MORE TO THE STORY

Chris Failla

What LOST, spankings, and doing laundry have

taught me about reconciling Jesus and the God of the Old Testament

Table of ContentsIntroPART ONE

1. Your Mother and a Traffic Cop2. What a Jerk3. A Baby With a Job4. Are You Saying I’m Fat?In Other Words

PART TWO

More to These Stories“It Is What It Is?”Resources

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Intro

For about four years I directed a school that was focused on trying to understand the Bible. During that time, and since, I’ve had lots of exposure to the Bible and to people’s opinions and interpretations of it. The main reason I directed that school was that God used scripture, both the Old and New Testaments, to profoundly transform me and my understanding of Him. I like the Bible. A lot. (And I’m sure God’s happy to know that.)

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I also like the Old Testament (at least most of it). I believe that it tells the story of a relentless, passionate, patient, wounded and most of all loving Creator, dealing with the inconsistency, brilliance, and flakiness of his amazing creation. In no way am I saying that there is anything wrong with it, that it should be ignored, or that it is not inspired by God. Quite the opposite. However...

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...we all know that the Old Testament contains some stories and events that portray God as, well, not so patient, gracious, loving, etc. In light of that, there are a few things that I try to keep in mind when reading the Old Testament. This book is a look at what those things are.

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PART ONE

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“They fought against Midian, as the LORD commanded Moses, and killed every man.” And Moses said to them, “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.” Numbers 31.7,17-18

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“Yay, God’s happy again! Wait, God’s always happy! Wait, no, God’s always mad!” Homer Simpson

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In my parent’s house, hanging on the wall, there’s a painting of a lady sitting in a rocking chair and the caption says “God is watching you, and so is your mother.” It’s probably supposed to be funny, but to me it was more like a constant and legitimate warning (the God part, not as much the mother part). Like the song you probably learned as a kid if you grew up in church- “be careful little eyes what you see, be careful little ears what you hear, be careful little mouth what you say, for the Father up above is looking down in love...” in other words, don’t screw up or do something bad, because God is always watching!

1.Your Mother and a Traffic Cop

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I’ve been pulled over for speeding about eight times (but fortunately I’ve only gotten two tickets). I don’t really speed anymore (technically, I don’t actually drive anymore, because I live in China). Even though I don’t speed anymore, whenever I’m driving and I see a cop I immediately slow down a tiny bit, then I check my speedometer, and then I get anxious about everything that could be wrong: Is there a brake light out? Are the tags of this car expired? etc. For some reason, whenever there’s a cop around, I convince myself there must be something that I’m doing wrong.

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For most of my life I had a “traffic-cop” understanding of God.

I thought he was always waiting, looking to punish me for something. Trying to find anything I was doing wrong.

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This understanding came from many places, including school, church, the media, and a little from my family, who got it from their churches and families, and on and on. But if any of us were ever not fully convinced that God was really like that, we didn’t have to look far for proof. It was there in black and white (about 1000 pages of it) in the Old Testament.

Whether or not you grew up going to church, there’s a good chance you know what I’m talking about. The Old Testament is a barbaric book in the eyes of many people: the bloody and cruel sacrificial system, the endless wars, the commands from God to kill entire civilizations, and even the near annihilation of entire species by God himself. (Yeah, I know!)

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Then we read the New Testament (if you can get that far and haven’t given up hope or got too disgusted) and see Jesus come on the scene, saying that he is God in human form, living a life and sharing a message of love, compassion, reconciliation, forgiveness, etc.

Jesus, you did a great job, and I like your message and all, but there’s two problems (only one of which we’re gonna get into here, the other one I’ll save for another time): 1) some of your followers seem to live even more like the god of those centuries than the One you talk about, with their judgmentalism, hate and intolerance, and 2) you can’t just erase all that horrific stuff that happened over the centuries before you came. We can’t just pretend like it never happened.

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So what are we to do with the Old Testament? Is God schizophrenic? Or bi-polar?

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When Jesus said “I and my Father are one” did he not really mean that? Or did he not see the same side of his Father that we see in the Old Testament?

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Or is there something else going on?

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It took me forever to give in, because I didn’t see what could be entertaining about people running around trying to find their way off an island for an hour a week. I saw Castaway and that convinced me: There’s not much to do on a deserted island, especially for an hour a week for six years. Finally I did start watching LOST, and within the first few episodes I was certain about something else: Jin, the Korean, was a Jerk.

2. “What a Jerk!”

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First you see him giving his wife, Sun, dirty looks all the time and telling her what to do: “Don’t talk to him!” “Button that top button!” He was ruthless.

Then you see him drag Michael into the ocean and beat him until someone else pulls him off.

Finally, you see that back in Korea he had gone to a man’s home, broken in, and beaten the man almost to death in front of the man’s family.

Nice guy, this Jin.20

A few years ago, when my son Joshua was about 18 months old, someone looked out the window just in time to see me smack Joshua on the butt pretty hard. Watching me smack my son for no apparent reason, they possibly thought, “What a jerk.”

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What this person didn’t see, what they didn’t know, was that I had just chased Joshua and stopped him from running out into the street in front of a car. I wanted my son to know that it was big deal and my gut reaction was to smack him (that’s the only time I’ve actually ever spanked him, for the record).

Quite often, there’s more to the story than what we see.

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Over the next few episodes of LOST you begin to realize that Jin dearly loves his wife, Sun, and is trying, in his limited and incomplete way, to protect her and their relationship.

You find out that Michael had somehow ended up with the watch Sun’s father had given Jin to deliver to someone, and the fight had to do with Jin trying to get it back.

And you also come to learn that when Jin was beating that man to a pulp in his own house, he beat that man almost to death, but Jin had actually been ordered to kill him (by his boss, who also happened to be his father-in-law).

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Like I said, quite often there’s more to the story.

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The person who only saw me smack my son on the butt without knowing the reason, the story, the context, could have, and probably did, draw conclusions about me as a person. But once they become aware of the rest of the story, they have to re-evaluate those conclusions, don’t they? They have to look at the story, and me, in a different light.

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If you’ve seen the movie The Sixth Sense, Crash, or more recently The Book of Eli, you know exactly what I’m talking about. At the very end something significant is revealed and then all of a sudden, click, the whole story makes more sense. If you could go back and watch the movie with that knowledge, it changes everything.

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“In every story, there comes a moment, an event, that no one anticipated, that no one saw coming, but once it happens the whole story needs to be re-interpreted in light of that event.” C. Baxter Kruger

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In the case of the Biblical narrative, the event through which everything must be re-interpreted is the coming of Jesus.

The whole Old Testament and the God whose story it tells needs to be understood in light of who Jesus said he was and what he did and said, not the other way around. When Jesus says, “If you’ve seen me, you've seen the Father,” he meant the God of the Old Testament too. Colossians says that he is “the Image of the Invisible God.”

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The authors of the Old Testament were portraying what they experienced, what they understood, what they believed. But there was more to the story.

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When Joshua started to run across the street that day, why did I respond so primitively? If my wife does something I disagree with, I don’t smack her on the butt. I reason with her. But no one would fault me for not reasoning with Joshua. It would have been pointless to explain the laws of physics, the cost of a funeral, or the emotional impact a death has on a parent to an 18 month old.

My son Zachary turned one year old last month. So we expect him to get a job and find his own place to live soon. After all, he’s walking now and he can kind of say “thank you” (in two languages). He’d be fine out on his own, right?

3. A Baby With a Job

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We all understand that there’s a process, a development, to growing up, to maturing as a human.

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We even understand that about companies and teams. That’s why they’re called “start-ups,” and we have different expectations of them. There’s a process, a learning curve. Kinks are being worked out.

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What if it’s the same case for an entire species? What if humans don’t just develop and mature as individuals, but as a species? And what if God has known that all along?

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I’ve been a teacher for about seven years, and I’ve taught a huge variety of age groups, from five-year olds to college students. No matter the age group, one of the most important things for me to do as a teacher is to lay down some classroom guidelines. Imagine it’s the first day of class, and I establish a set of guidelines that look like this:

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1.I’m your only teacher in this class. Respect me.

2.Don’t make a fake teacher out of play-doh (or anything else) and obey it instead of me, and don’t seek out other teachers. I’m the most qualified to teach you.

3.Don’t misrepresent me or things I say.

4.We’re gonna take a break every once in a while.

5.Treat your parents well. You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for them.

So far so good, right? Everyone will know who the authority is here, which is healthy. Then I add these:

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6.Don’t kill each other. I’m serious.

7.Don’t sleep with someone else’s spouse.

8.Don’t take something that doesn’t belong to you.

9.Don’t go crazy trying to have things other people have, especially at their expense. Be content.

10.Don’t lie about what happened if you saw something, especially if someone’s future or reputation is on the line. Tell the truth.

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Most of those guidelines are common-sensical, pretty standard “how to treat people” type things. But if I need to clarify to the class “We don’t kill each other here, or sleep with other people’s spouses,” what does that say about the kind of people I’m dealing with? To say the least, they apparently need to be taught the basics of how to get along with others.

God told the ancient Israelites pretty much the same thing. What does that say about the culture back then?¹

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Despite God’s commands, there was still a brutal reality at work in the days of the ancient Israelites: kill or be killed.*

*For an interesting look at violence over the course of human history, check out this TED Talk by Steven Pinker38

So when God gave the Israelites permission to go to war, he was essentially giving them permission to survive. Telling them to “turn the other cheek” in their day and expecting them to survive would be about the same as me telling an 18 month old Joshua about the laws of physics and not stopping him from running into the street, and expecting him to survive. In the midst of all the war and violence of the time, there was no framework to understand something like that. (It would be like me asking you “你明白吗？” even though you’ve never studied Chinese.)

God had to meet humanity where we were at. He had to speak our language.

(Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that this is the only explanation for all the slaughter that happened in the Old Testament, nor is it a thorough one, but we have to start somewhere.) 39

In that time, it was normal for nations to continue on in conquest until a stronger nation or empire came along. Empires expanded by the destruction or assimilation of other nations. But notice what God tells the Israelites in regard to foreigners, even those they had previously gone to war with:

“Treat them like native-born Israelites, and love them as you love yourself. Remember that you were once foreigners living in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God.”

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God’s command to the Israelites to love others as they love themselves was way, way ahead of its time.

But other commands seem crude and uncivilized. For example, “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” seems primitive in light of Jesus’ exhortation to “turn the other cheek.” But it wasn’t like God thought to himself “Hey, ‘an eye for an eye’ sounds legit” and then Jesus tried to one-up him by saying “turn the other cheek.” (You can almost hear God saying “I wish I had thought of that!” Can’t you?)

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At the time, “an eye for an eye” was an improvement on how they were living, a way of pulling humanity forward. It was an expression of mercy and a way of putting boundaries on retaliation, because in ancient cultures retaliation was usually far more severe than the original crime.

Over the course of Biblical history we see a spectrum of commands from God that go all the way from “Kill your son (just kidding!)” to “Don’t murder” to “Don’t even be angry with your brother or sister” and from “An eye for an eye” to “don’t retaliate, but turn the other cheek.”*

*For an incredibly interesting look at these words of Jesus, check out this article by Walter Wink. 42

We see a great example of this in the book of Mark. At one point some religious people ask Jesus whether divorce is okay or not. In Jesus’ typical style, he turns the question back on them, asking their opinion. They answer with what Moses said in Deuteronomy, that it was okay in some circumstances. The gist of Jesus’ telling response: “God allowed that because of your hard hearts, but it was never his ideal. From the beginning, two that have come together under God have become one.”

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God is pulling humanity forward, because he can’t just yank us violently from point A (where we are) to point B (his ideals). He respects us and the process too much to do that.

Where we are His idealsNecessary process

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Think for a second about the sacrificial system. I don’t understand how you could enjoy reading the book of Leviticus.

“Kill this animal like this” and “put the blood here and here and there.”

Delightful.

Why would God invent such a disgusting, nauseating thing?

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What if he didn’t?

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Rob Bell, in his amazing talk “The Gods Aren’t Angry,” points out that when God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham doesn’t seem surprised.² He doesn’t even ask “how?” You get the feeling this wasn’t the first time something like this happened. Remember Cain and Abel? Their drama started because of offerings that were given to God. But no where is it recorded that God required them to do that. Humanity had picked that up somewhere along the way- that gods required sacrifices.

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They actually took it so far (the offerings) that they began hurting themselves (I’m assuming that castrating yourself would hurt), giving everything they had, and even sacrificing their own children on fiery altars.

Do you think these things were God’s idea?

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So God comes and says “Look, if I told you I didn’t need this trash, you wouldn’t believe me. (Remember Hebrews 10- “you think God was satisfied by the blood of animals and stuff? Nah-uh, the blood was for your conscience.”) So what we’re gonna do is this: no sacrificing kids and no hurting yourselves. You can only sacrifice animals and food, and I’m even gonna put a limit on that so that you know when to stop.”

(I Samuel 15.22, Isaiah 1.10-17 and Hosea 6.6 [Matthew 9.13] also talk about how the sacrificial system was never actually what God wanted.)

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He didn’t invent the sacrificial system. Actually the opposite: he was starting the process of saving Humanity from it, and the anxiety and shame that led to and undergirded it.

Jesus was the culmination of that process, and the salvation not only from the system, but the anxiety itself.

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I love my brother’s sense of humor. For about year, whenever anyone would tell him almost anything, he would turn it around on them and say “are you calling me fat?” (Me:“Bubba, let’s get something to eat.” Him: “Are you calling me fat!?” or Me: “Have you seen that movie yet?” Him: “Stop calling me fat!”) He weighs about 150 pounds.

4. Are You Saying I’m Fat?

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A while back my wife had a really strange conversation with a friend of hers. The friend was upset because of things my wife had said, things like “this would be really good for you” and “I’m proud of you for how you...” The friend took what my wife had intended as encouragement and compliments, after filtering them through her insecurity, they came out like “You have this wrong with you so you need to...” and “You’ve really been slacking in...” What a disconnect, huh?

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We do that all the time, don’t we? “Jimmy never texted me back, he must be mad at me.” It doesn’t occur to us that maybe Jimmy never got the text. Paul Young, the author of The Shack, points out that shame causes us to interpret behavior statements as value and identity statements. “Please don’t mix the reds with the whites when you do laundry” becomes “you are so incompetent and untrustworthy.” We even take encouragement sometimes and put a negative spin on it. Shame, anxiety, and insecurity work like that. A couple days ago I told my teacher that class was really good that particular day. Instead of saying “thank you,” she said, “Oh, so the other days weren’t good?” She wasn’t being completely serious, but what would make her even think to respond like that?

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That insecurity, that shame, has been going to work on us since the beginning of our existence. Early in the book of Genesis we are told that Adam and Eve “were naked, and they were not ashamed.” Then they eat from the Forbidden Tree and run off and hide. Remember Adam’s response when God was looking for him? “I was naked, so I hid.” As soon as they ate from the tree, insecurity, guilt, and shame flooded their consciousness.

From that point on, most of what God said or did was filtered through the lens of Adam’s (and his descendant’s) insecurity.³ In the book of Isaiah, it says that the people’s “sins had hidden God’s face from them.” God hadn’t moved, or changed. Their perception had, and not for the better. Just like in the case of Adam and Eve, God’s face, and true character, was distorted by whatever they were hiding behind.

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To once again quote my friend Baxter Kruger: “We paint God’s face by the numbers of our own sense of guilt.”

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Two years ago my wife took some time to read through the Bible chronologically. It took her about six months, and part of that time was spent in Thailand attending a gathering. The keynote speaker at the gathering had just given a talk about the grace and love of God. After the talk my wife went back to our room and continued her reading, picking up where she had left off, somewhere in Numbers or Deuteronomy. I got back to the room a little later to find her pretty disturbed, almost to the point of tears. I asked her what was wrong and she went on to explain that she had just read about Moses not being permitted to enter the promised land because he hit a rock or something.

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It didn’t seem a big enough deal to her, for someone who had faithfully served God for 40 years to have a little temper tantrum and then for God to say to them, “Sorry, you’re going in ‘timeout’ for...the rest of your life, actually. And the rest of these people who’ve complained, whined, and even made a little golden cow to worship are going to enjoy this other amazing place for the rest of their existence (granted they’ll have to fight for it) while you die here on these rocks. P.S. Thanks for your faithful service.”

(All I could think of to tell my wife was that just like in parenting and leadership, maybe Moses’ side of the story was a little bit different than God’s would have been. In other words, maybe there was more to the story?)

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Maybe you’re not like my wife, and that story about Moses never struck you as unfair or unloving. But chances are that at some point you’ve looked at the God of the Old Testament and thought to yourself, “He seems different than Jesus.” For example, after Peter had denied Jesus three times (Peter even swears, but I’m not sure which kind), Jesus doesn’t say “You’ll never lead again.” He does just the opposite. He still believes in him and actually commissions him to lead in Jesus’ absence. What a contrast with the story of Moses!

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The Biblical narrative, culminating with the death and resurrection of Jesus, is the story of God’s attempt at meeting us on our level, breaking through our insecurities and healing our anxiety so we once again can see him as he really is. But the Old Testament was written with that anxiety, that shame, in full effect.

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I don’t remember Jesus opening up the earth to swallow people whole, giving commands to destroy nations, standing by silently while a group of perverts rapes a woman, or commanding the brutal slaughter of innocent animals. But those are the kinds of things that happened in the Old Testament. So what’s the deal?

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I don’t know.

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And many people a lot more experienced, intelligent and educated than me have tackled that question (I’ll point you to some resources later).

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But I do know this- there were many people in the Bible that God considered “friends.” And in Jesus’ day there were many people who knew the Bible incredibly well.

But after all that God had done, after all the ways he tried to reveal his true self to his people, Jesus still proclaimed: “No one knows the Father, except for the Son.”

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So what if next time we come across what seems to us like a predicament, paradox, or dichotomy between Jesus and his Dad, we stayed open to the possibly that...

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...maybe humanity had to develop and mature as a species just like we do as individuals, and that God had to deal with us on our level...

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...and maybe the shame that penetrated Adam’s psyche also penetrated the rest of humanity’s, which distorted their (our) understanding of God...

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...and maybe like in LOST, there’s more to the story.

Because when Jesus said “I only do what I see the Father doing” he didn’t secretly mean “I only do some of what the Father does, because sometimes he gets a little out of hand...”

Jesus really meant it when he said “I and the Father are one” and “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father.”

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Jesus is how we know what God is like.

God is gracious, merciful, loving, patient, sacrificial, generous, and wise.

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He has never been anything else.

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So the next time you read the Bible or think about a story where it seems that God is acting “out of character,” try to keep in mind these three questions:

• Could there be more to this story? Is there something I (or they) missed?

• How could the filter or perspective of the person writing affect the way the story is told? What would the story be like from someone else’s point of view?

• Is what’s going here a representation of God’s ideal, or is He working within the confines of the culture of the time? In which ways is He pulling humanity forward, towards maturity?

In Other Words...

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Doing Laundry (Filter of Insecurity)

Spankings (Maturing Humanity)

Potential for profoundmisunderstanding

In Other Other Words...

LOST(Limited Perspective)

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PART TWO

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I’m going to take a few pages and look at some specific passages of the Old Testament that are, at least at face-value, pretty “un-Jesus-y” (Is that a word?)

I know, I realize I’m getting in way over my head, but we’ve already come this far, right?

More to These Stories

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I was hanging out with this guy Kevin who had grown up in the church but wanted nothing to do with God, and part of it was because of the Old Testament. He specifically mentioned the story in Judges where some guys visit a man’s house and demand that his male guest come outside “to play” (for lack of a better word). The host decides that that isn’t good hospitality so he sends out his concubine instead, to be ravaged and raped. To top it all off, the next day they take her dead body, cut it into 12 pieces, and send them to the 12 tribes of Israel.

We can understand Kevin’s concern, can’t we?

Judges- One Girl, 12 Pieces

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I think part of the problem is our (mis)understanding of the Bible as a moral guidebook. There’s a line of thinking that says the primary purpose of the Bible is to teach us how to live (Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth). Yet when a book that is supposed to be a compass for life, a guidebook, tells a story like this, what are we to do with that?

What moral lesson could be hidden in there?

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None, really.

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We need to remember that although the Bible contains profound wisdom and understanding as to how to live rightly, it isn’t primarily for that purpose. Its primary purpose is a Story, of creation, the people of Israel, Jesus and His church.⁴ So when it contains a story like the one in Judges, it’s not that God promotes or even condones that kind of behavior (He’s sickened by it too, literally to death) but that’s what actually happened at one point in the story, like it or not. If you read the story carefully, not once will you find God encouraging or even commenting on the situation, because He was probably too disgusted to even speak.

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But God isn’t silent about the subject forever.

That story took place in a city called Gibeah. And in the book of Hosea, we find these words coming out of God’s mouth: “You got your start in sin at Gibeah— that ancient, unspeakable, shocking sin— And you’ve been at it ever since...”

God goes on to explain His profound love and dedication to Israel, in spite of their sickening actions. A love that kept Him by their side through some really crazy stuff.

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In Joshua chapter 7, a man named Achan takes a cloak, some gold and some silver that he shouldn’t have taken, and as a consequence he (and apparently his entire family) are stoned and burned to death. Was that reaction overboard? You could possibly make a case for it being holy (depending on your definition) and just, but how is it merciful, gracious and compassionate?

Achan- The Stoned Shoplifter

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Keeping in mind that there’s more to the story, let’s look back at the conversation the Israelites have with Joshua when he replaces Moses. They tell him- “We will obey everything you say, and anyone who disobeys you we will put to death!”

That was the Israelites’ understanding of justice at the time. Disobeying Joshua equals death.

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So if someone disobeys God, and nothing happens, what does that say about God’s authority compared to Joshua’s? The Israelites, with their extreme and twisted view of justice, put God in a very difficult place. (And as far as his whole family dying, we have to remember that the ancient Israelites were not an individualistic culture, but rather understood actions as being tied to family and community.) Maybe God was left with no other choice.⁵

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In the book of Genesis, chapter 11, we’re told that all of humanity spoke one language, and that they had invented bricks, with which they wanted to build a huge tower and city, so that they “could make a name for themselves and not be scattered all over the earth.” God looks down and sees what they are learning and what they are scheming. He decides to confuse their language so that they can no longer communicate, and in the process scatters them all over the earth.

I used to read that story and think “was God threatened by them, was he being insecure or something? Why was he mad?” It didn’t make sense to me. Why was he punishing them?

The Tower of “Babble”

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Then I remembered something.

One of the first things God ever asked of humanity was to “be fruitful, multiply, and cover the earth.”

And yet here they are saying, “Lets do this, so that we don’t have to be scattered, so that we don’t have to cover the earth.” In essence, “We know better than him.”

God wasn’t punishing them. He was helping them to fulfill their calling, their destiny, which was to steward all of creation, not just one tiny corner of it.

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The near-destruction of the human race could fall into the category of “misunderstandable,” right? What could possibly be going on there, especially in the mind of a loving God?

The Flood- An Artist or A Farmer?

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In Genesis 5.1-2, it says that God made man in His image, blessed them and called them “human.” He was particularly pleased with how they had turned out. This was the creature He had told to (to use romantic and scientific language) “be fruitful and multiply.” (Translation: “I like you, go make more of you...”)

But then, within a few generations, God destroys all but a few of them. What on earth? Was God acting like a depressed, impulsive artist who creates a masterpiece and then in a moment of artistic insanity and rage decides “I don’t like this anymore!” and thrashes it to pieces?

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At the beginning of chapter six of Genesis we read this: “The sons of God married the beautiful women of the human race...” apparently implying that these sons of God, whatever they were, weren’t human.

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The human race that God had created, that he was so pleased with, was no longer pure, no longer fully human. Then it says that “their thoughts were consistently and totally evil.” It broke God’s heart to see what was happening to his humans, between their self-destructive choices and their mating with whatever those other things were. Maybe what God destroyed in the flood wasn’t his masterpiece after all. Maybe his masterpiece had already been destroyed (by sin and by hooking up with those other creatures) and God was less like an angry, tormented artist and more like a man who has to shoot his beloved but dying dog to save it from more agony in the future (think Old Yeller).

Was this the case? I don’t know for sure. Is it possible? I think so.88

There’s a chance that you’re thinking You can’t just make those stories say what you want them to say, to fit your desires. The Bible is what it is! If you are thinking that, I know what you mean, and you’re right.

“It Is What It Is?”

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The Old Testament is inspired by God.When Moses wrote the Law, he was inspired by God. When the prophets spoke, they were inspired by God. A man named Philip, an Israelite, was very familiar with the words of Moses and the words of the prophets, the words God had inspired. And the instant Philip saw Jesus, he told his brother, “We’ve found the One Moses wrote about in the Law, the One preached by the Prophets. It’s Jesus, Joseph’s son, the one from Nazareth!”

When Philip said that, he was inspired by God.

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After Jesus was crucified, two of his disciples were walking down a road, dejected and hopeless. They were discussing Jesus’ death, and suddenly, Jesus himself began to walk alongside them. For some reason they were unable to recognize him, and in their despair they explained to him all that happened- the betrayal, the trial, the suffering and death, even the rumors of his resurrection. Jesus’ response was straightforward, almost painfully so: “You guys don’t get it, do you? Don’t you know the Story? Don’t you know that the whole thing, from Moses, to the Prophets, to the Psalms, all of it, was always pointing to and talking about ME?”*

*Sound familiar? Jesus told the Pharisees, people who had memorized the whole Old Testament, almost the exact same thing. “You have your heads in your Bibles constantly because you think you'll find eternal life there. But you miss the forest for the trees. These Scriptures are all about me! And here I am, standing right before you, and you aren't willing to receive from me the life you say you want.” (John 5.39-40, the Message)

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Later on in the same passage we read about Jesus meeting up with the rest of his disciples. They had been commiserating together and trying to make sense of what had just happened, how all their hopes of a restored kingdom of Israel had seemingly been crushed. Again Jesus directs them to the Old Testament, assuring them: “I told you this when I was with you, and I’m telling you again; everything that happened to me was just like it said would happen in the books of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.” Then Luke tells us something spectacular: the next thing Jesus said would open their eyes to understand the scope of the entire Old Testament.

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He told them, "This is what is written: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.”

In other words, “This is what the scriptures (meaning the Old Testament) say: The Messiah (God’s chosen king) must suffer and die, but on the third day will rise to new life, and the whole world, all the way from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth, can begin to live according to a new reality, as new creations living in a new Creation.”

That’s what the whole story is about.

The whole Old Testament, according to Jesus, was about him. Pointing to him. Setting the stage for him. And creating a longing in the hearts of humanity for him. Waiting for him to come and show us the Father. As John the Baptist said,

“No one has ever seen God,

       not so much as a glimpse.

    This one-of-a-kind God-Expression,

       who exists at the very heart of the Father,

       has made him plain as day.”

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The Bible is what it is. And it has a New Testament for a reason: the Old Testament alone is incomplete. The whole Old Testament points to Jesus, who came to fully reveal his Father to us. May we have the eyes to see.

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OTHER STUFF

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¹For more on the idea of humanity developing, check out the “Why I’m Biblical” Chapter of “A Generous Orthodoxy” by Brian Mclaren

²For more thoughts on both the anxiety and the development of humanity, check out “The Gods Aren’t Angry” DVD by Rob Bell

³For more on the idea of the profound anxiety that plagued the human race, check out “Jesus and the Undoing of Adam” by Dr. Baxter Kruger. Also check out his blog at http://baxterkruger.blogspot.com

⁴For an intro to this idea see N.T. Wright’s article “How Can the Bible Be Authoritative?” and for a more developed treatment of the idea check out his book “The Last Word.”

⁵“Scary God or Scary People?” by Brad Cole http://godscharacter.com/article.php/20091102113717623

You might also want to check out these talks below. (I haven’t listened to them yet, mainly because I know there would be too much good stuff and I would want to include it all here in this, but I want to keep this thing short.)

Wrath & Love, Greg Boyd and Paul Eddy http://www.whchurch.org/content/page_961.htm

Jesus vs. Jehovah, Greg Boyd http://www.themeetinghouse.ca/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=121&Itemid=3&a80e25747060a573e6e62ea09d2af118=678adb15a284ad77585eb2ebe427cbd9 (scroll down to sermon number 6)

Resources

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p. 17 John 10.30

p. 28 John 14.9

p. 28 Colossians 1.15

p. 37 Exodus 20.1-17

p. 39 Matthew 5.39

p. 40 Leviticus 19.34

p. 41 Leviticus 24.20

p. 42 Genesis 22.2 Matthew 5.22

p. 43 Mark 10.2-9

p. 47 Genesis 4.1-5

p. 48 Deut. 12.31, Lev, 20.3

p. 49 Hebrews 9, 10.1-10,

p. 56 Numbers 20.8-12

p. 58 John 18.15-27, 21.15-17

p. 60 Numbers 16.1-35

p. 63 Matthew 11.27

p. 67 John 5.19, 10.30, 14.9

p. 54 Gen. 2.25, 3.10, Isaiah 59.2

p. 75 Judges 19.29

p. 69 Hebrews 13.8

p. 75 Judges 19.29

p. 76 2 Timothy 3.16

p. 79 Hosea 10.9

p. 80 Joshua 7

p. 81 Joshua 1.18

p. 84 Genesis 1.28

p. 87 Genesis 6.1-8

p. 88 Genesis 6.5

p. 90 2 Timothy 3.16

p. 90 John 1.45

p. 91 Luke 24.13-35

p. 93 Luke 24.46-47

p. 94 John 1.17-18, the Message

Bible References

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