Peter: My parents are missionaries. I respect missionaries, because I believe in what they do, which is to bring God’s love to the peoples of the earth. That is only a part of the reason I’m taking missions for the twenty-first century, a class taught by the man who was my parents’ professor when they were in seminary. In that class and throughout my life I’ve heard of the ‘mission mandates’ of the bible, which is more than just the great commission. Almost all the missionaries or mission books and articles I’ve read reference God’s covenant with Abraham as the beginning of missions. Specifically they mention the fact that God blessed Abraham so that through him all nations may be blessed. This, ‘they’ say is a clear reference to God’s love for all nations and peoples on earth. Evidently that didn’t include the Amalekites. One reason I love reading the Old Testament is because there are so many cool things there that don’t exist in the New Testament. The other reason I love reading is because I find it a lot more difficult to reconcile with the God I know and love. Sometimes impossible.
The guest speaker today spoke of obedience to God; specifically I found intriguing his use of 1 Samuel 15. If you simply look at Saul’s response to God and Samuel, yes, obedience, or disobedience is clearly a theme. However, what about the whole story? Stacey Foster kind of read through the story, and he spent a lot of time assessing where in the story Saul was disobedient, you know, when even though he killed the Amalekite men, women, and children, he ‘didn’t kill what was good.’ As if that wasn’t confusing enough, he mentioned two things about it. First, he went on to relate ‘good things’ in the reference to ‘self-deceit.’ That is, he said that if God says to get rid of something, even if we think it is good, get rid of it. He then mentioned things he used to think of as good, such as cigarettes or whatever, and that he was convinced to get rid of them in his life. And I don’t know if that was a valid application of the passage. To be sure, I would agree with doing what God says, but I also don’t see the relationship between Saul not killing all the Amalekites and their cattle with not smoking. Secondly he did acknowledge the seeming genocide of the Amalekites, but I think by acknowledging it he gave himself less credence, because he essentially said that God said to destroy the Amalekites because He knew they were idolaters, and that Israel was prone to neighboring influences in that arena. Somehow I don’t think killing somebody else because they might be a poor influence on you is justifiable through the bible, yet this is the connection he made. I realize this wasn’t his point; however, it was the justification given for making his point through the text, and I don’t think it was valid.
All that being said, he did make a few profound points that often get overlooked: first, that partial obedience is disobedience. I think that often I fall into this trap myself, enough said. This brings me to the next thing, which is that our actions do matter, and that disobedience to God is wrong. That is, our actions matter.
All that being said, he did make a few profound points that often get overlooked: first, that partial obedience is disobedience. I think that often I fall into this trap myself, enough said. This brings me to the next thing, which is that our actions do matter, and that disobedience to God is wrong. That is, our actions matter.
The one thing I wish he would have mentioned in relation to his points on obedience is that of conscience. I think that is something taken for granted as well, or at the very least overlooked quite often. We spend a lot of time talking about right and wrong, shoulds and shouldn’ts, and we oft mention the fact that the Bible is the measure of all of that. Which it is. However, I would say that beyond the law, beyond the Bible, beyond upbringing, the conscience does much to guide in what is right and wrong. Paul talks about the conscience and its integral role in living life, and he also talks about the fact that God has ‘made himself evident,’ so that there is no excuse for those who do not serve God. Albeit, he also mentions that the conscience can be corrupted, and it is often corrupted, which is what Stacey was describing when he was talking about self-deception. But despite this fact I’ve heard far too many sources ignore the conscience and its role in our lives.
Lastly I just want to go back to the text he used, and there are other texts similar to it. How do I reconcile a God I believe is loving, and who blessed Israel
I apologize for the disorganization of this post, I poorly constructed it.
Tim: Apparently today was “Compassion Day” in chapel. For this special day, we had a guest speaker come from Compassion International. He showed a video clip that I really enjoyed. What stood out to me most was an boy saying, “I want to get a good job so that I can look after my grandparents.” In some ways, I think the wealthy miss more than the poor. If that kid were me or most people in my position, they would be hoping for a good job to make money, live comfortably, and raise a family. I don’t really have a problem with that, but I have a problem with it being our ultimate goal and prize. Getting a job in order to help others just strikes me as a lot more meaningful. Sometimes I’m jealous of poor people. Don’t get me wrong, I want to help deliver people from poverty. I just struggle with the fact that as people come out of poverty, it seems like we trade the values of the impoverished for the demands of the entitled.
May it be known, too, that when narrator started speaking, I pegged her as an Aussie. This makes me 3/3 on accent diagnoses in chapel! No one cares, I know. (Peter: it’s true, he’s impressive at identifying accents.)
Our speaker talked about obeying God. His passage for this was from Samuel, regarding when Saul didn’t completely obey God’s command to completely destroy the Amalekites. His point was essentially that we, like Saul, find ways to avoid complete obedience and incomplete obedience is just not sufficient. We do these four things: refuse to give up our favorite things, live in self-deception, play the blame game, and fail to understand the consequences of our sin. He spoke about how he had done these things in his own life. I would have to say that I have diagnosed at least a couple of them in my own life as strong forces holding me back from what God may be wanting me to do. I think the main thing he called us to do was to identify our “good things,” whether they are relationships, possessions, behaviors – and surrender those things to God. If we don’t kill our disobedience, it will kill us. I have to say, I enjoyed his message and thought that it reflected a lot of truths I have found in my own life.
There were three things, though, that I wonder about. The first two go together. He said we need to “get the man together before we can change the world.” He also said that partial obedience is disobedience. I know what he’s getting at and I agree that we out of our faithfulness to God will come change, and that we need to fully embrace obedience and faithfulness in order to be most effective. But with both of his statements, I wonder kind of the same thing. Can we wait until we’re “together” to try changing the world, and isn’t partial disobedience better than, say, complete disobedience? David didn’t completely obey, but God still calls him a man after His own heart. Granted, he could have done much more for God had he obeyed completely, but I still think he did better than if he never obeyed at all.
I guess I get a feeling sometimes that people think they can’t make a difference until they get their act together completely, which causes them to spend their lives trying to fix themselves and doing very little for the world around them. I have often felt that way myself, but sometimes working to change the world helps us “get ourselves together.” I’m certain he wasn’t suggesting we never do anything for God unless we’re perfect, but I feel like it’s an idea present in our society.
Peter: on this note, this is one of the problems of new churches: they feel like they can’t reach out until they’ve fixed all their internal and local concerns, but for some reason I don’t believe that God’s orders to go to ‘Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and the ends of the earth,’ while progressional, is successional.
Tim: Also, often in my own life, my question is not “am I going to obey God,” but “is this really what God wants me to do?” Am I simply denying it’s God because I don’t want to do it? Or could I be legitimately uncertain whether it is something God actually wants me to do? I’m often paralyzed by uncertainty and don’t even know if I’m being disobedient.
lastly: we always encourage thoughtful commentaries, and Naomi Thorson did just that on her blog, which although i have deep reservations about a few of her comments, we believe it to be a very thought-provoking and sincere reaction to this chapel. here it is: http://simplyshalom.blogspot.com/2009/10/condoning-genocide.html
Thank you for these thoughtful responses.
ReplyDeleteIn my haste to get my feelings out my own response was a bit garbled and...shall I say, radical. Which may or may not have represented what I actually think. I'm still working on that one. So I actually deleted my post and posed a bunch of questions instead.
Reconciling a good, loving God, with a God who orders mass genocide is an enigma to me.