Читать книгу The Complete Rob Bell: His Seven Bestselling Books, All in One Place - Rob Bell - Страница 8
ОглавлениеPlease understand, I stumbled into this gig.
I was teaching waterskiing the summer after I graduated from college at a camp in northern Wisconsin called Honey Rock. My job was to drive the boat all day, drag kids around the lake, plan ski shows, and get paid $30 a week for it. Every Sunday morning the camp had a chapel service in the middle of pine trees beside the lake. One week I was with the people who were planning the service, and for some reason, when they started discussing who would give the message, I told them I would do it. I had never preached or taught or tried to explain the Bible to a group of people—I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.
And they said, “You’re on this Sunday.”
I walked around the woods a lot that week, asking God to give me something to say. And if God could give it to me before Sunday, that would be great.
Sunday eventually came. I remember standing up to talk in front of those hundred or so people gathered among those pine trees and being aware of the presence of God in a terrifying way. Seriously, it was terrifying. But in a good way. The word that comes to mind is holy. I became aware of something so real, yet I couldn’t see it or touch it. I was standing there and I hadn’t said a word yet, and what did I do? I took off my sandals because I knew the ground I was standing on was holy and that my life was never, ever going to be the same again.
It was in that moment that I heard a voice. Not an audible, loud, human kind of voice, but inner words spoken somewhere in my soul that were very clear and very concise. What I heard was, “Teach this book, and I will take care of everything else.”
In that moment, my entire life changed forever. It was like a rebirth. I had been so restless and rebellious and unsettled and unfocused, and I had all this energy and passion but nowhere to channel it. Now I had something I could do with my life. In that moment by the side of a lake, barefoot, with my tongue tied and my heart on fire, I found something I could give my life to.
Or it found me.
It wasn’t planned. No angels were involved that I know of—just a young, restless soul discovering a purpose.
Like I said, I stumbled into this gig.
So for a little over ten years, I have oriented my life around studying, reading, teaching, and trying to understand the Bible. I continue to find the Bible the most mysterious book—the more insight I gain, the more I realize how much I don’t know. It inspires and encourages, and it also frustrates and provokes.
The Bible is a difficult book.
It’s Difficult
We all understand that ethnic cleansing is evil, and when someone announces that God has told him or her to kill certain people, we think that person is crazy. And yet there are passages in the Bible in which God orders “his” people to kill innocent women and children. The famous story of the people marching around the wall of Jericho, blowing their horns, and then the walls falling down is also a story about slaughter of the innocent. The text reads, “They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.” The section ends with this verse: “So the Lord was with Joshua.”1
God was with Joshua when he killed all those women and children?
Is God really like that?
What does a thinking, honest person do with a story like this?
And while we’re at it, what about those letters in the New Testament from one person to another group of people? Notice this verse from 2 Corinthians: “I am out of my mind to talk like this.”2 A man named Paul is writing this, so is it his word or God’s word?
Is God out of his mind?
Is God out of Paul’s mind?
Is Paul out of God’s mind?
Or does it simply mean that Paul is out of Paul’s mind?
And if the verse is simply Paul being out of Paul’s mind, then how is that God’s word?
Notice this verse from 1 Corinthians: “To the rest I say this (I, not the Lord) . . .”3 Here we have Paul writing to a group of Christians, and he wants to make it clear that the next thing he is going to say comes from him, “not the Lord.”
So when a writer of the Bible makes it clear that what he is writing comes straight from him, how is that still the word of God?
Now I think the Bible is the most amazing, beautiful, deep, inspired, engaging collection of writings ever. How is it that this ancient book continues to affect me in ways no other book does?
But sometimes when I hear people quote the Bible, I just want to throw up.
Can I just say that?
Can I get that off my chest?
Sometimes when people are backing up their points and the Bible is used to prove that they are right, everything within me says, “There is no way that’s what God meant by that verse.”
Several hundred years ago people used Bible verses to defend their right to own slaves.
Recently a woman told me that she has the absolute Word of God (the Bible) and that the “opinions of man” don’t mean a thing to her. But this same woman would also tell you that she has a personal relationship with God through Jesus. In fact, she spends a great deal of time telling people they need a personal relationship with God through Jesus. What is interesting to me is that the phrase “personal relationship” isn’t found anywhere in the Bible. Someone made up this phrase and then said you could have one with God. Apparently the “opinions of man” do mean something to her.
I was reading last year in one of the national news magazines about a gathering of the leaders of a massive Christian denomination (literally millions of members worldwide). The reason their annual gathering was in the news was that they had voted to reaffirm their view of the importance of the verse that says a wife’s role is to submit to her husband.
This is a big deal to them.
This is what made news.
This is what they are known for.
What about the verse before that verse?
What about the verse after it?
What about the verse that talks about women having authority over their husbands?4
What about all of the marriages in which this verse has been used to oppress and mistreat women?
It is possible to make the Bible say whatever we want it to, isn’t it?
How is it that the Bible can be so many different things to so many different people?
Nazis, cult leaders, televangelists who promise that God will bless you if you just get out your checkbook, racists, people who oppress minorities and the poor and anyone not like them—they all can find verses in the Bible to back up their agendas.
We have all heard the Bible used in certain ways and found ourselves asking, “Oh God, you couldn’t have meant that, could you?”
Somebody recently told me, “As long as you teach the Bible, I have no problem with you.”
Think about that for a moment.
What that person was really saying is, “As long as you teach my version of the Bible, I’ll have no problem with you.” And the more people insist that they are just taking the Bible for what it says, the more skeptical I get.
Which for me raises one huge question: Is the Bible the best God can do?
With God being so massive and awe-inspiring and full of truth, why is his book capable of so much confusion?
Why did God do it this way?
Where does one go in trying to make sense of what the Bible even is, let alone what it says?
For me, clarity has begun to emerge when I’ve begun to understand what Jesus believed about the scriptures.
Let’s start with a straightforward verse from the book of Leviticus: “Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.”5
Could there be a more basic verse? “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Who could possibly have any sort of problem with this verse?
And how could someone mess this up?
What could be complicated about loving your neighbor?
Even people who don’t believe in God and don’t read the Bible would say that loving your neighbor is a good thing to do.
A couple of questions this verse raises: How do we live this verse out? What does it mean to love? What isn’t love? Who decides what is love and what isn’t love?
And what about your neighbor? Who is your neighbor? Is your neighbor only the person next door, or is it anyone you have contact with? Or is it every single human being on the face of the planet?
And what happens if one person’s definition of love and another person’s definition differ? Who is right? Who is wrong? Who decides who is right and who is wrong? Who decides if whoever decided made the right decision?
So even a verse as basic as this raises more questions than it answers.
In order to live it out and not just talk about it, someone somewhere has to make decisions about this verse. Someone has to decide what it actually looks like to put flesh and blood on this command.
And that’s because the Bible is open-ended.
It has to be interpreted. And if it isn’t interpreted, then it can’t be put into action. So if we are serious about following God, then we have to interpret the Bible. It is not possible to simply do what the Bible says. We must first make decisions about what it means at this time, in this place, for these people.
Here’s another example from the Torah (the Jewish name for the first five books of the Bible): “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.”6 The next verses command the people to do no work on this Sabbath day; they then explain the command by saying that God rested on the seventh day after creating the world in the first six days.
You can already see the questions this verse raises: Who defines work? Who defines rest? What if work to one person is rest to another? What if rest to one person is work to another? And what does it mean to make a day holy? How do you know if you’ve kept something holy? How would you know if you hadn’t?
Once again, the Bible is open-ended. It has to be interpreted.
Somebody has to decide what it means to love your neighbor, and somebody has to decide what it means to observe the Sabbath and keep it holy.
Rabbis
Now the ancient rabbis understood that the Bible is open-ended and has to be interpreted. And they understood that their role in the community was to study and meditate and discuss and pray and then make those decisions. Rabbis are like interpreters, helping people understand what God is saying to them through the text and what it means to live out the text.
Take for example the Sabbath command in Exodus. A rabbi would essentially put actions in two categories: things the rabbi permitted on the Sabbath and things the rabbi forbade on the Sabbath. The rabbi was driven by a desire to get as close as possible to what God originally intended in the command at hand. One rabbi might say that you could walk so far on the Sabbath, but if you went farther, that would be work and you would be violating the Sabbath. Another might permit you to walk farther but forbid you to do certain actions another rabbi might permit.
Different rabbis had different sets of rules, which were really different lists of what they forbade and what they permitted. A rabbi’s set of rules and lists, which was really that rabbi’s interpretation of how to live the Torah, was called that rabbi’s yoke. When you followed a certain rabbi, you were following him because you believed that rabbi’s set of interpretations were the closest to what God intended through the scriptures. And when you followed that rabbi, you were taking up that rabbi’s yoke.
One rabbi even said his yoke was easy.7
The intent then of a rabbi having a yoke wasn’t just to interpret the words correctly; it was to live them out. In the Jewish context, action was always the goal. It still is.
Rabbis would spend hours discussing with their students what it meant to live out a certain text. If a student made a suggestion about what a certain text meant and the rabbi thought the student had totally missed the point, the rabbi would say, “You have abolished the Torah,” which meant that in the rabbi’s opinion, the student wasn’t anywhere near what God wanted. But if the student got it right, if the rabbi thought the student had grasped God’s intention in the text, the rabbi would say, “You have fulfilled the Torah.”
Notice what Jesus says in one of his first messages: “I have not come to abolish [the Torah] but to fulfill [it].”8 He was essentially saying, “I didn’t come to do away with the words of God; I came to show people what it looks like when the Torah is lived out perfectly, right down to the smallest punctuation marks.”
“I’m here to put flesh and blood on the words.”9
Most rabbis taught the yoke of a well respected rabbi who had come before them. So if you visited a synagogue and the local rabbi (Torah teacher) was going to teach, you might hear that this rabbi teaches in the name of Rabbi So-and-So. If you were familiar with the yoke of Rabbi So-and-So, then you would know what to expect from this rabbi.
Every once in a while, a rabbi would come along who was teaching a new yoke, a new way of interpreting the Torah. This was rare and extraordinary.
Imagine: A rabbi was claiming that he had a new way to understand the scriptures that was closer to what God intended than the way of the rabbis who had come before him. A new take on the scriptures.
The questions would immediately be raised: “How do we know this is truth? How do we know this rabbi isn’t crazy?” One of the protections for the rabbi in this case was that two other rabbis with authority would lay hands on the rabbi and essentially validate him. They would be saying, “We believe this rabbi has authority to make new interpretations.” That’s why Jesus’s baptism was so important. John the Baptist was a powerful teacher and prophet who was saying publicly that he wasn’t worthy to carry Jesus’s sandals.10
“And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.’”11
A second voice affirmed Jesus’s unique calling. The voice of God.
Amazing.
A Jewish audience reading Matthew’s account of Jesus’s baptism would pick up right away on Jesus’s getting the affirmation of two powerful voices.12
Which leads to an interesting scene: In the book of Luke, what is the one question the religious leaders keep hounding Jesus with?
“Where did you get your authority?”
Jesus’s response? “You tell me, where did John get his?”13
Now imagine if a rabbi who had a new perspective on the Torah was coming to town. This rabbi who was making new interpretations of the Torah was said to have authority. The Hebrew word for “authority” is shmikah. This might not even happen in your lifetime. You would hike for miles to hear him.
A rabbi who taught with shmikah would say things like, “You have heard it said . . . , but I tell you. . . .”14
What he was saying is, “You have heard people interpret that verse this way, but I tell you that this is what God really means in that verse.”
Now the rabbis had technical terms for this endless process of forbidding and permitting and making interpretations. They called it “binding and loosing.” To “bind” something was to forbid it. To “loose” something was to allow it.15
So a rabbi would bind certain practices and loose other practices. And when he gave his disciples the authority to bind and loose, it was called “giving the keys of the kingdom.”
Notice what Jesus says in the book of Matthew: “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”16
What he is doing here is significant. He is giving his followers the authority to make new interpretations of the Bible. He is giving them permission to say, “Hey, we think we missed it before on that verse, and we’ve recently come to the conclusion that this is what it actually means.”
And not only is he giving them authority, but he is saying that when they do debate and discuss and pray and wrestle and then make decisions about the Bible, somehow God in heaven will be involved.
Our Turn
Jesus expects his followers to be engaged in the endless process of deciding what it means to actually live the scriptures. And right away in the life of this new movement, we see them doing it. In Acts 15, these first Christians find themselves having to make a huge decision about what it means to be a Christian.
To understand what they are facing, we have to understand that they are Jewish—Jewish believers who are circumcised and eat kosher and recite Jewish prayers and celebrate Jewish feasts.
Jewish followers of a Jewish messiah who live a Jewish life in a Jewish nation.
But all sorts of Gentiles (people who aren’t Jewish) start becoming followers of Jesus. People who don’t eat kosher, who aren’t circumcised, who don’t dress and talk and look and live like them.
So what do they do? Do they expect all of these Gentiles to start being Jewish?
And what exactly would that mean? What would that look like? (Grown men being told that if they are really serious about becoming Christians, there’s a little surgery they need to have . . .)
The first Christians know that Jesus is for everybody, but what do they do with all of these Jewish laws they follow? So they convene a council (yeshiva in Hebrew) to discuss it.
After hearing all sides of the issue, they decide to forbid (or should we say they bind?) several things.17
Here is why this is so important: They have to make decisions about what it means to be a Christian.
They actually do it. They gather together and make interpretations of the Bible regarding what it will look like for millions of people to be Christians.
I wonder if one of them stood up at any point and said, “Jesus gave us the authority to do this, didn’t he?”
Now let’s move things into our world. If we take Jesus seriously and actually see it as our responsibility to bind and loose, the implications are endless, serious, and exhilarating.
The Bible is a communal book. It came from people writing in communities, and it was often written to communities. Remember that the printing press wasn’t invented until the 1400s. Prior to that, very few if any people had their own copies of the Bible. In Jesus’s day, an entire village could probably afford only one copy of the scriptures, if that. Reading the Bible alone was unheard of, if people could even read. For most of church history, people heard the Bible read aloud in a room full of people. You heard it, discussed it, studied it, argued about it, and made decisions about it as a group, a community. Most of the “yous” in the Bible are plural. Groups of people receiving these words. So if one person went off the deep end with an interpretation or opinion, the others were right there to keep that person in check. In a synagogue, most of the people knew the text by heart. When someone got up to teach or share insight, chances are everybody knew the text that person was talking on and already had their own opinions about it. You saw yourself and those around you as taking part in a huge discussion that has gone on for thousands of years.
Because God has spoken, and everything else is commentary.
Contrast this communal way of reading and discussing and learning with our Western, highly individualized culture. In many Christian settings, people are even encouraged to read the Bible alone, which is a new idea in church history. A great idea and a life-changing discipline, but a new idea. And think of pastors. Many pastors study alone all week, stand alone in front of the church and talk about the Bible, and then receive mail and phone calls from individuals who agree or don’t agree with what they said. This works for a lot of communities, but it isn’t the only way.
And it can’t be the only way if we take seriously Jesus’s call to be binding and loosing, which must be done in community. In fact, binding and loosing can only be done in community with others who are equally passionate about being true to the words of God.
In Jesus’s world, it was assumed that you had as much to learn from the discussion of the text as you did from the text itself. One person could never get too far in a twisted interpretation because the others were right there giving her insight and perspective she didn’t have on her own. Jesus said when he was talking about binding and loosing that “where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them.”18
Community, community, community. Together, with others, wrestling and searching and engaging the Bible as a group of people hungry to know God in order to follow God.
Perhaps this is why the Bible can be confusing for some the first time they read it. I don’t think any of the writers of the Bible ever intended people to read their letters alone. I think they assumed that people who were hearing these words for the first time would be sitting next to someone who was further along on her spiritual journey, someone who was more in tune with what the writer was saying. If it didn’t make sense, you could stop the person who was reading and say, “Help me understand this.”
When we’re serious about dealing with the Bible as the communal book that it is, then we have to be honest about our interpretations. Everybody’s interpretation is essentially his or her own opinion. Nobody is objective.
Several years ago I was in an intense meeting with our church’s leaders in which we were discussing several passages in the Bible. One of the leaders was sharing her journey in trying to understand what the Bible teaches about the issue at hand and said something like this: “I’ve spent a great deal of time recently studying this issue. I’ve read what the people on the one side of the issue say, and I’ve read what the people on the other side say. I’ve read the scholars and the theologians and all sorts of others on this subject. But then, in the end, I decided to get back to the Bible and just take it for what it really says.”
What was she really saying?
Now please understand that this way of thinking is prevalent in a lot of Christian churches, so I don’t mean in any way to single her out. But this view of the Bible is warped and toxic, to say the least. The assumption is that there is a way to read the Bible that is agenda- and perspective-free. As if all these other people have their opinion and biases, but some are able to just read it for what it says.
Think about that for a moment: This perspective is claiming that a person can simply read the Bible and do what it says—unaffected by any outside influences.
But let’s be honest. When you hear people say they are just going to tell you what the Bible means, it is not true. They are telling you what they think it means. They are giving their opinions about the Bible. It sounds nice to say, “I’m not giving you my opinion; I’m just telling you what it means.”
The problem is, it is not true.
I’m actually giving you my opinion, my interpretation of what it says. And the more I insist that I am giving you the objective truth of what it really says, the less objective I am actually being.
Obviously we think our interpretations are the most correct; otherwise we’d change them.
Or as one of my favorite writers, Anne Lamott, put it, “Everybody thinks their opinion is the right one. If they didn’t, they’d get a new one.”19
The idea that everybody else approaches the Bible with baggage and agendas and lenses and I don’t is the ultimate in arrogance. To think that I can just read the Bible without reading any of my own culture or background or issues into it and come out with a “pure” or “exact” meaning is not only untrue, but it leads to a very destructive reading of the Bible that robs it of its life and energy.
I have heard people say their church is growing because they “just teach the Bible.” As if other churches don’t. And what about the church that teaches the Bible and shrinks? The church that’s growing in numbers is probably growing for a lot of reasons, but the teaching-the-Bible reason is that they are teaching a particular understanding of the Bible. A yoke. They aren’t objective, and they aren’t just telling people what it says. They have interpreted it and made decisions about it, and this particular yoke they’re spreading resonates with people. This version—their version—is striking a chord with people, and so they are coming to hear more of this take on the Bible.
The Bible has to be interpreted. Decisions have to be made about what it means now, today.
The Bible is always coming through the interpretation of someone. And that’s because binding and loosing require awareness.
Awareness that everybody’s understanding of the Bible rests on somebody’s binding and loosing.
When was the last time you saw a Christian greet another Christian with a holy kiss? But it’s right there in the Bible. I can show you verses in Corinthians and Thessalonians and in one of Peter’s letters that say we should greet each other with a holy kiss.20
Or how about women having to wear head coverings?21
Or cursing people who don’t love the Lord?22
Or selling all your possessions and giving everything to the poor?23
Or men raising their hands when they pray?24
Or slaves having to obey their masters?25
These are all commands that appear in the Bible. And yet they are rarely followed. This is because someone somewhere made a decision about those texts; someone decided that Christians didn’t have to greet one another with a kiss or wear head coverings or curse people who don’t love the Lord.
All of these verses have been interpreted by someone, whether it was a priest or a denomination or a pastor or a council somewhere—somebody somewhere engaged in the difficult work of binding and loosing. Somebody in your history decided certain Bible verses still apply and others don’t.
At one point in church history, a group of Christians decided that the Sabbath is not Saturday but Sunday. If you go to a mass or service or house church on Sunday, then you are, in essence, agreeing with their binding and loosing.
Now some people may get a little uneasy about this discussion on interpreting the Bible and say, “We shouldn’t make it say what we want it to say.”
I agree, but everybody is resting on a set of interpretations, and we need to be honest about it.
And not only is everybody resting on someone’s binding and loosing, but that binding and loosing was new for its day. When people stepped forward and said, “You have heard it interpreted this way, but I tell you it really means this,” it was progressive for their day. They were making new claims about what it means to be true to the Bible. What is accepted today as tradition was at one point in time a break from tradition.
This truth about interpreting the Bible extends all the way to the simple reading of it in English. If we don’t read the Bible in its original Greek or Hebrew or Aramaic, then we are reading someone’s interpretation of the Bible. Just the work of translating requires the translator to make decisions about what the Bible says. Certain Greek or Hebrew or Aramaic words do not have an exact English equivalent, leaving the translator with a challenge of how to best represent the text using English words.
Here’s an example: The word hell is found fourteen times in the Bible, twelve of those occurrences being found in the teachings of Jesus. The word hell in English is the word gehenna in Greek. Gehenna is a reference to the Valley of Hinnom, a ravine on the south side of the city of Jerusalem. This valley was the site over the years of many violent and horrible deaths, and it came to be viewed as cursed. By Jesus’s day it had become the town dump. Garbage, trash, wild animals fighting over scraps of food, a fire burning—a place of waste and destruction. Some referred to it as the place with the gnashing of teeth where the fire never dies. So when Jesus uses gehenna, it is loaded with meaning and visual power—everybody knew what he was talking about. The translator is faced with a decision about how to translate the word. If he or she uses the word hell, later readers might miss the fact that Jesus is talking about a present reality. If the word gehenna is used, readers might understand the present, geographical meaning of the word but miss the bigger implications. Every translation, every version, every paraphrase of the Bible requires thousands of decisions about how to interpret what these words are saying to us today.
Which leads to another observation: Binding and loosing demand an intricate balance of conviction and humility.
When those first Christians in Acts 15 came out of their meeting and announced their decision regarding the Gentiles, they said the strangest thing: “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements.”26
Let me repeat that one phrase again: “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us.”
They are making a monumental decision in the history of Christianity, and the best they can say is that it seems like it is the best decision? It seems good to them and the Holy Spirit?
They don’t claim to have an absolute word from God on the matter; they at best claim guidance from the Spirit of God, but they even hold that loosely.
What is so beautiful about the language in Acts 15 is that they make a decision, they step up, they take their responsibility seriously, they acknowledge a strong sense of God’s leading, but they remain humble.
With their “seems,” they leave room to admit they may not have nailed it perfectly the first time. They hold their action and God’s action in healthy tension. They understand that they have action to take, but they also understand that God is at work as well. They don’t take a passive route, which is to do nothing and assume that God will miraculously do it all. And they don’t take a route based in human arrogance, which leaves no room for the leading and guiding of the Spirit of God.
What if we were to say about what we do, “It seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us”?
I love the sense of movement in these first Christians’ language, like they are discovering things and making decisions, but there is this inherent assumption that they are on a journey. There is more ahead. And God is with them every step of the way.
They aren’t done painting.
Alive Today
Here’s another observation about binding and loosing: You can only bind and loose if you believe the Bible is alive.
Let me get at this truth with a question: Is the greatest truth about Adam and Eve and the fruit that it happened, or that it happens?27 This story, one of the first in the Bible, is true for us because it is our story. We have all taken the fruit. We have all crossed boundaries. We have all made decisions to do things our way and then looked back and said to ourselves, What was I thinking? The fruit looked so great to Adam and Eve for those brief moments, but the consequences were with them for the rest of their lives. Their story is our story. We see ourselves in them. The story is true for us because it happened and because it happens. It is an accurate description of how life is. The reason the stories in the Bible have resonated with so many people over the years is that they have seen themselves in these stories.
Here is another example: The Israelites leave the kingdom of Egypt where they are slaves, and God brings them out into freedom.
It happens.
Every day.
For many of us, that is our story. We were in darkness and God brought us out. And we continue to identify areas of darkness in our lives, and God continues to bring us out.
So the exodus is the Israelites’ story, but it is also our story. It happened then; it happens now.
In fact, in a Jewish synagogue to this day, you will probably hear kids taught the story of Exodus as their story. A friend of mine recently heard a Jewish kid say, “We were slaves in Egypt and Moses led us out, and we complained in the wilderness.”
This is why the Bible is still so powerful: These ancient stories are our stories. These stories are reflective of how things are.
And this is why the Bible loses its power for so many communities. They fall into the trap of thinking that the Bible is just about things that happened a long time ago.
But the Bible is about today.
These stories are our stories. They are alive and active and teaching us about our lives in our world, today.
The rabbis spoke of the text being like a gem with seventy faces, and each time you turn the gem, the light refracts differently, giving you a reflection you haven’t seen before. And so we turn the text again and again because we keep seeing things we missed the time before.28
I was talking to a pastor several years ago who was preparing a sermon, and I asked him if he was ready to give it. He said, “Oh yeah, I’ve got this passage nailed.” How is that possible?
When you embrace the text as living and active, when you enter into its story, when you keep turning the gem, you never come to the end.
I just wrote a phrase from the Bible on the wall of the room I am writing in right now. It’s from John 11 where a man named Lazarus dies. Jesus meets up with Lazarus’s sisters who are complaining that Jesus got there too late to save their brother. When Jesus tells them to roll away the stone in front of where Lazarus is buried, one of the sisters, Martha, complains that there will be a terrible odor, “for he has been there four days.”29
The King James Version reads like this: “He stinketh.”
For some odd reason, I have not been able to get that phrase out of my head lately. “He stinketh.” It’s working on me. It’s teaching me. I’ve been meditating and reflecting on it and turning it over and over in my head and my heart. Inspired words have a way of getting under our skin and taking on a life of their own. They work on us. We started out reading them, but they end up reading us.
This is what happens when the Bible becomes living and active. The strangest dimensions of these stories grab us and won’t let go.
And this phrase continues to swirl around in my mind and my heart. Where is there death in my life? Where am I dying because of decisions I’ve made? Where do I “stinketh”?
“He stinketh” is written on the wall of this room because it is my story.
It happened in John 11.
It happens for me every day.
The reason the Bible continues to resonate with so many people isn’t just because it happened. What gives us strength and meaning and direction is something in addition to the historical events: It is the meaning of these events. Some call this the more-than-literal truth of the Bible.30
We live in the metaphors. The story of David and Goliath continues to speak to us because we know the David part of the story—we have lived it. The tomb is empty because we have met the risen Christ—we have experienced Jesus in a way that transcends space and time. And this gives us hope. We were in darkness and God brought us out into the light.
The Word is living and active and it happens. Today.
Real, Real, Real
In order to bind and loose, we must understand that the Bible did not drop out of the sky. It was written by people. People who told stories and passed on oral traditions and sat down and wrote things with a pen and paper. The Bible originated from real people in real places at real times.
It is poems and stories and letters and accounts. It is people interacting with other people in actual space and time. It is God interacting with people in actual space and time. We cannot ignore this.
To take statements made in a letter from one person living in a real place at a moment in history writing to another person living in a real place out of their context and apply them to today without first understanding their original context sucks the life right out of them. They aren’t isolated statements that float, unattached, out in space.
They aren’t first and foremost timeless truths.
We may, and usually do, find timeless truths present in the Bible, but it is because they were true in real places for real people at real times.
I heard somebody recently refer to the Bible as “data.” That person was in an intense discussion about what the Bible teaches about a certain issue, and he disagreed with someone else so he said, “I don’t see the data for your position.”
Data?
The Bible is not pieces of information about God and Jesus and whatever else we take and apply to situations as we would a cookbook or an instruction manual.
And while I’m at it, let’s make a group decision to drop once and for all the Bible-as-owner’s-manual metaphor. It’s terrible. It really is.
When was the last time you read the owner’s manual for your toaster? Do you find it remotely inspiring or meaningful?
You only refer to it when something’s wrong with your toaster. You use it to fix the problem, and then you put it away.
We have to embrace the Bible as the wild, uncensored, passionate account it is of people experiencing the living God.
Doubting the one true God.
Wrestling with, arguing with, getting angry with, reconciling with, loving, worshipping, thanking, following the one who gives us everything.
We cannot tame it.
We cannot tone it down.
If we do, then we can’t say it is the life-giving Word of God. We have made it something else.
So when we treat the Bible as if it floats in space, unattached to when and where it actually happened, we are basically saying that God gave us the wrong kind of book. It is a book of ancient narratives. We cannot make it something it is not.31
When Jesus talks about divorce, he is entering into a discussion that was one of the eight great debates of his day.32 He is interacting with a specific tradition and other rabbis of his day who had said specific things about divorce. The great rabbis Hillel and Shammai had specific yokes in regard to divorce. When Jesus is asked questions about divorce, what he is really being asked is, “Who do you side with, Hillel or Shammai?” People are asking him to enter into the current discussion. And in Jesus’s answer, he sides with one of them.33 To grab a few lines of Jesus and drop them down on someone 2,000 years later without first entering into the world in which they first appeared is lethal to the life and vitality and truth of the Bible.
Real people, in real places, at real times, writing and telling stories about their experiences and their growing understanding of who God is and who they are.
This does not in any way discount the power of reading the Bible with no background knowledge at all, which is why these words are so powerful. We can enter into them at any level and they speak to us. Whether we are reading the Bible for the first time or standing in a field in Israel next to a historian and an archaeologist and a scholar, the Bible meets us where we are. That is what truth does.
For example, the book of Deuteronomy is patterned after treaties that were common in its day. The writer essentially took a common legal document and changed the content and the names but kept the form the same.
The end of the book of Mark is arranged according to the coronation ceremonies of the Roman emperor. Maybe Mark witnessed one of these ceremonies, because he is very intentional about the order of events leading up to Jesus’s death. His readers would have been familiar with these Roman coronation events. They would have read between the lines right away. Mark wants you to see Jesus as a king like Caesar, but at the same time totally unlike Caesar.
The first three miracles in the book of John are directly related to the three major gods of Asia Minor, the region John writes his gospel to. Dionysus was the god who turned water into wine, Asclepius was the god of healing, and Demeter was the goddess of grain. So how does John begin his story? With Jesus turning water into wine, healing, and then feeding thousands of people. John has an agenda. He wants these people in this place and this time to know that Jesus is better than their gods.
When Paul writes to Timothy about women being saved in childbirth, he is making a direct reference to the goddess Artemis, whose temple was just down the street in Timothy’s hometown of Ephesus. Artemis’s followers believed that Artemis saved women from dying in childbirth, which is significant in a city where one out of two women died giving birth. Paul’s statement here has huge political, social, and religious implications. He is implying that Artemis is a fraud.34
The first chapters of the book of Revelation follow the sequence of events of the Domitian games, held in honor of the caesar who was in power at the time Revelation was written. Domitian would address the leaders of the various provinces, then his choir of twenty-four would sing worship songs to him, and then there would be a horse race. John is writing Revelation to people who had seen the Domitian games; they know exactly what he is referring to. He wants them to see that Domitian is a fake and Jesus is the real King.
The writers of the Bible are communicating in language their world will understand. They are using the symbols and pictures and images of the culture they are speaking to. That’s why the Bible has authority—God has authority and is present in real space and time. The Bible is a collection of stories that teach us about what it looks like when God is at work through actual people. The Bible has the authority it does only because it contains stories about people interacting with the God who has all authority.
The point in the book of Acts isn’t the early church. The point is the God who is at work in and through the early church to change the world.35 When we take the Bible seriously, we are taking God seriously. We believe that the same God who was at work then is at work now. The same God in the same kinds of ways. The goal is not to be a “New Testament church.” That makes the New Testament church the authority. The authority is God who is acting in and through those people at that time and now these people at this time.
The point is to ask, what is God up to here, now?
What in the world is God doing today?
How should we respond?
How did they respond?
What can we learn from them that will help us now?
This is why binding and loosing is so exhilarating. You can only do it if you believe and see God at work now, here in this place. You are reacting to a God who is alive and well and working and saving and redeeming.
The Bible tells a story. A story that isn’t over. A story that is still being told. A story that we have a part to play in.
Creating and Recognizing
In order to bind and loose, we have to think about inspiration in terms of recognition as well as creation. Here’s what I mean: People sat down and wrote things on paper. Well, sometimes even that came a lot later. Much of the Bible was oral tradition that was circulating for years and years before someone wrote it down.
Picture a campfire thousands of years ago in what is Iraq today. A group of shepherds have gathered at the end of the day; the meal is over and the stories begin to flow, and a young girl says to her uncle, “Tell me again why the world is how it is.”
And her uncle responds: “In the beginning God created . . .”
Back to the writing part. The people who eventually wrote all of this down weren’t sitting there with their hand and the pen moving as if controlled by some outside force.
The writers of the Bible had agendas.
Luke said he wrote to give an orderly account of all that has gone down.
John said he wrote so we will believe in Jesus.
The writer of the book of Ruth had some strong opinions about Jews marrying Gentiles.
The writers obviously took what they were doing very seriously and had specific outcomes they wanted from their writings, but that doesn’t mean they woke up in the morning thinking, Today I’ll write a section of the Bible.
Now, apparently their writings were recognized as inspired soon after their creation. Peter mentions the writings of Paul in one of his letters: “[Paul] writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other scriptures, to their own destruction.”36
I love that phrase “hard to understand.” The Bible was difficult to grasp on the first pass for people who had written it.
But my point here is that Peter is referring to the writings of Paul in the same light as “the other scriptures.”
Already early in the life of the Jesus movement, certain letters and writings were beginning to distinguish themselves as being different, inspired, “from God” in ways that other religious writings weren’t. For the next several hundred years, there was a lot of discussion in the Christian community about which books were considered scripture and which books weren’t. But it wasn’t until the 300s that what we know as the sixty-six books of the Bible were actually agreed upon as “the Bible.”
This is part of the problem with continually insisting that one of the absolutes of the Christian faith must be a belief that “scripture alone” is our guide. It sounds nice, but it is not true.37 In reaction to abuses by the church, a group of believers during a time called the Reformation claimed that we only need the authority of the Bible. But the problem is that we got the Bible from the church voting on what the Bible even is. So when I affirm the Bible as God’s Word, in the same breath I have to affirm that when those people voted, God was somehow present, guiding them to do what they did. When people say that all we need is the Bible, it is simply not true.
In affirming the Bible as inspired, I have to affirm the Spirit who I believe was inspiring those people to choose those books.38
Were they binding and loosing the Bible itself?
At some point we have to have faith. Faith that God is capable of guiding people. Faith that God has not left us alone. Faith that the same Spirit who guided Paul and Peter and those people in a room in the 300s is still
with
us
today.
Guiding us, showing us, enlightening us.
Wrestling
Binding and loosing can only be done if communities are willing to wrestle. The ultimate display of our respect for the sacred words of God is that we are willing to wade in and struggle with the text—the good parts, the hard-to-understand parts, the parts we wish weren’t there.
The rabbis even say a specific blessing when they don’t understand a portion of the text. When it eludes them, when it makes no sense, they say a word of thanks to God because of the blessing that will be theirs someday. “Thank you, God, that at some point in the future, the lights are going to come on for me.”
The rabbis have a metaphor for this wrestling with the text: The story of Jacob wrestling the angel in Genesis 32. He struggles, and it is exhausting and tiring, and in the end his hip is injured. It hurts. And he walks away limping.
Because when you wrestle with the text, you walk away limping.
And some people have no limp, because they haven’t wrestled. But the ones limping have had an experience with the living God.
I think God does know what he’s doing with the Bible. But a better question is, do we know what we’re doing with the Bible?
And I say, yes, we are binding and loosing and wrestling and limping.
Because God has spoken.
