The rain necessitated some quick adjustments – but the program went on
The bands and choirs sounded good despite the rain causing some sound system problems
Serenity and I had some fun taking pictures of each other on the pink scooter before the barbecue
In Chapter 7 of Volume 2 of his OT theology, Humanity, Goldingay discusses nature and God’s involvement within the world. He quotes Terence Fretheim to describe the way that the Old Testament the reality of the universe, “the world of the Hebrew Bible is a spiderweb of a world. Interrelatedness is basic to this community of God’s creatures. Each created entity is in symbiotic relationship with every other and with God.”
The first major point he makes is that this is God’s World. He made it and he owns it. God determines how it works and and it shows God’s “greatness and grace.” This means the world displays regularity and order. Our security in this world comes from the fact that God maintains the universe. The order reflects the moral order that God desires. The world also prompts worship because it is a magnificent place full of wonder and grace. The Psalms show that God is committed to bringing about the same perfect order that is in heaven into the earth some day. Yhwh is committed to bringing about his plan for the inanimate, animal and human parts of his creation. All the world is an exposition of God’s wisdom.
God's ownership of the world has a number of other implications. It means God is in a position to decide how it works and to make sure of its security and stability. It means it manifests God's greatness and grace. It means there is a unity about it; earthly experience can help us understand God's dealings with us. It means that we can share in the world (because God invites us to), though we cannot behave as if we own it. It means the world gives God worship. 648
To understand the workings of the cosmos is to be drawn into worship, not to find reason to suspend worship. Nature does not cease to be full of wonder. 657
The world deserves not only human respect but human reflection. The world tells us about the nature of reality. It even tells us about ourselves (cf. Prov. 30.24-33). The world is, indeed, an expression of divine wisdom...So the world is a place to learn from. Because the world is God's creation, it cannot but be a revelation of God. 668
The next section deals with the relation between The Heavens and the Earth. The heavens are the home of God and the earth is the dwelling place of people. Psalm 19 points out that the heavens (though imperfectly) give witness to God’s glory. Yhwh is the “faithful God of the storm” who uses its awesome power to benefit his people and the animal world with the gift of rain and abundant food, even though people and animals are often too stupid to use the benefits. The entire world is there for the benefit of God, not people, but we are tasked with managing it for him. Relationship with God benefits people both spiritually and materially. Governments are supposed to aid in this and promote order but often have the opposite effect.
These phenomena in the heavens that have their effect on earth are not merely manifestations of extraordinary power. In Yhwh, power is adjoined to moral qualities and serves a moral purpose. Yhwh has determined to reign in the world, but the exercise of authority is associated with a commitment to faithfulness. 673
Accounts such as Job 38-39 also complement Genesis 1 by offering a less monarchic and human-centered understanding of God and creation and by seeing humanity much more as part of the ecology of the world. While retaining ownership of the heavens, Yhwh has given earth to humanity (Ps 115.16), yet even the earth is given us to use, not to own. The land itself continues to belong to Yhwh. 682
(Psalm 72) propounds a different view of the way the government goes about ensuring that the economy works, that the crops grow. It is not so much a matter of encouraging investment and efficient management of human resources. It is a matter of ensuring that things work out fairly for the needy...It assumes an underlying moral structure of reality. Matters on earth are interwoven, and attention to one issues in effectiveness in another. 688
God’s Ongoing Activity in the World continues in the creation pattern. He is always at work graciously making daily provision for the needs of his creatures. Throughout history he works in the corrupted world of sin and suffering to bring about his plan as humans fail in their responsibility to manage it. God brings both deliverance and blessing to nature and history in ordinary, natural and extraordinary ways. Yhwh is sovereign over the world and those who recognize this will do a better job of managing his world. Yhwh will use nature to restore his people and, with that, restore the rest of his creation.
The pattern of Yhwh's activity in the original creation continues in Yhwh's ongoing activity in the world. Wondrous acts of creation continue in ongoing provision. Occasional acts of deliverance are complemented by ongoing blessing. Nature and history, creation and politics, the creation of the world and the history of Israel, all are one. 692
Both the ordinary and extraordinary reflect God's involvement, and in this respect the First Testament invites us to rework both our understanding of nature and our understanding of history. Yhwh works both in cyclic time and historical time. 700
The psalm (77) is also a reminder that the person praying has to look for the invisible indications that God is acting and has to be prepared to read nature as reflecting God's activity. 706
How this works is not always clearly seen by people because of The Ambiguity of Life in the World. There are evil forces, entities and people (spiritual and physical) that seem to be working against Yhwh and sometimes it seems the forces of darkness and chaos are winning. But the sunrise every morning should be seen as a sign that the forces of darkness will not ultimately succeed. Somehow darkness and death play an important and necessary part in God’s perfect plan and are under his control. Nature, while often a blessing, can often be a threat and bring about death and darkness, but Yhwh will harness even that in the end to bring about the “Day” of his rule.
There is an irreducible ambiguity about life in the world. The world as God created it, rules it and manages it is full of surprises. It is not at all what we would have made it...But Yhwh is committed to bring ambiguity to resolution and the world to its destiny. 709
The Old Testament recognizes the reality of evil and sees its origin in the “self-assertiveness” in nature itself, of spiritual entities and in humanity. For some reason, God did not put down the forces of evil in creation before he created human beings. We recognize that life in the universe does not reflect universal submission to God as it will some day. Ultimately, only God can put down the evil of the “beast” and “dragon.” Evil, in its subhuman and human, natural and supernatural forms will only be put down when God finishes his plan for the universe and Christ rules over all, as prefigured in his resurrection and ascension.
Human beings are responsible for what they do; no one forces them to do it, yet it does not simply emerge from inside them. This is clearer in Genesis 6 where evil issues from the intervention of heavenly forces in the world, though Genesis does not explain how there came to be heavenly powers in apparent rebellion against God. Genesis 1-2 recognize that as created good, the animal and plant world still needed some mastering, and this mastering is humanity's vocation. 718
When we pray "Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven" we imply that heaven is a place where God's desires are fulfilled and that earth is a place where they are not, but both Testaments imply a more complex understanding...But the Lord's prayer is realistic in recognizing that it is no good us thinking that we can overcome evil, that through us God's will can be implemented. We await divine action to achieve that. The Lord's Prayer is a prayer, not a disguised New Year's resolution. 719
There is plenty of ambiguity in the life of the church and in the life of individual Christians. New things have happened, but the old things have not gone very far away. Precisely that fact puts us into the same position as the creation. We do not simply accept the emptiness to which we are subjected, as if no alternative could be envisaged; we know there is an alternative, and we therefore rail against the emptiness (cf. Rom 7). 731
Paul has been working hard to increase the usefulness and quality of our library. He are some links you can check out to see what is happening in the PIU Library.
Library Newsletters, Friends of the Library Program, The Official PIU Library Page
Serenity enjoyed the baby ducks they received for Easter. Their house is a zoo with dogs, cockatiel, rabbit, cat and now ducks
Hicknerson and Jordan hid the eggs
The kids worked hard to find them
We all enjoyed eating them
The VOM ministered with a couple songs on Friday night and Howard delivered the opening prayer on Easter Sunday morning
There were not enough seats for all of the people.
In the first section of the book Peterson decries the culture’s definition of what a pastor is. He proposes three adjectives to strengthen the noun idea of pastor. They are “unbusy,” “subversive,” and “apocalyptic.” He asks the question, “How can I persuade a person to live by faith and not by works if I have to juggle my schedule constantly to make everything fit into place?” He urges pastors to return to the significant things they should be doing: study, prayer and listening to people.
It was a favorite theme of C. S. Lewis that only lazy people work hard. By lazily abdicating the essential work of deciding and directing, establishing values and setting goals, other people do it for us; then we find ourselves frantically, at the last minute, trying to satisfy a half dozen different demands on our time, none of which is essential to our vocation, to stave off the disaster of disappointing someone. 28.
But what I want to do can’t be done that way. I need a drenching in Scripture; I require an immersion in biblical studies. I need reflective hours over the pages of Scripture as well as personal struggles with the meaning of Scripture. That takes far more time than it takes to prepare a sermon. 30.
The question I put to myself is not “How many people have you spoken to about Christ this week?” but “How many people have you listened to in Christ this week?” 31.
Secondly, the pastor needs to be subversive. Most people don’t, at heart, come to church for the right reasons and they resist the changes that Christ wants to make in their lives. The pastor must keep the balance between meeting people’s felt needs and moving them toward meeting their real needs.
The kingdom of self is heavily defended territory. Post-Eden Adams and Eves are willing to pay their respects to God, but they don’t want him invading their turf. Most sin, far from being a mere lapse of morals or a weak will, is an energetically and expensively erected defense against God. Direct assault in an openly declared war on the god-self is extraordinarily ineffective. Hitting sin head-on is like hitting a nail with a hammer; it only drives it in deeper. There are occasional exceptions, strategically dictated confrontations, but indirection is the biblically preferred method. 41.
Thirdly, pastors must be apocalyptic. They must be “the persons in the church communities who repeat and insist on these kingdom realities against the world appearances.” They must prayerfully and patiently move the perspective of people caught up in the daily world up toward a kingdom perspective.
Apocalypse convinces us that we are in a desperate situation, and in it together. The grass is not greener in the next committee, or parish, or state. All that matters is worshiping God, dealing with evil, and developing faithfulness. Apocalypse ignites a sense of urgency, but it quenches shortcuts and hurry, for the times are in God’s hands. Providence, not the newspaper, accounts for the times in which we live. 57.
Part 2 of the book deals with what the pastor does “between Sundays.” Often we focus so much on the Sunday work we forget that the real ministry is done in the other six days in between. The focus of ministry should be the “care of souls” rather than “running the church.” It means a life of being with people and bringing them into the healing presence of God.
If pastors become accomplices in treating every child as a problem to be figured out, every spouse as a problem to be dealt with, every clash of wills in choir or committee as a problem to be adjudicated, we abdicate our most important work, which is directing worship in the traffic, discovering the presence of the cross in the paradoxes and chaos between Sundays, calling attention to the “splendor in the ordinary,” and, most of all, teaching a life of prayer to our friends and companions in the pilgrimage. 73.
The pastor also needs to be out in the world “praying with eyes open.” We need to be with people experiencing daily life with them and connecting these things to God. We need to be a bodily presence in the community – a regular guy connected to Christ and connecting people to Christ.
Matter is real. Flesh is good. Without a firm rooting in creation, religion is always drifting off into some kind of pious sentimentalism or sophisticated intellectualism. The task of salvation is not to refine us into pure spirits so that we will not be cumbered with this too solid flesh. We are not angels, nor are we to become angels. The Word did not become a good idea, or a numinous feeling, or a moral aspiration; the Word became flesh. It also becomes flesh. Our Lord left us a command to remember and receive him in bread and wine, in acts of eating and drinking. Things matter. The physical is holy. 77–78.
We need to be out there to teach people to pray. We need to be praying with people and praying for people.
This is my essential educational task: to develop and draw out into articulateness this personal word, to teach people to pray. Prayer is Language I. It is not language about God or the faith; it is not language in the service of God and the faith; it is language to and with God in faith. 100.
We need to be working with people to help them find God’s will and be conformed to it. This is not something we force or compel, but it requires us to get to know people so that we see what God is doing in their lives and join him in that. This is how we grow together as people in community.
Prayer and spirituality feature participation, the complex participation of God and the human, his will and our wills. We do not abandon ourselves to the stream of grace and drown in the ocean of love, losing identity. We do not pull the strings that activate God’s operations in our lives, subjecting God to our assertive identity. We neither manipulate God (active voice) or are manipulated by God (passive voice). We are involved in the action and participate in its results but do not control or define it (middle voice). Prayer takes place in the middle voice. 110.
This happens within a “ministry of small talk.” It happens as we enter into the lives of people and talk with them about the ordinary things of their lives. We don’t get opportunity to talk about the big, important spiritual things until we show we care about the things that concern them. The ordinary and everyday is important.
If we bully people into talking on our terms, if we manipulate them into responding to our agenda, we do not take them seriously where they are in the ordinary and the everyday. Nor are we likely to become aware of the tiny shoots of green grace that the Lord is allowing to grow in the back yards of their lives. If we avoid small talk, we abandon the very field in which we have been assigned to work. 121–122.
How we view people is also important. We need to see people as sinners, but as sinners who have God’s gracious forgiveness and spiritual potential within them through the Holy Spirit. If we focus on their inadequacies we will beat them down. We need to help people to see God’s grace working within them. Do we really believe that Jesus can change people or do they need our methods to make that happen?
If the pastor sees inadequacy as an unfortunate feeling, he or she will use psychological and moral means to remove it. If he sees it as a sign of sin—an avoidance of personal responsibility in the awesome task of facing God in Christ—he will respond by kindly and gently presenting the living God, pointing out the ways in which God is alive in the community. The instances of courage and grace that occur every week in any congregation are staggering. Pastoral discernment that sees grace operating in a person keeps that person in touch with the living God. 131.
We have to beware of pastoring to satisfy the congregation. We need to make sure that we stay connected to God so that we are able to continue calling the people around us out of where they are to where God wants them to be.
Your task is to keep telling the basic story, representing the presence of the Spirit, insisting on the priority of God, speaking the biblical words of command and promise and invitation.” 145.
This means that the pastor should not be doing this by himself. Peterson advocates pastoral sabbaticals so that both the pastor and congregation will know that he is not indispensable.
We are both, the congregation and I, experiencing a great freedom in this: neither of us neurotically needs each other. I am not dependent on them; they aren’t dependent on me. That leaves us free to appreciate each other and receive gifts of ministry from each other. 158
The book ends with a chapter of poems. This one was my favorite:
The Pain
The bawling of babies, always in a way
Inappropriate—why should the loved and innocent
Greet existence with wails?—is proof that not all
Is well. Dreams and deliveries never quite mesh.
Deep hungers go unsatisfied, deep hurts
Unhealed. The natural and gay are torn
By ugly grimace and curse. A wound appears
In the place of ecstasy. Birth is bloody.
All pain’s a prelude: to symphony, to sweetness.
“The pearl began as a pain in the oyster’s stomach.”
Dogwood, recycled from cradle to cross, enters
The market again as a yoke for easing burdens.
Each sword-opened side is the matrix for God
To come to me again through travail for joy. 170.
In Chapter 6 of Volume 2 of his OT theology, Humanity, Goldingay discusses who we are as human beings and what is our task and situation. Essentially, “Humanity is made in God's image and is addressed by God with a commission to rule the created world on God's behalf. God is committed to humanity, and humanity is under obligation to God, to serve God and serve God's world.” (517) Humans are created for the purpose of relationship with God. We are all made in His image to reflect Him and relate to Him in the world whether we like it or not. We are under obligation to God to work (and to rest) in service as he has designed.
To be human is thus to be responsible to God for fulfilling the creator's commission...Man is not sufficient to himself. Life is not meaningful to him unless it is serving an end beyond itself, unless it's of value to someone else...The transactional dynamic also confronts the notion that human beings are defined by their rights. Rather they are defined by their responsibilities. 522
As their master, God commissions, provides and protects; as servants, human beings do not do what they like but seek to fulfill God's expectations. Being created to be servants of a kind master also implies a deep security; human beings are not designed to serve any human master. 526
Neither Israel nor other peoples needed to be told that they should worship; worship is built into being human. Israel worships in fulfillment of a vocation that applies to all humanity. 527
People are created to be in community. It is our nature to be connected with one another. There is no such thing as an independent person. Thus, it is important that each person is valued and values others within the community. Faithful actions within the community lead to its prosperity. God has wired the universe so that generosity and service to others lead to one’s own prosperity. Government on a small (city) and large (nation) scale is responsible to foster the prosperity of all its members.
So to try to understand human nature without reference to a human being's relationship with other human beings, without an attitude that treats other people as neighbors, is to skew the study from the start. Sin lies in a rejection of this attitude. 529
People who think about others and behave in extraordinarily self-giving ways toward them, and/or stay faithful to them when they have ceased to deserve that, find that this rebounds on them. For instance, the people to whom they give themselves do respond, and/or other people are moved to relate to them in generous ways. 533
The legacy of ancient Israel provides us with no distinctive politics and with no template for translating culture and religion into a viable polity. Nor has another people improved on their efforts. Perhaps its significance is to model for us the wrestling with insoluble questions that is required of every people. 535
Goldingay also sees the family unit, nuclear and extended, as a “key good” and an important component in human happiness and in fulfilling our responsibilities to God. Birth shows us that we are dependent on family from the beginning. Parents are responsible to the younger generation for discipline and provision. There is no concept of single life in the OT. Everyone is part of a family. Marriage is another key part of the family covenant. It has an important role in the social and economic life of the community but is also a way that the image and love of God is expressed.
The psalm's (139) language is more violent than it sounds in NRSV. Emerging from the womb is not a gentle event. God does not merely draw a person delicately from the womb, but pulls a person out kicking and screaming...God then gives a baby no choice but to rely on its mother's milk... Life may be much less secure outside the womb than inside, so from the beginning of our lives we are thrown onto God. 539
The First Testament's implications are less patriarchal than we might have thought. Men and moment were interdependent, with women as well as men being involved in the management of the family's work and life. The society was relatively egalitarian. A wife was not simply her husband's property. More likely we should see her as a kind of extension of her husband, part of his person, the two of them form one social and legal unit (cf. Gen 2.24). 546
The First Testament assumes that it is not the case that what consenting adults do in private is their own business. A major concern of the attitudes to sexual relationships in a traditional society is the protection of the family. 547
The Old Testament does not so much see The Person as a spirit or soul with a body, but as a holistic unity of the immaterial and material. Without either we are not fully human. “Soul and body are the visible and invisible aspects to the same person.” The heart is the inner center of the person and its character is made known though the deeds of the body. Wrongdoing damages both the inner and outer person and both are in need of renewal by God’s Spirit. Human beings live within time and so the “good life” is a long one with basic needs met and peaceful relationships within the community.
Body and soul live in perichoretic union, like the Father, Son and Spirit, "a relationship of mutual interpenetration and differentiated unity," without structures of domination. They form a gestalt, in mutual covenant, a gestalt formed by the creative divine Spirit. 553
Holy points to the distinctive uncreated divine transcendence. Spirit points to the distinctive dynamic divine energy...Yhwh is the one that makes things firm. Perhaps the implication (in Psalm 51) is that the human spirit needs the divine, holy spirit to continue to be operative on it for its energy to be steadfastly in the proper direction. 558
Life is a great thing, a great gift from the living God. R Norman Whybray suggests twelve aspects to "the good life" as the First Testament sees it: security, a land to live in, power, food and sustenance, a long life, wealth, family, justice, laws, wisdom, pleasure, and trust in God 562
Section 5 discusses the issue of human Responsibility. “freewill is a key aspect of what it means to be human” and people must use their freedoms to be responsible to serve God and one another. We belong to communities and our actions effect others as theirs effect us. It is even possible for the faithful actions of a few to save a whole faithless community. Even though we act in the now as individuals our actions affect future generations even as we are affected by what has been done before us. God’s forgiveness can enable us to make decisions which escape the consequences of the past, but each generation is responsible to repent and secure their possession of God’s blessings.
The First Testament recognizes the reality of individual responsibility from the beginning; it is the presupposition of the earliest regulations of the Torah as of the latest. At the same time, alongside this it recognizes throughout the reality of the people's or a family's communal nature and communal responsibility, both horizontal (in relation to our contemporaries) and vertical (in relation to earlier generations). 564
Sin is as natural to us as breathing. But none of this means we are not challenged to accept responsibility for our lives. 573
Yhwh does not have any problem about forgiving people their sin if they have turned from it. Ezekiel (33) does not imply that their new faithfulness makes atonement for their wrongdoing, though neither does he make clear how this process does work...the father's instinct is to welcome him back; the wrongdoing ceases to matter. Ezekiel assumes it is so with God. 575
“Wisdom is a quality all humanity is designed to possess,” although it is rare and it does not always assure success in this life. God makes wisdom available through learning from God’s revelation and from the wisdom of the past. Tragically most people seem to want to be stupid. One who is ignorant needs learning but there is not much hope for the one that refuses to learn. An important foundation for wisdom is to learn to reverence and worship Yhwh. There are “two ways” to go in life and faithfulness to God is the only wise way. The wise person also understands that different situations require different solutions, sees the “big picture,” understands that human wisdom is limited, and that trust and submission to God are the only wise way to live because we do not understand all the mysteries of life.
In the Western understanding, we think in terms of each individual's unique life journey.In Proverbs, the journey is one we take in the company of others... Both (paths) are walked by groups of people and we decide which group we walk with...We keep deciding which group we belong to. 585
It is trust, acknowledgement and faithfulness that will make our paths turn out straight and make things go well for our bodies. Trust, acknowledgement and faithfulness are wise in a practical sense. 593
We do not reach a point where we "understand" creation or the problem of evil or the nature of God or the nature of our relationship with God. What wisdom does is help us along in the process of reflection on these deep and mysterious realities...youth likes straight and uncomplicated answers and is intolerant of enigma and mystery. It is this aspect of wisdom that maturity puts people into a position to utilize. 596
What does the OT say about How Life Works? God has set up the universe to make it work for people who trust Him. We have to work wisely within the natural forces that God has set up. God has made the universe to make things work out (eventually) for the faithful and punish the faithless. Yhwh is acting, both within and above the natural processes to do this. Yhwh is directly involved in the lives of individuals to protect and deliver and to guide and direct. This extends even beyond death.
What is it that gives you pleasure and enjoyment, makes you relax and laugh? This is a key question, because what gives you pleasure and makes you laugh is likely to reach deep into you as a person; it points to the wellsprings of your life. For a fool it is wrongdoing; for a person of insight it is wisdom (Prov. 10.23). 599
In creating the world, Yhwh set limits to dangerous and threatening powers such as the sea and the darkness, ensured that other dangerous and threatening forces such as hail, storm, lightning and thunder are under Yhwh's control for use in battle, and set in place the planets and stars to determine the orderly passing of the seasons (Job 38.8-38). Those facts provide the evidence that Job's private world cannot be the victim of uncontrolled chaos in the way that it seems, even if Job cannot see how that is so. 609
Both aggressors and their victims are inclined to think that the former will be in power forever, but both need to remind themselves that is not so. Human beings can look weighty but actually lack substance. Death is the great leveler. (Ps 62.9, Prov. 11.7) 615
There is a balance to the previous section as the OT explains How Life Does Not Work. Often it seems like life does not work in a moral way. There are exceptions to the above as in the story of Job. Both Job and Ecclesiastes focus on these exceptions. “The moral rules do not always work.” Wisdom does not always work. Sometimes suffering is corrective and/or testing. Sometimes suffering is a “world-shattering,” “death-experiencing,” hope-removing event that drives a person into a deeper understanding and experience of God. It shows that God is the only safe refuge.
Wisdom thinking is Israel's equivalent to the social sciences. Its rules involve looking for patterns in events that in reality are all unique. Yet if wisdom truly involves acknowledging how life actually works, it has to be realistic about the "exceptions" to its rules as well as about the rules. It therefore involves both the kind of generalizations that especially characterize Proverbs and the insistence on the exceptions that especially characterize Job and Qohelet. Neither the generalizations not the exceptions would constitute wisdom without the other. 616
Elihu's thesis resembles that of the despised Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar in combining insight, danger and irrelevance. It suggests insight because suffering can indeed make people examine the nature and bases of their lives, change their minds, their attitudes and priorities and draw them back to God... But it is notably hard to find Scriptures that declare that God sends suffering to this end as opposed to harnessing it to that end. 623
No, you cannot understand what is going on, says Yhwh near the end of the book (Job). And I am not going to tell you. You have to live without knowing. 628
Death is also a universal part of being human. Long life is seen as a blessing, but mortality is accepted in the OT as a normal part of life. The OT very rarely refers to any kind of after life. Death is seen in the OT as both an enemy and a welcomed sleep. Death is seen as an “emptiness” and the end of hope. It is not until much later in the OT (though there are hints as Jesus argues from Exodus) that the Bible begins to speak explicitly of bodily resurrection (Daniel 12).
"A covenant with death" (Is 28.15) "is the ultimate absurdity, since death alone brooks no compromise; yet every post-edenic human endeavor is an attempt to make a deal with death." Therefore the first task of every religion is to provide an answer, an oracle, in the face of death. 633
The fact that we do suffer means that it would be wiser to see health as "a subjectively ascertainable attitude" to one's fluctuating condition, "the strength to be human." That strength lies in "the acceptance, the affirmation, and the love of frail and mortal life." 634
Christians' frequent failure to take this life seriously shows God's wisdom in delaying the revealing of the resurrection, and it points to the necessity to keep living by the First Testament's emphasis on this life as well as by the New Testament's evidence for the resurrection. 646
