Then the Lord said to Moses, "Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole; and it shall be that everyone who is bitten, when they look at it, shall live." Numbers 21.8 I was really stuck with this one for a while... both the verse and the comments just confused me a little, and I wasn't really hearing anything in them. So first off, I want to share that experience because that's ok - especially those who are creative among us, we often expect ourselves to come up with all the ideas always. And sometimes that comes from other people expecting that of us! That we can turn any topic or comment into something creative, or that we have a view on everything that they want to hear. Well often; but not always. And that's ok.
This has been my experience with studying the Bible too. Sometimes, some texts are just confusing. I pray for God to explain to me what they mean, or how they could possibly show the God that the rest of the Bible says God is, and who Jesus - the Word become flesh - shows God is! But I don't get the answer. That's ok too. God will speak to me in that passage when God knows I'm ready or I need it. So first off, don't be afraid to park things for a while - somewhere you can come back to them, again and again, but not somewhere you're anxiously seeing them all the time and worrying about your lack of inspiration! Secondly - this image. When I kept coming back to my church's post for today, there was one line that the imagery stood out to me. It was talking about the story that comes before the above verse, where the people had done wrong, and this is what had made a way for the snakes that were biting and killing them all to come into the camp. And they came, all together, and corporately confessed what they'd done, crying out to God, realising that what they did had caused this bad thing to happen. And their deep introspection and genuine remorse and pain and suffering moved God to act. Then that imagery I was talking about: 'We too can move heaven during this lockdown...' I think the rest of the image speaks for itself. Stay safe, and take care!
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But I trust in you, O LORD; I say, "You are my God." My times are in your hand; rescue me from everything against me! Psalm 31.14-15 (ESV + translation mine) Today, the other of our pastors shared this verse. She was thinking about when she had a scare recently - which I know many can relate to, especially those who live with vulnerable people at the moment. She wrote:
'Let's make time to sit with God and ask Him to strengthen our trust in Him. And to lead us to passages in His Word, that will deepen that trust. For when I was scared, God led me to the above verse. He reminded me that my life, and your life too, is not in the clutches of Coronavirus, but safe, in the Hands of the God who will always do what is best for us.' So I made that time, and I pictured what God's hands might look like. Often, myself included, we imagine God's hands holding us. Probably from the kids' church 'He's Got the Whole World in his Hands' over and over again, drilled into us!! But today as I sat, I saw God's hands extending outwards from me, in all directions. Holding life at bay. One hand cupped above my head, the other ready to catch me if I needed it - like when you're walking along a balance beam or a slack line and you get someone to walk along beside you holding out their arm, nearly touching you, but not quite. Like that. Just in case. One hand pointing out forwards, hands blocking danger from front and back, curling and reading to protect from left and right. "In your hands" indeed - right in the centre of all God's hands! "My times are in your hand" - there is nothing that God doesn't know about, doesn't go through with me, and doesn't see coming. Let's make time to sit with God and ask him to strengthen our trust in him. And to lead us to passages in the Bible that will deepen that trust. And then to help us picture in our minds - in words, images, objects, stories - what that looks like, for us, today. Hang in there, everyone. Stay safe, and take care! Put yourself aside long enough to help others get ahead, and look out for each other, like they are the most important. Philippians 2.3-4 (translation mine) My church has started sending out daily thoughts to guide our hearts and minds back to God during this time of self-isolation, social-distancing and insecurity of what this will all mean for the future. They're callled 'LOOK UP IN LOCKDOWN' and I don't know who came up with that idea, but I love it. I'm someone who can sometimes feel swallowed up because I'm looking so intently at what's around me, or going over and over again in my head what's within me, and it's all - in my opinion - highly stress inducing.
Last week I was struggling with back pain (let's just say my home is not yet Work-From-Home-ready...), and that along with the constant changes in what we were or weren't allowed to do left me feeling frustrated and easily annoyed. I was sad that I wouldn't be able to see anyone outside of my house, and afraid that it'll last a long time. I tried to busy myself thinking of all these things I could do in my house, but every time I tried to do any of them for any length of time, my back pain got worse. I was at breaking point. And then I read these words in the first instalment of LOOK UP IN LOCKDOWN (and had some solid help (pushing!) from my husband yesterday to do something I enjoyed and which gave joy to others): "...in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of others." (Philippians 2.3-4, NIV) This is the picture it produced in my mind. A woman who's put aside the thoughts of herself, the things to do with her appearance, her actions, what others think, what others see. All that is hung up on the fence, while she gets dirty for something all can enjoy. There are many ways we can think highly of others and do things for others. My favourite right now is baking - what's yours? But my favourite part of this verse, when I looked into it, is that where we usually read it as "not looking to your own interests but the interests of others..." - the word in Greek means "not watching out for yourself, but each [watching out for] others". That's what I translated it 'look out for each other'. Who can you be looking out for this week? Those in your house? Those who might not be in a house with anyone right now? People you can message, call, email, check-in with. Look out for each other. God knows we need more of that right now. Stay safe, and take care! "Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, clear as glass, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life, with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations." (Revelation 22.1-2) "All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again. All things are wearisome, more than one can say." (Ecclesiastes 1.7-8a) Water is ubiquitous. There is water we need to drink. Where I live, there is often water that falls from the sky, pin-pricks spiking through my clothes as I cycle and as clouds begin to let go. There is water we wash in. There is water that seeps out of the corners of our eyes when things become too sad, or too happy, or too overwhelming, or too disappointing. There is water that powers across the sea, crashing as waves against rocks, or cliffsides, or beaches. Water that wears down the land itself. There is water in streams, and lakes. There is water locked up in glaciers and ice-caps. There is water melting, tumbling, crashing. Sometimes life can be like water. Like everything is moving, cycling, yet necessary. What do you think? If all that I do goes into the world, yet the world is never full (complete, perfect, right, better), why do I bother? Ecclesiastes 1.7-8a. When all things are more wearisome than one can say, what keeps us going? Perhaps the utopian images of "something better" that we cling to, even if we are unable to say how it could become reality. And then we believe, somewhere deep inside us, that there can be life-giving water, that tears can be no more, that fruit can grow and sustain all year round, and that nations can be healed. Revelation 22.1-2. They are both here. We know the world is too broken for us to be able to fix it, but we also know that we've got to live this life as if we're trying to - or what's the point? This is metamodern. This is what a large majority of millennials and gen-z's feel. But it feels almost as if we're crashing around, tumbling and melting like ice-caps when we feel this way. We keep our heads above water, but only just. And what do we miss while we're so intent on surviving it? Sometimes, in the midst of it all, I need another lens through which to look.
There will be time again to fight the wrong things in the world. There will be time again to realise the world is beyond my power to fix. There will be time again to decide to keep trying to do good anyway.
But there needs to be time for silence, and to be still. Christmas has been a little different for me this year. Different to how it had been before, not worse, still good, just different. I grew up in a family that loves Christmas! It has always been a time of year for me which was just special, when we tried to remember the extra-ordinary ways that God works and interacts in our, often tiringly ordinary, world. My family would spend a lot of time at church and with extended family, and on Christmas Eve, we’d go back to our house and my sisters and I would pretend we were so tired that we needed to go right to bed, where we would sneak into whoever’s room was biggest and tidiest (my parents equally pretending they didn’t know we did it). We would stay up until we couldn’t, laughing, telling stories, retelling old stories, laughing some more, trying to hold in the laughter while my dad went around the landing putting our stockings on our door handles, despite knowing most of those rooms were unoccupied. And then we’d wake up early on Christmas day to share in gift-giving together before walking down to church in our new Christmas socks to share in joy and happiness and love and hugs. We would then usually crash out mid-afternoon after the pitiful amount of sleep we’d all gotten the night before.
Most of those things still happened this year, and I got to invite my fiance into some of those joyful moments, so precious to me. But some of them didn’t. Now that me and two of my sisters have moved out, and the other two were back only in the holidays from university, the time I got to spend with them was less. It was just as loud as ever, just as laughter- and love-filled when we were together, but I was only there briefly, and they sometimes had work, and we all decided this was the year we wouldn’t try and stay up all night (not least because I was driving Jordan and myself back to Cambridge in the evening of Christmas day and needed not to be insanely tired for that). But the brief times Jordan and I spent in any one place meant we got to be in more places; I saw friends here over Christmas too, and got to be enveloped in their love as well. And I got to meet Jordan’s grandma, visiting from St. Lucia, pulling me into their family. Extra-ordinary. It wasn’t the same-old. It was a time of meeting God in people God knew and who’d spent variously long lifetimes growing in a relationship with him. So my Christmas this year was quieter. It had much more travel. More people. More places. It was the first Christmas I got to spend in all the same places as Jordan. It was a Christmas in which I got more sleep, one for which I had to be more sensible. One with more space to observe. And I realised, not for the first time and I doubt for the last, that my life is changing again. It’s different to how it was, and it will be more different still. It had been changing for a while too, maybe every moment different from the last, and it was like I’d only just discovered an ability to notice it. An ability I’d almost forgotten I had. The last couple of months have been a whirlwind of settling into a new job and planning a wedding which sucked nearly all my free time into this exciting but exhausting blur of newness and change. (Or tired me out enough anyway that all I wanted to do instead was fall in front of the TV or better my Mario Kart score…) Difference, newness, change - though I clearly profess to and think I love it - is also tiring. This month, my youth group will be looking at the theme ‘I AM’. That great name of God that denotes a God who doesn’t change, never tires; a God who is. In a world of constant change, and in the moments of realisation that things have changed, this is still the name of our God, and a name we need to know. Psalm 9, verse 10 | “And those who know your name put their trust in you, for you, O LORD, have not forsaken those who seek you.” When God names himself, it is not random or trivial, not because he likes the sound of this or that name, or wants to continue a tradition of ancestors. God chooses names for the sake of revealing things about himself that will deepen his people’s understanding of him, faith in him, and love for him. When God gives himself a name in Scripture it is a moment for us, like this Christmas time has been for me, to slow down and observe. So when Moses asks God who he is and God’s answer is, “I AM who I AM” we should take notice. We should ask what this answer reveals about God. We should consider what kind of a God would name himself this. We should observe, and see, and notice why God wants us to know this name in particular for him. When God first shares this name, things had changed for Moses too. He’d grown up in a palace. He’d had everything he’d wanted. He’d never hungered or thirst. He’d learned and read and run and grown. Only one day he’d seen too much - too much injustice - too much that he couldn’t stand by and watch it any longer and he got angry. He felt it wasn’t right. His bones told him it wasn’t fair. His stomach lurched and twisted as he stood there watching the show of inhumanity on these slave people. On a people he knew he’d come from. A people he somehow belonged to. He reacted. He wasn’t proud of it. He tried to hide it, and forget it ever happened. But when someone pointed him out, he knew he couldn’t do that there and so he ran. That’s when things really changed. So now he kept the flock. But he liked it out here. It wasn’t worse, it was still good, just different. Out here he didn’t have to see the things that weren’t right. The things that made his blood run hot, and the sweat bead on the back of his neck. Out here he could go on, not seeing. He didn’t want to be an observer. He was content to not see anything. But one day he observed something he couldn’t not see. Exodus 3, verse 3 | “And Moses said, ‘I will turn aside to see this great sight, why the bush is not burned.’” So POINT NUMBER 1: If we do not turn aside to see where God is, in either the changed situation we find ourselves in, or the one we have built into our comfort zone, we will never even make it to the place where God, in his light, reveals himself to us in just the way we need right then. It is easy to carry on going, doing as we always do. One of the things I love most about the Sabbath, is that it is different time to every other day. It is a defined time for the ‘doing as we always do’ to stop. Moses could’ve carried on, keeping the flock - you see a fire and you keep moving. If I was Moses, I’m not risking going back to my father-in-law to tell him that all his sheep died in a bush fire that I stopped to look at. But every week, we have this different time, where we’re not worried about the same things as every other day (the normal things we have to do for work, the people we want to impress), and I want to use that space to remind myself as much as anyone, to keep on saying throughout each week, ‘I will turn aside to see this great sight.’ Because I want to see where God is here. To slow down, and observe what God is doing in me and around me. Point 1: If we don’t turn aside to see where God is, we will never even make it to the deeper revelation of who God is. Following this turning aside, Moses is invited into God’s presence. To a burning bush that doesn’t burn. He is told he walks on holy ground. He hides his face, afraid to look. But God immediately tells him the reason he’s called out to him - God has seen the suffering, the affliction, the inhumanity that his people are being subjected to in Egypt. The same suffering and inhumanity that Moses saw, and which turned his heart in anger all those years ago. The suffering and inhumanity he’d stopped seeing when he’d restarted his life out here in the hills. Well God has seen it and he says to Moses, “I have come down to deliver them… COME, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.” Exodus 3, verse 10. God says, ‘I have COME DOWN’, he then calls Moses to COME, and he’s calling Moses to come so that he may BRING Israel also. God has come down, to call us to come, so that we might bring others of his children also. I really want you to get this, because this is what God is saying of himself. God doesn’t sit back and orchestrate his plans like a puppet master, or a super long strategy board game. God comes down, then calls us to come, so that we might bring - we’re never alone in that. God has come down first. I’m emphasising that because it’s easy not to get it. We’re like, of course, it’s obvious, we know this, we get it. And sometimes we look on the people God interacts with in the Bible and we think (sometimes I definitely think), ‘Seriously? How could you still be questioning? How could you still not get it?!’ But in reality, we are just the same. We, like Moses, respond as in verse 11: “But Moses said to God, ‘Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?” I’m crying out to Moses, ‘God speaks to you from a burning bush that doesn’t burn and tells you himself that he has come down to deliver his people, and he wants you to come with him to bring them and you still think this has anything at all to do with what you can do?!!’ But in reality, I am just the same. Four years ago I went paintballing for a friend’s birthday in Derbyshire - it was the only time I’ve ever been, so far, and I completely loved it! I was climbing over anything I could, wading through rivers (streams…), dodging and watching and running and crawling. I really liked it. But I remember - to this day - this one moment, just before I got shot in the leg 3 times (at close enough range for it to sting and leave a nice array of bruises for a few days!). I was behind a tree, and I was looking forward, where what I was trying to reach was behind a little house-style wall. But there was someone crouching in the window, firing at me. And then someone else who I’d failed to notice started firing at me from the right. And I couldn’t be behind the tree in both directions, and I couldn’t fire back in both directions, but there was nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. I remember it so well. I wasn’t scared of being hit, that had already happened that day, and it didn’t really hurt, but my heart was beating fast because in that moment I couldn’t work out a way through this. I knew I couldn’t do anything. I knew I wasn’t equipped for this, wasn’t trained for it, and I was all alone, too far ahead of my team to even hope for anything that could save me. I was the only one there, and in that short moment, I was overwhelmed by my own inability to do what I wanted to do. The difference is that when God comes down and calls us to come too, there will never be that moment when there isn’t somebody there who’s got our back, and our above, below, left, right and ahead. So POINT NUMBER 2 is this: We don’t need to depend on ourselves, when God calls us to come. When it is God we’re seeking, we will not be forsaken. I do know this. I’m sure you too do know this. But I still get that same feeling sometimes. When I witness God’s love being quashed in favour of power, or hatred, or greed, or conflict, and I want to change it, and I want to make the world better, somehow, but I can’t think of anyway that could ever happen. And suddenly I’m behind that tree again, and I sink down, my heart pounding. But if the story of Jesus coming down, a story as long as time, tells me anything, it reminds me of our God who surprises people with hope time and time again. As God interacted with the patriarchs, spoke through the prophets, shouted to clear the way through John the Baptist, was born to a teenage girl, taught teachers new ways, brought healing where unfairness only had been known, died on a cross so that I could be free, and rose again to declare victory - that God is also with me. So that even if we feel pinned behind a tree, with nowhere to go and nothing to do but wait for the inevitable, God is beside us, as if from everywhere, surprising us as always, illuminating a way to bring love and peace and joy and hope to that situation too. Point 2: We don’t need to depend on ourselves, when it is God we are seeking. Then of course we get to the crescendo of the story we are looking at. God tells Moses to come, Moses questions, ‘Who am I…?’ and God tells him “But I will be with you,” then Moses questions again, ‘And who are you?’ Exodus 3, verses 13-15 | “Then Moses said to God, ‘If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name? what shall I say to them?’ God said to Moses, ‘I AM WHO I AM.’ And he said, ‘Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’ God also said to Moses, ‘Say this to the people of Israel: ‘The LORD, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.’” In verse 14, God calls himself by the Hebrew word ‘I AM’ or ‘I WILL BE’ (as those tenses are the same in ancient Hebrew) in the first person, ‘I AM.’ And in verse 15, he gives the most common name he is ever called in Hebrew Scripture: the tetragrammaton. Sometimes Christians have called this name Yahweh or Jehovah, supplying vowels that make sense to a word without them. Jews viewed this word as so holy, that they wouldn’t even read it and so when they came to this word in Scripture, they said ‘Adonai,’ a word for an exalted Lord, hence in our English translation the word is translated as LORD, but in all-caps, to show where it is a translation from this name. But these two names are intrinsically linked. They come from the same stem: ‘I AM’: ‘eh.weh; ‘HE IS’: ya.weh. The consonants in these two words, and the way they are interchangeably used in these verses, show us that whenever we see LORD in all-caps, that name of God has something to do with this story where God responds to the question ‘Who are you?’ by saying, “I AM WHO I AM.” But what can we know about a God who answers that ‘he is who he is’? What does ‘I AM’ tell us about God? At this point in Israel’s history, the Israelites had been in Egypt for around 400 years. They had become slaves and were severely oppressed. All they knew about God was what he had done for their ancestors. The only promises they knew of were the ones to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, told of around the dinner table and in quiet corners by beds at night. They needed to know that God had not changed and neither had his promises. The name I AM tells of a God who IS. A God who exists with nothing that brought him to exist. If you asked me how I got to be who I am, I could point to a hundred moments that shaped me, I could tell of my parents who begot me and formed me, I could tell of friends and teachers and church members who taught me, I could tell of a God who planned me and created me. When God was asked, he said, ‘I AM WHO I AM.’ God is who he has always been, and will always be. God IS, and therefore doesn’t change in the ways we do. Objectivity - is crucial here. It’s important that we believe in an objective truth beyond our own subjective feelings or desires. It’s very important, of course, that we know that this objective truth is beyond us, and we don’t confuse our own ideas and make ourselves the objective truth in our eyes - but we must know that God is unchangingly true, always. We may desire God to be a certain way, or we may feel that God can’t possibly be as some people say, but none of that changes who God is. Our calling as God’s people and God’s creatures is to strive to know him for who he is, not who we’d like him to be. So POINT NUMBER 3: God IS. We can always depend on God because God doesn’t depend on anything else to exist and God doesn’t change, regardless of what we think or feel. Only when we know that God is both truth and here can we trust him whether we are joyous celebrants, settling into our comfort zone, captive slaves, or on a mission. For us, things change all the time. But in each change, God remains. Point 3: God IS: God is here, and God’s truth doesn’t change. There is one final important point when we talk of our God, I AM. In John, chapter 8, verses 56-59, Jesus says, “‘Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad.’ So the Jews said to him, ‘You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?’ Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.’ So they picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple.” This God - this God who answers when asked and reveals when people seek him - has drawn near not only to Moses, but also to us in Jesus Christ. This God who is here and who is truth that doesn’t change, is revealed to us, and draws close to where we are, in Jesus Christ who went as far as dying for us, so that we could know God with us, Emmanuel. Point 1: If we don’t turn aside to see where God is, we will never make it to the deeper revelation of who God is. Point 2: We don’t need to depend on ourselves, when it is God we are seeking. And point 3: God IS: God is here, and God’s truth doesn’t change. As we begin a new year let us restate our faith in our God, I AM. Let us commit ourselves to the habit of regularly turning aside to see where God is and grow into a deeper understanding of who he is. Let us push forward, not depending on ourselves, but trusting that when we are seeking God, we will not be left behind, or forgotten. Let us know, with our whole hearts, our whole souls and our whole minds that God IS here, and God IS unchanging truth, and may knowing this deeply fill us with Love of God and love for others. I pray this prayer today. Amen. |
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AuthorI'm a recent Cambridge Theology graduate now studying for a Masters in Biblical Studies and blogging about all sorts of things! I'm interested in faith, Church, theology, social action, the great outdoors and being creative, and all of those things - along with many more - come through in my posts!
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