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by
Brian Zahnd
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July 14 - August 8, 2019
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. Everyone who grows, changes.
Change always involves death and resurrection, and both are uncomfortable. Death because it involves letting go of old ways of seeing, of abandoning sometimes precious prejudices. It means having to ask for forgiveness and humble ourselves. And resurrection is no easy process either; having to take risks of trust that were not required when everything seemed certain, agreeing with the new ways of seeing while not obliterating the people around you, some who told you what they thought was true but isn’t after all.
People have never seen God until they see Jesus. Every other portrait of God, from whatever source, is subordinate to the revelation of God given to us in Jesus Christ.
Sometimes the Bible is like a Rorschach test: our interpretation of the text reveals more about ourselves than about God.
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.”
Literalizing a divine metaphor always leads to error.
what we may call the whetted sword of God’s vengeance is, on a deeper level, the reciprocal consequences of seeking to harm others.
The fear of God is the wisdom of not acting against love. We fear God in the same way that as a child I feared my father. I had the good fortune to have a wise and loving father, and I had deep respect, reverence, admiration, and, perhaps, a kind of fear for my father, but I never for one moment thought that my dad hated me or would harm me. God does not hate you, and God will never harm you. But your own sin, if you do not turn away from it, will bring you great harm. The wisdom that acknowledges this fact is what we call the fear of God. Sin is deadly, but God is love.
The Bible is sent by God and inspired by God, but the Bible is not God.
We might say it this way: “There was a book sent from God, whose name was the Bible. It came as a witness to the light, so that all might believe through it.” The Bible testifies through John the Baptist, “[Jesus is] he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ ”*2 This is not a low view of Scripture but a high view of Christ.
The Bible is not the perfect revelation of God; Jesus is. Jesus is the only perfect theology. Perfect theology is not a system of theology; perfect theology is a person. Perfect theology is not found in abstract thought; perfect theology is found in the Incarnation. Perfect theology is not a book; perfect theology is the life that Jesus lived. What the Bible does infallibly and inerrantly is point us to Jesus, just like John the Baptist did.
first Hebrews were enslaved by Egypt; Israel was
What is an enemy? An enemy is someone whose story you haven’t heard. So the Bible supplies us with subtext stories to subvert our assumptions about enemies.
Clinging to our lust for vengeance, we lose Jesus. But if we can say amen to Jesus closing the book on vengeance, then Jesus will remain with us to teach us the more excellent way of love.
When we speak of the Word of God, Christians should think of Jesus first and the Bible second. It’s Jesus who is the true Word of God, not the Bible.
The Bible is the word of God in a secondary sense, faithfully pointing us to the perfect Word of God: the Word made flesh.
The Transfiguration is where Moses and Elijah find their great successor. The Transfiguration is where the Old Testament hands the project of redemption and restoration over to Jesus. The Transfiguration is where the old witness (testament) yields to the new witness (testament).
What can happen with a flat reading of the Bible is that Jesus’s teaching of nonviolence in the Sermon on the Mount can be conveniently ignored because we found divine sanction for violence in the Old Testament.
The Bible is not a flat text where every passage carries the same weight. This is why Jesus can say things like, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.”
a Christian can’t cite Moses to silence Jesus.
That wasn’t what the Law said, but Jesus was revealing the heart of God, not giving a conservative reading of the Torah. Jesus gives us a new ethic of life-affirming mercy, which sets aside the old ethic that supported death penalties.
We cannot create Christian ethics while ignoring Christ!
The role of the Old Testament is to give an inspired telling of how we get to Jesus.
Jesus is greater than the Bible.
It’s not biblical manhood that men should aspire to but Christlike manhood. If we only speak of biblical manhood, who is our pattern? Abraham? Moses? David? Elijah? With their propensity for deceit, anger, adultery, and violence? No, Jesus alone is our model of redeemed manhood.
I never read the Old Testament without Jesus.
Jesus is my sponsor for admission into the Old Testament. (Why else would a Gentile read the ancient Hebrew Scriptures?)
“You search the Scriptures because you think they give you eternal life. But the Scriptures point to me!”*23 If we see the Bible as an end in itself instead of an inspired witness pointing us to Jesus, it will become an idol.
(This despite the fact that the use of torture is illegal in the United States!) Among the demographic groups Pew Research studied, only white evangelicals had a majority who supported the use of torture. How could 60 percent of Bible-believing white evangelicals come down in favor of torture? Well, as Bob Dylan said, “You never ask questions when God’s on your side.”*27
The writer of Hebrews is not talking about the Bible as the all-seeing judge of every thought and intention, but Jesus Christ.
Jesus cannot be locked up in the Bible; he is the living Word who enlightens humanity with the light of God.
Reading the Bible Right It’s a STORY We’re telling news here Keeping alive an ancient epic The grand narrative of paradise lost and paradise regained The greatest “Once upon a time” tale ever told The beautiful story which moves relentlessly toward— “They lived happily ever after” Never, never, NEVER forget that before it’s anything else, it’s a story So let the Story live and breathe, enthrall and enchant Don’t rip its guts out and leave it lifeless on the dissecting table Don’t make it something it’s really not— A catalog of wished-for promises An encyclopedia of God-facts A law journal of
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At the cross Jesus does not save us from God; at the cross Jesus reveals God as savior! When we look at the cross we don’t see what God does; we see who God is!
The justice of God is not retributive; the justice of God is restorative. Justice that is purely retributive changes nothing. The cross is not where God finds a whipping boy to vent his rage upon; the cross is where God saves the world through self-sacrificing love.
It was not God who required the violent death of Jesus but human civilization.
In Christ we discover a God who would rather die than kill his enemies.
The cross is as ugly as human sin and as beautiful as divine love—but in the end love and beauty win.
The crucifixion is not what God inflicts upon Jesus in order to forgive; the crucifixion is what God endures in Christ as he forgives.
God desires us to grow beyond the rudimentary beginning of fear.
God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them….There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.*19
The Roman cross was an instrument of imperial violence that Jesus transformed into a symbol of divine love.
In other words, the psalmists, the prophets, and the writer of Hebrews come to understand that God abolishes primitive ritual sacrifice in order to establish as justice actually doing God’s will.
On Good Friday we see that our violent system of blame and ritual killing is so evil that it is capable of the murder of God. And once we see it, we can repent of it, be forgiven for it, and be freed from it. This is how the cross saves the world.
If we persist in thinking that somehow it was God who demanded the murder of Jesus, we continue to exonerate the very system of evil that God intends to save us from. It’s at the cross of Christ that the world and its violence are condemned so that the world, at last, might be saved by the love of God.
The cross is not about the wrath of God finding a suitable sacrifice. The cross is about the love of God offering humanity a way out of the vicious cycle of producing endless victims.
Their gospel was the audacious announcement that the world has a new Lord, a new King, a new emperor: the crucified and risen Jesus of Nazareth.
To be a Christian means I am deliberately attempting to follow Jesus. Being a Christian does not mean I can ignore Lazarus with impunity! Being a Christian means I can no longer pretend that I don’t see Lazarus lying at my door.
“No, hell is the inability to love other people.”
We might even say that hell is the love of God wrongly received.
Hell is not God’s hatred; rather, hell has something to do with refusing to receive and be transformed by the love of God.
