God's Covenant Love and Adrenaline

In Genesis 6 through 9, the account of God destroying all life on earth with a flood is chilling.  Noah and his family are saved, and immediately afterwards, the family breaks up.  Ham and Canaan are cursed and it is as if the garden and tree thing has happened all over again.  I suppose it is just telling evidence that it never went very far anyway.  Then the Tower of Babel, the Table of Nations, and then war for the rest of human history sum up the remainder of time from then until now.  Oh, I forgot, and God saved the world through His Son, Jesus.  At least that is how it seems sometimes.  But it’s not.

There is a difference in this world and in human history because the Creator of humans has not left us alone.  For reasons that are all His own, I see record after record of one covenant after another with this rebellious cantankerous rabble He created, wiped clean, and started again.  I call the reason I don’t really understand, love.  He loves me (us really).  But that word has to be defined for me by what He has done.  Love is now thousands of years of patience with the crazies crawling on the earth.  Love is continually engaging ones in conversation, covenants, giving laws, and finally invading their paradigm, allowing Himself to be killed.

So, I don’t really fully understand love; only to the degree that I see my Master’s work.  And I suppose the question posed by Chambers this morning is, do I believe that and abide by that final covenant?  It better be yes, but is it?  I am still so wrapped up in me that I wonder.  Honestly it’s not like I expect my Master to do more than He has done.  It honestly has to do with my knowledge of His love having no bounds.  I know He forgives me.  I am ashamed to say it, but I know I can get away with my sinful things because I know the One who sees me also forgives me.  It is as if I have said with my life that sin should abound all the more.

The wrong I do is not unconscious.  Sometimes it is habitual, but that never lasts.  The stuff that lasts or in which I continually participate are things I know are wrong.  Being a bully to my daughter instead of lovingly correcting her is not something I do because I think it’s the way a parent is supposed to be.  I do it for the same reason bullies have always done that:  I feel powerful and less afraid when I exert control over others.  It’s stupid and devoid of surrender to my Master.  When I am irresponsible, when I am…wow, this is depressing.  Anyway, I’m sinful and it has to do with me breaking a covenant with my Master.

The answer is being faithful to my Master.  It really comes down to tipping the emphasis of my time and life toward Him.  Lately it has been toward games.  That’s not working for me.  I just ejected the disc that has been in my drive for weeks now, and put it away.  It’s not an evil game per se, but it has been consuming me.  It’s intense, and while that’s not wrong, it’s something appealing and easy for me to obsess over.  I crave the adrenaline.  And it’s safe; I get the adrenaline rush without jumping off a bridge with rubber bands attached to my ankles.  I don’t have to base-jump; I can focus on a computer screen.  I see it has become bad for me.

If my brother wants to play, then I can for social reasons.  I have been telling myself I’m practicing.  I was for a while, but I’ve practiced.  There are things around here I need to do, laundry, shopping for my wife (did I mention Christmas is coming?), and so on.  I’m not running short of things to occupy my time.  I have blog entries I’m stacking up for after December 15.  I’ve got stuff to do, so I won’t be bored.  It all lacks the adrenaline though, the intensity.  So I know that it will be difficult for a while, but peace seems at odds with adrenaline.  Let’s see how I do with peace for a few days.

Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, December 6

Seeing my Master through a Legal Lens

One of the criticisms of the Book of James by Martin Luther was that it discounted the role of faith.  The problem with his assessment is that what is left is law.  Yet in the second chapter, James says that the law cannot save.  So, what was misunderstood by Luther is that James is saying that faith has a resulting change in the person which is evidenced by good deeds.  If the deeds are not present, the faith that led to change may not be there either.  So James is not discounting the need for faith or saying that faith does not save; but rather is saying “put up or shut up” about your faith.  So faith is evidenced more by deeds than words.

The role of the “law” in my life is probably not what it is for some.  I know there are Ten Commandments separated out, and lots of believers think of that only when thinking of the law.  But James refers to the “whole law” when he discusses keeping the law.  If one is broken out of the whole law, that person is guilty of all of them.  There are a lot more laws than those found in the Ten Commandments.  So what is the purpose or value of those?  I believe there is value for believers in those esoteric and forgotten laws.  It’s not to save a person from separation from their Creator, it’s to better understand Him and His character.

The major bodies of law texts are found in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy.  They are not the most riveting reading.  Once past much of the drama of Exodus, it becomes hard to get through the legal parts.  Part of the difficulty though is the difficulty in reconciling what is being read with a modern paradigm.  It sounds so foreign that is hard to visualize or imagine what it would look like today.  Therefore it makes little sense to modern readers.  This is where a technique I learned from my wife becomes helpful.  She would constantly ask me, “What’s the point?”  That’s the key question when examining a set of laws on a particular topic.

A lot of or most of Leviticus, the point is consistently the holiness of God requiring a subsequent holy behavior in His people.  Right down to what they wore and how they did their hair this concept was consistently, “Be Holy as I am Holy.”  In Deuteronomy the layout and structure is that of a Hittite Legal Contract or Covenant between a power and those under that power.  It could be the king or a prince, or a chieftain in power, but someone in power.  Once they conquered another people, this is the document the conquered ones were forced into complying with.  The nice thing for the conquered people is they knew what to expect.

Those two contexts make addressing their contents somewhat easier.  There are other historical issues to be addressed, like the setting of the writing and so on, but the essential over all context is a lot of help in understanding the paradigm it come out of.  The book of Exodus is not as easy.  This one is sort of a precursor to the other two, and provides some foundational sets of laws and lots of what is known as “sundry laws” in most modern translations (that is what the heading reads anyway).  The laws defy a particular categorical definition.  This makes the sets of legal matter in Exodus a bit more difficult to understand in one sense.

The key to any of these legal texts is the one consistent truth about them all.  The Deliverer of Israel provided His people with a glimpse of what was important to Him, and therefore of His character.  All of Scripture can be seen this way, but especially the legal texts.  In no other place do we see the Master of the universe giving direction so clearly and so distinctly.  It is one of the places I see a clearer glimpse of my Master.  It is one thing to see Him and His character in the poetic and prophetic texts of the Hebrew Scriptures, but those stem from these.  The legal texts give life and depth to the rest.  These lay a foundation for the Christian Scriptures.

Well, this is all well and good, but what would it look like.  I’m out of time this morning, so I’ll need to demonstrate it later.  In the meantime, I will be spending some time in those texts to refresh my memory (that’s right, I haven’t been there is a while, I know).  Perhaps I will discover something new.  Fortunately I don’t need to pass the bar or find my “powdered wig” to search through these laws.

Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, December 1