daily java

Daily Java:

Now go and write down these words. Write them in a book. They will stand until the end of time as a witness. (Isaiah 30:8)

I have always believed that the writers of the Bible didn’t know they were writing the Bible when they did.

There is a song in Jesus Christ Superstar that has the apostles singing at the Last Supper. In it is the line: “Always hoped that I'd be an apostle. Knew that I would make it if I tried, Then when we retire we can write the gospels So they'll still talk about us when we've died.” It’s a funny line, but I don’t think anything like that happened.

I believe in verbal plenary inspiration. I believe every word in the Bible is where it should be. However I believe it differently than many others of my comrades in arms. I believe that God guided the men who wrote and that when they wrote they pretty much said what God wanted.

I do not believe, however, that God grabbed them, wrung out a book while they were in a trance and when they woke up, arm cramping in pain, they had written Romans. For one thing, each book bears a definite characteristic of its writer. John is different from Luke, Paul from Peter, and so on. Someone says that God used their style, but to what end. If God had just dictated the book, they would all sound the same.

I do believe that the God of the Universe is big enough and powerful enough to speak the world into existence. Therefore he is big enough to order the minds of men (which he after all created from nothing) to say what he wanted them to say without co-opting their minds and bodies. They could write what he wanted and still be conscious.

But I don’t think they necessarily knew that what they wrote would be preserved for thousands of years. After all, there were a lot of writers in the first century writing a lot of letters to a lot of churches. And each of these letters were essentially Bible classes on paper. In the absence of any central document, every teacher, every apostle, everybody (good and bad included – look at some of the books like the Gospel of Mary Magdalene) wrote them. God guided the hands of those who collected them and let just what he wanted float to the top of the pile. And the Bible was born.

Can you imagine the Lord appearing to you and saying, “I want you to write a book for me to put in my Bible. The book will last for thousands of years, be hotly debated, people will parse and dissect every single word and take much of what you say out of context. Now get busy. We’ll call it Colossians.”

You’d freeze right away. What will I say? How will I say it? You would go through draft after draft and still not be able to say just the right thing in just the right way. It would drive you crazy.

They knew what they were writing was important, that people would read it and get good out of it. They knew it was valuable to the church. But I don’t think they knew it would be THE HOLY BIBLE.

It would surely scare me if I knew these blatherings on my blog would last forever.

career suicide

After this, Absalom bought a chariot and horses, and he hired fifty bodyguards to run ahead of him. He got up early every morning and went out to the gate of the city. When people brought a case to the king for judgment, Absalom would ask where in Israel they were from, and they would tell him their tribe. Then Absalom would say, “You’ve really got a strong case here! It’s too bad the king doesn’t have anyone to hear it. I wish I were the judge. Then everyone could bring their cases to me for judgment, and I would give them justice!” When people tried to bow before him, Absalom wouldn’t let them. Instead, he took them by the hand and kissed them. Absalom did this with everyone who came to the king for judgment, and so he stole the hearts of all the people of Israel. (2 Samuel 15:1-6)

An author I read a lot just wrote an ugly article, racially motivated and just plain ugly. The weblog he was a part of for a decade disavowed him for it. Their comment was that he was free to write whatever he wanted, just not for them anymore. He had always been an edgy guy, with views that were a little out of the mainstream, but he had never crossed such a line before.

And the line he crossed was done with such force and strength that it worked to completely and irrevocably sever his relationship with his primary employer.

What I cannot for the life of me figure out is why. Why would he all of a sudden write such an article knowing full well that it would kill his career with conservatives?

Absalom had done this. He was King David’s favorite son, but he had been in exile from the king for killing his own half-brother. His half-brother had raped Absalom’s sister so Absalom had good reason, but it hurt David.

He finally had come back, and now he decides he would be a better king than David and stands at the city gates telling everyone how good he would be.

Things finally come to a head and David is once again on the run with a force behind Absalom trying to unseat David. It ends tragically with Absalom’s death.

When this writer wrote this article, he had to know it would kill his career. Or at least, his career with conservatives. It would be like me writing an ugly article for the back page of the bulletin knowing that Pastor Mel doesn’t always read them first before publishing them. or like a preacher standing up and censuring his church or his denomination from the pulpit. Or like a husband telling his wife he thinks she is fat and ugly and he never has liked her.

Any one of those would destroy a relationship beyond reparation.

Someone within our congregation recently wrote a mass letter to our church telling them that he did not agree with the pastor on something and that he didn’t think it was right. He had been working behind the scenes for a while and was gaining no support, so he finally wrote this letter. I suppose he hoped it would wake people up to his line of thought.

What it did was get him removed from the church. There was nothing wrong with him believing the way he did, but when he went behind the leadership’s back to teach and promote it, he was wrong. When he wrote the letter – and he was a former pastor himself, he had to know – he placed himself in direct opposition to the biblical model of authority.

When this writer wrote this article, he had to know it would kill him with his supporters. Was it career suicide? What was it? A death wish? He couldn’t figure out what else to do so he went for broke?

Absalom had to know it would not work. But he was so full of himself and his own self-love that he started thinking that his was the only real way to go. The man in our church must have too when he wrote that letter. The man who wrote the article online must have too.

I never agreed much with that author, but I respected him as an alternative voice. I guess he was just too alternative to live with us.