How Would Life Be Different If Jesus Did Not Rise?

9 April 2012

This post is part of April’s Synchroblog.

What if Christ did not rise?

The stock answer, of course, is straight out of 1 Corinthians 15: in that case, our faith is futile and we are of all men most to be pitied.  Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

I have no difficulty with Paul’s answer there.  It is born of Paul’s long reflection on Jesus and what He means, and there is deep wisdom in it.  However, for many conservative evangelicals, quoting Paul’s answer is not an indication of deep wisdom and reflection.  It has become a stock answer, a thing we can say that prevents us from thinking about the topic any further.   It’s like looking up the answer to an equation in the back of a math book: you can know x=3.5 without being any good at algebra.  However accurate the answer may be, though, just parroting it without thought is not the path to wisdom.

The path to wisdom is working through the problem yourself.

***

If Jesus did not rise from the dead, then He is not alive now.  The last people to see Him before He died were the last people to see Him, ever; the thing He said before He died was the last thing He said, ever.  He did not appear to the eleven.  Not only did He not appear to various people in Judea and Galilee in the weeks following the crucifixion, He also did not appear to Saul of Tarsus on the Damascus road.  Saul remained, to the end of his days, a devotee of Gamaliel in the school of Hillel.  As he grew older, Saul wrote, of course, as brilliant rabbis are wont to do, and some of his works are preserved in the Jewish community to this day.

If Jesus is not presently alive, then He did not make His presence known to, for example, Anthony Bloom.  Bloom recounts his conversion experience:

I asked my mother whether she had a book of the Gospel, because I wanted to know whether the Gospel would support the monstrous impression I had derived from this talk. I expected nothing good from my reading, so I counted the chapters of the four Gospels to be sure that I read the shortest, not to waste time unnecessarily. And thus it was the Gospel according to St Mark which I began to read.

I do not know how to tell you of what happened. I will put it quite simply and those of you who have gone through a similar experience will know what came to pass. While I was reading the beginning of St Mark’s gospel, before I reached the third chapter, I became aware of a presence. I saw nothing. I heard nothing. It was no hallucination. It was a simple certainty that the Lord was standing there and that I was in the presence of him whose life I had begun to read with such revulsion and such ill-will.

This was my basic and essential meeting with the Lord. From then I knew that Christ did exist. I knew that he was thou, in other words that he was the Risen Christ. I met with the core of the Christian message, that message which St Paul formulated so sharply and clearly when he said, ‘If Christ is not risen we are the most miserable of all men’. Christ was the Risen Christ for me, because if the One Who had died nearly 2000 years before was there alive, he was the Risen Christ. I discovered then something absolutely essential to the Christian message — that the Resurrection is the only event of the Gospel which belongs to history not only past but also present. Christ rose again, twenty centuries ago, but he is the Risen Christ as long as history continues. Only in the light of the Resurrection did everything else make sense to me. Because Christ was alive and I had been in his presence I could say with certainty that what the Gospel said about the Crucifixion of the prophet of Galilee was true, and the centurion was right when he said, ‘Truly he is the Son of God’. It was in the light of the Resurrection that I could read with certainty the story of the Gospel, knowing that everything was true in it because the impossible event of the Resurrection was to me more certain than any event of history.

But if Jesus is not alive, that didn’t happen.  Bloom remained an angry young Marxist, and as angry young Marxists tend to, he found some problem or another in the Gospel of Mark and discarded it.

Of course, if Jesus is not alive, the last Mark ever saw of Jesus, soldiers were surrounding Him, and Mark was fleeing naked for his life.  He never wrote the Gospel of Mark — what could he use for an ending?

If Jesus did not rise, He did not ascend to the Father, and if He did not ascend to the Father, He did not send the Holy Spirit.  Pentecost never happened, and the signs Mark promised would follow those who believe did not happen, and we, today, do not hear God’s voice through the Holy Spirit or look to Him for intervention either.

If Jesus did not rise, biblical prophecy and proclamation is dead.  Micah predicted the place, Daniel predicted the time, Isaiah predicted the manner of His coming.  Jesus fulfilled every expectation…and then died prematurely, never to rise.  The God Jesus called Father set the whole thing up, but then He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, get it done.  Of course the gospels and epistles were never written.  Why would God let the whole thing collapse like that?  Maybe He ran out of power.  Maybe He just lost interest in us — who knows?

Of course, this would not necessarily stop us from choosing to live by the principles of the Scriptures, such as they would be.  We could still live our lives by a biblical moral code — or try to.  We might have to gloss over some of the tougher bits, but that’s easy enough to do, isn’t it?  We could still have church services with music and teaching about the content of the Bible, just like we do now. We would not be the Body of Christ, of course, because He is not alive.  But we could still operate organizations and churches; there would just be no underlying unity that holds us all together.  We could still give money to support pastors and missionaries.  We could still have seminaries and Bible colleges.  What would we study?  What would we talk about?  Plenty.

We could still talk about the great miracles of the past: creation, the Red Sea, the raising of Lazarus.  We could still talk about how God spoke to great men in the past like Moses, giving him powerful principles for living well, or Samuel, helping him to lead Israel to victory over the Philistines.  Once upon a time, God was really something; He really did act in the affairs of men.  When He spoke, the fates of nations hung in the balance.  Once upon a time.

But that was before He hung Jesus out to dry.  That one failure changes everything.  After that, how do you trust God to intervene in your life today?  Why would you even want Him to speak to you today?  After He set us up to expect the Messiah, and sent Jesus, in every way fulfilling our expectations, and then allowed Him to die prematurely and descend into the grave forever — well, if He could betray His own prophets, His own people, His own Messiah in that way, then we certainly couldn’t trust Him with our lives.

So we wouldn’t.  With no Pentecost and no Holy Spirit, we wouldn’t even expect Him to show up, much less to do or say anything to us. We could not expect God to speak to us.  We would not expect to feel His presence — or value it if we did.  He wrote a book, once upon a time, and that’s as good as it’s going to get.  We’d just go on living by the principles.  Disagreements about the principles, of course, would balloon into huge fights — without the Body of Christ and the Holy Spirit, what have we got, besides agreement on some common principles?  So we’d huddle up with some folks we agree with on the principles, and hope that as we grow in wisdom over time, we’ll get better at living them out, and that would be it.

But it would take God betraying us to make us live like that…right?

***

And the Synchroblog link list:

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Posted by Tim Nichols

What Jesus Really Died For

8 April 2012

There’s something fundamentally goofy about preaching a Good Friday sermon, and then not preaching an Easter sermon (or vice versa).  Each day has its own emphases, and deserves its own time.  But life is often goofy.  Even though it’s posting here on Easter, this entry is based on a devotional delivered Friday night by Joe and me at the very first meeting of a community that we expect to shortly evolve into a church plant.  Since logistics prevents us from meeting on Easter this year, we went ahead and rolled the topics for both days into one short devotional.   Hope it’s a blessing to you.

Good Friday is a day to consider what was nailed to the cross.  Jesus, of course.  Our sins, of course.  But all too often, we talk as if the whole meaning of our existence is to escape this earth and get to heaven.  If that’s true, then…

  • the problem with sin is that it keeps us out of heaven
  • the point of the cross is that it takes our sin and puts it on Jesus, and He takes care of it
  • the point of the resurrection is that it really worked, and the sin is gone
  • the next really significant event in your life is you dying and going to heaven.

In between now and then?  Well, just hang on.  In light of eternity, a few decades of quiet desperation isn’t so long, really.

The truth about the cross is so much more than that.  God put man and woman on the earth to guard and cultivate it, to lovingly rule over it and make it productive.  We were supposed to be the very image of the Triune God on the earth, walking with God, partaking in flourishing marriages, families, and friendships.  We were made to be healthy, strong and whole — in every possible sense of those words.

We ruined it, thoroughly, by sinning and bringing death into the world.  We gave the Serpent a foothold in our domain, and he has used it to steal, kill, and destroy.  But at the very beginning, God made a promise that the Seed of the Woman would crush the Serpent’s head.  The Serpent won a victory in the Garden, but it was only temporary.

Jesus did not come to gather a few bedraggled refugees to heaven before Adam’s failure finally makes the earth fall apart for the last time.  Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil and set the world right again.

What did Jesus die for?  Everything that keeps us from that. Every sin, yes.  Also every sickness, every death, every suffering; every physical and emotional wound ever inflicted; every broken relationship; everything without exception that stands in the way of human flourishing on earth.  This is why the blind, the lame, the maimed were excluded from the Old Covenant priesthood: because the Tabernacle (and later the Temple) is a new Garden of Eden, and those maladies have no place in the Garden — not because God rejects those who suffer from them, but because He heals them.  It’s what Jesus said when John the Baptist asked, “Are you the coming one, or do we look for another?”  “Go and tell John what you see: the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear; the dead are raised and the poor have the gospel preached to them.”  In another place, Jesus read a Scripture in the synagogue: “The Spirit of the LORD is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed;  to proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD.”  Then He sat down, and the eyes of all were upon Him as He said, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

Our eyes should be on Him as well, because what He said is true.  He didn’t just bear our sins to the cross; according to Isaiah, He bore our griefs and sorrows, our weaknesses, our sicknesses.  That’s why Isaiah doesn’t just say “By His stripes we are made righteous.”  That’s true, and it’s important, but there’s so much more than that: “By His stripes we are healed.”

As Paul meditated on the meaning of Jesus to the Ephesian church, he took it further than just healing what is broken.  He said that we are already seated in the heavenly places with Christ, blessed by the Father with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, and commissioned and equipped to make war on spiritual armies of wickedness in the heavenly places — right now.

This is the furthest thing from pie-in-the-sky hope for eventual escape from this earth into heaven, and it’s a good thing.  If that’s all you’ve got, you haven’t got very much.  Even as great a man of faith as David sustained himself with faith that he would “see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”  Jesus told us to pray for that: “Thy Kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  We are Christians; we don’t abandon earth for heaven.  We are agents of Almighty God taking part in an invasion — heaven invading earth.

You have what Christ bought for you.  Act like it.

***

On November 12, 1993,   the first Ultimate Fighting Championship took place in Denver, Colorado, and mixed martial arts entered the mainstream in the United States.  You have to understand that up to this point, most martial arts tournaments were held for a single style only. Karate guys went to karate tournaments; taekwondo guys when to taekwondo tournaments, etc., and all the tournaments had a long list of rules.  This tournament was different: eight fighters from eight different styles would face each other with no weight classes, no time limits, and almost no rules at all. For most martial artists, myself included, it was a night of surprises.  In the end, Royce Gracie, a Brazilian weighing less than 180 pounds, defeated a field of contenders far bigger than he was.  The audience was baffled.  The announcers were surprised.  The fighters were shocked — all but two: Gracie himself, of course, and another fighter named Ken Shamrock, who came from a similar (grappling) background.  Shamrock lost his bout to Gracie, but in the fight before that, he faced a big, strong kickboxer named Pat Smith.  (You can see the bout here.)  Shamrock won handily, placing Smith in a leg lock and forcing him to surrender.

The thing about those kind of locks is, they hurt like the dickens, but as soon as the guy lets up and you have a minute to recover, you feel okay.  You don’t even feel like you lost the fight — you feel like you were tricked somehow.  That’s what happened with Smith, and if you watch the video clip of the fight all the way to the end, you’ll see him tap and lose the fight, but then you’ll see him get up, shake it off, and start yelling at Shamrock and trying to restart the fight.  He lost, but he can’t accept it — he wants to keep fighting.

Can you imagine Shamrock actually letting Smith restart the fight?  Think about it — he’s already won.  It’s over.  How dumb would he have to be to let Smith talk him into giving up the victory he already won, and getting back into the ring to go again?

Isn’t that exactly what we do with the attacks of the devil?  Jesus already won the victory; the Serpent’s head is crushed.  But he likes to pretend that it’s not true; he wants to keep yelling at us to get back in the fight.  Why do we believe his lies?

Or as a pastor I heard a couple months ago put it: “I’m tired of listening to people talk about struggling with sin.  They come to me and say, ‘Pastor, I’m just struggling with this sin in my life,’ and I tell them, ‘Stop it!’  Stop struggling with your sin; rebuke it in Jesus’ name and get on with your life!”

And again, why stop with sin?  Let’s rebuke everything that Jesus died to deliver us from.  Let’s call for the space around us to be an outpost of God’s Kingdom, come to earth.  Yes, the coming of the Kingdom is a process, which is a fancy theological way of saying that God probably isn’t going to give us all the cookies at once.  But I believe we have yet to even scratch the surface of what He will give us, if only we will believe.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Why Complementarians MUST Ordain Women, Part 5: Cultural Exegesis and a Prescription

1 April 2012

Well, the discussion on 1 Corinthians 14 continues, but it appears that discussion is more narrowly focused on exactly how male and female differences affect the use of particular spiritual gifts in formal worship.  The question of whether to ordain women, and to what functions, is a larger issue, and even though it’s closely related to 1 Corinthians 14, I think for the present I can address it and steer around the not-yet-settled questions in that one chapter.

Back in Part Two of this series, we discussed how within North American church culture, we have created a monster through misconstruing (or just ignoring) what the Bible says a pastor is supposed to be.  Having failed to apprehend the biblical picture of a richly gifted team of leaders functioning in diverse ways in the church, we expect one pastor to fulfill all those roles.  By our lights, the lead pastor is supposed to cast the vision for the church, comfort the sick and afflicted, counsel the broken, resolve disputes, preach every Sunday, coach his staff, teach Sunday school, oversee the administration of the church, represent the church to the community, and much more.  He is, in short, supposed to have all the gifts at once, and use them all simultaneously.  This job description is not biblical, and it’s a recipe for disaster.  (This is not to say that nobody can live up to it.  In God’s providence, there are a few incredibly gifted and energetic folks who not only rise to this sort of challenge, but seem to thrive on it.  But they are few and far between — certainly not one for every church.)  Having created this Frankenstein paradigm of clerical ministry, we then use ordination as the vetting process for releasing someone into that ministry.

So if we’re going to return to a more biblical practice of church leadership (and I find encouraging signs that this is the case everywhere I look, these days), then it’s time to rethink ordination a bit.  At its core, ordination is the church recognizing the person’s calling, qualifications and character.  If we don’t think the person is called into the ministry to which we’re about to ordain him, then we won’t ordain him.  If we think he’s called, but he’s doesn’t yet have the skills he’ll need in the ministry, then we ask him to beef up his skill set before we ordain him.  If he’s got the calling and the skills, but is still struggling with immaturity or other character flaws that are going to significantly hamper his ministry, then again, we ask him to take some time and grow in the Lord before we ordain him.  To be ordained, he should have all three: calling, qualifications, and character.  He doesn’t have to be perfect, and there’s always room for improvement, so it’s always a judgment call.  But there comes a time when he’s ready to get out there and learn by doing, and the church’s job at that point is to appoint him to the ministry and send him out.

Stripped down to those basics, we actually see something similar to ordination in the New Testament.  The apostles laid hands on the seven (deacons?) appointed to the care of widows in the Jerusalem church (Acts 6:6).  The Antioch church laid hands on Paul and Barnabas to commission them for their missionary ministry (Acts 13:2-3).  The eldership laid hands on Timothy, apparently not only to consecrate him for ministry but to impart a gift to him (1 Tim. 4:14).  Paul did something similar for Timothy (2 Tim. 1:6).

What we see in New Testament practice, though, is specific.  A person is not ordained to “gospel ministry” in general.  When the church lays hands on someone, it is because God is separating that person to a specific ministry: care of widows, taking the gospel to the Gentiles, and so on.  Perhaps our practice of ordination should follow the same pattern.

Within the tribe that raised and trained me, we actually have an institution like this already: it’s called a “commissioning service,” although the only time we really did it was for missionaries that we were sending out from our own local congregation.  We would lay hands on them and consecrate them for their particular calling and mission.  However, in these cases, we didn’t do much in the way of due diligence, because we were outsourcing that to Pioneers, New Tribes, or whatever mission board that person was going with.  The mission board would have primary responsibility for the missionary once he was on the field, so we trusted them to examine the candidates thoroughly (and generally, they did, but notable lapses are not unheard of).

Within that tribe, ordination was taken to be entirely a church function, and so the church would delve quite a bit more intensively into the candidate’s life.  We would give notice to the congregation, several Sundays in a row, that John Doe was a candidate for ordination, and if anyone knew of reasons why he should not be ordained, that person should speak to the elders at once.  There would be interviews.  The candidate was often asked to prepare a doctrinal statement and/or philosophy of ministry statement, and then provide an oral defense for them.  The process would culminate in a grueling several-hour ordination exam, where the elders and other interested parties would grill the candidate on his calling, his Bible knowledge and practical wisdom, and his character and experience. If the candidate passed all tests, then a day would be appointed, and the whole church would come together to see the elders and pastors lay hands on the candidate and ordain him to the ministry.

What I propose for ordination is a blending of these two categories.  Let the examination of the candidate be as intensive as ordination exams have tended to be.  But let us not ordain someone to anything so general as “the gospel ministry.”  No single part of the Body is the whole Body, and so no single part should be ordained to do the whole Body’s ministry.  If we are going to the trouble to examine a candidate’s calling and qualifications in detail, then let us commission that candidate to the specific area of ministry for which which God has called and qualified him.  Or her.

Of course, “or her.”  Because once we agree that the commission should be to something specific, and not to some Frankensteinian polyglot called “the gospel ministry” (which necessarily includes teaching and exercising authority over men, along with practically all the other gifts and functions), then we immediately see a number of biblically sanctioned roles to which a woman can be called without violating even the strictest readings of 1 Timothy 2:12 or 1 Corinthians 14:34.  Deaconess and prophetess head the list of New Testament categories here, but it goes further than that.  1 Timothy 5 implies an office of “church widow” — a widow over 60, with no relatives to support her, who devotes herself to service to the church, and in turn is supported by the church.  There may be more biblically attested categories.

In addition to the “big box” categories, there are more specific callings.  Just as Paul and Barnabas were commissioned to a specific mission work, and not simply to a general calling of “evangelist” or “apostle”, so other believers also have specific callings.  For example, I have a friend whose calling in this season of her life is to devote herself to encouraging and mentoring women.  I dare say that if she were pursuing this ministry among brown people in Jakarta or Nairobi — or even white folks in Zagreb or Madrid — few churches would have difficulty laying hands on her and commissioning her for the work.  But instead, God has called her to Denver.  What difference does it make if the women she’s mentoring speak ‘Merican?  Should we not commission her to the work all the same?

3 Comments | Controversies, Meditations | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Why Complementarians MUST Ordain Women, Part 4: Understanding Gender in 1 Corinthians 14

25 March 2012

This post has taken rather a long time to write.  I apologize for the delay; I’ve been sick and had to pare down my responsibilities to the bare minimum for a while in order to make sufficient time for rest and recovery.  Thank you for your patience, Gentle Reader, and my thanks also to those of you who have been praying for me; it’s much appreciated.

We left off with two options to explore in 1 Corinthians 14.  How were the Corinthians to understand “let your women keep silent in the churches”?  We had two views to consider, each with problems and advantages.  Let’s take them each in turn.

Option A is that 14:34 is an absolute prohibition on female speaking in the church service.  When the church gathers, a number of people speak to share a prayer, a psalm, a prophecy, a tongue (if interpreted), a teaching, or what have you — all of them men.  Women are not to speak out in the church meeting, period.

Option B is that 14:34 is speaking about the judging of prophets.  When one prophet speaks, Paul says, the others are to judge.  Within this context, the women are to keep silent in the churches, and the men are to judge the word of the prophet.  In this narrower reading, Paul is not prohibiting a woman from sharing a psalm, prayer, prophecy, or what have you; he is prohibiting a woman from entering the discussion following a prophecy, in which a verdict will be rendered as to whether the prophecy was of God.

Neither of these readings sit well in our egalitarian era.  Allowing men to do anything and barring that same thing to women is a big no-no these days.  But we have to face the facts: Paul is certainly prohibiting the women from doing something.  How that prohibition might apply in our own place and time is a fascinating question, but it’s a question that will have to wait until we’ve figured out what Paul was asking of the Corinthians.  If we can’t work out what he was asking them to do, how are we supposed to apply the instruction to us?  So let’s consider the options here.

Option A: Total Ban on Women Speaking in Church

One of the first and most obvious advantages of this view is that it’s got immediate “curb appeal,” just based on its sheer simplicity(for folks from my fightin’ fundie roots, anyhow).  The verse says “let your women keep silent in the churches,” so they weren’t to let women speak in church.  Simple.

On this view, I’ve heard two different ways of handling chapter 11.  The first is that Paul’s just “handling one problem at a time.”  First he gets the prophetesses to cover their heads, thus ending the indecency, then three chapters later he tells them not to speak at all.  A more plausible approach is that ch. 11 is not talking about conduct in the church meeting, but Christian conduct generally.  Women certainly ought to pray, and prophetesses certainly ought to prophesy, and when they do, they ought to cover their heads.  However, within the church meeting, women are not to speak; the praying and prophesying takes place elsewhere.

As we come into chapter 14, obviously the speakers are all to be male, so “you may all prophesy” doesn’t really mean all, it means all the men.  (Women can prophesy too, of course, but somewhere else.)

A problem arises with the explanation that follows the prohibition, though.  “And if they want to learn something, let them ask their own husbands at home….”  If what Paul has in view is preventing the Corinthian women from sharing a psalm, a prayer, or a prophecy in the church meeting —  this is not wanting to learn something, but wanting to share something so that others may learn.  I’ve not yet heard a plausible explanation for how v.35 fits in with this interpretation.  One possible answer involves a re-reading of v.31.  “For you may all prophesy one by one, so that all [of you prophets] may learn [how to exercise your gift of prophecy] and be encouraged [in the use of your gift for the benefit of the Body].”  If this is a proper understanding of v. 31, then exercising the gift in the church is a learning experience for the prophet, and we may read v.35 thus: “And if they want to learn something [through exercising their gift of prophecy], let them ask their husbands at home….”  It’s not clear to me why Paul would describe a woman exercising her prophetic gift at home as asking a question, though, so I’m not convinced on this one.

This interpretation also does not explicitly give a venue for the Corinthian women to use their gifts in prayer and prophecy for the benefit of the Body.  This seems problematic: if they were not to speak in church, then when, where and how were the prophetesses to use their gifts for the benefit of the Body?  However, this issue may arise only through the imposition of contemporary church paradigms (in which we only see our “church friends” at church once a week) on the text.  By contrast to our contemporary practice, if the Corinthian church functioned like the Jerusalem church (Acts 2:46-47), then the formal gathering of the church for worship was a tiny percentage of overall church life, and there would be many other opportunities outside the formal worship service.

Option B: Ban on Women Exercising Authority over Prophets

According to this understanding, Paul is not banning women speaking in the church meeting overall; he’s speaking to a more narrow circumstance defined in the immediate context.

On this understanding, the first half of chapter 11 could well be speaking about conduct in the church meeting, although it may also have reference beyond it.  This seems to fit the overall context better in any case.   Chapter 11 is an organic whole (note the pairing of “I praise you” in 11:1 and “I do not praise you” in 11:17).  Since the rest of the chapter (vv.17-34) is certainly speaking about the church meeting, it makes sense that the first half would be as well.

As we come into 14:26, “each of you has a psalm, has a teaching, has a tongue, has a revelation…” means exactly that — everyone brings something to share.  But there are some protocols to follow. First, two or at most three tongues-speakers may speak, each one in turn (i.e., not all at once), and they must be interpreted.  If there is no interpreter for the utterance, the person should still speak — but only to himself and to God, not to the Body.  Second, two or three prophets may also speak, but their words should not be taken immediately as from God.  The others (in context, it seems to mean “other prophets”) are to judge what they are hearing.  As they are hearing the prophet speak, if something is revealed to another who sits by listening and judging, the first prophet must yield the floor to the second.  Subject to the judgment of the church and the limitations of two or three per meeting, “You may all prophesy” in 14:31 means exactly that — each of the people so gifted, male and female, may speak, so that all may learn and be encouraged.  Dodging the protocols can’t be excused on the grounds that “God took control of my mouth and made me speak,” because the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets.  The prophets are each responsible for their own behavior, because God does not generate confusion, but peace, as He does in all the churches of the saints.  Lastly, with respect to this matter of judging the prophets, women are not part of the discussion; rather than taking on the mantle of authority they are to be submissive, as the Law also requires.  Women also may not participate in the discussion under the guise of “just asking a question” or “just trying to learn something.”  If a woman wants to understand why the judgment is rendered the way it is, she may ask her husband at home; it is shameful for a woman to speak in this fashion in church.

On this understanding, the reading of v. 34 meshes well with 1 Timothy 2:12.  The act of judging the prophets is an exercise of authority (often over a male prophet), and so Paul does not permit a woman to take that role.

The major problem with this reading is the underlined phrase above.  It is not immediately clear that vv.34-35 are specifically about judging the prophets.  It’s a relatively plausible reading, given the need to harmonize 14:34-35 with 14:31 and 11:1-16. But I’m certainly not satisfied that it’s the right reading.

How Did the Corinthians Read Chapter 14?

Paul closes the discussion of church protocols with a challenge: did the word of God come originally from Corinth?  Did it reach only Corinth?  Of course not; Corinth is one church among many, and it should conform with the practice of its sister churches.  Anyone in Corinth who thinks himself a prophet — or even just a spiritual believer — should acknowledge that Paul’s writing here is God’s commandment, but if someone insists on being ignorant, very well.  The Corinthians should abandon him to his ignorance.

Chapter 14 seems cryptic to us in part because Paul did not need to explain in detail what other churches did.  The charter members of the Corinthian church certainly knew what Paul’s worship services would look like; he would have led them in the beginning.  Also, Corinth was a port city; some of the members of the church would be well-traveled, and would have observed the worship at churches in other places. The Corinthian church would have been well aware of the mainstream worship practices of the New Testament church, and the ways in which their worship service was unique.  Paul is calling them to abandon (at least some of) that uniqueness and fall back into the mainstream practice of all the churches.  That part is clear enough.  Exactly what that practice was seems less clear.

I’d like very much to launch a discussion here.  In the interests of full disclosure, I’ll tell you that when I started writing this post 3 weeks ago, I was strongly disposed toward option B.  The more time I’ve spent with the text, the more skeptical of that I’ve become.  However, I continue to see serious problems with option A as well.  If I can’t resolve it, I’ll just have to “steer around” it for the time being, and rely on other passages to fill in the gaps.  It’s an imperfect solution, to be sure, but for the moment I’m stumped.

15 Comments | Controversies, Meditations | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Why Complementarians MUST Ordain Women, Part 3: Does Gender Difference Make a Difference?

26 February 2012

The church at Corinth is justly famous for its problems, but it was also noteworthy for its gifts.  So richly gifted was the Corinthian church that Paul said they come short in no gift.  There’s all kinds of discussions we could have about the various differences between Corinth and the present milieu, but let’s start by trying to understand what was happening in the church then.  There’s a particularly rich vein of discussion centering around how the Corinthians were supposed to use the gift of prophecy, so we’ll focus our discussion there.  They had a number of prophets functioning in the Corinthian church — in fact, they were completely out of control, and part of Paul’s purpose in writing the epistle is to help restore a measure of order to their worship service.

So let’s take a little time to look what the practice of that particular gift was supposed to look like in the church.  The first stop is 1 Corinthians 11:1-16.  Again, lots of ink spilled on whether we need to do this head covering thing today, and for the moment, let’s bypass all that and focus on what Paul wanted the Corinthians to do.  It’s pretty simple, actually: men, when praying or prophesying, should uncover their heads; women, doing the same, should cover their heads.  Why?  As a sign of submission.

Let’s just sit with that for a moment.  Here we have a man and a woman.  Both are believers; both have the gift of prophecy; both have a word from the Lord to speak.  No problem with any of that; they can both speak, but Paul insists that the man uncover his head to do it.  Paul also insists that that the woman cover her head to exercise her gift.  This from the same guy that wrote, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” to the Galatian churches earlier in his career.  Has he changed his mind?

Of course not.  Jesus is one with the Father; Jesus is not the Father.  The Father sent; the Son obeyed to the point of death; the Father raised and exalted Him.  Christian unity is trinitarian unity: real equality in value and glory, but not sameness in either identity or function.  The application here to men and women fits well with the internal logic of Pauline iconography; a husband represents Christ and a wife represents His Bride, the Church.

If we stop right there, we have something valuable already: Paul plainly teaches them that both men and women can (and should) pray and prophesy, but not in exactly the same way.  Which is to say, gender difference makes a difference in how the gift should be exercised in the Corinthian church.  It could also make a difference today, could it not?

But let’s keep walking with the Corinthian church a while, because there’s more to say.  A woman in the church of Corinth is certainly supposed to use her gift of prophecy for the benefit of the Body.  Does that mean she may prophesy in the church meeting?  There are two options here, and they have to do with how you understand 1 Cor. 11 and 14:31 as over against 1 Cor. 14:34-35.  The latter passage says,

Let your women keep silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak; but they are to be submissive, as the law also says.  And if they want to learn something, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is shameful for women to speak in church.

Let us begin, first of all, by discarding the notion that we cannot just stomp a foot, say “That’s not fair!” and disregard this portion of Scripture.  It’s there; God said it, and if you’ll pardon a note of philistine biblicism here, we’re just going to have to live with it.  God loves us, and He knows what He’s doing.  It will turn out, if we obey wisely, that this is a good thing, a glorious thing, and not some scourge to be borne until the Lord returns.

But how to obey? Of course, we have to consider how to map the Corinthian situation onto our own situation (and that’s coming, Gentle Reader, but first things first), but before we can do that, we still need to settle out what Paul was asking the Corinthians to do.

The problem is that we have a seeming contradiction.  Paul has already said, back in 1 Cor. 11, that women are to pray and prophesy with their heads covered, which means that he believes women should pray and prophesy.  He has also said, just a few verses earlier, that all can prophesy one by one, so that each one may learn and be encouraged.  So how are we to take it when, just a few verses later, he then says women are not to speak?  There are two basic positions that seem viable.

Option A is that women are supposed to exercise their gifts of prophecy within the church, but not within the church meeting proper.  This understanding has the virtue of a commendable simplicity, but it seems to leave a number of unanswered questions in the context.  Option B is that women are to prophesy in the church meeting just as men are, but they are not to take part in the judging of the prophecy that follows a prophet speaking.  This latter understanding seems to answer more questions in the context and follow the argument more closely, but at the same time feels a bit like a cop-out given the absolute-sounding statement in v.34.

Up to this point, I have felt that either understanding made equally good sense, and neither answered all my questions.  I have not been able to rule out one or the other.  If you’ll bear with me in an experiment, Gentle Reader, I want to undertake the project of exploring these two positions over the next few weeks and seeing if I can rule one or both of them out.  If we can do that, then we can consider how this might map onto the present day.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Why Complementarians MUST Ordain Women, Part 2: What About Preachers?

19 February 2012

So for those of you who are just joining us, the title says most of what you need to know.  In the first installment, we discussed the biblical case for deaconesses and prophetesses — which we will revisit shortly in order to discuss the differences in the ways men and women minister.  But the pressing question, for most of the conservatives, is whether we’re going to have women preachers.  If I wait six installments before I address that question, that’s going to annoy some of the neighbors I’m supposed to love — so let’s go ahead and start that ball rolling this week.

The first thing we need to think about here is what we typically mean by “ordaining a preacher.”  Within my tribe and the model I grew up with, we ordain a “minister of the gospel” to go out and take that lead pastor position.  We know, of course, that not everyone we ordain will, in fact, be a lead pastor one day, but the lead pastor position is seen as the paradigm case, the example par excellence of what we’re ordaining the man (and in this tribe, it is always a man) for.  The job description includes deciding on the vision and direction for the church, leading that church, counseling the congregation, overseeing the services of the church, preaching every Sunday, representing the church to the community and so on.  There’s effectively only one office we do a full-blown ordination exam for, and this is it.

So here’s how the “we can only ordain men” thing works: That job description above is what we’re ordaining people for.  Add in a dash of 1 Timothy 2:12, notice that the job description calls for exercising authority over the whole church, men most definitely included, and there you are.  Can’t ordain women; the Bible says so.

But what’s biblically necessary about that job description?  Is that job description what ‘pastor’ means in the New Testament, or have we just taken the biblical word and superimposed our own definition on it?

Yes, indeed we have.  So is it okay for us to put a woman in that position?  Of course not.  But I’ve got a better question: Is it okay for us to put anybody in that position?

Let’s back up.  How do we know there’s even such a thing as a “pastor?”  Because it’s right there in Ephesians 4:11, right?  Let’s look at that.  Paul says in chapter 3 that the grace given to him is to proclaim Christ to the Gentiles, but then adds in 4:7 that grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of the gift Christ gave.  What’s that?  Christ rose up from His throne in heaven, descended to earth, won the victory, and ascended again, taking the spoils of His victory (i.e., the people He redeemed) with Him.  He then gave these people as gifts to the Church: some apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers (hereinafter APEPTs, just to save me some typing).  The purpose of giving APEPTs is in order that they in turn equip the saints, so that the saints can do the work of the ministry, through which work Christ builds His whole body up into adulthood.  So just as proclaiming Christ to the Gentiles is the grace given to Paul, we all have some function in the Body that is the unique grace given to each of us.  Christ has given gifted people to His Body, and in turn the Spirit has given those gifted people their capacities to serve within that Body.

The ‘fivefold ministry’ school of thought would say that everybody’s gifting fits into the APEPT schema somehow, but that’s a discussion we can bypass for now.  The gender question is what concerns us at the moment, so let’s look at the APEPT classifications with that in mind.  Apostleship is not limited to the Twelve, nor even the Twelve plus Paul (see Acts 14:14), so there’s certainly a possibility that it’s a more expansive category, but I’m not aware off the cuff of any attested female apostles in the New Testament.  However, there were certainly prophetesses, as we’ve already established.  Nobody thinks gifted evangelists are exclusively male, nor does anyone think the gift of teaching is reserved for men alone.  So why would the shepherding gift be reserved only for men?

“Because,” sputters my complementarian friend, “a woman can’t teach or have authority over a man.  So how’s she supposed to be a gifted shepherd without doing those things?”

Gee, I dunno.  How’s a gifted female teacher — and we all acknowledge they exist — do her thing without violating the same scripture?  Not being a female teacher, I couldn’t say for sure, but I suspect she does it by not accepting teaching authority over men.  Not exactly rocket surgery, is it?

So what if — and I’m just throwing out a wild idea here — we step up to the challenge of acknowledging women’s shepherding ministries as fully worthy of the dignity, celebration and recognition that attends men’s shepherding ministries?  In other words, what if we male shepherds get up off our blessed assurance and treat female shepherds as “fellow heirs of the grace of life”?  What might that look like?

Different than what we’re doing, to be sure.  We’ll pick up the discussion of some of the differences next week.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Why Complementarians MUST Ordain Women

12 February 2012

Because men and women are different, and that difference is expressed in they way we minister.

Got it?

No?

Lemme unpack that a bit.  Two things we need to think about here: How do men and women minister, and what does ordination mean?

Let’s not mince words on this: there are some roles that a woman ought not to play, just as there are some roles a man ought not to play.  Scripture describes some of these.

The description “husband of one wife” in the qualifications of elders (Titus 1:6) and overseers (1 Timothy 3:2) would seem to require that a male fill those positions.  People try to finesse this by arguing that filling these positions with a man was an accommodation to the culture of the time, but since the apostles and prophets do not seem to have ever been interested in catering to the culture of the time in essential matters of church order (note what Paul did to their dining customs in 1 Corinthians 11), I see no reason to believe that they caved in at this one point.  No, they had only men in the position of elder/overseer because that’s what God wants His church to look like.

Of course, for the same reason, they had deaconesses and prophetesses.  Now, I’m aware of a couple of lame arguments against deaconesses, but let’s be realistic.  If Romans 16:1 contained a man’s name instead of a woman’s, there would be no discussion at all: the verse would be taken as proof positive that he was a deacon in the church at Cenchrea.  The reason we doubt that Phoebe was a deaconess is only because of an underlying prior theological commitment.  Those who share that commitment will regard the translation “deaconess” as a priori unlikely, and will insist that the burden of proof is on their opponents.  I say that anyone who presumes to interpret the Word of God had better have a good reason for their understanding, and “burden of proof” arguments are about evading the necessity to do some actual work.  I don’t think that theological construct can hold up, but I welcome any theological dance partner with a work ethic who wants to take up the project.  Let’s discuss it.

More of that anon — for the moment, let’s move on to prophetesses.  The existence of prophetesses, Old and New Testament, is well attested.  Miriam was a prophetess, as were Deborah, Huldah, and the wife of Isaiah.  In the time of Jesus, Anna (Luke 2:36); in the time of Paul, Philip’s four daughters (Acts 21:8) and the women of Corinth (1 Corinthians 11:5, who needed only cover their heads).  In the time to come, both sons and daughters shall prophesy (Joel 2//Acts 2:17).

Now, what is the normal biblical pattern for a prophet’s ministry?  Elijah was commanded to anoint Elisha as his successor (1 Kings 19:7).  It appears that the anointing can be literal, with oil, or metaphorical, through some other type of consecration ritual.  For the latter, consider Psalm 105:15, in which the entire nation of Israel is considered as God’s anointed prophets.

Now, if one ought to anoint a prophet, who could complain if we anointed a prophetess?  Shouldn’t we?

If we would lay our hands on a deacon to consecrate him (Acts 6:6), then what would stop us from laying our hands on a deaconess to consecrate her for the ministry to which God has called her?

Prejudice, that’s what.  Prettied up in theological language, to be sure, but simple prejudice nonetheless.  What we’re dealing with here is an institutionalized conviction that the ministries of women need not be treated with the same dignity, nor attended by the same celebration, as the ministries of men.  That’s an offense to the gospel of Jesus Christ, and it needs to be denounced high, wide, and publicly.

My stance here will be denounced as “blurring gender distinctions.”  It isn’t.  It’s a search for good answers to hard questions — and the people who accuse me of blurring the lines are just mad because they haven’t got any.

Want me to prove it?  In a number of churches in my tribe, we’ll cheerfully lay hands on a missionary couple (husband and wife) and commission them to their ministry; we’ll even do that for a single woman — if she’s going to cross an ocean to teach little brown children.  If she’s staying here to be a Sunday School teacher to little white children, not so much.  Hm.  Does it take a greater anointing to minister to brown children, or is it just that Jesus loves them more?

What about other public ministries besides teaching Sunday School?  Youth leader?  Young Life worker?  Counselor?  Intercessor?  House mother in an orphanage?  R.A. in a dorm?  How do we recognize these ministries?  How should we?

But someone will say, “That’s not ordination.  Ordination is for preachers.”

Ah yes.  Preachers.  We’ll be talking about that next week…

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Theopoetics: My Insight Engine

22 January 2012

My partner and I have occasion, from time to time, to introduce people to the Bible, or parts of the Bible they’ve never met before.  Or at least never met before that way.  Or never seen how that bit connected so nicely to this bit, over here.  When one of these things happens, we look like absolute geniuses. In fact, genius has very little to do with it.  The Bible is at once a simple and a demanding book, and as we seek to engage it fully, there’s certainly room for genius if there happens to be any lying about.  But the genius is not the point, and in fact it’s not really required.

On a good day, someone will ask us how we do it, and we have a chance to engage that discussion.  On a bad day, they just assume that it takes something they don’t have, and they could never do what we do.  Now, in all modesty, God has gifted us in certain areas, and no amount of training and schooling can put in what God left out.  Understanding Scripture, though, is for everyone; this is a thing that can be learned.

We have accepted a fairly simple set of practices — hard, but simple — into our lives.  These five things have shaped us into the sort of men who can do what we do.  There’s nothing magical (or even especially academic) about it, and the truth is that we learned relatively little of this in seminary.  It doesn’t take a degree or time in the classroom; it doesn’t take knowledge of Greek and Hebrew.  Again, there’s room for those things to find expression, if you should happen to have them, and if you want them, I can help you get them.  But they’re not essential.  Diligence is essential, a passion for pursuing God.  It was our passion for pursuing God that led us into these things to start with.

So, without further ado, the five core practices that I’ve dubbed my “insight engine”:

Walk with God personally.  No excuses, no imitations, no treating God as a thought experiment, a set of principles, or a vending machine in the sky (even if it’s just dispensing spiritual blessings).  It is the birthright of God’s children to hear their Father’s voice, to know it for what it is and converse with Him, and to partake by grace in the dance of the Triune fellowship.  Accept nothing less.  The better you know a person, the easier it is to understand what he writes — and God is a Person.  Three, actually.

Map your world with the Word of God.  What is man?  Dust and breath.  What is the sun?  A power made by God to rule the day.  It’s not a “love scene” in a movie — it’s not even a “sex scene.”  It’s a “fornication scene.”  Take everything that happens in your world and go back to the Word with it.  Find it there, in the Word, and then you will know what it is, and what to do with it.  This is a key part of the task the Scriptures describe as meditation.

Talk like God talks.  Having done the hard work described above so that you can think of the things in the world, talk that way.  Constantly.  With everybody.  Yes, when you say, “Can we fast-forward through the fornication scene?” they will look at you funny.  So?

Walk with the wise.  Spend lots of time with people who are skilled in these things.  We don’t learn nearly as well from lecture or musty classrooms as we do from apprenticeship, working together with someone else who is more skilled.  Find those people and spend all the time with them you can.

Know your limitations.  Jesus could walk up to a guy mending nets on the beach and say, “Leave your dad and his servants here, drop your nets, and come follow me.”  He was walking so closely with the Father that He could see exactly what the Father wanted, and He could speak it out directly.  If I don’t hear the Father quite that clearly, then I ought to be hesitant about speaking that clearly and authoritatively. I am not, in fact, the Holy Spirit, and it’s not okay to poach on His territory.

So that’s it.  If you like the biblical insights you find here, this is where they come from, and there’s nothing in the list above that you couldn’t do just like I do.  (If you think I’m a nut, well, these things are to blame.  But I think all the people who thought me nuts quit reading a while ago.)

 

1 Comment | Meditations, Theopoetics | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Psalms, Culture, Memory, and a Brief Book Review

15 January 2012

So it’s been a while since we talked much about singing psalms and such, and I have an update.  I’ve been singing, saying, and yes, even occasionally chanting psalms for about 4 years.  I’m working with a youth group that’s been singing psalms for more than two years.  When we started, we expected  that it would take a while to see results, and we had to endure the opprobrium of lots of folks who simply did not believe our approach would work, and felt themselves justified when they could say that it’s been four months, and nothing seems to be happening.  Well, it’s been a lot more than four months now, and the results are starting to surface.

Our kids have memorized more scripture completely by accident than most youth groups ever get their kids to memorize on purpose.  We did it all without guilt trips or haranguing them about the importance of scripture memory.  All we did was introduce them to a musical culture.  We worshiped in front of them, and with them, and led them into worship with us, and in worship, we sang a  great variety of songs, but at least half of them were/are psalms, ripped right from the pages of the Old Testament.

Understand, these kids come from a culture of personalized performance music.  Everybody goes around with earbuds in, but nobody sings together.   Over a few years of persistent modeling and encouragement, we have created a culture of participatory musical worship. It’s not weird to sing together anymore; it’s just what we do.

It doesn’t just go for music, either.  A while back, we used the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed regularly.  We found it necessary to take an extended hiatus from both for reasons you don’t want to hear about.  (Trust me on this, Gentle Reader; the making of church policies, like the making of sausage, is a process best not described in public.)  Nonetheless, during that time of hiatus, we would find the language of both the Prayer and the Creed popping out of our kids’ mouths at some very applicable moments, and now that we’re free to resume, the kids have picked up as though we never stopped.  As we are a people who sing together, so we are a people who pray and confess our faith together — and the confession spills over into Facebook and school cafeterias as well as occurring in our worship.  Again, I hasten to point out that we never tried to get them to memorize any of this, never harangued them about the importance of memory, not a bit of it.

Behold, the mighty culture-forming power of sheer repetition.

Nor is this boon confined to the kids we’re ministering to.  Since (as you may have noticed) I’m sort of serious about the psalms, I do a fair amount of reading about them.  My latest book is Seeing the Psalms: A Theology of Metaphor by William P. Brown.  I heartily commend it to your attention.  It is a scholarly book, and Brown does salt it a bit more liberally with Latin phrases than is strictly necessary to his purpose.  (Et cetera has entered the English language; ad nauseum is tolerable; qua avis is a bit too obscure.  “As a bird” would do just fine; saying it in Latin adds nothing.)  Those drawbacks aside, it is an outstanding exploration of the poetics and metaphors of the Psalter, and I’m enjoying it immensely.  But the reason I mention it is that I’ve noticed something interesting.  In pursuit of explaining the various metaphors of the Psalter — refuge, the path, animals, plants, water, and so on — the book wanders all over the Psalter, and I’ve discovered that far more often than not, I know the passages.  Frequently, the author will quote a line from a psalm, and I find that I know the next line.  Four years of immersion in the Psalter is paying off — and again, I made little to no attempt to memorize.  I simply sang, said, prayed, and chanted the psalms in the ordinary course of my life — “a long obedience in the same direction” as it were.  Of course, recognizing lines from the Psalter in a book is just a sidelight, an interesting epiphenomenon.  The point is that knowing the Psalter that well has transformed the way I talk to God — and the way I hear His voice, too.

Repetition forms personal culture too — who knew?

The fashion of the age is to scorn repetition.  Repetition is just too simple for us; we prefer to emphasize understanding and critical thinking.  The problem is, a person can understand an explanation perfectly well today, and then forget the whole thing tomorrow, never to have been deeply touched by it at all.  If we want a person to be formed, however, repetition is essential. So we say, for example, the Apostles’ Creed.  They won’t understand it first time out, but who cares?  If it takes a year, that’s fine.  We’re going to be saying it at least that long.

First we trust in a teacher, then we obey, then we understand, and lastly we are perhaps in a position to innovate intelligently and think critically.  That’s the order.  Or as one ancient writer put it, “Add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge….”

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Posted by Tim Nichols

2012: Bus Driver to…

8 January 2012

Walking with God…sometimes it’s running ridges like a mountain goat or a calm walk along the beach, but often God leads into the deep places, the valley of the shadow of death.  If it’s Yahweh we serve, we have to be as ready for the thick darkness of Sinai and Golgotha as the light of Mount Tabor — “if I make my bed in the depths, You are there.”  Like all the really important things in the Christian life, this is much easier to talk about than to actually do.

Ditching “Theologian” as a label for myself (as I discussed last week) allows me to dump a whole set of agendas and expectations that never did make much Kingdom sense.  The publication credits, conferences, contacts, all the accoutrements of building a personal empire — I suppose in the right hands all these things can be made to serve Kingdom ends.  But in my hands, they were building a career.  A career of service to the Body, sure.  It would all have been very defensible.  But in His hard mercy, God had something else in mind for me, something that required a major humbling and the resulting change of heart.  He who exalts himself will be abased, and God did that for me.  I’m not gonna lie to you; it sucked like a brand new vacuum cleaner.  Being humbled is a miserable experience.  It has to be, otherwise it’s not humbling.

This is what it takes, I suppose, to become the supple clay that the potter can mold into whatever He desires.  Maybe other people yield better than I do, and don’t have to take such a pounding to become soft, but this is what it took for me.

So now what?  The temptation, of course, is to wallow in the mire.  I can say “I’m just a bus driver — what could I do for the Kingdom?”  It would all be very defensible, again.  “I got humbled, remember?  I can’t do that kind of work anymore.  God took it all away.”  But of course, that’s foolishness.  If God can ordain praise from the mouth of nursing infants, certainly He can use me.  I don’t really get to say I’m “just” a bus driver, because a Christian is never “just” anything.  We are partakers of the divine nature, heirs of God, the hands of Jesus to minister in the world, and His feet under which Satan will shortly be crushed.

So now what?  What shall I call myself?  “Bus driver” doesn’t exactly ring with the sort of Kingdom expectations I need.  It’s a good thing to be, and at a certain point in the story, there’s nothing wrong with it.  But I’m already visibly more than that — God is already adding things back into my life.  (Which is exactly what I should have expected, because Jesus’ promise is good: seek first the Kingdom, and all these things will be added.  Some exciting stuff is going on there, Gentle Reader, but more of that anon.)  So what can I say about myself at this point?  What shall I aim for, and who am I?

I’m not sure I can answer that yet.  I know for sure that if I’d tried to answer that question back in the summer, the answer would have been way, way off — there was still too much stuff in my life that needed to be stripped away, too much deconstruction that I couldn’t yet see.  I’ve come a long way since then.  A lot of what God stripped away was good stuff, too — I wouldn’t have been into it if it weren’t, and it wouldn’t have been so hard to accept losing those things if they hadn’t been good.  But every good opportunity is not my good opportunity, and there was a lot in my life that is not part of where God is taking me next.  Those things had to go; not everything good is good for me.

 

As I said, God is already bringing new things forward in my life, building up new ministry endeavors and giving me new relationships and opportunities.  Some of the old ones have been deepened and transformed as well — it’s very good.  But I have this sense — very strongly confirmed by a friend I trust — that if I lean too hard into the new things right now, I will truncate some of the blessings God has for me.

It’s like God is building me a mansion on a plot of ground that holds a swayback shack and a briarpatch.  Half the shack is bulldozed down and a bunch of the ground is cleared, and He’s already starting to build.  But if I dive into the building project now, I’ll wind up with a briarpatch smack in the middle of the living room, and there will be no place for the east wing, because the wreckage of the shack is still in the way.  God is building, and He’s letting me see it, and this gives me hope.  But he wants me to focus on clearing the ground.  Up to now, I’ve been simply trying to deal well with whatever ground God chose to clear, trying to accept the suffering as necessary.  Now, though, I’m ready to be God’s partner in removing whatever needs to go.  He has to provide the wherewithal, of course; I can’t do this in my own strength.  But I’m ready to remove what needs to go.

He who saves his life, as Jesus said, will lose it.  There’s still more deconstruction to do.  Here’s to the deep places in the earth; we find diamonds nowhere else.

3 Comments | Autobiography, Meditations | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

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