All New.: January 2009

Friday, January 30, 2009

Beginnings II

by Elanor

Genesis 8:18-9:17

The royalty of man established in Genesis 1 was before the fall. Chapter 3 tells of Adam and Eve’s innocent mistake that culminates over the next few chapters in their oldest son killing his younger brother. You can imagine the first man and woman burying Abel and thinking back to the choice that brought them to this unthinkable position.

Genesis 6:5 says, “Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. The Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart.” This time, God looks on His creation and sees that it is not good.

When you make a mistake in cooking, like I did the other day trying to make egg noodles, and you realize that what you have in the pot is inedible, you throw it away and start over. This is what God did. He washed away all the iniquity on the planet. The surface of the earth was covered by water for 180 days, and when it subsided, it was clean.

Then God was free to repopulate the planet anew with beings who would follow Him, who were not so evil that happiness was impossible.

Except, either God is like me in that He is too stubborn to admit that He has made a mistake, or He knows something we don’t. He rebooted His creation, but saved some of the corrupted file on a memory stick and reinstalled it after his system was clean. Not only that, He promises He will never restart again.

Genesis 8:21 (after Noah comes out of the ark): “The Lord said to Himself, ‘I will never again curse the ground on account of man, for the intent of man’s heart is evil from his youth; and I will never again destroy every living thing, as I have done.” Even though man is evil, God will never again destroy Him.

Following this admission of man’s helplessly sinful state, God does something even more surprising: He renews man’s authority over the new earth.

“And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. The fear of you and the terror of you will be on every beast of the earth and on every bird of the sky; with everything that creeps on the ground, and all the fish of the sea, into your hand they are given. Every moving thing that is alive shall be food for you; I give all to you, as I gave the green plant’ ” (Gen. 9:1-3).

God is, if anything, giving man more power over the earth than He did in the first place. Now the animals are ours, not only to rule, but to eat as well.

God continues, “ ‘Whoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed, for in the image of God He made man’ ” (Gen. 9:6). This phrase refers back to Genesis Chapter 1, when man was the crowning glory of creation. God remembers the first magnificence even now, after it has been marred seemingly beyond all repair, and He is willing to honor the people who have become evil.

This new covenant, the first between God and fallen man, is more incredible than the first gesture of giving Adam paradise to rule. The prince has turned out to be spoiled, eager to exploit his kingdom in every way so that his wants can be fulfilled. But the King does not disown him; He acknowledges kinship even with this shameful child, and renews His promise to make the prince a king over his own kingdom.

“God said, ‘This is the sign of the covenant which I am making between Me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all successive generations; I set My bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a sign of a covenant between Me and the earth. It shall come about, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow will be seen in the cloud, and I will remember My covenant, which is between Me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and never again shall the water become a flood to destroy all flesh’ ” (Gen. 9:12-15). The heavenly hunter hangs up his bow as a sign of good will, so that he can no longer shoot arrows down on those who have disobeyed him.

This is the first of the Bible's long series of incidences where man's evil is countered by God's mercy.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Beginnings

by Elanor

Peter says your view of God changes when you get married. I find this to be true, and the change has affected every aspect of my relationship with God. When I was at Wheaton shortly after starting to date Edwin, I saw evidence of the change in that there was another person who joined God in the background of my mind in everything I did. When I came back to San Jose and started spending all my time with Edwin, the change was even more apparent because I found I did not know how to relate to God anymore. I didn’t talk to Him in the same way I used to. I would try to ask Him questions as I usually do, but I found my questions almost always redirected towards Edwin, who would answer them with wisdom and understanding. It was strange.

I think a large part of the strangeness came from being in between singlehood and marriage. I didn’t particularly like the in between part: both Edwin and I wanted to be married right away so that the whole awkwardness of boundaries would be over. Now that I am married, I think my relationship with God is becoming clearer.

Everyone has been asking me how it feels to be married. In many ways, it feels exactly the same as being single. But in this way, it feels completely different: I see myself having to learn everything over again in terms of how to relate to God. It is as though the ties I had with Him have been all knotted together, and I have to untangle them to put them back in their proper places. But I know that, after I have gone and done over again the work I have been doing for the past three years, I will have covered twice the distance as I did the first time.

I started reading through the Bible in order to help relearn things I once thought I knew, so I thought I would share about what it says to me.

Genesis 1

I would quote the whole chapter, but it would be too long. To get the whole effect, though, read verses 9 through 26 and see how God furnishes a world to make it paradise and then creates a king to rule it.

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth…” Then God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you.” (Gen. 1:26, 29)

I have heard of no other religion which teaches the earth has been given to the human race as a king gives to his son a portion of his kingdom to rule over. C. S. Lewis had it right when he made four ordinary children kings and queens over all of Narnia. For you can see how each person spends his or her life trying to attain mastery over a certain part of this kingdom: as we go and find jobs, as we search for what we’re meant to do in life, we are finding the land where we are to rule. A housewife is the empress of her kitchen, because she knows where each spatula and pan belongs. She fights disorder with cleanliness so that her kingdom can produce food.

An electrician might not have read much literature and he might not know a thing about biology, but when he is called in to fix a circuit board, his feelings of inadequacy are replaced by confidence, because this is where his expertise lies, this is what he knows and rules over.

You can see where things have gone wrong by looking at how people treat one another. We have mistaken the gift of the planet for the gift of all the people on the planet. Too often, the search for mastery consists of trying to subdue other people to our rule. We must learn from St. Francis of Assissi, who “treated the whole mob of men as a mob of kings” (G. K. Chesterton). We must submit to one another in love as we are learning to master the earth.

This is not to say we can do whatever we want to the planet, either. Bad kings exploit their kingdoms to line their palaces with gold. Good kings are no less in charge of their kingdoms, but they rule them for the purpose of bringing out the best in their lands. We should be good kings, not because we are stewards who are afraid of punishment when the Master returns, but because it makes us happy to see our kingdoms prosper. God has given us a gift: He’s not going to ask for it back.