Essays

For five days and most of a sixth, God creates at the sound of His own voice. "Let there be light," and there was light. Let there be an expanse, and the waters divided. Let the earth sprout, let the lights be set in their places, let the waters swarm, let the earth bring forth living creatures. Command after command executed at a distance, worlds ordered by a word, and never once does the text show God touching what He makes.

There are stretches in the Christian life when everything seems to go wrong at once. Not one trial, arriving alone and departing before the next, but many at the same time, each one landing before the last can be dealt with, until the days stop feeling like separate difficulties and start feeling like a single sustained one. None of the pieces alone would be worth writing about. Together they can feel like a pressure cooker, every source of strain sealed into the same pot at the same time, squeezing out whatever composure a person had left.

"But God." More often than not, a believer says these words standing on the far side of some hardship, surveying the ground he has crossed, in awe of God who brought him through it all. That praise is right and good; God is indeed in control and orchestrates every outcome of everything that takes place, and He alone is worthy of praise. Joseph offers these two words to the brothers who sold him into slavery. Asaph offers them after his faith has nearly given way. To say "but God" over the wreckage of a hard providence is not wishful thinking; it is worship, the worship which comes from a soul that has seen whose hand was governing everything the whole time.

There is a question that most Christians would rather not be asked directly: how well do you actually know your Bible? The question is uncomfortable because most of us already know the answer. We know the familiar passages. We can find the Psalms and the Gospels. We have a handful of verses committed to memory, usually the ones that comfort us, and we return to them the way a person returns to the same chair in the same room. The chair is good. There is nothing wrong with the chair. The problem is that God gave us a house, and we have only been living in one room.

Most of us could recite the command from memory. "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another" (John 13:34, ESV). We learned it in Sunday school. We have seen it on bumper stickers and coffee mugs, usually abbreviated to the point where the second half disappears. Love one another. It sounds gentle, manageable, the kind of thing decent people already do. But Jesus does not say "love one another." He says "love one another just as I have loved you."

We often read the Old Testament as a story about human failure. Israel sins. Israel is judged. Israel repents. God relents. And then, inevitably, Israel sins again. We read the cycle in Judges and shake our heads at a stiff-necked people who never seem to learn. We walk away feeling the weight of it, maybe even a kind of exhaustion on God's behalf, as though He were putting up with His people rather than delighting in them.