I very piously and dutifully spent the entire day at church, yesterday, laboriously gluing bits of paper to wooden boards, all for the love of Jesus, I kept telling myself. In a sane world I would have just cut and pasted some bible verses into some documents, printed them out, and left a stack of papers on the table for my Sunday school teacher.
But nothing about the last decade of building these rooms has been that sane. It’s been many hours and minutes of fussing over bits of wood and glue and paint and careful lettering. Back when I was covered with babies I had a big table in my living room, and I was always trying to sand and paint and keep infants from touching it all. I would finish a project the morning I wanted to use it, my face gray from not sleeping, my frustration mounting because of all the obstacles and ridiculousness of hauling stuff up the three flights of stairs to my attic Sunday school room in the old church.
Why bother? I always ask myself. I asked myself yesterday as I wrote out verse after verse until my hand was on fire. Kids probably don’t care. If they even show up.
But I kept writing, and one of the things I found I was writing over and over, because it gets repeated that much, was, “And God said.”
Now, if you’re a regular person, and you read the word “said” you know that someone spoke out loud, that some person audibly said something in an objectively verifiable way. If it wasn’t you who said anything, but someone else, and you didn’t hear, they would be frustrated. If you said something, you would expect to be heard.
But something very clever has been done to the words “and God said”. There is one children’s curriculum that describes God “speaking” to Abraham like this, “And God came so close to Abraham, and Abraham so close to God, that Abraham understood.” There he is, out under the stars, and in his soul, he just knows, somehow. And that, whatever it is, is enough that he packs up and moves to another country.
But the biblical text doesn’t say that, it says, “God spoke to Abraham saying”. Under normal circumstances, the word “spoke” doesn’t mean you approximating some experience in your spirit. It means God Spoke. Audibly. With Language.
As I toiled over all these words, I ended up with the verse, “Every word of God proves true, he is a shield to those who take refuge in him.” It is a great mercy that God communicated audibly and objectively to those ancient men and women. That his words were so clear and unmistakable that their lives were changed and indelibly marked by obedience. It is a crying shame that in this age we have reduced the speaking of God to the subjective feelings of the changeable human heart.
The person who attends to God’s actual words, in the actual bible, is like one who runs into a strong tower to be safe, like one shielded from danger. And if one or even two children can pick up my boards, and trace over the words with their fingers, and see the words, “God said” and understand the immeasurable riches of his grace in communicating with them, it will probably be counted up as having been worth it.
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