R.P. Nettelhorst's Blog, page 129

Mistaking Your Will For God’s

Josiah mistook his own will for God’s will–and it cost him his life. (2 Kings 23:29-30, 2 Chronicles 35:20-25) Josiah was a king of Judah noted for having restored the proper worship of Yahweh and for eliminating idols throughout the land. It was during his reign that the “book of the Law,” commonly thought to be the book of Deuteronomy, was rediscovered.

During his reign, the king of Egypt, Neco, took his army north toward a place called Carcemesh, to align himself with the Assyrians against the Babylonians led by Nebuchadnezzar’s father. To get there, he had to pass through Josiah’s kingdom. Josiah denied him passage and went out to fight him on the battlefield. In the resulting war, Josiah was killed. Neco ultimately got to Carchemesh, but the delay hurt and in the end, both he and the Assyrians were defeated by the Babylonians, who became the new dominant power in the Middle East. Within a decade, Nebuchadnezzar marched down upon Judah and conquered it. In the end, he would burn Jerusalem and destroy its temple, besides deporting the upper class of Judah to exile in Babylon.

Neco had told Josiah, when Josiah first threatened him: “What quarrel is there between you and me, O king of Judah? It is not you I am attacking at this time, but the house with which I am at war. God has told me to hurry; so stop opposing God, who is with me, or he will destroy you.” (2 Chronicles 35:21)

It’s Not Always All About You

David wanted to build God a temple. He told the prophet Nathan about his plans and Nathan happily lets him know that it sounds like a great idea to him. Only later, after God talked to Nathan, did Nathan have to go back to David and let him know that God did not want him to build a temple after all. In the first place, Nathan explained, as God pointed out, it’s not like he was in need of a home. Second, the tabernacle—a portable tent—had served well for a few hundred years now and God had never voiced any complaints about the arrangement. And finally, although a temple was fine, David’s violence over the years made him not the right man to do the job. Instead, the job of building a temple would go to his son, Solomon. (1 Samuel 7:1-29)

Sometimes we see the goal of God. But sometimes that goal is not for us. We can see the Promised Land, but we’re not allowed to enter it. There are other people in the world besides us, and there are other people in the world that God is working with and through. Just because it’s a good idea and just because God wants to do it, does not mean that you’re the one for the job. God does have a plan for your life; but you’re not alone in having a plan. God is God and you’re not.

* * *

My novel, Somewhere Obscurely, is now available as a free e-book for the Kindle on Amazon. It is normally $7.99; it will remain free through Saturday, January 5, 2013.

Murder. Kidnap. Slavery. Then the real trouble began.

Mohado — vulgar term applied to timeslipped workers. Living as virtual slaves, these desparate workers move back and forth through time at the whims of their employers. This is Aramond Smith O’Reilly’s life. Witness to his mother’s murder, kidnapped, and sold into a life of misery… He will never know where – or when – he will be. After escaping wretched conditions, Aramond rises above his situation. Purchasing a timeship, he becomes the very thing mohados dread and fear: a coyote–one of those who transports and delivers the workers to those who would exploit them.

The Way of Moses

When Moses murdered an Egyptian, it was an example of good intentions gone wrong. Moses witnessed one of his fellow Israelites being abused by an Egyptian overseer. Appalled at the injustice of it all, he sought to right the wrong himself and killed the abusive Egyptian. Rather than being greeted as a liberator by his people, the next day when Moses sought to break up a fight between two Israelites, one of them asked him, “Who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian?” (Exodus 2:14)

Terrified, Moses realized that what he’d done was now public knowledge; his fears were confirmed when the Pharaoh sought to have him caught and executed. Running for his life, he fled to Midian, married a local girl, and spent the next forty years tending sheep.

Moses was right to be concerned about the Israelites. God was concerned too–and he had a plan. But just because Moses was concerned and had tried to rectify an injustice, didn’t mean that God endorsed his approach. Moses was right to want to see justice done. Moses was even right that God wanted Moses to be the one to do something about it. But: Moses was wrong about the method and timing. He had to wait 40 years for God’s plans to come to fruition.

Good intentions are not enough. The rightness of our cause is not enough. We must learn God’s way and then act, when he let’s us know the method and timing are right. There is sometimes a big difference between our way and God’s way, even when both are aiming for the same destination.

Being Ezekiel

Ezekiel was God’s prophet to his people in Babylonian exile. God used him to speak his words and also used him to illustrate those words, whether by odd behavior (such as laying siege to a brick with toys) or making him mute except on those occasions when God wanted him to proclaim a message. The worst illustration that God ever asked of him came when God informed Ezekiel that the love of his life, his beloved wife, would die. Not only would she die, but he must make a point not to show sadness: no tears and no changing of clothing as would be customary. His grief must remain bottled up inside, where no one could see it. When those around him asked him about his peculiar behavior, he gave them the explanation: God’s temple was going to be destroyed. Like Ezekiel with his wife’s death, the people of Israel would have no opportunity to mourn: not for the loss of the sanctuary, or the death of the remaining Israelites in Jerusalem.

Even when we understand God’s reason for doing something, we may not like it or agree with it. Was the death of Ezekiel’s wife really the only way God had of making a particular point with his people? It is reminiscent of the man blind since birth, who suffered his whole life until he was past forty, simply so that Jesus could come, heal him and thereby show “the glory of God” (see John 9:3).

When something bad happens to us, we would like to be able to ask God, “why” believing naively that his answer would satisfy us and then we’d be okay with the tragedy. Ezekiel’s story illustates that such naivete is mistaken. Pain still sucks, whether you know the why of it or not, whether you can, in some abstract way make sense of it. Ezekiel knew exactly why his wife died. It doesn’t necessarily mean that he was satisfied by that knowledge. He still wanted to cry–and even that small relief was denied him. (Ezekiel 24:15-27)

God is Still Near

When facing problems that won’t leave, God is still near. An otherwise unknown author named Asaph wrote a Psalm reflecting the darkness that sometimes afflicts the human heart. He opens his poem by writing,

I cried out to God for help; I cried out to God to hear me.

When I was in distress, I sought the Lord; at night I stretched out untiring hands and my soul refused to be comforted.

I remembered you, O God, and I groaned; I mused, and my spirit grew faint.

You kept my eyes from closing; I was too troubled to speak. (Psalm 77:1-4)

What exactly is troubling Asaph? He doesn’t say. The value for the reader is the universal applicability of his feelings. Whether we’ve experienced the loss of a loved one, the breakup of a relationship, financial setbacks or illness, the words express the misery of the human heart in turmoil. Asaph wants God to make the pain go away; he wants to experience peace, calmness, and comfort. But despite all his tears, all his pleading, comfort never comes. God does not break through the clouds. Instead, the gloom remains.

Devastated now by both his problems and the refusal of God to respond to him in his hour of need, he casts about fitfully, wondering what he can possibly do.

Then it comes to him: he will remember God’s faithfulness in times past. He will recall the character and actions of God in other situations, other moments, and comfort himself with the notion that, even though his heart is broken with no healing in sight, he will choose to believe that God is there and that God has not abandoned him, regardless of how it looks just now. If God could rescue the Israelites from Egypt, bringing them through what seemed the insurmountable barrier of the Red Sea, then God will surely see Asaph through his current crisis.

Near the end of his poem Asaph comments that God led the Israelites through the sea, “though your footprints were not seen.” Asaph can’t see God, but then neither could the Israelites. Not seeing God at work does not mean that God isn’t.

Faith

Naaman learns that healing doesn’t take much faith. Naaman was a general in the Syrian army. One of his servants, a girl, had been captured and enslaved from Israel. One day she told Naaman’s wife about a prophet in Israel named Elisha that she thought would be able to cure Naaman of the leprosy that he suffered with.

Naaman approached his king and asked permission to go to Israel to find this prophet. The king granted him the permission and off he went. Finally reaching the home of Elisha, Elisha didn’t even bother to come to the door. Instead, he sent a messenger telling Naaman to “Go, wash yourself seven times in the Jordan, and your flesh will be restored and you will be cleansed.”

Angry, Naaman stormed off complaining that he expected the prophet to come out and call on the name of his God and wave his hand over the leprous spot. Besides, he knew that the rivers of his homeland were far better than the Jordan. Why couldn’t he just bathe in those if that’s all it took?

One of Naaman’s servants, however, told him “My father, if the prophet had told you to do some great thing, would you not have done it? How much more, then, when he tells you, ‘Wash and be cleansed’!” (2 Kings 5:13)

So, Naaman went on down to the Jordan and did what Elisha had told him to do and his leprosy was cured. From that moment on, Naaman became a worshipper of Yahweh.

Jesus pointed out that one needed faith no bigger than a mustard seed to move mountains. The quantity or even the quality of the faith seems to be unimportant. How much you think a given course of action will be successful doesn’t seem to count at all. Rather, what matters is what you put your faith in–and do you act upon it? Naaman merely went through the motions, doing what the crazy prophet told him to do. He chose to act as he was told to act. And it worked. Despite the fact that his belief mostly came after God cured him.

Whether you believe the medicine will make you better, if you believe enough to simply take it like your doctor tells you, you’ll get well. The medicine acts no matter how little you believe in it. It is putting feet to your faith that makes stuff happen. Just do it, as Nike would say. Faith is a choice; that’s all: it’s not complicated or some deep, spiritual feeling. And it comes down to this question: does God exist? Can God do what he says he’ll do? Then live accordingly. Believe what he has promised and choose to live that way.

A One Star Review

One star reviews are an inevitable sort of thing—akin to death and taxes. If you write, you’re going to experience rejection from editors, publishers and agents. The value of those rejections is that they give you calluses on your heart and mind of such massive thickness that the one star reviews (and their close cousins, the two star reviews) that arrive after having an editor and publisher actually like you, no longer bother you quite as much. Instead, they are mostly amusing.

All right: and also somewhat, maybe a little, annoying.

Obviously, you are never going to please everyone with what you write. Those responsible for making Mystery Science Theater 3000 (and now RiffTrax) have a list of some of the worst movies ever made. They are experts in such things. Near the top of their list are the Twilight movies. And yet, despite their opprobrium, and that of many other critics, there are also far more people who think the Twilight films and books are wonderful—and the filmmakers have certainly made a bundle thanks to them.

The sort of books that I think generate the worst sort of one star reviews are books having to do with politics or religion. Nothing brings out negativity in some people more than politics and religion: the frothing at the mouth, wish you were dead, you should burn in Hell sort of opposition. I’m not sure that the Twilight books and movies generate the same level of heat.

Thus, given that my non-fiction books are religious in nature, the negative reviews are profoundly negative. I noticed a new one yesterday on Amazon for my book The Bible’s Most Fascinating People. It is the only negative review of that book.

The review struck me as somewhat incoherent. The headline the critic put to his review was “spiritual suicide: hijacked by intellect”. All lower case. Then, after putting me in league with false prophets and false teachers—and quoting relevant Bible passages to make his point—there was this confusing sentence: “Though I cannot give a fully accurate view of his disagreement with the Word of God’s claim, here are some general observations of mine and disagreements with Nettelhorst, to the best of my understanding:”

So. Even though he “cannot accurately say” how I disagree with the Bible, he is certain that I somehow do. Thus, I had to assume that he intended to inaccurately say how I disagree with the Bible. He managed much in the way of inaccuracy. For multiple paragraphs.

What got me annoyed most was his quotation of a line in my introduction (with a misspelling I didn’t have and without quotation marks), followed by his comment in parentheses:

…Is the Bible true? Are Shakespear’s plays? (rhetorical questions leading to the answer: NO)

Um. Wrong answer. Kind of opposite of my answer, really. He seems to have completely missed my point, which was to address those who attack the Bible in ways they would never think to criticize other literature, as well as to suggest that a lot of people who read the Bible are missing what it’s all about and getting bogged down with nonissues: i.e., if you’re trying to prove or disprove if it’s possible for someone to survive in a giant fish for three days, you’re not really getting the point of Jonah’s story.

Oddly, my critic admits that the issues he has are minor, even as he concludes that I am therefore leading people to Hell: “Whereas this may seem picky, it is these types of variations that draw us away from the Good News.”

Oh. And apparently my critic didn’t read anything beyond my two page introduction. Printed with large type.

The Poor in Spirit

According to Jesus in Matthew 5:1-16, the poor in spirit are blessed. In the message that Jesus preached on a mountainside, sometimes referred to as the Sermon on the Mount, he gives a series of statements known as the beatitudes, which begins with the phrase, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:3) Jesus makes use of a technique common in Hebrew literature that grows out of the parallelistic nature of Hebrew poetry, where instead of rhyming sounds, ideas are “rhymed” or repeated. The technique when it is used in narrative can be described as “newspaper style.” That is, just as a newspaper article will summarize its entire contents in the first paragraph, so in Hebrew, the first line of a narrative will often summarize what will then be expanded upon in the lines that follow. Thus, in his beatitudes, Jesus sets out to explain or define, in the lines that follow his opening statement, just who the “poor in spirit” might be, as well as giving some sense of the nature of “the kingdom of heaven.”

So who are “the poor in spirit?” The poor in spirit mourn, are meek, hunger and thirst for righteousness, are pure in heart, are peacemakers, and are persecuted. The first line, in verse 3 ends with the phrase “kingdom of heaven” and likewise, the last verse, verse 10, ends with the same phrase, tying the whole passage neatly together.

And what is the “kingdom of heaven?” The kingdom of heaven is described as a place where the poor in spirit are comforted, inherit the earth, are filled, shown mercy, see God, and are called the children of God.

On a side note, there is nowhere in the New Testament where Jesus describes the kingdom of heaven as being like the Roman Empire, or even like the Davidic kingdom. But of course that makes sense, given what Jesus says in Luke 17:20-21:

Once, on being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, “The coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is in within you.”

Don’t Despair

Doing what God asks you to do may not work at first or the way you expected. When Moses reluctantly returned to Egypt, he knew what his job was supposed to be. He was supposed to go to the Pharaoh of Egypt and demand that the Israelites be permitted to go worship God for three days. In reality, he was to lead the Israelites to freedom from slavery for good and lead them back to the land from which their ancestors had left over four hundred years previously. To help him convince both the Israelites and the Pharaoh to listen, God had given him a couple of impressive signs to perform.

His confidence was shattered, however, when Pharaoh not only turned down his request, but actually made life even more difficult for the Israelites he had hoped to rescue. Angry and upset, he prayed, “O Lord, why have you brought trouble upon this people? Is this why you sent me? Ever since I went to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has brought trouble upon this people, and you have not rescued your people at all.” (Exodus 5:22-23).

In response, God reassured Moses and told him to simply be patient, it would eventually work out—after God sent ten plagues against Egypt that almost destroyed the country. The process took at least a year, maybe more. This was neither the way nor the length of time that Moses had anticipated. Doing what God wanted took a lot more time and energy than he expected. And of course, once the people were rescued, the short trip to the Promised Land ended up being a nightmare forty years in the making.

Just because the going gets harder, just because you face opposition and disappointment, just because it doesn’t work the first time or even the hundredth time, does not necessarily mean that you’re going the wrong way.

Someone once wrote that if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Someone else wrote that only a fool believes that the same procedures that failed before will work if you try it again and again. There comes a time, some say, to stop beating a dead horse.

“I know this is where God wants me to be. I’m so thankful he’s given me the opportunity to be at this college.”

My fellow classmate had stood up in chapel service and voiced his enthusiasm. With high school behind him, new textbooks, new classes, new dorm room, and new friends, at eighteen the world was full of exiting possibilities and boundless hope.

Two weeks later he was in my dorm room, his face betraying his inner despair. “I always got A’s in high school. I don’t understand what happened.” He showed me his first paper, a five page effort produced for his biology class. A bright red C lit up the corner of the front page, just below his name. “I just don’t know any more if this is where God wants me to be after all.”

Frank Herbert became a very famous science fiction novelist. His best known novel, Dune, which has been made into both a major motion picture as well as a mini-series on the Science Fiction Channel, was rejected by over twenty publishers before it was finally picked up by one that normally only published manuals for repairing cars. If, after sending his book to nineteen publishers and being told “no thank you” had he decided that it simply wasn’t meant to be and he should take up ditch digging instead, both he and the world would have been worse off. Failure does not come from things not working smoothly or the way you expected. Failure comes from giving up. Winston Churchill is quoted as giving a very short commencement address once. He told the new graduates a very simple thing: “Never, never, never give up.” And then he sat back down. He knew whereof he spoke: most of his political career he was a back bencher, rising to become prime minister only after years of ridicule and having been written off at an age when most people would be long retired—and then to face a crisis of unprecedented horror such as the world, and Great Britain, had never faced before.

Complaining is Okay

Accepting God’s will does not mean no complaining. Feeling the need to complain when things don’t go as you’d like is part of being a normal human being; and it is important to be honest with God rather than to pretend. Job’s life had turned from wonderful to horrible in a matter of days. It was nothing that Job had done or not done. He was a good man. In fact, God himself said that Job was righteous and that the death of all his children, loss of wealth, and the loss of his health was “without cause.” Job’s friends were convinced that he’d committed some horrible sin and if only he’d confess, all could be well again. Job knew better and simply complained about his fate. He was willing to accept whatever came his way, commenting at one point, “the Lord gives and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord.” But that didn’t keep him from voicing how he felt about his circumstances. He didn’t try to pretend he was okay, or that he wasn’t angry. He told God that he was unhappy with him and that he thought he’d done him wrong. In the end, God agreed with him, telling Job’s “friends” that their ideas about God and what was going on were completely wrong, in contrast to Job whose words had been right. (Job 1:13-22, 9:27-10:1, 42:7-8)

Some Christians get the mistaken idea that they are supposed to be happy regardless of what happens and that it is somehow sinful to get mad at God, let alone to admit to it or to tell him so. But Job tells us that God values honesty in his relationships. After all, he knows what we’re really thinking anyway. Why pretend? Lying isn’t exactly a virtue, whether we’re doing it to ourselves or to a friend or to God.