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Posts Tagged ‘God’


Our women’s ministry is called WOW- Women of the Word, indicating our desires for them to be women in whom the Word of Christ dwells richly. So when Crossway sent me a copy of Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds by Jen Wilkin (ebook), I was a little intrigued.

Last year I brought our men through Bible Study so they would learn how to study and teach the Bible. WOW is much shorter, and seeks to address things from a woman’s perspective (lots of illustrations I wouldn’t understand) while also offering some warnings against “feminizing” it. She does want them to remember it was written to both men and women.

Overall I thought it was a good book to help women dig deeper into the Scriptures. She was quite clear, succinct (I could learn from this) and interesting (probably more so if I were a woman and was familiar with things like rhumba tights). Her study plan is really about depth and she makes some wise warnings about how this all takes time. Her goal is for women to use this method in their personal study or when studying a book of the Bible as a group.

She starts with what she calls a series of “turn arounds” or ways in which she was reading things wrong and needing to begin reading them. She also realized that the Bible is primarily about God (and secondarily about us), the mind matters because it transforms the heart. These are two important things to know or you will make the Bible into a self-help book meant to make you feel good. This is the ever-present danger of therapeutic moral deism.

“But our insecurities, fears, and doubts can never be banished by knowledge of who we are. They can only be banished by the knowledge of ‘I am.'”

Her second chapter is “The Case for Biblical Literacy”. She wants women to develop a working knowledge of the whole Bible, how it all fits together, instead of a patchwork understanding (similar to one developed by children’s SS lessons and a steady diet of topical preaching).

“Sound Bible study transforms the heart by training the mind and it places God at the center of the story. But sound Bible stud does more than that- it leaves the student with a better understanding of the Bible than she had when we started. Stated another way, sound Bible study increases Bible literacy.”

She lays out a few bad methods. In the Xanax approach, you are looking to take away bad feelings, and look for just the right passage. It makes the Bible about you instead of to you. There is the Pinball approach in which you bounce around like a pinball without any thought to the context and purpose (and therefore the meaning) of a text. There is the Magic 8 Ball approach where we simply look for what to do in a crisis rather than learning who we are to be in Christ. The Holy Spirit transforms us.

Bible literacy, she rightly argues, keeps us from falling into error. If we know the whole of Scripture we can notice if someone is abusing a part of Scripture. We will also be better prepared to answer the charges of our critics. Bible literacy is not developed overnight. It takes time to read for both breadth (devotionally) and depth (study). It takes reading the whole Bible repeatedly to see patterns, references and allusions to other passages. It takes years, and in our microwave society most people don’t want to invest that kind of time unless they grasp how important it is. Perhaps I’m weird, but no one told me to do this. I just did it.

Her plan or method is to study with the 5 P’s: Purpose, Perspective, Patience, Process and Prayer. Much of what she lays out is what a pastor regularly does in sermon preparation minus the crafting of said sermon.

Purpose is important. It is about understanding the purpose of the Scriptures AND the purpose of that particular portion of Scripture. As a whole the Bible is about redemption, a redemption story. Particular passages are stories of redemption within the story of redemption. They progressively reveal God’s greatness and the greatness of His plan. We begin to look for how each text fits into the whole text instead of viewing it as an isolated, independent text.

Perspective is asking questions of the text to understand its purpose which will help you understand its meaning in due time. This is the process of understanding the historical and cultural context of the particular book. We want to see it, as best we can, as the original audience did instead of just putting our 21st century American presuppositions and experience on the text. We did much of this in English class as we studied literature. Who wrote it? When? Why? To whom was it written? What genre or style?

Patience remembers that digging deep takes time and effort. It is applying the concept of delayed gratification to Bible study. We remember that our efforts have a cumulative effect. We will have to be patient with ourselves. We will fail. We will find reasons to not study on a particular day. We will discover we have grossly misunderstood texts. We will have to be patient with the process, refusing to take short cuts. There will be patience with our circumstances which may present hindrances to study. There will be plenty of reasons for patience.

“Could it be that feeling lost is one way God humbles us when we come to his Word, knowing that in due time he will exalt our understanding?”

Process is the main portion of the larger plan. This is the nitty-gritty. She wants women to own the text through lots of hard work. Owning it means understanding its original meaning, attempting to interpret it and then make application from it. She wants you to read it repeatedly so you notice the flow of the argument or story (depending on the genre). She wants you to break out the colored pencils/pens (on a copy of the text) to note verb tenses (yes, they matter), subjects and all that grammar jazz. Yes, she wants you to outline the passage and put notes in the margin of that copy of the text. She wants you to compare different translations and see why they differ (when they do). She wants you to crack open a dictionary to understand words that are used that you don’t commonly use. Yes, this is hard work and not always exciting but if we want to understand a text’s original meaning (what it says) it is necessary work.

We then move to interpretation or what the text means. She wants you to hold off on the commentaries until you develop your own interpretation. I’ve seen others say the same thing. Generally that is a good idea. But sometimes you do struggle with “what it says”. Commentaries aren’t just interpretations, but also help us get what it says because sometimes the text is hard to discern, or parts of it. It is important to read 2-3 commentaries so you don’t fall into a cult of personality (“well, Bultmann says” repeated ad nauseum). There is more hard work here: looking at cross references, paraphrasing and just plain thinking. Yes, sometimes you just sit there and think (also known as meditating on the Word of God).

Once you know what it says, and what it means you can ask how it applies. What am I to believe about God? What am I to believe about myself? What does God call me to do in dependence upon Him? This takes thinking about the text, myself and my circumstances.

Prayer is a short chapter. The point is we are to pray all through the process, knowing that we need the Spirit’s help to illuminate the Scriptures so we can understand the Word, ourselves and our circumstances (yes, I’m adding a little Frame to her thoughts).

She then has a chapter in which she demonstrates her process using James 1. This way you can see it in action and have a better idea of what she has been talking about. The book concludes with some encouragement for teachers in how to bring the fruit of this into a group setting, and then a call to seek God. The purpose of all this is to know God, not just gather information.

This is a good introduction. I would quibble with some of the books she recommends because of the theological commitments and method of interpretation used which I think distorts the Scriptures. Yes, I’m talking Dispensationalism. I’m not saying she is a dispensationalist particularly since focusing on the whole story is more of a covenantal perspective of Scripture (which focuses on the unity of Scripture). Just one of those weird things that passes through my mind.

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I don’t actually go to the movies very often. Way too expensive to happen as often as when I was younger. So, I wait for the movies that beg for the big screen: action. The Avengers is one of those movies whose siren call I could not resist. And I was not disappointed.

I really wasn’t into comic books as a kid. Some of my friends were. The medium was just lost on me. Seemed too much like the children’s books. I don’t know. But I’ve always enjoyed the movies starting with the Superman series when I was a teenager. Okay, just the first two. Did they make any others?

This year will be comic book hero heaven as they wrap up the Batman series, re-boot the Spider-Man series with a darker take (why did they do this again?) and introduce The Avengers series. They have been building toward this with the 2 Iron Man movies and then both Thor and Captain America last year. Those two movies introduce some key elements to the plot of The Avengers. I only saw Captain America, but I was fully able to follow along with what was happening in The Avengers. Some of the other characters appeared in some of the Iron Man movies.

Mark Ruffalo is in there, somewhere

So, you walk into the movie having back stories on some of the Avengers. This is the third movie for Hulk, and the third actor playing him. The second was essentially a reboot of the first (and much better). Edward Norton did a great job as Hulk, but apparently fans just miss Bill and Lou because Hulk, despite his incredible strength and jumping ability can’t get off the ground as a series of movies. Enter Mark Ruffalo with his take on Hulk (this is turning into the first Batman movie series: both Kilmer and Keaton were very good, and Clooney utterly horrendous). It is almost like the other two movies didn’t exist. Mark is sort of the hippie Hulk. The laid-back genius who is supposedly angry all the time. He was better than Eric Bana, but … Apparently I am in the minority because Ruffalo has been signed to additional movies. Sadly, Edward Norton has gone the way of Val Kilmer: a great actor with a bad reputation for working well with others (rumor has it, that in Val’s case the directors probably should have listened to him more often but you know how that goes).

Hawkeye and Black Widow share a moment

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I’m not sure why I watched it to begin with. I suppose it was because of the commercials on the Comcast On-Demand this summer. I’m not really into zombies but I thought I’d watch the first episode. And I was hooked. I quickly watched the rest of the first season.

The Walking Dead has zombies in it, but it really isn’t about zombies. It is about people- humanity. What drew me in originally was Rick’s quest to find his family. Rick was a deputy who was shot during an arrest. He woke up from a coma to a whole new world he didn’t understand. His town was a ghost town aside from the walking dead who moved in herds. But he knew his family was alive and took some guns to go looking for them.

The show took some interesting looks at morality in extreme circumstances. This is a situation in which there is no law and order. The creatures who are trying to eat you used to be people. It is not like war where they have a different language, form of government or religion. These people used to be your neighbors. In the premiere, they showed a man conflicted about shooting the zombie who used to be his wife. He wanted to end her misery, but he still saw her. This show is not about killing zombies. It is about the living.

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My first series at Desert Springs will be Foundations of the Faith from Genesis.  I’ll be spending 3 weeks on Genesis 1 (I’ll be moving more quickly through the rest of Genesis).

The first week I’ll be focusing on what it says about God (communicating Frame’s Lordship attributes).  The second week will focus on creation.  And the third will focus on humanity and the creation mandate.

There are many interesting questions to ponder or address from this chapter and these topics.  Here is some of what I’ll be using.

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While we are away, I thought I’d work my way through Job, again.  It can be a good place to go when you are suffering precisely because it doesn’t offer prepackaged answers.  It is not all neat and tidy.  He’s in pain and becomes confused at points.  His friends are not quite helpful.  They speak truth, but not the right truth- it was not true in Job’s situation and as a result was not loving.

Job 1-2 set the stage for this theodicy (defense of God).  Job does not know why all these horrible things happened to him.  We know since the author gives us access to the heavenly council.  But Job never knows.

This is instructive to us.  We usually don’t know why we suffer.  Oh, he knew about the Sabeans, Chaldeans and “natural disasters”.  But our souls long for something more than evil guys and a fallen world.

At first Job was ‘content’ to worship and trust God.  He exhibited great faith, boldly acknowledging that God is ultimately at work.  He suffers from a wife who like Peter had the wrong things in mind.  She tempts him to ‘curse God and die.’  In other words, ‘get it over with, God obviously hates you.’

Job’s friends, seeing how devastated he is, sit silently with him for a whole week.  This was the wisest thing they did- it all goes downhill from there.  But it is Job who breaks the silence…

With his first speech, we move into wisdom literature in poetic form.  Lots of white space as my professors used to say.  Flowerly language and lots of word pictures.  Definitely not succint.  Job curses the day he was born.  He does not curse God, but rather himself.  He wished he had never been born rather than suffer these devastating losses.  He buried all his children and was immediately bankrupt.  It was an incredibly profound reversal of fortunes.  He is understandably upset.  At this moment, all the years of good fortune seem insignificant.

This is what we often do in those moments.  The scales seems quite unbalanced and we lose all objectivity.  I’m not poking a finger at Job here.  I do this- we all do this.  We are people of the moment.  Life is as life currently is- apart from the sustaining grace of God to keep it all in context.  His greatest fears have come upon him!

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In Book I, chapter III of The Institutes of the Christian Religion Calvin begins to discuss the knowledge of God.  In this chapter he says that knowledge of God was naturally implanted in the minds of people.  This would be a result of our being made in the image of God.  Since we are made to reflect Him, we know He exists and something of His glory.  God put it there when He made us.

On an interesting note, Calvin uses many ancient philosphers to make some of his points- both positively and negatively.  He uses the philosophers, like Cicero, to show how people think.  This is no different from what Tim Keller does in The Reason for God.  No group of people is documented to be a society of atheists.  Is this because all cultures got a memo to socially construct a ‘god’, or because God has made us religious by nature and we must worship something?  Though some seek to flee from the notion of a God, they still show signs of His existence like guilt, shame, ethics etc.

In chapter IV Calvin asserts that this knowledge is smothered or corrupted.  This is essentially Romans 1, people choose the lie over the truth just as Adam and Eve did.  We suppress the true knowledge of God through our own unrighteousness whether we are trying to do that or not.

Some people consciously turn away from God.  Others inadvertintly do this because they fashion a god according to their own imagination.  They create idols according to their own whimsy instead of submitting their minds and hearts to God’s revelation of Himself in Jesus and Scripture.

Scripture does point us someplace beside itself to gain knowledge of God.  In chapter V Calvin discusses how knowledge of God is found in creation and providence.  Psalm 19 is one of the places pointing us to the heavens, which declare the glories of God.  Romans 1 tells us that creation reveals His invisible qualities.  The process, Calvin is in favor of scientific inquiry to understand God’s creation.  Christians should not be afraid of science or not engage in science.  Rather we should engage in science, though with different presuppositions than non-Christian scientists.  As we gain true knowledge of creation, we gain true knowledge of the Creator.

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