: “Can’t I have just a little peril?”  “No, it’s too perilous”.

Sometimes we have the grace of a Lancelot to save us from falling into the trap set by the wrong voices in our moral GPS.  Sometimes we’re alone.  Sometimes we’re among people who want us to do wrong.  In these cases, the strength to choose wisely must come from inside.  Back in Proverbs 1:29, wisdom says people go on the wrong path because “they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the Lord”, suggesting that’s the deciding factor.

Absent Lancelot dragging us away, it is the fear of the Lord that makes us listen to, and act in, wisdom instead of going any which way.  It is the fear of the Lord that makes us listen to the correct voice in the broken GPS, to weigh that voice above the others.  The Holy Spirit may or may not add facts to the conversation, but it adds God’s heavenly perspective, influencing us to choose what is eternally valuable.  God does not want to drag us kicking and screaming into righteousness; He wants us to be thankful for His love and trust Him to know what’s best for us.  He knows about, and cares deeply about, every possible consequence of our actions to us and to others, not just the ones we see, or even want.

Wisdom is about taking the right action, not about accumulating facts.  Facts matter, but any voice can have facts.  In context of the Great Commandments[6], wisdom is what tells us how to love God and others actively, but in a way based on obedience that leaves the results to God.  In the book of Acts, Ananias didn’t minister to Saul, the notorious persecutor of Christians, because he thought it would end up well for Ananias[7], he did it because God told him to, and God knew that future Saul was Paul, the author of much of the New Testament.  Ananias didn’t decide based on the facts as he knew them, but he adjusted the facts in light of revelation from God.  Also, wisdom might sometimes tell you the best action is to do nothing.  Sometimes wisdom flashes a red light while others are flashing green.  “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death” – Pr. 14:12 and 16:25.

Wisdom is why the Way, the Truth and the Life must be a person, not a set of rules or philosophy.   Truly, only you, in relationship with God through the Holy Spirit, can figure out what your purpose and identity in the body of Christ are.  Wisdom is proactive and specific to you.  Nobody else’s situation is your situation, and nobody else has the same relationships, abilities, and resources.  Books, advice, and experience can be helpful, but you need to “taste and see” the Holy Spirit in you, working at your very core where only He can reach.

Wisdom will put you on a path that provides you, and this world, a taste of heaven.  It is informed by a justice and righteousness – God’s law and Christ’s character – that is not of this world.  With wisdom you can build and create on the cornerstone of Christ.  The world might not like it, but the world is not your Creator.

Fulfilling our purpose requires Wisdom and Grace, motivated by Godly fear – perhaps even the boldness of Caleb in the wilderness to face giants despite the majority opinion[8].  The next post, God willing, will be about combating the other voices in the Moral GPS.

Future Topics: Mind Your Own Business, Learning from Chaos, Walking on Water, some song analysis, recycled posts from my old, defunct blog, and hopefully much more!

Thanks for reading – comment below and/or share if you want.  What was meaningful to you?  What did you disagree with?  How do you define wisdom?  How does the world?

[1] Proverbs 8:22-31
[2] Proverbs 9:10a
[3] Romans 8:26-27
[4] Proverbs 2:9
[5] See last post.  These are some arenas of opposition defeated by Christ on the cross, and that He wants His people to influence.
[6] Matthew 22:37-39.  In short, love God and love your neighbor.
[7] Acts 9:13
[8] Numbers 13:30

Creation vs Anti-Creation

Todd R 4 Comments

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.  The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” – Genesis 1:1-2
“But the hawk and the porcupine shall possess it, the owl and the raven shall dwell in it. He shall stretch the line of confusion over it, and the plumb line of emptiness.” – Isaiah 34:11

My first post covered the futility of mankind creating something whose purpose is to give purpose back to mankind.  It ended with a recommendation: take your individual experiences, talents and desires and begin to create something – something unique to you, but which is guided by God’s plan.  Tyler Joseph of the band twenty øne piløts says that in the beginning you might only come up with “Pointless curses, nonsense verses” but you must begin somewhere.  Then, “You’ll see purpose start to surface”.

Nonsense in Genesis

I have no idea if Tyler had this in mind, but the Bible’s story of creation does start out with a “nonsense verse”.  In Genesis 1:2, “without form and void”, is the English translation of “tohu va’bohu” in Hebrew.  There’s a lot of debate about what these words mean, but I had a college professor who said that when Genesis was written, there were no appropriate words to describe the state of the universe between Genesis 1:1 and 1:3, except by inventing an onomatopoeia – a word that sounds like what you’re trying to describe.  Thus, “tohu va’bohu” sounds like an echo in an open, empty space.  Say it out loud – I’ll wait.  While this may be the original purpose of the words, over time the phrase has come to represent empty things, things with no value or purpose.  The phrase is used very rarely in the Bible since it has such a specific “meaning”, or lack of.  In Genesis 1:1, God had created something, but it started as a useless something.

Fortunately, God wasn’t done, and all the forces of nature were designed and put in motion in short order.  From the “tohu va’bohu”, structure and purpose “start to surface”.  The laws of nature were written into the source code of the universe, and everything was “good”, conforming to God’s purpose.  Wisdom “set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth”, was there, “like a master workman”, guiding the process[1]  Nothing in the universe was random.

Then came the Fall in Genesis 3: Adam and Eve – deceived by the serpent – decided they wanted to choose between good and evil on their own, instead of trusting God for direction.  In consequence, two more creative forces were put in motion: rebellion and the curse.  From this point forward, everything in this universe exists in a state between chaos and glorified perfection.  The curse introduced something like the scientific concept of entropy – the tendency of everything to move toward a state of disorder.  Nature itself would frustrate man’s ability to act as God-appointed stewards.  No longer would everything be “good”.

In addition to the curse, mankind became inclined to make things that glorify themselves, rather than God.  An early manifestation of this was the Tower of Babel, whose builders said: “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth” in Genesis 11:4.  It was an attempt to establish a reputation independent of their Creator.  To build a legacy.  The punishment?  God turned their words into nonsense (“babble”) by spontaneously inventing different languages and scattered them into multiple nations.  Back to square one for them.

Nonsense in Isaiah

But Babel would return[2].  A key theme of history from a Christian perspective is the progressive building of the Kingdom of God, and the destruction of all idols.  The book of Isaiah is particularly centered on this theme.  Judah, the Southern Kingdom of the Israelites, was under threat of conquest because of their lack of allegiance to God, and Isaiah repeatedly reminds them that they are God’s chosen and that all other nations are doomed.  Isaiah begs them to rely on God and not on military alliances[3] with these doomed nations for their salvation[4].  In describing the future fate of Edom[5], a rival kingdom to Judah and an enemy of God, Isaiah says in chapter 34, verse 11:

“But the hawk and the porcupine shall possess it,
the owl and the raven shall dwell in it.
He shall stretch the line of confusion over it,
and the plumb line of emptiness.”

Everything the Edomites built – their cities, fortresses, culture, political and economic systems – would be over-run by nature and decay.  The animals would move in and chew through Deep Thought’s wires.

But what’s this about a “line”?  Before iPhones had an app for that, a builder would use a string or rope to orient the next piece of construction to an existing piece or a marker.  If orienting vertically, they would use a “plumb line”, or a string or rope with a weight on the end, to make sure the structure was level.  Isaiah is describing construction equipment.  Why?

Remember “tohu va’bohu” from Genesis 1:2?  Here in Isaiah, “confusion” is a translation of “tohu”, and “emptiness” is “bohu”.  The original audience would have instantly remembered these rarely used words and know that Isaiah is saying all the creative work of the Edomites will revert to its pre-Genesis 1:3 state.  To empty meaninglessness.  In case they missed the point, verse 13 says that thorns and thistles will grow over the Edomite strongholds and fortresses, referencing the curse of Genesis 3:18.  Verse 15 piles on still further that the wildlife not only take over, but raise their young. indicating the permanence of the judgment.  Nature itself gets to punish the Edomites for their rebellion.  God says you can’t just build anything with the creativity He’s given you.

Isaiah’s point is not so much about the physical nature of the thing being created; Edomite buildings probably looked and functioned much like Judah’s buildings.  He’s using physical terms to explain that everything has moral content, or purpose behind it.  For the modern reader, the message is that all iterations of “Deep Thought” (see last post) and works that proceed from them are doomed to be cursed and essentially un-created.  They are meaningless and have no value and can’t provide real meaning and eternal value for you.  If you don’t believe that there is a Creator and won’t honor Him with your work, the very tools you use to build will be useless.  If you think gravity “just exists”, why would you expect the Creator of gravity to honor your use of it?  Creating something while ignoring the Creator and His laws is like building an airplane using a ruler that isn’t straight.  Or while insisting that 42 is the answer to 5 times 7.  I for one do not want to fly in that airplane!

A Sensible Foundation

Fortunately, this hopeless scenario is not the end.  Amid all this doom and gloom, God continues to proclaim and execute His plan.  Isaiah 28:16-17 says:

“therefore thus says the Lord GOD,
Behold, I am the one who has laid as a foundation in Zion,
a stone, a tested stone,
a precious cornerstone, of a sure foundation:
‘Whoever believes will not be in haste.’
And I will make justice the line,
and righteousness the plumb line;
and hail will sweep away the refuge of lies,
and waters will overwhelm the shelter.”

While the “line” and “plumb line” of Edom was “tohu va’bohu”, the promise of God is a future world where “tohu va’bohu” is replaced by justice and righteousness.  You can’t build anything meaningful if your starting point is meaningless and your construction materials are useless, which brings us to the “cornerstone”.

The cornerstone is the “square one” that the builders of Babel missed and had to go back to.  A cornerstone is typically the first stone laid for a new building.  All other stones and parts of the building are constructed in relation to it.  If they line up with it, they’re in the right place.  If they don’t, they’re not and the whole structure might be jeopardized.

In the New Testament, Isaiah’s “cornerstone” is identified as Jesus Himself – the “Answer” of the last post.  He introduces Himself as such by quoting Psalm 118:22 – “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone”[6].  Who are these builders who reject Him?  In the words of N.T. Wright, at the crucifixion, “Jesus suffers the full consequences of evil: evil from the political, social, cultural, personal, moral, religious and spiritual angles all rolled into one”[7]  All the forces of Jesus’ time conspired against Him out of jealousy; they liked their creative freedom and power and wanted to keep it.  So they conspired to kill Him.

If Jesus had remained in the tomb and there was no resurrection, there would be no Christianity.  There would be no future heaven and no hope.  Evil would have won, and the universe would have continued with unanswerable questions.  The law of entropy would run its course, and all would eventually revert to “tohu va’bohu” – meaninglessness.

But this was also not the end.  There was a resurrection.

Start Making Sense

Which finally brings my story to Pentecost, where we encounter two more creative forces: miracle and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.  Before Jesus was crucified, He promised the disciples the Holy Spirit, as their “helper”[8] to accomplish His mission.  As told in Acts 2, many disciples were gathered in Jerusalem, along with many travelers visiting for the Festival of First Harvest, one of the three major pilgrimage events.  God wanted publicity for this event.

The Holy Spirit – the third person of the Trinity – rushed in like a mighty wind and manifested what looked like tongues of fire on the disciples, who were miraculously able to speak in other languages and preach the mighty works of God to representatives of many nations.  All miracles in the Bible have a purpose – they are special reminders that God as Creator can do what He wants.  As G.K. Chesterton said: “A miracle only means the liberty of God”.  He made the laws; He can bend or break them.  But He limits miracles, so we don’t rely on them.  Each one is a lesson, not a promise of ongoing provision.  (Thus, we still need Bible translators).

Pentecost is the anti-Babel – In Genesis 11, everyone had the same language and tried to build a tower so their kingdom would reach up to heaven, but God thwarted the plan by confusing their language.  Here, God un-confuses the language, enabling His kingdom to come down to earth, to the many nations.  In addition, the believers are anointed with this Spirit, and when God anoints, it is for a purpose.  Through the Spirit, God’s justice and righteousness – the line and plumb line of eternity – come alive in man.  God gives us His tools.  Tools that do what He designed them to do.  It’s as if God was saying, “Now you will build something that reaches up to heaven – something eternal”.

We all have nonsense in our lives (our own personal “tohu va’bohu”), but if we start with Christ as foundation and go from there as the Spirit guides in justice and righteousness, we each find our purpose.  It’s not the size of what you create that matters, but whether it glorifies Christ who deserves our trust.  We’re not here to “fix” the world, but to show it what heaven is like and what is possible there.  The work will involve every dimension represented by the forces that Jesus defeated at the cross: “political, social, cultural, personal, moral, religious and spiritual”.  He empowers us to bring more justice and righteousness to each of these arenas, each in a way unique to us.

You might not be a rock star or build a tower and city as at Babel, but your work will reflect His glory to this world.  The Little Drummer Boy isn’t a great Christmas song because the boy was a fantastic drummer, but because he was using what little he had to honor Christ.  The woman who put her only two coins in the offering[9] may have created more eternal value than many kings because her sacrifice was made in faith.

All God’s people will inherit a perfect heaven and earth, but there is also a reward for contributions to the project, as Paul assures us in 1 Corinthians 3:11-15, while summarizing the cornerstone concept:

“For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.  Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw— each one’s work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work that anyone has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If anyone’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.” (Emphasis mine)

All creative forces will be aligned to achieve perfection.  There will be no more curse, just God’s power in complete harmony with the work of His people.  The hope of this future is worth everything and simply not possible any other way, which brings us back, finally, to Pentecost.  What was said in all those languages?  “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins” said Peter in Acts 2:38.

Repentance is the key to abandoning the existing building plans and adopting the new ones.  Through repentance, God will build His kingdom.  Repentance is the topic of the next post, God willing.

Future Topics: Mind Your Own Business, Learning from Chaos, Walking on Water, some song analysis, recycled posts from my old, defunct blog, and hopefully much more!

Thanks for reading – comment below and/or share if you want.

[1] Proverbs 8:22-31

[2] Perhaps 42 times?  Sorry, already made that joke in the last post.

[3] I consider Isaiah 31:1 a summary of the book’s theme: “Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help and rely on horses, who trust in chariots because they are many and in horsemen because they are very strong, but do not look to the Holy One of Israel or consult the LORD!”

[4] Judah would eventually succumb to Babylon (Babel all over again) and go into temporary exile.  But ultimately every Babylon is doomed to the same fate as Edom.

[5] Further reading: Genesis 25:30, Obadiah

[6] Matthew 21:42

[7] N.T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God, P. 92

[8] See John 14:15-20

[9] See Mark 12:41-44