Their Stories / Our Stories
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
Household – What did the children of Israel bring with them into the desert? What did they carry for forty years as they wandered toward Canaan? Each one brought his bayit, “household,” “family.” But more importantly, each one brought his story
“The Bible is not a system of abstract ideas but a record of happenings in history. . . . Events rather than abstractions of the mind are the basic categories by which the biblical man lives. . . . The God of the philosopher is a concept derived from abstract ideas; the God of the prophets is derived from acts and events. The root of Jewish faith is, therefore, not a comprehension of abstract principles but an inner attachment to those events; to believe is to remember, not merely to accept the truth of a set of dogmas.”[1]
“Biblical revelation must be understood as an event, not as a process. What is the difference between process and event? A process happens regularly, following a relatively permanent pattern; and event is extraordinary, irregular. A process may be continuous, steady, uniform; events happen, intermittently, occasionally. The term ‘continuous revelation’ is as logical as the term ‘round square.’”[2]
“The term ‘event’ is a pseudonym for ‘mystery.’ An event is a happening that cannot be reduced to a part of a process. It is something we can neither predict nor fully explain. To speak of events is to imply that there are happenings in the world that are beyond the reach of our explanations. What the consciousness of events implies, the belief in revelation claims explicitly; namely, that there is a voice of God in the world – not in heaven or in any unknown sphere – that pleads with man to do His will.”[3]
“‘What really happened in Egypt?’ becomes a less important question than ‘How best to tell the story?’”[4]
An event is not something that can be fully explained, nor is it predictable. Events defy human control. They happen to us; they are not manufactured by us. Our Western world seeks, above all else, to control our world. Our theology is ultimately not an attempt to understand God but to control Him, to fit Him into a system of regular, repeatable rituals and doctrines. But this control denies the biblical claim of revelation, which in itself is completely unpredictable and extraordinary. God’s interaction with men is on His terms, not ours. As a result, what matters most to us is our stories of the events in our lives where God is present. And if we look hard enough, we might just discover that He is always present, not because we can fit Him into our plans and purposes, but because years later we see where He was all that time.
If you want someone you love to know this God, you will need to tell your story, with all the emotional details required to connect it with the story God is writing with you.
Topical Index: story, event, faith, remember, bayit, Exodus 1:1
[1] Abraham Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, pp. 12-13.
[4] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus (Schocken Books, New York: 2001), p. 5.
