Difficult Passages
I love this phrase: it characterizes many parts of my life.
The first 'difficult passage' in my life must have been my birth. This, fortunately, leaves me with little sense of guilt because my mother maintains that I was an easy birth (no, not an easy lay; my mother is not a hen) and that I "wanted to come out and look around". She was well pleased, as most people think the first birth is the most difficult. But that, I suppose, was not really that difficult a passage to her; it was a difficult passage to me and I am glad I remember none of it.
My mother, however, delights in telling the story of my midnight birth, at which the doctor delivered me and (as was then traditional) was about to whack me on the bum in order to start my breathing. According to her account, I twisted around, looked him in the eye as if to say, "Nothing doing, buster!" and shocked him into almost dropping me. I am sure there is a lot of exaggeration there, but I'm not sure where.
The second kind of difficult passage is the familial trait of spending too much time reading and thinking and thus developing a bad case of the piles, those dreadlocks of the annulus with the spiffy Greek label of 'haemorrhoids'. I am not so unfortunate, but I have had moments of near-misses. (Yes, I am conscious, dear reader, that this post so far has been nothing but an exploration of the nether regions and the odd problems that flesh-and-blood is heir to.)
The third kind of difficult passage is the kind of passage you find in a text which leads you to believe that people are selling you a load of codswallop wrapped up in a tender sheath of baloney. I remember the time I came across this passage in the Bible, in which the hosts of heaven are gathered to the left and right of God. God asks for one of them to volunteer to deceive Ahab into going to his death, and they discuss it. Finally, one brave (and unnamed) spirit of the Host volunteers to be a lying spirit in God's service. God says, "You will persuade him, and prevail; go forth and do so."
That's when I realised that the sons of men are not supposed to bear false witness, but God may do what He wants because he is God. We are told to accept both good and evil from him, but there is no darkness in him. Neither is He a man that He should lie: the answer is given in the form of Balaam's question, which is ambiguous to say the least. The point of all this, which I believe most bible scholars miss, is that the lesson of the Book of Job is the most important lesson. God is never constrained. He has no rules that make any sense; who would set rules for God? You either trust human sense and logic (or faith, or wisdom, or whatever) or you accept that He gave you some rules and never set any for HImself.
The first kind of difficult passage gave me life; the third kind gave me a deeper kind of life. The point of all that stuff is that God has never made it easy; in fact, the easier it looks, the tougher it gets. Those people out there who are happy to receive material wealth and call it the blessing of God are right; but they must also realise it is the poorest blessing of God. Those who receive wisdom and power, likewise. The best gift is the gift of being able to accept that God is God, and every man who says more is a liar.
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Yeah, I realise that some people out there will take offence. But what is beyond doubt is that God allows us to be deceived. In fact, in at least two cases, He allows angelic beings to tempt humans into self-delusion or self-deception. Job wins by sheer stubbornness, Ahab loses by the same but in the wrong direction. No, God never lies. But He certainly makes use of deceivers and other villains: Moses the murderer, Jacob the deceiver, Abraham the Machiavellian warlord, the list is a long one. God is not one for the Pharisees much, He is the God of you and me, the painfully and morally 'normal' members of the human race.
The first 'difficult passage' in my life must have been my birth. This, fortunately, leaves me with little sense of guilt because my mother maintains that I was an easy birth (no, not an easy lay; my mother is not a hen) and that I "wanted to come out and look around". She was well pleased, as most people think the first birth is the most difficult. But that, I suppose, was not really that difficult a passage to her; it was a difficult passage to me and I am glad I remember none of it.
My mother, however, delights in telling the story of my midnight birth, at which the doctor delivered me and (as was then traditional) was about to whack me on the bum in order to start my breathing. According to her account, I twisted around, looked him in the eye as if to say, "Nothing doing, buster!" and shocked him into almost dropping me. I am sure there is a lot of exaggeration there, but I'm not sure where.
The second kind of difficult passage is the familial trait of spending too much time reading and thinking and thus developing a bad case of the piles, those dreadlocks of the annulus with the spiffy Greek label of 'haemorrhoids'. I am not so unfortunate, but I have had moments of near-misses. (Yes, I am conscious, dear reader, that this post so far has been nothing but an exploration of the nether regions and the odd problems that flesh-and-blood is heir to.)
The third kind of difficult passage is the kind of passage you find in a text which leads you to believe that people are selling you a load of codswallop wrapped up in a tender sheath of baloney. I remember the time I came across this passage in the Bible, in which the hosts of heaven are gathered to the left and right of God. God asks for one of them to volunteer to deceive Ahab into going to his death, and they discuss it. Finally, one brave (and unnamed) spirit of the Host volunteers to be a lying spirit in God's service. God says, "You will persuade him, and prevail; go forth and do so."
That's when I realised that the sons of men are not supposed to bear false witness, but God may do what He wants because he is God. We are told to accept both good and evil from him, but there is no darkness in him. Neither is He a man that He should lie: the answer is given in the form of Balaam's question, which is ambiguous to say the least. The point of all this, which I believe most bible scholars miss, is that the lesson of the Book of Job is the most important lesson. God is never constrained. He has no rules that make any sense; who would set rules for God? You either trust human sense and logic (or faith, or wisdom, or whatever) or you accept that He gave you some rules and never set any for HImself.
The first kind of difficult passage gave me life; the third kind gave me a deeper kind of life. The point of all that stuff is that God has never made it easy; in fact, the easier it looks, the tougher it gets. Those people out there who are happy to receive material wealth and call it the blessing of God are right; but they must also realise it is the poorest blessing of God. Those who receive wisdom and power, likewise. The best gift is the gift of being able to accept that God is God, and every man who says more is a liar.
=====
Yeah, I realise that some people out there will take offence. But what is beyond doubt is that God allows us to be deceived. In fact, in at least two cases, He allows angelic beings to tempt humans into self-delusion or self-deception. Job wins by sheer stubbornness, Ahab loses by the same but in the wrong direction. No, God never lies. But He certainly makes use of deceivers and other villains: Moses the murderer, Jacob the deceiver, Abraham the Machiavellian warlord, the list is a long one. God is not one for the Pharisees much, He is the God of you and me, the painfully and morally 'normal' members of the human race.
etched with acid at 11:27:00 pm
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