It Happened to Me
Now these are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob; they came each one with his household: Exodus 1:1 NASB
Names – The Bible is not a timeless guidebook. It is a story of the history of men and God. It is a recollection of what happened, not a collection of moral aphorisms. To treat the Bible as a set of principles is to miss its greatest impact. The Bible is about how people lived in the presence of YHVH. The only way to learn from it is to make its people your people. For example, when we convert the Beatitudes (or any other “teaching” passage) into moral truths, we strip them of their power—the power that they had on the real people who heard them. The same is true of Torah. Torah without the children of Israel recently freed from bondage in Egypt is impotent to alter culture. Torah ignored or “fulfilled” in the Church is essentially the same as declaring that God’s history with Mankind doesn’t matter. The Church without Torah is an attempt to create the “new man” by artificial insemination. The denial of history has terrible consequences.
“Innocence in our day is the hope that there ‘are no enemies,’ that we can move into a new Garden of Eden, a community characterized by freedom from want, guilt, and anxiety. But this also means freedom from responsibility; it means going back prior to the birth of consciousness, for guilt is only the other side of moral consciousness—we have ‘eaten of the tree of knowledge.’ We valiantly try to persuade ourselves that if we only find the ‘key,’ we can easily create a society in which nakedness, guilt, anxiety will all be things of the unmourned past. Unmourned and unstudied—here lies the contemporary uninterest in history and the refusal to study it. To hang on to this picture of innocence, you must deny history.”[1]
The Bible is not a map to the new Garden of innocence. The Bible is a record of failure! There are no innocent people in the Bible after Genesis 2. There are only people in need of restoration; people who have broken their promises, made bad choices, fallen by the wayside, drowned in sin. There are no whitewashed saints. There are only recovering sinners. If you thought the Bible was a book of moral instruction or a design for a godly government, you were wrong. This book is about God’s faithfulness in the lives of real human messes. It is a case study in the disaster of hubris. And the only answer it provides is batach—trust in the Lord for He is good.
When the children of Israel came to Egypt, they had names. Shemot. Real people. Real problems. Real struggles. Just like us. They didn’t have a sacred guidebook. They had a covenant God. I wonder if we haven’t traded trust for words on a page. Maybe we need to come out, without our creeds, our doctrines and our printed red-letter editions, and learn to live in His presence.
Topical Index: shemot, names, Exodus 1:1, Bible, batach, trust, innocence, history
[1] Rollo May, Power and Innocence, p. 56.
To put it simply, its what God has done for us, not what we do for God.
Uh oh, I think I need to read Rollo May. What a quote! What a powerful indictment! Shot right down the middle for me. Thank YOU for “remembering”, Skip, and by that, requiring that we do, too.
I had a choice when I was young presented to me, to “come out” or die, essentially, so I did – without those “creeds, doctrines, and printed red letter editions” – and for 40 years I have been wandering in my wilderness, and from what I can tell, in this community, at least, I am not alone. I know it can be a terribly lonely and disconcerting place, this wilderness, all y’all who I can tell have been wandering too (thank you! I don’t feel alone any more!), but you know what they say – history that has been forgotten is going to be repeated. That wilderness experience, so essential to separate the Children from Egypt, must be repeated now, apparently, for Egypt is back (or we are back in it), and how else are we going to separate ourselves back out?
We thought we didn’t have to identify with all those Old Testament failures by making them into ‘others’ – you know, as in Not Us. Well, firstly, I think that reaction may have just been a byproduct of what I think of as the two human glitches in the wiring: the tendency to believe that there are such things as Something For Nothing, and Us’s And Thems’s. We apparently thought that if we could pretend that we weren’t ‘the Jews’ (Us’s and Thems’s) that we would not suffer from all that hardheadedness. Perhaps that thinking could have been at least partly a product of the Enlightenment (mis-named, for sure), as in we, the Enlightened Ones, could not possibly be that way! Well, all we apparently accomplished with all that effort was to set ourselves up to repeat their disaster…
I believe part of the “grafting in” to Israel is to allow us to benefit from their (now OUR) mistakes, by not having to repeat them. I am quite certain that I, at least in part, have been repeating the Wilderness because at least some of my forbears refused to identify with, and therefore benefit from, those mistakes.
I have read a lot of wilderness survival manuals in my lifetime. They resonate with me. I have been drawn to the wilderness, and have identified with it my whole life. I have certainly been wandering in a spiritual one for a long time. I think I now may be able to see, at least partly, why. Thank you, Skip! This was great!
Deuteronomy 32:8 When the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel.
It would seem that “counting heads” has more to it than just countin’ heads. What were we thinkin’.
YHWH bless you and keep you…….
As Shabbat draws near let’s also remember we are counted with those who rose up out of the dust ….as the song goes…Diamonds rising up out of the dust.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7o9yG1mWcE&list=FLgAMygYUKrdy_s_x3s3eY8g&index=1
Shabbat Shalom
My guess is that the last thing church-world would ever think of doing would be living in the presence YHVH. It’s way to difficult and punishing. Why, look what happened to the Jews, who made a complete mess of it and paid the price over and over and over. Besides, all you need is Grace. To be obedient is “old-school”. Hard work is way overrated and quite unnecessary with Grace. Say a prayer, ask Jeshua into your life, get a bible and read John. That’s it. You’re on your way to Heaven and your insurance policy can never be cancelled. Oh happy day! To be and live in the presence of YHVH is way to difficult to even attempt. It’s much more interesting and way less risky to fiddle around with stuff like “Pre-Trib”, “Post-Trib”, the “Rapture”, tweaking the temperature and flame height in the furnace of Hell and keeping score of who’s in and who’s out. I want to live in that presence. I’ll take my chances!
A history of others First Attempt In Learning (FAIL) how to know God. And what a God we know as He has ensured that by preserving this history we do not make the same mistakes or at least have some guidelines in how to deal with these mistakes should we make them…
This was a timely encouragement/rebuke. Something I needed to read very much today. Thank you.