Hope or Harrumph?

In Psalm 37, David says:

Do not fret because of those who are evil 

or be envious of those who do wrong; 

for like the grass they will soon wither, 

like green plants they will soon die away.

 Trust in the Lord and do good; 

dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture.

(Psalm 37:1-3, NIV version)

David is contrasting two ways of responding to wrongs in the world and in people. First, he says “Do not fret.” In the original Hebrew, the word for “fret” is:

חרה (hrh)

That is, do not get hot, do not blaze. The word primarily means to burn. 

Listen as you ty to say it out loud—it sounds like burning fire. It is a burning anger. Like “Harrumph,” from the old comic books when a character was frustrated. Or a loud growl by an angry Orc.

 

In contrast to “hrh,” David says to trust in the Lord. The Hebrew word for “trust” here is:

בטח (batach)

That is, trust in God. Relax that anger muscle. Put out that fire. God is the one you need to look at. Hold on to him. Do not hold on to your response to evil people. That only joins the evil, because our anger comes from our evil selves, not from God’s holiness. 

 

Recently, in the midst of major work stressors at the hospital, a coworker told me I was stupid to hope that things would get better--because certain people could not be trusted. I didn’t know how to respond. I wanted to still have hope, but I agreed that poor decisions were made. This prompted me to think about David’s words even more. A Jewish friend told me this reminds him of the practice of “Mussar,” focusing on inner virtues.

 

My coworker made many good points. And if you rely only on people and situations, that is a thin support for hope. People will disappoint you, often purposefully choosing the wrong path. The only logical response is anger, and a big Harrumph! That is why David says to turn to God. Only in God is found the complete absence of evil. And only in God is there a firm basis for hope. 

 

Later in the same Psalm, David says: “Take delight in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.” David is speaking to the situation where evil people have the upper hand, and it looks like there is no hope. In that instance he says: “hope in God, delight in God.” Decide in your mind that there is a basis for hope: God. Then, tell your heart that not only are things going to be great in the future (whether in this life or the next), but that promise makes it worth enjoying God right now, whatever the situation.

 

Someone smiling amid suffering appears stupid. That is why my coworker was angry at me: he wanted me to wake up and smell the roses! I can understand that. And this idea should not be used to ignore evil, to allow it when we have the power to fight against it. But for those who believe that there is something more to hope in than our situation, someone greater to trust in than those who let us down, there really is reason to hope. 

 

Unchanging and Changing

• Biblical Truth does not change. Humankind’s understanding of God, the universe, and personal human experience before God does change. God is an absolute truth while humankind’s statements about God are in the form of theological presuppositions. 
•  
•                                                -From C.W. Brister, Pastoral Care in the Church
  

Why Follow?

The people did not follow Moses because they thought he had a good idea. The people followed Moses because they sensed that God truly sent him, that his mission was God inspired. They believd that God was behind the mission, and so they followed the one who articulated God's call.
                                                              - George Cladis, Leading the Team-Based Church (p51)

God

God is not a bureau

                                    -Millard Erickson, Christian Theology

Nothing

Where there is nothing sacred, there is nothing.

                                                                              -Phillip Rieff, My Life among the Deathworks

Speed

Spiritual growth does not happen by running faster.  What keeps many of us from growing is not sin but speed. We are going as fast as we can, living life at a dizzying speed, and God is nowhere to be found. We're not rejecting God: we just don't have time for him. We've lost him in the blurred landscape as we rush to church. We don't struggle with the Bible, but the clock. It's not that we're too decadent; we're too busy. We don't feel guilty because of sin, but because we have no time for our spouses, our children, or our God. It's not sinning too much that's killing our souls; it's our schedule that's annihilating us. Most of us don't come home at night staggering drunk. Instead, we come home staggering tired, worn out, exhausted, and drained because we live too fast.

If we want to stay on the road of faith, we have to hit the brakes, pull
over to a rest area, and stop. Christianity is not about inviting Jesus to
speed through life with us; it's about noticing Jesus sitting at the rest
stop.

                                                                     -Michael Yaconelli, Messy Spirituality

Water Under the Bridge?

What is infinitely more interesting, however, is not how far we have taken ourselves from what was intended, but how powerful and unrelenting our yearning remains even now in spite of all the water under the bridge... Our soul sings when properly reminded of the courage and goodness for which we were made and we weep when we look upon our moments of failure. Hallelujah, for by this we know that the heart of our maker lives. It still pounds within us: muffled, neglected, stifled, denied and stricken. And yet beating, wooing, yearning, weeping. Who we truly are and were meant to be is evidenced more by our yearnings than by our history. This is the grace of God that even now he sets before us a pathway to courage and boldness of heart.















                                                          -Gary Haugen, Just Courage

The Spiritual Sensualist

 

...I realized that in so much of my life I had been a spiritual sensualist, always wanting to feel God's presence in my prayers and feeling depressed when I didn't. I saw that until I could believe without spiritual goose pimples I would always be vacillating, and my faith would be at the mercy of my emotional feelings.  So I tried this praying whether I felt spiritual or not; and for the first time in my life found that we can live on raw faith. I found that very often the very act of praying this way brings later a closer sense of God's presence. And I realized a strange thing: that if a person in his praying has the feeling, he doesn't really need the faith. I began to feel very tender toward God on those mornings during which I would pray without any conscious sense of His Presence. I felt this way because at last I was giving back to Him the gift of faith.
                                                                        -Keith Miller, The Taste of New Wine

The Wrath of God

If we don't feel the need for atonement, it's probably because we assume God has the same nonchalant attitude toward evil that we do. But he doesn't. God has a total, unremitting hatred for sin and injustice. His response to sin is extreme righteous anger.  The Bible calls this God's wrath. Some people are repulsed by the idea of God being a God of wrath. But if you think about it, a God who doesn't hate evil is terrifying.  True goodness hates evil. True righteousness and justice must stand in opposition to injustice and unrighteousness. God's wrath, writes John Stott, "is in fact his holy reaction to evil."
                                                                             -Joshua Harris, Dug Down Deep

Measureless

 

To say that God is infinite is to say that he is measureless.  Measurement is the way created things have of accounting for themselves. It describes limitations, imperfections, and cannot apply to God. Weight describes the gravitational pull of the earth upon material bodies; distance describes intervals between bodies in space; length means extension in space, and there are other familiar measurements such as those for liquid, energy, sound, light, and numbers for pluralities. We also try to measure abstract qualities, and speak of great or little faith, high or low intelligence, large or meager talents.

Is it not plain that all this does not and cannot apply to God? It is the way we see the works of his hands, but not the way we see him. He is above all this, outside of it, beyond it. Our concepts of measurement embrace mountains and men, atoms and stars, gravity, energy, numbers, speed, but never God. We cannot speak of measure or amount or size or weight and at the same time be speaking of God, for these tell of degrees and there are no degrees in God. All that he is he is without growth or addition or development. Nothing in God is less or more, or large or small. He is what he is in himself, without qualifying thought or word. He is simply God.

                                                                                  -A W Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy

Finishing

"And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ."
                                                                                  -Philippians 1:6

God will never disown you. He will never give up on you. He will never regret the price he paid to adopt you into his family. And he will never set aside the sanctifying process he began in you on the day of your salvation.

More than likely you will go through occasional times when God seems distant or you're losing your spiritual edge. In those seasons perhaps even your desire to grow in godliness will break down. But your feelings don't represent all that is true. God is still at work in you. In fact, many people will say that their times of deepest struggle became game-changes because of what they were forced to learn about God and life when put to the test. What was theory became belief. What was presumption became conviction...Because God finishes what he starts.

                                                                                  -Tim Grissom and John Majors

Everywhere and Nowhere

Philosophy and science have not always been friendly toward the idea of God, the reason being that they are dedicated to the task of accounting for things and are impatient with anything that refuses to give an account of itself.  The philosopher and the scientist will admit that there is much that they do not know; but that is quite another thing from admitting that there is something which thy can never know, which indeed they have no technique for discovering. To admit that there is one who lies beyond us, who exists outside of all our categories, who will not be dismissed with a name, who will not appear before the bar of our reason, nor submit to our curious inquiries: this requires a great deal of humility, more than most of us possess, so we save face by thinking God down to our level, or at least down to where we can manage Him. Yet how He eludes us! For He is everywhere while he is nowhere, for "where" has to do with matter and space, and God is independent of both. He is unaffected by time or motion, is wholly self-dependent and owes nothing to the worlds his hands have made.
                                                      -A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy

Work

"Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you."            
                                    -Jesus (John 6:27)

How do you get up in the morning and go to work not for the food that perishes--not mainly for the profit?  This is really a spiritual discovery, attained through much prayer and longing...Yes, labor, but do not labor for the food that perishes. Go ahead and purchase, but act as though you have no goods. Do your business dealings, but stay free from them. The financial outcome of these is not your life...

Christ has lifted the curse of work. He has replaced anxious toil with trust in God's promise to supply our needs and has thus awakened in us a different passion in our work. We turn with joy to the call of Jesus: Seek the kingdom of God first...Labor to love people and honor God...Stop thinking mainly of profitability , and think mainly of how helpful your product or service can become.
                                    -John Piper, Don't Waste Your Life

Listening?

If God speaks not to us, then we are imagining him and all our time and energy thinking about God and praying to God and donating to God and discussing God is a fantasy and a self-invention.  At best a soothing distraction, at worst playing with razor blades.

The Pessimist

Not many years ago when I was an atheist, if anyone had asked me, ‘Why do you not believe in God?’ my reply would have run something like this:  ‘Look at the universe we live in.  By far the greatest part of it consists of empty space, completely dark and unimaginably cold...Earth herself existed without life for millions of years and may exist for millions more when life has left her.  And what is it like while it lasts?  It is so arranged that all the forms of it can live only by preying upon one another.  In the lower forms this process entails only death, but in the higher there appears a new quality called consciousness which enables it to be attended with pain...In the most complex of all creatures, Man, yet another quality appears, which we call reason, whereby he is enabled to foresee his own pain which henceforth is preceded with acute mental suffering, and to foresee his own death while keenly desiring permanence.  It also enables men by a hundred ingenious contrivances to inflict a great deal more pain than they otherwise could have done...Every race that comes into being in any part of the universe is doomed; for the universe, they tell us, is running down...All stories will come to nothing: all life will turn out in the end to have been a transitory and senseless contortion upon the idiotic face of infinite matter.  If you ask me to believe that this is the work of a benevolent and omnipotent spirit, I reply that all the evidence points in the opposite direction.  Either there is no spirit behind the universe, or else a spirit indifferent to good and evil, or else an evil spirit.’

There was one question which I never dreamed of raising.  I never noticed that the very strength and facility of the pessimists’ case at once poses us a problem.  If the universe is so bad, or even half so bad, how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator?  Men are fools, perhaps; but hardly so foolish as that.  The direct inference from black to white, from evil flower to virtuous root, from senseless work to a workman infinitely wise, staggers belief.  The spectacle of the universe as revealed by experience can never have been the ground of religion: it must always have been something in spite of which religion, acquired from a different source, was held.

CS Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Bondage

“They, then, are but abandoned and ungrateful wretches, in deep and fast bondage to that malign spirit, who complain and murmur that men are rescued by the name of Christ from the hellish thralldom of these unclean spirits, and from a participation in their punishment, and are brought out of the night of pestilential ungodliness into the light of most healthful piety.  Only such men could murmur that the masses flock to the churches and their chaste acts of worship, where a seemly separation of the sexes is observed; where they learn how they may so spend this earthly life, as to merit a blessed eternity hereafter; where Holy Scripture and instruction in righteousness are proclaimed from a raised platform in presence of all, that both they who do the word may hear to their salvation, and they who do it not may hear to judgment. And though some enter who scoff at such precepts, all their petulance is either quenched by a sudden change, or is restrained through fear or shame.  For no filthy and wicked action is there set forth to be gazed at or to be imitated but either the precepts of the true God are recommended, His miracles narrated, His gifts praised, or His benefits implored.”
                                                                                                   -Augustine, The City of God

Here is Augustine, referring to those who criticize and malign the Christians and their God.  Blaming them for bringing the anger of the gods, the dissolution of society, and all sorts of other evils.  In great detail, he points out that their accusations are baseless, and truly illogical from start to finish.  In the end, the only explanation that makes sense is that those who are criticizing them are in bondage to the demons that they worship.

So it is today.  And like Augustine, we must go to great pains to argue and persuade. To plead and teach and show the truth.  But in the end we need to realize, as he did, that our detractors are caught in a trap.  They are in bondage to something greater than themselves, and beyond their control.  The way to break this bondage is the word of God.  Spoken, taught, and lived out in the lives of Christians in the world.  In a world that criticizes, the Christian when hit leaks out truth and light.  In a world that laughs, the Christian becomes Christ to them, for it is Christ who was mocked first.  And in a world that takes even the life from the man or woman of God, it is blood mixed with the blood of Christ, the very drink that will sustain the seeker in his journey to the kingdom.

你从远处知道我的意念

From psalm 139, when talking to God: “you from a distance know my ideas and thoughts.”

The self.  “know thyself.”  “Find yourself.”  These are the messages surrounding us moderns.  Not a new idea, of course, to know the self was a popular goal for the Greek philosophers such as Socrates and Pythagoras.  Emerson’s poem “Find yourself” shows our American attachment to the same philosophy.

  “Give up to thy soul—

  let it have its way—

  It is, I tell thee, God himself…”

We have heard and spoken the response to this philosophy:

“I am going to college to find myself”

“I am going to the mountain to find myself”

“I will be on a trip to India”

“I need to leave this marriage”

The desperate search to find the hope, the truth, the God that hides inside.  Are we certain that this philosophy we have been given is based on reality?

Of course it is useful and wise to know and consider one’s own strengths and weaknesses.  To ignore them is to waste one’s talents, or blindly go to fail, not understanding one’s limitations.

But the problem for most of us lies not in missing an adequate self-assessment, but in that self-obsession that so easily traps us.  The lies that our society tells us keep us solidly locked up:  all that matters is you.  You must take care of yourself alone.  God ultimately is to be found inside yourself.

In this face of this we see the spiritual cry from Psalm 139, a man looking outside of himself.  He says to the other (not the self): You.  And realizes that his thoughts and ideas are not themselves God.  As if God were an imagination, a contemplation.  But that God is the ultimate “Other” that our soul has missed all along, searching within the self.  God defined not by me, by my whims and moods, but God a real person with real attributes and independent concerns, revealed to us, declared to us, introduced to us.  And this God sees my thoughts, ideas, drams, plans.  And this God sees the reality of me, only partly known by me despite my endless mining.  And of course only partly formed as incomplete without the God relationship.

And in that connection with the Other we actually find our true self.  Not in self-contemplation until we imagine a divinity.  Nor in a self-serving attempt to enjoy the meaningless life that we “find ourselves” with.  But in connection with the Other.

Let us enter into this relationship.  And marvel at it!  Not that we are willing to open our heart to God, but that God, the unknowable Other, consents to relate to us.  Who never ceases takes pointed interest in our thoughts.  Those self-absorbed, narcissistic thoughts, ideas, plans, that cage us in the first place.  For God sees, God knows, God redeems even that.

Apologizing

Do you think that you have discovered something new and unusual in your doubts towards the teachings of the church and of the scripture?  You have questioned God and said:  how can a loving God cause or allow all of the bad things that I see to happen?

Religious people, trying to defend God, have made excuses for God in an attempt to answer this question.  The apologist goes to the world to apologize for the sins of God.  We are told to have patience with God, to forgive God.

But what of God’s word to us?  Has not God answered this question, surely burning on the hearts of people since the beginning of time?

No.

The word from God does not answer this question!  It is silent.  You can look and search in your bible and you will not find the answer.  You can find people asking the question.  You can find some peoples’ answer to the question, just like anywhere and anytime you could find peoples’ answers to the questions of the day. 

Most of the book of Job in the bible is Job asking this question of God.  His friends take up chapter after chapter giving their weak an hollow answers, expounding and “apologizing” and criticizing with great poetry and structure and argument.  And yet at the end of it all, God tells them they are ignorant, proud, and wasting time with their speeches.  And when you expect God to answer, he does not, at least not a direct answer, an explanation, as we would request of him.

Then what do we do, where do we go with this question?

Perhaps God is answering, through a story.  A story that requires listening to God.  That we give God our attention for a moment instead of insisting that all eyes stay on ourselves and our questions.

And it turns out that God does have a story. A love story.  An adventure story.  A story of sacrifice, of death and destruction, of life and forgiveness.  A story for all times and all places.  It is the story of God.  Nowhere does God say “stop asking your questions.”  But listening to a story does require a certain pause in one’s speech.  And an honest question does pause for an answer does it not?

Who is Watching You?

The Hawthorne Effect is a very interesting phenomenon. The term was coined in 1955 when reviewing experiments done earlier at the Hawthorne Works factory near Chicago. Simply, it is the increased productivity that occurs when workers are being observed. In medicine, it could be considered that improvement that occurs in a patient simply by the doctor measuring his or her symptoms or illness. This is part of the "placebo effect."

The concept is in the Bible as well. Ephesians 6:6 says when working, don't just work hard when you are being watched (ophthalmodoulia), of course implying that is what happens. The Christian is to be a faithful, hard-working servant, working for God and not for man. The believer is one who knows that someone is actually watching him or her at all times. How few of us fit this category, if measured by our behavior?

speak

God, speak to me

I speak

No, I want loud, I want audible, I want thunder.

You want crazy.

Not crazy, just you speaking to me, showing me the way.

The way I already showed you.

What you mean is, I spend more of my time off of the path than on it, I know that. Maybe if you would speak to me, that would help.

Would it?

Please just speak to me.

I speak

If you speak, I will hear, I will know. Others will hear, others will know.

What does your doctor say?

My doctor? I am a doctor. Oh, what would the doctor say if I told him I heard audible voices of God? He would say I was crazy.

Would do you say?

I would say I was crazy, too. My ingrained teaching, my habit, my work, my references, all say that. I see, they are built on a foundation that rejects the entire concept of God interacting with people. The materialistic foundation that rejects all that cannot be explained by cause and effect in a scientific experimental model. Really, the foundation of all of my training and education is a rejection of God.
…
I should rather be asking the question: how is it that you can communicate with me at all?

I am God.

Yes, but how is it that you can reach someone with a foundation, an education, a language, which rejects you?

I am God.

I see you using others. Others who know you, who share my language, my culture, my foundation. They speak of you as if you are real, as real as dinner, as rocks, as light. They trust in you as a real person, more than just a concept. But they start with a concept sometimes to get there. A concept like e=mc2, which I don’t understand, but I know is true. Concepts resonate with me, with my foundation. I take e=mc2 on faith, and I can be unhindered in faith with that realization.
…
I see you using other cultures and places. I see in rural Africa, people believe and hear and see, things that I would say are crazy. To me, they are unscientific, they are unenlightened. And I have things to share with them, ways to free them from superstition. But they have things to share with me, ways to free me from a hobbling walk, to enable me to fly a flight of faith.