Wisdom Cries Aloud

Need to get onto a new bible reading schedule. Since the glorious advent of the guy who reads the bible when I push play on the Internet, in contrast to the bad old days when I had to read it from the page with my eyes and my mind, I’ve gotten through the whole thing every ten months or so for a few years. How many is a few? Is it five? Or three? I don’t know. The main thing you can be assured of is that I am starting every day, almost, with whole chunks of the scripture, read out to me, while I nod my head in a stupor of sleep and try to drink four cups of tea.

It turned out, though, that I suddenly finished it again, without expecting to, some six weeks ago, and was therefore unprepared with any kind of plan. Would I begin again at the beginning and go all the way through without stopping? Would I go through it chronologically? Would I do a chapter of the old, a chapter of the new, and a psalm? These are the questions that need to be asked and, having not asked them, I just pushed play on the psalms, intending to buy myself some more time. And now I’m well into proverbs, and still no plan. Wisdom is wailing away in the street with no one to listen to her, and I am still wondering what it is that I am doing.

So interesting, about wisdom, described as a woman having to shout because no one will listen. Maybe she tried speaking quietly and reasonably, but no one stopped what they were doing, not a single person, so then she said it again a little louder, and still nothing. Finally she is out in the street “raising her voice”, and I think we all know what that sounds like, but the street is virtually empty of anyone who can hear or understand what she is saying.

I usually imagine her lone wailing figure and think that God must be talking about something mystical and interesting. Oh Ah! Wisdom! That sounds so out there, so beyond, so transcendent. I bet no one can even know who she is. But I think imagining her this way is wrong headed, however tempting.

She isn’t young and beautiful. She is oldish, and because no one is listening, she is a touch crotchety. It’s not that God the Holy Spirit is wandering around in this ethereal feminine form breathing new and special knowledge into the ears of all who are hipster enough to listen. No, rather, we are talking about the necessary and tragically under appreciated use of the mind through reason, knowledge of the bible, fear of the Lord, and good sense. And that is just not that appealing.

Paul’s words about human freedom, wherever they are in 1 Corinthians and Galatians, came floating back to me, banging into wisdom’s admonishing voice. The Christian has to make some decisions, with the use of the mind. And that means thinking stuff through, and weighing all the factors, and knowing who God is. We’ve traded that off hoping for a special word here or there, an intuitive “sense” for what God might be doing in the world. Even though he’s already clearly said what he’s doing. He’s redeeming the world by bringing people to faith in Jesus. He’s making the people who already have faith more holy. He’ll send Jesus back later but we don’t know when. So we should obey him…..and understand who he is. And oh my word, if you narrow it down to this you cut out most of western Christianity making its buck right now. It can’t be about God and knowing him as he has so boringly revealed himself. It has to, oh my word, it has to be about what God is about to do! What God is doing for you! What God is going to morph into so as to be much less offensive to the world! We want something shiny and cool and maybe even a little bit wrong. We want God to change his mind to suit us, and we want to be at the center of it all.

But God would rather have us understand who he is through the toil-some labor and sweat of reading his own self revelation. If you look at his own self revelation, the bible, you can see that God starts out very simple and clear–“don’t eat that”–and carries on clear, horribly clear most of the time, so that the person who doesn’t want to hear has to make a loud racket to overcome what he is saying. And, as he goes, revealing himself book by book, word by word, layers of complexity and depth are added so that you have to continue to engage with your mind. You can’t always just take the surface reading. You have to account for the kind of literature, the audience, the intent. You have to look at everything around a verse so as not to pour in meaning that isn’t there. And all the time, God is still understandable and no one wants to understand him.

Take the emotional distance God himself travels through the Old Testament. As you carry on through the books of history, you don’t get as many instances of God saying something directly and audibly, although they are there and are very understandable (God’s speaking to Elijah comes to mind). God gives messages to be delivered and the prophet goes and says, ‘God said such and such.’ By the time you get to the prophets (and this is why I think people struggle through the prophetic books) God reveals himself in speech overpoweringly immediate, personal and intimate. The voice of the prophet, talking back to God, easily recedes into the background and you’re faced with a God really communicating, really making demands. Then you come to the New Testament and God himself becomes the Word and speaks with his own mouth and is perfectly clear about who he is and what he is here for. And that is so appalling he is universally rejected and killed. No one wants God to speak, no one wants to hear what he is saying. Better for him to take his self revelation somewhere, far away, and let humanity be. Finally, consider the apostles. Paul, for instance, no longer says, ‘thus saith the Lord’ but rather, do this, do that, I’m telling you to do such and so. The Holy Spirit is talking out of his mouth, his pen, the distance and cry so immediate that you have to stone him and run him out of town and fling the book after him. All of it is God, all of it is perfect, but in the very unfolding revelation of God to humanity we can see the distance God himself overcomes to get through to us.

And all of it understandable, to the one who stops in the street and listens. So I guess maybe it’s back to the beginning for me. No more fussing around.