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I remember playing a sort of game during Science class when I was a kid. The teacher would show us a series of pictures of things and we would have to describe the objects in the pictures. We didn’t know it at the time, but they were all pictures of very plain ordinary things (a banana, a table top, an eraser) only they were taken with a high-powered microscope. The pictures didn’t look like anything we could identify, and we were left just basically describing the characteristics of what we were seeing. Lumpy. Jagged. Bubbly. Messy. Spikey. Things like that. After the game, the teacher showed us pictures of the items in regular size. He went on to explain that both images were accurate images of the items but, in order to fully understand a thing, we must attempt to look at it from every possible perspective. Seeing a table top only as a bumpy, pitted, irregular surface in a microscope would not allow us to understand the table top as the smooth clean surface that we use it for. Seeing only the smooth peel of a banana would mislead us about the incredible detail and complexity that actually makes up the banana peel. We tend to have this same perspective problem with the Bible.
There are 66 books of the Bible. My Bible has 863 pages in it. There are 1,189 chapters in the Bible. There are 31,103 verses in the Bible. These 31,103 verses make up one complete story. But we tend to look at the Bible with a microscopic view. We have our favorite verses that inspire us, uplift us, give us hope, and speak peace to us. We have our handful of verses prepared for battle, so to speak… those that back up our beliefs and doctrines that we whip out of our holsters when challenged. We have verses that we plaster on billboards, bumper stickers, and signs at football games. While still an accurate picture of the Bible itself, they are but a microscopic view of it. In order to fully understand any verse or book of the Bible, including the Bible as a whole, it must be viewed from the larger perspective. In other words, we must not only understand individual verses, chapters, and books, but also how they fit within the context of the entire Bible.
A person who was only exposed to the microscopic picture of the banana may indeed come to learn much about bananas that would be accurate, but he could never comprehend the whole banana. A person who consistently examines only the same handful of verses will also come to learn much that is accurate about God, but he could never understand God as fully as he is intended to without seeing the bigger picture.
For whatever reason, I was thinking today about what event in the Bible I would most like to have experienced in person. You know, kind of the whole if-you-could-go-back-to-any-point-in-time-what-time-would-it-be game, but limited to the Bible. My first instinct was to say the resurrection of Jesus. But as my mind played through the entire Bible, I came up with one that I think I would have liked to experience even more than that. I decided that my time would have been to walk the road to Emmaus with Cleopas and the other disciple of Jesus.
It was just after the resurrection, but only a handful of people had yet witnessed the resurrected Messiah. Here are these two disciples on a seven mile walk to a neighboring town, talking about all that had happened over the past week. Suddenly this stranger joins them on the road. Their conversation eventually turns into a Bible study as they walked along, with the stranger as the teacher. The stranger, of course, was the resurrected Jesus who “beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself.“
The very idea gives me the kind of excitement that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up a little bit. I can imagine walking along the dusty roads, looking down at my sandaled feet plodding along, while listening to the very voice of Jesus. I can imagine myself often stopping, unable to take another step, as Jesus reveals Himself in verse after verse of the Bible and my mind tries to soak it all in. I can imagine looking up occasionally to look into His face and ask a question, only to see Him smile back at me and go on to give me a perfect explanation that clicks in my brain like a rusty combination lock finally snapping open. What I can’t imagine is the joy and amazement that would have come once I realized that I had spent intimate hours with Jesus as He revealed Himself lovingly, patiently, and truthfully to just me and a few select friends. It kind of makes me wonder why I ever talk about anybody or anything else, honestly. The Bible is not a book of history, laws, and judgments… it’s all about Jesus. The world around us is not about politics, wars, and economies… it’s all about Jesus. The church is not about attendance numbers, denominations, and systematic theologies… it’s all about Jesus. When Jesus had the undivided attention of His disciples on the road to Emmaus he could have taught them about anything, but the one thing He chose to talk to them about was Himself. If we are truly trying to be like Jesus, that is what we will be engaged in as well… proclaiming Him, teaching of Him, reaching for Him, being all-consumed with Him.
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So, I’d love to hear what your moment in Biblical time would be and why. Post a comment if you’d like to share…
I used to sell real estate several years ago. The only reason I mention this is that I was thinking tonight about two of the people who I helped in selling their homes. One was a nice middle-aged couple with a teenage son. They lived in a pretty typical little 3 bedroom 2 bath starter home. The other was an older single lady who lived in what was probably the worst house I’d ever seen somebody actually living in. She had tried and tried to sell it, but no bank would loan money on it so nobody could buy it. She was kind of stuck. But one day she got a knock on her door from a business owner that was coming to town that wanted to buy her house and two of her neighbors’ houses so he could knock them down and build a new store. She jumped at the chance. We found her a great little house to buy that was a world apart from her old one. She was going from leaky plumbing, creaking floors, broken windows, failing foundation and a mold problem into a house that was only a few years old.
The reason I think of these two home sellers together is that I had a chance to visit both of them just before they locked the doors to their old houses for the last time. I was shocked at the state of the house of the middle-aged couple. It was a wreck. They had dinged the walls all up while moving furniture out, didn’t bother to even sweep the floors, the toilets weren’t cleaned, and they left a small mountain of garbage bags in the backyard. They seemingly couldn’t have cared less about the condition of the house. They were leaving it anyway, so why bother? It was somebody else’s problem now.
When I dropped in on the older lady, I found something I didn’t expect. As I walked up to the house, I saw her in the window, up on a stool, with windex and paper towels. She was washing all the windows. As she let me in the house, I could see she had spent a lot of time cleaning things up, and this was a hard house to even notice when it had been cleaned. Like I said, it was in really rough shape. I asked what she had been up to and she informed me that she had been cleaning for hours. The floors were mopped, the countertops wiped down, the drawers washed out, the trash taken to the street, and the windows just about all washed. All of this for a house that was going to be knocked down within a week. When I asked her why she was cleaning, she said that even though it had been a hard house to live in with a lot of problems, it really had been a blessing in her life. Her parents, now deceased, had bought it for her decades before and she couldn’t stand the though of dishonoring their gift by leaving it a mess. There was a lot of emotion in her words and I knew that, even though she was going somewhere far better, what was a wreck of a house to everybody else had been her home.
Christians live in a world that we believe is quickly passing away. Jesus is expected at nearly any moment and this earth will be demolished as we prepare for a new heaven and a new earth. We, like the homeowners, are getting ready to lock the door for the last time and turn the keys over so it can be knocked down. But which of the two home sellers are we like? I am disturbed by the many Christians I meet that seem to welcome the destruction of this world, writing off its current state and ecological issues as no big deal because the earth is doomed anyway. Why bother cleaning it up if it is just going to be destroyed?
In the beginning of time, man was given the charge of taking care of this amazing planet that God meant as a gift for us. As far as I can tell, He has not let us off the hook from that charge. Just because we know its final destiny does not give us license to let the place go to hell (pardon the expression). It is still our job to take care of it as best we can. Sure, we may just be washing the windows of a condemned house that is slated for destruction, but I think God will be pleased to find us doing what we can to honor His creation when He comes.
Sorry for the seemingly political foray with this post. But to me, it really is a spiritual issue of honoring God by honoring His creation.
We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.
