In 1 Samuel 15, God told King Saul to wipe out the Amalekites, every last one of them, and leave no survivors. The story is about Saul failing to follow God’s directions while claiming to have done so. He kept King Agab alive and allowed his men to save the best of the sheep and other animals. When Samuel, the prophet, asked, “What is this bleating of sheep I hear?” Saul blamed the men for his failure to obey God, but Saul was the one who did not obey God. That is how the story goes….
But, wait a minute! …. God told Saul to kill them… all of them. That sounds incredibly harsh. It sounds worse than harsh. Is God not supposed to be a loving God?
This is a pretty common question (a rhetorical one) posed by people who oppose Christianity and reject the Bible. “A loving God would not kill people,” they say. Since the Old Testament, in particular, depicts God in this way, the Bible cannot be true, the Christian God is fiction and the whole thing is bunk.
The unspoken sentiment behind that line of thinking is that “we” (humankind) have come a long way since primitive times. We have evolved past the Enlightenment into a modern scientific age in which we have superior moral and intellectual stature. We are the gods of our own world. We have thrown off superstitious belief in a tyrant God that stifles human potential in this post-enlightenment age.
In the wake of Obama’s executive orders on immigration and the outcry and fallout from it, I realized that I did not have a biblical framework on which to analyze the issues. I could not definitely say exactly what the Bible instructs us on the issue of immigration.
The Syrian refugee crisis at that time was much in the news, and I was conflicted by the many Christians urging our government not to allow Syrian refugees into the country. I was conflicted because I didn’t know what to think.
I realized that, as a Christian, I need to be instructed by the Word of God, and I wondered, “What would that instruction be?” Therefore, I took the time to study it, and the answer surprised me in its clarity.
I have found myself recently caught up in the torrent, reacting and re-reacting to the various comments, news clips and videos, like waves of offensives and sieges…
The world seems to be coming unglued! Militant, radical Muslims in Iraq are killing Christians, minority religious groups and even other Muslims. Hamas bombards Israel, and Israel responds with shelling that is killing women and children. At home, police decked out in military gear in a Missouri town are confronting an angry mob looting in the street and threatening to kill policemen.
Daily posts on Facebook and other social media demonize Barack Obama and “liberal Democrats”, or greedy corporations and capitalists, or Israelis or Hamas. The air is filled with ranting on both sides and all sides decrying every conceivable evil in the world. The cacophony seems to be reaching new heights. The many forms of social media make ranting as easy as shouting out the window to a world that is right within earshot.
I have found myself caught up in the torrent, reacting and re-reacting to the various comments, news clips and videos, like waves of offensives and sieges, until I began to realize something was happening to me…. Continue reading “Whatever We Fix Our Eyes On We Reflect”→
Music is a powerful thing. Perhaps, nothing captures human emotion like music. The theme of love runs through music, as it does with all forms of art. The intimate love of a couple is one of the most powerful and life changing emotions a person can experience. The intensity of being in love may be unmatched by any other human emotion, even the love of a parent for a child.
I muse on this as I listen to music this morning. One of the most intimate of modern musical muses is JohnnySwim. The kitschy and unlikely name belies a husband and wife combination making some of the best music today. They also seem madly in love with each other. Beautiful voices. Smooth harmonies. Palpable emotions. Powerful songs. It is catchy music, but it is not pop. I would call it indie, but folksy.
Their story is as compelling as their music. She is the daughter of Donna Summer, the disco queen. Her first CD as young girl was Vince Gil. He is Cuban. His father was a preacher. They saw each other for the first time across a room in college. She pegged him as a ladies man, out of her league. She avoided him for four years. He saw her and said to himself, “That is the woman I am going to marry.”
“We are the fire from the sun. We are the light when the day is done. We are the brave, the chosen ones. We are the diamonds rising out of the dust.”
“Make no mistake. Live while we’re young. Chase down the sun. Hands off the brake. We can die when we’re done. Let’s live while we’re young.”
They portray that intimate, heady love that is the thing dreams are made of, the happily ever after feeling that books and movies attempt to capture on the screen and poets captured in words. It is a love that everyone yearns for, but often seems just out of reach. Listen to Take the World and You and I:
[T]hey can write stories
They can sing songs
But they don’t make fairy tales
Sweeter than ours
Tell me where we’re gonna plant these seeds
I come climbing up your apple tree
Can you take me to your garden please
Then there is the song, Over. It is as beautiful as it is haunting. “Wake me up the dream I had is over”.
The truth is that the Disney kind of love really does not exist. It is too good to be true. It is an illusion. It cannot be sustained, at least not in the passionate, head over heels kind of way. “[Y]our love is on fire on mountain tops not down with me….” is recognition of the illusion that many people fall for. They want to stay on the mountain top forever, but nothing really grows on mountain top, as beautiful as it is there. It is not a place a person can live indefinitely, even if you manage to reach its heights.
Many people chase a mirage that always seems to evaporate, and then they chase it again in a new direction – it seems always just out of reach. Poets and lovers have been trying to capture the essence of that elusive pot of gold for thousands of years. Even when love is found, it is fleeting, “like a shooting star” as the Bad Company tune goes.
Maybe that is because “we are all just dust in the wind”. From dust to dust we live. Even the strong, lifelong love that precious few are able to sustain with any degree of conviction and earnestness cannot maintain the original intensity. The 50, 60 or 70 years it lasts, is like the bloom of a single flower in the field of human history. It is a brief glory.
Is there a love that does not fade like a shooting star? Is there a love that rises above the dust? Is there a flower that does not lose its bloom?
We instinctively “know” there is something more. Musicians and poets have written about it for centuries. The longing is real.
Would we have any sense of “it” if there was no essence of “it” to be sensed? And if the essence that we sense is real, it must exist in some other realm than this human existence; it must grow out of a different soil.
Jeremiah the prophet said, “Those who turn away from you will be written in the dust because they have forsaken the Lord, the spring of living water.” (Jer. 17:13) He also predicted that one day “living water would flow out of Jerusalem.” (Jer. 14: 8) He said that, without God, we are like broken cisterns that cannot hold water, the living water that God offers to us. (Jer. 2:13)
Jesus was/is that living water. (John 4:10) Jesus said, “Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” (John 7:38) In Revelations, John saw a vision in which he was told that God will lead the people who follow him to streams of living water and wipe every tear away. (Rev. 7:17)
I believe this living water is the love that we sense and that we long for. This is love that is available to us from God. It is love that we only see through a glass darkly in this mortal coil we inhabit, but it is a love that grows in intensity rather than fading. It is a love that, indeed, lasts forever and quenches the thirst so that one will never thirst again. All real love is a subset of this Great Love, and divorced from it no love can be sustained. God is this Love. (1 John 4:8)
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C.S. Lewis famously said, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we are made for another world.”
