Archive for July 10th, 2009

Dead Ends

Friday, July 10th, 2009 | Author:

We don’t really believe in a God of hope. If we did, we would rejoice in dead ends. No, my observation is that we really believe in the God of stoic perseverance. We believe in that inner resolve of the human spirit that shouts at the dark, “I will not go quietly. I will fight. I will prevail. I will never give up.” Of course, all that emotional rhetoric is very inspirational, until you come to a complete dead end.

We are prisoners of the Greek view of life. Human achievement. Victory against impossible odds. The Greek mythic heroes who fought the Fates. When we approach dead ends, we do everything possible to find our own way out. Denial is the usual beginning. “Oh, it’s not really that bad. We’ll make it.” Followed by anger. “Why did this happen to me?” Followed by remorse. “I must have done something to deserve this.” Followed by resignation. “It’s too late for me now.” Everything but rejoicing. Anything but contentment.

Why are we like this? Why do we struggle and strive and squirm and squeal to change the circumstances of our lives? Why don’t we see what dead ends really are – carefully crafted but disguised blessing of confrontation with the divine.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not suggesting a passive, compliant posture toward living, sitting quietly on the side waiting for life to take care of me. Life is work. Work is sacred. God intended it that way. If I chose to do nothing, I will receive the reward of nothing. Dead ends that come as a result of my own laziness or disobedience are not God’s intention, although the results of my foolishness can certainly be woven into His plans. No, I’m talking about the real dead ends. The blindside hits. The disasters of life that seem to have no reasonable explanation.

My close friend was healthy, vibrant, joyful and a fine example of a Christian. I stood by her bedside as the cancer overcame her body. She left behind so many who were transformed by her smile. No one saw it coming at all. One day, wonderful. The next day (or so it seemed), passing through the door marked “No re-entry”.

My wife is driving home. She stops at the intersection. There are no other cars. As she pulls out to cross, two tons of flying metal obliterates the passenger side of her car. The van ran the stop sign at 45 miles an hour. She is instantly covered in glass and shrapnel. She never saw it coming. She’s alive but the agonizing recovery has just begun.

The children chase a can along the side of the road. Kicks and shouts and laughter. It is a brief respite in the war-torn village. They reach the end of the street just in time for the car bomb to explode in front of the police station. Parents sifting the dirt looking for anything for comfort, hoping not to find it.

Death is the final dead end. But there are plenty of others in this fallen world. Our Twelve Step friends call it “hitting bottom”. It doesn’t matter what the addiction. They all push us toward the dead end. I suspect that no one really understands life until the journey reaches a large yellow sign saying “Dead End”. It’s not that life is morbid. It’s rather that life cannot be clearly seen for what it is if we can only look at it through Miller Genuine Draft commercials.

The biggest problem is not that life’s aim is to put us in the pit with Joseph. The biggest problem is that we do everything possible to pretend it won’t happen. I suspect that we feed this delusion because if we faced the pit, we would discover how powerless we are. So we drive ourselves toward the clutter of the busy in order not to hear the silence of the damned.

But what if we’re wrong? What if it is God’s intention to bring us to the dead end? What if the dead end is the place where we can encounter blessing and God is interested in blessing us so He just keeps trying to get us to see where we really are? What if all the hype and the activity and the success images and the power games only serve to keep us from really finding God? What if God is standing in the wilderness, waiting at the dead end, while we run to the concrete cities for protection from ourselves?

The wilderness is a very important piece of geography in the Bible. We think of it as the place of the temptations. That makes it Jesus’ problem; one which he, being God, overcame. But if we think of the wilderness only in mythical terms as some battleground between Satan and the Christ, we have robbed ourselves of a great truth. The wilderness is not the territory of Satan’s evil empire. The wilderness is God’s home.

The Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness. The Spirit took Jesus to the place where God could be found to offer all the sustenance Jesus needed before Satan arrived at God’s doorstep. The wilderness is the place of refuge, not of battle. Why? Because the wilderness is the place where I must confront my powerlessness.

When Israel left Egypt, God kept them in the wilderness for forty years. They could have marched to Canaan in a few weeks. There were much shorter routes. But they were not ready to possess the Promised Land. They had slave mentalities. God needed to reconstruct their thinking. And He did that by showing them what it is like to live in His house.

Daily bread from the hand of God. No planting. No harvesting. No storage barns. Living water from rocks. No wells. No cisterns. No canteens. Victory over enemies. But no fortresses, no shock troops, no military prowess. What was it like living in God’s house? It was complete powerlessness under the authority and reign of the Lord of Hosts. It was learning the truth of “Be anxious for nothing”. For forty years God provided what life needed. Food, shelter and security. An entire generation’s worth of daily lessons. It still wasn’t enough.

Some of them understood. Most didn’t. They were unable to be completely dependent on God. Any attempt to make do for themselves on their own power just brought them back to reality – face to face with the wilderness, the place where only God is in charge. The story has been the same from the beginning. Adam, a dependent steward of the garden. Abraham, a dependent traveler. Jacob, dependence learned in brokenness. Joseph, dependence forged in prison. Elijah, David, Daniel. Over and over, God engineers wilderness encounters in order to bring us to the reality of dependence.

We buy Hummers. And life insurance (just what are we insuring, have you ever asked?) Portfolio management. Retirement accounts. Security systems. We don’t want to live in the wilderness.

No wonder we can’t find God.

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Speechless

Friday, July 10th, 2009 | Author:

Moses made a copper serpent and mounted it on a standard; and when anyone was bitten by a serpent, he would look at the copper serpent and recover.  Numbers 21:9

Copper Serpent – Many people believe that the common symbol of medicine, two serpents on a cross, originated with this event.  But a careful reading suggests otherwise.  There is something else going on here that is grounded in ancient cultural thinking, not in the Greek symbols of medicine. 

Notice that Moses makes a single copper serpent, not two snakes intertwined.  Furthermore, Moses’ choice of material (copper) is really a word play in Hebrew.  Copper is the word nehoshet.  The word for serpent is nehash.  Moses makes a nehash nehoshet.  Why?  Why not make it of gold or silver or any other material?  Because in the thinking of ancient Egypt, the culture where these people have spent the last several hundred years, word similarities were powerful.  It is as if the power of the real serpent can be drawn off by the word connection to the metal.  The reality behind this strange story is lodged in the culture of ancient Egypt and Semitic thinking. 

Several Jewish Targums add commentary to this text.  One suggests that God used serpents because its speechless existence as a result of the curse is now the punishment for those who speak against the Lord.  That’s why the serpents attack in the first place.  The people complain against God and God sends a cursed creature who cannot complain to test the people.  Another Targum suggests that those who trusted in God’s word through Moses were saved because they had to act on the basis of a spoken word, the very thing that brought their trouble in the first place.

Some word pictures offer additional insights.  The word picture for serpent is “what destroys the fence around life” (N-H-Sh).  The serpent is cursed because the serpent refused to acknowledge God’s boundaries and convinced Havvah to do the same.  The word picture for copper (N-H-Sh-T) is “a covenant concerning what destroys the fence around life.”  In other words, the word picture of “copper” actually removes, by covenant promise, what the serpent initiates.  Did you ever wonder why so many New Age adherents claim mystical powers for copper bracelets?  Perhaps they are more Jewish than they think.

What is the application for this little lesson in ancient cultural thinking?  First, we discover that the stories of the Bible can only be understood within the original culture.  When we pull these stories out of their original environment and language, we often inadvertently add our own cultural perspective.  Just think about Christian sermons that claim this story is about the cross of Christ.   Secondly, we find that many of our contemporary fables, mythical beliefs and practices are really rooted in ancient biblical events.  We are products of the Hebrew culture without recognizing it.  Finally, we see the hand of God, working deliberately within the cultural context of His people, to reveal Himself in ways that they would understand – ways that we perhaps no longer see without serious investigation.  If this is true of the story of the serpents, how much more diligent must we be when it comes to the Genesis stories or the miracles of the prophets?  When Yeshua taught those two men on the road about His presence in Scripture, He helped them see the world through the eyes of the ancient audience.  Don’t we need to do the same? 

The Christian church has practically given away its Hebrew heritage.  It converted the Old Testament into a platform for proof-texts about Christian theology.  Maybe it’s time to return to the roots and become citizens of an ancient Kingdom.

Topical Index:  serpent, copper, Targum, Numbers 21:9, culture

Category: Today's Word  | Tags: , , , , ,  | 27 Comments

Sin Habla

Friday, July 10th, 2009 | Author:

10 de julio Y Moisés hizo una serpiente de bronce y la puso sobre el asta; y sucedía que cuando una serpiente mordía a alguno, y éste miraba a la serpiente de bronce, vivía.

Números 21:9


Serpiente de Bronce – muchas personas creen que el símbolo común de la medicina, las dos serpientes en una cruz, se origina de este evento. Pero la lectura meticulosa  sugiere lo otra cosa. Aquí hay algo mas que se fundamenta en el pensamiento cultural antiguo, no en los símbolos griegos de la medicina.

Nota que Moisés produce una sola serpiente de cobre, no dos serpientes entrelazadas. Adicionalmente, la selección de material de Moisés (cobre) realmente es un juego de palabras en hebreo.  Cobre es la palabra nehoshet. La palabra para serpiente es nehash. Moisés produce una nehash nehoshet. ¿Por qué? ¿Por qué no hacerla de oro o plata o cualquier otro material? Porque en el pensamiento de la antigua Egipto, la cultura donde este pueblo había pasado los últimos cientos de años, las similitudes de palabras eran poderosas. La realidad detrás de esta extraña historia esta atrapada en la cultura del Egipto antiguo y el pensamiento semítico.

Varios Tárgum judíos agregan comentario a este texto. Uno sugiere que Dios utilizo serpientes porque su muda existencia como resultado de la maldición es ahora el castigo para quienes hablan contra el Señor. Por eso es que las serpientes atacan desde un inicio. Las personas se quejan contra Dios y Dios envía una criatura maldita que no puede quejarse a probar al pueblo. Otro Tárgum sugiere que aquellos que confiaron en la palabra de Dios por medio de Moisés fueron salvos porque actuaron en base a la palabra hablada, exactamente lo mismo que provocó sus problemas desde el inicio.

Algunas imágenes ofrecen información adicional. Esta imagen para serpiente es “lo que destruye el cerco que rodea la vida” (N-H- Sh). La serpiente es maldita porque rehusó reconocer los límites de Dios y convención a Havvah que hiciera lo mismo. En otras palabras, la imagen de la palabra “cobre” de cierto remueve, por promesa de pacto, lo que inicia la serpiente. ¿Alguna vez  te has preguntado por que tantos seguidores de la Nueva Era declaran las propiedades místicas de los brazaletes de cobre? Quizás son más judíos de lo que creen.

¿Cuál es la aplicación de esta pequeña lección sobre pensamiento cultural antiguo? Primero, descubrimos que las historias de la Biblia solo pueden comprenderse dentro del contexto cultural. Cuando halamos todas estas historias de su ambiente e idioma original, sin desearlo agregamos nuestra propia perspectiva cultural. Solo piensa en los sermones cristianos que dicen que esta historia se refiere a la cruz de Cristo. Segundo, nos percatamos que en muchas de nuestras fabulas contemporáneas, nuestras creencias y prácticas  míticas realmente se originan  en eventos bíblicos antiguos. Somos el producto de la cultura hebrea sin saberlo. Finalmente, vemos la mano de Dios, trabajando con propósitos específicos dentro del contexto cultural de Su pueblo, para revelarse en maneras que podían comprender – maneras que quizás ya no vemos sin investigación profunda. Si esto es cierto de la historia de las serpientes, ¿Cuánto más diligentes debemos ser sobre las historias en Génesis o los milagros de los profetas? Cuando Yeshua enseñó sobre Su presencia en las Escrituras a los dos hombres en el camino, les ayudo a ver el mundo a través de los ojos de la audiencia antigua. ¿Necesitamos hacer lo mismo nosotros?

La iglesia cristiana prácticamente se ha deshecho de su herencia hebrea. Convirtió en Antiguo Testamento en una plataforma de textos probatorios sobre teología cristiana. Quizás ha llegado el momento de regresar a las raíces y convertirnos en ciudadanos del antiguo Reino.

Category: La Palabra de Hoy  | Tags: , , , ,  | One Comment