An Unlikely Hero - Throwing Out a Fleece
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger. We’re still missing Bryan Broome, but we’re planning to have him back with us next week.
We’re in the middle of the story of Gideon. We’ve reached the point where he throws out a fleece. In common parlance, throwing out a fleece would be like proposing a test to find out the will of God regarding a certain thing. Is that what Gideon is doing?
There’s something in that, I think, that’s ironically fitting here. At this point Gideon has got his whole hometown and his family on his side, and the tribes of Asher, Zebulun, and Naphtali, so he’s got a pretty good-sized army, and yet there’s a hesitation.
Gideon said unto God, if thou wilt save Israel by mine hand, as thou hast said, behold, I will put a fleece of wool in the floor (threshing floor), and if the dew be on the fleece only and it be dry upon all the earth beside, then shall I know that thou wilt save Israel by mine hand, as thou hast said. And it was so, for he rose up early on the morrow and thrust the fleece together and wringed the dew out of the fleece, a bowl full of water.
And Gideon said unto God, “Let not thine anger be hot against me, and I will speak but this once. Let me prove, I pray thee, but this once with the fleece. Let it now be dry only upon the fleece, and upon all the ground let there be dew. And God did so that night, for it was dry upon the fleece only, and there was dew on all the ground.
This is the first time I’ve actually noticed how many times it says, “As thou hast said…as thou hast said…”
Yeah, God has already told him that he’s going to deliver the Midianites into his hand, and Gideon acknowledges this at least twice. So the question comes up, “Didn’t Gideon set out a fleece to know the will of God?” No, he knew the will of God. He was after something else.
He says very plainly, “I know what you said,” so the divine revelation was already verbal revelation, propositional revelation. “I will do this for you. This is what will be the result to the Midianites,” and yet Gideon, as it were, puts God to the test.
We need to remember that Gideon was raised in a household where Baal was central. As is often true today and was often true more in my generation perhaps and the one just before, it is and was common enough to give lip service to God who made the world, God who has a good purpose in everything, God who is love, God who made you special…
And loves you very much, and that’s about it. Someone has called it therapeutic deism. But in terms of everyday stuff, depending on your leanings we turn either to natural law, science, the forces of nature conceived of as abstract forces and principles at work in the universe, and strangely enough it is a universe, although God doesn’t seem to be the unifying factor here – or if you have more a New Age mentality there are spirit guides and exalted masters and other ilk of spirits and powers that you can appeal to.
In other words, God is great as kind of a limiting concept or as a safety net for your system so that if anyone ever asks you, you can admit that there is meaning back of all this somewhere somehow, that it is in fact a universe for some reason. But in terms of normal everyday life, God recedes into the background and there are other forces that are closer at hand and that we are much more concerned with.
For some strange reason I’m thinking of the children’s TV show, Jonny Quest, which came out in the ‘60s. Are you familiar with it?
You should. It was very well-done for what it was. The father is a scientist. He’s a top scientist apparently because he has to be guarded by some kind of American intelligence agent 24 hours a day, but the hero is the son Jonny, who’s 10 or 12, someplace in there, and his friend who’s kind of adopted into the family at some point named Hadji.
I remember an episode – and it’s strange that when I was a kid this was still a thing – and there was a scene where the boys are kneeling down by their bed and praying as they go to bed. It’s a nod of some sort to family values. Yes, even scientists acknowledge there’s a God of some sort. But if you watched the entire series we get the idea that there are rights and wrongs, and that there are some things worth risking your life for, but as far as I remember there’s no other mention of religion or religious philosophy. It’s just “science will solve all of our problems,” and I think that was pretty typical of the generation just before mine.
Your generation discovered that science couldn’t solve all of your problems.
Yeah, pretty much. The same thing shows up in old TV shows. The only TV show I know of today – and I don’t know many – where you see prayer going on is Blue Bloods. They are explicitly Roman Catholic.
It’s in New York. Tom Selleck leads the cast, and once you get into it it’s pretty good. I think they’re better than typical Catholics in very strong values. The family goes to church together, but even more of a ritual is “and afterwards we all go over to dad’s house, and grandpa is also there, and we all have family dinner together and everyone is expected to be there and we all love each other. Even when we’re having personal feuds, we come and try to bury them and get along with each other because this is what’s important,” and they pray every single time.
Of course, there’s the crossing yourself in Roman Catholic fashion, and some of the prayers are less than orthodox, shall we say. At one point, one of the young ladies says, “Ooo, I just learned a Buddhist prayer. Can I do that?” and the answer is, “Sure.” There was a time when families praying was not absent from TV.
Here are two odd examples. In The Brady Bunch the family did go to church, because at one time the mom was supposed to sing in church and lost her voice. It was for a Christmas concert so the whole show was about that. “Can Santa Claus get her her voice back so she can sing?” That was weird.
The TV sci-fi show, Lost in Space, before it got very silly, the first few episodes were pretty serious. There’s a point when the family has escaped danger and they all kneel down and the father pulls out a book, presumably the Bible, and leads the family. We’re kind of at a distance and we don’t really hear what’s going on, but I think they said something like it was time to give thanks or something like that, an echo of the original Swiss Family Robinson – the Space Family Robinson.
There was still in that generation room for this sort of thing where you would acknowledge God, and yet ultimately when it came down to, “But who made the world and how…” then “Well, let’s talk about evolution and let’s talk about forces and let’s talk about biological necessity and biochemical conditioning” and all the blah blah blah. Science steps in, not that it doesn’t have a place, but it more and more became a dominant factor in American thinking until the ‘60s.
Then we had the backlash with flower children and all of that. “No, science has created this horrible impersonal culture, this plastic culture, where nothing means anything. We’ve all become numbers in the machine. We’re all cards in a computer.” Back then computers were programmed with cards. “We want away from that. We want to expand our consciousness and find God on some other level,” so the whole movement was toward the occult, toward New Age mysticism and Eastern mysticism, very literally putting spirits back in place. Yes, there may be a God someplace behind all this, but spirits are more immediate and more helpful.
To bring this back to Gideon, he is faced with the same thing that pretty much every non-Christian generation will be faced with, where there is still the memory of the worship of the true God. God will slowly recede into the background, and forces, whether they be conceived of as natural and scientific or semi-personal and magical, will come to the fore. Then it becomes a question of manipulating those forces. Baal was the god of storms and sunshine and anything masculine and violent in nature.
It was. They gender stereotyped a lot because they didn’t have a Christian balance that said, “Hey, women actually are significant.” The ancient world didn’t have to put up with that. It was just, “We don’t care. If we can beat up on the woman we don’t care.” Pagan culture did not treat women very well most of the time, something that some feminists have real trouble believing.
Right, because the way you worshiped the goddess was you found a prostitute and abused her. For instance in Assyria, women, to move into the phase of being women as opposed to girls, had to go to the temple of Astarte and sell their services to a random male stranger. That was just one of the things that was required and expected in that culture. That was goddess worship. It was not what people think it was.
So here’s Gideon. He’s grown up in this environment where to get at nature there’s magic you do, or science if you will, ways of manipulating natural forces that he’s learned. It’s all part of the grand irrationality of nature, of the universe. The universe is somewhat rational, with a strong side of irrationality bound together, because this is inevitable in pagan concepts without a Creator God. You try to make sense of it, and then ultimately you realize, “But there’s no sense because there’s no final voice uniting it all.”
So you start trying to manipulate cause and effect, and then find out that there is no cause for the effect that you need, so you just resort to more drastic and more drastic measures.
You try to scare nature into doing what you want. That’s what Gideon was used to, and yet here comes a personal God, as it were out of the past, out of folklore, out of memory, out of the Bible, who he stands and talks to in ordinary words. Nothing high-falutin’, nothing mysterious, no kind of strange exotic esoteric speech he can’t understand.
As Lewis says in a different context, “…as when a man meets another man on the road.” They’re just talking and it’s not that hard. But what this man, this angel, the angel of the Lord has said is, “I’m going to give you an incredible victory over forces that are way beyond anything that you’re ready to cope with. And I promise this because I’m the creator of the universe, and you should know about this because you’ve heard of the miracles.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard of them. They’re in this old book. I haven’t seen any. Could you do one, please?” It’s sort of a crisis of faith. “Yes, I’ve talked to him. Yes, he’s told me what to do. Yes, he’s promised me what he will do. But my whole culture has told me this is not the way religion works, so would you mind just putting some flesh and bones on the theology? Nothing big, just here, I’ll put the fleece of wool on the floor, and in the morning if all the dew is on the fleece and the ground is dry, then that will be you, because that’s not normally quite how it works.”
And yet after it happens he thinks, “Wait. What if the fleece simply soaked up all the water from the ground? I think I need another sign. I need it to happen backwards. I need God to show me that this is not simply a natural process that he kind of tagged onto. I need it to clearly be a miracle. The test run said the water goes toward the fleece. Lord, would you please do it the other way?”
Let me prove, I pray thee, but this once with the fleece. Let it now be dry only upon the fleece, and upon all the ground let there be dew, and it was so.
So God is in charge of even little things like the way dew/moisture flows in a small contained area. He rules nature down to the smallest details, and that’s what Gideon needed to know.
And his humility in his asking. Again we can contrast with Zechariah who’s like, “Well, what sign are you going to give me?” and the angel says, “You’re not asking this in faith, so the sign you get is going to be not very fun for you.”
But when Gideon says to God, “Let not thine anger be hot against me,” that proves that he knows that it’s not his right to have this sign. God would have reason to be angry, and he’s asking him to please not be.
“Please don’t. In my head I know how this works, and in my head, as I understand theology, this could really tick you off. However, I really, really, really need something beyond the rational. I need you to show me that God acts in the affairs of men, that God rules the universe” – not just in terms of general broad principles, but he can set aside his regularities, the covenant faithfulness we call natural law, and he can do miracles.
It doesn’t have to be a big miracle. It’s not so much a question of what is God capable of, but is God capable of anything. Can God interfere with the regularity of nature, with Baal, even in a small way? Because either Baal is in control or God is who he says he is. And if God proves even on a small scale that Baal/nature is nothing to him and that he is completely sovereign in all these things, then my faith will be buoyed up. I will understand that indeed what I heard perhaps at my grandparents’ knees or someplace along the line is the truth.
God does not promise us, in this age of grace, that kind of reassurance because we have a completed Bible. Gideon had the Torah and Joshua. I think that’s it. Maybe Job if it was circulating around. It might not have come until later. He didn’t have all that we have. Messiah had not yet come. The Holy Spirit had not yet been poured out.
The whole history of the Old Testament where God constantly throws down false gods and asserts his sovereignty, he didn’t have that. So God is willing for this instant, for this necessity, to grant a form of special revelation, a miracle, and a largely uninterpreted one. God does not say what this means, nor does he say whether or not it’s a symbol or allegory or image of something.
I’ve seen a number of attempts at, “It’s a threshing floor, so it seems to be significant. Water is significant. Sheepskins are significant. There’s got to be something here,” but I’ve never seen anybody come up with something that either really satisfied them or satisfied me. So maybe there is something, and I would not discourage anyone from trying to find it, but the major point here is simply the sovereignty of God to the point that nature is actually not a thing.
There is no thing called nature. There is the creation ordered and ruled personally by a sovereign God who does as he will, and generally out of covenant faithfulness does things in a regular predictable fashion, so predictable that we can describe some of those things with mathematical formulas.
Yeah. God makes apples fall toward earth with a force that can be calculated as F=Gm1m2/r2. It’s that accurate. We can measure down to the nanosecond, the nanometer, and below. Of course, when we start getting up at speeds near light or down toward the quantum level, some of those rules don’t seem to work so much anymore. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any. It just means that God is bigger in his thoughts than we are, and the patterns that we see may not be all there are to the patterns, and that’s okay.
What God guarantees, for instance, is not that objects in earth’s gravity will fall at -9.8 m/sec2, but that down will be down and things will fall. Summer, winter, springtime, and harvest – all of these things will be constant – cold and heat, summer and winter. All of these things will be constants.
He doesn’t exactly promise that all natural rates or natural constants will be forever constant, but they will continue in such a way that man can do his job. God has set us about the task of dominion, and if say the gravitational constant shifted every day, we couldn’t even build buildings or bridges. We couldn’t even plant food. If the sun fluctuated in the discharge of its radiation, we could burn all our crops up in one afternoon and then go freezing for months on end. God promises regularity so that we can do the work he’s called us to.
Dominion implies predictability, a pattern of behavior on God’s side that we can trust, not because God is bound by any law of nature but because for our sakes and so that God can give us the platform we need to work on, God is covenantally faithful to maintain the universe in what seem to us as fixed patterns and rates, but there is no natural law. In fact, natural law is itself an interesting metaphor.
Where are the courts where people are dragged for breaking natural law? Where are the natural law cops?
Exactly. More than once I’ve spoken to Christian teachers about this and have said, “Are you ready for a paradigm shift? True or false? God created the natural laws that run the universe?” and I usually say, “And this is a trick question.” Yet Christian educators will raise their hand and say, “Yeah, it’s true that God created the natural laws that run the universe,” and I have to say, “No.”
They hear “God created…” and they’re all about that, and they don’t hear the rest of it, “…the natural laws that run the universe.” First of all, God created natural laws? No, he didn’t. Where do you find these natural laws?
Yeah, where are they written? Can you email them? Can you take a picture of them? “Mr. Uttinger, can I take out my phone and take a picture of what’s on the board?” We can’t do that with natural laws. They are patterns of behavior that we deduce by constant observation. There’s no mechanism that forces the universe to work the way it does. It’s God’s hand. It’s God’s power.
The Heidelberg catechism says, “What do you mean by the providence of God? The everywhere present power of God, whereby as it were by his hand he upholds heaven and earth and all that’s in them, and so governs them,” and it gives a list of rain and sunshine and fruitful and barren years and drought. All of these things come not by chance but by his fatherly hand. That’s the biblical doctrine of providence over against the doctrine of natural law, which is basically Baalism.
“Natural is self-sustaining, self-regulating, and we’re bound by it. All we can do is try to get into the system and work with the system, deduce the code and hop onto the computer line and hope that we can work with it.” But scripture gives us a personal God who can stop the sun in its tracks. He can undo death. He can undo the degeneration of a mortal body.
These are very different concepts, and unfortunately from the late 1800’s on, and particularly the 1950s and early ‘60s, American society and particularly the church bought into this concept of a God who started the process and backed off, and now it’s all about learning the natural laws if we want to invent technology and get anywhere. God is nodded to, praised in our political speeches…
It goes back further than that, doesn’t it? Thomas Jefferson doesn’t count as Christian culture, for obvious reasons, but his entire milieu has this idea that natural law is something that can be rationally deduced from the way things work, rather than from what God has stated.
But Jefferson and his ilk tended to be sort of an elite. They were the educated people who didn’t have to work for a living. And what happened, particularly in the ‘50s, and I think it was reflected in television and in the world I grew up in – ‘50s and early ‘60s – is that everybody is thinking that way now. It’s taught in the public schools. It’s on TV. It’s not taught as an assault on scripture yet. That will come in the mid-‘60s on, but it’s taught as, “Well, you can have a Bible. You can have your religion. That’s one realm, but practical stuff – that’s science.”
To bring this back to where we were, this is what Gideon is up against. He’s caught in that state of being in two minds. There’s a God who rules the universe who’s rescued his people in the past, but…science, but…the spirits, but…magic, and he’s trying to sort it out.
It’s interesting that God does not rebuke him. Zechariah the priest, you mentioned with regard to John the Baptist, had no excuse. He’s a priest. He’s living in a time when Israel has thrown off its idols finally…
They had the entire Old Testament. He has so little, and he’s not doing it after the fact like, “I saw an angel yesterday, didn’t I? Didn’t I? Was that real? I don’t know. Was I dreaming?” He’s talking to the angel at the time, so he gets what he deserves on that one. And there were prophecies in place that said this was coming, and the angel says, “Your prayers are heard,” so whatever he was praying about is fulfilled in John the Baptist.
He may have been praying very specifically. “Lord, it’s time for the Messiah. Please send the herald that you promised.”
“Wait. I prayed for it, but that doesn’t mean I expected you to actually do it or anything.”
Oh man, I do that in my prayers all the time. It’s like, “Oh yes, Lord, I did ask for that perfect job to come at the perfect moment, but I didn’t expect it to actually come at the perfect time and perfect moment.”
That’s what we get growing up in our culture when God is remote and we don’t expect him to actually intervene.
I will not claim any great faith in this area. I’m probably as subject as anybody else in doubting God and forgetting God’s promises, but over the years I have seen some very marvelous appearances – we call them special providences – where what are the odds? Apparently 100% in this case because the thing you were looking for just showed up at the door with a bow around it. Okay, I can take that. There are lots of stories, but I won’t tell any of them now.
So we come to this in part as a response to those who today, as you say, use the phrase “throw out a fleece.” If I want to know today what God’s will is for my life, can’t I do what Gideon did? Gideon wanted to know what God’s will was, so he set this test for God. We’ve seen that’s not what happened there, but let’s consider what this looks like and what it’s looked like culturally.
Several generations ago now, probably the early 1900s and then back a few generations before that, there were a number of customs in America – rural America usually – where people had interesting ways of finding out God’s will. It’s hard to know at this end of things how seriously they took them.
One I ran into was this. A young girl places a key on the first page of the book of Ruth. She shuts the Bible, binds it closed with a ribbon, but she carefully leaves the top of the key exposed. Then she puts her finger into the keyhole and holds the Bible up in the air. She begins to speak the names of possible suitors. When the Bible spins or jerks or falls, she has discovered the name of her true love. Folk custom prescribes a similar ritual for learning the identity of thieves and finding hidden treasure.
Folk culture has multiplied all kinds of these things. Some would seem completely strange and foreign to us, like this one I’d never heard until I saw this particular incident, but there are other things that people do. Of course, one of the more common ones is, “Let the Bible fall open by itself, put your finger down, and whatever you read there – that’s God’s will for you for the moment.”
And there we go, and we didn’t rehearse that, but we’ve heard it a lot of times. People can smile at it, but it’s not unusual for people to think that that’s a way to get at what God wants.
Which is treating the Bible as a tool for superstition. It’s not taking the Bible on its terms.
Yeah, and when we started this you made the remark about, “Oh, we’re actually going to read the Bible.” Yeah, we’re going to read it and not just use it as a sort of Ouija board to find out by some outside mechanical means, magical means, what God wants. We’re going to assume that the Bible is in fact a word – a whole bunch of words, actually – from God, that in his infinite wisdom he has given to us so that at any given time, through proper study and comparing scripture with scripture, we can know what God wants.
Theology distinguishes two different meanings of the will of God. The will of God can mean what has God decreed? What has God in his infinite sovereignty planned for the world, and what will he bring to pass? That’s his business and mostly it’s secret. Sometimes it’s called the secret will of God or the decreed will of God.
He’s told us some things. He’s told us, “It’s appointed to man once to die, and after this the judgment,” so we all know that unless we live to see the coming of Jesus, we’re going to die. That’s a certainty. Well, there were Enoch and Elijah, but beyond that – and there was Lazarus who actually died twice – but as a general principle God has told us that.
I quoted this badly earlier so I will actually read the text now. At the end of Genesis 8 God promised Noah this –
While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.
So until the end of redemptive history, the laws of thermodynamics will apply – cold and heat. The earth will continue to spin on its axis and continue its revolution around the sun – day and night. It will maintain its tilt on its axis so that we will have summer and winter. And the connection between these things and the germination of plants will be a constant, so these things God has promised. In other words, unless Jesus comes the sun is going to rise tomorrow. We can be certain about that. God has told us this. You might find a few other things where God has said in advance, “Look, this is the way the universe works, and I’m promising it will continue to work that way.”
Other things may be really constant and generally reliable, and that’s what a good deal of science is about, trying to see what else there is and how far we could push this promise into other areas. Thermodynamics underlies chemistry and physics, which underlie biology and botany, so there may be other things we can deduce from this, where we can say, “If I put a match under this paper, it will burn.” That’s not the greatest prophecy skill, but you know, there are things we can tell here.
Fairly predictable. Usually when I’ve heard the phrase “the decreed will of God,” it’s referring more to the mysteries of life, the things that we trust to God’s providence but don’t necessarily make sense to us, like why is there sin in the world? Everything that happens God decrees, but clearly God doesn’t want us to sin but he allows it to happen, so how does that work? That’s what I’ve heard described as the secret will of God. Is that accurate?
I would think that would be putting too narrow an edge on it. The secret will of God is anything that we don’t know. So yes, everything you’ve described is certainly within the secret will of God. There are things that we don’t understand about how God does things or how in his perfect holiness he’s able to do it. How does he tolerate sin in the world? How does he decree the actions of sinners and yet not be responsible for their sin?
There’s a lot there that’s mystery to us. “The secret things belong to the Lord, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children, that we may do all the words of this law.” That’s Deuteronomy 8:28-29.
And that would be the underlying proof of this distinction that we’re trying to make.
Yes. It’s a good verse to this point, so there’s that. Generally we don’t know the secret will of God. Sometimes we really, really would like to. One of my former students said, “Wouldn’t it be great if you were born with the name of the person you’re supposed to marry tattooed on one hand, and your calling in life on the other?”
You know, it wouldn’t really solve everything. [inaudible 34:57…Mary? Marry? Funny voice…] “You’re going to be an engineer.”
“I’m going to build bridges, in fact,” or “Domestic engineer – I’m going to work in a kitchen all my life?” Not everything is as clear as it might seem to be.
It would, most literally, and would still leave many, many other questions. “Where am I supposed to live? Who am I supposed to work for exactly? How many children are we going to have?” There constantly will be things we’ll want to know and God has just said, “It’s none of your business. You will find out as they happen.”
I’ve asked my students a number of times, “How will you know who God has planned for you to marry?” and they’re pretty good at it these days. “When he or she says, ‘I do.’” It’s not the engagement ring. It’s not the promise. It’s not the falling in love.
I know two people who have been very dear to me who were sure they were going to get married, and things were going that way and everything was great, and then suddenly he died under very difficult and somewhat mysterious circumstances and she was left devastated. They both had been looking for someone to marry for a long time and they found each other with the help of friends, and just at the last second God said no. If you had asked them, “Who has God planned for you to marry?” I’m sure they would have pointed at the other person, and yet that wasn’t it.
Then there are movies like Runaway Bride. Until the ring is on the finger and the vow is said – in fact, you could even push for the marriage license signed – you don’t know, and so we wait. We find out that one day at a time, one hour at a time, one second at a time, as God unfolds his plan for us. He has made no promises beyond those few things that I mentioned. Jesus is going to come back one day. We’re going to die some day if the other doesn’t happen first. And the normal phenomena of life will continue so that we can exercise our call to dominion. That’s about it.
There’s no guarantee that God is going to tell you anything secret or whether he’s going to keep his secrets and you’ll find out the same way everyone else does. Of course, if you’re one of those people who picks up a book and has to read the last chapter first, this is frustrating. “I can’t read a book until I’m sure it’s going to end well. I’ve got to read the last page first.”
It’s like all the questions that I get from my 5th-graders every day. “Are we going to do this today? Are we going to do that today?”
“Wait and see. You’ll find out. You don’t have to ask me before it happens. You can just experience it.”
Then there’s the other God wills, and that’s what God has told us he wants us to do. How shall we then live?
The moral will, the ethical will, the preceptive will, and that’s found in the Bible. God tells us in general terms and in very specific terms how we are to live. In this sense, finding the will of God is generally not hard.
Now, there are exceptions, and the exceptions are usually ones that catch us off-guard and we make a big deal about them, but there are so many things that are not hard to figure out. “Shall I cheat with my neighbor’s wife?” No. “Shall I cheat on this test?” No. “Shall I skip church on Sunday simply because I want to sleep I and I’m lazy?” No. “I really hate that guy’s guts. I have a knife here. Can I thrust it into his belly? Would God approve of that?” No.
There are so many things every day that we could ask questions about, but we don’t because we know either directly or indirectly, instinctively or explicitly, that God has said, “These are wrong.” It’s called morality and, although in this generation more and more people are denying that there is such a thing, Christians have no excuse. We’ve read the Bible. It claims to be the word of God. It tells us how to live. And while there occasionally are things where one commandment or principle seems to be at odds with another, those are the rare exceptions. Most things are awfully, awfully plain.
The problem is not that we don’t know God’s will, but that we know it all too well and simply don’t want to do it. It’s scary, it’s difficult, it’s going to require too much of us, it’s going to be embarrassing, it’s going to put us outside of our comfort zone. “I know God wants me to go over to Susie and apologize to her, but she’s just going to gloat and laugh at me and I’ll look like an idiot. That can’t possibly be God’s will. He wouldn’t want those bad things to happen to me. God is a God of love. Whew, glad I got over that. Alright, moving on…”
We rationalize in terms of our own interpretations. We isolate and deify one attribute like love or our conception of justice or acceptance or patience or something, and we ignore what God has clearly told us elsewhere. “This is the way. Walk ye in it.”
The words are clear. Again, there are a few things. We could think of the church’s recent response to the pandemic, and there were some real questions about, “Okay, we need to obey civil government usually, but it’s intruding on the church, but if this thing is as bad as they say, getting together could kill people.”
We’re not supposed to do that. The Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So there were things for a little while there that were cloudy, and God’s people wrestled with them and sometimes came up with different answers. But as things went along, we got a clearer and clearer perception of, “Okay, cancelling church for a couple weeks is one thing. Cancelling it for half a year is something very, very different,” and more and more people began to say, “You know, we just eliminated fellowship with God, public worship from our lives for months. This is not the will of God.”
Where people are sick or have legitimate reasons to be afraid of illness, that’s one thing. But the church needs to be the church, so that was a hard one. But generally do I need to get up every Sunday morning and decide, “Is it God’s will for me to go to church? Lord, give me a sign so that I know.”
Those are very sufficient signs that God has given us. He’s given us human authorities. He’s given us pastors and elders. He’s given us parents. He’s given us spouses, employers sometimes, older wiser Christian friends, who can point us to the scripture and say, “You know, the Bible says this.”
“Okay, let’s talk about what it means and why you’re being ridiculous here.”
I get that with high school girls and junior high girls sometimes. “Oh, he’s tall, tan and terrific, and he comes to youth group…now and then. He says he’s a Christian or he’s going to be a Christian any time now.”
“In other words, he’s not and you’re being hoodwinked because you’re gullible and infatuated.”
Again, this is not a question of having to find out the will of God. It’s a question of having to do it, and that could lead to a further consideration – I don’t know if for now but sometime. When we start disobeying God, we stop seeing clearly the will of God. Our disobedience or unbelief clouds our judgement and clouds our thinking, and it can be to an extreme.
I’ll give you an example out of my distant past. Two of my students at one point were the “Weasley twins” – redhead and off the wall and all that – and they wanted to form a rock band. They began to get flack within the church that Christians don’t do that kind of thing.
So one day I noticed that they’re both late for Bible class, but one of them comes in late, “I’m late, sorry about that,” and just kind of comes in and plops down. I’m trying to teach and he stops me and says, “What do you say to somebody who says he doesn’t know if he even believes in God anymore?” and thus began a conversation which lasted about 30 minutes between me and this young man.
You could heard a pin drop the whole time because suddenly it was real for everybody, because everyone knew exactly what was happening. His brother was having doubts about the reality of God because he wanted to play rock music in environments that many Christians would not have approved of, and he was getting flack and he was basically being told, at least by some people, that Christians can’t do this. And suddenly for the first time he began to wonder if there was really a God. He came out of it and today he’s a pastor.
I’m glad to hear that, and I hope he’s encouraging Christians to play rock music in their free time.
Last time I heard from him he was. In fact, he started as minister of music and then went on, as I understand it, to become a regular pastor of a church. But there was a moment, and his brother was kind of caught in this dilemma of, “As far as I know I still believe in God, but my brother is getting really weird and flakey and I don’t know what to say to him.”
Everyone understood what was going on and they listened like everything while we had that conversation. Nobody interrupted. Then when we were done and it was clear we were done, there was suddenly this “ahhh” as everyone breathed in, and we went on and did other things, and everybody started talking and all the tension was lost.
This is what sin and unbelief can do. You can look at something that six months earlier would have been black and white, not a hard call at all, but suddenly if you’ve made enough steps in unbelief and disobedience, finding the will of God may be difficult.
So we’ve talked about finding the will of God. Yes, the Bible tells me so, but there’s some things that go with that. First, you better make sure you’re walking in obedience with the Lord, that you are doing the things that you already know. You should be examining your own motives in light of God’s word, making sure that God’s glory and Christ’s kingdom are your chief priority, not simply in there someplace. You should get as much information as possible so you can make good well-informed decisions. And you should listen to the advice of those who are wiser and more experienced, like, oh, parents would be a start, and pastors and elders and such. And you should pray for wisdom.
God promises wisdom to those who ask of him, but the wisdom he grants is not sudden divine realization dumped into your brain in a flash. He will bring to your mind what you already know from scripture, and therefore the more you know the scripture and the more you’ve searched it out with regard to this particular thing, the more God has to work with.
God can still convince you from scripture of some very basic things, but if you want more detailed guidance then you need more detailed study on what God’s talking about. And, of course, you should pray along the way that God will shut doors, open doors, protect you from stupid decisions, make your path clear, give you wisdom and good advice and all of these kinds of things.
At some point you just say, “I have choice A and B. God doesn’t forbid either one. I could do both to his glory. I could bear witness to him in either case. It doesn’t seem to be a matter of particular lust or vanity or pride. These are just good choices and I don’t know which one to pick.”
“No, it’s like chocolate or vanilla. If someone puts out chocolate and vanilla ice cream, God is not upset if you pick the one you like.”
Yeah. Speaking of – so, blue or pink socks – either one, or in the case of my girls – both.
It’s a choice and there’s not a moral issue here. The last line of the article this discussion is based on says – “At some point we should seriously take into account our own preferences and tastes. Sometimes it really is as simple as chocolate or vanilla, and some people really don’t like vanilla and that’s okay.”
And I think it’s important to recognize the potential implications of making yourself live with something that you don’t like, simply because you don’t like it and you think it will make you better. When I fall into that I always end up being less patient at the end of the day. I end up wronging all sorts of people because I’ve put myself in this situation where I am frustrated with the choices that I’ve made, and it’s my fault. I could have done less harm to the people around me if I had just taken a bubble bath or something.
See, your spiritual aspirations are higher than mine. I just say, “I don’t care what they want. I’m going to do what I’m best at and what I enjoy.” If some small child is wandering out onto the freeway, okay, yes, I’ll go risk my life to save the child.
But in terms of other things, if I realize I’m not good at it and someone else can do just as good a job, I don’t need to do that. I have other things to do. There is that danger of picking the hard way simply because it’s hard.
Exactly. I think there are enough hard things in life that that will come on its own. I don’t think we necessarily need to. Maybe somebody can come up with some exceptions and show me some parts of scripture where God does encourage that under certain circumstances, but it’s certainly not automatic. “You have choices. Always pick the hard one because that will make you grow.” No, God is great at finding hard things to make us grow.
Yeah, he’s got plenty of avenues for discipline, which does not seem pleasant at the time.
Somebody told us that’s going to happen, so I don’t see any particular need most of the time.
Now parents with children, that might be a little bit different. You might give your child a hard task because you know it’s good for him.
Yes, but you don’t do that all the time for everything. There’s a particular reason, and you are old enough and wise enough to see the end and what it will probably accomplish. Well, God is wise enough to see that for us, but to take that upon ourselves can be a little presumptuous. So I will be content to do the easier things until I see the value of the hard thing that I need to put all my energy into. There will be many such things – marriage, children, calling, holiness. These are all things that are hard in themselves, but they bring the great reward of righteousness, blessing, godliness, joy, and peace.
On that note I think we should wrap up with some recommendations. I forewarned Greg that I had a long recommendation, and that is something I’ve recommended before, which is the Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot.
There are two movements that I think are particularly relevant to this conversation, and one of the reasons that I love this set of poems so much, so I think I’m going to take executive privilege and just read them in the recording here. If you don’t want to listen to the poem, listeners, congratulations. This is a podcast. You have the liberty to skip ahead.
In the Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot is reckoning with time in various aspects. Is time the machine in which we’re locked and that we need to find freedom from? How do we relate to the past and to tradition and to the future? So in this part he’s mostly dealing with the past and tradition and values that have fallen away in his lifetime. He’s writing in the early 1940s, so he’s seen the inter-war period and is reflecting on it.
The first one I’m going to read is from East Coker. That is the second of the four quartets, and it’s the fifth movement. There are some French words and I’m going to butcher them because I can’t speak French, but I’ll try my best.
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres-
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
I’m going to skip over to the Third Quartet, again the fifth movement. He’s shifted to a discussion of divination, of looking toward the future rather than to the past.
To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,
To report the behaviour of the sea monster,
Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,
Observe disease in signatures, evoke
Biography from the wrinkles of the palm
And tragedy from fingers; release omens
By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable
With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams
Or barbituric acids, or dissect
The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors-
To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual
Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:
And always will be, some of them especially
Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgeware Road,
Men's curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardor and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled,
Where action were otherwise movement
Of that which is only moved
And has in it no source of movement—
Driven by daemonic, chthonic
Powers. And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying;
We, content at the last
If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not too far from the yew-tree)
The life of significant soil.
I have nothing nearly as classy to recommend, but I will recommend two books. One is the update of the other. When I was probably in my early years of college, I don’t even remember anymore, I came across a book called The Charismatics by a pastor who I guess was just getting a reputation for himself. His name was John MacArthur.
The book was pretty even in its tone and pretty polite, and it was pointed out, “Here are some mistakes the charismatic movements makes,” and he did some basic exegesis of key passages in a very familiar everyday kind of guy kind of level, and pointed out some of the dangers of following your feelings.
I remember he starts one section early on by saying, “I discovered a Bible in a used bookstore, and on the inside cover was written, ‘I don’t care what the Bible says. I’ve had an experience,’” so he talks a little bit about this, about how people have sought signs from God. I believe it’s from him I got the idea of some young man who wanted to know whether or not God was calling him to be a missionary in India. He really wasn’t sure he wanted to go, so he told God, “I’m not going to India unless I see the word India written in letters like 6’ tall.”
The next day he goes to a missions conference and there against the wall, indeed, is India spelled out in letters 6’ tall, so he’s convinced now he has to go to India. God does have a sense of humor and sometimes he does move us along through our own stupidity and gullibility. These are among his secret instruments.
The updated version is called Charismatic Chaos. It’s a much thicker book. They’re both paperbacks and the second one is probably easier to find, although in many ways I prefer the first one. In the second one he goes into some things that happened between the publication of the first and the second, of the Vineyard movement and some other things, where people got really weird. But it is still one of the best simple everyday approaches to the theology involved and a discussion of the signs and wonders that have been reported and things like that. So in the context of what we’ve just talked about, I think this would be a good buy for anybody who wants to pursue this further.
There are works that are more theologically rigorous, but you know, sometimes they don’t come to any better conclusions and they’re not as easy to read, so I’m going to go with this.
Cool. Thank you very much, and thank you for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband.
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