Mythic Truth

                                            

Mythic Truth

by Jeff Treder


We humans are born storytellers. Sometimes our stories are just entertainment, and sometimes they are also meant to teach lessons.  Beyond entertainment and instruction, however, there are times when our stories resonate deeply within our minds and hearts and seem to be expressing certain essential truths about our human condition.  These resonant stories have been called myths.  Now, “myth” is often regarded as synonymous with “fiction” or even “seductive lie.”  But it seems more useful to reserve the term “myth” for those stories that seem to convey, in their own way, powerful truths about human life.

“What is truth?” Pilate asked, and despite his cynicism it’s a good question. A reasonable definition of truth is “correspondence to reality”—a statement is true, that is, insofar as it corresponds to the reality about which it speaks.  Some of the time we just want to escape reality, but our lives tend to go better when we knuckle down and try to figure out what’s real and how to cope with it—when we try to get in touch with the truth.

Can stories help us get in touch with the truth?  Can deeply resonant stories—can myths?  To answer this, it may help to look at the similarity between myth and metaphor.  When Burns says his love “is like a red, red rose,” we easily understand that she isn’t a flower, but that she has certain delightful qualities in common with a beautiful flower.  There is truth here, but it isn’t literal, it’s figurative.  It’s still truth, however—in the poet’s estimation, she really, truly does have these qualities (like beauty, attractiveness, even evanescence) which he thinks can better be conveyed by the floral comparison than by piling up adjectives.  Centuries of poetic theory agree with him; an always-literal Shakespeare wouldn’t just be less memorable, he would convey fewer important truths about human life.

A story is essentially an extended, elaborated metaphor—“life is like this,” it tells us (or maybe, with just-for-fun stories, “wouldn’t it be interesting if life were like this”).  When a great story—a myth—tell us that “life is like this,” the response of thoughtful readers is, “I don’t fully understand it, but yes, life truly is like that.”


                                 Some Literary Myths

Let’s consider a few well-known examples:  The Odyssey, Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” Don Quixote, and Macbeth.  Homer’s Odyssey is the story of a man making his way home after years at war.  Home means family (his wonderfully faithful wife Penelope, his devoted son Telemachus); home is where life is settled, ordered, known, familiar, secure.  Odysseus genuinely desires to get home, fight off the suitors who are insisting that Penelope must be a widow, and re-establish himself as husband, father, and king of Ithaca.  But he is also a born adventurer, and his homing desire contends with an almost equally strong desire to experience everything the world has to offer (wild sex, wild magic, wild monsters) before he gets home.  No wonder that, for nearly three millenia now, this story—this myth—has persuaded millions of thoughtful hearers and readers that it is telling them something deeply, perennially true about human life, and conveying that truth with a power and resonance that no plot summary or lecture on the subject can match.  We should note carefully that the Trojan War is known to have been a historical event, and that the figure of Odysseus may well have had a historical counterpart, and that Homer’s account of his adventures is full of what Homer surely knew to be tall tales.  The point here is that the mythic truth of the story depends not a whit on how much of the tale is historical fact and how much is poetic fiction.  Mythic truth, we might say, has a life of its own.

Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” comes in his work The Republic, when he imagines a group of people who have lived their whole life confined in a cave.  On the back wall of the cave they see shadowy figures moving about, and they assume that these shadows are all there is to life, to reality, beyond themselves.  Actually the shadows are the projections of real people going by outside the cave, but they don’t know that.  This, Plato says, pictures the poverty of our ordinary perceptions of reality.  The story has mythic power because, as with The Odyssey, many generations of readers have felt that it conveys an accurate but hard-to-define truth about human experience.  The myth itself conveys the truth with a vividness that Plato’s explanation of it in his theory of Forms (or Ideas) cannot match.

Cervantes’ Don Quixote is the great seminal story about human idealism versus ordinary reality.  Idealism, embodied in the “knight of the woeful countenance,” is both noble and ennobling; it is the only thing that can raise human life above that of, say, crocodiles.  Ordinary reality, spoken for by Sancho Panza, is full of squalid taverns, whores and windmills (and crocodiles), where the Don sees splendid castles, immaculate ladies and giants to be overcome by valor.  The question the story raises, and leaves for us to answer, is whether human idealism actually has the power to ennoble ordinary reality, or whether it is nothing more than the madness that Sancho perceives.  The story has mythic truth because we realize that the question itself, as the myth poses the question, expresses a profound truth about human life.

Macbeth is probably the most powerful story ever told about crime and punishment (Dostoevsky’s novel comes in close behind it).  More precisely, it’s a story, a myth, about human guilt.  As the play opens, the good King Duncan comes to Macbeth’s castle as his honored guest.  Lady Macbeth believes, and persuades her husband, against his conscience, to believe, that they can murder Duncan and get away with it both politically and spiritually.  They are, of course, mistaken in this belief, but, again, no summary or essay on Macbeth can even approach the power of the myth.  In common with most myths, Macbeth is told in richly figurative, imaginative language, and the power of the myth is inseparable from this language.  The figure of Macbeth comes to us from the legendary history of Scotland; but as with The Odyssey, the mythic truth of Shakespeare’s play does not depend at all on the extent to which his character and plot correspond to actual history.  Either way, the play is about real people.




                             Mythic Stories in the Bible

Human mythmakers, then, seem to have the ability to express certain truths about human experience which cannot be expressed as well in any other way.  If truth is correspondence to reality, human mythmakers are able to very closely approximate certain realities.  Now I want to go on to consider some stories or accounts in the Bible from this point of view.  If the Bible is not divinely inspired, not “the word of God,” then these stories will, at best, have mythic power and mythic truth comparable to those stories we have already looked at.  For reasons I won’t go into now, I believe the Bible is in fact the word of God—in, as a standard formula puts it, the words of men—and in that case its stories and accounts will have unique power and convey unique truth. They will represent exactly certain realities of human experience
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First, the book of Job.  No one knows just when this story was written or who wrote it; estimates of its date of composition range from sometime in the second millenium B.C. to the fourth or third century B.C.  Bible scholars have debated whether Job is a historical person who actually underwent the ordeal described, or whether the story is fictional or somewhere in between.  Some people hold that if you believe the Bible is the word of God, then you must believe that Job was a historical person.  Others, myself included, doubt whether we have enough information to know for sure, and wonder whether it matters.  For whatever else it may be, the book of Job is one of the world’s great mythic stories, and that is true whether or not Job was a historical person.  Nothing else ever written explores to the same depth the “problem of evil”:  If God is good, loving, and all-powerful, how can he in good conscience allow such things to happen?  (The author takes for granted what the book of Ecclesiastes says explicitly, that if God were absent, then human life would be meaningless and futile, “chasing after the wind.”  Evil would be a mere fact, not a problem.)  The book only offers a partial answer to the question.  God exists, and he is indeed good, loving, and all-powerful, and he had his reasons for putting Job to the test, but he never discloses what those reasons were (the prologue gives the setting more than the reason; the coming of Christ, however, has subsequently given us much more insight on the question).  The mythic power of the book of Job, in a way similar to Don Quixote, is the power with which it raises and explores the question.  If the book is, as I believe, “the word of God in the words of men,” then its presentation of the issue is uniquely true:  It corresponds exactly to the reality of our human condition—specifically, of human suffering.

Next, and finally, let’s consider the early chapters of Genesis, and especially the account of Adam and Eve in Eden.  Like most other mythic stories, this one comes to us in richly poetic language.  It is crafted and structured around a profusion of elemental symbolic images—the primal chaos, water, darkness and light, the garden, the earth from which God creates man, the two trees, the snake in the garden.  About the mythic power of this story there can be no doubt; in its influence on human thought, self-understanding and history, it is the most powerful of all our myths.  It tells us that we are creatures of God, not just random accidents, and that all the wrongs in human history—all the broken families, war, oppression, injustice, slavery, and idolatry—stem from our decision to disobey God and try living independent of him.  (In telling us this, the Eden myth sheds a great deal more light on those questions raised by the book of Job.)  If the Eden myth is also “the word of God in the words of men,” then it is also uniquely true:  Like the story of Job, the story of Adam and Eve corresponds exactly to reality. Just what reality, though, are we talking about?  Logically, there are three possibilities: (1) literal, historical reality; (2) spiritual reality; (3) both of these together.  (Because I believe the Bible is the word of God, I am leaving out of account those who think there is no such thing as spiritual reality and that the Eden story is obviously fictional, merely an ancient Near Eastern folk tale.)  No Bible believer doubts that Genesis is a revelation of spiritual reality, so the real issue is whether the myth embodies both spiritual and historical reality, or only spiritual reality. Is the Eden story historical?  And how can we determine whether it is historical?  Our answer to the first question depends on our answer to the second.  So then, how can we determine whether the Eden story is historical?


                                  Some Definitions

First, it may help to examine more closely what we mean by the terms “literal,” “historical,” and “spiritual.”  “Literal” refers to the surface meaning of a statement, what the words mean when taken at face value.  Much of human communication, however, is figurative, symbolic, or ironic to one degree or another, so that the author’s intended meaning—his real meaning—differs to some extent from the surface meaning.  When Jesus, for example, tells us, “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away” (Matt.5:29a), we readily understand that he is not commanding self-mutilation but warning us, in a deliberately shocking figure of speech, how serious our struggle against sin is.  We have already noted that our stories and our myths essentially are elaborated metaphors—“life is like this.”  On the literal level, the story may be historically factual (say, an account of the Apollo 11 lunar landing) or it may be entirely fictional (say, Frodo’s quest in The Lord of the Rings).  In either case, in either of these examples and in countless others, the story may convey mythic truth, and, as I noted with both The Odyssey and Macbeth, the truth and power of the myth do not depend on whether the story is historical or fictional.  In the case of the Eden story, we have to consider both the human author, Moses (edited, probably, by subsequent priests), and the divine author, God.  Do we know, or can we know, what either God or Moses had in mind with regard to the historical status of the episode?  That, as Hamlet said, is the question.

This brings us to what is meant by “historical.”  Some theorists in the field limit it to events and persons that are well attested by reliable written records, corroborated where possible by archeological records.  On these grounds, Martin Luther is a historical person while his next-door neighbor, if no records of him or her survive, is not.  I am using “historical” in a broader sense than that, to mean an event that actually occurred, or a person who actually lived, in the natural course of events on planet Earth, regardless of the documentation.  The “natural” course of events stands in contradistinction to the supernatural and the spiritual.

“Supernatural” means beyond the natural or greater than the natural.  Outside the worldview and witness of the Bible, we have no reliable information of a supernatural reality.  But I believe that the Bible is true—reliable information—and that God is the supernatural reality.  Jesus has told us that “God is spirit” (John 4:24), so God is also the spiritual reality.  The ultimate reality, spiritual and supernatural, is God.  Even among Christians, many people, if they try to rustle up a mental image of “spirit” or “spiritual,” come up with something close to “gaseous” or “vaporous.”  This mental picture accords, actually, with Biblical language—the Hebrew and Greek words translated “spirit” both basically mean “breath” or “wind”—but it can be misleading.  In our natural and fallen condition we are unable to see God as we see the natural world; this inability persists after we are born again by the Holy Spirit and will persist until we are taken to heaven or heaven comes to us when Jesus returns.  This blindness, however, tells us nothing about God’s reality, though it may cause us to doubt it.  In fact, God’s reality is greater than ours, more powerful and substantial than ours.  He is the source and constant sustainer of our existence.  Notice the imagery that Scripture gives us when speaking of heaven; it’s mostly royal imagery, the trappings of kingship—thrones, crowns, banquets, and plenty of gold and gems.  In ancient societies, kings were the embodiment of authority and power, as well as, hopefully, wisdom and justice and compassion.  The Biblical imagery tells us that God is the ultimate King, not only sovereign and omnipotent but also, as it turns out, perfectly wise, just and compassionate.


                         Supernatural and Historical Reality

Now, with these definitions, we are almost ready to consider whether the Eden story gives us historical as well as spiritual truth.  First, though, it may help to think about the Flood story in Genesis 6-8.  After Noah built the ark, God brought on forty days of rain, but before that he caused a pair of every animal species (seven of every ceremonially clean species) to come to the ark.  How did he do this?  How, for instance, did he cause polar bears to come from the arctic, or koalas from Australia, or llamas from South America, all the way to Mesopotamia?  The answer has to be that he used supernatural means.  To provide enough rainwater to cover the highest mountains (7:19-20), nearly six miles above sea level, he also must have used supernatural means; it would have required about 750 feet of rainwater per day.  Even if we limit it to just nearby mountains, it would still be hundreds of feet of water per day, and in either case, only supernatural means could have disposed of the excess water.  This is not to say that these events never happened and are fictitious; rather, I am exploring the mode of their happening and how we might understand it. The narrative is deeply supernatural and spiritual (the terms are nearly synonymous) by virtue of being dominated by God’s activity.  One difficulty this presents is squaring all of it with evidence from fields like geology and paleontology; more immediate, for our present purpose, is the difficulty in determining how the supernatural and the historical connect in these events.

The strongest evidence for the historicity of the people and events in Genesis 1-8 comes from references to them in the New Testament.  Luke’s genealogy of Jesus (3:23-38) traces his descent directly back to “Adam, the son of God.”  Of the other references, the most significant is probably Paul’s comparison of Adam and Christ in Rom.5:12-19.  Paul unquestionably considered Adam to be as fully historical as Christ. To disagree with Paul on this point, I think, would be to doubt the inspiration of Scripture—which, on a number of grounds, we have strong reason to believe. Agreeing with him, however, leaves us with the difficulty of understanding the interface between the supernatural and the historical.  We will underestimate this difficulty if, influenced perhaps by Hollywood, we think of supernatural events merely as natural ones with spectacular special effects.  The difference is greater than that; the difference is absolute. God is infinitely greater than the natural world, and his state of being is, to us, incalculable, unfathomable.  These early Genesis accounts, though they are about historical people, are full of divine, supernatural acts.  The interface between these completely different levels of reality presents us with a mystery and leaves us with a conceptual gap.  The problem is most obvious when God is acting in person, so to speak, as when he creates Adam out of a scoop of dirt and then Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs.  Any attempt of ours to picture this will be false; what really happened is literally beyond our imagination.  The same problem exists, in fact, whenever the infinite intervenes on the finite.  No matter how many artists’ renderings you have seen of Elijah being swept up in the heavenly chariot (2Kings 2:11-12), none of them can possibly be accurate.  The event is beyone the grasp of our finite minds.  Elisha saw something, but he could neither fully comprehend it nor clearly describe it, any more than Ezekiel could comprehend and describe the manifested glory of Yahweh (Ezek.1). Ezekiel’s best effort comes across as dreamlike, hallucinatory.  Peter and John were similarly overwhelmed when, on separate occasions (Mark 9:2-8, Rev.1:12-18), they saw the glorified Jesus.  We who trust in Jesus will be glorified with him one day (Rom.8:30, 1Cor.15:35-57, 1John 3:2), but until then we would be equally brain-overloaded and descriptively challenged if we saw what they saw.


                                             Bridging the Gap

 An understanding of mythic truth may help us bridge the gap between our finite mental horizon and God’s infinite reality.  If it doesn’t explain the mystery, at least it may give us a better way of approaching it.  The stories of Eden and the Flood are poetic in form and language. Most of their elements, while historical and literal on one level, are also evidently symbolic, and in accordance with the way symbolic language works, the main meaning inheres in what the symbols represent.  The Tree of Life is Christ (John 11:25-26, Col.3:4, Rev.2:7, 22:13-14). The talking snake is Satan as well as the prototype of every smooth-tongued deceiver. The ark symbolizes our spiritual deliverance through Christ (see 1Peter 3:18-22). Meaning expressed in this way is mythic truth, which, especially when inspired by God, points directly at human reality—the truth about what it means to be human.

The same literary feat, or at least a similar one, occurs in Homer’s Odyssey.  The very disparate levels of experience comprised in domestic normality (the hero’s home in Ithaca) and in the poetic imagining of supernatural (or at least paranormal) beings—Calypso, Circe, the Sirens, the Cyclops—are integrated by the power of myth into a unity embracing the full range of human experience.  This unification takes place not only in the poem as a whole but also, in a beautiful touch, within the poem, when the shipwrecked Odysseus is given hospitality in the palace of King Alcinous, and after dinner the blind poet Demodocus (generally and reasonably thought to be a self-portrait of Homer) sings some epic poems and transports his domestic audience into the same world of heroic marvels from which Odysseus has just emerged, exhausted and naked.  The difference between The Odyssey and Genesis is the difference between supposed supernatural powers and the real thing. Odysseus angered the sea god Poseidon; the pre-flood human race angered Yahweh.

In Genesis, mythic power works to unify the supernatural and the historical in the service of spiritual truth; and this truth pertains to us because we are primarily spiritual beings, created “in the image of God” (Gen.1:27).  From the beginning of Genesis down to the Gospels, there is a process which C.S. Lewis has described as myth becoming fact (using “myth” in just the same sense as I am using it).  As the Biblical narrative proceeds, it gradually becomes more recognizably historical in form and content.  When we get to Abraham, our confidence in the historicity of the information is reinforced by New Testament testimony but not reliant on it (as it is in Genesis 1-8), since the meaning is primarily conveyed on the literal level.  The mythic truth and power of Abraham’s story, however, are still immense—think of him obeying God’s call to emigrate from Mesopotamia, believing God’s promise to give him a son in his old age, and then obeying (until forestalled) God’s command to sacrifice the son of promise.  Continuing on, when we come to the Babylonian Captivity, we are reading about an event heavily documented in history and archeology but still loaded with mythic truth:  This, the event tells us, is what happens when God’s people ignore him, scorn his prophets, and lust after worldly values.

Jesus Christ is the person, and his coming to the earth is the event, in which mythic truth, spiritual truth, and historical fact at last become completely integrated.  In particular, it is the Incarnation, God and man being united in one Person, which closes the gap forever.  Jesus is God, and his miracles are no more capable of natural explanation or subject to accurate picturing than Elijah’s fiery chariot; but he became a human being, and as a human being he was—and remains—fully knowable.  And since, in Christ, God and man are united, in him we can know God.  Through him, belief and knowledge have become integrated, so that Paul could honestly write, “I know whom I have believed ....” (2Tim.1:12)  This knowledge is both intellectual and, much more momentously, relational.  Because Jesus is alive forever and has given us his Holy Spirit, we (like Paul, who had never known Jesus during the Savior’s earthly life) can know him in direct personal relationship.  Granted, this relationship depends on faith, on trust, but so does every sound human relationship.  And as with all human relationships, the growth of our relationship with God through Christ depends on steady mutual communication.  In giving us his Son to die in our place and then rise again into indestructible life, God has made all this possible. The great story told in the Gospels, while verifiably historical—multiple eyewitness testimonies, unparalleled manuscript attestation, major historical consequences—is also, obviously, of supreme spiritual import and tremendous mythic power.

 As long as we are in this mortal state, a degree of mystery will remain concerning Adam and Eve.  If videocameras could have recorded those events in the Garden and we could view the tapes, what would we see?  I don’t know.  No one knows, any more than anyone knows how God got those polar bears hale and hearty into the ark.  Our answers even to whether there was a historical Eden or a historical ark with polar bears and koalas on it will be answers given by faith or unbelief, not knowledge.  A generous share of intellectual humility is appropriate here.  But if all the truth we have about the historical Adam and Eve is mythic and spiritual, is that enough?  What, exactly, does that leave us with?

Actually it leaves us with all that we need (and thus one might suppose that the limited nature of our knowledge here reflects what God thinks we need to know).  We know that God is supreme and sovereign, the Creator of the heavens and the earth, and of all earthly creatures including man and woman.  We know that all of humanity’s woes stem from our decision to go it on our own.  We know that the possibility of independence from God is the Big Lie. No creature is independent of God. Satan himself, whatever he may think about it, depends entirely on God for every moment of his miserable existence.  We know that when God created humanity, he had already planned our redemption; Genesis 3:15 tells us this in mythic terms.  And we know that God will judge the human race.  Later Scriptures (for instance, 1Cor.4:2-5 and Rev.20:11-15) tell us this explicitly.  But the fact—or more exactly, the mythic truth—that he has already done it once before, in the Flood, gives us good reason to take seriously both the Last Judgment and the great deliverance from that judgment provided for us by Jesus Christ, who is God, whom we know.

Silence

Silence


One of the Bible’s major themes is the fear of the Lord.  When we understand who he is, then we rightly revere and worship him for his supremely gracious character, a character proven by his deeds on our behalf.  And when we understand his almighty power—that our very existence and our deliverance from his judgment and wrath depend on his mercy—then “the fear of the Lord” becomes not only reverence but also “fear itself,” a holy and healthy fear which “is the beginning of wisdom.” (Prov.9:10)
A related theme in the Bible is the day of the Lord, or Judgment Day.  Because it lies in the future, Judgment Day is a subject of prophecy.  As with some other prophetic subjects, Judgment Day often has both a near-term and an ultimate reference in Scripture.  The near-term reference might be a catastrophic flood which will kill off most of the human race, or a military siege by the Babylonians which will destroy Jerusalem and the Temple, or a later siege by the Romans which will destroy Jerusalem and the Temple yet again.  In all such cases, though, the ultimate reference is a point in history at which God will intervene personally and drastically to end history as we have known it, take his people and transform them, and judge and destroy his enemies.  (The choice, by the way, of which group you are in is up to you.  Which group do you want to be in?  You do have to choose, and there is no third option.)
Another related theme in the Bible is our silence before the Lord.  For instance, Psalm 46:10:  “Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.”  The Hebrew for “be still” can be understood in the sense of “calm down”:  Calm your fears and anxieties; I am God, and I am in control of all things, including your circumstances.  Or the Hebrew could also reasonably be translated “Shut up!” We can understand easily enough why God has to shut us up. We are, in our teeming millions, forever gossiping, laughing, yelling, arguing, boasting, cursing, cheering and jeering.  God has always had to do drastic things to get our attention.
So the word of God repeatedly tells us to be quiet.  “The LORD is in his holy temple; let all the earth be silent before him.” (Hab.2:20)  “Be still before the LORD, all mankind, because he has roused himself from his holy dwelling.” (Zech.2:13)  And as Paul puts it in the New Testament, “Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God.” (Rom.3:19)
At least one of these admonitions relates our silence to the day of the Lord:  “Be silent before the Sovereign LORD, for the day of the LORD is near.” (Zeph.1:7)  And later on in Scripture this command receives a solemn fulfillment (though the fulfillment is still prophetic, since it hasn’t happened yet).  This occurs in the book of Revelation.  In the fifth chapter of Revelation there is a tumultuous celebration in honor of Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God: “Then I looked and heard the voice of many angels, numbering thousands upon thousands, and ten thousand times ten thousand. They encircled the throne and the living creatures and the elders.  In a loud voice they sang: ‘Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise!’” (Rev.5:11-12)  Then in chapter 7 the redeemed people of God join in the great celebration:  “After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice: ‘Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.’” (Rev.7:9-10)
Imagine the sound of more than a billion people, together with who knows how many billions of angels, singing their hearts out and blowing trumpets and clashing cymbals.  (By that time, presumably, we will have better ear drums.)  But, now, notice what happens next:  “When he [Jesus] opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.” (Rev.8:1)
We are accustomed, in public gatherings, to being asked to observe “a moment of silence.”  Such moments usually last less than a minute; if they last a full minute, it seems like half an hour.  Now imagine a full half hour of utter silence, all those billions of voices suddenly and absolutely hushed. Why? Because Jesus had just opened the seventh seal, commencing Judgment Day.  This will be one time when God won’t have to call us to silence.  This will be the most solemn moment in all history, when history as we know it will come to its disastrous end.  This will be “the great and dreadful day of the LORD.” (Joel 2:31)  The pause before the Judgment begins will be a long half hour.
 






  
  

Knowing God

by Jeff Treder


Late in his life, in one version of the story, the renowned Swiss theologian Karl Barth was asked by an interviewer, “Dr. Barth, in all your years as a theologian and biblical scholar, what is the most profound thought you have ever come across?”

Barth considered a moment, then replied, “Jesus loves me, this I know.”

Puzzled, the interviewer asked, “You mean that ‘Jesus loves me’ is the most profound thing you’ve ever come across?”

“No.  This I know.”

That’s it; that nails it.  The question was actually a rather silly one, but Barth took it seriously and gave it a better answer than it may have deserved.  “This I know.”

Profound.  But is it really?  And if so, why?

Knowing and Knowing

Also late in life, the apostle John explained to his readers, “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.” (1John 5:13)  And in John’s gospel, Jesus prays this: “Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” (John 17:3)

These are both foundational statements for Christian life and doctrine, and together they tell us that we can know that we have eternal life if we know God through Jesus Christ.  Both the English word “know” and the Greek word ginosko which it translates are used to cover a range of meanings, including two distinct meanings in the verses just quoted.  The first meaning, in 1John 5:13, is to perceive and understand some fact or truth intellectually—as the dictionary puts it, to “grasp in the mind with clarity or certainty.”  In this sense we know that ewes give birth to lambs and we can know that we have eternal life.  The second meaning is to know some person or persons through relationship or acquaintance.  In this sense we know our family members and, John 17:3 says, we can know God.  The French language makes this distinction in the two verbs savoir and connaître. The distinction is important because there is a fundamental difference between knowing a fact or a skill and knowing a person.  Human beings are persons—self-aware, intelligent, morally responsible beings—by virtue of having been created in the image of God (Gen.1:26-27).  Being persons is the one thing we have in common with God.  For our purposes here, the important thing to grasp in our mind is that, according to the Bible, we can know a priceless truth through knowing a priceless Person.

Basically it’s as simple as that, but the ramifications are complicated.  I would like to loosen as many knots as possible.

For as long as human history has been recorded—for more than three thousand years—people have wondered and speculated about this question of knowledge.  How do we gain knowledge?  How do we evaluate what we learn?  Can we even know whether what we think we know is really true?  (It gets complicated quickly, you see.)  A field of study has grown up around questions like these, a branch of philosophy called epistemology, generating countless books, lectures, seminars and arguments.  What we are concerned with now is that branch of epistemology dealing specifically with the question of knowing God.  Here too the books and arguments are beyond counting or reading; a good place to start, though, would be Knowing God by J.I. Packer.

Overcoming the Sin Gap

   “Knowing God” is an extremely challenging assignment.  Here’s why.  God is an infinite, eternal, all-powerful Being, spiritual and not physical—which means that while his reality transcends ours (is greater than ours), he remains invisible to our senses even though he is everywhere present.  He is holy, utterly free of any moral imperfection.  We, on the (distant) other hand, are finite, bound to our physical bodies, and born into sin, ensnared by sin, deluded by sin, and addicted to sin.  Sin essentially is our natural attitude toward God: our contempt for him (even to the point of denying his existence), our desire to live independently of him, and our conceit that we are morally superior to him. When we understand what sin is, it’s easy to understand why, according to the Bible, sin separates us from God.  It does so by its very nature.  That being the case, however, how can we overcome sin and get to know this transcendent, holy God?  The short answer is, we can’t.  No one but God alone has ever had the ability to overcome our sin and close the gap that it has caused between us.  But, again according to the Bible, the only way he could do that was to take on human form—Jesus Christ—and sacrifice himself in our place, thus accomplishing “the great exchange”:  “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2Cor.5:21)  “For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.” (1Peter 3:18)

But why would God go to such lengths and pay such a price to reconcile people who, until he reaches in and changes our heart, don’t even want to be reconciled, who are spitting at him the whole time?  Because, unlike us, God is gracious.  He loves the unlovely. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16) “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Rom.5:8)  The more we consider these things, the better we can understand what grace means.

What Jesus has done and is still doing is the culmination of God’s long plan of salvation, of which the whole Bible is the record.  It’s a marathon, covering the entire history of the human race.  It’s also a process through which God has gradually revealed himself to us, through his dealings with Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham, Moses, the prophets and the apostles (keeping the list short), and supremely in Jesus himself, the Son of God.

So God has—graciously—enabled us to know him.  In doing so, he has availed himself of all the ways in which he has enabled us to know anything.  Which brings us back to epistemology, the study of human knowing.

The Four Ways of Knowing

Essentially there are four ways in which we gain knowledge.  Two of them I can do by myself, and for the other two I need input from others.  These four are sensory experience, reasoning, authoritative testimony, and divine revelation.  Before looking into these, however, we must consider an alternative which would cancel them all.  This is radical skepticism, the belief that all our supposed knowledge is illusory or uncertain.  Such skepticism has been around since the ancient Greeks and is currently alive in the philosophical movement called Postmodernism, but it has never gained much traction, probably because it goes against both common experience and common sense.  They may tell us we can’t know for sure that apples grow on trees or that 2+3 = 5, but few people buy it.

So on to the four ways by which we can gain real knowledge. The first two, sensory experience and reasoning, would work for me even if, like Robinson Crusoe and, more recently, Tom Hanks, I was stranded on a desert island.  Through my physical senses I could take in my surroundings and understand my plight.  I could explore the island and find out what resources were available for my survival.  In that way I could learn a great deal.  At the same time, I would also be employing the second way of gaining knowledge; I would be reasoning (furiously, in such a case), thinking things through.  And if, as Crusoe did, I came across a human footprint I was sure I hadn’t made, I would learn, by reasoning, a new and very consequential fact.
We reason about things in two main ways, deduction and induction.  In deduction we work from general information we already possess, putting two or more pieces of information together in order to draw a specific conclusion—new knowledge.  Robinson Crusoe knew that only a human foot makes that impression in the sand, and he knew it wasn’t his foot that did it, and so he realized he wasn’t alone.  In the Conan Doyle story “Silver Blaze,” Sherlock Holmes knew that the dog guarding the stable would have barked if a stranger approached in the night, and he knew that the dog didn’t bark when the prize racehorse was taken from the stable, and so he deduced—from “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time”—that the horse thief was well known to the dog.

Whereas deduction goes from general to specific knowledge, induction goes the other way, compiling specific information in a systematic way in order to derive a general conclusion. This is the primary method of empirical science. Patiently and systematically, the astronomer Edwin Hubble observed and measured the velocities at which distant galaxies are receding from one another.  From all this gathered information he concluded momentously that the whole universe is expanding.

Historically, philosophers have tended to divide themselves between empiricism and rationalism—that is, between those who think sensory experience is our primary source of knowledge and those who think our rational processes are primary.  The seventeenth century French philosopher Rene Descartes famously defined the rationalist position when, having set himself to doubt everything he found doubtful, he concluded that the evidence of his senses might possibly be illusory, but he could not doubt that he was actually thinking about these things, and that proved to his own satisfaction that he, at least, existed:  Cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.”  A few decades later, though, John Locke, in his almost-as-famous Essay Concerning Human Understanding, argued that sensory experience is the primary and most essential source of knowledge.  Modern science combines both ways of knowing, and biblical teaching, as we will see, also regards both as essential sources of knowledge.  The debate over their primacy, while historically important, is ultimately a tempest in a teapot.

Then we come to the third and fourth sources of human knowledge, where the knowledge comes to us from minds beyond our own:  authoritative testimony and divine revelation.  Testimony is one of those things we tend to take for granted without realizing how much we rely on it.  How do you know that George Washington was the first president of the United States?  Or that Beijing is the capital of China?  Or that the earth orbits the sun and not the other way around?  These and innumerable other things we know—or at least we assume them to be accurate knowledge—because somebody (a parent, a teacher, a writer, etc.) told us it was so, and we thought we had good reason to believe them, to consider their word authoritative—that is, informed, reliable, true, right. Much of our ongoing learning process consists in continually re-evaluating our store of testimonial knowledge in the light of new knowledge we are gaining (much of this also being testimonial).  As a child you form, in conspiracy with your peers, certain ideas about how parents should treat their children.  When you marry and are expecting your first baby, you read some books and talk with friends who have young children, and this leads you to re-evaluate your ideas about parenting. A few years and two or three children later, you are re-evaluating once again.  Knowledge isn’t gained easily, but accurate knowledge is better than misinformation or ignorance.

The most familiar instance of testimony being heard and evaluated is courtroom procedure. Eyewitness testimony is considered the most reliable; secondhand or “hearsay” testimony is generally excluded. Even eyewitness testimony has to be evaluated—seven different witnesses, as they say, see seven different crimes.  Witnesses can be mistaken, impassioned, scared, suborned, or just dishonest.  And yet their testimony, sifted and checked as carefully as possible, is the surest way (along with physical evidence) to find out what really happened.

Finally, we can gain knowledge through divine revelation—particularly, of course, knowledge about God.  There are many who trust knowledge gained through their senses, their reasoning, and testimony from other people, but who think divine revelation is sheer fantasy.  That’s regrettable, because divine revelation—both through the Bible and directly from his Spirit to our spirit—is the source of the surest knowledge we can have about the ultimate issues of human life:  about our Creator, our Redeemer, and our eternal destiny.  In order to receive this knowledge we need to trust its Source, God himself.  That means taking the Bible seriously, yes, but through reading and studying the Bible we discover that God has, in fact, revealed himself to us in all four ways in which we are capable of gaining knowledge.

God and Our Senses

First, he has revealed himself to our physical senses in the created world he has given us to live in.  As the psalmist sings,

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge.
There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard.
Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.
            (Psalm 19:1-4)

It is the sheer magnitude and unapproachable distances of the starry realm, evident to ancient observers and all the more to modern astronomers, which impress upon us the incalculable power and majesty of their Creator.  If we deny that such immense and varied splendor even had a Creator, we are just suppressing evidence and the conclusion to which it points:  “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.  For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” (Rom.1:18-20)  If you don’t like thinking about your wickedness and God’s wrath, you can either repent (in gratitude for God’s mercy through Jesus Christ) or reject the whole idea (that is, go on suppressing).  What you can’t do is follow the judge’s impossible instruction to the jurors, to put out of their minds what they just heard.

Not only the heavens but the earth itself speaks of its Creator.  Did all this astonishing beauty just happen to happen?  Is it merely by coincidence that we are able to appreciate such beauty?  (The more you think about these things, the more of these coincidences you will notice.)  We recognize the artist’s hand in a painting by Rembrandt or Renoir; what about Yosemite and Victoria Falls? “Formed by purely natural processes,” indeed, in one case by the painter’s brush strokes, in the other by God’s geology.  “But we know the human artists or at least know about them.”  Certainly.  As for God, besides the previous quote the apostle Paul also observed that God “has not left himself without testimony: He has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons; he provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy.” (Acts 14:17)

God and Our Mind

Second, God reveals himself to our mind, as we use the ability he has given us to reason and follow logic where it leads.  Jesus, God’s supreme self-revelation, is called the divine Logos (John 1:1,14), meaning God’s rational expression of himself to our rational minds.  Our word “logic” stems from logos.  In all his teaching, Jesus addresses our mind much more than our emotions.  Of course we respond emotionally to what he has done for us, but the parables make us think.  “Be transformed,” Paul exhorts us, “by the renewing of your mind.” (Rom.12:2)  Only a fool (the Hebrew word nabal implies moral corruption that disturbs mental balance) thinks there is no God (Ps.14:1).

Modern science, as already noted, combines knowledge derived both from our senses and our reasoning.  Ever since the Victorian period, and especially since Darwin, a widely accepted view has been that the more knowledge we get of the natural world through science, the less room is left for God.  He has, it is said, become superfluous, obsolete and implausible. During the last half century, however, the discoveries of science (particularly molecular biochemistry coupled with mathematical probability and information theory) about the biological cell have made God not only plausible but, increasingly, unavoidable. The cell, we now know, is primarily a device which stores, copies, processes, and reproduces information.  The heart of this extremely complex operation, without which life would be impossible, is the celebrated nucleic acid known, in shorthand, as DNA.  In every one of the approximately 50 trillion cells in your body, DNA is constantly processing information in the same way your laptop computer processes it, but much more information, much faster and more efficiently.  There is now broad agreement among scientists (though for many this comes hard) that random chance alone could not have originated the first biological life—the odds are far too steeply against it.  Modern science knows of only one source of this kind of information and, all the more, this abundance of information:  intelligence.  (On this subject see, especially, Stephen Meyer’s magisterial explanation in Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design [2009].)  The most complex, highly organized things we know of are at the start of the chain of life (the biological cell) and at its apex (the human brain).  There is intelligence behind all this, immense intelligence—in fact, God’s supreme intelligence, communicating with our created intelligence.

God and Authoritative Testimony

Third, God has revealed himself to us through authoritative testimony, in the Bible.  No one denies that the Bible is full of testimony, but is it authoritative?  How can we evaluate its authority?  In what sense, if at all, is it “the word of God”?

To begin with, we can know with certainty that this book, among all human writings, is absolutely unique, a world-historical phenomenon.  For that reason alone it merits our scrutiny.
The Bible is divided into the Old Testament, covering everything from the creation of the universe down to the time just before Jesus was born, and the New Testament, covering everything that has happened since then and will happen in the future. “Covering” here means revealing the spiritual meaning. Although the Bible contains true history, its purpose is not to survey all of human history but to reveal the true meaning of that history.

 It was written over a period of some fifteen hundred years, from around 1450 B.C. to 90 A.D., by about forty different people, including kings, priests, poets, prophets, a shepherd, a physician, a tax collector, a missionary, and some commercial fishermen.  It has a wide variety of literary forms—history, law, genealogy, prophecy, proverb, lyric, correspondence, parable, apocalyptic, and more.  Its cultural settings range from tribal to theocratic to nationalistic to cosmopolitan.  And yet, even with all this breadth and diversity, it is definitely one book.  Anyone who is willing to spend the time and effort to read it thoughtfully will discover this.  Where you might expect to find a mishmash of conflicting views, you find a symphony of concurrence; and this impression of deep inner harmony grows stronger the more deeply you delve into it.  What the Bible teaches about God and humanity, religion and ethics, history and destiny, forms a clearly definable body of consistent, coherent information.  As Bible scholar R.A. Torrey explains, its unity is both profound and organic:

It is not a superficial unity, but a profound unity.  On the surface, we often find apparent discrepancy and disagreement, but, as we study, the apparent discrepancy and disagreement disappear, and the deep underlying unity appears.  The more deeply we study, the more complete do we find the unity to be.  The unity is also an organic one—that is, it is not the unity of a dead thing, like a stone, but of a living thing, like a plant.  In the early books of the Bible we have the germinant thought; as we go on we have the plant, and further on the bud, and then the blossom, and then the ripened fruit.  In Revelation we find the ripened fruit of Genesis.

A skeptic might think that this unity is something that believers have found because they wanted to find it.  The truth is, though, that millions of believers (like myself) came to the Bible as skeptics and then found themselves slowly but surely convinced. It is a supremely self-authenticating book.
 
The Bible possesses this organic unity because its primary author is God himself, conveying his truth to us through his chosen human authors.  It focuses constantly on the stream of salvation history that flows through the center of human history.  Its first sentence reports the act of creation, and its final chapters describe the consummation of history at the second coming of Christ.  Its subject matter is nothing less than cosmic and human history from A to Z, and its central figure is Jesus himself, who says, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.” (Rev.22:13)  In the Old Testament the way is prepared for the coming of the Messiah, in the Gospels he is on center stage, and the rest of the New Testament explains the significance of his coming.

The Gospel writers each gave an account of what seemed to them the main events in the earthly life and ministry of Jesus.  Two of them, Matthew and John, were among the twelve disciples and thus were eyewitnesses.  Mark was a younger associate of another eyewitness, Peter.  Luke, a companion of Paul and a research historian (of very high caliber), relied on the eyewitness accounts of others, as the preface to his Gospel indicates.

Eyewitness testimony is authoritative when it is genuine and honest, and the New Testament writers often remind us of this.  Peter says with characteristic bluntness, “We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.” (2Peter 1:16)  These men spent three years in constant, intimate companionship with Jesus.  They heard a lot of his musings and asides along with the more formal teaching that he gave them in private, in addition to his public teachings.  As John says in the last verse of his Gospel, they saw many more of his acts than they were able to record—acts of kindness and compassion, miracles of healing and deliverance. What we get in the Gospels is a selection and distillation, a sort of “best of”—except that with Jesus, everything was the best.  What we don’t get is “cleverly invented stories.”  Keep in mind, we are not dealing with hoaxers or lunatics but with sober men who worked with their hands to support their families.  When threatened with death on account of their testimony about Jesus, they would not recant.  As eyewitness evidence, the Gospels are as good as it gets.  (For much more on this, see Richard Bauckham’s groundbreaking book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony [2006]).

The Bible is also the most personal book ever written. It speaks to each of us about our life as we experience it, more profoundly, poignantly, intimately, and accurately than any other book.  It is unique in every way—a word often used loosely but in this case properly applied.  It is far and away the most copied, printed, translated, distributed, read, quoted, discussed, and researched book in history.  Its literary and cultural influence is vast beyond measure; no one who neglects it can have a sound understanding of human history since the time of Christ.

The Bible, then, is in its own category, unrivalled in its influence.  Its testimony about Jesus comes to us with trustworthy authority.  From beginning to end, in fact, the Bible claims an ultimate authority: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness ....” (2Tim.3:16)  “Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation.  For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” (2Peter 1:20-21)  “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.” (Mark 13:31)  The Bible claims to be “the word of God” and therefore to speak with absolute authority; whether or not to accept this authority, however, is something each of us has to decide for himself or herself. It’s a matter between each person and God, a matter of conscience and relationship (“knowing God”).  Unless you read the Bible yourself, however, this most consequential of all decisions will be made in ignorance and by default, possibly in dependence on the opinions of some whose authority on the question is another question.  And since the Bible’s central figure is Jesus, the place to start is the Gospels.

Direct Revelation

Fourth and finally, we can gain knowledge of God through direct revelation from his Spirit to our spirit.  After we have trusted in Christ for our salvation, “The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.” (Rom.8:16)  In general, this kind of direct revelation is known as mysticism.  Mysticism is one of those things, like hallucinogenic drugs, that are usually prized by those who have experienced them without apparent harm and shunned by those who haven’t.  There is plenty of evidence that hallucinogens can harm us mentally, especially over time. Mysticism is not dan-gerous in the same way, but like drugs it is subject to fakery and abuse, especially from phony gurus of every religious pretense who prey on the gullible and vulnerable. There is probably no area beyond the party scene and the used car lot where discernment is more needed.  But the real thing, the Holy Spirit revealing himself in all his glory and love and passionate purpose, is more precious than gold and sweeter than honey (see Ps.19:10).  It isn’t easy or safe, though; it’s dangerous in another way.  It can be an ordeal—check out Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Hosea—and it may change your life in ways you otherwise might not have chosen. Left to his own devices, Peter would probably have remained a commercial fisherman, but after Pentecost (Acts 2) he never looked back.  Then there is Saul of Tarsus, converted through a sunburst of direct revelation from an embittered, violent Pharisee into the man who gave up everything for the sake of knowing Jesus, counted what he had lost as garbage, and, in chains, wrote that joyous, love-soaked letter to the Philippians.

The direct revelation of God’s Spirit to our spirit covers a wide experiential range, from the subtle to the overwhelming.  It can be so subtle that we aren’t even sure it’s happening.  Was that God who just nudged me, reminded me, or warmed my heart?  The best way to answer this is to consider whether the nudge is toward helping or encouraging or otherwise benefitting other people.  If so, figure it was God; if not, it was probably your own appetite or something worse.  At the other end of the spectrum is the overwhelming. The Bible records a number of such experiences, after which the recipient says things like this:  “And there, where they [the Jewish exiles in Babylon] were living, I sat among them for seven days—overwhelmed.” (Ezek.3:15)  “I had no strength left, my face turned deathly pale and I was helpless.” (Dan.10:8)  “When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead.” (Rev.1:17)  The attempts of these people to describe the visions or theophanies almost always come across as weird and bizarre, but we should cut them some slack:  They are trying to describe the indescribable.

Many Christians since Bible times have also recorded a great variety of mystical experiences.  Such accounts, by their very nature, cannot be verified except through the person’s subsequent behavior.  Again, if it was the God of the Bible revealing himself, the behavior will be in the direction of humility and love, or what Paul unpacks as “the fruit of the Spirit”: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentle-ness and self-control.” (Gal.5:22-23)

One of the most notable of these accounts comes from the seventeenth century French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher of religion, Blaise Pascal.  Pascal was a child prodigy, and in adulthood his genius illuminated every subject to which he turned his mind.  At sixteen he wrote a treatise on projective geometry, and later he laid the mathematical foundations of modern probability theory.  Today he is most famous for his Pensées (“Thoughts”), which are really his notes for a planned book explaining why Christian belief makes good philosophical sense.  He died—just short of his fortieth birthday—before he could write the book, but even in their preliminary form the Pensées have deeply impressed readers in every subsequent generation who take an interest in what it means to be a human being in a vast, mysterious and uncaring universe.

In 1654, two weeks after surviving an accident in which his carriage nearly plunged off a bridge into the Seine river, Pascal had a visionary experience with God.  He told no one about the experience but recorded it in a note which he sewed into the lining of his coat, near his heart.  After his death in 1662 the note was discovered by one of his servants.  It is known as “Pascal’s Memorial”:

The year of grace 1654,
from about half past ten in the evening until about half past midnight.


FIRE.


God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,
not of the philosophers and scholars.
Certitude.  Certitude.  Feeling.  Joy.  Peace.
God of Jesus Christ.
“My God and your God.”
“Your God will be my God.”
The world  forgotten, and everything except God.
He is only found by the ways taught in the Gospel.
Grandeur of the human soul.
“Righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you.”
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy. . . .
“This is eternal life, that they know you, the one true God, and the one that you sent.”
Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ.
I abandoned him, shunned him, denied him, crucified him.
Let me never be separated from him!
He is only kept securely by the ways taught in the Gospel.
Renunciation, total and sweet.
Complete submission to Jesus Christ and to my director.
Eternal joy for a day’s effort on the earth.
May I not forget your words.  Amen.

One thing to be sure of about such experiences is that each one is unique, just as each person’s relationship with God is unique.  They can be remembered, even treasured, but not reproduced.  And for our spiritual growth, the more important thing is our day-to-day, moment-by-moment awareness of God’s presence—Immanuel (“God with us”), present through his Holy Spirit.

Conclusion

Scripture assures us that we can know that we have eternal life if we know God through Jesus Christ. God has revealed himself to us and enabled us to know him through every way in which we are capable of gaining knowledge.  But none of this happens automatically.  We need to trust Jesus (“believe”), ask, receive, and follow (obey).  “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.  For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.” (Matt.7:7-8)  “Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.” (John 1:12)  Getting to know God, better and better throughout our life, isn’t easy.  God is holy and he is making us holy, a process the Bible likens to precious metals being refined by fire. The New Testament continually tells us to make every effort, to run the race, to deny and discipline ourselves, to fight the good fight (and turn the other cheek), to stand firm, to count the cost, to take up our cross—meaning to embrace the death of our old, independent life. “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling ....” (Php.2:12)

So, is getting to know God worth it?  Oh yes.

The Good King

by Jeff Treder

Between Tyranny and Anarchy

Throughout human history, political government has been problematic.  We need order in society, but too much order is oppressive. Finding an optimal or even a satisfactory balance between tyranny and anarchy has been difficult.  Some times and places have done better than others, but it has never been easy and never even close to perfect.  The United States in the 1950’s, the rosiest period in the history of the richest nation ever, was good for most Americans but not so good for dark-skinned Americans. Over the centuries, political theorists have pondered this problem. We can imagine what a truly just society might look like, but the path to making it happen is littered with obstacles.  There isn’t even much agreement on which path is the right one, which destination the most desirable, or which obstacles the most dangerous.  Concerning the perils of tyranny and anarchy there have been, not surprisingly, two main views, one seeing anarchy as the greater threat and the other fearing tyranny more.

A classic expression of the fear of anarchy is Ulysses’ speech on degree in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (where “degree” means political and cosmic order, especially hierarchical, top-down order):

      O, when degree is shak'd,
Which is the ladder of all high designs,
The enterprise is sick! How could communities,
Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenity and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
But by degree, stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows!  Each thing melts
In mere oppugnancy:  the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
And make a sop of all this solid globe;
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead;
Force should be right; or, rather, right and wrong,
Between whose endless jar justice resides,
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.  (I, iii, 101-124)

This was standard political theory in Shakespeare’s day, the conventional wisdom.  More recently, in the twentieth century, the same view was restated in very similar terms in Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming”:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned ....

This was written in 1919, at the end of the lunatic carnage of the Great War.  The fear expressed by both poets is a timeless one, and the essential idea is that human nature is so driven by voracious “appetite” that, in the political realm, it must be controlled by strong government.

But strong government, of course, is manned by human beings who are driven by greater than usual measures of the same appetite, since rulers tend to have great abilities and big egos.  No one doubts any more that power corrupts.  Yeats was aware of this, as any sane man must have been in 1919, and along with many other sane people he was in political despair.  Can any institutions successfully restrain our tendencies toward greed, mistrust, xenophobia and violence?  Can anything prevent strong government from devolving into tryanny or ruinous folly?

        A century and a half earlier, that constellation of political genius, America’s Founding Fathers, had tackled these questions deliberately and thoroughly. They began by penning history’s most momentous manifesto against the danger of tyranny (though the tyranny they decried was by historical standards a mild one), the Declaration of Independence. After the war for independence, there ensued the debate over federalism which surrounded the writing of the Constitution.  The framers understood their task very clearly: to ensure that the government would provide enough order to restrain anarchy—and tendencies toward anarchy such as crime, political corruption, mob violence, economic turmoil, and the secession of states—while at the same time ensuring that the government would not grow so strong as to curtail civil liberty. Their achievement was as exceptional as the difficulty of the task, though well short of perfect (each black person counted as three fifths of a human being). In spite of the merits of the blueprint, however, we keep finding ways to botch the building project.

        By almost any measure, the world system which the United States has dominated since the Second World War is in deep trouble in 2010.  The reckless greed of wealthy financiers, mostly American, plunged the global economy into recession in 2008.  The financial system, national and global, has yet to be seriously reformed, so the danger of further economic turbulence remains.  The United States has been fighting an unwinnable war against stateless Islamic fascists for a decade, with no end in sight.  This warfare, along with deregulated “free trade” economic policies, have made the rich much richer and the middle class poorer and less secure, while the poor have become wards of the state.  This is a politically unstable condition.  Add in demographic pressures—aging Baby Boomers and escalating health care and Social Security costs—plus the federal government’s gigantic deficit spending to avert economic catastrophe, and we have a republic sinking into long-term insolvency.  Our economic life, such as it is, depends absolutely on oil imported from volatile places like the Middle East and Nigeria.  Even if Saudi Arabia were as stable as Denmark, oil is a non-renewable and diminishing resource. In any realistic view, the outlook for America’s economic and social well-being ranges from bad to worse.  Our major political parties blame each other for all this, and both are right.

        Nor is the rest of the world much better off.  Most of it is much worse off, and China, now widely heralded as the world’s coming superpower and economic success story, is in fact an environmental wasteland and a political earthquake zone. The authoritarian government’s legitimacy, in the eyes of thirteen hundred million Chinese citizens, depends on maintaining a ten percent economic growth rate over the next two decades.  There is a very slim chance of that happening.  Any number of contingencies could derail their economic juggernaut, in which case tyranny could swing toward anarchy in short order.

But why are things this way?  Why are we so in need of being governed strongly and well, and so unable to supply our own need?  The proximate cause, I think, is fear, which in turn is caused by radical insecurity—economic, political, and, at the deepest level, spiritual—and this insecurity ultimately is the result of our fundamental commitment to autonomy.  This needs explaining, and to explain it I now turn to the book which has long since diagnosed our problem and set forth the one and only solution.

The Question of Sovereignty

        The Bible speaks only indirectly about order versus chaos in cosmic and human affairs; directly it speaks of sovereignty. The Bible expresses a Hebraic worldview.  Virtually all its human authors were Jews, and Luke, the one probable exception, had come to see life in Hebraic terms through his discipleship under Paul.  The analysis of human experience in terms of degrees of order stems mainly from Greek philosophy and is more abstract than the Hebraic worldview; or, alternatively, the Hebraic view is more concrete. Neither of these two ways of expressing human experience is inherently superior to the other; rather, they complement each other. In Ulysses’ speech on degree, good order in cosmic and human affairs promotes well-being, while disorder promotes misery.  In the Bible this issue is presented more concretely:  Who is the sovereign, the one who actually wields authority and power?  Is this person’s reign legitimate, and is it exercised wisely?

In the Bible’s view, of course, ultimate sovereignty resides with God.  He is the Creator, the Almighty.  “All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the LORD, and all the families of the nations will bow down before him, for dominion belongs to the LORD and he rules over the nations.” (Ps.22:27-28)  “You alone are the LORD. You made the heavens, even the highest heavens, and all their starry host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them. You give life to everything, and the multitudes of heaven worship you.” (Neh.9:6)  If God is absolutely sovereign, then the well-being of everything under his sovereignty, including us, depends entirely on his character.  Just as “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov.9:10), the character of the Lord is the beginning of the good news.  All the moral qualities that most all of us consider good and desirable are attributed to God in Scripture—love, compassion, generosity, justice, mercy, faithfulness, and so on—and his actions in history, culminating in the mission of Jesus Christ, confirm that he really is like that.  Good news indeed.

       The problem, according to the Bible, is that the first people God created decided to rebel against his sovereignty.  Just why a sinless couple in a delightful setting, in perfect union with a perfect Creator, would decide to rebel remains rather mysterious, even when we take into account the involvement of an evil tempter.  Perhaps the best way to comprehend their folly is to reflect on our own personal track record.  In any event they deliberately disobeyed, with a result that can be understood in two ways, both true.  First, moral acts have moral consequences. Good acts are rewarded by God with blessing, while evil acts are punished with a just (morally appropriate) punishment—see, for instance, Rom.2:6-8 or, for a longer version, Deut. 28.  The penalty for Adam and Eve’s rebellion, as God had already warned them (Gen.2:17), was death, both spiritual and physical.  Spiritually they were separated from God, who is the only source of spiritual life.  Physically, as a consequence of the spiritual separation, they became mortal and their bodies began an irreversible process of decay.  Second, we can also understand what happened to them as the logical consequence of their own action.  Simply put, they unplugged themselves from the life source.

        What Adam and Eve opted for was independence from God, or autonomy.  “Autonomy” comes from Greek roots meaning “self law.”  Essentially, human beings have only two choices in this regard.  We can submit ourselves to God’s law—his reign and direction in our life—or we have to figure out the directions for ourselves.  The first option, according to the Bible, comes to us in the form of a covenant, a formal and binding agreement, initiated by God.  God made such a covenant with Adam and Eve (briefly summarized in Gen.2:15-17), which they proceeded to break.  Later on he made a covenant with Abraham (see Gen.15 and 17), which later still he expanded in the covenant with the people of Israel mediated through Moses.  Israel broke that covenant through chronic unfaithfulness; “but God, who is rich in mercy” (Eph.2:4), knew they would break it and had planned a final solution to our problem:  a new and final covenant mediated by the sacrificial death of his own Son, Jesus Christ.

A Revelatory Moment

        The process by which Israel broke the covenant is instructive.  The concluding verse of the book of Judges sums up in this way how things stood at that time:  “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” (21:25 NAS)  Everyone, that is, was autonomous, a law unto himself, and in the author’s view that was a bad state of affairs, verging on anarchy.  The book of Judges was written during the monarchical period in Israel (eleventh to seventh centuries B.C.), and the author was clearly a loyal monarchist.  When he says “there was no king in Israel,” however, there is a double meaning which he may or may not have intended, and which takes us back to the inception of the kingship, shortly after the period of leadership by individuals known as “judges,” whom God called and empowered to serve under him on an ad hoc basis.

        As that period drew to a close, Israel looked for leadership to the prophet Samuel, who was in effect the last of the judges.  Samuel reminded the people, just as Gideon had done previously (Judges 8:23), that by the terms of their covenant, they had—and needed—no king but God Almighty, who would speak to them and lead them through his prophets.  As Moses had predicted would happen (Deut.17:14-20), however, the people protested against this arrangement and demanded “a king to lead us, such as all the other nations have.” (1Sam.8:5)  Samuel, a true prophet, gave them the Lord’s warning about political life in “all the other nations”:

Samuel told all the words of the LORD to the people who were asking him for a king.  He said, “This is what the king who will reign over you will do: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots.  Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots.  He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers.  He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants.  He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants.  Your menservants and maidservants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use.  He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves.  When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, and the LORD will not answer you in that day.” (1 Sam.8:10-18)

To anyone with any experience of politics, the people’s response will come as no surprise:  “But the people refused to listen to Samuel. ‘No!’ they said. ‘We want a king over us.  Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles.’” (1Sam.8:19-20)  Even when God, through Samuel, warned them that they were setting themselves on a road that would lead to breaking the covenant, they remained adamant, and so:

Samuel summoned the people of Israel to the LORD at Mizpah and said to them, “This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: ‘I brought Israel up out of Egypt, and I delivered you from the power of Egypt and all the kingdoms that oppressed you.’  But you have now rejected your God, who saves you out of all your calamities and distresses. And you have said, ‘No, set a king over us.’” (1Sam.10:17-19)

And they got King Saul.  In the world of autonomous humanity, the character of the ruler matters almost as much as it does in the kingdom of God—but it’s a lot more iffy.

        The books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles describe the trajectory of Israel’s monarchy, which is in fact the trajectory that all successfully ambitious states follow:  conquest, wealth, pride, complacency, decadence, and downfall.  Now we can see the double meaning, or ambiguity, conveyed in the statement, “In those days there was no king in Israel.”  There was no king, that is, except for the King of kings.  In demanding a human king just like all the other nations had, Israel effectively rejected the rule of the only King with a difference, the One who is perfect both in moral character and in power.

Their decision marks one of the great revelatory moments in human history.  First of all, it shows that God had spoken truly when he told Moses, “You are going to rest with your fathers, and these people will soon prostitute themselves to the foreign gods of the land they are entering. They will forsake me and break the covenant I made with them.  On that day I will become angry with them and forsake them; I will hide my face from them, and they will be destroyed.” (Deut.31:16-17)  In hindsight, and particularly with the hindsight afforded by the New Testament writings, we can see that the Mosaic Covenant was never designed to be permanent.  It could have been permanent only if the people of Israel were able to remain faithful to the covenant, to keep up their end, and they weren’t.  The reason for their inability is implied in Jeremiah’s famous prophecy of the New Covenant:

“The time is coming,” declares the LORD, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah.  It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them,” declares the LORD.  “This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time,” declares the LORD.  “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.  No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,” declares the LORD. “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” (Jer.31:31-34)

In what amounts to a commentary on this prophecy in the third chapter of Second Corinthians, Paul emphasizes the difference between the external nature of the Old Covenant, written on tablets of stone, and the internal nature of the New Covenant, written on the believer’s heart by the Holy Spirit.  The Israelites couldn’t keep the covenant because their inward motivation was inadequate.  They were under God’s law but were still essentially autonomous, both individually (with a few exceptions, who are referred to as a faithful “remnant”) and as a whole society.  A leader they couldn’t see with their physical eyes seemed unreal to them, and therefore they demanded a king like all the other nations had—an autonomous, flesh and blood king.  In this way, Israel serves as a proxy or representative of the whole race of fallen, autonomous humanity.  In God’s plan of salvation, they are the test case, the example of why we need a Savior. “These things happened to them as examples,” Paul writes, “and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come.” (1Cor.10:11)

Fear:  The Dominion of Darkness

Autonomy is a difficult and stressful condition. Alienated from God, we are alone in a vast, unknown universe which seems utterly indifferent to us. Having lost our true home as children of God, we can never be really at home in the universe he created, no matter how hard and how long we try.  We do not truly know who we are or the reason for our existence.  The Bible describes fallen humanity as people walking in darkness, living in the land of the shadow of death (Isa.9:2).  With unforgettable authority, the book of Ecclesiastes reminds us that life without God is meaningless, futile, hopeless, and endlessly frustrating even in its brevity.  In losing God we have lost our moral compass; we have to figure out our own moral and legal codes.  We can decide on a moral code very close to God’s own values (a tacit admission that rebelling wasn’t so smart), or we can decide to be hedonists or sadists or racists or communists, or we can just live like animals, though without their dignity.  Most of us are born and raised in a religious system—Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Catholicism, spiritism, atheism, and so on—and it is hard to break free of these, mentally or socially.  (Atheists dislike being classed as a belief system, but they do systematically believe there is no God and can’t prove it; Q.E.D.  Jesus—to anticipate a bit—explodes all religious systems, even Christianity when it becomes too religious and systematic.)

Autonomous individuals can either submerge their own identity in something felt to be greater than the self—a religion, a tribe, an ideology, a strong leader (a “king”)—or else they remain self-centered; for them, there is no other possible center. This condition produces our economic and political life in all its fluid variations.  Trust in other people is necessary for any degree of economic or political life, but who can I trust?  How far?  We extend trust first to family members, then the clan, then the tribe—but there is always doubt and always rival clans and tribes.  As our society grows more sophisticated we form guilds and parties and all sorts of special interest factions.  We master the arts of war in order to enhance our wealth and supposed security, but glutting the world with land mines, machine guns and nuclear weapons leaves no one secure.  We learn the uses of propaganda (now euphemized as public relations), from the simple deceitful persuasion with which the serpent conned Eve to the gold-standard, ultra-sophisticated chicanery by which all things from beer to pills to politicians are marketed on television. Full-blown, as it is today, this autonomous life rests on endlessly shifting sands and innumerable tipping points. Any stable balance between order and chaos becomes ever harder to find.  Order is oppressive and imposed by force, while at the same time chaos can barely be restrained.  “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold ....”

To live this autonomous life is to be chronically insecure.  Half of the world’s people have no real security against starvation, disease, or physical violence, and they know it.  The wealthy can retreat into walled enclaves, as they have done ever since civilization (a loaded word) got started, and then satiate themselves as best they can, but they too are going to get old and sick and dead.  Money can only buy so much.
Such radical insecurity produces fear.  Some of our fears are imaginary, but most are well-founded, like the fear of economic loss or relational rejection or cancer or old age, senility and death.  As it happens, all this fear is a subject about which the Bible has a lot to say.

It began as soon as Adam and Eve broke their covenant with God.

Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden.
But the LORD God called to the man, “Where are you?”
He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” (Gen.3:8-10)

Ever since, we have been afraid because we are naked; neither fig leaves nor three piece suits can cover up that kind of nakedness.

The moral barrenness of our fallen condition was unveiled soon enough when Cain, fraught with envy, murdered his brother Abel.  For this act, he was condemned to be “a restless wanderer on the earth.” (Gen.4:12)  As in the case of his parents, his doom may be understood either as an appropriate sentence from God or as what is inexorably the lot of a murderer within human society:  He is feared and becomes a pariah.  But the moral character of autonomous humanity is such that mistrust and fear are universal.  Paul summarizes this condition: “The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like.” (Gal.5:19-21)  It doesn’t take a bluenose to assemble such a list; just watch the evening news and the programming that follows it, or surf the net for a few days
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Cain’s response to his doom and the ambience of fear was to build a city (Gen. 4:17), presumably the first city. (Whether you interpret this account as historical or archetypal makes little difference for my purpose here.) City-building can be explained in anthropological terms, but it is spiritually significant as well, as Jacques Ellul has brilliantly propounded in The Meaning of the City. A city is a means of defense against other people whom we fear will be envious or hostile.  But it is also, as Ellul brings out, the main way by which autonomous humanity has sought to build a meaningful life in the absence of God, an independent life whose benefits and profits will be our own.  The city is “our thing.”  Among its benefits are increasing wealth and technological power, which readily translate into military power.  From a bastion for defense, the city morphs into a launch pad for offensive operations.  Through warfare, the city expands to dominate an empire. In Biblical times we had Ninevah and Babylon and Rome, and ever since we have had more of the same.

There are ingrained problems with this evolution, however. Cities are intensely political, meaning they are full of factions, power struggles, deals made and broken, and lying propaganda. Order and disorder struggle against each other. The strong and wealthy joust while the poor try to avoid getting trampled. Warfare, the animating spirit of empire, wastes the wealth and health of victors and vanquished alike, so that empires plant and reap their own destruction.  “Destructive forces are at work in the city; threats and lies never leave its streets,” as David observed (Ps. 55:11)  Here in the world we have built for ourselves, wrote the author of Hebrews, “we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.” (Heb.13:14)

Rivalry and Warfare

The constant experience of autonomous humanity, then, has been a struggle between order and disorder, tyranny and anarchy.  Thomas Hobbes famously argued that only strong government can prevent an endlessly destructive “war of all against all.”  Along with the struggle, however, we also experience plenty of goodness (Hobbes may have overstated his case).  Some of this goodness comes to us through the earth around us.  Certainly we have droughts and floods, freezes and famines, but mostly what we get from nature is beauty and bounty.  More importantly, we find goodness also in human relations—love, generosity, tolerance, mutual help and encouragement. Vital to our understanding of human life is whether we see this state of affairs as evidence of a core of goodness in human nature which may be nurtured until it predominates, or whether the goodness is a gift of God: God impressing something of his own nature upon our nature to keep us from destroying ourselves. This interpretive difference is the main thing that separates humanistic worldviews from the view of the Bible.

The Bible’s teaching on this point is clear and emphatic.  God destroyed most of the race in the Flood because he “saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.” (Gen.6:5)  Afterward, God promised not to destroy the race again “even though every inclination of his [man’s] heart is evil from childhood.” (Gen.8:21)  Jesus objected to being called “good teacher” on the grounds that “No one is good—except God alone.” (Mark 10:18)  Paul stated the same case by quoting from the Old Testament: “As it is written: ‘There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God.  All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.’” (Rom.3:10-12)  This doesn’t mean that no one ever does anything good—think of the parable of the Good Samaritan, or of the disciples fishing through the night to provide for their families—but it does mean that when we do good, we rightly attribute the motivation to God.

So, as regards autonomous humanity per se, we have rebellion against God, tension and struggle, evil in our hearts—and the main manifestation of all this has been endemic warfare.  A close survey of human history—whatever region, whatever nation or era—reveals almost continuous warfare. We have clan feuds, border disputes, dynastic wars, religious wars, factional struggles, gang wars, resource wars, guerilla wars, ideological conflict, civil wars, genocides, imperial wars, colonial wars, wars of conquest-for-its-own-sake, warlord armies and warrior cultures. The development of human technology has been spurred and led by military technology.  Tolstoy’s great novel War and Peace is mostly war.

War, however, doesn’t spring full-blown out of peace. Within autonomous human society, “peace” really means a truce seen by each side in a conflict to be the most advantageous policy currently available.  Patrick Henry quoted Jeremiah’s perennially apt observation: “They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.” (Jer.6:14)  “Peace” as only a truce might seem an unduly pessimistic assessment, but it rests on a realistic understanding of social and political relations among autonomous humanity.  “War,” von Clauswitz said, “is the continuation of politics by other means,” and he was right, because politics is, essentially, the way we organize our innumerable rivalries.  Rivalry is the prime motive of autonomous human life, and rivalry naturally leads to conflict.

The autonomous person, remember, is existentially alone.  Trust among people is necessarily provisional.  We are mostly seeking the same things—food, sex, shelter and security—and the uncertainty of trust makes competition inevitable.  So we find rivalry at the core of humanity’s sexual, economic and political relationships.  Sexually, what our world calls “love” is, in male and female alike, a compound of lust, ambition and jealousy, where the goal is ownership and control, hopefully (but not usually) leading to security, stability and happiness. This is clearly presented in television soap operas, which dramatize not what really exists but an exaggeration of it which, programming executives have learned, people hanker after.  Rivalry is indisputably the core of our economic life; capitalism has enthroned competition as the sovereign way to gain wealth.  Almost every nation accepts this as a fact of economic life, and all are desperate to figure out how to survive riding the tiger.

Even though God is good and has revealed his goodness to us, and even though all our troubles stem from our rebellion against God, many of us tend to blame God for the injustice and suffering that have pervaded human history.  Even Christians have misgivings on this score. Intentionally or not, we are inclined to suppress the truth, spelled out in Romans 1, that human injustice and suffering are, directly and unequivocally, the result of the Fall of Adam and Eve and the participation of every one of their descendants in that Fall.  In the words of the cartoon character Pogo, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

As best we can tell, God had only two options in creating the human race.  He could have created a race of moral puppets who would obey him without choice and be glad and content.  Or he could create a race of beings made “in his image” as to moral freedom—that is, with real moral choice and responsibility—who could live in unhindered relationship with him and yet be, unlike him, finite (limited) in knowledge and wisdom.  We may be inclined to look at this second option as God “rolling the dice”; but of course God always knows how the dice will fall.  Knowing the end from the beginning, God decided to give us moral freedom and deal with the consequences.  We chose autonomy, which meant alienation, “lostness,” fear, rivalry, the strong exploiting and oppressing the weak, and warfare.  God chose to send his only Son to pay the penalty for us and provide us a way out.

Probably the one instance of warfare that most troubles Christians with regard to God’s involvement in it is the conquest of Canaan following the Exodus.  To understand what was going on in that episode, we need to see it in the larger context.  Throughout history, God has dealt with us as we are in our social and political arrangements.  How else, unless he abandoned us, could he deal with us?  “As we are” always means struggling, uncertain, and insecure, with conflict between individuals, families, and larger groups.  Israel at the time of the Exodus was a tribal nation just forming its nationhood, in direct conflict with both Egypt and the smaller tribal nations to the north and east.  If the Israelite people were to survive as a nation, they could only do so through warfare.  In this respect they are the same as every other nation throughout history; warfare between tribes and nations has been constant during the long saga of fallen humanity.  In granting them the land of Canaan, God was availing himself of this perennial condition and using it to serve his long-term plan of salvation.  To carry out that plan, he needed a nation through which our salvation could be prepared.  The tribes currently occupying the land had to be completely driven out or destroyed because God needed the nation of Israel to be a “separate people” with whom his covenant could be established and put to the test.  (As the sequel shows, the main purpose of this testing was to prove our absolute need for a divine Savior.)  The moral degeneracy of the Canaanites was one reason for their destruction, but not the main reason; if God acted on strictly moral grounds, he would destroy the whole race.  The primary reason was God’s determination to work out a plan of salvation within fallen humanity—on our turf, literally.  God told the Israelites in the plainest terms that the reason they were spared and given the land was not that they were better than the current inhabitants:

After the LORD your God has driven them out before you, do not say to yourself, “The LORD has brought me here to take possession of this land because of my righteousness.” No, it is on account of the wickedness of these nations that the LORD is going to drive them out before you.  It is not because of your righteousness or your integrity that you are going in to take possession of their land; but on account of the wickedness of these nations, the LORD your God will drive them out before you, to accomplish what he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  Understand, then, that it is not because of your righteousness that the LORD your God is giving you this good land to possess, for you are a stiff-necked people. (Deut.9:4-6)

Over the ensuing centuries the Israelites managed to forget this admonition almost completely, in spite of their prophets’ reminders.  A New Covenant became the only hope of fallen humanity.

The Secret

There is a secret, the Bible tells us, behind the grandiose but sad, bloody and ruinous course of human ambition.  The secret is that the world system is not actually autonomous; autonomy is a delusion.  A “secret power of lawlessness” (2Thess.2:7) dominates our minds and motives, pulling our strings.  Satan, who hides behind the myth that he is merely a mythical figure, is in fact, as a result of Adam’s fall, “the prince of this world” (John 12:31), “the god of this age” (2Cor.4:4), and “the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient.” (Eph. 2:2)  The New Testament uses the word “world” (Greek kosmos) in quite different senses, which can be confusing. Sometimes it means the earth, sometimes the human race (whom God loves—John 3:16), but often it means the world system dominated by Satan—the spiritual “evil empire.”  “Do not love the world,” the apostle John warns us, “or anything in the world.  If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.  For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father but from the world.  The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.” (1John 2:15-17)  The “world” in this sense is a system of motives and purposes, which are those of Satan himself:  hatred, envy, pride, ambition, deceit, intimidation, treachery, and above all fear.  Satan himself is full of fear—abject, naked, hopeless fear—and as far as he can, he turns this into a weapon against his subjects.

Jesus came to the earth “so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.” (Heb.2:14-15) In the Biblical worldview, God and the deliverance he has provided are our only escape from existential fear:

God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea,
though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging. (Ps.46:1-3)

Otherwise, if God is not our refuge and strength, we will most certainly be afraid under the regime of life and death as we find it in this world.  Anyone who denies this is not being entirely candid.  We can master our behavior under this fear, but we are still under it.

By far, however, most of the occurrences of the word “fear” in Scripture have to do with the fear of God.  This is often explained as a reverential fear, and inasmuch as our fear of God is bound up with gratitude and love and joy, it must be distinguished from the naked and hopeless fear of fallen humanity.  Nevertheless, our feeling toward an infinitely powerful Being with absolute control over our destiny, even while it is tempered by gratitude and joy, is something more spine-tingling than reverence.  Jesus advised us, “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” (Matt.10:28)  This is a healthy fear.  We can evade it, of course, by disbelieving God’s existence, but that leaves us back with fears of cancer and Alzheimer’s.  We’re better off with God.

Much better:  “For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” (Col.1:13-14)  Enough about the dominion of darkness; let’s look at the kingdom of the Son.

The Good King

Order struggling against chaos is a valid way of describing the attempts of autonomous man (as he sees it) to organize his life.  As I have said, though, the Bible presents these attempts in terms of our varied responses to the sovereignty of God.  Our responses are evaluated in moral terms because God is, supremely, a moral Being.  So the issue is, fundamentally, good versus evil.  Whereas autonomous man has to search out moral values for himself, the New Covenant in Christ frees us from that futile quest.  God himself is absolute goodness.  A hoary theological question asks whether an act is good because God wills it, or whether he wills it because it is good.  This is a false dichotomy, both sides of which are true. If it were not a false dichotomy we would be in trouble, since in that case either God’s will would be arbitrary, “beyond good and evil,” or else God’s sovereignty would be subject to a moral code which would be, in some mysterious way, above and beyond him.  Thankfully, it is not so.  God and the Good are one and the same.  This is what it means when God is called “righteous.”  It means that his moral character is perfect—and we know this not just because “the Bible says so,” but because his character, as evidenced by his actions within history as well as by the testimony of Biblical authors, squares with what just about all of us consider moral excellence. “And he [God] passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, ‘The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.’” (Ex.34:6-7)  Are those not good qualities?

We have already looked at the reasons why we needed a New Covenant, why we needed God himself to come to us in the person of Jesus Christ and take on himself the appropriate penalty for our rebellion.  We can’t rule ourselves, at least not tolerably well.  We aren’t good enough.  We can’t maintain a stable balance between order and chaos, tyranny and anarchy.  We need a Good King. When we study the character, the teaching, and the actions of Jesus, we discover that he is not merely what we need, he is way better than we could ever have imagined.  We thought we had love scoped out, but now we find we had only dipped our toe in a muddy puddle of it.  In Jesus we experience the pure depths of love:  “This is how we know what love is:  Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.  And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.” (1John 3:16)  It is crucial for us to grasp that there is no other way for us to know what love is except by knowing Jesus, and we can only know Jesus by entrusting our life to him, letting go of autonomy and embracing faith:  “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen.  For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” (2Cor.4:18)  “Unseen” doesn’t mean unreal.  God is real; there does exist “the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.” (Heb.11:10)  Absent God’s self-revelation, however, fallen humanity is blind.

As well as being the King of kings, Jesus is the Creator of all things. “For by him all things were created:  things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him.” (Col.1:16)  This is, of course, a restatement of the original creation account: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” (Gen.1:1)  In a way, creation is similar to chaos. It’s revolutionary. It brings wild change. Creation is hard to control; it’s almost impossible to know what’s coming next—unless you’re God. Unless you are Jesus Christ.  Jesus has always had creation completely under control.  In our fallen world, under the desperate rule of a maniacal evil spirit who operates with flunkies as stable as Nero and Hitler (no wonder things fall apart), order fights against chaos with no peace in sight.  “‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.” (Jer.6:14)  In the kingdom of the Prince of Peace, however, who holds the devil’s neck in his fist, the sovereignty and creativity of the King are in perfect harmony.  Enter the service of this Sovereign and you will be truly free:  “So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” (John 8:36)  We are free because he, God, is free, and by faith we are in him, “in Christ.”  In Christ, we are no longer under God’s law or under the regime of fear:  we are in.

There is a beautiful Biblical word, “grace,” that sums up all these qualities—sovereignty, love, creativity and freedom—and tells us that in God they all “work together for good”—and not just for goodness in itself, but also “for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” (Rom.8:28)  This is an incomparably better arrangement than anything autonomous humanity (not to mention the devil) has ever come up with.  The gracious kingdom of God is a great place to live.