Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again

by Rachel Held Evans

Generations of Christian African Americans have found solidarity and empowerment in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, with liberationist theologian James Cone making a striking connection between the crucifixion of Jesus and the scourge of lynching against black men.

After all, Scripture is described as the living Word of God (Hebrews 4:12), which means it remains animated and active, pulsing with possibility.

“Turn it and turn it,” the ancient rabbis said of Scripture, comparing it to a precious gem, “for everything is in it.”3

characters like the daughters of Zelophehad, who successfully lobbied the leaders of Israel for the right for women to inherit property, and the Ethiopian eunuch from the book of Acts, whose status as an ethnic and sexual minority makes his dramatic baptism especially meaningful to those who have been treated as outsiders. I had never before considered that Joseph, the despised brother with the coat of many colors, was a victim of human trafficking, or that Jesus himself was once, as a child, a refugee.

This method of engaging Scripture in unexpected places she called “dislocated exegesis.”

There are few doctrines of the Christian faith more astounding to me than the incarnation, the remarkable notion that the God of the universe was once vulnerable as a fetus and hungry as a baby. Mary knew the humanity of Christ more intimately than anyone, from the moment that humanity manifested itself in the swelling of her breasts,

as counselors and neuroscientists continue to confirm, the ability to shape a narrative from your experiences, and to connect your story to a greater one, is essential for developing empathy, a sense of purpose, and well-being.

But be warned. In Scripture, and in life, the road to deliverance nearly always takes a detour. Rarely do the people of God reach any kind of promised land without a journey or two through the wilderness.

Some biblical

characters, like Hagar and Jacob, fled to the wilderness to escape troubled relationships or oppression;

The prophet Elijah hid in the wilderness to escape political persecution, and Jesus retreated there to fast and pray in p...

In the Bible, the wilderness is a place of danger and desolation, creeping with wild animals and threatening with rugged, parched terrain. In life, it’s that long journey through grief, those years between calls with your grown kid, a season of caregiving that stretches your reservoirs of patience and perseverance, the aftermath of the divorce, the season of doubt, the period in between jobs or in between relationships or in between diagnosis and healing. In the wilderness, God can seem very far away, or absent altogether. It may take weeks, months, or even years to get on track again. In the meantime, every well, every drop of manna, every raven bearing bread in its beak, is salvation.

“Like

manna, [God’s] wilderness presence is always enough on which to survive, but not too much. Like manna, he can be graciously received but not stored or presumed upon.

The wilderness, by design, disorients. As any wilderness trekker past or present will tell you, the wilderness has a way of forcing the point, of bringing to the surface whatever fears, questions, and struggles hide within. Nothing strips you down to your essential humanity and inherent dependency quite like submitting to the elements, surrendering to the wild. In the wilderness, you find out what you are made of and who your friends are.

Indeed, some of Scripture’s most momentous events occur not at the start of a journey, nor at the destination, but in between, in the wilderness. Jacob wrestles with the mysterious stranger. Moses encounters the burning bush. The Israelites receive the Law that will shape them as a people for millennia to come.

It’s worth noting that at the culmination of nearly every wilderness journey is a naming. After receiving a new name of his own, Jacob, now called Israel, names the place where he wrestled with God Peniel, which means “face of God.” Hagar names the well of her salvation Beer Lahai Roi, “I have seen the God who sees me.”

God makes a way where there seems to be no way.

“Six hundred thirteen commandments were revealed to Moses; 365 being prohibitions equal in number to the days of the year, and 248 being mandates corresponding in number to the bones of the human body” (Babylonian Talmud Makkot 23b).

yet most of us have committed to memory the famous Shema Prayer—“You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (taken from Deuteronomy 6:5).

This is not a God who liberates, then leaves. This is a God who walks with people through the desert in a cloud of smoke and fire and who literally sets up camp with them in the form of a traveling tabernacle. This is a God who cares about every detail of their new life together, right down to the management of their oxen.

Many womanist scholars note that Hagar’s liberation is incomplete, for she was told by God to return to her cruel masters.

Jesus is what the living, breathing will of God looks like. This includes compassion for the poor, esteem for women, healing for the sick, and solidarity with the suffering. It means breaking bread with outcasts and embracing little children.

“The historic Christian doctrine of the divinity of Christ does not simply mean that Jesus is like God. It is far more radical than that. It means that God is like Jesus.”11

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (Matthew 22:37–40).

We all go to the text looking for something, and we all have a tendency to find it. So the question we have to ask ourselves is this: are we reading with the prejudice of love, with Christ as our model, or are we reading with the prejudices of judgment and power, self-interest and greed? Are we seeking to enslave or liberate, burden or set free?

Feminist scholar Phyllis Trible aptly named these narratives “texts of terror.”

“If art imitates life,” she wrote, “scripture likewise reflects it in both holiness and horror.”2

But this is the deleterious snare of fundamentalism: It claims that the heart is so corrupted by sin, it simply cannot be trusted to sort right from wrong, good from evil, divine from depraved. Instinct, intuition, conscience, critical thinking—these impulses must be set aside whenever they appear to contradict the biblical text, because the good Christian never questions the “clear teachings of Scripture”; the good Christian listens to God, not her gut.

When you can’t trust your own God-given conscience to tell you what’s right, or your own God-given mind to tell you what’s true, you lose the capacity to engage the world in any meaningful, authentic way, and you become an easy target for authoritarian movements eager to exploit that vacuity for their gain.

If we train ourselves not to ask hard questions about the Bible, and to emotionally distance ourselves from any potential conflicts or doubts, then where will we find the courage to challenge interpretations that justify injustice? How will we know when we’ve got it wrong?

“Belief in a cruel god makes a cruel man,” Thomas Paine said.

The play is about fascism, I think, but it reminds me a bit of Christians and their Bibles. Sometimes it seems as if there are all these rhinoceroses barreling through the pages of Scripture, pooping on sidewalks and flattening housecats, but we’ve grown so accustomed to defending their presence we end up debating the length of their tails.

If I belong to this community because I share its beliefs, what happens if I stop believing?

“We don’t become more spiritual by becoming less human,” Eugene Peterson said.

So I brought my whole self into the wilderness with God—no faking, no halfway. And there we wrestled.

If you really want to understand what makes a community or a culture tick, ask the people in it what they believe is worth dying for, or perhaps more significantly, worth killing for.

To reinforce the miraculous nature of Israel’s victories, the writers of Joshua and Judges describe forces of hundreds defeating armies of thousands with epic totality. These numbers are likely exaggerated and, in keeping literary conventions of the day, rely more on drama and bravado than the straightforward recitation of fact. Those of us troubled by language

about the “extermination” of Canaanite populations may find some comfort in the fact that scholars and archaeologists doubt the early skirmishes of Israel’s history actually resulted in genocide.

Theologian Paul Copan called it “the language of conventional warfare rhetoric,” which “the knowing ancient Near Eastern reader recognized as hyperbole.”10 Pastor and author of The Skeletons in God’s Closet, Joshua Ryan Butler, dubbed it “ancient trash talk.”11

Even though America is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, it takes in less than half of 1 percent of the world’s refugees, and drone warfare has left many thousands of families across the Middle East terrorized.

If the God of the Bible is true, and if God became flesh and blood in the person of Jesus Christ, and if Jesus Christ is—as theologian Greg Boyd put it—“the revelation that culminates and supersedes all others,”16 then God would rather die by violence than commit it.

The cross makes this plain. On the cross, Christ not only bore the brunt of human cruelty and bloodlust and fear, he remained faithful to the nonviolence he taught and modeled throughout his ministry.

On the cross, Jesus chose to align himself with victims of suffering rather than the inflictors of it.

So to whatever extent God owes us an explanation for the Bible’s war stories, Jesus is that explanation. And Christ the King won his kingdom without war.

The connection between suffering and sin remained pervasive enough in first-century Jewish thought that when Jesus’ disciples encountered a man blind from birth, they asked their Rabbi, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2).

theodicy (why God allows suffering and evil to persist in the world),

In the world of the ancient Near East, wisdom wasn’t just a virtue; it was a coveted commodity, prized for its promise of a full and honorable life. The book of Proverbs compares wisdom to rubies, gold, and silver, and claims “nothing you desire can compare with her” (Proverbs 3:15).

In the Protestant Bible, the books of Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon are generally grouped together and categorized as wisdom literature. Jews identify these books as part of the Ketuvim, or “Writings”—miscellaneous works that are neither Torah nor prophecy.

The point, he said, is that wisdom isn’t about sticking to a set of rules or hitting some imaginary bull’s-eye representing “God’s will.” Wisdom is a way of life, a journey of humility and faithfulness we take together, one step at a time.