Attempting Genocide through God

Jonah was a despicable man.

No doubt in my mind about it.

In fact, of all the characters that we all grew up learning Sunday School stories about, Jonah is by far the most disgusting.

Please understand, there were lots of 'bad guys' working hard at becoming the most depraved, or at least selfish, people ever to be recorded on paper.  (i.e. Herod the Great, Haman)

There are examples of people teaming up against a weaker opponent.  (i.e. Joseph's brothers)

There are examples of rulers attempting to force people to worship idols.  (i.e. Nebuchadnezzar)

None of those people, however, were in direct communication with God, while simultaneously attempting to willfully commit genocide.

Yes, Jonah tried to commit genocide.

How, you ask, can one individual man attempt such a task?  Easy.  All it took was a good, but incomplete understanding of God's character.

I can hear the "huh???" echoing through cyberspace.

Pull out your Bible and look up Jonah, chapter 4, verse 2.

Ok, I'll make it easy on you and reprint it, "He prayed to the Lord and said, “Oh, Lord, this is just what I thought would happen when I was in my own country.  This is what I tried to prevent by attempting to escape to Tarshish!  – because I knew that you are gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in mercy, and one who relents concerning threatened judgment"

The "this" in that first sentence that Jonah is referring to is Ninevah repenting and being saved by God.

Basically, what Jonah is outright telling God here is that he ran away not because he was scared to carry God's message or thought himself inadequate.  He didn't run away because he was confused or upset at God's interfering in his life.  Jonah doesn't head for the hills to escape God's wrath.  No, Jonah says that he took off because he knew God was merciful.

WHAT?

Mercy is a good thing, isn't it?

I'm willing to bet that even Jonah agreed with that, at least when the mercy was applied to him.  In this discussion the topic isn't mercy applied to Jonah though, it's mercy applied to the Ninevites, who Jonah apparently HATED.

You know when you're little and a parent or teacher or somebody tells you that you shouldn't say you "hate" somebody because it means you wish they were dead?  Yeah, we can use that definition and Jonah still HATED the Ninevites.

Jonah told God he ran because he figured that if Nineveh never got the message that God was mad at them they couldn't repent and fire and brimstone would rain down on the city (and it's inhabitants) Sodom and Gomorrah style.

Jonah tried not to deliver God's message in an attempt to whack a whole population at once.  I've heard about suicide by cop, but genocide by God?  Well… you have to give him credit, at least Jonah was ambitious.

Here's where Jonah underestimated God though.  Jonah limited God to being "gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in mercy, and one who relents concerning threatened judgment". 

Now, I don't think anybody can reasonable say that God is not those things.  Nevertheless, God is not only those things.

God is also, among many other things, Omnipotent, all knowing, and, amazingly, committed to restoring us from our current state of despair.  Jonah's story foreshadows this beautifully for us.

Even though people (like me) deserve to die, God has decided to orchestrate a grand plan to offer them (me) reprieve from destruction.

Even if it requires the unnatural regurgitation of some spiteful religious people by an oversized marine animal.

I think my two year old wants to go to training

I think my two year old wants to go to training.

Yes, you see that correctly.

Heather was helping decorate the Corps for VBS yesterday afternoon.  She left Lili at Grandma's house and I was to pick her up after work. 

I did.  Now I'm mildly disturbed.

When I walked in my mother-in-law could barely contain her laughter.  Appearently I had just missed Lili preaching to the other little girls.

Yep.  I said preaching.

Lili had the phone book out, which is pretty normal, it's probably her favorite book this month.  However, she made the little girls sit down while she stood and told them that this was a book about Jesus loves me. 

Then she proceeded to preach, with the phone book open in her hand.

"Jesus loves me therefore I know the Bible tells me something like a diamond in the sky and Barney hugs Jesus and he loves you too... Now sing with me, 'Therefore The Bible Loves Us and Jesus Says Amen'!"

Her Grandma wrote it down word for word so she wouldn't forget it.

Little did I know that wasn't the end of it.

As I stood there and listened to Grandma tell me this story, I watched Lili make the other two little girls get up on the ottoman so they could "drive".  They were informed they needed to 'put your seatbelts on!'  When they did it incorrectly, Lili mimicked undoing her own seatbelt, got down, walked around and helped them do it correctly.

Once everyone was buckled securely, Lili climbed back up into the imaginary drivers seat, pretended to turn the steering wheel, and informed her passengers that she was "drivin' to Women's Minstries [sic]".

My two year old was doing pick-ups.

Even with all that, I wasn't honestly scared until my mother-in-law told me about the last trip they had taken to "Women's" a half hour earlier.

Apparently, they were at a store first.  They went through the same process starting to drive, but only made it a few seconds before Lili realized she had forgotten the receipt and had to go back to the store and get it.

Yes, she made sure she had the receipt.

Upon climbing back onto the vehicle, she handed the invisible receipt to one of her passengers and told them "Hold this.  Don't lose it."

Wow. 

She's still 3 or 4 years away from even being eligible to be a Jr. Soldier.

Come to think of it, do they make Jr. Soldier uniforms with red trim?

Next time she scrapes her knee I'm going to find a magnifying glass and see if there is blue and yellow mixed in with the red blood.

I fear my poor, sweet, daughter may be doomed.  Four or five generations of Salvationist on both sides of the family may just be too much (in?)breeding to overcome.

…and I've never even wanted a Silver Star…

What does this mean to you?

"What does this mean to you?"

That's possibly my least favorite sentence in the English language.

It's also one that I hear way to often in church settings.

Have you ever sat around a table when this question was asked?  Chances are, if you're reading this, that everybody at the table had a Bible sitting in front of them.  A worn out King James across the table.  A brand new NLT Life Application Study Bible next to you.  A slightly wrinkled and faded NIV Thompson Chain at the end of the table.  And a dinged up hard-cover Gideon Bible two chairs down.

What does this collection of books have in common?  They are all the divinely inspired word of God, and no matter the choice of translation, binding, or reference commentary, they all say the same thing!

That's right.  They all contain the same message, no matter slight variations in word choice.

So then, if they all say the same thing, why did the guy at the end of the table just read a verse and then promptly pose the question to the assembled crowd "What does this mean to you?"

It has no special meaning only to me.  It simply has a meaning.

Let me give you a real-world example.

I'm an engineer by trade and training.  Part of my job is to take special customer requests and come up with a concept and price and send it back to the customer for approval.  I get these request, invariably, in writing.  Now, I can look at what the customer wrote and say "well, to me this means he wants a widget in front", but if I send that back and what he really wanted was a gadget in back, then my work was useless.  The customer request doesn't have a meaning that varies from person to person reading it.  The request simply has a meaning.

Now, that's not to say the meaning is always straight forward and easy to understand, quite the contrary, it usually takes some digging to figure out what the customer really wants, but ultimately if I want to get it right, I have to find the actual meaning of the text.

The same principle applies to Bible study.  Do you think that the Apostles had multiple meanings in mind when they wrote epistles to churches they had founded?  No, of course not.  They were dealing with the everyday problems those churches were having almost 2,000 years ago.  Now, there are many, many timeless, absolute truths that can be found in studying those letters, but we have to do it correctly. 

We have to change our perspective. 
Start by determining what the author meant instead of what we want it to mean.  Then figure out the timeless truth contained in that passage.  Only as a final stage determine how that truth applies to your life.

Skipping straight to how the passage applies to your life is like my assuming I know what my customers want without doing the background work… an exercise in futility, because most likely I'm going to get it wrong.

So next time you're sitting at a table doing Bible study, simplify your question.  There is only one meaning, so just ask "What does this mean?".

Phineas Jacob Garrington was born today at 11:25 AM.

He's 8 lbs 2 oz and 20 inches long.

Momma and Baby are both doing great.

Here a video clip of the C-Section.  Be warned, it's a c-section, so there is a bit of blood involved.

For those of you too squeemish for the blood, here are a couple pictures.

10 minutes old

   big sis loving her brother while he eats

 first tempertantrum.  actually, the only one so far.  keep your fingers crossed!

The Faint Red Thread

Sunday's schedule this week was a bit off from usual.

Most Sunday mornings, I spend the hour of Sunday School in the nursery with Lili.  She's the only infant or toddler there for the Sunday School hour.

This past Sunday Lili had spent the night at her Grandparents house, and therefore wasn't at church for Sunday School.  So, I went to the adult Sunday School class.

This really is an anomaly.  For whatever reasons, I don't think I've attended our adult Sunday School class more than a half dozen times in the almost four years I've lived in Manitowoc. 

It turned out to be a good Sunday to show up. 

Our Sunday School teacher Ray, who was looking a little sickly at the start of the hour, made it about half way through before he turned a lovely shade of green and made a hasty exit of the room.  On his way out the door he asked me to take over.  I looked at the material in front of me: a flimsy paperback book including this week's lesson and my pocket ESV Bible that I keep in my tunic, nice and portable but with about size 2 font.

The lesson was on 1 John 3.  Now, I'll be honest, I've read 1 John, more than once.  None of those times, however, have been recently.

So I took a few minutes during the active discussion to re-read the text and pay a bit more attention than I had the first time around.

There it was.

An almost visible thread running through the passage.  A hazy red line that seemed to encompass key words and phrases in our reading.  '…love…children of God…in him there is no sin…Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil…'

In my mind that thread stretched out in both directions.  To the immediate left were the Pauline epistles and the Gospels with the same thread running all through them.  Tracing the thread even further left I saw Daniel, Hosea, Isaiah, and the rest of the prophets connecting to the string.  I could see exiles and returns from exile.  I saw the lives of David and all the Judges.  I saw the Exodus from Egypt and the covenants made with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  I saw the rainbow over the ark and the struggle between Cain and Able.  The whole Old Testament story connecting to this thread.  All the way back to the thread's origin at Eve's first bite of fruit.

To the right of 1 John the thread continued straight out of the tru-tone synthetic leather back cover of my Bible.  There was a timeline.  Well, almost more of a family tree.  A visual representation of Church History.  It was harder to see the red thread here.

A tangle of branches quickly developed.  Some branches diverged from the red line almost immediately they had labels like "Aryanism" and "Gnosticism".  Most of the branches however stayed close to the red thread.  They seemed to zigzag back and forth across the thread.  At some times right on top of it, at others pulling rapidly away.  Every time it seemed that the branches would lose reach of the red thread they corrected back towards center.  The correction points were labeled with names like "Nicaea" and "Wittenberg". 

When I looked closer, the branches were actually made up of millions of little dots clustered so close together they looked like lines.  These were people.  The individuals who have made up the Christian Church over the last two millennia.

All of this; from humanity's disgraceful exit from Eden, through Christ's sacrifice, and on to the dozen people sitting in front of me; are all tied together by this red thread. 

Connected by God's plan for redemption.

I could sit back and see that the whole of not just Christian history, or church history, but of human history was connected in a way planned by a creator.  An omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent deity who was carefully rescuing his creation.

I looked up from my Bible.  The discussion was starting to fade.  I looked at each of the faces around me.  I started winging leading the discussion.  My mouth was on autopilot.  We've got an insightful and talkative group, the discussion only required a bit of guidance and prompting.  I didn't have to carry it.

My mouth may have been on autopilot, but my mind was in overdrive.  I wanted to pull aside each and every person and say "Can't you see it?  It's so clear!  We're not disconnected individuals following God!  We're connected!  We're permanently tied into God's plan for human redemption.  God's plan to rescue us from ourselves and return us to his presence.  To return us to Eden!"

I wanted to scribble a white board full of the images floating in my head.  I wanted to hand out a half dozen lovely books to everyone so they could see the connections between the dots and not just the dots.

I looked at the clock.

10 minutes.

That's what I had left of Sunday School.

Other eyes were starting to glance toward the clock and the donuts.

It didn't look like I was going to be able to do that today.  Besides, I think they may have tried to have me committed if I had started pointing to crazy squiggles on a non-existent white board and shaking people saying "CAN'T YOU SEE?!?!?!?"

Now to figure out how and when to lay it all out without resorting to entry-level violence…

* * * * *

Okay… so the above was a bit of an over-dramatization of the actual events.  True in essence, exaggerated by creative license wherever the author saw fit.

The connectivity of the Biblical narrative and connection to Church history have both been things I've been studying off and on for the last two or three years. 

It started because I realized that I had a decent grasp of the New Testament whereas when reading the Old Testament I quite regularly had what I refer to as "What the heck??" moments.  Readings that made no sense to me and didn't seem to be related to the real story of the Bible, the Gospels.  I made the O.T. a defacto second class citizen.  Sure, I would articulate that "We believe that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments were given by inspiration of God, and that they only constitute the Divine rule of Christian faith and practice."  And if you asked me I would tell you that both Testaments were of equal value and equally God's inspired word.  But in practice I was a borderline Marcionist, even if the church father's declared Marcionism a heresy almost 1700 years ago.

I decided I didn't want anymore "What the heck??" moments when reading the book I professed to base my faith on.  So I started reading up.  Not just reading the Old Testament, but referencing commentaries and study Bibles and other reference works on what this was really talking about.

It started to click.  This two-thirds of my Bible actually was useful for more than children's Sunday School class and as a collection of nice stories that we can learn a moral from.  This was talking about the exact same stuff that I already knew the Gospels were talking about.  Not only that, but it made my understanding of the New Testament richer, deeper.  It was like I'd been driving in the dark and trying to read my speedometer.  Sure, I could see it, but once I turned the lights on the backlight just brought everything into focus.  It sharpened my vision.

Church history was maybe not quite as dramatic.  But I was aware that I was lacking an understanding of exactly what all lay between Paul the Apostle and John Paul II.  Well, from high school history I knew about Constantine and Luther and Papal Political machinations.  From my Honor Jr. Soldier days I could still recite by rote "Booth, Booth, Higgins, Booth, Carpenter, Orsborn, Kitching, Coutts, etc…"  That was about it though.

So I started reading.  About Origen and Irenaeus, Polycarp and Tertullian, Jerome and Augustine.  Placing the first seven ecumenical councils on a timeline.  Reading about the split with the Eastern Orthodox and the rise of Monastic culture.  The rise of the reformation and it's effect percolating through Europe.  Understanding the origins of the Holiness Movement and who this character John Wesley and how his thinking affected my doctrines.  Beginning to understand how doctrine is developed and how dealing with a heresy can push our theological understanding to a whole new level. 

The greatest value came in fully grasping that while special revelation may have ceased with the death of the last Apostle, that does not mean that God ceased working on his plan to redeem humanity. 

Yes, the risen Christ is the culmination of the redemption story. 

He is the cog that makes redemption possible. 

But if God's plans had ended completely on Easter Sunday we wouldn't even have a New Testament.  He continued to use humanity to write what we call the N.T.  He used people to translate the Bible so that more fallen humans could be reached and brought into a redeemed state.  God used people to study and write about scripture so that we could imitate Paul and give a defense of our beliefs.  God gave people the ability to look critically at teachings and test them on the basis of scripture and tradition to follow the instructions Paul gave Timothy and to watch out for false teachings. 

God's individual plans for people throughout history tied directly into his redemptive plan for all of humanity.

So my allegorical "red string" above was dramatized for your entertainment, but the more I've read, discussed, and asked questions, the more often I've had "Aha!" moments.  These are when the "What the heck?" puzzle pieces snap into place to make the big picture of the puzzle more and more visible.

The part of my story about where I wonder how to make everybody understand the background so they can have an "Aha!" moment is true though.  Well, minus the threat of violence.

I wish I knew how to do that.