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My kids are getting old enough that they will soon be driving. It’s got me a little freaked out, to be honest. They don’t seem old enough to be behind the wheel of a car. One is 17 and the other is 15… 16 in a few days. I was driving at 14, so I’m not sure what my hangup is. But anyway…
As I’ve been teaching them a little bit about driving, I’ve found myself going to extremes in order to try to keep them safe. Take speeding for example. We’ve talked all about speed limits, speed limit signs, speeding tickets, and policemen with radar guns. But what I’ve really tried to reinforce to them is that, “If you speed, you’ll get in a wreck and die.” Pretty dramatic, right? But it is the dramatic examples that seem to get through to them. It’s what got through to me when I was in their shoes. In reality, many other lesser things are much more likely to happen if they speed than a fatal car crash. In fact, the vast majority of the time, nothing will happen at all. They’ll get away with it. Sometimes, but very rarely, they’ll get a ticket. Every once in a great while they might get in a fender bender. The chances of getting in a fatal accident because of speeding are real, but somewhat remote. It’s hardly the likeliest thing to happen. I realized I had used this same ‘extreme example technique’ to teach them lots of things. Don’t walk alone or you’ll be kidnapped. Don’t wander off or you’ll get lost and we’ll never find you. Don’t play near the street or you’ll be hit by a car. Wear clean underwear in case you get in an accident (okay, I’ve never said that one, nor do I understand it, but that’s a different subject entirely). I realized that, when something is really important to get across to them, I tend to get really extreme to make my point.
Well, God does the same thing. You see, I had been struggling with why there was so much blood in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament. Lots and lots of animal sacrifices, sprinkling of blood on altars, and such. I wondered why God would choose blood as the way to communicate with us the consequences of sin. I realized that, just like me with my kids, God is using the most dramatic example He had at His disposal in order to communicate to us the seriousness of the danger. He is sounding the most extreme warning He can of the real danger of spiritual death that comes from sin. It’s effectiveness is evident by how much it affects people who read the Bible, and how much more it must have affected people who actually lived during the time of the sacrifices. It is disturbing and a little overwhelming at times… but it’s supposed to be. There is no denying that the images of bloody sacrifices communicates the very real danger of sin, just like the mental images of terrible car crashes just might help my kids make the decision to slow down when they are driving. It is God being a good and responsible Father by teaching us as vividly as possible about the very real dangers we face.
The other thing that really spoke to me about this is that I suffered from the misunderstanding that God actually enjoyed these sacrifices… that it was something He took pleasure in. Then I came across this incredible passage in Isaiah.
“To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices to Me?” Says the LORD. “I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams And the fat of fed cattle. I do not delight in the blood of bulls, Or of lambs or goats. When you come to appear before Me, Who has required this from your hand, To trample My courts? (Isaiah 1:11-12 NKJV)
Here is God — the same God who required these sacrifices from His people — saying He doesn’t delight in them, He doesn’t desire them. What’s up with that? Almost immediately I had the image of a swear jar come into my mind. It’s a method some people use to get people in their family to stop swearing. Imagine you are a father and you institute a swear jar to help your son stop using bad language. Every time he swears, he has to put another quarter in the jar. A day later your son comes up to you with a great big smile on his face…
“Dad! You’ll be so proud of me,” he says. “Look how much money I’ve put in the swear jar! It’s really adding up! You have no idea how many times I’ve had to swear today to get this much money collected!”
Your son has obviously missed the point of the swear jar, just like the Israelites (and us) miss the point of the sacrifices. God did not delight in the sacrifices for sin. His point was that He wanted them (and us) to stop sinning. The swear jar wasn’t instituted as a way to make money, but to correct bad behavior. The sacrifices for sin were not meant to be a pleasure to God but to correct bad behavior. But as the scripture above says, the Israelites had become so confused that they were actually trampling His courts to make their sin sacrifices. Even though we don’t have to make those kinds of sacrifices today, we can still suffer from the same misunderstanding that the Israelites did about them and start to believe in a God who delighted in blood and gore.
God does not delight in the shedding of blood. Obviously neither do we, considering that is why so many people are turned off by all the blood in the Bible. And that is precisely why He uses its symbolism so often throughout the Bible. It speaks to us graphically, powerfully, and effectively. Nobody can be left wondering about exactly how strongly God feels — and wants us to feel — about sin.
When I first started really studying the Bible in earnest, I found a God who seemed very concerned with being the center of His creation’s attention. You can’t help but notice throughout the scripture that God expects to be worshipped… demands it even. I had a hard time coming to terms with a God who claims to be love, claims to be good, claims to be perfect, and yet also seems at times to be completely preoccupied with His own glory. He can seem to be a very vain God indeed. This is something I struggled with for quite awhile, trying to rectify in my mind these character traits of God and getting them to mesh in some sensible way.
This, for me, was one of those things that took time to come into focus. I’ve learned to really cherish the hard teachings in the word of God — the ones that make me scratch my head — because they are the very teachings that keep me searching for answers, keep me in prayer asking for God’s help, and keep me in the always rewarding process of trying to get to know the unknowable God. After all, if you could read the Bible one time through and understand it all completely, why would you ever pick it up again? I firmly believe that God has left His Word full of mystery, metaphor, poetry, and symbolism to keep us coming back over and over, and teaching us to understand it more deeply with each search.
The answer to this particular question – is our God a vain God? — came in two parts. The first was the simple realization that God demands glory and worship because He is worthy of it. He is the only Being truly worthy of it. He is the only Being worth giving glory and worship to. We, as humans, are going to worship something or somebody. Turn the TV on any hour of the day and you will see it. We worship movie stars, athletes, comedians, reality show contestants, and even politicians. Walk down the street and you will see the worship of name brand logos, nice cars, huge status symbol homes, and perfect physiques. We align ourselves more intensely with our favorite college football teams than we sometimes do with our own families. We are constantly trying to give glory and praise to almost everything around us… almost like that’s what we were made to do.
But that is only part of the equation. Of course God is worthy of our praise and worship. If you believe in God, that should be a no-brainer. But the second part of the equation is what really turned the lights on for me.
I believe the reason we tend to seek out things to worship around us is because we are literally designed to worship. He doesn’t demand worship from us for His sake, He is trying to show us what will fulfill us as the human race. He knows that the only thing that will truly fulfill us is the worship of Him. He is what we are seeking. He is what we are desiring. He is the missing piece of our lives that we are trying so desperately to fill with everything in this world. And this isn’t some theological position for me. It has become true to me because I have experienced it so intensely in times of worshipping Him.
Have you ever noticed that nothing in this life really seems to fully satisfy? As soon as you get the job you always wanted, you realize there is another even better job that you want. As soon as you build your dream home you begin to discover things you would change or do differently with the next dream house. As soon as you move to the city you’ve always wanted to live in, you begin to discover that it’s not the paradise you hoped it would be and begin wondering if the grass is greener somewhere else. It’s like God is trying to tell us something in all of this. Why would He have given us this intense desire for satisfaction in life and then leave us no way to completely fulfill that desire? Well, He has given us the one thing that will give us satisfaction, the one thing that will finally complete us as humans. He has given us Himself. I can tell you that the only times I’ve felt completely whole in my life have been in times of worship. When my gaze and my desire is on Him and Him alone, I am complete. To borrow a cheesy line from Jerry McGuire… He completes me. All those feelings of being unsatisfied with the world around me melt away in Him. I was designed to worship Him.
Unfortunately, it’s not a condition I can permanently enjoy until I am with Him in eternal life. I think I’m getting better and better at being able to be in that place more often, and for longer periods of time, but it is still fleeting. I still have misplaced desires that I try to fulfill with the world around me. I’m still learning daily to turn these things over to Him and seek His ability to fulfill my life rather than seek my own ways. I’m sure it’ll be a lifelong process. But I am so grateful to have found what so many are still searching for in all the wrong places.
If you are reading this and are struggling with feelings of doubt, fear, disillusionment, depression, or lack of purpose, I encourage you to worship God. Spend some real time seeking Him in prayer. Spend some real time in the word of God, learning who He really is. Spend some time singing praises to Him. Spend some time confessing to Him and offering Him thanks. Spend some time just kneeling at His feet and giving Him glory and honor. If these things seem strange or uncomfortable to do, tell Him about it. Ask for His help in learning to worship Him. He is so eager to teach us how. Find fellow believers that can come alongside of you in worship.
I was taught in elementary school that our basic needs are air, water, food, shelter, and love in order to stay alive. But if we want to do more than just stay alive — if we want to live as we were designed to live — we must worship God.
It may be one of the strangest stories in the Old Testament. An old dude named Balaam is asked to come and curse the Israelites. He doesn’t really want to, but is persuaded to go anyway, and sets off on his donkey. Along the road, an angel from God appears in the road. Balaam doesn’t see the angel but his donkey does and refuses to go any further. Balaam begins to abuse the poor donkey, both verbally and physically, trying to get the donkey to go forward. Finally, the donkey says to Balaam, “What have I done to you, that you have struck me these three times?” Yep. That’s right. The donkey spoke to Balaam.
I’ve read critics of the Bible who attack this story as proof that the Bible is fiction by saying things like not only do donkeys not have the mental capacity for speech but, even if they did, their mouths, lips, and tongue are not capable of it. It’s physically impossible. Well, thank you, Einstein. I guess Christians didn’t know that donkeys don’t normally talk. Time to chuck our faith and move on, right?
What really gets me is that these same people who attack this account never take on the idea of God speaking to Moses through a burning bush. Does a burning bush have more capacity to speak than a donkey? Certainly not. The whole point is that God is showing the lengths He is willing to go to in order to get our attention. I don’t know of any Christian who believes that the burning bush actually formed and spoke the words of God, nor do I think that we need to believe that the donkey literally spoke in the story of Balaam. In fact, in Peter’s second letter, chapter 2 verse 16, he sheds some more light on this crazy occurrence: …but he (Balaam) was rebuked for his iniquity: a dumb donkey speaking with a man’s voice… Peter tells us the donkey was dumb, just like every other donkey, and that it was in fact speaking with a man’s voice, not a donkey’s voice. It’s my opinion that the voice was actually the angel’s voice — who goes on speaking with Balaam once he can actually see him, incidentally — and that the angel was simply using the donkey as a means of getting Balaam’s attention. Talk about an effective way to do it!
So, talking donkeys? Well, maybe. God could certainly pull it off if He wanted. But I think the story is better understood as God stopping at nothing in trying to get through to Balaam. I, for one, am glad to know that God will even do crazy stuff when He has to in order to get through to us. Just in case, I’ve been listening really closely to my dog lately, but he isn’t saying much.
