BIG, PLAIN, RICH TRUTHS
What is “sunrise”? It’s when the sun first appears
over the horizon as the result of the earth spinning on its axis. This is true
and we’re glad. But that isn’t “sunrise”! GK Chesterton would say: Sunrise is
when God says to the sun, ‘Get up!’ GKC liked dictionaries but he knew they had
real limits. They reduce everything to bare definitions but we’re not to
criticize them for that—they’re doing the best they can.
There’s a habit of thinking that reduces so much. We
can be carried away with information, explanation, definition and cognitive,
rational instruction. We need information, don’t you know, but it’s too bad
when we allow information to limit our vision to the dictionary or a grammar or
even a pursuit of correctness.
Ask Jesus about
that field of flowers and he’d say,
“Beautiful isn’t it! Solomon in all his grandeur never looked that good.
My Father
clothed that field.” He goes onto say that before you know it the
flowers will wither and be burned and yet the Father never tires of
pouring out such glory. How gloriously generous He is in his giving.
Jesus would look at sparrows and speak of his Father’s generous
and faithful provision. He’d pass a woman adding yeast to her dough and he’d think
of his Father’s kingdom and say something like, “Remind me to look at this on
our way back.” He’d see tired oxen with ill-fitting yokes that rubbed their
necks raw, dragging a plough up and down, up and down, up and down a field and
donkeys, heads down and burdens up to the sky on their backs. He sees them and
thinks of the burdens of people and how he had come to deliver them and wishes they'd come to him. He looks up
into the limitless heavens and sees them as his Holy Father’s “theater of
glory”. Everything he saw, even the sadness and hurt of the world, made
him think and speak of and act for his Father and his Father’s eternal purpose.
I’m for exegesis; I’m for the use of grammars,
lexicons, literary models, sociological insights, hermeneutical approaches—or
anything else within my reach and competence—that help us to grasp the meaning of a text, section or book. Of
course! But all the Bible study,
however rich in technique and however successful in getting at “authorial
intent”—if it doesn’t lead us to the massive subtext that lies beneath all the
verses and all the books, if it doesn’t open out eyes to life and all there is
and help us to see as Jesus saw, it’s worse than wasted time [note John 5:39]. I
don’t say I know very well how to gain such insight much less that I have
gained it to a marked degree. But I know as sure as I live that I know the kind
of writing or speaking that doesn’t carry us there.
I’ve seen more than one lovely young person carried
away by scholarship, seduced by literary and philosophical conundrums; left
close to speechlessness. Well, at least, left not knowing what to do with the
biblical witness to feed the people of God. Every text and even the Bible
itself, becomes problematic; every biblical claim has to be rigidly scrutinized
in the heady realm of academia before the scholar can make use of it for Church-feeding—especially
in the presence of his scholarly peers. And while they talk to each other
the People of God starve [or are left to the ceaseless and banal moralizing
that passes for Church-feeding or to the rigidly religious with their
exhaustive blueprints, slide-rules and books on logic placed in the church pews for the listeners to become acquainted with].
One of the leading gurus of a generation or two ago,
one who specialized in the biblical Wisdom literature, ended up believing in
virtually nothing distinctively Hebrew/Christian though his understanding
of OT biblical texts is still highly regarded. Sigh! We can end up “correct” or
seriously seeking to be and end up clinically depressed or without convictions
or hope—ceaselessly on the probe for intellectual consistency and "integrity"; worshipping at the shrine of the goddess, Knowing All.
We all begin with some “givens”; with convictions we
take as the foundation of whatever we’re going to build on them. Everyone
does! There's no getting to a place where we can prove beyond debate and with
“geometrical certainty” what we believe. The ceaseless search for indisputable
truth is a
losing game. God hasn't left us in the dark or short of truth and
there's something sinister about our insatiable hunger to make our
claims academically respectable.
Look for, ask people to help you find, ask God to
provide the help you need to find the big, plain, rich truths the Bible offers
and makes much of. Find those, purposing to throw in the stubborn ounces of
your weight into God’s glorious and loving purpose toward humanity and
cheerfully march on under the banner of Jesus Christ.
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, theabidingword.com.