Balancing Pose

Clues to God's Character

Numbers 32-Deuteronomy 7 (Day 13)

It starts toward the end of Numbers and continues through Deuteronomy: Moses prepares the people for the transition from wilderness wandering, to battle, to settling in the promised land. Moses will not enter the land. If my count is right, Moses himself mentions this three times in the first six chapters of Deuteronomy. He got irritated with the people of Israel. That irritation spilled over into disobedience to God, and so Moses joins the rest of the first generation of those freed from Egypt yet destined to die outside the boundaries of the promised land. 

Boundary Speech: From Remembrance to Trust

Moses’ farewell speech takes place at the edges. The wilderness itself is one giant boundary between slavery and inheritance. Moses himself is near the boundary between life and death.

In this place and time “between,” the speech of Moses itself pivots between remembering and anticipating. He commands the Israelites to remember what God has done for them, to teach it all to their children, and to recognize the ways that God’s actions in their history have shown them God’s loyal character. The memory of God’s faithfulness will (or at least it should) help them trust God when they are in the midst of uncertainties that lie in the future for them. These early chapters of Deuteronomy make the point that God will hold up God’s end of the bargain. God has freed them; God will give them the land.

The pivot from remembering to trusting should work better than it does for most of us. Given what they know of God’s faithfulness, why do the Israelites so quickly and so often fail to trust God in the chapters and books of Scripture yet to come? One might also ask, why do we? 

"Not as the World Gives...."

One of my favorite quotes is a line from Annie Dillard, possibly from Holy the Firm. “Ask. Seek. Knock.” she writes, alluding to Matthew 7:7, “But you have to read the fine print: ‘Not as the world gives do I give to you.’” Maybe trust is so difficult for us because we just forget. We forget about God’s deliverance. We need someone to remind us of God’s past faithful and generous actions, especially when the present and future are frightening. But maybe there is something more than poor memory at play here, too. I wonder if something in us doesn’t know that, even though faithfulness and generosity are elements of God’s character, one may also say of God what Jesus said of himself: “Not as the world gives do I give to you” (John 14:27, RSV). That not-as-the-world giving is not always what we are sure we need. The temptation, then, is to think we might be better off taking matters into our own hands. 

In the readings to come, I’ll be looking for how God’s faithfulness and generosity surprise the Israelites not only because (a) they forgot that God is faithful and generous, but also because (b) they defined faithfulness and generosity rather differently from the way God did.

Why I Hate (Parts of) the Old Testament

Numbers 21-32, especially Numbers 31

There are several reasons I do not like many part of the Old Testament. Numbers 31 represents one of them: so-called holy war. The chapter is one of those “God said to lay waste” chapters. Words like “avenge” and “vengeance” figure prominently. Moses is furious when he finds out that the soldiers who killed all the Midianite men let the women live. He orders the death of any women who have “seduced the People of Israel away from God in that mess at Peor” (31:17, The Message), and so on. 

One of my pastoral colleagues says that he believes this sort of thing in Scripture is a “period piece,” by which he means that Israel saved in its canon the record of how it used to think about God in order to show how its thinking evolved. Ancient Israelites understood God to be commanding them into war and genocide. Later generations would not be so quick to assume that the impulse to war and genocide came from God. In this view, the scripture as a whole is not a moral guide as much as it is a record of the good, the bad, and the ugly as Israel struggled through their history to hear and heed God. Just because something is in the Bible, and just because something is said to bear God’s stamp of approval, that doesn’t mean it went down as God would have wanted. 

This helps a little, but mostly I am still appalled by holy war texts. To get through readings like this, I have to rely on what I know from the New Testament: Jesus never, ever took up arms against his enemies. Yes, he worshiped the God of Israel; yes, he was a Jew. It is also true that he never took up arms. The closest he came was that whip of cords with which he cleared the temple, which was a far cry from the summary execution of “seductresses” in Numbers 31. In Christ, God does not “get a bigger hammer” to solve the problem of human sinfulness. Instead, God absorbs the blows and neutralizes the power of violence by not returning evil for evil. The only way I can read texts like this Midianite massacre is to say that whatever God was thinking and doing then, God was acting in an equally earth-shattering, yet decidely non-violent way, in Jesus of Nazaeth.

Looking Back vs. Living Forward

Numbers 8-21

Over and over again in this section, the Israelites complain about their circumstances in the wilderness, and each time, they bring up Egypt. The wilderness wandering is interminable. How is this better than a life of slavery, punctuated by a decent meal now and then?

“We ate fish in Egypt—and got it free!—to say nothing of the cucumbers and melons, the leeks and onions and garlic” (Num 11:5).

“Why didn’t we die in Egypt? Or in this wilderness? Why has God brought us to this country to kill us? Our wives and children are about to become plunder. Why don’t we just head back to Egypt? And right now!” (Num 14:2-3).

“And why did you take us out of Egypt in the first place, dragging us into this miserable country? No grain, no figs, no grapevines, no pomegranates—and now not even any water!” (Num 20:5, all texts are from The Message).

Going back, rather than forward, often looks like a good strategy. That is never more true than when selective memory has helped you filter out the bad times and romanticize the good. Those of us reading these chapters after having read Exodus know that what the Israelites remember about Egypt is not all there is to the story. These people had been slaves in Egypt. When Moses went to them with news that God had heard their cries and would rescue them, they were too worn down even to hope for an end to their trouble. When Moses asked the Pharaoh to give God’s people time off to worship God in the wilderness, he concluded they had too much free time and simply increased their workload. Now the people of Israel have forgotten all that. When something hard is happening in the wilderness, their first thought is, “If only we were back in Egypt.” 

When we are tempted to look for ways to “go back” to the good old days, it may help to remember a few things the Israelites are having trouble calling to mind here:

1. Life doesn’t run backward. We live our lives in one direction. Remembering is not a bad thing, but recreating or re-living the past is not possible and trying to do it puts us at risk of missing what new things God is doing in our present and future. 
2. The longing to go back is often based in a lie. Were things really the way we remember them? How many lashings did an Israelite slave endure before they went home to a few slices of fresh cucumber? 
3. God is trustworthy, especially when things are hard. We do not need to look back with longing. We will find God not just in the past but also ahead of us, in the future we cannot see yet. 

Timothy Dudley-Smith has written a hymn text, “O Christ the Same,” that puts our lives in the context of the news that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8) and gives us words to offer thanks, not just for the past and present, but also for the future even before it happens. In the last line, we sing, “O Christ the same, beyond our brief tomorrows, we bring you thanks for all that is to be” (text © 1984 Hope Publishing Company).

In What Kind of Lives Does God Work?

Genesis 28-50

The second half of Genesis reads a bit like a script from Dallas or one of those other "big, rich, morally bankrupt family" shows from the 1970s. There are patriarchs, wives, affairs, corrupt business dealings, and underhanded schemes at every turn. Laban would probably win the prize for the most double-crossing of all the double-crossing family members here, but I don't know: Jacob seems to give as good as he gets. Joseph's brothers are in the running too, not only lying to their father about Joseph's death for years, but also selling him into slavery in the first place. And then there's Joseph himself, with his deceptions and set-ups after he recognizes his brothers and before they know they are dealing with him.

The striking thing about these chapters from a theological perspective is that God is at work in the midst of all this violent, creepy, and (we must say) fairly "normal" family life. Tamar plays a prostitute in order to trick the patriarch, Judah, into providing her an heir (cf. Gen. 38). From that heir, the Messiah is a descendent (cf. Matthew 1). Joseph's brothers nearly kill him, then decide to sell him into slavery not out of mercy but merely for more personal gain, and though Joseph's own fortunes are up and down for years, in the end many people are saved from famine because he was eventually in the right place (prison) at the right time (after Pharoah had dreams no one else could interpret).

To the question, "Through what kinds of people does God work for good?" the answer is, "People like you." Your life, with its twists and wrong turns, with its lucky breaks and unlucky mistakes, with its displays of generosity and displays of sin: your life is exactly the kind of life God works in to redeem what has been lost, or stolen, or sold away, and to bless all the nations of the earth.