R.P. Nettelhorst's Blog, page 76

Dependability

The LORD says:

You are my people and nation!

So pay attention to me.

My teaching will cause justice

to shine like a light

for every nation.

Those who live across the sea

are eagerly waiting

for me to rescue them.

I am strong and ready;

soon I will come to save

and to rule all nations.

Look closely at the sky!

Stare at the earth.

The sky will vanish like smoke;

the earth will wear out

like clothes.

Everyone on this earth

will die like flies.

But my victory will last;

my saving power never ends. (Isaiah 51:4-6)

God offers a lifetime warranty like no other. The Earth wearing out like a garment is an image quoted by the author of Hebrews 1:11 as part of his exaltation of the Son of God, who unlike the angels, always was and always will be and who is the creator of the universe.

God’s salvation is not just for the people of Israel; instead, it is for all people everywhere and he told the Israelites that someday soon he would reach them all and rule over all the nations, not just over Israel. Israel had picked up the disease of their neighbors, the delusion that their God was small, ruling over just the lands that Israel called home. To be exiled from one’s homeland was not just to be removed from what you had known, it was also to be removed from the care—and reach—of your god.

But God told them again that he was more than they imagined: he ruled over not just Israel, but all nations and beyond that, the entire universe: look at the sky, he told them, look at the earth; in Hebrew thinking, to refer to heaven and earth in the same passage meant “everything that there is”; it was equivalent to our modern conception of “the universe.” The universe will end, but God will not. Everyone will die, but God will not. Therefore, God can be depended upon.

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Perspective

“Remember this, fix it in mind,

take it to heart, you rebels.

Remember the former things, those of long ago;

I am God, and there is no other;

I am God, and there is none like me.

I make known the end from the beginning,

from ancient times, what is still to come.

I say: My purpose will stand,

and I will do all that I please.

From the east I summon a bird of prey;

from a far-off land, a man to fulfill my purpose.

What I have said, that will I bring about;

what I have planned, that will I do.

Listen to me, you stubborn-hearted,

you who are far from righteousness.

I am bringing my righteousness near,

it is not far away;

and my salvation will not be delayed.

I will grant salvation to Zion,

my splendor to Israel. (Isaiah 46:8-13)

How long a minute is depends on which side of the bathroom door you’re on. God’s sense of quick bears no resemblance to ours. So we need to have the mind of Christ.

The Persians—modern day Iran—is to the east of Israel. The “bird of prey” from the east, “a man to fulfill my purpose” is none other than Cyrus the Great. In Isaiah 45:1 God referred to Cyrus as his “anointed”—the Hebrew word “messiah.” Their captivity in Babylon would end and God would use Cyrus as the instrument to destroy the Babylonian empire and to set his people free. Isaiah’s prophesy came about a hundred years before it would come to pass, and yet God said that his “righteousness is near” and “my salvation will not be delayed.”

When Isaiah prophesied, the Babylonians hadn’t even yet conquered or attacked Jerusalem. The seventy years of captivity were yet far in the future. Before they even needed salvation from the Babylonians, God was already letting them know that he would save them. From a human standpoint, a hundred years doesn’t seem to be very soon. We become annoyed just waiting a couple of seconds for a web page to come up or two minutes for our food to heat in a microwave. God’s perspective is not nearly as rushed as ours.

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Until Your Hair is White

“Listen to me, descendants of Jacob,

all you who remain in Israel.

I have cared for you since you were born.

Yes, I carried you before you were born.

I will be your God throughout your lifetime—

until your hair is white with age.

I made you, and I will care for you.

I will carry you along and save you.

“To whom will you compare me?

Who is my equal?

Some people pour out their silver and gold

and hire a craftsman to make a god from it.

Then they bow down and worship it!

They carry it around on their shoulders,

and when they set it down, it stays there.

It can’t even move!

And when someone prays to it, there is no answer.

It can’t rescue anyone from trouble.

“Do not forget this! Keep it in mind!

Remember this, you guilty ones.

Remember the things I have done in the past.” Isaiah 46:3-7

We’re not on our own. The Assyrians invaded Israel around 722 BC and took captive a little less than 30,000 of the people, mostly the upper classes and the well-to-do: those who were most likely to lead an uprising. God spoke to the Israelites left behind after that destruction, who would be wondering what the future might hold, who might think that God no longer cared about them.

Even though they might not realize it, God had been carrying them, watching them, taking care of them since before they were born and he would continue carrying them until they were old and white-haired. There was no stage of life where God would not be present. They could not get away from him, no matter how hard they might try. There was no way that God had, or ever could, abandon them.

In contrast, the idols that the Israelites had focused so much of their energy on were nothing more than the wood, stone or precious metals out of which they were manufactured. How could God ever be compared to them? They were worthless, but God was valuable: he would always be there for them. We don’t carry idols any longer. But it is all too easy to trust in our jobs, our abilities, our technology. But if the economy goes bad, if we get sick or disabled, if the batteries run out or we can’t find a plug, what then? God never gets sick, his arm is never weak, and his batteries really will keep going and going and going.

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Database Issues

Over the last week or so there have been problems with the database on my website. The company hosting my website has been good about repairing the issues which were apparently related to some of the plugins I was using with the WordPress software. I’m hoping it is fixed and that the site will stay up and running properly for awhile.

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He’ll Be There

Jacob left Beer-sheba and went toward Haran. He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place. And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And the LORD stood beside him and said, “I am the LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, “Surely the LORD is in this place—and I did not know it!” And he was afraid, and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” (Genesis 28:10-17)

God came one dark night. Jacob was desperate, on the run, and everyone was against him. He was scared. Jacob knew he was in trouble. He’d deceived his old father in order to rob his brother of his birthright. Both his father and his brother were understandably mad at him. In fact, his brother had threatened to kill him and so that’s why he’d had to leave home. His mother had arranged his escape, just as she’d arranged for him to steal the birthright. Perhaps, as he lay down to sleep that night alone and forsaken, he wondered whether that had been such a good idea after all—and whether maybe heading off toward his mom’s relatives was such a good idea, either.

Sleeping with a rock for a pillow, he had weird dreams. And then God talked to him and promised him that everything would be okay. His response was to get scared again, since the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. This was his first encounter with God, but would not be his last. Love casts out fear and eventually he would learn to love God instead of being afraid of him. But it would take his whole life. He promised God his devotion, responding to God as human beings always do: first with fear, then with love, knowing that though he was leaving his home, he wouldn’t be alone after all. Our lives teach us that we can trust God to take care of us.

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Rainbows

Again, God said to Noah and his sons:

I am going to make a solemn promise to you and to everyone who will live after you. This includes the birds and the animals that came out of the boat. I promise every living creature that the earth and those living on it will never again be destroyed by a flood.

The rainbow that I have put in the sky will be my sign to you and to every living creature on earth. It will remind you that I will keep this promise forever. When I send clouds over the earth, and a rainbow appears in the sky, I will remember my promise to you and to all other living creatures. Never again will I let floodwaters destroy all life. When I see the rainbow in the sky, I will always remember the promise that I have made to every living creature.” (Genesis 9:8-16)

The need for punishment is long past. On the surface, the story of the post-flood rainbow resembles stories like, “how did the bear lose its tail?” But the story of Noah and the ark was not devised simply to explain where rainbows come from. In fact, rainbows predated the flood, just as circumcision predated Abraham. God simply imbued both the rainbow, and later circumcision, with a new significance: they became signs, or symbols of a contract. They were the equivalent of what we would see later when the patriarchs such as Jacob would set up a stone or a pile of stones to serve as a kind of marker for an agreement, promise, or significant incident. The rainbow served as an everlasting reminder to the human race and to every other creature living on Earth, that God would never again allow all life to be destroyed by a great flood. It also served as a reminder to God. It was an everlasting promise, one that he would always keep and never break, despite the sad reality that human behavior had not changed at all. Soon Noah would be getting drunk. Since Noah, other bad behavior has followed: wars and rumors of wars, murder and violence of every kind.

The reasons for the flood have not gone away; but God will never again punish us like that. Perhaps, therefore, the flood and the rainbow stand as symbols of something else: that Jesus died once for our sins and he never has to do that again. Jesus suffered once for all the punishment we have ever, or will ever, deserve.

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A Female Prophet

Hilkiah the priest, Ahikam, Acbor, Shaphan and Asaiah went to speak to the prophetess Huldah, who was the wife of Shallum son of Tikvah, the son of Harhas, keeper of the wardrobe. She lived in Jerusalem, in the Second District.

She said to them, “This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: Tell the man who sent you to me, ‘This is what the LORD says: I am going to bring disaster on this place and its people, according to everything written in the book the king of Judah has read. Because they have forsaken me and burned incense to other gods and provoked me to anger by all the idols their hands have made, my anger will burn against this place and will not be quenched.’ Tell the king of Judah, who sent you to inquire of the LORD, ‘This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says concerning the words you heard: Because your heart was responsive and you humbled yourself before the LORD when you heard what I have spoken against this place and its people, that they would become accursed and laid waste, and because you tore your robes and wept in my presence, I have heard you, declares the LORD. Therefore I will gather you to your fathers, and you will be buried in peace. Your eyes will not see all the disaster I am going to bring on this place.’”

So they took her answer back to the king. (2 Kings 22:14-20)

Hey, look what we found! During the reign of Josiah, the last good king, the priests discovered a copy of the “book of the Law” while they were renovating the Temple. The book of the law is most likely the book of Deuteronomy, though it’s possible it might be the entire Pentateuch, Genesis through Deuteronomy. Besides not worshipping God like they were supposed to, and besides not loving one another like they were supposed to, the Israelites had misplaced their copy of God’s word to them, a metaphor of how they had misplaced God from their lives. Startled by what they read, the priests took it to the king and read it to him. He reacted by tearing his robes and exclaiming that God was angry at them. So he told the priests to go and find out what God’s intentions were. Was there any hope? Could they fix the problem—pay a penalty short of foreclosure? So Hilkiah, along with other religious and government officials went to Huldah. We know nothing more about her than what is related here.

Upon receiving her message, which was simply a confirmation that they had accurately understood the contract and that indeed, they were in serious trouble with God, the priests and other officials returned to Josiah and relayed her words. Then Josiah went to the Temple, along with a large percentage of the population of Jerusalem. There, he read the words of the contract to the people and renewed it, encouraging them to abide by the terms of what was in the “book of the law.” He knew that the judgment would not come in his day because of Huldah’s words. But he hoped that if he could get his people to genuinely repent—as he had—and thereby gained God’s forbearance. He hoped that the same would happen to his nation as well.

Unfortunately, the people of Judah did not genuinely repent and the judgment that God had long promised came. Ignorance of the law would not protect them. Without repentance, discipline is inevitable. God wants to change our lives for the best. He’ll do whatever it takes to make it happen.

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Learning a Language

During the summer of 1976, between my freshmen and sophomore years of college, I went to Israel and worked on a kibbutz. At the time, I knew no Hebrew at all. By the time I came back to California, well-tanned from working in the banana fields and among the date palms, I had learned a dozen Hebrew songs, a few words and phrases, and I could easily count to ten.

When I returned to college I signed up for an introductory course in Hebrew. It was not modern Hebrew. Since I attended a small Christian liberal arts college, I learned the ancient language of the Old Testament. Even so, the Coca-Cola bottle I had brought back with the odd Hebrew writing quickly became just another Coke bottle: unexceptional and mundane, it’s formerly unfathomable letters transforming into the comprehensible.

Growing up I regularly attended Sunday School. As a child I learned that the Bible had not been written in English, but instead had been written in other languages, specifically Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. My first Bible was only a New Testament. My mom told me I could have the Old Testament along with it once I got older, and so I looked forward to that with great anticipation. Perhaps that longing contributed to my lifelong interest in the Old Testament.

As I became a teenager, I began to have concerns about how reliable the Bible was, especially whether I could I fully trust the translations: could I rely on people I didn’t know to stand between me and what the text actually said? I didn’t really understand the concept of translation. It seemed a profound mystery to me: something secret, something hidden, something reserved for only the elite. I wondered: if I were to learn Hebrew and Greek would I discover the Bible said something other than what I thought it did? Learning that there were other translations of the Bible than the one I had grown up with contributed to my fear that there might be something amiss with what I thought the Bible was all about.

But then, after that first summer in Israel, I found myself starting to peel back the mystery, learning what I had imagined until then that only a select elite could possibly understand.

As I passed my quizzes and the exams, as the grammar and the vocabulary slithered into my brain, it occurred to me that Hebrew was not so mysterious after all: it wasn’t even hard. The ancient Hebrew words in the Bible were no more peculiar, no more mysterious, than the words on the side of that Coke bottle. It was still just Coca-Cola, regardless of the shape of the letters.

My childish thought that translation might be something like twisting the gears on a Cracker Jack decoder ring, where the letter A was now represented by B and so on was of course mistaken. It’s a bit more complex than that, but of course Hebrew is no weirder than Spanish or German. But since there’s more to translation than just using a decoder ring, it also means that there’s no such thing as “literal” translation. The concept of idiom made its way into my head: ways of speaking that we take for granted that make no sense if you tried for literalizing them in translation. I realized that an English phrase like “I’m sick and tired of apple pie” was not so easy to render into another language. If I insisted on literalism instead of finding the equivalent idiom, a Spanish speaker would think that apple pie made me sleepy and nauseous. Like English, Hebrew has idioms and simply accomplishes the same meanings in ways entirely different than we do it in English Hebrew nouns are all masculine or feminine, unlike in English, where most of them are genderless. In English we use forms of the verb “to be” in phrases such as “the man is ugly” or “I am Jane.” Not so in Hebrew. In Hebrew, the same phrase is simply “the man ugly” and “I Jane.” It reminded me of Tarzan-speak.

And so, after three years of ancient Hebrew as an undergraduate, and another four years as a graduate student at UCLA (plus two years of the modern language), I find myself nearly as comfortable with the biblical language as any non-native speaker of a dead language can be. Of course, I suspect a kindergartner in Israel still knows Hebrew better than I ever will.

But now I know that I don’t lose anything much in translation—except for the puns. Those just don’t translate well. And the various translations available of the Bible that one finds in any bookstore are no more questionable or unreliable than the various translations you’ll find there of Homer, Gothe, Dostoevsky , Tolstoy, Dumas or Jules Verne. Of course a translation of Homer made in 2014 will probably be easier reading than one made in 1611, just as J.K. Rowling is easier reading than William Shakespeare.

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Falcon Heavy

Source SPACE.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration.

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Hope

On average, I manage to consume at least two books, usually three or four, every week. I’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember. It started when my mom began taking me to the library when I was very young. My reading fixation has never wavered since, even through college and graduate school.

Though I spend an inordinate amount of time reading science fiction novels, there’s another sort of book that I read through every year. Given that I’m a theologian, college professor, and author of several religious books, it’s no surprise that it’s the Bible. But why do I read it cover to cover every year? Did I lose a bet? Do I do it out of a sense of religious duty?

I read it regularly for the same reason I read anything: entertainment and knowledge. At sixteen, I had never read through the entire Bible even once. All I knew of it were a few bits and pieces, mostly from what I’d heard in Sunday School and church. I decided I needed to learn the book for myself.

Reading through it the first time was eye opening: I discovered stories I’d never heard before. And the ones I had heard before? Sometimes what was written in the Bible was not exactly the way I’d learned it in Sunday School.

When I first started reading the Bible I tended to treat it like the man in the old story who wanted to know what God’s will for his life was each day. One morning he pointed at a spot on the page with his eyes closed. Opening his eyes, he read “Judas hanged himself.” Finding no comfort there, he tried again, only to have his finger land on the phrase, “Go and do thou likewise.” In a panic, he tried a third time, only to read “Whatsoever thou doest, do quickly.” Of course, the Bible is not designed to be used like a Ouija board or Magic Eight Ball. It is not a fortune cookie.

I eventually learned the importance of context: understanding what was happening on the page, as well as taking into consideration the cultural and historical setting. The comfort I could gain from the Bible moved from seeking what mattered to me, to seeking what mattered to God.

As I saw how God worked with the characters in the Bible, learned about their struggles and concerns, I discovered that these ancient individuals faced the same doubts, confusions, and problems that I did. They were just as flawed as me, just as troubled. And God stayed with them regardless. I learned that they didn’t always get the answers they wanted. I learned that they weren’t always comforted. But through it all, they stayed with God anyway.

The stories in the Bible have helped me in times when I couldn’t make sense of my world, when everything was going wrong, and when there seemed to be no hope. I found no guarantees that I’d always get out of my problems, but I did find out that even if I couldn’t understand why, God’s love remained—and He hadn’t left me just because I was hurting.

One day most of the followers of Jesus left him. Jesus turned to the twelve apostles and asked, “Are you also going to leave?” Peter responded, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” (John 6:66-68). During those times that I get so low that I wonder what’s the point, why go on, why not just give up on God, I remember Peter’s words.

During the reign of king Jehoshaphat, the people of Judah faced an overwhelming invasion. There seemed to be no way out. They saw no hope. So king Jehoshaphat prayed to God: “For we have no power to face this vast army that is attacking us. We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you.” (2 Chronicles 20:12). If nothing else, we can always keep our focus on Him.

The prophet Habakkuk asked God to do something about the misbehaving people of Israel. God answered that he’d send the Babylonians to punish them. This puzzled the prophet, since he knew the Babylonians were far more deserving of God’s judgment than the Israelites. How could God use a greater evil to judge a lesser evil? God gave him no satisfactory answer. But the prophet decided to trust God anyway:

I heard and my heart pounded,

my lips quivered at the sound;

decay crept into my bones,

and my legs trembled.

Yet I will wait patiently for the day of calamity

to come on the nation invading us.

Though the fig tree does not bud

and there are no grapes on the vines,

though the olive crop fails

and the fields produce no food,

though there are no sheep in the pen

and no cattle in the stalls,

yet I will rejoice in the LORD,

I will be joyful in God my Savior.

The Sovereign LORD is my strength;

he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,

he enables me to tread on the heights. (Habakkuk 3:16-19)

Sometimes life just doesn’t make sense. But that’s no reason to give up on God. If you give up on God, has your problem gone away? Does it make you feel better?

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