What Do You Do With ...

Hi Everyone-

I hope you're having an awesome day.  It's beautiful and sunny up here in the Northwest.  I love riding the ferry to school on days like this.

Today, my question is what do you do with those stories in the Bible that are hard or just don't make sense?  Take for instance when God sends the Flood to wipe most of humanity out or when he orders Abraham to slit Isaac's throat or God tells the Israelites to kill all the people (including women and children) and animals in an area.  Here's what Barbara Brown Taylor has to say about these passages:

"It is a book in which wonderful and terrible things happen by the power of an almighty God, whose steadfast love for us does not seem to preclude scaring the living daylights out of us from time to time."

I love that last part, "does not preclude scaring the living daylights out of us from time to time."  Too funny.

Still, what do you/we/I do with those passages?

I've been reading a lot about the Book of Job for a class I'm in this term, which doesn't give me definitive answers to my question, but I do have some ideas.  My starting point here is that God is love.  What I think the Book of Job shows through its behind the scenes description of Satan talking to God and God talking to Job at the end is two key things.  One, God is very close to us and desires relationship with us, so much that when Job "calls" him out, he comes and talks to Job.  We are after all made in God's image.  Conversely, God is also completely beyond us, beyond our comprehension, beyond our definitions, and beyond our ability to understand his purposes and plans in every situation.

When I have time I've been reading Peter Rollins' How (Not) to Speak of God, and this is a major point he makes.  In a concept that blows my mind, Rollins points out that God is in actuality beyond our "definition" of him as beyond definition.  Crazy!

So, some of what I do with hard stories in the Bible is remember that God is love and desires to be close/in relation with us, but God is also God and thus way, way, way, way beyond my little self (in a good way!).

What do you think/do?

Grace and peace,
Lang

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