When I awake I will see your face! All I want is to see you as you are.
Psalm 17:15
The Story of Israel
Both Judaism and Christianity are historical religions, meaning, among other things, that if you want to truly understand them, or their God, you must understand their history beginning with Genesis. However, this is not a matter of inquiring into the dates and hard facts of particular events, but of entering yourself into the Hebrew experience of life as an encounter with the One who exists as both numinous reality and intensely personal presence. The story of the Old Testament is the story of the long relationship between God and the ancient Hebrews. It is a story that has been unfolding and developing for nearly two thousand years by the time Jesus is born in the town of Bethlehem. As the history of the relationship between God and the ancient Hebrews it involves stories of desire, need, argument, accusation, lament, disappointment, pleading, anger, praise, betrayal, faithfulness, great depths of insight and total blindness. We could even think of it as the story or history of a conversation. It is simply impossible to get at the meaning of any one text in isolation from the story as a whole. So, the texts with which we began part one of this post cannot be understood apart from the strange call of Abraham and Sarah to trust God, to leave the easy life of their home in Ur and make the arduous journey to live as nomads in faraway Canaan. They cannot be comprehended apart from the four hundred years of Jewish slavery in Egypt, or their astounding escape and miraculous liberation, and they cannot be felt without remembering the drama of cloud and lightening and fire and smoke on Mount Sinai as they receive the Torah and vow to be the people of God. And their formation as an ethnic group, political entity, and spiritual religion through forty years of struggle and danger in the desert wilderness, with God alone as their help, is essential in interpreting the whole of the Hebrew Bible.
What the patriarchs and matriarchs, the priests, poets, prophets and people discovered in this long journey into intimacy with God were the names of God––not the fuzzy and abstract terms for God used by philosophers and theologians who love participating in a vigorous game of intellectual gymnastics, but strong, concrete, active names that spoke of a real God with whom it is possible to have a real relationship. In the Old Testament Hebrew God is Yahweh, El or Elohim, El Shaddai, and Adonia. God is, then, if these names are translated literally: “He who is,” or “He who exists,” or “He who is the one being.” God is the strong leader who teaches the people how to work, shows the secret of the doing, by working alongside them, and nourishes and sustains them like a mother whose breast milk is sufficient to nourish her infant in health, strength, and growth. And as Adonia, “My Lord,” God is the one who defends, protects, provides and cares for the people––especially the poor and vulnerable. Each name for God is not just a tag for some nebulous concept or idea. For the Hebrews a name wasn’t simply what someone was called, but identified something essential about their character. For the Hebrew poets and worshippers to say, “My hope is in the name of the Lord, creator of heaven and earth” (Psalm 124:8), was to affirm that their hope was in the very essence of who and what God is. Obviously Israel’s experience of God was of one who was for them, not against them. This raises the pertinent general question, why if Dawkins’s assessment of matters is correct did the Hebrews God good and worthy of worship? It also raises a more personal question: Does something deep in your own soul resonate with and affirm the same discoveries made by Abraham and Sarah, by Moses, by Mother Mary and Jesus Christ; even while, at the same time, recognizing there are passages in the Old Testament that are neither worthy nor truly representative of God.
Lived Experience
I am going to suggest to you now that ultimately the only knowledge of God really worth having comes through this sort of lived experience. “Things of the Spirit,” Saint Paul said in his correspondence with the Corinthians, “must be discerned spiritually.” One of my favorite anecdotes is a little story William Barry the Catholic priest, Jesuit, clinical psychologist, Rector of Boston College, and distinguished author and spiritual director tells about his mother in his wonderful little book on prayer, God and You: Prayer as a Personal Relationship. He writes, “When my mother was dying of cancer, she said that she prayed every night that God would take her in her sleep. I asked her what God was like,” says Fr. Barry, “and she answered, “He’s a lot better than he’s made out to be.” Apparently when William Barry’s mother thought of God coming for her in the night, and gently taking her as she slept it was a comforting image. She had not been shaken by priests and teachers who pictured God as capricious, vindictive, or cruel. The heated rants and diatribes of atheists like Dawkins or Hitchens had not disturbed her faith in the One Lord of the Bible who is: “Father of all, over all, through all, and in all.” Nor did the imprecatory psalms or claims God commanded brutal holy wars seem to have lessened her confidence in the essential goodness of God. Barry says his mother had learned about God, and what God is really like, mainly from praying a lot. She read her Bible, recited the rosary, and prayed simple devotions. “One time I asked her,” he says, “what happened when she prayed. During her response she said something like this: ‘Sometimes while you’re saying your prayers, you go deep and you know he’s listening to you and you to him.'” However, I am not just talking about one’s solitary experience, but of entering into the whole experience of the people of God. Barry’s mother was not a solitary believer but part of a worshipping community; and, a participate in the sacred history that unfolds in the both the Old and New Testament..
The Threatening God
In both my work as a counselor and spiritual director I encountered many people who, particularly as a result of growing up in abusive or dysfunctional families, had formed such a distorted image of God that they could not walk into a church without it giving them the creeps. Here is another quote from William Barry that provides further insight. This one is actually from two different books, Paying Attention to God: Discernment in Prayer and his Finding God In All Things. In both he quotes largely from the British psychiatrist J. S. Mackenzie and the psychoanalyst Henry Guntrip:
The enjoyment of God should be the supreme end of spiritual technique; and it is in that enjoyment of God that we feel not only saved in the Evangelical sense, but safe: we are conscious of belonging to God, and hence are never alone; and, to the degree we have these two, hostile feelings disappear. . . . It is a common experience in psychotherapy to find patients who fear and hate God, a God who, is always snooping around after sinners, and who becomes an outsize of the threatening parent. . . . The child grows up fearing evil rather than loving good; afraid of vice rather than in love with virtue, Anyone who has done pastoral work can attest that this is a common experience among many Christians. And while sermons and homilies whose theme is the love of God may help, ultimately people need to experience that love. It will tax our ingenuity to develop the spiritual techniques or pastoral practices that will help people to have such a foundational experience.
If your aim is to logically figure out whether the God of the Bible exists, which is what this question of whether the Judeo-Christian God is good or malevolent is really all about, you should be able to find plenty of people willing to help you take that sort of head-trip. But if you want to know God intimately you will ultimately find such efforts to be an exercise in futility. Knowing God, knowing that God is and knowing the character of what God is, must ultimately be experienced rather than thought. You can think, and think, and think all you want, and while that may be somewhat helpful it will only take you so far. In the end you are either capable of sustaining a vital relationship with God and a believing congregation of sufficient spiritual vitality to undergo the transformation of metanoia or you are not.
A Boyhood Story
I grew up in the very conservative Churches of Christ. Actually, I grew up in a subset of the Churches of Christ that was more conservative than the conservative main body. I do not wish to disparage these churches in any way. It was in their fellowship that I came to faith, experienced my call to ministry, and learned much that has helped and sustained me throughout my life. Having said that, I also found many obstacles that had to be overcome; but, even that is not necessarily bad for it is in the struggle that growth most frequently occurs. One of the obstacles I struggled with was the idea that God is strict and demanding. God’s will must be followed with exactness in all things; and ignorance of what is required is no excuse. The smallest of infractions will send one to hell. At least, that was my childhood and young adult understanding of matters. One of the key texts often used in sermons to support this was Leviticus chapter ten–– actually it was just 10:1-2 that was read––the King James Version of course:
And Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, took either of them his censer, and put fire therein, and put incense thereon, and offered strange fire before the Lord, which he commanded them not. And there went out fire from the Lord, and devoured them, and they died before the Lord.
So the point to be made, as I understood it at the time, was extrapolated from the phrase, “and they offered fire which God commanded them not.” This, we were told, meant that God had not explicitly forbidden this particular incense so they thought, “Why not? This mixture smells pretty good so let’s use it. After all it’s not explicitly forbidden.” And the next thing you know they are knocked right out of their sandals by a bolt of lightning, as dead as dead can be (at least that’s what I imagined as a kid). The moral of the story is simple and certain: Even if you think God vague or ambiguous you had better get it right with precision or you could end up very much like a piece of toast––and the margins for error are more than exceedingly small. This is the sort of thing that might fall within Dawkins’s accusation. So note the following and try to look at them in the context of this post as a whole:
• Were Nadab and Abihu just two happy klutzes that didn’t read the small print in the Incense Guide? Or, were they somehow at odds with Moses and the Torah itself? At Sinai they had certainly shown a propensity for a religion of wild music, dancing, sex and booze. And the explicit prohibition in verse eight against drinking any fermented drink in the tent of the meeting implies that they were intoxicated––intoxicated, irreverent, and defiant. Some scholars think that they had not only arrogated for themselves the role of the High Priest but they were also initiating some sort of extra-cultic rite. I say they were irreverent because the text makes clear they were obviously unable to distinguish between what is sacred and what is profane. These are all clues that whatever was going on involved something significant for Israel as a spiritual nation and a light in a world where the religious celebrations of other states often included drunkenness, prostitution (both female and male), bestiality, the offering of infants in the fires of an idol; and, where the injustice suffered by the poor was codified in royal law and supported by the religious establishment. Notice how verses three through four seem to confirm this. Moses says to Aaron, who is both his brother and the High Priest:
“This is what the Lord spoke of when he said:
“‘Among those who approach me
I will be proved holy;
in the sight of all the people
I will be honored.’”
• Did God actually strike Nadab and Abihu with lightening? I don’t know. It is, as I say, what I imagined as a kid but I don’t know. The text says “fire went out from the Lord,” which would seem to correct my childhood notion of a lightning bolt and suggest that something happened right there at the incense altar. I remember a college professor suggesting they got drunk and caught everything, including themselves on fire. Regardless of how an objective team of observers recording the event might have described it (a lightning strike, an explosion emanating from the incense altar, or the intoxicated Nadab and Abihu accidentally setting themselves on fire) the Hebrew’s would have said “fire went out from the Lord.” This is because they could not conceive of anything happening that God is not involved in, which leads to ways of framing things that does not fit easily with our Western way of conceptualizing matters. For example, Exodus in describing what happened when Moses pleaded for Pharaoh to let the Israelites go, says at times that Pharaoh hardened his own heart and refused, and at other times that Pharaoh refused because God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. In our Western way of thinking we want to know which it was. Did God harden Pharaoh’s heart or did Pharaoh harden his own heart. The Hebrews simply did not think of cause and effect quite as we do, and we need to remember that in interpreting any given text. But we do understand consequence––well theoretically we do. Some, like those addicted to alcohol and drugs, have a difficult time with the concept, have a difficult time making the invariable connection between thoughts, consciousness, actions and results
• The rest of the story is informative. Moses tells his brother Aaron, the High Priest, that he is not to mourn Nadab and Abihu but to continue with the prescribed sacrificial ritual and ceremony. However, Aaron and his remaining priestly sons do not eat the sacrifice as stipulated but allow it to burn up. When confronted by Moses (verses 19-20) Aaron says that considering the tragedy that has befallen him and his family that day God will surely understand. And with that Moses is satisfied. When the rest of the story is told it does not prove the arbitrariness of God as I was told as a child, but that God’s understanding and mercy is broad, and the margins for error wider than many have thought. So here we have that balance the Hebrews saw in everything. In this instance there is the reverence required upon entering the presence of the Holy, and the gentleness needed in dealing with everyday human frailty if it is ever to be transformed into something more.
Punishment and Consequence
I will try to say something briefly here about punishment and consequences because I think it relevant to our overall discussion. First notice the balance just referred to above as the balance of compassion and justice in Exodus 34:7-8.
Yahweh! Yahweh! the God who is compassionate, merciful and gracious, always patient, extravagant in love, staying true to thousands in loving kindness, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet, he does not ignore their twisted ways. But visits the consequences of the parents’ sins on their children and grandchildren to the third and even fourth generation (My translation).
We are contemporary people, and contemporary men and women have a great appreciation for God as love and kindness, especially if that means whatever everything is all about it’s all about them and their wishes. As Charles Tart has it in his not entirely factious Western Creed, “What pleases me is Good, what pains me is Bad.” People are therefore adamant in their insistence that God, if God exists at all, is absolute and pure love. Their enthusiasm for the idea that God is the one to whom they are ultimately accountable and responsible is far less obvious. Yet, love and accountability for what we do with or to that love is integral to the cosmic balance.
The root meaning of the Hebrew word for punishment means “to shed.” It is used to refer to the removal of shoes (Exodus 3:5), an axe head slipping from its’ handle (Deuteronomy 19:5), and the fall or collapse of a nation (Deuteronomy 7:1). The prefix attached to this root word conveys the upward movement of the eyes. The purpose of what our English translations may render as “punishment” is to get us to lift our eyes, to look up in order to see where we have slid (literally shed or fallen) from. In Scripture punishment by definition is restorative and redemptive in nature, and if a punishment does not restore or redeem, (if it does not re-establish balance) then it has failed. Family and child counseling of course makes this distinction by using the term “consequence” rather than “punishment.” Allowing natural consequences to occur or applying logical consequence, as opposed to arbitrary punishment, is meant for redemption and restoration. What I am obviously suggesting is that much of what we view as coercive punishment in the Bible is really consequence.
A number of years ago William Gaultiere wrote a little book many found helpful. The title of Gaultiere’s book was, Mistaken Identity/Clear Up Your Image of God and Enjoy His Love. His thesis was that especially adults who grew up in dysfunctional families may have distorted images of God. The parent whose expectations are inconsistent or cannot be met, or who is chronically angry, who is demanding but never around to help with life’s tasks, who is harsh and authoritarian, who cannot be pleased, or is in some way psychologically abusive and “crazy making” may cause us to seriously mistake the identity of the God of the Bible. But if the lens through which we are looking is cleaned just enough that we can begin to see the connection between our thoughts, actions and circumstances we may begin, little by little, to glimpse God more and more as God is.
And a Final Prayer
In Genesis Jacob, whose very name means something like manipulative cheat, through trickery and deception steals both the birth right (the future inheritance) and blessing that belong to his older brother Esau. This enrages Esau who determines to kill Jacob who, with the help of their mother, then flees to the safety of their uncle Laban in Mesopotamia. Years later shrewd Jacob, who is now a wealthy man, decides to return home to Canaan with his four wives, children, large herds of goats, cattle, camels, and flocks of sheep. He is afraid that the fierce Esau will now take his bloody revenge. Emissaries he has sent ahead with gifts for Esaul come back to tell him that Esau is already coming with his warriors to kill him and take everything he has. As part of his strategy Jacob creates three groups. After he has gotten them all across the river with the livestock that evening, he goes back across the river for some unknown reason. There he encounters a mysterious stranger, some accounts say an angel, with whom he wrestles all through the night there beside the Jabbok. When the morning comes the stranger blesses Jacob and tells him that his name is no longer Jacob but Israel, probably meaning “God fights.” Jacob need not be afraid, his God will fight or contend for him. But God also contended, or wrestled, with Jacob himself that night––a struggle so intense that it altered Jacob’s very identity so that he was now no longer Jacob but Israel. That’s what I would pray for you––that you have the stamina to wrestle with angels beside the river of your doubts, fears and unknowing until morning breaks and you know the joy and confidence of transformation.