For human beings, looking back on our past work or actions, cringing, and striving to do things better or differently in the future is a universal experience — like when an artist looks back on his or her earlier work with mild disgust. But when it comes to God, it sounds unlike him to think this way and maybe pokes a bit at our perceptions of his character, like his immutability or sovereignty. And yet, it’s this negative commentary that helps drive the story forward to its rightful climax in a way that a static, all-positive, “no problems here!” story can’t.

Though there are many places we can go to see this in the Bible, I like to pick up right in the middle, after centuries of covenant living are in the rearview mirror for Israel, and God begins to speak through the psalmists and the prophets. It’s during that time that David says, “Lord, you don’t desire sacrifice, but a broken heart.” Isaiah dials up the rhetoric further by saying (for God), “I don’t want your sacrifices, or your festivals, or your Sabbaths! I detest them!” and elsewhere “I live in heaven, not in temples built by human hands.” The attuned reader at this point might scratch their head and ask, “But, wait, didn’t God command these things to be kept and observed?”

When we get to the New Testament, we see this disconnect even more obviously with Jesus, whose freedom from the law reveals more than mere quibbles over interpretation. When it comes to the practice of Sabbath rest, Jesus proclaims himself its Lord (Mk 2:28), and even breaks it in favor of healing a paralytic (Jn 5:18). He refuses to throw a stone at the adulteress even though the law commanded it. He differentiates himself from Moses’s “Eye for an eye” and instead teaches his disciples to “Turn the other cheek.” He commends the faith of the unrighteous tax collector and scorns the righteousness of the Pharisee (Lk 18:9-14). He not only positions himself against the old ways but against things God himself spoke into existence. In this, David’s words become Jesus’s: “Father, you don’t desire these things anymore, you never really did, but I am here to do your will” (Ps 40:6-8, Heb 10:5-7).

Where I think we see this at the highest level, though, and where Jesus matches God’s Old Testament zeal over this matter, is when he flips over the money changers’ tables in the temple. Something often missed in this story is how Jesus sat down and “made a whip out of cords” before he drove people and animals from the temple, meaning that this wasn’t a spontaneous freak-out, but a calculated act that (at least temporarily) disrupted the entire sacrificial system of the day. An overreaction, you could say, if all he intended to do was to turn the dial 5 degrees or to “clean up” what was otherwise a good thing that was intended to last forever. Where was gentle Rabbi Jesus when you needed him? Wouldn’t a simple teachable moment have sufficed?

So, why is he doing this? Why is he flipping rather than teaching? The answer is that Jesus isn’t just overturning tables, he’s overturning eras. All due respect to the “temple cleansing” language we often use to summarize this Bible story, but I don’t think it does it justice. 

Jesus isn’t a small update to the operating system of the old covenant, but a new system altogether that renders the old obsolete (Heb 8:13). Between the two systems, the language is similar, some of the code persists, and the coder is the same, but they are as different as MS-DOS is from Windows 11 or the latest MacOS. 

It’s no coincidence that a few verses after Jesus flips the tables, he starts talking about his own body as the new temple and how he’ll raise it from the dead after it’s been destroyed. He’s signifying that he is the new way sinners will meet with and be mediated to God — not on the basis of our obedience, or moralistic “trade” (Jn 2:16), but by a broken heart, and moreover, Jesus’s broken and torn body. His own whipping.

Using Jesus’s suffering and death to shed light on the psalms and the prophets, as well as his position against the old Law in his early ministry, it becomes clearer why God has such zeal for all of this. It’s because fidelity to the rules lower our field of vision away from Jesus. Those who believe themselves to be healthy, after all, have no need of a doctor (Mk 2:17). The rules elicit pride and self-reliance more than faith and intimacy. Jesus’ prophetic demonstration in the temple sounds like anger, and in one sense it is because it’s linked with peoples’ sinful actions (the law incites disobedience), but digging deeper, it’s actually a veiled love story. It’s God in the flesh tearing up the thing that keeps his people from him, doing damage to the old way of “bring your sacrifices to God” and replacing it with a new and better way of “God brings his own sacrifice to us.”

A helpful quip to remember in Christian theology: God doesn’t change, but the covenants do. He isn’t aloof, or indecisive, nor does he make mistakes. He knew exactly what he was doing by sending the law first — to show us that our calloused hands aren’t the answer. But Jesus was always his plan A. His grace is the axis around which the entire story rotates. Everything else (even other parts of Scripture) falls subservient to it, and morphs and bends and aches at the whim of it. God has a heart, even a zeal, for this kind of scriptural drama. He puts us, the money-changing self-justifiers, out of a job. He beckons us to find rest in his son alone, the one who was struck on the cheek for our sins. And he invites us to stop the charade of striving to measure up and to be better versions of ourselves. These aren’t quaint lessons. They’re things God went to war over, and who took the bullet, that we might lay down our religious checklists and be spared. 

The post God Doesn’t Change, But The Covenants Do appeared first on Red Tree.

This predisposition to believe that we bring artistry, knowledge, or any unique addition to the works of God in our lives is something that we see time and time again throughout the biblical story. It’s been a problem since the garden, and one that will remain with humanity until we and our earth (and along with it, our creativity and imagination) are fully redeemed when Christ returns. Regardless of how majestic and beautiful our works can be on this side of heaven (and man, do we knock it out of the park sometimes, you guys), they will never compare to a mere thought or word that passes from the mind or mouth of God. 

Now, does God work through us to create these inspired and astounding pieces of art or literature or engineering or whatever it is we create in our lives? Absolutely. We see it in the Bible. Consider Noah’s ark, for starters. God ordained what the ark would look like, how it would be built, what it would be built of, and how many doors and decks it would have. And when the last nail was put in, God filled it with his own walking, flying, and buzzing creations, both to witness and to showcase. And from this God-inspired ark, we saw life step out, the enclosure having protected God’s people through Noah’s family.

The newly freed Israelites were also on the receiving end of specific instructions that would help them co-create with their Creator, for another ark, this time for the Ark of the Covenant, the box that contained the Ten Commandments and served as the very throne of God in Old Testament times. Again, we see specific materials, measurements, and flourishments. Not only that, but we see in Exodus 31 that God filled the men working on it with his Spirit, ensuring that the vehicle of his grace and protection would be truly worthy of his presence. Again, just like the ark of Noah, this ark would produce and provide a way for God’s people to live in this world alongside their holy and just Creator.

Then came Solomon, who completed a dream that his father David had and built what was without a doubt one of the most breathtaking pieces of architecture that ever graced the face of this earth: the temple. But this one, though the most ornate and dripping with the most wealth, carries one major difference from the arks. While the construction of both arks was led by God’s instructions, the temple’s was led by Solomon’s. In this section of Scripture, the language is no longer God speaking and providing, but Solomon proclaiming what he is doing to make this building majestic. He sends his skilled men (2 Chronicles 2:13) instead of God’s Spirit being the lead architect. He chooses the wood, he chooses the measurements (3:3). The language is subtle but important. “And he made” appears over and over again, which is not something we see in the other accounts. It is clear that this is Solomon’s temple, and though he dedicates it to the Lord, and God even sends his glory to fill it, its creation was birthed in the minds of David and Solomon. The lack of divine instruction is a glaring omission, but intentional as it’s set within the fabric of the story itself — what comes before and what comes after.

Also important is how these structures fared over time. We are not told about the fate of Noah’s ark after it parked itself on a mountain. We can assume that it eventually disintegrated, but it isn’t a small thing that the Bible doesn’t tell us, because narratively speaking it makes the ark eternal. The same can be said about the Ark of the Covenant. The last we see it is in 2 Chronicles when King Josiah instructs the Levites to return it to the temple. The temple was subsequently destroyed and plundered, but the text remains silent about the fate of the ark. Again, it gets absorbed in the theological timeline of God’s redemption of His people. As mentioned above, however, the Bible is very clear about what happened to Solomon’s temple. It was dismantled and destroyed, brick by brick, as the people of God were led away in chains. There were attempts to rebuild it, but they would pale in comparison to the original. It was a tragic reminder that the best that man could offer was unable to provide them the sanctuary that was freely provided by both arks that came beforehand. 

To punctuate this difference, God spends a good deal of time in Ezekiel talking about not only the purpose that Solomon’s temple ended up serving before it was destroyed (“Behold, I will profane my sanctuary, the pride of your power, the delight of your eyes, and the yearnings of your soul,” which sounds very reminiscent of the tower of Babel, another man-made wonder), but also brings Ezekiel to the doorstep of a greater temple. In a vision that comes just after a promise from God that he would restore His people after their impending destruction and imprisonment, Ezekiel is shown a temple that dwarfs Solomon’s in both size and glory. In it, we find water flowing through the midst of it, which clues us into how this is the new temple that will make its earthly appearance at the end of days when the doors are thrown open and the River of Life will flow from the side of Christ and in our midst for eternity. 

And at this point, in case it wasn’t clear already, the New Testament goes full tilt. Think of Stephen’s sermon, moments before he is stoned to death when he speaks of Solomon’s temple he follows it quickly with a Davidic psalm that proclaims “the Most High does not dwell in houses made by hands” (Acts 7:47). Paul, too, declares to the Athenians that the “Lord of heaven and earth does not live in temples made by man,” but that “in him we live and move and have our being.” Despite the grandness of the temple, God urges us to move on from it, and to see that it’s in his work, his building, that we live and rest, not he in ours. Indeed, the only rest we can have is found in the hands and feet of Christ, nailed to the cross, having finished the work, the building of the temple where God would dwell for eternity.

So, was Solomon’s temple magnificent? Absolutely. Was it a sin to create? I don’t think so. But, just as with anything we do, the trap lies in forgetting that our creativity sprouts from Creativity itself, as well as forgetting that the Bible constantly moves us away from the works of our hands and towards the works of Jesus on our behalf. When we do things for our pride, our delight, and our yearning, we harness ourselves to the side of Solomon, whose pride blossomed from this creation and ended up tearing the nation apart. But this is so much more than just a simple lesson in pride. It’s a reminder that when God’s hands are in our lives, we have the opportunity to delight in being swept up in the very source of Imagination itself. It’s a reminder that our eternal protection, provision, and sanctuary all come from the outpouring of God’s creative flow and not our own. It’s a promise that when it comes to what matters most in life, we can stop trying to make something beautiful enough for God to notice us. Instead, he distances himself from our religious charades and invites us to live with him through what his Son has done for us alone. 

The post The Master Architect Works Alone appeared first on Red Tree.

The reason Moses was kept on the wrong side of the promised land occurs earlier in the book of Numbers. Amid constant rebellion and pushback from God’s people, Moses reached a boiling point. He let his temper get the best of him and did not follow God’s specific instructions on how to get life-saving water to pour out from a rock for the Israelites. Instead of holding his staff and telling the rock to open up (much like he did on the shores of the Red Sea), he yelled at the people and brought his anger down on the rock itself, striking it twice. Despite his disobedience, the rock still poured forth water, but Moses’ fate was sealed. God said, “Because you did not believe in me, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them” (20:12). We aren’t told how Moses reacted to this news, but we can assume it was devastating. Fast forward to the end of Deuteronomy, the end of forty years of leading a people who were bent on their passions and lawlessness, and here Moses sits, on the top of Mount Nebo, the Lord himself showing Moses the land that had been promised to Abraham so long ago, in which he would never step one foot. 

But in this sad story lies a glimmer of hope. From two angles. The first has to do with the timing of Moses’s death. His death preceded the people’s entrance into a new life, a promised life, a land that was flowing with provision and blessing. The Israelites were unable to enter the promised land until Moses died; they had known this from the time of Moses’ striking of the rock. They mourned, but their sadness was followed by the fulfillment of a joyful promise. Jesus’s death would serve this same type of bridge many years later. He would be the rock that was struck in the wilderness, breaking himself open and pouring out living water. He would be the one to die a cursed death in symbolic Moab, hanging on a tree, for us (Deut 21:22-23). And ultimately, his death would precede and usher us into the land that was promised, the land flowing with milk and honey. Except this time it wasn’t Canaan or any other actual land. This new land, this better land, was Christ himself and the promise of eternal salvation of abundance through his death and resurrection. Christ’s coming was foretold directly and indirectly throughout the stories of the Old Testament. Moses’ life, and more importantly, his death was a symbolic reflection of Christ, who came as a better and complete version of our Exodus hero. Unlike Moses, however, there was no heartbreak at the knowledge of his unavoidable death. We read in Hebrews 12:2 that Jesus “for the joy that was set before him endured the cross.” He climbed a hill, just like Moses, and laid down his life, just like Moses, on the precipice of the fulfillment of the greatest promise ever made.

The second angle has to do with what Moses represents in the greater biblical storyline. One of the great acts that God accomplished through him was the passing down of the Law. Immediately after breaking his people free from the chains of Egypt, God thundered his perfect law from the top of Mount Sinai, carving it in literal stone, making it as immovable and as unforgiving as its bearer. This stone-written law was not to be broken, and the penalty for wavering even one single iota from it was death. We see this in the first generation of Israelites who continuously rebelled and were sentenced to wander the wilderness until they died. And, unsurprisingly yet heartbreakingly, we also see this in the life of Moses. Moses represented the law; he carried it down the mountain. Yet it was his failure to keep it that kept him from the promised land. Even the one who saw God carve the letters into the tablets was not able to keep it perfectly enough to walk into Canaan.

So who was it that took on the burden of the Israelites and finally led them into the land of Canaan? It was Joshua, one of the twelve spies that had been sent into Canaan in Numbers 13, the one who encouraged the Israelites to rise up and take the land that they had been promised, despite the seemingly insurmountable obstacles that had been living there (including giants!). In the face of the impossible task that could not be performed by the work of their hands, he trusted that with God on their side they would have victory. 

The enormity of this transition cannot be overstated. Instead of the man who became a picture of the law and the death sentence that it represents (“Do this or die!”), the people reached the land of milk and honey following a different man, the man who said, “I know that I can’t do this, but God can.” What a beautiful microcosm of the greater movement in the Bible from the works of our hands which always leads to death to the work of God’s hands which always leads to life. Though Jesus hadn’t been born yet, we see glimpses of his upturning of the law even here at the end of the Pentateuch. He is our true and better Joshua, so that we might know that to truly enter God’s land of salvation is to do so by his grace alone, owning our weaknesses, and trusting in the one who was strong for us on the cross.

The post So Close And Yet So Far appeared first on Red Tree.

Consider the book of Acts, which is often reduced to a church planting manual or, more broadly, a “how to” on the evangelistic side of the Christian life. This is common for readers of the Bible to do — categorizing books topically so we have a broad-brush starting point for understanding their meaning. “Nehemiah is the book on leadership, Jonah is the book on global missions,” and so on. But such categorizations are too simple. They treat the Bible more like an encyclopedia than good news.

The story of Paul’s shipwreck in Acts 27 is a helpful place to go to see this, and to see how the Bible prefers to tell history in a way that’s “translucent,” that is, clear enough to see Christ on the other side of it.

On his way to Rome to appeal to Caesar, and under the supervision of Roman centurions, Paul and company run into a veritable hurricane on the Mediterranean. After days of tumultuous winds, little food, and constant fear of death, the ship is finally broken apart and the crew and prisoners need to swim for shore on a nearby island called Malta. Miraculously, everyone survives. I like to compare it to the movie Sully about the US Airways flight in 2009 that water-landed on the Hudson River after running into a flock of birds, another true story where catastrophe and almost certain death are met instead with a 100% survival rate. In both stories, the main characters exude an other-worldly calmness, one that reminds us of Jonah on the boat in his own storm on the same sea hundreds of years before, and even more, Jesus, who slept soundly amidst the storm on the Sea of Galilee while his disciples cried out for their lives.

And that’s our first clue that there’s more to this story than history alone. Paul points beyond himself here. His insistence that “not a hair from any of your heads will perish” in verse 34 is an echo of when Jesus consoles his disciples with the exact same words in Luke 21. So, far from simply a lesson on how Christians should replicate the same kind of faith when we find ourselves in similar disastrous situations, Paul is actually Jesus’s word of grace to us about how comprehensive his blood is when it comes to our redemption. His blood saves every single molecule and atom in our bodies — the smallest particles, the smallest of hairs, the most ingrained sins, even things we don’t realize are there, things we can barely see, but are still keeping us from God. He covers it all. There really is nothing to fear.

Paul continues to mimic Jesus when he calls the crew away from “continuing in suspense” (v. 33) and invites them to sit down to rest and break bread together. It’s an almost verbatim copy of what Jesus says at the Last Supper, which is intentional. It’s a reminder of how the gospel calls us away from our fears, worries, and especially our active efforts to save ourselves from the storm of our sin, and instead to trust in the broken, bread-like body of God’s Son alone. Verse 38 adds, “When they had eaten as much as they wanted, they lightened the ship by throwing the grain into the sea.” Jesus is the grain in this story as well, the bread that will suffer. In a surprise (and unfair?) twist, it’s the innocent grain that gets thrown into the sea first, even before the guilty prisoners. In the same way, it’s not just Jesus’s body, but his crucified body that saves us. It’s the scandal of the ages, when God would bear the greatest of injustices on our behalf, so we can unfairly, yet graciously, have our loads lightened.

There’s one more thing, however, that suffers in the story: the ship itself. It says, “The stern was being broken up by the surf … and the centurion ordered the rest who couldn’t swim to make for land on pieces of the ship. In this way, everyone reached land safely.” The ship, like the grain, isn’t about the ship. It’s a picture of something more. Jesus, in his ministry, fell asleep “on the stern”, linking him linguistically with the broken stern of Acts 27. But what’s most helpful is to see that it’s the broken ship that provided flotation devices to get everyone safely to land, especially those who couldn’t swim. It had to be broken, you could say — like Jesus’s body — or the way to land wouldn’t have been possible.

This is the good news. The centurion’s message wasn’t “Train hard to become an Olympic swimmer!” but “Hold on to the ship’s planks!” And so it is for us. The whole of the Christian life is characterized by holding onto something rather than trying to become better versions of ourselves. Looking back and looking ahead, we find even our successes and victories in life were purchased by the suffering of another rather than byproducts of our spiritual fitness. We’re all castaways. But that’s a good thing because God is at work saving those who know their need, and who know they can’t swim. Like the grain, he jumps in first, and like the broken ship, he jumps in with us, breaking up with the waves, so in the face of our own shipwrecks we remember he is not only with us in the storm, but he takes the worst the storm can offer for us. The ripple effects of Calvary move forward into this part of the Bible, whispering to us how much we’re nourished and buoyed by his grace alone, not by our works.

The post Paul’s Shipwreck From Hell appeared first on Red Tree.

[Jesus] said to Simon, “Put out into deep water, and let down the nets for a catch.”

Simon answered, “Master, we’ve worked hard all night and haven’t caught anything. But because you say so, I will let down the nets.”

When they had done so, they caught such a large number of fish that their nets began to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them, and they came and filled both boats so full that they began to sink.

When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at Jesus’ knees and said, “Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!” 

Luke 5:4-8

One of the most significant story arcs the Bible takes is a movement from an old way of being into a new way of living and relating to God. Jesus says so in many and various ways, one of which is when he says that if you try to fit the new way into the old “you,” both are destroyed (Mark 2:18-22). In other words, if you try to insert grace into the old system of the law, you’ll end up with all the worst parts of religion and none of the benefits of the church. 

The old way is marked by the work of our hands and the emptiness that our work brings, especially with regard to spiritual fruit. This can be traced all the way back to our first parents choosing to eat from the tree knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. Life under this tree (which not surprisingly reads a lot like law) can be summarized as: things get bad, to murderously worse, to exile, and then to 400 years of total silence from God. 

When the spiritual compass is put into the hands of human beings, we never arrive at a destination, because we don’t know True North. This is true in this little story: fishermen, who, if they know how to do anything it’s to fish. But here, they flop. Nothing to show for an entire night’s worth of labor. 

But then along comes, Jesus, who has a propensity to interrupt, surprise, and bring about a new way that does not look like the old. Here he takes this little group to the exact same place where they failed, and by his word they bring in a haul of fish that has exceeded anything these nets and boats have ever brought on board. The new way is fundamentally marked by the work of God in Jesus.

Our failures and breakdowns become the location where he brings abundance. His means of doing so are contrary to our intuition. It isn’t that God just shows up and provides. In the big story, the movement from old to new is decisively marked by death. The old has to come to an end if the new is to take shape. And it will be Jesus himself, who takes on the job description of fulfilling the old covenant before he sinks under the wrath of God like a tiny boat weighed down by too many fish. 

This is God’s means of overabundance. Jesus, like the nets in this story, is broken for our sins. He does this so that we can finally know him. And despite our proclivity to say, “Go away from me Lord, I’m a sinful man,” he says to us “I’m never leaving you. I’ll always bring the abundance at the end of your rope. Because this is the story I’ve had in mind all along. Now let’s go flip the world upside down with the only message that fills empty things.”

The post A Bad Day At The Lake appeared first on Red Tree.

This is maybe one reason why I’m so drawn to the encounter the prophet Elijah has with the prophets of Baal in 1 Kings 18. In the wake of calling out King Ahab and the people of Israel for their one-foot-in-both-pools worshiping both the God of Israel and the false god Baal, he sets up a showdown on the top of Mount Carmel, winner take all (life and limb, literally). The winner being the one who can convince their god to consume their sacrifice with fire.

The prophets of Baal go first. They set their bull up on a wooden altar and begin to call on their god. And they keep calling. And calling. From morning till noon. Elijah steps in at this point and begins his verbal assault: “Cry aloud, for he is a god. Either he is musing, or he is relieving himself, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened” (1 Kings 18:27) Turn up the volume! Your god is probably on the toilet! This of course drives the prophets madder, and they kick it up a notch. They yell louder in case he’s asleep, and even resort to cutting themselves, hoping that the smell of human blood will entice their silent god to speak. But for them, there was no voice. And then, the ice-cold verdict: “No one paid attention” (1 Kings 18:29). 

Elijah takes his turn next and, predictably, it ends with God sending a waterfall of heavenly fire to consume his bull, even after Elijah pours water on it first. There’s something poetic about it all — watching God respond more to impossibility and weakness than strength and human striving. A God who, through his prophets, throws sarcasm toward religious effort is the greatest of twists. And yet there’s one more worth considering.

We could ask: why is all of this banter included in the story? It’s enjoyable to read, but if the point is to show God’s power (over/against ours) in the end, the sarcastic chastising could have been omitted. But the Bible isn’t aimless. Unnecessary additions are not unnecessary. All Scripture is God-breathed, after all.

Well, there is another story in the Bible containing relentless mockery, but it’s not as fun to read as the showdown on Mount Carmel. It takes place on another mount with another sacrifice set up on another type of wooden altar. The mount is Calvary and the sacrifice is Jesus Christ of Nazareth and the altar is a wooden cross. While he slowly and agonizingly suffocates, the onlookers ridicule and hurl insults at him.

Matthew paints the picture: “You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from that cross. He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. He trusts in God; let God deliver him now if he desires him.” Cry louder, Jesus! Maybe God is on the toilet! On and on they went, railing insults at the man from Nazareth. And just like on Mount Carmel, there was no voice, no one answered, no one paid attention. Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Even to this, the bystanders said to one another, “This man is calling Elijah,” possibly drawing a line back to that mountaintop battle of words in 1 Kings. But, they didn’t know that Jesus was the fulfillment of all that Elijah was and did. And even more, they didn’t know that he was the absorber of every mocking voice of scripture and every mocking voice that trips past our tongues toward others. 

It’s easy to read the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal and think that we are the passive Israelites watching from afar (if we don’t put ourselves in Elijah’s position first!). But, looking at the crucifixion of Christ, that isn’t the only way to read that passage. We are also mixed in the throng of lost men and women who are crying out daily to our own false gods, sacrificing our time and our bodies for things and passions that cannot answer or save. Perhaps we were the rightful receivers of this pointed mockery from the prophet of God, just as we can rightly see ourselves in those who stood at the foot of the cross and hurled insults at Jesus. And inconceivably, Christ stepped into that place during his suffering. He became the object of derision on our behalf. Suddenly, Elijah’s knocks and jabs hit a little harder, because we know that ultimately they will be turned onto God himself while he dies a slow death on a cross.

We don’t get to play the hero in the Bible. We will more likely find ourselves in the fringe at best, and in the thick of the mess more often than that. But if we allow ourselves to sit in the grime, our cleansing at the cross will be all the more sweet and available to us. If we let ourselves acknowledge that we should have been the rightful targets of the derision of a God that we continually spur, it will make it all the more gut-wrenchingly life-changing when we see that he turned it unto himself instead, even while we were actively raving around on our mountaintops of idol worship. I don’t claim even for a minute to understand the magnitude of this kind of love, but I thank God for it. And though I will continue to pass down the legacy of loving sarcasm and joking to my children, I will remind them that even when our jokes go too far and our words sting, God has played the biggest joke of all, in the backward, grace-filled redemption of a wayward people.

The post The God of Sarcasm appeared first on Red Tree.

The story consists of Elizabeth and Mary both receiving an angelic pronouncement that they were pregnant. Elizabeth was barren and Mary was a virgin, so the news is met with bewilderment and joy. It’s yet another time in the Bible when God overcomes the obstacles of age, infertility, despair, and now virginity, which makes sense on the cusp of the New Testament since, at the core, the gospel is about life coming from nothing. Onward to Easter!

But what strikes me most about these birth narratives is how they differ — how they duel. In fact, in a lot of ways, the distinctions between the two are more important than the similarities. In John the Baptist’s case, it actually isn’t Elizabeth who first gets the news, but her husband Zechariah, a priest who served in the temple. After the angel Gabriel says, “Your super old wife is going to get pregnant,” he’s (justifiably) skeptical. And this is where the otherwise joyful moment takes a turn for the sour. Because of his disbelief, Zechariah is stricken mute and won’t be able to talk until John is born.

It’s hard to not empathize with the guy, isn’t it? — at least for everyone who has struggled to trust God for things before. My wife and I, after our first pregnancy ended in miscarriage, had a hard time believing that there were brighter days ahead. But a curse of silence? Really Gabe? Not even a second chance? Nor a little understanding that maybe it’s going to be hard for a lifelong barren couple to believe they’re pregnant? Perhaps, though, this is the point. Readers of the Old Testament don’t need much convincing that the rote inability human beings have to obey or trust in God comes with consequences, many times immediate and unpleasant. 

But that’s what makes Mary’s story so surprising:

She said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God” (Luke 1:34-35). 

Notice anything — oh, I don’t know — blatantly unfair about that? The one million dollar question here is why isn’t Mary punished for her own form of disbelief? Her words “How will this be?” are almost a verbatim copy of Zechariah’s (Lk 1:18-20), and yet she isn’t struck mute. She’s just doled out more grace in the form of a promise. It’s as if these two announcements are operating by a completely different set of rules.

The answer to this apparent contradiction (and angelic flippancy) has to do with how these two couples and these two sons represent two different biblical covenants or ways of relating with God.

Zechariah, on the one hand, is a priest who is inside the temple when he is made mute. Not only does he represent the old covenant “professionally” (as a Levitical priest), but he is also experiencing the full weight of what the law did to Israel and the watching world, that is, cursed those who couldn’t keep it. Notice the conditionalism: keep the law, or else; believe God, or else; have perfect faith, or else. 

Mary, on the other hand, is different. She’s a Judahite and represents the new covenant of grace. She represents that the long-awaited time when God would forget our sins is now here. Her son Jesus would be associated with enemy love, not speedy condemnation. No more muteness or Tower of Babel-like punishment. Just reconciliation with God through his shed blood forever.

In the end, like so many things in life and theology, there’s a bad-news-good-news lesson for us here. Zechariah’s lack of faith mirrors ours. He’s an emblem of how all of us are crushed by heightened expectations, unkeepable standards, and various forms of failure every day.

But Mary is a picture of us hearing the gospel. She’s a picture of the curse of the law being replaced with Jesus’s loving restraint, even his willingness to be struck mute himself, like a sheep silent before its shearers, that we might live. To borrow a word from the angel, this gospel “overshadows” anything and everything we do — the good and the bad. That’s what’s so unique about it. Contrary to so many of the world’s mantras, life is better when it’s less about us and what we do and more about God and what he has done. It’s better when his love not only covers our sins but also takes the focus off of our goodness so that we can truly find freedom in the grace that is given unconditionally and despite our stubbornly persistent faithlessness.

The post Dueling Birth Narratives appeared first on Red Tree.

I had my own experience with this in my mid-20s, early on in my Bible-interpreting journey — an eye-opening paradigm shift that came, somewhat counterintuitively, with less trying and more submitting to the (foolish) direction of Scripture itself. But before I got there, or rather was helped there by God and others, I took the scenic route down the winding roads of some less-than-helpful methodologies that turned me inward rather than to the only one who can reveal mysteries.

One of these roads was the modernistic emphasis on historical context and authorial intent. Fee and Stuart’s book Reading the Bible for All Its Worth popularized this approach in the 80s and 90s — at least in my circles — but many others have sung the same tune. The argument is that the Bible can only mean to us what it meant to the first audience. So, the majority of our interpretive efforts must center on grammar, language studies, context, and things like word repetition and other literary devices. “What did Moses mean when he wrote Genesis 1?” becomes the principal question. “What Hebrew word for ‘God’ does he use? How would this have defied Egyptian deities and other ancient Near Eastern creation narratives? Why does the word ‘good’ come up so frequently?” Meaning is confined to the words themselves, and if you understand the background, drown out all other noise, and let the syntax give you a glimpse into what the human author intended, then all will be revealed.

On a similar level, a well-meaning seminary professor once assigned me Robert Alter’s book The Art of Biblical Narrative, which is a non-Christian Jewish man’s literary approach to reading Old Testament narrative. I didn’t see the irony at the time, but it was a surprising choice for a Christian seminary seeking to teach future pastors how to read the Bible in a distinctly Christian manner. Didn’t Jesus get on the Pharisees’ case for reading the Old Testament on their own terms and not as though it were all about him? But I digress.

Now, is this all bad? Not necessarily. Does understanding the original languages, literary context, and word repetition sometimes help with Bible study? It does. But here’s the problem: the Bible never uses these methodologies when it’s interpreting itself. Instead, when you read the New Testament, it’s much more concerned about how all Scripture orients us to the one who wrote it into existence, Jesus Christ, the Word that gives meaning to all other words. And many times this goes beyond what it meant to the first author and audience. The early church fathers called it sensus plenior, or “fuller meaning” — the idea that Scripture was written historically on the outside but spiritually on the inside and that true understanding comes from both parts, not just the outer shell.

The Book of Hebrews is one helpful place to go to see this way of reading at work. It shows us with surprising ease how the Psalms are about Jesus (even more than David), how Israel’s desert wanderings are typical of the Church’s, and how Moses, Joshua, and Melchizedek all foreshadow Jesus in their intercessory and priestly roles. I remember reading Hebrews when I was a younger Christian just trying to make sense of the landscape of the Bible and being quite taken aback at that. I would channel my best Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride: “You keep using that verse, I don’t think it means what you think it means.” But, Hebrews — seemingly uninterested in our modern interpretive tools — operates in a way that makes more sense of the Bible. It shows how one can be truly centered on the grace of the gospel all of the time, not just in theory or for the starting place of faith, but a way consistent with how Jesus shows the two disciples in Luke 24 how the entire Old Testament is about him going to and coming back from the grave.

The bigger passage for me in helping to fully cement this paradigm shift in my brain was Galatians 4:21-31. In it, the Apostle Paul interprets the Old Testament story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar (and the two sons the two women have, from Genesis 16) as an allegory. The story of Abraham sleeping with Hagar so she could produce a son so that God could make good on his promise to bless the world through his offspring is contrasted with the story of how God miraculously allowed his wife Sarah to conceive in her old age. Paul says the two women represent two covenants or ways of relating to God. Hagar represents the Old Testament, and Sarah represents the New Testament. Hagar represents human effort and works — it was Abraham’s way of saying to God, “Don’t worry God, I got this. I know we’re too old to have kids, so I’ve figured out a workaround.” But Sarah represents God’s effort and grace. What happens to her flies in the face of Abraham’s arrogance in thinking he could help God, not to mention his adulterous actions. With Sarah, God did everything. He made life come out of nothing, Sarah’s 100-year-old, barren womb. The ultimate theological landing point being: Jesus came from Sarah’s child, Isaac, because Jesus would come from the genealogical line of grace, not works. It’s like the story is a microcosm of the two main testaments of the Bible: the old that conditions salvation based on law observance gives way to the new that comes completely by the resurrection of Jesus Christ, not at all by our help, works, or moral prowess.

That is what Genesis 16 means.

Learning to read the Bible this way was category-busting for me. Like a pair of decoder glasses were placed over my eyes. Just like Jesus had saved me from my sins single-handedly, so did he now single-handedly serve as the one true lens to understanding the Bible’s meaning. No longer did I have to be held down by complex methods that left me wondering if I did them right, which in turn created doubts surrounding the point of a passage and how I failed to hear God the right way. No longer did I have to read overly-simplistic moral lessons into stories like Sarah and Hagar. No longer did I have to miss the forest for the trees. Instead, I could read the Bible the way the Bible reads itself, that is, with less effort, with less of ‘me’ altogether, and more sitting at the feet of Jesus, having my eyes opened and my heart stirred when he opens the word by means of his own blood (Lk 24:32).

It reminds me of what Kathleen Norris says about the Benedictine monks: “Although their access to scholarly tools was primitive compared to what is available in our day, their method of biblical interpretation was in some ways more sophisticated and certainly more psychologically astute… [It] was far less narcissistic than our own tends to be, in that their goal when reading scripture was to see Christ in every verse, and not a mirror image of themselves.”

This is what the Bible means when it says we need the Spirit to help us understand (Eph 1:17-19). The Spirit isn’t just an assistant to our own human ways of reading it, the Spirit is the way himself. Meaning: as Paul pits the Spirit against the works of the flesh so often in his letters, the only way to truly get at God-intended meaning is to see what we would never see in the Bible on our own if the Bible itself didn’t first show us, that is, Christ crucified and raised. “The rock Moses struck was Christ,” it says (1 Cor 10:4). So was the snake lifted up on the pole (John 3:14). So was the Passover lamb (1 Cor 5:7), the temple (Jn 3:19), and the torn veil (Heb 10:20). And on and on it goes. This kind of stuff is foolishness to the world — even to some “Christian” approaches — because it deviates from what we expect to find, but it’s the power and clarity of God to all who see Christ in every verse, and his story in every other story.

Ian Olson says, “We don’t need more truth: we need the news that changes the world.” Before you dismiss that as unnecessarily dichotomizing, yes, the gospel is the truth. And vice versa. But it’s also possible to mistakenly search for the truth apart from the gospel. And that, when it comes to biblical interpretation, is the worst of sins. Our own grids for understanding the Bible, when drenched in too many layers of human ingenuity and trust in our own ability to understand, are Abrahamesque ways of saying to God, “Look, I’ve figured out how to do it on my own, apart from Jesus!”

But God will have none of it. He’s too loving for that. The only way to understand is by reading the Bible on his terms, through the lens of grace (over and against our works), as though it’s much more about him than us. For he alone informs, enlivens, and clarifies the varied pages of God’s one story.

The post Reading the Bible Foolishly appeared first on Red Tree.

The story of Esau and Jacob’s deceit-filled meal is one such story (Genesis 25:29-34). 

It opens with Jacob cooking stew. Esau then storms into the kitchen, exhausted from his hunting trip. He’s literally about to die (his words), and in his famished state, he asks Jacob for some of the red stew. Jacob, perhaps without even hesitating, offers him a deal. Esau can have the stew if he relinquishes any right he has to the birthright of Isaac, their father. This is no small ask, as the birthright would bestow on the one who inherits it (normally the oldest son, which Esau is by about a millisecond) the technical ownership of the family upon the father’s death. He would own the land, animals, servants, and any type of monetary holdings they have. He would be the decision-maker, protector, and literal head of the family. And in this case, with Abraham’s family line, he would also inherit the blessing bestowed upon Abraham by God himself, which promised God’s faithfulness throughout the generations. Whew! I mean who would give that up? But, guys, Esau is, like, really hungry. So the deal is made. Esau swears that Jacob can have the blessing, and Jacob hands over the bread and red stew. It says in verse 34 that Esau ate and drank and rose and went his way. Deal done, hunger satisfied, Esau left Jacob alone in the tent, Jacob now the rightful bearer of the birthright.

Such an interesting look into family dynamics, isn’t it? I’m sure my therapist could do wonders with it. But there’s more going on here, just below the surface.

Jacob and Esau, like many pairs in the Bible, represent two different things, more specifically, two different testaments, or promises. The Bible is chock full of pairings like this, even apart from counting the main division of the two parts, the Old and New Testament. Jacob and Esau’s own grandmother Sarah was in such a pair with her counterpart Hagar. Paul unpacks this in Galatians 4, where he says that these women (and the sons they bore) represent two covenants, one of works/slavery and one of grace/freedom. 

The same comparison can be made with Jacob and Esau, and we see it very early on in their lives. The twins struggled in Rebekah’s womb, but the one that fought his way out first was Esau, Jacob literally riding on his coat-tails. The boys grew up, and, so it seems, grew apart. Esau was “a man of the field”, one that would hunt and toil. Jacob, however, was “a quiet man,” who stuck to the tent. Even in their parents’ love we see this dichotomy. Esau was loved by Isaac “because he ate of his game.” Esau had to work for it. But Jacob was just loved by Rebekah. No qualifier. Just loved. We see early on that Esau represents the law: the make-sure-you-do-it-right-so-you-can-be-loved type of covenant. But Jacob, like his grandmother, represents grace, rest, and no-strings-attached love. We see from their relationship that these two cannot cohabitate. They run up against each other their entire lives, but that strife is meant to teach us something.

Picture the scene again. In this tent, in this place where Jacob resides, we have the man of the law, the man of works, storming in famished, needing sustenance. Esau was born first, so he naturally holds the birthright of the family. He is panting at the door of the tent, needing red stew to satiate him and send him on his way. Jacob, in what seems like a mental wrestling match that he will physically recreate later in his life (Genesis 32:22-32), holds the stew at bay and demands the birthright. The man of works relents, eats the stew offered by the man of rest, and leaves the headship of the family behind.

This story is about a transference of ownership. But even more: it’s about the how behind the transference of ownership.

It moves us from Esau to Jacob, from old to new, from law to grace by way of a meal. Christ, the new and better Jacob, offers up the red stew of his blood, the bread of his broken body, and demands a trade with the law: the birthright of his family for the meal of his death. The law, you could say, feasts on Jesus, the only meal that could have satisfied (or fulfilled) it, and just like Esau, it “drank and rose and went his way.” Now Jesus alone has become the head of our family. The tent of rest is our home. We no longer have to toil in the fields and work for the love of our father. It is given freely, without any strings attached. 

These 5 verses are the entire story of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. Much more than an overly-simplified moral tale about not being deceitful like Jacob, or lazy like Esau, this story portrays for us the battle between the testaments, and yet the symbolic and theological unity between them at the same time. It reverberates for us the echoes of God’s mercy and grace that ultimately spill like red stew from the cross and meet us where we are, most notably in our exhaustion over our tireless attempts at working for God’s favor. 

The post There’s Theology In That Stew appeared first on Red Tree.

One night when Noah lay passed out naked on the ground, one of his sons, Ham, sees him and goes and tells his brothers about it. His point in telling them isn’t simply to inform but to gossip and expose. If social media were around back then, he would have posted about it, brazenly and foolishly mocking his own dad. Not his most shining moment as a son. But his brothers, Shem and Japheth, take a different approach. Instead of furthering the shame, they delete the post from their feeds, lay a blanket on their shoulders, and walk backward toward their father to cover him without seeing his nakedness. When Noah wakes up and finds out everything that happened, in embarrassment and anger he curses Ham, but he blesses Shem and Japheth (Gen 9:18-27).

In Christian theology, stories like this often have two sides to them, but the sides aren’t just a simple right vs. wrong. Genesis 9 has no obvious moral lesson. “Don’t see your dad naked” or “Don’t make fun of people” seem ridiculously out of place, especially at this juncture in the biblical storyline. Instead, the two sides represent two ways of relating to God through the two primary covenants of the Bible.

Ham represents the first covenant, the Old Testament, which is why he comes first in the story even though he’s the youngest. He personifies the thing that exposes and makes us want to run for cover, that is, the law. If we didn’t realize we were naked already, the law makes it crystal clear. Adam and Eve found this out the hard way when they sinfully reached for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in Genesis 3. Turns out that grasping for impossible standards (and the fruitless attempts at proving ourselves that comes with it) isn’t as fun as it first sounds. So they immediately hid from God, and the rest is history.

But Shem and Japheth represent the second covenant, the New Testament. They represent the covering of our shame. They work against exposure, not for it. It’s no surprise that genealogically Jesus comes from the line of Shem, not Ham, because he came to save us by the work of his nail-pierced hands, not to thrust the work back onto our shoulders. And his grace, we learn, isn’t preconditioned on our spiritual (or physical) sobriety, but like Noah we are covered on our worst days, not our best — even when we’re least expecting it. Grace has a way of surprising us like that because it has the audacity to be given apart from works, not in response to them. God says somewhere in Romans, “I revealed myself to those who did not ask for me.” That’s good news for the humble, but bad news for those who like to keep score.

This is the clash of ideologies in Genesis 9. Like these brothers who fought with each other as they grew up, so do the testaments they represent. Law and grace are oil and water. Better yet: mirror and blanket. They treat us differently. And like Shem is the better brother, so is the New Testament the better covenant (Heb 8:6), because it’s built on a savior whose love covers a multitude of sins (1 Pet 4:8).

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