I'm shoring up a bunch of my musings over the past several months. I write these things in a note in my phone entitled "Writing," hoping that I will have a future time to flesh out the concept further through writing. I usually have to flesh out a bunch of it all at once due to time constraints. I need to start dating each things in the note.
Probably 4-6 months ago I wrote:
“The cycle replayed repeatedly in the Bible: calling, intent to follow, fear, sin, consequences (slavery), crying out, rescue, a journey out of slavery, and a journey to claim promises. We live this cycle over and over in our relationship with God and reality (God). Teaching on recognizing that cycle?”
It's interesting to me that I wrote that several months ago because just a few weeks ago I came across a Youtube video where the OneStory creators explained their story map for the entire Bible which shows how cycles replayed over and over again. Their map teaches students how to recognize the phases. Their phrases are a bit different though: wild place, through the waters, blessing in dry places, covenant, garden, choice, and a seed of promise.
I guess to take the best of both their map and my own concept of the cycle, I might go with:
- Calling / Invitation to the Garden
- Intent to follow
- A choice:
- Fear/Sin (proceed to #4)
- Trust/Surrender (proceed to #7)
- Consequences / slavery / wild place
- Crying out
- Journey out of slavery / through the waters
- Blessing in dry places
- A journey back into the garden / journey to claim promises
- Loop back to #3 sooner or later (at least while on this earth)
A related item from my note:
We can’t stay in the exhilaration of a tune’s crescendo very long. Neither can we spiritually stay in the heights. It is precisely the slower, darker notes which birth the exultation, and they too convey their own beauty.
Next item in my note:
“The resurrection was God’s endorsement of the cross. It shows us that God would rather suffer and die than overcome evil by violence, and it invites us to live by taking up our cross as Christ did. Life through death.”
I’m still wrestling through trying to understand what happened with the cross and Jesus’ life. On the one hand it WAS violence. But was God doing it? Willing it? Was God unleashing His anger on Jesus, or was God with Jesus on the cross, showing us the way forward (life through death)? It seems like pitting God against Jesus doesn’t work, since they are One. And I can’t bring myself to accept concept of an angry God. He clearly set up a universe where sad consequences happen as a result of choices to act contrary to reality – which I think Roman’s 1 calls “wrath.” But I have a hard time calling that anger or even wrath because of what those English words mean (when we talk about them in any human context). God’s version of them has to be something other--something purer and something that is somehow loving/seeking of restoration.
Dallas Willard said,
“I’ll either allow my view of evil to determine my view of God and cut Him down accordingly, or I’ll allow my view of God to determine my view of evil and elevate Him accordingly.”
The problem is, I feel like depending on your chosen systematic theology you can use scripture to support whatever view of God you want to take. This is where I think personal experience with God – via faith (a risky choice to act on the assumption that He’s good and trustworthy)—comes to bare. Often we have to get to a low place to be willing to take that sort of risk. We cry out (#5 above) and decide to head for the Red Sea even though it looks impassible from a human standpoint, but we’re at the end of our rope and willing to give Gods’ a shot. At least that’s what it feels like inside of our heads. In reality I think there’s a drawing, reassuring, fueling, and supernatural enabling on God’s part which facilitates our faith.
As we step into the waters, we see Him hold back the current and make a way forward for us, and we come to know Him experimentally. That experience becomes a data point - a personalized revelation of God inserted into your life. We bring that data with us as we approach scripture, and it helps us to discover truth.
Next note:
“Seeing nature is peering into the mind of God.”
Next note:
“To the degree that I am willing to wrestle with my mind’s dissonance in open conversation with the Creator, I begin to experience the true joy of discovery and I taste what the scriptures call ‘gospel.’”
Next note:
“Jesus always told people who came to Him for healing, ‘your faith has healed you.’ Maybe we should understand, therefore, that spiritual healing is also on offer for those with faith enough to pursue it.”
That’s essentially the choice (#3 above) that Jesus demonstrated and proclaimed. He said that the reign of God was real and presiding over the earth such that anyone could choose to enter it and live by kingdom realities (choosing trust and surrender rather than fear and sin).
Some weeks later I apparently was having the same thought and wrote,
”Jesus regularly told people, 'your faith has healed you.’ What if faith is also what is necessary to experience spiritual healing? Maybe if we were just as aware and desperate about our sin as Bartimaeus was about his blindness, and if we were willing to be persistent and socially unacceptable (even when rebuked) in our pursuit of healing, we might receive healing? Not that we could reach perfection. Bartimaeus’s sight surely maintained the limits common to human eyes. But perhaps we might see real, noteworthy progress—the type of progress that causes those around us to praise the God who still honors faith today.”
Next note:
“Life is like a river.”
I remember this being a big and centering thought that I seemed to receive from God based on the issues I was dealing with in my mind on that day, but didn’t have time to fully flesh out in writing. I think I was envisioning myself floating along in a large, steadily flowing river, accompanied by my family and regularly floating near other people in my vicinity, and regularly passing by / bumping into random debris, rocks, and floating logs. The temptation is to focus solely on those people and situations right around us and forget that the river contains all of it, knows all of it, and continues to move us all along through it. We can choose to fear the course of the river, or we can choose to move with it, watching for where it will go next, and adjusting ourselves accordingly, trusting that the river is worth floating in, and reaching out to help along those floating near us.
“In Him we live and move and have our being.”
Next note is a quote from Tim Mackie from a Bible Project class,
“What’s of value is the substance of what the words are about…” (speaking of scripture), “The words are a vehicle to communicate something that is real—SomeONE that’s real, and because the words are a vehicle, the wording as such is not an end in itself.”
He was speaking about how New Testament authors often quoted the Old Testament in broken and switched around/combined ways rather than doing perfectly verbatim quotes the way our culture does (to avoid the dreaded evil of plagiarism).” This stood out to me because of how I’ve been seeking to understand, in recent years, the mean of Jesus being “The Living Word,” and struggling with the feeling that we sometimes worship scripture over and above God Himself. He inhabits His word, but I think, as Mackie points out, that He is the meaning intended through the words. That is why Jesus, who lived out the intended meaning of the Old Testament can rightly be called the living word. He is the meaning – the substance which inhabits scripture when scripture is engaged with in an open, honest pursuit of truth with the help of the Holy Spirit. That, however, is probably not as common as we might think. We much more often go to scripture with our own agenda, and miss the One who inhabits it.
That's all for now! I shall muse on 😊
