Am limping through my briskly paced read-the-bible-in-a-year-and-the-Psalms-twice plan. Have nearly made it out of January and into February, which means I’m finally getting out of Genesis and into Exodus.
There are a lot of reasons to go through the Bible over and over. Human beings are forgetful, for instance, and can’t remember why they came into the room and have to turn around and go back out again. Moreover, God’s Word is fathoms deep. You can go again and again to a very simple set of words and, with each repetition, find that God is stranger to behold as the lines grow ever more familiar. But another, and perhaps harder reason to go to the same book over and over and over and over is to experience again God’s traumatic rending rescue of his people. Each time you pass by the story becomes simpler and more impossible to accept.
In illustration of this last reason to keep reading the Bible over and over, I am always shocked when, after burying Jacob in Canaan, in the tomb of his father, all his sons go obediently back to Egypt and don’t sort of drift off and set up tents hither and thither. Never mind that they left their little ones back with the leeks and the meat pots. They threw Jospeh in a pit, what’s to stop them from stubbornly plunking down and deciding to stay? Or if not then, perhaps later, after Joseph dies. Why didn’t some of them just decide to chuck it and go back to the land of the promise? Why stay in Egypt? It’s not like they’re known for obedience. It’s not like there’s a great scrupulosity that keeps them from doing bad things. Why be obedient now, to stay in Egypt, and then be disobedient later, refusing to go into Canaan some 400 or so years later?
Why wouldn’t you want to go in and settle! To take what God had promised you? All the obedience seems in the wrong direction.
Of course, here I am, sitting in upstate New York. Right now it’s ghastly because frozen rain is careening heavily from the sky. Later it’s promised to turn into snow. My window is rather high and I can see the lights of downtown, and then out to a sweep of hills. It’s very staid. The hills are the usual hills. The grass, whenever you can find it, is green, the low hung beastly architecture of the modern age nestles in as far as the eye can see. Still, it makes perfect sense that God would come to earth to save his people. Why wouldn’t he, what with the gently rolling hills and the basically nice people. Really, it’s more that he would come to earth on a congratulatory tour, rather than as the crowning moment of salvation history.
I didn’t feel quite the same way, several years ago, standing on the Mount of Olives, misnamed, I thought. Should have been called the Mount of Graves. We stood there, our big tour group, and looked at the big golden Mosque that has invaded the Temple complex. The day was hot and sticky–more like Mali, for temperature, which was fine with me, but the infant in my arms protested loudly. I imagined Jesus standing there, surrounded by crowds, brooding over his city.
O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, let my right hand be cut off if I forget thee. Go up to the city of the Lord! I mumbled to myself. It’s so beautiful, I thought. But could I live here? And for God to come here? To this city of strife? Perched on the hill, many thousand years old. It doesn’t look very comfortable.
If you read the text over and over again, in the comfort of your carefully temperature controlled living room, imagining the Jerusalem sketched in your children’s bible, or some nice city like Rome, it is incomprehensible. Why wouldn’t they go in?
But standing there, looking out over the city, I felt my complacency shattered. Why would God come? Here? It is a strange and beautiful city. But maybe the willingness to go live in Egypt, and the unwillingness to cross the Jordan–it might be the same as my flinching inability to look at the cross, to see something so strange, so foreign. I almost can’t make out what I’m seeing.
Because the land, the promise, it’s not that comfortable. It is contrary to every human value–the smallest, the rockiest, the most fraught. We prefer the comfortable, the massive, the strong. It is a true admission of who God is to go in to his gracious rocky conflict torn land. You’re saying something about yourself that not very many of us want to say–walking alone up the narrow rocky path that leads to salvation. You’re saying that you get it, you need a savior, and it can’t be had any other way.
It’s easy to judge the other for his disobedience, as I always do struggling through the Pentateuch. Why couldn’t they just do what God said? Why couldn’t they just go across the Jordan the first time? Why did they have to go and throw Joseph in that pit? Why couldn’t they be more like me. Me sitting here in my comfortable house with my massive fridge stuffed with food and my real fire place to console all my feelings hurt by the snow. To live here, so comfortably, obedience must be the obvious thing. What’s their problem? It’s easy for me, far away as I am from the muddy sin filled water of the Jordan.
I have to stop judging and look, really, so that I can see how I really am–just as bad. Ready to flee when it’s time to stay. Ready to sit down when it’s time to walk. Ready to blame when it’s time to repent.
And, I have to fix my eyes on that heavenly city, just as strange to the spiritual eye as the land of the promise must have been to the one wandering in the wilderness. A single city, perfect, gold laden, bejeweled, bright without the sun. Sounds pretty terrifying. Not sure how comfortable it will be to live there. Praising God forever and ever when I can’t seem to manage it for even one morning seems hard to fathom.
And yet, it may be that after all this reading, of trying to trace my way to the cross over and over and over again, that when I finally get a full look, it will be exactly the right thing. We’ll all go up to the city of the Lord, to Zion, and be perfectly happy to be there.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In