Monday, January 15, 2024
Martin Luther King Jr. Day
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Pour new wine into new wineskins
We read, and then talked a bit, about the first chapter of Genesis – those seven days, when God created the world and everything in it. Genesis came alive as we dove into deep waters intellectually, spiritually and personally on a bleak mid-winter ice-covered day everywhere in the USA. What fun that was for the seventy or so of us.
God called it all good (Hebrew tov). Turns out the word “good” isn’t defined in the Bible; the concept is just assumed. We thought about this, and asked jokey questions about mosquitos, and less jokey questions about tornadoes and earthquakes. Did (does) God make those too? How does it all fit together?
We don’t have answers; mostly we aren’t even sure about the questions. However, we can be sure God is trustworthy – in his initial creation, in his response to what Christians call the Fall, in his relationship with each of us.
Why is that? How can we be sure?
Remember that God “saw” that it was good. After our class, I read this on a website called “Got Questions?”
It is encouraging to know we can trust God to inform us truthfully and accurately. If He is making determinations like this—assessing the quality of all things created—and if we can trust Him with that, then there is a precedent clearly presented that we can trust Him with anything. He is the determiner of what is good and what is not.
Adam and Eve failed to acknowledge that, as the Creator, God had the right to define, assess, and judge. It is easy for us to make the same mistake, but God has graciously allowed us access to His creation account so we can learn that He is the Definer, and we can trust Him—we should trust Him, in fact. If we don’t, we are falling into the same trap Satan set for Eve: trusting someone else’s judgment when God has defined, determined, and communicated for us and to us.
This assumption, that we are wise enough without God, began at the beginning and will not end until the end. Samuel screams at Saul:
Stop! Let me tell you what the Lord said to me last night. The LORD anointed you king of Israel and sent you on a mission, saying, “Go and put the sinful Amalekites under a ban of destruction. Fight against them until you have exterminated them.” Why then have you disobeyed the LORD? You have pounced on the spoil rather than destroying it!
Saul defended himself. Fruitlessly. Samuel stared straight into Saul’s eyes.
Because you have rejected the command of the Lord, he too has rejected you as ruler.
Like Saul, and indeed, like Samuel, I too fail to trust God in every moment of every day, with all my mind and all my heart. I spoke up about that in our class. And I said that if I did trust God unconditionally, that would be a quantum leap moment for me, a paradigm shift so complete that my life would change completely to one of absolute obedience.
“Then why don’t you?” Aaron, another member of the class, acknowledged his own incompleteness, but he also asked me about me. If we could have had more time, I might have said that my efforts at trusting get in the way as much as they help. Henri Nouwen often teaches me that with his confessional words about his own life:
For most of my life I have struggled to find God, to know God, to love God. I have tried hard to follow the guidelines of the spiritual life—pray always, work for others, read the Scriptures—and to avoid the many temptations to dissipate myself. I have failed many times but always tried again, even when I was close to despair.
Now I wonder whether I have sufficiently realized that during all this time God has been trying to find me, to know me, and to love me. The question is not “How am I to find God?” but “How am I to let myself be found by him?” The question is not “How am I to know God?” but “How am I to let myself be known by God?” And, finally, the question is not “How am I to love God?” but “How am I to let myself be loved by God?” God is looking into the distance for me, trying to find me, and longing to bring me home.
Jesus was certain about this, even as he used a word picture to describe the problem and the promise.
No one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the skin are ruined. New wine is poured into fresh wineskins.
As much as I want to, I cannot remake myself into a fresh wineskin, trusting God with everything. But I do trust God to continue doing that work in me, day by day.
Each day has enough trouble of its own. At the end of each day I think back and realize how much I did not trust the One who made heaven and earth. But it’s also true that each day gives me more time with God, who made me, who finds me “very good,” and who will never leave me nor forsake me.
(1 Samuel 15, Psalm 50, Hebrews 4, Mark 2)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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