Sending "Satan" (Old Testament) to Hell in a Hand Basket

Last month I looked at Sending "Original Sin" to Hell in a Hand Basket as part of my Original Sin, Satan & Hell rethink. This post is part two of what will probably now be a four part post as I am conveniently (for me) looking at Satan in the old and new testaments as two separate posts.

As I start this post I'm thinking of an interview with Peter Cundal of Gardening Australia fame where he told a story of how once he asked in Sunday School "If Satan tempted Eve and Satan used to be an angel them who tempted Satan?" he was thrown out of Sunday school for the question and promptly gave up any further thought about Xy.

There's a lot of varied thought about Satan, I wonder if one of the reasons is because there is not too much said about this character. This is true particularly in the Old Testament where the Hebrew word for Satan appears only a handful of times. For the most it part the word is translated as "accuser" (Num 22:22, 1Sa 29:4, 2Sa 19:22, 1Ki 5:4, 1Ki 11:14, 1Ki 11:23, 1Ki 11:25, Psa 109:6) and once as "adversary" Num 22:32.

In Job the character doing the accusing (often called Satan) appears quite a bit in the first two chapters. (Job 1:6, 7,8,9,12, 2:1, 2,3,4,6,7). Job is wisdom literature and I think written to teach us how God views suffering, rather than a historical account of Job's life and as such the writer takes some licence including the possibility of the creation of the accuser character, who unlike how most people would think of Satan, is part of heaven 1:6. The accuser's role is simply to say "Hey, I think Job only likes God when everything is going well for him". Similarly in the only other two places (yes only two) in the Old Testament where "Satan" is mentioned (1Ch 21:1 and Zec 3:1,2). The role of the character is only to accuse and nothing more. This character does not have all the characteristics that we would normally associate with Satan.

If you're thinking "what about Isaiah 14:12-17 where Satan is described as a fallen angel?" That's pretty widely considered a bad interpretation of that passage. See Dennis Bratcher's essay on Isaiah 14:12-17 for more info.

In case you're wondering the "Devil" or "Lucifer" are not mentioned in the Old Testament.

Next month... either sending "Satan" (New Testament) to Hell in a Hand Basket or sending "Hell" to Hell in a Hand Basket or if that gets tricky sending "Hell" (New Testament) to Hell in a Hand Basket.

Star Wars Birthday Continues...

The presents keep coming. It started with a glorious Yoda back pack. Then my most excellent sister in law got me a Darth Vader t-shirt from threadless.

Then, to top it all off my friends Gary and Tania gave me a Christmas decoration. Yes that's right I am now the proud owner of an official Hallmark Keepsake Luke and Yoda Christmas decoration.

Ahhh... turning 34 doesn't feel so bad after all.

Sunday Sermon

It's all over and yes, I am nuts. It took a couple of weeks but I finally got an answer to the question "Why is there suffering in the world?" and I managed to put it into bite size Sunday morning sermon size. If you want to hear what it sounds like the mp3 is here. The talk started with a slide show of pictures of people suffering with Nirvana singing "Jesus don't want me for a sunbeam" beneath it. The slide show ends with a quote from the book Fight Club, then I start talking. The sound quality isn't great but it's not painful.

God is just like the Gestapo?

Night 3 of Alpha I found kind of disturbing. It was probably the first time during Alpha where I found myself thinking "do I really want to identify with this?", "Do I really want to be implicitly saying I'm a Xn just like the way the video says".

My thoughts started when Nicky Gumbel told a story of a Nazi death camp where a priest steps in and offers to be killed instead of a family man which the Gestapo agree to. Nicky then went on to explain that we are like the family man and Jesus is like the priest, which is all fine and dandy until you realise that God is therefore the Gestapo and that the priest died so that the family man can be friends with the Gestapo. To be fair Nicky later explains that The Gestapo and the priest are really the same person (not using this analogy) but none the less you end up with a sadomasochist God rather a Gestapo God. Both I find pretty unsatisfactory.

I've wrestled with this before in my new analogy for atonement post. My thoughts about Jesus death at the moment go something along these lines.

1. We start life outside the Garden of Eden and dislocated from God
2. The only way for that connection to renewed is for God to become human
3. As a human (Jesus) God shows us a new way of life, a life where we choose love the result of which is suffering and for Jesus is suffering on a cross.
4. The cross is where we get a new perspective on life it's the point on the journey where we think everything will end but instead in the resurrection we see a new reality. A reality where love and justice prevail and sin does not.

Of course with no one else in the group bringing up the issue of God being equated with the gestapo and the speed of my brain it meant I didn't say anything. Maybe I will next week, but maybe I won't. The whole Alpha thing seems to be working for most of the group, just not for me.

World's Best In Laws

It is quite possible that I have the world's best in laws. They've built a shed for me, made a driveway for me, put in reticulation, let us stay at their beach holiday house and produced a beautiful daughter. But here is the final undeniable proof...

My boyhood fantasy

My new manhood reality

The Yoda backpack is a truly great birthday present.

Am I Nuts? The dangers of getting involved with a church

Well flirting with a church leads to getting involved with a church and that's exactly what I've done. At first it was some innocent rocking up to an alpha course (I'll do pretty much anything for a free feed) and the occasional bit of bass playing. Now, with two weeks notice I've committed to doing a talk at the church in just 13 days time. The topic: "Undeserved Suffering" – Facing the fact of evils inflicted on innocent people by natural disaster, sickness, or accident." Am I nuts? I'll let you know in two weeks. Oh, and let me know if you have any tips for the talk. Ta.

Relooking at Sin

Tonight was week 2 of the Alpha course I'm doing and as one person shared how they felt it was difficult to get over the idea that if they had done one thing wrong that they were just as bad as a mass murderer, I started thinking that's actually not only a hard thing to believe but perhaps a pretty silly thing to ask Xns to believe. This attitude we project onto God that, a small sin of someone trying to be good is as bad as all the sins of the world’s worst mass murderer is an attitude we wouldn't accept from our friends or our legal system. So it would be understandable why many wouldn’t accept it from God. I wondered if this might be a better way of looking at it...

Sin is evidence of separation (or disconnection) from God.

This definition would mean that the average try to be nice to everyone kind of person isn't "just as bad" as a mass murderer. It just means that perhaps they've got less evidence that they are not connected with God.

Just a thought.

Confused about how to raise your teenager?

Confused about how to raise your teenagers? Mrs. Walter E. Handford can help with this handy booklet. Just put it on your child's bedside cabinet, they're sure to read it!

If these pictures are too small for you to read click here.

Brad Jersak: Can You Hear Me? (part 1) - Review / Reflection

I was asked by my wife to read this as some friends of hers had read it and got a lot out of it. At the moment I've got through Part 1 (of 3) but thought I'd post some initial thoughts here.

Firstly, I'm not one adverse to the idea of listening to God. I try to do 3 sessions of silent meditation each week in order to listen to God.

My first overwhelming impression is that his theological exposition in the book is woeful. This starts with Jersak’s interpretation of John 10 which kind of underpins the book. Basically takes what the gospel writer even describes as a “figure of speech” (John 10:6) to mean that the follower of Christ can literally hear Jesus voice. The book (so far) is full of similar ways of reading scripture like confusing "The word" as expressed by Jesus in the gospels with the charismatic understanding of "a word". I found this is very frustrating.

None the less I put this behind me. Just because someone has a bad biblical exposition doesn't necessarily mean what they have to say is bad. This is something I honestly believe. Besides, the little blurb on his "Kissing the Leper" book looks pretty good.

The book is not all bad by any means I thought his section on the ways of hearing God (Invitation, Scripture, Teachers, Worship, Conviction of Right & Wrong, A Burden for Others and Prompting) was quite helpful. My problem is not the idea that people hear God but rather exactly how that happens and how we should expect that too happen.

Let me start by explaining how I think we hear God. I‘ve have alluded to this a little in my previous “Me and God like a Jazz Band” post. My thought is that God is playing a jazz rhythm track and we are playing a solo. So like a jazz musician we can play in harmony with that track or in dissonance, but even when we are playing in harmony there is a huge amount of freedom in what we play. So for me hearing God is really about hearing that rhythm track and responding in harmony to that in a me kind of way.

The difference between what me and what I think Jersak is saying is that I have a backing track to which I improvise where Jersak is looking for a particular set of notes that God wants him (us) to play. Hence he gives examples of being told by God to talk to a particular stranger sitting in a coffee shop or get off a road just before a truck is coming. Now I don’t deny that this is possible my worry is when people expect this to be the norm, because my experience is that for most Xns this is not the norm. Nor should it be. To me this is like the difference between having God's Spirit and having God's instruction. If you think of someone doing something in say the spirit of Martin Luther King (MLK) you could imagine what that might be like (and there would be endless possibilities of what that might look like). They would not necessarily use words by MLK. It would be a combination of the essence of MLK and the person doing the thing. To receive instruction is just to do what someone says. To me to have God’s spirit and to listen to God is not about getting direct words from God (although at times this can happen) it’s about hearing that rhythm track and playing something appropriate. In fact as we grow as Xns you might expect to hear even less direct instruction from God, just like a music student might.

When Jersak asks “Is that God or just your imagination?”. My thought is that it's both. To me our imagination in prayer is like listening to a complete jazz song and asking is that the solo or is that the rhythm track? They cannot be separated. I fear that Jersak does that and belittles humans in the process. One example is when he describes Nicola Telsa’s vision of Alternating Current as a vision from God. I’d argue that in fact that was Tesla’s idea, an idea discovered because of the way God had created him but none the less his idea and his imagination. Imagination is great and important for Xns. Imagination is the conduit between what we know about God and how we apply it in our context. Imagination is how we ask what would Jesus do in this situation? Otherwise Xns would be turning up to weddings and trying to turn water into wine or sitting at home waiting for a vision about which tie to wear.

As you can see this has been a hard book as it’s made me do lots of thinking. It’s a book with many things in it that I agree with just not from the angle that those things are being presented. None the less I will keep listening to God but I won’t be expecting any specific instructions, I won’t deny that it’s possible, all I won’t to do is be in harmony with my creator.

10 Weeks of Alphalpha Coming Up

This week I started an Alpha course and it's the first time I have ever done alpha or anything like it. I've always been a little bit sceptical of them but I'm going in with an open mind. My first three initial reactions to the introduction session are

1. Nicky Gumbell is a complete dag. That's not a bad thing as he does not try to be otherwise, in fact it makes him kind of pretty ordinary or normal which is probably quite a good thing seeing this alpha is appealing to such a mainstream audience.
2. The first presentation was really similar to the "Burn Your Plastic Jesus" seminar a friend and I used to do in high schools. Our presentation has video, live music and discussion groups half way through but none the less I think both presentations looked at the question of wether Xy is irrelevant, boring and untrue. Nicky had his anecdotes and we had the video and music and compared quotes of Kurt Cobain & Marilyn Manson favourably with Jesus and quotes by Fred Nile favourably with the Pharisees. So kind of different but kind of similar.
3. The whole gist of the presentation was very much like the "God Shaped Hole" talk that one of my youth group leaders used to do when I was young. The message was that like the famous toy (see below) he had a God shaped hole in his life and no matter how he tried to fill it with cars, work, sport or girl friends none of them would fit and he needed God to be complete. I realise this is how a lot of suburban people probably think so I might learn something about reaching out to people in my new suburb, but most of the non An people I've known are already aware of the God shaped hole in their life and are trying to fill it with other spiritual things. So, I hope these kind of people get addressed eventually.

My other initial reaction is that Nikki Gumbell says "Jesus Christ" in exactly the same way as the boyfriend of Mr Garrison, Mr Slave (below) from South Park.

Anyway, more reflections in the future I'm sure.

The Bible in Two Pages

Ok, here is the Bible in two pages. Well actually it's all the section headings from the NRSV bible at www.anova.org/sev. I find it kind of usefull to get a feel for how the whole Bible fits together without having to read the whole thing a few times.