Category: Joy, Peace, and Hope Through the Bible

How the Bible empowers us to become people of joy, peace, and hope through the virtues of faith, hope, and love

Posted on

Anxiety, Pride, and Relationships, Part 4: How God Redeems Relationships

Genesis 16 presents us with a family mess. It starts with anxiety, leads into pride, and ends in injustice. By verse 6, the family seems at the breaking point. Abraham abandons Hagar. Sarah treats Hagar harshly. Hagar runs away with Abraham’s child in her womb. The family now consists of a separted but complicated web of relationships. Can things turn around? If so, how?

God Meets Hagar
The answer? God shows up. But He showed up in an unlikely way. If we were to ask at the beginning of the story, “to whom would God appear to get them to turn things around?”, who would it be? Probably Abraham. Maybe Sarah. But here’s the surprise of the story. God showed up for the first time in the story, and He talked to . . . Hagar.

God asked Hagar, “Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?” Let’s not miss the importance of this. As we noted in my past articles on this past (read part 1 on anxiety here, part 2 on pride here, and part 3 on injustice here), the anxiety of a slave is over the fact that they are unseen. Hagar seemed to be seen by Abraham, but then Abraham abandoned her to unjust abuse by Sarah. It seemed like she was unseen again. The Angel of the Lord, whom I believe is Jesus in a pre-incarnate form, the 2nd person of the Trinity, met her by the well and took an interest in her like He would in an unlikely woman at a wall a thousand plus years later (see John 4).

Hagar was honest with the angel. She said that she was running from her mistress Sarah.

Then, the angel of the Lord gave her a command, “Return to your mistress and submit to her” (Gen. 16:9).

By the end of the story, Hagar was encouraged and willing to go back.

What Motivates Hagar to Return
Why encouraged Hagar to go back to a tough situation? Continue reading “Anxiety, Pride, and Relationships, Part 4: How God Redeems Relationships”

Posted on

Anxiety, Pride, and Relationships, Part 3: Anxiety & Injustice

[This is the 3rd of a 4 part series. You can read the 1st part focusing on anxiety here and the 2nd part focusing on pride here]

Pride, Anxiety, and Injustice in Relationships
Why is it so hard to dislodge injustice? Why is it that families and communities can allow the worst sort of situations to go on and on? You see this happen all the time. They won’t make even the slightest change to make a bad situation better. Why do they stay in these bad relationships and make little effort to change them?

Why? Because it is scary. Injustice is rooted in an attempt to solve the basic problems of life: loneliness, insecurity, provision, and meaning. When you fight against injustice, you are battling with people’s anxiety over these basic issues. This makes these problems much more intractable.

This does not mean that we should not fight against injustice. It just means that we will fight against it better if we understand that it is rooted in anxiety over the basic problems of life.

A great example of this tragic interplay of injustice can be seen in American race relations. The treatment of African-Americans by whites in this nation has been reprehensible. However, the system of slavery was designed to solve the basic problems of labor, and it was the basis of the position of the wealthy elites of Southern society. Over this position, they had much anxiety. If they let slavery go, where would that leave them? Understand. I am not excusing it. I am just saying that there was a fear in letting that go that made it harder to apply the basic principles of Western and Christian teaching to this issue. As Booker T. Washington noted, “Having once got its tentacles fastened on to the economic and social life of the Republic, it was no easy matter for the country to relieve itself of the institution.” This is the way injustice becomes a fixture in human life.

That’s why it was so necessary for Martin Luther King, Jr. and others to work to force whites to give up their privileges in the South and elsewhere. He recognized that because of the anxiety of giving up privileges, the white community would not give up their privileges without being compelled to.

On a smaller scale, why do people stay in such bad relationships? Why do they not confront such bad behavior? Because the alternative is often being alone, and that is quite scary. The current relationship solves to some degree our anxieties over loneliness and security, and it is hard to face those issues more directly without the anxiety reducer of even a bad relationship.

In our third installment of our study on the relationship of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, I want us to consider what injustices their anxiety and pride led them to. I will show how each of their behaviors was unjust but also try to show how that injustice was rooted in their own significant challenges. The injustice calls for condemnation, and the anxiety calls for sympathy. It is a complex response to a complex problem.

The goal is to enable us to better confront injustice in ourselves and others. When we can confront our own unjust behavior by confronting our underlying anxieties. That’s what God does when He confronts this issue, as we shall see in the next article.

Hagar
We noted in the last article that Hagar’s anxiety was that of a slave: she is unseen. However, what every human longs for is to be seen and to be seen as significant. A slave is not seen that way. A slave is just part of the scenery. That’s the misery that every slave would experience every day of their lives.

Then, something happened. Hagar was chosen to bear the child of Master Abraham. She conceived, and she became a major player in the house. She let this go to her head. The result was that she looked down on her Mistress, Sarah. “And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress” (Gen. 16:4). This wasn’t something she kept to herself. Sarah noticed and brought it up to Abraham.

What was the injustice here? It was a lack of respect. Ironically, she did not see Sarah as valuable. Maybe Hagar was just doing to Sarah what Sarah had done to her, but this would not justify this behavior. Continue reading “Anxiety, Pride, and Relationships, Part 3: Anxiety & Injustice”

Posted on

Anxiety, Pride, Relationships, and Redemption: A Tale of Sarah, Abraham, and Hagar

According to the Christian faith, the fundamental human problem is not lack of material resources, unjust government, or lack of education. It is the disruption of the relationship between God and human beings. Out of this disruption, flow all of the addictions, injustices, and abuses of human life.

The Bible gives this fundamental problem a name. It calls it sin. Sin is the conditions and actions of being out of accord with what we ought to be and what we ought to do. It is first and foremost about a wrong relationship with God, but it disrupts human relationships as well.

Sin is worthy of condemnation, but when we look at it more closely, we often feel sympathy for those in sin. Why is this? Because sin is complex, not simple.

An insight I received from the study of American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was that sin is rooted in anxiety. He said, anxiety arises out of our ability to see the world and its threats to our well-being combined with our inability to do much about them. This is not sin in itself, but it becomes the occasion for sin.

A quick perusal of the sins of the Bible will show you that this is the case. Sin arises out of people’s anxious response to threats. Cain has anxiety about his standing with God, and so he kills Abel. Joseph’s brothers have anxiety over their relationship with their father, and so they sell their favored brother into slavery. Pharaoh has anxiety over the growth of the children of Israel and so enslaves them. The people of Israel have anxiety over Pharaoh, provision, and status and so complain against the Lord. And on and on it goes.

There are two responses to the threats of this world. We can trust the Lord, or we can try to come up with our own solution. This latter response is pride. This pride that we can solve our own problems and are bigger than we are leads to disruption and dissolution.

In this series, I am going to look at one example of this. We will see how sin grows out of anxiety. The prideful response to anxiety leads to choices and actions that disrupt the family. But the good news is that God does not leave Sarah, Abraham, or Hagar in sin. He makes Himself known, and this brings a healing element into the relationship.

Sarah’s Anxiety
“She had borne him no children.” Some people do not want children, but for those who do, how painful it is to go through this experience! Continue reading “Anxiety, Pride, Relationships, and Redemption: A Tale of Sarah, Abraham, and Hagar”

Posted on

Joyful Fellowship with God Through the Christmas Message

If you think about Christmas time, you think of getting together with your friends and enjoying laughter, conversation, and affection. But it would seem that you can’t do that with God, so how do you have joyful fellowship with God? It’s nice to know that Jesus came down to earth to fellowship with some people, but isn’t the whole point of Christmas to connect God and humans together in fellowship? What does that look like when Jesus isn’t physically present with us?

The shepherds of Christmas experienced an interaction with God that we might like to have. If we could experience His glory and light and an audible voice, we might feel like we were having joyful fellowship with Him. But there is a problem. It didn’t last. It didn’t happen every night. How, then, would the shepherds continue to have joyful fellowship with God once the heavenly light had faded? If we can answer that question, then we also can know how we can experience joyful fellowship with God through the Christmas message.

So, let’s consider this question by considering from Luke 2:8–20 the revelation from God, the recipients of the revelation, and the response to the revelation. My hope is that this will lead you to joyful fellowship with God through the Christmas message.

The Revelation
There are four aspects of the revelation or message that the shepherds received. The first was the amazing light that came with the heavenly revelation. In a world without electric lights, the angels lighting up the night sky must have been truly astonishing.

The second aspect was the appearance of the angels. At first, a single angel appeared that gave them a message. Then, a choir of angels appeared singing the songs of heaven in praise of God. Continue reading “Joyful Fellowship with God Through the Christmas Message”

Posted on

10 Tips for Applying the Book of Judges to Your Life

Out of all the books in the Bible, the book of Judges may be harder for modern ears to hear than any other. Between kidnapping brides, guts spilling out, tent pegs in skulls, and sending body parts to the various parts of Israel, there’s enough crazy stuff in there to make even the most experienced moviegoer wince. So, what to do with this book? In spite of all the gore and war, there is much to learn here to enable us to live well with God and fellow human beings.

We might not like to talk about it, but there is still plenty of violence and messiness along the lines of the book of Judges in the modern world. Then as now, we find God right in the middle of it. Jesus was not born into a sanitized world but a world filled with such things. When God comes down, He enters into a world filled with evil and problems in order to bring it to a better place and in order to bring us to a etter place. If we look at things from that perspective, we can learn much from the book of Judges.

Here are ten tips for applying this ancient book to your life. If you wish, you can listen to my recent sermon where I took this approach. Listen to it here.

1. God’s wrath is rooted in His love for people. There is no question that God gets angry in the book of Judges. No way around it. Other cultures may struggle with the love and forgiveness of God, but ours is one that struggles with the wrath of God. At the same time, would we really want a God that did not care how humans lived or what injustices they committed? God is passionate against evil because He wants humans to do what is truly good for them and what is best for them is to live in harmonious fellowship with Himself and with other human beings. When you see the wrath of God in the book of Judges remember that it is rooted in God’s passion for people to live in the good way He created them to live.

2. God’s wrath is rooted in His love for His Son. The book of Judges is Trinitarian. The whole Bible is really about revealing the Son of God who ultimately comes in human form in the gift of Christmas. But Jesus was present and existed before He ever became a human. In the book of Judges, one way we see Jesus is as the angel of the Lord (Judges 2, Judges 6, Judges 13). This angel of the Lord speaks to the people of Israel and says that He is the one who brought them out of Egypt. He identifies as Jehovah, the Lord, and yet he is also in some ways distinct from Jehovah. It is the relationship of the eternal Father with His Son. The Father has such supreme delight in His Son that when people don’t listen to Him, it grieves Him and angers Him (see Psalm 2 for a framework for this).

3. Every generation faces its test. Judges is a book of multiple generations. There is a part of us that wants smooth sailing for our children and grandchildren, but that’s not going to be the way things work out. Each generation has to face the hard facts of reality and decide how it will live in light of them. It has to decide whether to rely on the Lord and seek the way of the people around them. This is true for our generation, and it will be true for the next generation. In Judges, each new generation faces its own challenge and has to work through things in order to come to the right place. Generally, that’s how it works, and this book is a great reminder of that. The more we can tell our children that they will have to face challenges, the better we will be able to equip and prepare them for that test.

4. Passing on the faith is a challenge. It’s easy to assume that our children will just “get” what we teach them. They do imitate us to a great degree. However, passing on our faith requires conscious effort. The generation that came out of the wilderness served the Lord, but “there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel” (Judges 2:10). They lived for the Lord but did not talk about Him nearly enough to the next generation. We should prepare the next generation for the tests they will face and make sure they know what God has done in the past.

5. God is full of compassion. One amazing thing about Judges is how compassionate God is. In spite of the way people ignore Him and do exactly what He tells them not to, when they are in trouble, He is always ready to help them. Judges 10 is a poignant example. The people cry out to Him, and He says that He is not going to help them anymore. The people keep crying out to Him and say, “We don’t believe you! You will help us!” Then, it says that God became impatient with His people’s misery, i.e., could not bear it any longer (10:16). Then, He acted.

6. God will hear us when we cry out to Him. That should encourage us to cry out to the Lord when we are in misery. Whatever we are struggling with, we should cry out to Him about it. “But when the people of Israel cried out to the Lord, the Lord raised up a deliverer for the people of Israel . . .” (Judges 3:9). Ask, and you will receive. When there is deep hurt, pain, or struggle, it is time to cry out to the Lord, and He will hear you and help you. Does He not act right away? Keep crying out. He hears and in the right time will act.

7. God delights to use His people for big things. In Judges 3:9 (just cited in #6), it notes that when the people cried out to the Lord, He raised up a deliverer. He did not just destroy their enemies. He didn’t just confound them by miracles or mighty acts. He raised up a leader, Othniel. That’s what God likes to do. In Judges and throughout the Bible, God delights to use His people to do great things. He delights to use you!

8. God uses many leaders to point to the greatest leader, Jesus. One reason God the Father loves to raise up leaders is because He is always thinking about the greatest leader, His Son, our Lord Jesus. All of the leaders that God raises up point to this one great leader who is the great Judge and Savior of the world, the Savior from Satan, sin, and death. God sends hundreds of leaders in the Bible to point to Him, and each one teaches us a little bit about the Son whom the Father delights in and wants to honor as the greatest leader the world has ever known, the conqueror of all evil.

9. God’s Spirit empowers us for service. In Judges, we see not only the presence of the Father and the Son but also the Holy Spirit. When Othniel led the people of Israel to freedom against Cushan-Rishathaim of Mesopotamia, the Spirit of God came upon Othniel. That’s how He was made a leader. When God calls us to His service, He not only gives us the command but the power of the Holy Spirit to enable us to serve Him and do great things for His name.

10. God is faithful to keep blessing His people in spite of what they deserve. God is faithful. He keeps doing good in spite of what His people deserve. He doesn’t give up on them. He keeps working with them, calling them, and leading them. God just keeps working with His people. That should encourage us when we fail, make mistakes, and sin. God keeps coming back with His relentless love to bring salvation and blessing to the world, and especially His people.

This should give you some ideas for thinking of how to apply this ancient book to the modern world. Have different thoughts or ideas about this? I’d love to read them in the comments below. Thanks for taking the time to read my site. If you liked this post, you can sign up to the right (laptop) or by scrolling down (mobile). I hope to see you hear again.

________

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Proudly powered by WordPress