theology proper

When You’re Tempted to Hate People, Part 3: Compassion

September 23, 2019 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Description

In his primary description of himself, God includes a list of related attributes (Ex 34.6-7):

Compassionate
Gracious
Slow to anger
Abounding in lovingkindness
Abounding in truth
Keeping lovingkindness for thousands
Forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin
Not leaving the guilty unpunished
Visiting the iniquity of fathers upon children

And in the parallel prophetic passages,

Relenting of calamity

For easy comparison, I’ve posted a chart of the parallel passages here.

There’s a lot here that calls for investigation, rumination, and careful analysis. God describes himself in ways that emphasize tenderness without the weakness of permissiveness. We’ll take a few posts to cover this list, occasionally combining similar terms for efficiency and clarity.

We begin, as God does, with compassion.

The Hebrew word is closely related to the word for “womb”; it speaks of the intense feeling we get in our midsection when we’re deeply affected emotionally. We speak informally of being “punched in the gut” or “kicked in the stomach” when we received intensely emotional news.

Interestingly, the Gospels speak of Jesus as often feeling this way, of being “moved with compassion.”

When he saw the people “as sheep having no shepherd” (Mt 9.36; Mk 6.34)
When he saw a large crowd near the Sea of Galilee—whom he was about to feed miraculously (Mt 14.14; Mk 8.2)
Similarly just before he later fed the 4000 (Mt 15.32)
When he healed Bartimaeus and the other blind man just outside Jericho (Mt 20.34)
When he saw the widow of Nain in her son’s funeral procession (Lk 7.13)

Paul, recognizing this characteristic of his Lord, speaks of longing for the Philippians “in the bowels of Jesus Christ” (Php 1.8 KJV).

God, knowing of people’s desperate needs, is moved with compassion for them. It’s part of his character; it simply can’t not happen. I’m tempted to say that he can’t help himself, but that language, taken literally, would imply some limitation on divine self-control—which of course is omnipotent and perfect. So let me say that just as the Bible says that God cannot lie (Ti 1.2)—because, as self-consistent, he cannot and will not violate his own nature—even so he cannot be uncompassionate.

And this characteristic of his takes us to unexpected places. The examples of Jesus’ compassion that I’ve listed above all involve people in great sorrow and need, and we can easily understand that. We like to think that in similar circumstances we too would do what we could to help. I write this post just after buying a tank of gas for a stranger with a sad story so he could get home.

[Sidebar: Sure, maybe he was lying. In these situations I don’t give cash; I offer to go with them to the gas station, or the restaurant, or the grocery store, or whatever, and buy them what they say they need. The shysters typically refuse and say they need the cash (for drugs, usually). This guy went with me and let me gas up his truck. So it looked legit to me.]

But keep in mind that Jesus knew what was in people’s hearts (Jn 2.25). He knew that the widow of Nain was a sinner. He knew that a lot of those 5000 and 4000 people were just following him to see him do tricks—and after he fed them, for the food (Jn 6.26). As he wept over Jerusalem, he knew that its inhabitants “killed the prophets, and stoned them who are sent to you!” (Mt 23.37; Lk 13.34).

And so it shouldn’t be surprising to us when we find God going to considerable trouble to compel a recalcitrant prophet to go on a journey of 500 miles to tell people he hated that God was going to judge them—not because he was going to judge them (though he eventually would, as Nahum records)—but because he knew that the prophet’s angry message would scare the dickens out of them and would result in their genuine repentance.

This compassionate God comes to Jonah, sulking on the hillside after the Ninevites’ repentance and consequent deliverance, and rebukes him from his own heart: “Should I not have compassion on Nineveh, the great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know the difference between their right and left hand [i.e. babies], as well as many animals?” (Jon 4.11).

This is how you treat people you hate.

Indeed, this is how you feel about them.

Photo by Uriel Soberanes on Unsplash

When You’re Tempted to Hate People, Part 2: How God Describes Himself

September 19, 2019 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Introduction

As we’ve noted, even Jonah the bigot knew that God had revealed himself as a God of compassion, who extends mercy even to the most wicked, upon their repentance—and who seeks that repentance from them.

When and where did God reveal this?

It begins with Moses.

He had spent more than a month atop Mt. Sinai, in the very presence of Israel’s God (Ex 24.12-18), receiving the stone tablets containing the commandments God had spoken earlier to the people (Ex 20-23; 31.18). At the end of that remarkable experience, God tells him that the people have corrupted themselves by worshiping a golden bull that they believe represents God himself (Ex 32.7-8), and that God intends to wipe them out and start the nation over with Moses (Ex 32.9-10). Moses argues successfully against that policy by countering that God has promised to build the nation on Abraham (Ex 32.11-14). But when he returns to the foot of the mountain (Ex 32.15) and finds the nation in debauchery, he breaks the stone tablets (Ex 32.19), destroys the bull (Ex 32.20), and brings judgment into the camp (Ex 32.25-28).

As the nation prepares to leave Sinai and travel toward the Promised Land (Ex 33), God prepares Moses to receive a second set of tablets to replace the ones Moses has destroyed (Ex 34.1-4). And there, atop the mountain again, Yahweh reveals himself to Moses with characteristics, attributes, that he has not significantly revealed before. He describes himself as

Yahweh, Yahweh God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth; ⁷who keeps lovingkindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression and sin; yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations (Ex 34.6-7).

This is quite a list. As I said, it’s new revelation; there’s almost nothing said about these things before this point in Scripture. (I’ll specify the “almost” in later posts.) And it becomes a refrain throughout the rest of God’s revelation of himself; it’s clear that he takes it seriously and views the list as a centrally significant part of his relationship with his people. Further, it’s clear that his people recognize that significance, for they bring it up again and again:

When Israel reacts in fear to the inhabitants of the Promised Land (Num 13.32-33), disbelieving God’s sure promise to Abraham and to Isaac and to all Isaac’s descendants since, wishing that they had never left Egypt (Num 14.1-4)—saying that bondslavery to the Egyptians was better than serving God!—Moses again intercedes for them (Num 14.11-16) by quoting God’s self-description back to him (Num 14.17-19), thereby rescuing them once again from obliteration (Num 14.20).
David the psalmist rejoices in this self-description of God, 500 years after it was originally spoken, by reciting it and then expanding on it in lyrical meditation (Ps 103.8-14)—more than once (Ps 86.15; 145.8).
More than 500 years after David, the chorus rises again, this time from the Jews who have returned from captivity in Babylon. Under Nehemiah’s leadership, they cleanse themselves and the Levitical priesthood, issuing forth in a psalm of praise to God (Neh 9.5-38) that includes the ancient self-description (Neh 9.17)—again, more than once (Neh 9.31-32).
The prophets too pick up the refrain; between David and Nehemiah, Joel weaves the refrain into his call for Judah’s repentance (Joel 2.13); and as we’ve noted, in far-off Nineveh Jonah recalls the verse, in frustration and anger over God’s willingness to accept the repentance of the deservedly hated Assyrians (Jon 4.2).

So this is a big deal. God takes it seriously, and so do his people, even when, as in the case of Jonah, they wish it weren’t so.

We might say that this is the core biblical view of the person of God. This is the most direct statement of who he is. It is his essence, his character, his personality.

Well, then. If our whole purpose is to know God—which is a necessary prerequisite to the Greatest Commandment, to love him (Mt 22.35-40)—then we’d better understand it.

That’s worth a few posts, don’t you think?

Photo by Uriel Soberanes on Unsplash

When You’re Tempted to Hate People, Part 1: Introduction

September 16, 2019 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

We’re polarized.

Yep.

And each side sees the other as the Ultimate Personification of Evil.

They’re bad people, you see. They want to destroy us and all that we hold dear.

No tactic is out of bounds in our desire to destroy them.

It’s war.

Bring it.

There were situations like this in biblical times: existential crises, where God’s people, and all they held dear—or should have held dear—was under assault by those who hated what they stood for, because they hated the God who had chosen them for himself.

The prophets called down God’s judgment on the nation’s enemies, and they didn’t mince words. The list of targets is long. It begins with Israel’s neighbors: Moab (Is 15-16; Jer 48); Edom (Jer 49.7ff; Ezk 25.12-14); Ammon (Jer 49.1-6; Ezk 25); Damascus / Syria (Is 17.1-3; Jer 49.23-27; Amos 1.3-5); Tyre (Is 23). And then it extends to more distant kingdoms that are even more of a threat because of their hegemonous power and reach: Egypt (Is 19; Ezk 29-30); Babylon (Is 13-14, 46; Jer 50-51); and Nineveh / Assyria (Nahum).

Especially Assyria. They’re the worst.

No one in the ancient world, or perhaps since, has exceeded the Assyrians in their gleeful cruelty to their defeated enemies. In Iraq today is the site
of Calah, the capital city chosen by the Assyrian ruler Ashernasirpal II, who reigned in the early 9^th century BC. There in the Temple of Ninurta is inscribed Ashernasirpal’s own official account of his victories:

I stormed the mountain peaks and took them. In the midst of the mighty mountain I slaughtered them; with their blood I dyed the mountain red like wool. … The heads of their warriors I cut off, and I formed them into a pillar over against their city; their young men and their maidens I burned in the fire.

I built a pillar over against the city gate and I flayed all the chiefs who had revolted and I covered the pillar with their skins. Some I impaled upon the pillar on stakes and others I bound to stakes round the pillar. I cut the limbs off the officers who had rebelled. Many captives I burned with fire and many I took as living captives. From some I cut off their noses, their ears, and their fingers, of many I put out their eyes. I made one pillar of the living and another of heads and I bound their heads to tree trunks round about the city. Their young men and maidens I consumed with fire. The rest of their warriors I consumed with thirst in the desert of the Euphrates.

Hulai, their governor, I flayed, and his skin I spread upon the wall of the city.

Scholar Jack Finegan observes that “the quotations just given are typical of many more which can be read in the annals of this king.”

Now those are some seriously evil people. Existentially so.

Why am I telling you all this? What’s the point?

It’s this. It was to this people, this nation, that God sent a prophet to declare judgment.

Well, that makes sense, doesn’t it?

You know the story well. The prophet’s name is Jonah, and after considerable initial reluctance, Jonah finally arrives at Nineveh, the current capital city, and gleefully preaches the announcement of oncoming doom.

And then, in his view, everything goes seriously awry.

Nineveh repents (Jon 3.5). From the king on down (Jon 3.6-8).

Well, this wasn’t the plan. Not in Jonah’s mind, anyway. There’s nothing in Jonah’s message (Jon 3.4), or in God’s instructions to him (Jon 1.1-2; 3.1-2), that offered any hope of repentance. Jonah could easily have argued that repentance was impossible and in any event would not have been accepted.

But the Assyrian king hoped for better things. “Perhaps,” he said, “God may turn and relent and withdraw His burning anger so that we will not perish” (Jon 3.9).

And you know what?

Jonah knew that too. “I knew,” he said to God, in frustration and anger, “that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, and one who relents concerning calamity” (Jon 4.2).

And Jonah was not one bit happy. He hated these people. And he had perfectly good reasons to.

Where did Jonah get the idea that God was gracious and compassionate, even to hated people?

God had told his people that. Repeatedly.

Next time we’ll look at what he had told them, and under what circumstances. And then we’ll spend a few posts learning what it all means, for us, and for all those people we hate.

Photo by Uriel Soberanes on Unsplash

God of Law, God of Grace

July 28, 2019 by Dan Olinger 2 Comments

So which is it?

Is God all about law or all about grace?

Is God the heavenly tyrant who insists that we follow his rules, or else? Who constantly chases the kids off his lawn?

Or is he the kindly old gentleman who always has candy in his pockets for the children?

There are some who see law and grace as enemies—so much so that the God of the Old Testament must be different from the God of the New. And of course they like the latter better.

Even among less reactionary people, there’s the assumption that law and grace are at odds: you have to choose one or the other. The old-timers choose law, because you know, and the hipsters choose grace, because, well, it’s obvious.

But there’s no dichotomy—in fact, there can’t possibly be. The God of the Old Testament is also the God of the New, and he isn’t at odds with himself (Num 23.19; 2Tim 2.13), and he doesn’t change (Mal 3.6; Jam 1.17).

Law and grace are one.

When I was a child in Sunday school, I occasionally heard a teacher say that the Old Testament saints were saved by keeping the Law, and we’re saved by grace.

Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s a wonder I didn’t grow up to be a flaming heretic.

So how are they one? Paul makes that clear in his two sister epistles Romans and Galatians. Abraham, he tells us, lived long before the Law even existed (Gal 3.17), and he was justified—counted righteous, though he was not righteous—by trusting God (Rom 4.2-3). By faith.

That’s grace. It couldn’t be Law, since there wasn’t any.

So if grace was working fine before the Law, why did God complicate the system by ordering Israel to keep the Law?

I’m glad you asked. Paul tells us why. The Law, he says, is designed to lead us to Christ (Gal 3.24).

All of us are really good at justifying ourselves. My case is different, you see; I have good reasons for my, um, idiosyncrasies. I’m a good person. I live by my own set of rules, and I conform to them very nicely, thanks.

God knows that if he doesn’t set the rules for us, we’ll never come to him. We’ll consider ourselves just fine—better than that other guy over there—and he knows that we’ll never be pure, never be fulfilled, never be joyous, unless we come to him. He can’t abide that; he loves us too much.

So he gives us a Law, and it’s impossible. You can try all you want, but you’ll never keep it. He’s not trying to frustrate us, to rub our faces in our own failure; he’s holding out his hands, waiting for us to come to him for forgiveness and cleansing, having realized that we can’t do It without him.

The Law brings us to Christ.

So guess what?

The Law isn’t in conflict with grace; it is grace. It’s the way God leads us stubborn horses to water, where we can drink all we want for free (Is 55.1-2).

The Law is grace. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the Ten Commandments, where God, as he is setting up the rules, reminds us of who he is, and what he has done:

I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage (Ex 20.2).

I’ve already delivered you, he says. That’s the kind of person I am; I rescue people who don’t deserve to be rescued.

And then he says something that sounds harsh:

I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; ⁶And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments (Ex 20.5b-6).

But it’s not harsh. Look more closely.

How far does sin reach? To the third and fourth generation.

How far do mercy and grace reach?

Thousands.

Thousands of what?

Thousands of generations, of course.

How long is a generation?

Well, let’s say 20 years. These days couples are having their first child later than that, and in West Virginia they have them a lot earlier ( :-) ), but 20 should be close enough, conservatively.

How long is a thousand generations?

20,000 years.

I’m a young-earth creationist. I don’t think we’ve been here that long.

So what’s his point?

Sin has its day, but grace lasts for as long as you need it. It’ll never run out.

And that’s right there in the Ten Commandments.

The Law.

It’s grace.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

On Beginning at Moses

October 25, 2018 by Dan Olinger 3 Comments

… with a nod to my former Greek teacher and colleague Dr. Mike Barrett.

One of my favorite experiences is gaining an insight into biblical material that has never occurred to me before.

That happens to me fairly frequently, and yesterday it happened right in the middle of class, thanks to a student question.

We know that the entire Scripture is about Christ. Jesus himself made that point in a conversation he had with two disciples on the road to Emmaus after his resurrection (Lk 24.13ff). (And that passage, Lk 24.27 precisely, is where Dr. Barrett got the title for his book.) Boy do we wish Luke had seen fit to include a transcript of that conversation in his Gospel!

I suspect it was pretty much like Paul’s standard synagogue sermon, recorded in Acts 13.14ff, but with a lot more prophecies included.

Those two disciples said that their hearts burned within them when they heard these things (Lk 24.32). It’s easy to see why. Here they were realizing that the Tanakh (the Old Testament)—a document they had studied all their lives and thought they knew well—was filled with meaning that they had completely missed. It was like the old book had become completely new again; they were starting over as neophytes, going over long-familiar words and seeing completely new things in them.

It’s also easy to see why the early church became really taken with the idea of finding Christ in the Old Testament, looking under every bush—burning or not—to see if he was there. They found a lot of good examples, but sometimes they found things that weren’t even there—for example, when they decided that Solomon’s personification of wisdom in Proverbs 8 was actually talking about Christ. The heretic Arius was able to turn that unfounded interpretation against them by citing Prov 8.22 as proof, then, that Jesus was created by God “in the beginning.”

Oopski.

Mistakes like that have made more recent interpreters, including yours truly, a little wary of suggesting that Christ is somewhere in the OT where he hasn’t been widely recognized before.

So it’s with some trepidation that I share my “insight.”

[Deep breath.] Here goes.

The New Testament tells us repeatedly that Jesus, the Son, is in fact the creator of all things (Jn 1.3; Col 1.16; Heb 1.2). I take that to mean that the Father is the visionary, the designer, in creation, while the Son is the active agent, actually doing the work of creating, while the Spirit hovers over and tends to what is created (Gen 1.2). (So far, that’s a fairly standard, common interpretation.)

And I take that to mean that Elohim (“God”) in Gen 1 and the first paragraph of Gen 2 is actually the person of the Son. (Many others would argue that the name refers to the united Godhead, the essence rather than any one of the persons. That’s not a hill I’m interested in dying on, but bear with me here.)

In Gen 2.4 the name changes from Elohim to Yahweh Elohim (“the LORD God”). Does that indicate a change of person, or is the protagonist still the Son? Well, if “God” created man in Gen 1.27, and in the theological retelling of the story “the LORD God” created man in Gen 2.7, then it seems reasonable to continue to see the Son as the protagonist in the account.

Now, “the LORD God” continues as the main character through the end of Gen 3; Gen 4 begins to use the name Yahweh (“the LORD”). (Eve uses that name in Gen 4.1, and the narrator—Moses—begins using it in Gen 4.3.)

All of this serves as a reasonable basis for seeing Jesus as the one acting in Genesis 3. An additional evidence of that is that “the LORD God” is described as “walking in the garden in the cool of the day” (Gen 3.8)—and the Son is the only person of the Godhead described as physically embodied in Scripture. (But is Rev 5.6-7 an exception? Hmm.)

So, finally, here’s the thought I had in class today.

Is it actually Jesus who utters the prophecy of Gen 3.15?

Is it Jesus who, perhaps with an animated glint in his eye, tells the serpent that one day, the seed of the woman will crush the serpent’s head?

Wouldn’t that put quite an edge on those words? Wouldn’t it be a lot like the time David gave Goliath a list of all the things he was going to do with Goliath’s various body parts (1Sa 17.45-47), but exponentially more fearsome, and exponentially more consequential?

The Son and the Serpent, standing in the Garden, face to face, making an appointment for a battle to the death, thousands of years into the future?

I’m going to have to think about that.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

7 Stabilizing Principles in a Chaotic World, Part 3

July 19, 2018 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1 Part 2

Number 2: Image of God. Everyone is infinitely valuable. Treat him that way.

God not only runs the world; he created it. From scratch. (Google ex nihilo sometime. The official meaning is “from scratch.”) All of it. Everything is from his hand, originally.

But not everything is of equal value. He created light, and darkness, and water, and dirt, and plants, and animals. They’re all worth something, because he decided they’re worth creating.

But humans are different. In the creative process, the creator set them apart. He did so in many ways—by creating them last, climactically; by eagerly anticipating what he was about to do; by getting his hands dirty in the act of creating them. And most clearly, by speaking of them as specially gifted—they are, he said, “In our image, after our likeness” (Gen 1.26-27).

You’re in the image of very God. You’re not God, but you’re like him in some ways, and that makes you infinitely valuable.

Now, we’re all fine with that part. But here’s the thing—every other human is like that too. The people you like, sure; but the people you dislike as well. Even the people you hate.

When Noah left the ark after the flood, God established a system of human government, including capital punishment; he gave Noah, and by extension other humans, the right to kill murderers. This is the same God who later told Moses, “You must not kill!” (Ex 20.13). Is God unstable? Self-contradictory? Forgetful?

Of course not. God gave a reason why murderers could be killed while others must not be: the murder victim was in the image of God (Gen. 9.6).

Now, that’s really interesting. Sometimes murder victims get killed for no reason. But sometimes they don’t. Sometimes there’s a very good reason–or at least an incitation. My great-grandfather Olinger was murdered in Missouri, back in the 1800s, in a dispute with his neighbor over water rights. The details of the story haven’t been preserved for my current family members, but I’ve often wondered if he did something to provoke his neighbor, in word or deed. Sometimes that happens.

Sometimes murder victims, well, kinda have it coming.

But God says the murderer still gets executed, because that murder victim, distasteful and unlikable and rage-inducing as he may have been, was in God’s image.

Broken, sinful, perhaps—from all outward appearances—worthless. But also in the image of God.

The implications of that are far-reaching.

The homeless person is of unlimited value. Even if he’s homeless because of his own stupid inattention to personal responsibility.

The illegal immigrant is of unlimited value. Even though he’s broken the law.

The political enemy is of unlimited value. Even though he’s obviously an idiot. And eeeevvvviiiillll.

Now, suppose I pay a visit to the United Kingdom, and I see a bust of the Queen, and I spit on it. (All my British friends, please bear with me for a moment.)

I’m going to get a response. It might be just a cocked eyebrow. Or it might be a verbal rebuke from a passerby. Or, more likely, it just might be a visit from a bobby.

Why? It’s just a piece of rock!

Well, no, it isn’t. It’s a piece of rock that happens to look like the Queen, God save her, and spitting on the image of the Queen is going to get you in a lot of trouble, deservedly, from the Queen’s devoted subjects.

So when you treat God’s image with disrespect, what do you think is going to happen?

If you ignore the plight of the homeless, or the need of the illegal immigrant, or if you treat your political opponent with disrespect, these actions are not without consequence. The God of heaven sees, and he knows, and he cares, and boy, you’re in a heap of trouble.

Now, this all screams for a disclaimer, the one you’re eagerly waiting for. There are ways to address the needs of the homeless without forcing taxpayers to foot the bill, and without being wasteful or creating dependency. And illegal aliens have broken the law, and there are consequences for that. And your political opponent might well have no idea what he’s talking about; that has happened. I’m not saying that socialism or lawlessness or moral relativism are necessary consequences of the image of God in humans.

But I am saying that the image of God matters, and that at the interpersonal level, you need to treat everybody—everybody—with that kind of respect.

If you’ll see all those around you in that light, the way you feel about them will change. And so will the way you respond to them on social media.

Frankly, I doubt that the chaos of the current culture will go away just because your perspective has changed.

But it’s a start.

Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

Photo by Keith Misner on Unsplash

On Existential Providence

March 12, 2018 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

God’s in charge.

He’s sovereign; his will is always accomplished. That includes the big things, and the tiny little things. In my case, tiny little things brought existential results: I wouldn’t exist without them.

My Mom grew up in Brockton, MA, the daughter of hardworking and really interesting Universalists. On graduation from high school, she went to secretarial school and then moved to Baltimore during World War II to work some sort of secretarial job. She got an apartment with a roommate named Nikki.

Dad grew up in the Pacific Northwest, born in Salmon, ID. By age 13 he’d lost both of his parents, and he finished his youth under the freewheeling stewardship of his older siblings, mostly in Spokane, WA, and LA (where he experienced the Long Beach earthquake of 1933). Around 1944 he volunteered for the Army, mostly, I suspect, to get out of the house. Basic training at Camp Roberts in California, then off on a troop ship to the Philippines, as a replacement soldier for the combat-depleted 31^st “Dixie” Division, known today as the Alabama National Guard. Spent time on both Leyte and Mindanao, with little combat; made a little extra money by cutting other soldiers’ hair in the jungle.

When the war ended, he returned Stateside and was sent to Fort Meade, MD, during the last days of his enlistment.

One weekend he got a pass and went into Baltimore.

I dunno, I think I’d have gone to Washington. But he went to Baltimore.

He and a buddy or two dropped in to a café to get something to eat. As they were getting seated, Dad noticed another couple of soldiers making a clumsy pass at two girls who were paying their bill at the register. The girls clearly didn’t want to talk, but the guys kept trying.

Dad got up and told them to knock it off. We can all see they don’t want to talk to you; leave them alone, and get out.

They were privates. Dad was a corporal. They got out.

Dad said a few words to one of the girls. Yeah, she was my Mom.

And 8 years later, along came Yours Truly.

So for me, this is really an existential story. I wouldn’t be here if that hadn’t happened. And oh, yeah, neither would my sisters.

What are the odds?

How did a boy from Idaho, 2 miles down from the Continental Divide, end up in the Philippines with a unit from Alabama?

And how did he and the future Mrs. O. end up in Baltimore, where neither of them had ever been before, at the same time for completely unrelated reasons?

And how did they end up at the same hole-in-the-wall café on supper shifts that overlapped by about 10 minutes?

What if he’d come to supper 15 minutes later?

What if a couple of jerks hadn’t hassled the girls on their way out?

What if?

Our lives are an endless stream of details, winding in and out of other endless streams, sometimes apart, but occasionally intersecting. And those intersections are usually brief and trivial and quickly forgotten. What was the name of the guy you greeted on the way into the drugstore yesterday afternoon?

But sometimes those intersections change lives, and those times they change all the world for the people involved.

And God oversees and directs the whole symphony.

The God who raises up kings and sets them down again, who empowers the existence and continuance of the whole universe, who sees that the water cycle and the seasonal cycle continue despite our attempts to contort and convolute them, this God engineers the tiny little details as well.

The tiny little trivial ones, and the tiny little existential ones.

I’m glad of that.

Photo by David Marcu on Unsplash

On Calling God by His First Name

November 16, 2017 by Dan Olinger 3 Comments

God has a lot of names.

And they’re significant, for two reasons: first, because unlike us, God has chosen his names for himself; and second, because he has chosen to reveal his character and works through them.

And so he has a lot of names, because there’s a lot to know about him.

Some of his names are simple and straightforward. Elohim (in the Old Testament) and Theos (in the New Testament) simply mean “God.” Adonai (OT) and Kurios (NT) simply mean “Lord.”

Some of them are more complicated. Yahweh Tsebaoth (OT) means “Lord of Hosts” or “Commander of Armies”; the name speaks of his ability to back up his plans and commands with a powerful heavenly host of battle-hardened troops—even though he’s omnipotent and doesn’t really need the help.

And that brings us to the name Yahweh, or more correctly YHWH, which we typically translate as “LORD.”

And that’s a shame. Let me explain why.

First, a little background.

Unlike the other names of God, which are titles or descriptions, YHWH is God’s personal name; in Western culture we would say that it’s his “first name.” And remarkably, God reveals that name to his people and invites them to use it when referring to him.

Imagine that. God invites his people to call him by his first name.

But of course, God is God, the Creator of heaven and earth; we may do whatever he invites us to do, but we may not treat him as common. He is holy; we treat him not just with respect, but with a respect unlike any other. And so he tells his people, “You must not take my name in vain” (Ex 20.7); that is, you may call me by my first name, but only respectfully. This relationship is not trivial, and it is not a joke.

When the Hebrew OT was written, scribes did not include vowels; they wrote just the consonants, and part of being literate was knowing the text well enough to know what the unwritten vowel sounds were. (That’s why it was—and still is—such a big deal for a Jewish boy to read aloud from the Torah, in public, when he became a man at bar mitzvah.)

At the same time, the Jews were very careful to keep all the commandments, and even to put protections in place to prevent themselves from violating a command accidentally. God had said not to take his name in vain; eager to please, the Jews thought they would safeguard against taking the name in vain by never taking it at all.

And so, when the public reader of Scripture came to the name YHWH, he would not pronounce it; he would read Adonai (Lord) instead. Centuries later—long after Christ’s death, in fact—when Jewish scribes called Masoretes added vowels to the OT text, to every occurrence of YHWH they added the vowels for Adonai as a reminder to the reader to say the latter, not the former. (And thus, to this day, we’re not sure how to pronounce the name—the name by which he invited us to call him.)

And then the word looked like “Yehowah.” Centuries later, when biblical scholarship passed through Germany, those scholars wrote that pronunciation as “Jehovah,” and a new name was created. (Interestingly, the name that the “Jehovah’s Witnesses” approve for God is in fact the one name that we know for sure is not actually a name for God (!).)

A thought. Do you like to hear your name? Of course you do. Often, in an introduction, your name is the only one you hear. :-) What do you think God thought when his own people refused to speak his name? And all out of respect?

I wonder in what other ways we choose to show our respect for God in ways that hurt him.

In another development, a group of Jewish scholars translated the Hebrew scriptures into Greek a couple of centuries before Christ. In a far-reaching decision, they chose to translate the Hebrew YHWH with the Greek kurios, “Lord”—even though they were already using that Greek word to translate Adonai—I suppose because the public reader would read “Adonai” whenever he saw YHWH anyway.

So now, we’ve replaced God’s first name with a title.

What does that do?

It distances us from the person.

Some people call me “Dan”—some few even call me “Danny.” (They would be my older sisters, in whose minds I am still an obnoxious little boy.) Others call me “Dr. Olinger.”

Which ones do you think I’m closer to?

God has asked us, his people, his sons and daughters, to call him by his first name. And we call him “LORD” instead. We hold him at arm’s length when he seeks an embrace.

How do you think he feels about that?

I’m not suggesting that we burn all the Bibles that have “LORD” in all caps. But we should at least remember that God has called us to an intimate relationship with him; he has invited us to come boldly and joyfully into his presence, as the little children came to Jesus.

We should delight in that degree of loving, respectful intimacy as much as he does.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash.