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by
Brian Zahnd
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May 11 - May 12, 2022
This is the God of my deepest longings, the One whom I can taste in the rhythms of music and creativity, catch glimpses of in my encounters with love, and feel embraced in the holy encounter with an ‘other.’ This is the whisper of the Spirit and the gentle touch of love.
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If transformation is by the renewal of the mind and I have never changed my mind, then be assured I am actively resisting the work of the Holy Spirit in my life.
“For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
Jesus is the One who shows us the face, the countenance, the disposition, the attitude of the Father.
I understand how this image of God can be justified. I understand we can use the Bible as our palette to paint a monstrous portrait of God, but when we’re finished, if the image doesn’t look like Jesus, we have got it wrong!
Sometimes the Bible is like a Rorschach test: our interpretation of the text reveals more about ourselves than about God.
Rather, the Old Testament is a journey of discovery. The Bible doesn’t stand above the story it tells, but is fully enmeshed in it. The Bible itself is on the quest to discover the Word of God. What we find in the Old Testament is a progression of revelation.
We cannot talk about God without using metaphor; it’s the only option we have when speaking of the supremely transcendent. But to literalize a metaphor is to create an idol and formulate an error.
The wrath of God is a biblical metaphor we use to describe the very real consequences we suffer from trying to go through life against the grain of love. Canadian theologian Brad Jersak says, “The wrath of God is understood as divine consent to our own self-destructive defiance.
What I want you to know is that God’s attitude, God’s spirit, toward you is one of unwavering fatherly-motherly love. You have nothing to fear from God. God is not mad at you. God has never been mad at you. God is never going to be mad at you.
The hands of God have been stretched out in love where they were nailed to a tree. The nail-pierced hands of God now reach out to every doubter and every sufferer, revealing the wounds of love.
To be a sinner in these hands is where the healing begins.
What I can accept is that our own understanding of God is in the process of growth, change, and mutation.
Elisha, heals the Gentile Naaman of leprosy. But Naaman wasn’t just any Gentile; Naaman was the general of the dreaded Syrian army that had been threatening Israel. It’s one thing to make a Gentile widow a sympathetic figure in a Jewish story, but it’s another thing to do that with a Syrian general. Imagine an Israeli story where God heals a Hamas general and you’ll get some idea of what is going on with this story.
What is an enemy? An enemy is someone whose story you haven’t heard.
As long as Jesus announced that it was the time of God’s favor, the crowd spoke well of him. But as soon as he made it clear that God’s favor is for everyone, as soon as Jubilee was made inclusive and not exclusive, they tried to throw him off a cliff.
Until we are captivated by the radical mercy of God extended to all, we will cling to the texts of vengeance as cherished texts.
Jesus has closed the book on vengeance. The Word made flesh prevents us from riffling through the Bible to find texts of vengeance to fling upon our enemies. If we try to hold on to a divine warrant for vengeance, Jesus passes through our midst and goes away.
If we cling to vengeance, we lose Jesus.
Jesus didn’t come to bring vengeance; he came to close the book on vengeance.
Jesus doesn’t bless revenge; he blesses mercy and teaches that the mercy we show to our enemies is the mercy that will be shown to us. God does not allow us to hope that the book of divine vengeance will be closed for us but left open and inflicted in full upon others. This is not how it works in God’s economy of grace revealed by Jesus.
If you are going to imagine divinely endorsed genocide, you should not imagine yourself as Joshua but as the unfortunate Canaanite whose entire family and village have just been murdered.
It’s Jesus who is the true Word of God, not the Bible.
Jesus is what God has to say!
The goal of the Law and the Prophets was to produce a society of fidelity and justice. Jesus and the kingdom he announces and enacts is where that project finds its fulfillment.
But with the coming of Christ, morning has broken, the new day has dawned, and the sun of righteousness has risen with healing in its rays.*7 Now the moon and the stars, Moses and Elijah, the Law and the Prophets are eclipsed by the full glory of God in Christ! The moon and stars recede from view because the sun has risen.
When we try to embrace Biblicism by placing all authority in a flat reading of Scripture and giving the Old Testament equal authority with Christ, God thunders from heaven, “No! This is my beloved Son! Listen to him!”
That wasn’t what the Law said, but Jesus was revealing the heart of God, not giving a conservative reading of the Torah.
If we want to rummage around in the Old Testament and drag out Moses or Joshua or Elijah or David to mitigate what Jesus teaches about peacemaking and loving our enemies, we are trying to build an Old Testament tabernacle on the holy mountain of Christ’s glory, to which God says, “No!”
Literalism is a kind of escapism
Being saved includes being saved from belief in malicious libel against God.
