Catching Fog

The Apocalypse grants hope in the middle of hard times. John’s Apocalypse, usually referred to as the Book of Revelation, is often misunderstood by modern readers who fail to comprehend it’s setting and don’t get the genre. The confusion of many modern readers is akin to the confusion of someone who goes to watch the horror movie, The Night of the Living Dead and then tries to interpret it as a romantic comedy. Revelation is an apocalypse, a form of literature created to encourage those facing persecution, who live in an oppressed, controlled society. It has, over the years, comforted Christians enslaved by Romans, hunted by Nazis, or put in the Gulags by Communists. For the original readers, they understood it as a message of hope, that the Romans who currently controlled the world, who attacked and denigrated the Christian faith, and who fed Christians to lions and worse, would ultimately be overthrown. The oppressor’s whip would be broken, the bars of the prison would shatter, and the kingdom of tyranny would be transformed into the kingdom of God. And of course, that’s what happened. The Roman Empire that had persecuted Christians and killed them, ultimately transformed itself and converted to become Christian itself. From a persecuted minority, the Christian faith became the religion of the greatest Empire the world had ever known. The evil empire had been destroyed, not be force of arms, as many might have imagined—but through the preaching of the Gospel. And it’s destruction was not physical, but spiritual: the enemy of Christians died when it became a friend of Christians instead.

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The LORD is my shepherd, I lack nothing.
He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters,
he refreshes my soul.
He guides me along the right paths
for his name’s sake.
Even though I walk
through the darkest valley,
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
Surely your goodness and love will follow me
all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the LORD
forever. (Psalm 23:1–6, NIV)

Like a shepherd, God cares for his people. The famous Psalm gives us one of many pictures that the Bible paints for us of God in the hopes of helping us understand him. In the New Testament, God is described as a Father. Elsewhere, he’s been described as a husband. Jesus compares himself to a mother hen. And here, the Psalmist compares him to a shepherd, a common image for the agriculturally based society in which it was penned. The shepherd devoted himself to watching over the sheep, seeing to it that they were fed and watered and protected from foes. Through heat and cold, through bright sunny days and dark scary nights, the Shepherd was always there, never leaving the sheep, never letting them face any hardship by themselves.

A phrase near the poem is commonly translated, “Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life.” The word translated “follow” is an interesting one, in that it has very negative connotations in the original Hebrew language in which the poem was written. It was used for “pursuit” as in a predator chasing after its prey or an army chasing an enemy. It was also used to describe persecution.

Thus, a powerful image is drawn by the poet, because he twists something negative into a positive, creating an unforgetible image of God’s people being chased by the ravenous rabid dogs of Goodness and Love. Are we going to let them catch us, or are we going to keep on running?

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Elijah is overworked, stressed, and lonely.

His great victory over the prophets of Baal during the Contest of the Gods on Mt. Carmel had been followed not by further victory, but with rejection and the threat of death at the hands of the Queen of Israel, Jezebel. Having fled in terror from Jezebel’s death threat, Elijah wound up in the wilderness. Discouraged, worn out, and alone, he prayed that God would kill him. Instead, God sent an angel to feed him and saw to it that he got some needed rest. Then he got up and traveled on for another forty days. Finally, while he was hiding in a cave, God came to him and asked him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” (1 Kings 19:9)
Elijah responded, “I have been very zealous for the LORD God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, broken down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too.” (1 Kings 19:10)

For Elijah, not only had the work of being a prophet been hard and tiring, it also seemed to be worthless. In all his years of preaching, teaching and working at telling his countrymen about God, what had he managed to accomplish? As far as he could tell, absolutely nothing. In fact, as far as he could tell, things had actually gotten worse. Where before there had been worshipers of Yahweh, today they were all gone with him alone as the sole follower of Yahweh. What had it all been for? Why had he bothered? Hence, his desire that God would simply kill him now.

In the popular movie staring James Stuart, It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey comes to believe that he has wasted his life since he never achieved his heart’s ambition. Frustrated and bitter, he comes to the point of suicide and wishes that he’d never been born. He is rescued by a clumsy angel who shows him just what the world would be like had he, in fact, never been born: not a pretty picture.

We suffer myopia when it comes to ourselves and it is easy to underestimate the positive repercussions of any individual life.

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The friction that brothers and sisters experience with one another is described with the phrase, “sibling rivalry.” In the story about Joseph and his relationship with his ten older brothers (see Genesis 37-50), we discover a description of the problem in its most extreme, murderous form. In fact, Joseph’s brothers decide not to kill him only because their greed was greater than their hatred of him. They decided that selling him into slavery was preferable to killing him, since that way they got rid of both the annoying younger brother and they got some cash to spend on the party later to celebrate his departure.

Joseph’s experiences over the next two decades of his life were mostly awful. Sold to Potipher, an Egyptian official, he became the object of lust by the man’s wife. When he refused her advances, she falsely accused her of attempted rape. So he went from being a slave to being a prisoner in a dungeon.

There, he one day accurately interpreted the dreams of two of his cellmates: a baker and cupbearer of the king of Egypt, the Pharaoh. The baker wound up executed, just as his dream had predicted, but the cupbearer was restored to his favored position with the Pharaoh. Three years later, when Pharaoh had a dream that no one could interpret, the cupbearer remembered Joseph and told Pharaoh about him.

Joseph came before the king, successfully interpreted the dream as a prophesy of coming famine, and suggested preparations should be made, with someone put in charge of stockpiling foodstuffs. The Pharaoh was impressed enough by Joseph to make him the man in charge, and so Joseph, overnight, went from prisoner to the second most powerful man in Egypt.

When his brothers came looking for food a few years later, Joseph gave them a hard time, but eventually rescued them from their problem and brought both them and his father down to Egypt to live with him in splendor. After his father died, Joseph’s brothers became worried that Joseph might seek at last to bring vengeance upon them for how badly they had treated him. But Joseph, catching wind of their fears, reassured them by explaining, “Don’t be afraid. Am I in the place of God? You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives. So then, don’t be afraid. I will provide for you and your children.” (Genesis 50:20-21)

The suffering of Joseph’s life had not been without purpose. Most of the time, people never see the reason for the suffering they experience. It arrives unexpectedly and seems entirely without purpose or reason, making people suspect that God is more like a mean kid pulling the legs off spiders so he can watch them squirm than a loving father.

For my wife and I, being unable to have children of our own was a devastating sorrow. But it led us to investigate foster care, something we would never have done had we not been childless. For the three little girls that wound up in our home, whom we ultimately adopted, it was the best possible outcome. They went from places of danger, drug exposure and neglect, to a loving and caring household. Their lives have turned out radically different than they otherwise might have. What seemed initially a bad thing for us turned out to be a blessing, and not just for us.

God is in the habit of perverting evil for good.

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Carpe diem: enjoying life is part of God’s purpose for you.

At the end of the creation of the universe, God looked at the finished product and the author of Genesis commented, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” The birds and animals, the plants, the people, everything that exists anywhere: all good.

The fact that grace abounds where sin abounds, Paul argued, did not mean that we should therefore sin as much as possible in order to maximize the grace that God would grant us. Likewise, although God is near us when we suffer, that doesn’t mean we should maximize our suffering in order to get God closer to us. The point is that in our darkest moments, when we would be tempted to imagine God is not there, we are reassured that indeed he is present. Only a loon would imagine that suffering is a desired goal.

The history of religion is riddled with people who think that way though. They withdraw from “the world” meaning they go and live in a cloistered setting, embrace poverty, wear ugly clothes that don’t fit well and are uncomfortable. Traipsing about barefoot in snow is a welcome opportunity. Sleeping as little as possible, and then only on cold hard ground without a blanket, while eating as little as possible and then only bland and “simple” fare is seen as the path to truth spirituality, the best way to approach nearness or even oneness with God.

As Penn and Teller might say in the eponymous Showtime series, “Bullshit.”

God created us to be like we are: to sweat, to get tired, to make love, to touch and feel, to laugh and cry. We rejoice in what we feel, what we taste, what we see, what we touch. The world around us is full of pleasures, of satisfactions, of enjoyment, and it is there for the purpose of being enjoyed.

There is no virtue in denying our senses, in pretending that we don’t feel, or in seeking discomfort instead of pleasure. We are not closer to God, we are not more spiritual, if we refrain from anything that might be fun. Why is the sun warm, the air filled with the smell of sweet flowers, the grass green, the water wet? Why is there pizza, and bread and fruit? Do we cringe from pain? Why does the noxious, the painful, the ugly and the uncomfortable make us flinch away? Why are we attracted to the pleasant, the sweet, the warm, the loving, the happy? Jesus was human like that. He loved life; he felt life. He experienced the full range of emotions. And you know what? We human beings were created in God’s image; we’re just like him, the lot of us. So feeling, being alive—these were not new experiences to Jesus; God knew those feelings; God has those feelings. Feelings, emotions—they’re not an evil thing. They simply are, like the blue in the sky, or the wet in water.

It is funny that we choose to believe the lie that the serpent gave Adam and Eve. What lie is that? “He doesn’t want you to have this fruit, because he knows that when you take it you’ll be just like him. So obviously God is holding out. He’s keeping something good from you! He doesn’t have your best interests in mind. Instead, he wants you to be unhappy. In fact, he never wants you to be joyful and peaceful ever again.”

How much of Christianity is built on this same squirrelly attitude? After all, how often do we read with approval, or view with approval, people who gave up everything so they could do God’s work or be closer to God? They sold everything they owned, they lived in a cave, their clothes were burlap and the slept on cold hard dirt. On account of that, we know they were especially holy and close to God, because the way to get close to God is to abandon anything that might be fun. If you’re smiling and eating and drinking, then you can’t possibly be close to God. It’s only in fasting and self-denial and misery and poverty that God can be found.

Yeah, right. And so Jesus himself was criticized by the Pharisees and other religious sorts because his disciples didn’t fast, and because he frequented parties where he ate good food and drank good drink (Matthew 9:14 and 11:19).

Why is it so hard to understand that God’s love is not dependent on how often we deny ourselves ice cream?

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Genesis 1:26-27 records God announcing:

“Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

The source of human rights, at least from the Jewish and Christian perspective, has its origin in that statement. Human beings—the human race as a complete whole, both male and female together—form the image of God. Together, we are like God and have been made for the express purpose of “playing God,” just as we expect our children to some day grow up and become like us: full fledged adults with all the rights and responsibilities that entails. Given that the human race has been made like God, human beings are of infinite worth, regardless of their age, gender, or race. We are all one, all together, one family. It should be inconceivable that we would ever mistreat or harm or denigrate one another, as bizarre as to imagine the Father harming the Holy Spirit or persecuting his Son.

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There is a tendency for human beings to create God in their own image. Many seem to picture him as an old man, like their grandfather with a white beard, sitting in a comfy chair somewhere. But the Bible never easily permits such anthropomorphizing. The author of Revelation and the author of Psalms, for instance, remind us in a profound way just how “other” God is. In Revelation, we learn that Jesus has been slain “from the foundation of the world.” (Rev. 13:8) while in Psalm 90:4 the Psalmist informs us that “For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night.” Peter picks up on this thought in one of his letters, writing, “But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.” (2 Peter 3:8)

God’s relationship to our universe, to us, is not quite how we might conceive it. While we exist in time, experiencing time linearly, God’s relationship is radically different. The passage of time does not affect him like it affects us. He does not experience it as we experience it. His perception of it is even not like ours. St. Augustine wrote that time is a part of this universe and had its “beginning” with the beginning of the universe, so that it is remarkably ignorant to ask what was going on before God made the universe. There’s no before there; time is something we live with, not something God lives with, or in. So for him, he sees the ends of the universe—the beginning of time and it’s furthest future, all in a glance. For him, the panorama of human history is like a painting on the wall: the creation of Adam, the crucifixion of Jesus, and the Second Coming are all equally viewable and real, just like we can see any part of a painting.

Below is the link to a clip from the first episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 where Benjamin Sisko, the commander of the space station, first meets up with the “wormhole beings,” non-corporal, non-time-bound creatures who do not understand the concept of linear time. For them, various points in time are like different places; they can see it all at once. Unfortunately, the clip is incomplete; the entire segment is one of the best fictional presentations of the difference between God’s perspective and ours.

Sisko on Human Existence

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