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Heart of Darkness

Thursday, January 06th, 2011 | Author:

Lord, all my desire is before You and my sighing is not hidden from You. Psalm 38:10 (Hebrew text – Hebrew Heart media translation)

Desire – Did you think David uses the word ta’avati (“my desire”) to describe his spiritual longing for intimate relationship with God?  Have you lifted this verse from its context in order to use it as a model of desiring holiness?  Better read the first nine verses again.  They are filled with physical distress, festering wounds, illness and discomfort as a result of David’s sin.  In context, this word can’t be about David’s yearning for God’s goodness.  In context, David proclaims that God sees all his ungodly desires.  This is the battle of the yetser ha’ra raging in David.  The same word that shows up in Genesis 3:6 is employed to express David’s seductive terrors.  No wonder he sighs.  Part of him wants to fulfill those cravings.  Part of him is greedy for his own relief.  (Both greed and craving are also meanings of ta’avah).  What does David discover?  God sees it all.    God sees the heart of darkness boiling within us.  And God is not afraid.

But we are afraid, aren’t we?  We are afraid to look at the real darkness within.  We sometimes feel caught in the trap.  Our desires are powerful, perhaps even overwhelming.  We wish we could hide, especially from our Lord.  Just like Adam, once we discover the truth of our second-agenda condition, we want to run for cover.  But God does not hide.  He looks right into the mess we have allowed to ferment and says, “Come back to Me.”  David recognizes that the first step toward verse 16, a verse of hope, is exposure.  Until I acknowledge that God sees me for all that I am, I can’t make much progress toward righteousness.  Life on this planet is always a fight.  God knows that too.  If I pretend that I am just fine, that there is no battle left in the depths of my person, then I am the one hiding.

It’s important to notice that David’s metaphors for his present state are particularly Hebraic.  They are all about tangible, physical conditions.  Wounds, sleep disturbance, weakness, deafness, dumbness, burning in the loins and general illness describe the symptoms of sin.  The Western Greek world views sin as an inner malady of the soul requiring spiritual and psychological counseling.  Greek sin drives me to the therapist.  Hebrew sin drives me to the Surgeon.  There’s a big difference.  David’s view of sin means that others observe his aliments and rightly conclude that he is having problems with God.  I wonder if we would draw that conclusion about what we observe.  Probably not.  And what a shame that we are blind to the whole-person disruption sin causes.  How can we help if we don’t see?

Ah, but God sees.  He sees it all.  All the corruption.  All the failure.  All the fight.  All the self-deprecation.  God sees – and He loves us anyway. There is no hope in me.  I am in the heart of darkness.  But there is an answer.  “For in You, YHWH, I hope, You will answer, Lord Elohiym.”

Topical Index:  desire, ta’avah, darkness, hope, Psalm 38:10

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The Problem Of Evil

Saturday, December 18th, 2010 | Author:

I YHWH and none else, forming light and creating darkness; making peace and creating evil – I YHWH do all these things. Isaiah 45:6-7 (translation: M. Buber)

Creating – Where did evil come from?  Such a simple question.  Such an enormously difficult answer, if there even is an answer.  One of the greatest impediments to belief in a wholly good God is the existence of evil.  For centuries theologians have struggled to find a resolution to the problem.  How can a good God be the final creator of all things and yet there be evil in the universe?  Usually we try to make a very big dent with an explanation about free choice and sin.  But some things just don’t seem to be explained by these facts.  Some things just seem too hideous to be accounted for by human failure.  When pressed really hard, theologians turn to this passage in Isaiah, claiming that even though we can’t understand how this can be true, the Bible clearly states that God is not in competition with some other equally powerful demonic force.  Evil does not have independent existence.

But maybe the appeal to Isaiah isn’t quite right.  Maybe Isaiah’s cultural setting has more to say about this statement than the hoped-for resolution of the theological problem of evil.  Martin Buber thinks so.

Buber suggests that Isaiah’s statement must be understood in the context of the 4th Century BC.  In that culture, Babylonian astral gods were the creators of light and darkness and the progenitors of the second-order divine beings who caused good and evil to exist.  These astral gods belonged to a tribal hierarchy of divine entities, ruling over the fate of men and requiring appeasement before showing favor.  Isaiah destroys this pagan belief by claiming that “YHVH is absolutely different, as He reveals Himself to Cyrus in the word of the prophet.  He creates by Himself not only the cosmic opposition pair light-darkness, but also that which constitutes the human sphere, peace-evil.  That shalom, “peace,”  “welfare,” and not tov, “good,” is here contrasted with ra, “evil,” is obviously in order to keep away the notions of ethical opposition.  Evil in the sense of wickedness comes into the world only as a result of resistance to God; but evil in the sense of adversity and affliction  . . . is fashioned by God Himself  for purposes of His leadership of the world, without gaining thereby the same standing as peace, since in the last resort this rules alone.”[1]

It’s worth noting that the verb for “create” in this statement is bara’, a verb used exclusively with God as the subject (cf. Genesis 1:1 and Isaiah 65:17).  Here it is applied only to the negatives “darkness” and “evil.”  “Light” and “peace” use the verbs yatsar and asah.  The emphasis is theological.  No pagan god or gods bring about any conditions of opposition in the cosmos or in the human realm.  God is God alone!  He is the only divine creator.

In the end, Isaiah’s statement does not answer the question, “Where did evil come from?”  It stands as a declaration of sovereignty in a cultural of pagan polytheism.  It’s focus is on the immediate need to overthrow idolatry.  Isaiah’s statement cannot be lifted from its cultural setting and forced into a box within the plan of the systematic theologian.  In the end, we discover that God is in history, interacting with the needs of the day, involving Himself in the issues at hand.  The Holy One of Israel is not the God of the eternal “present,” far above the petty concerns of human beings.  God creates in history; a history that is found in the realm of men, filled with the issues of men.  If we want to meet God, we will have to dress for the occasion in the garb of the day of His revelation.

Topical Index:  create, bara’, evil, darkness, peace, history, Isaiah 45:6-7

[1] Martin Buber, The Prophetic Faith, p. 213.

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Boundary Lines

Thursday, May 27th, 2010 | Author:

Where is this, the way light dwells; and where is the place of darkness? Job 38:19 (Hebrew text)

Place – The documentary extolled the work of volunteers in an orphanage in Haiti.  A teacher held up the coloring book page of a three-year-old.  “Last year when Alicia arrived, she could only color like this.”  The page represented an outline of a family.  Across the entire page were swatches of purple and yellow.  “But now, look at her progress.”  The teacher held up a second page.  The colors were neatly encased within the lines.  “This is real progress,” beamed the teacher.   She was right.  It was progress in conformity to the Greek-based view of the world.

Consider a coloring book.  On the pages, we teach children that objects are created by imaginary lines that must be filled in to give them substance.  Those lines represent boundaries between the “form” of an object and the rest of the world.  But the real world isn’t like this at all.  There are no outlines around trees or boundary lines around faces.  Objects are not preconceived empty spaces that require extra content.  Go look at a real tree.  Where is the “line” that separates the tree from the root or the leaf?  Where is the line that separates the trunk seen from this angle versus the trunk seen from another angle.  Look at a face.  Where is the border that separates eye from socket, nose from cheek, hairline from forehead?  The “boundary” isn’t a line.  It is a movement from one place to another where the boundary is part of both, just as the shore is the boundary of the sea and vise versa with both mixed together.

If this is so obvious to any observer, why do we insist on a world made up of imaginary lines of separation?  The answer is this:  Greek metaphysics is based on geometry and geometry is the mathematics of particular shapes.  When we see the world through these eyes, we impose artificial boundary shapes on reality.  When Job asks where is the place of darkness, he is not asking us to point to a line that distinguishes light from dark.  The place of darkness is already dark.  It is not a line drawn across the sky.  It is the observable reality of somewhere without light.

So you say, why does this matter?  Who cares if we add artificial lines to our view of the world?  Does it really make any difference?  Without lines, who is black and who is white?  Without lines, who is saved and who is lost?  Without lines, what is belief and what is unbelief?  Without lines, who is Israel and who isn’t?  Does this mean there aren’t any differences?  Of course not.  Anyone can see that black is not white.  But where is the line?  Ah, that’s not so easy to see, is it?  When does a man move from “lost” to “saved” if the Hebrew worldview doesn’t contain artificial lines?  Does a man cross from lost to saved when he declares he believes?  Or is it a matter of observable change seen from many angles over some period of time?  Is belief a matter of crossing a “line in the sand” or is it something that reveals itself over a lifetime of behavior?  Where is the line between trust and doubt?  Am I still a follower of the King if I trust Him today but fall victim to doubt tomorrow?  Is it a line or a process?

What happens to our neatly packaged view of reality if we erase all those artificial lines?  Would life become more like a verb – a movement, a process of becoming?  Would we act differently, talk differently, think differently if we didn’t see the world as boxes that need to be filled?  What if we saw the world as life in constant motion, always interacting?  Would we think about God differently if we looked carefully at the real world and noticed that His actions and our actions are all mixed up together in common purpose?  What would your faith be like if the “boundaries” were really messy?

Topical Index:  line, darkness, boxes, Job 38:19

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Hebrew Mathematics

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 | Author:

For you were formerly darkness, but now you are light in the Lord; walk as children of light Ephesians 5:8

Darkness – In Greek, Paul writes gar pote skotos, nun de phos en Kyrio (literally, “for then darkness, and now light in Lord”).  Even though his words are certainly Greek, did you notice that the syntax is Hebrew?  Did you notice that the imagery doesn’t say, “you were like darkness” or “you were caught in darkness” or “you were found in darkness”?  No, Paul makes a Hebrew equivalence.  You were darkness.  Darkness wasn’t merely a description of your state.  It was the essence of your being.  Remove the darkness and there would be nothing left.  Before we were rescued, we were black holes in the world, pulling creation into the emptiness within us.

This equivalence is typically Hebrew.  When you read this verse, your mind probably rearranged the sentence so that you thought skotos was a description (an adjective) of those who are lost.  You probably imagined some lost person described as alone, without direction, feeling empty, acting immorally, disobedient to God.  You imagined that Paul had these ideas in mind and simply used the summary term skotos.  But that is our Greek paradigm affecting the way you read this.  What Paul is really suggesting is this:  you and darkness were the same thing.  It’s not you, the person, who had a characteristic called “darkness.”  You were darkness.  You existed as shadow, as action without light, as disordered in the universe.

Now that we see Paul’s Hebrew-thinking, we can ask one more question.  What does “darkness” mean in the Hebrew worldview?  Since Hebrew constructs the universe in terms of purposeful actions, we discover that darkness is active emptiness.  It is flow without purpose.  It is movement, but movement away from the light, movement toward chaos.  Darkness is the power of disintegration, disorder and death.  Darkness is movement to destroy.  It is motion without life-giving purpose.  In spite of all the activity that occupied our former lives, we were vessels of destruction.  We were power that undid God’s creation by bringing disorder into being.  How did we accomplish such terrible purposes?  Ah, by living without light.

Remember!  Remember when darkness spoke to you?  Remember when you could hear the whisper behind those “natural” choices?  Remember when life seemed so clear until you acted, and you were suddenly entombed with consequences?  Remember when you were propelled forward as if you were pushed by a spindly hand in the back?  Remember when every direction was down?  Remember when you could close your eyes and still see the terrors of the night?  “You were formerly darkness.”  Pote is the word of hope here.  It describes both a time in the past and a time in the future.  Today, darkness is in the past.  Let it remain there with all the other shadows that used to haunt you.

Topical Index:  darkness, skotos, Ephesians 5:8

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Shady Lane

Friday, May 15th, 2009 | Author:

If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and we walk in darkness, we lie and are not practicing the truth. 1 John 1:6

Walk in Darkness – What do you think about when you read this verse? Most readers probably imagine that walking in darkness applies to the worst kind of reprobates, those who deny God’s goodness and live lives dedicated to themselves. But that doesn’t make sense, does it? John writes about people who claim to have fellowship with God, so it’s fairly unlikely that he has terrible sinners in mind. Sinners don’t claim to have a relationship with God at all. So, John must have someone else in mind; someone who says that he is close to the Lord but whose life doesn’t match his words. I wonder who that could be?

Maybe we should take a look at John’s theological background to see if we can determine who these poor souls are. To do that we have to look at John’s use of the imagery of light and darkness.

First, we recognize that John uses darkness to describe the path of wickedness. This path resists the light but it has no power to overcome it. To walk in darkness is to walk in opposition to and in ignorance of God’s ways. In his story of Yeshua, John uses darkness to describe those who had a form of religion but did not have the substance of relationship. While some of John’s statements encompass the whole world, most of his use of darkness describes religious people, not pagans. These are people who claim to be following the will of God but they do not follow the Way of the Son. In other words, even though they say that they have fellowship with the Father, they do not walk according to the example given by the Messiah Yeshua. Look at John 8:12, 12:35 and 12:46.

Secondly, Yeshua’s use of this imagery takes us back to the Hebrew Scriptures. Yeshua constantly reminds His audience of God’s Word. Darkness in apprehending God’s ways begins in Deuteronomy 28:29 where God pronounces a curse on those who do not follow His explicit instructions. The prophets echo the same warning (Isaiah 50:10, Jeremiah 2:31). Ecclesiastes tells us that a fool walks in darkness (2:14) and we must remember that the biblical use of “fool” is a man without moral sensitivity to God, not someone who is stupid. Proverbs 2:13 says that those who “leave the paths of uprightness” walk in darkness. The Psalms use this imagery over and over to warn us about departing from God’s direction (see examples in Psalm 18:28 and 91:6).

What can we conclude? Who did John have in mind? Clearly, John was not speaking to people who reject God completely. He was speaking to those who claim they are in alignment with the Father. But they are not doing what the Father says. In other words, they have determined their own codes of conduct. As a result, they are blind to the truth.

How about you? Are you standing in the shade by refusing to walk with the Son in His way? Are you making it up as you go along? Or is His path your path without qualification?

Topical Index: the Way, darkness, 1 John 1:6. skotia

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