Practicing the Father

In my last two writings I’ve written about working out the love of God: how it’s important for us to practice the love of God individually and in community. In this writing I want to answer the essential driving question, “How do we know God loves us?” We can learn much about God by listening to the Holy Spirit individually, we can learn much about God when we see people acting out the Son in community, but to approach the Father we must go beyond ourselves and our communities. We approach a timeless God who sits above our ideas of Him and everything our culture has to teach us about Him. God the Father is the great “I am”, the powerful statement of existence we cannot completely understand or fully grasp, even though we see manifestations of His love and power. For even though we have glimpsed the truth through Jesus His Son, even though we hear His whispers through the Holy Spirit, if God were to fully bring himself into our world we would all die. Not because God hates us, but because God the Father is so holy, so pure, the essence of righteousness and goodness that our sinful lives would be wiped out in an instant. God is too good, so good anything not-good cannot stand to be in His presence. There’s nothing we can do to protect or safeguard ourselves. This image of a not-good destroying God is terrifying. Rightly so. Yet we cannot stay in the fetal position, for that is not what God wants from us. As we’ve been looking at who God is we know God offers to wash us clean, to make us whole through his healing and love, so that when He comes we will not be wiped out, but be able to enjoy the wonder that is our creator, redeemer, and friend. How do we get to know and thus practice the Father? By engaging His Word, learning what He has said to us and desires for us through Scripture. Or to put it more simply, to read the book that goes by it’s own name: The Bible.

Bible reading can be dangerous. Many an intelligent atheist has said the best defense against Christianity is reading the Bible. This is because the Bible is a foreign document. It wasn’t written in one century, but across several. It wasn’t written by one person, but forty. It wasn’t written in a single language, but three. Even though the scope of the writing of the Bible is mind-numbingly wide, it stands as a unified text proclaiming a single, triune God. The authors of the Bible weren’t writing out their own ideas about God, but rather God was working through them to convey His truth. That’s why the truth of the Bible is timeless; it’s not about any one place in time. Yet the places in time and the descriptions we see can be confusing. For we don’t live in a sacrificial world anymore. We are not a wandering nomadic people. We are not oppressed by a foreign government. We have never lost our homeland. Furthermore the writers of the Bible did not hide their flaws, instead we see them clear as day. In spite of their flaws we know God loved them and called them His own, even though the writers pointed towards an impossible to follow Law. That’s why reading the Bible can be difficult. We can misunderstand what the writers were saying to their own people, and to us, when we don’t examine or try to understand the world they lived in. By only examining the literal Word, or by trying to over-analyze and mystify it, we can overlook the subtle quiet nature of our Father. He is not always a thundering voice from a mountain top, sometimes He is the subtle whisper of a gentle breeze. Sometimes God’s word to us is so ordinary and plain we simply do not see it.

Why?

From a religious perspective the Bible is a series of books about morals, ethics, and laws. Our role is to be good enough and by our goodness attain the favor of God. Which is complete trash. The Bible does contain ethics, morals, and the Law; yet, it does not rest it’s laurels on these things. The Bible is about the love of God. For loving God is the correction and turning point of all the points in the Bible. We do not love God because we first loved Him, we love God because He first loved us. He speaks to us. He reaches out to us. He does the work because we can’t. We can never be good enough, for God is the very definition of goodness. From Him all good things flow. The only way we can ever be good is by having a connection with Him. When God made the universe He saw that it was good. It was good because He made it. When He made humanity in His image, a reflection of Himself, He saw we were good. He then gave us the choice to not-be-good. We have all chosen not to be good, and the universe suffers for it. We all fall short of God’s goodness, even though we can still do good things, for we are still made in His image. God can restore His image in us, restore us to His goodness; we simply have to accept that all goodness comes from God and not from us. We do not co-participate in God’s restoration of brokenness. It entirely depends on Him. God loves us so much that He’ll take anyone who wants be made whole, no matter how bad they’ve been, and make them new. This is the message of Bible: we can be made new by God, not by our own deeds or living by a strict moral code, but by the love of God. For the love of God is stronger than morals, more complete than ethics, and more definite than the Law. These things tell us how broken we are; it is by them we come to understand our desperate need for God’s healing love. For our need for God’s restoration is well and truly desperate, even though we are not to live in desperation and anxiety, for to live this way is not to live by the love of God; it is to live in fear of the Law.

What is this Law, and why is it necessary?

Consider a company owner who runs a business. The owner puts together a set of policies and rules by which he wants his company run. He gives the policies and rules to his managers and employees so they will know how to run the business. If the owner then leaves for a long time and comes back, should not the managers and employees still be running the company by his policies and rules? If he comes back and finds those he left in charge have disregarded his policies and rules: they have been mistreating customers, making shoddy products, over-charging, and taking advantage of people, would he not be angry? Would he not bring justice to his company upon his return? Would not his policies and rules include a section warning his managers and employees what would happen should he find them unfaithful? Would not his first and foremost desire be to see his company run rightly? Would he not rather encourage his managers and employees to do what is right, than warn them of the repercussions of doing wrong? And if they persisted in doing wrong, failing to listen to his gentle or harsh warnings, would he not upon his return bring about a harsh and swift justice? We would expect this from a business owner, for the company is his to do with as he pleases. But when God does this same thing for us, for we and all of creation are His, we claim He is too harsh and too judgmental. To have this view of God means we are only focusing on the judgments of Scripture, and not the numerous encouragements to live out the love of God. For when we live in love we are no longer afraid, and the love of God guides us with more precision than ethics, morals and laws combined. For there will always be those who seek to take advantage of the Law and twist it to their own ends. The only defense against such twisting of the Law is the love of God, which we come to know through the Holy Spirit, Jesus the Son, and the reading of the Word.

Whose interpretation of the Bible should we read?

The best defense of the Bible is its breadth. It spans so much time that twisting the entirety of the Bible is impossible. For a translator may attempt to bend a single passage to his will, but he will never be able to bend all of Scripture. Consider one of the early printing press mistakes called the red-letter Bible. It was called the red-letter Bible because it left out a ‘not’ in the Ten Commandments. It read, “Thou shalt commit adultery”. Not only does this not make contextual sense in the Ten Commandments, for the commandments are listed in multiple places, which means one set of commandments read, “thou shalt not commit adultery,” while another read, “thou shalt”. Even if both passages had been changed there would still be stories in the Bible speaking out against adultery. One could not read the entire Bible and reach the conclusion that adultery is acceptable, for too many of the biblical writers spoke out against infidelity. A careful reader would come to the conclusion that someone had made a mistake in the re-printing of the commandments. Or as in the case of what historically happened, all copies of the original red-letter Bible were burned. A slight confusion in translation cannot change the entire Word of God; reading all of the Bible is an important part of getting to know the Father and knowing how He wants us to live.

Practically speaking there is more to be considered. The more scholars involved in a translation, the more accurate it will tend to be. The fewer scholars involved, the more inaccurate it can be. Teams of scholars can check each other. A single scholar cannot. I consider one person’s interpretation of the Bible dangerous. For just as we can check the teaching of God’s word by His Spirit, and the living out of His word by His Son, so too we can check a single translator by looking at multiple translations of the Word. We do not all have to learn the original languages, but we all have to learn the story of the Bible and become familiar with it; it is then we will know someone has made an error in translation.

If this is so reading the Bible sounds like a difficult task. Shouldn’t we leave that task to more educated people?

No. God’s Word is for all people, not just intellectuals, philosophers, law-makers, business owners, or translators. We have a right to know who God is because we are His. It would be like trying to let someone else manage your most important relationship. The things that are most important to us we do ourselves; I would never let someone else manage my relationship with my wife, that is for me to do! To give up on the Bible because it’s difficult is to give up on God, it is to say that God is so far removed from us that we cannot understand Him. That’s simply not who God is. Yes, God is bigger than our understanding, but He has also made Himself plain and easy to understand. He has given us a simple way for us to understand who He is, and the least mystical of these ways is reading His Word.

But what if we cannot read?

God is bigger than illiteracy. If we cannot read then we should ask to be read to. For as the Bible has been handed down through generations so too we must come to understand it’s words and meaning from someone else. But we cannot stay in the place of accepting someone else’s interpretation. We must come before the Living God, the Father of all, and come to know Him. His desire is not to be removed from us, but to be close to us. That’s why we call our connection with God a relationship. For nothing comes between two people committed to each other. No circumstance will ever be able to tear them apart. This is what God offers us, this is what we get when we accept who God is. Coming into relationship with God means no longer propping ourselves up on the things that brought us to God, but wholly trusting in Him as He is. Bible reading is an essential part of maintaining and growing that relationship. It’s just as important as our personal practices and our communal living.

By practicing these things we will come to know God; He will reveal Himself to us as He promised He would. For those who seek God will find Him. When our community confuses us we must turn to the Word and seek His truth. When we err in our personal lives, He will speak to us through His Scripture, reminding us of His love even as we read His Law. Yet should we err in the Word, the community of Christ, who have hidden the Word in their hearts, will come alongside us and bring us back to Him. For this is the power of God’s Living Word. It is the power to change, not only as individuals, but also as communities. Can we do any of this ourselves? No. It is only by the power and love of God that any of this will be revealed to us. A power that comes from a loving Father, made manifest through His Son, guiding us by His Spirit, made plain to us by His Word. Amen.