Wow, it’s been… almost eight months. (I say “almost” like it’s not actually eight months. Yeesh.)
Sorry about that, folks; my fault. I’ve been busy.
Witness
This weekend, our Sunday school class was going through Luke 3:1-21, which addresses the ministry of John the Baptist, or John the Immerser, who preached a ministry of repentance and action.
A question came up about why John, specifically. Why did the Messiah need an Elijah? Was it just to fulfill prophecy that there would be a precursor for the King?
Well, I don’t know if there’s an absolute answer, but I can certainly see analogs.
Messengers are used by God to reflect His glory in a way that we can understand and tolerate.
God is beyond us. (His ways are not our ways, Isaiah 55:8) If He were to show us Himself, we would not survive; see Exodus 33 for a simplistic example of this.
So God uses analogs, stories, parables, giving us examples that we can understand that reflect aspects of His Will for us. We understand the story of Jonah; we also understand the fall of Nineveh. These are analogs for Christ’s death for us, and the mercy of God upon sinners, and the punishment of continued sin.
The messengers prepare the way, and prepare our hearts for what is to come. “Be ready,” they say.
Further, they’re used as actors in God’s Will.
When you look at Samuel, you see God’s prophet – used to anoint two kings of Israel, Saul and David.
Nathan was used to tell David of his sin.
Elijah was used to proclaim Ahab’s return and his doom.
Jonah was used to rescue Nineveh from the precipice into which the city eventually leaped.
A king cannot anoint himself; he is a warlord in that case. A prophet is used to say “God has given us this man as our proper and blessed king.” Without that anointing by a true man of God, this king is a king in name only.
So why was John important to the life and ministry of Jesus?
He was the one who cried to make hearts ready for the coming of the King.
He was the one who proclaimed Jesus as Messiah.
His was the position of Elijah: going before the King, proclaiming and blessing Him.
John was a witness, one who testifies for Christ.
So are we to be: we are to proclaim the King, making hearts ready for Him. We cannot do the work the King does; we do not rule. Yet we, too, are called to be heralds, those who proclaim the coming of Christ.
Reference:
We are the contradiction.
Can God do anything He wants? Can He endure evil? If He can, why does He not do so, for the love of those He calls children?
I was thinking along these lines because of the school shooting in Connecticut. I found myself horrified; why, השם, do You allow this?
And then, because I love tautologies, I ended up thinking about some old questions:
- How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? (And which dance would it be? If it’s “Gangnam Style,” someone shoot me now.)
- Can God create a boulder so large that He could not lift it?
I don’t know of an absolute answer to those that would satisfy me.
The boulder question is easier; God cannot contradict His nature, because otherwise it’s not His nature.
You cannot decide to not be yourself; even if you tried, that would be you, yourself, deciding to alter who you are such that the “new you” was still you, and the attempt would have been part of your nature in the first place.
A similar logic applies to “Do I exist?” — the question implies the answer. If you do not exist, you are unable to ask the question. Therefore, since you are able to ask the question, you exist, and the question isn’t worth answering.
So God would not create a boulder so large that He could not lift it, because He would exceed the creation; yet, if He could exceed His creation, He could do so. They are all possibilities, restricted only by God’s identity and intent.
I don’t know how many angels could dance on the head of a pin; I don’t think numbers in our frame of reference would apply. Therefore, my only answers would be “infinity,” or “as many as God desires.”
From a mechanical standpoint, of course, you’d factor in the actual pin’s surface area, the size of the angels in question, and the area required for them to dance; that’s just math, and while it’s funny to think about it that way, it’s not really relevant.
And now we come to the horror in Connecticut. Here’s a rough transcription of my questions to God:
- My God, what have You done? (“What Have You Done” is a song from an amateur musician I found that sums this up pretty well.)
- How could You allow this?
- How could You ever allow this?
- You love us, enough to die on the cross for us. How can this encompass this horror? (And yet it has to. All have sinned (Romans 3:23); whoever believes in Him shall be with Him in glory (John 3:16). I could not do this. I am not God, thank God.)
- If You loved us enough to die for us, how then can You endure our presence, in that we defy You and desecrate Your Name?
And there we have the primary question for me.
How can a holy and just God, even factoring in His grace and mercy, endure us? How can a merciful and loving God not endure those of us whom He calls children?
Of course, He died for us, so that His nature covers ours; that’s an easy problem to analyze. However, the thought of the contradiction still lingers.
How can God endure what He sees here on earth?
I don’t have a simple answer. However, I think that the problem is in how we see Him, not in Him.
We continually apply our mathematics to Him; it doesn’t apply. For God, if 2+2=5, that is the truth as He wills it.
We continually apply our sense of justice as equals to Him. We do not kill (I hope!), because those whom we might kill are our equals before God and before us; God has no equal. His sense of justice is absolute, and we cannot properly understand it.
We apply our limits to Him, and they don’t apply.
Consider: we scream against Him when someone we love is hurt. “How could you do this? This person did nothing to You or anyone else!”
Yet that’s not true, is it? Remember, all have sinned. We are all guilty. Even if our sin’s guilt is removed from us, we still bear the consequences of that sin.
All of us have the potential for horror; God knows everything we are and will be. His actions are based on criteria we cannot know; we cannot judge Him as equals.
Sure, I understand people applying their own perspectives to God; that’s how we’re wired. I’m sure He understands, on some levels.
Yet that doesn’t make it proper. We cannot judge God.
Shalom.
What did Jonah say to Nineveh?
On Monday nights, my church has a men’s core training class, where a set of men get together to study books of the Bible together. Last semester, we went through the book of James (which ended up with me starting this blog in an attempt to do more as part of a Christian life); this semester, we have the books of Jonah and Nahum as material.
I’ve been thinking about the book of Jonah, since it’s what we’re covering first. One thing jumps out at me: what did Jonah say to Nineveh?
Quick Summary of the Book of Jonah
Nineveh is the capital of the Assyrian Empire, which is a particularly bloody-minded nation. Assyria and Judah were allies (with Judah being an unconquered vassal state); Israel was ground under Assyria’s heel.
Jonah is called by God to “preach against” Nineveh, a city to the northeast of Judah. As an ardent nationalist, Jonah goes straight west across the Mediterranean Sea, to be redirected by God (in the belly of a big fish, as the story goes) back to Nineveh, where he preaches about the doom God will visit upon the city.
Nineveh repents, puts on sackcloth and ashes.
Jonah gets upset that God would have mercy on the Assyrians in any way, and sulks; God addresses him in the last chapter of the book, in a less-remembered but far more substantial statement about God’s character.
So… what did Jonah say?
I’m honestly a little confused. We have a few things to work with:
- Jonah was called to “preach against” Nineveh, for its wickedness had “come up before” God (Jonah 1:1).
- Jonah 3:2 says that God told Jonah to “go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you.” Yet I haven’t seen what that message was, yet. Chapter 2 is a beautiful prayer to God – but it’s focused on God’s relationship to Jonah, not God’s rejection of Nineveh’s ways.
- Jonah 3:4 actually gives a message: “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.” This is all very well and good, and has to be a short form; I can’t imagine that this is all of what God had Jonah say, unless Jonah’s face was shining like the sun to inspire people to listen to him. Even so, being told “this will happen” isn’t exactly corrective in nature…
- Jonah 3:7-9 records a proclamation by the king:
Do not let people or animals, herds or flocks, taste anything; do not let them eat or drink. But let people and animals be covered with sackcloth. Let everyone call urgently on God. Let them give up their evil ways and their violence. Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish. (NIV)
My feeling is that Jonah went with two core pieces of content: one is that Nineveh was going to be destroyed (Jonah 3:4) and the other is that the city was to call urgently on God, and give up their evil ways and their violence (Jonah 3:8).
But… this still seems lacking.
Jonah was a prophet of Judah. His God would be the God of the Hebrews; his ethics would be based on the laws of Moses. Judaism was for the Jews, not the Gentiles; proselytization was rare and generally discouraged.
Judaism does, however, have the concept of the Noachide laws, seven laws by which non-Jews can be considered righteous. They’re derived from the edicts God gave to “the children of Noach” (i.e., all of mankind) and prescribe a general moral ethic:
- Prohibition of idolatry
- Prohibition of murder
- Prohibition of theft
- Prohibition of sexual immorality
- Prohibition of blasphemy
- Prohibition of eating flesh taken from an animal while it is still alive
- Establishment of courts of law
(The legalist in me wants to know the specific definitions of idolatry, immorality, blasphemy, et al – because I don’t know what is specifically considered immoral vs. moral behavior taken as specific characteristics, without an objective definition.)
Nineveh would have certainly violated many of these: theft, murder, idolatry, blasphemy, probably sexual immorality. I have no honest idea about the flesh from living animals in Assyria, and courts of law would have been established.
Maybe the flesh from living animals was another violation of the Noachide laws; after all, the city was told not to eat or drink. This seems like a bit of a stretch to me, but I don’t know.
So my feeling, after giving it some thought, is this:
Jonah told Nineveh that it would be destroyed, but that God might spare it if it repented of its sin according to the Noachide laws. (Remember: Hebrew laws of piety wouldn’t have applied.) Through God’s mercy and power, Nineveh listened and saw its doom on the horizon, and listened – for the short term.
(The book of Jonah ends well for Nineveh; however, it didn’t last. A few years later, Nineveh was scraped out like a gourd, as recorded by Nahum and others… to the point where archeologists are still hoping they’ve found Nineveh.)
Is this a “grand thought,” to figure out what Jonah spoke to Nineveh? Um…. not really. But one of the blessings of Christianity is that its message of salvation is for all the world, and not restricted to a nation chosen by God; the message is similar for everyone, such that it can be clearly and unambiguously proclaimed.
Shalom.
(Originally published January 12, 2012.)