In 1990, Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903-1994) summarized an interpretation of the meaning of El Shaddai by Rabbi Moses ben Maimon (1135-1204), popularly known as Maimonides:

[Maimonides] explains El Shaddai in terms of “the God for whom it is sufficient (shaddai lo): the God who is sufficient in Himself, whose essence is Himself, not in functions which He fulfills in relation to the world. That was the perception of our forefathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, of El Shaddai. On this the midrash comments, that our fathers - unlike the generation of Moses - did not demand signs and wonders upon which to base their faith in God. Now though, that Moses was sent to bring the tidings of the redemption to the Israelites, who did not know of God as El Shaddai, there was a need to use names of God that represented His actions in the world.

In slight contrast is a tradition that interprets the word Shaddai as derived from the phrase sh-dai meaning “that which is (sh) enough (dai).”

By knowing God as El Shaddai, the Patriarchs recognized the inherent holiness within everything that God created. It was through this holiness that they were able to connect with God. Moses’s generation, by contrast, failed to see the holiness that existed before them. They required grand gestures, miracles and wonders, in order to sustain their faith.

On one hand, God stands self-sufficient, not defined as “Creator” or “Savior”, but simply “God”; on the other, God is intimately understood by and through the products or functions of Creation. One views God from God’s perspective, the other views God from our perspective. The first embodies the classic proverb of not being defined by your work, the second finds the holiness in the function of using or working with creation, e.g. “work to live, don’t live to work”.

However, this post isn’t so much to compare the two etymological interpretations of El Shaddai, but to focus on the common conclusion in both - that the generation of Israelites leaving Egypt with Moses were unable to recognize and believe in the holiness of God without overt functional signs. Their perception of God had been reduced to seeking “grand gestures, miracles and wonders.”

The slavery of the Hebrews in Egypt epitomizes the subjection of humankind to the curse of sin and the futility of the soil: broken and beaten, men and women are unable to look beyond the physical reach of their lives and will grasp any seemingly miraculous display that offers immediate stimulation and relief, however fleeting. That search began with the forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden, reached the top of the tower of Babel, flashed in the forging of the golden calf, and so forth and so forth. Racing forward to 2000 years ago, we find echoes of this conclusion at various points in Jesus’ ministry:

He replied, “A wicked and adulterous generation looks for a sign, but none will be given it except the sign of Jonah.” (Matthew 16.4)

“No one has ever seen God, but the one and only [Son], who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.” (John 1.18)

“Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.” (John 3.14-15)

“Unless you people see signs and wonders,” Jesus told him, “you will never believe.” (John 4.48)

We are no different today. In the constant search of new titillation to feed our attention-starved lives, we look for signs of the day rather than accept by faith that God is “who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty,” the All Sufficient One. (Revelation 1.8) Without this faith, we fall sway to signs from any source, including those of Satan:

The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works. He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. (2 Thessalonians 2.9-10)

However, despite our wickedness, God loved the world in this way:

He gave His One and Only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16)

Jesus is the ultimate sign of God’s holiness and sufficiency, and his death and resurrection is the true assurance of our faith that God is sufficient beyond the limits of Creation and the Curse.

Best is discussing the contrast between our rational need for order, symmetry, harmony and balance and the seemingly overwhelming chaos of creation:

But walk into a meadow and see if you can locate a straight line of buttercups all exactly the same height, each with exactly replicated petals. Or try to find a strictly triangular stand of perfectly symmetrical trees foregrounding a mountain range the left side of which is a mirror image of the right side. There is no landscape in which we can find any semblance of order, no storm at sea in which the waves are the same shape, height, creaminess or momentum. [...] Nothing repeats and nothing is predictable. (Unceasing Worship, p.135)

Best goes on to discuss the paradox between the randomness of what we see and the reality of underlying laws that do not randomly fluctuate. Commonly known as chaos theory, the effect is that immutable laws are seemingly worked out with randomness, asymmetry, unpredictability and endless variety, all the while germinating from a fixed set of initial conditions.

Parallel to my reading, I was reminded in a conversation on the new Theologer forums (one of those “distractions”…) of a different “working out”:

So you too, my friends, must be obedient, as always; even more, now that I am absent, than when I was with you. You must work out your own salvation in fear and trembling; for it is God who works in you, inspiring both the will and the deed, for his own chosen purpose. (Philippians 2:12-13, REB)

Once saved, we are called into a life of service, not as best friends forever with God, but as fearful and trembling slaves, wholly dependent on him for our redemption and freedom from sin. The terms of his gift of salvation are well defined:

If the confession “Jesus is Lord” is on your lips, and the faith that God raised him from the dead is in your heart, you will find salvation. (Romans 10:9, REB)

And yet our lives are filled with decisions and deeds that often appear to make no sense, are not straight and orderly, twist wildly in the winds of our days, and we tremble before the throne.

If we apply the notion of chaos theory to salvation, that is 100% correct. Once we have heard the message of the gospel and the Spirit moves our heart to accept it, and we confess that “Jesus is Lord”, then God resets our “initial conditions” and our eternal lives become based on his immutable plan of salvation, rather than our natural condition of sinful inclination (Genesis 8:21).

Then, just as an immense fractal starts with the smallest mathematical expression, once through the narrow gate of Jesus Christ, we are free to fill the infinite expanse of the kingdom with the trembling twists and turns of our lives. Like the buttercups in the meadow, the trees and mountains, the landscapes and the stormy waves, our salvation lives are worked out in chaos, with infinite variety and all for God’s chosen purpose.

Leviathan was conquered. Long live Leviathan!

Inside I was ripping myself to shreds, frustrated to point of questioning the fruits of my spirit, questioning whether I belonged at church or not. I went and, after dropping the boys off for Sunday school, found a corner of the sanctuary to sit in, trying to find a quiet place to rest and get reoriented.

I was mute during the music worship, fighting the words. Reflecting, reflecting, reflecting hard before communion… pleading to bear the fruit of the Spirit and not the foul garbage that had been evident earlier. My heart screamed as the woman in the pew in front of me read her junk mail during communion, wafer in one hand, Father’s Day ad flyer in the other.

Pastor came to the front and began his remarks. “… some of you may be having a crisis of Spirit and don’t know which way to turn … you may be questioning whether you even have the Spirit in you … you desire to be full, to experience life fully.” The sermon was on Ephesians 5:18 and being filled by the Spirit, the conclusion of a lengthy series that’s been taught on the Holy Spirit.

15 Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, 16 making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. 17 Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is. 18 Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit, 19 speaking to one another with psalms, hymns and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord, 20 always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. (Ephesians 5:15-20, TNIV)

At the start of the day, I felt like I had been physically and spiritually cut open and all the crap revealed, so that I experienced the extreme negative of being empty in the Spirit. Then overflowing with goodness as the word was preached and taught and I was filled with the Spirit. I will try to post a little more on the sermon specifics later this week, but the reality is that the specifics of what was said mattered little; the reality is that my heart was prepared for the message and I received it.

The preparation was painful, but at the finish of the service, I sang (finally!) and made music from my heart to the Lord, experiencing the joy of worship again. Amen!

CALCULATING GOD’S WILL
By Michael A. Halleen

“So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 7:12)

John Cardinal Deardon once observed that “The designs of God are not able to be calculated.” We prove Deardon’s insight when we try to discover the will of God in the details of our lives. Does God want me to sell the house?… Attend this college, or that one?… Change jobs?… Get married?… Go on that mission trip? One church member told me it was God’s will that she had been sick at home all week because she had been able to receive a lovely phone call from her sister. (I didn’t dare ask her what she thought about God’s will for those who experienced the cyclone in Myanmar or the earthquake in China that same week.)

The will of God, I think, is more basic than we have made it out to be. Our difficulty is in calculating — or accepting — the simplicity of God’s expectation. God speaks grace, but we hear law. Jesus made it plain: God’s will is that we should treat people as we ourselves would like to be treated in a similar situation.

So the specific circumstances of my life are not, in themselves, what God “wills.” What matters is the kind of person I am in the midst of those circumstances. Married or single, living in Phoenix or in Sydney, healthy or unwell, God’s will for me is the same. Employed or unemployed, waiting tables or waiting in line, running an errand or running a company, I am to love (to be kind and truthful toward) the people around me wherever I am and whatever the circumstances of my life and theirs — family, neighbors, enemies, those who disappoint or fail me — all of them. No one earns his way into God’s love, and no one ought to have to earn her way into mine.

Occasionally one hears some objections to this “Golden Rule”:

• People are unreasonable, illogical and self-centered. Love them anyway!
• If I do good, people will accuse me of having ulterior motives. Do good anyway!
• Being kind and truthful with people will make me vulnerable. Be kind and truthful anyway!
• I may spend years trying to build a relationship that the other person may tear down overnight. Build anyway!
• People need help, but they end up attacking you if you help them. Help people anyway!

God’s designs are not able to be calculated, but God’s will is clear: We are to do for others just what we hope they would do for us.

——————-

Copyright 2008 Dr. Michael A. Halleen. Permission is granted to send this to others, with attribution, but not for commercial purposes.

Ezekiel 15:1-8 (TNIV)

The word of the LORD came to me: “Son of man, how is the wood of a vine different from that of a branch from any of the trees in the forest? Is wood ever taken from it to make anything useful? Do they make pegs from it to hang things on? And after it is thrown on the fire as fuel and the fire burns both ends and chars the middle, is it then useful for anything? If it was not useful for anything when it was whole, how much less can it be made into something useful when the fire has burned it and it is charred?

“Therefore this is what the Sovereign LORD says: As I have given the wood of the vine among the trees of the forest as fuel for the fire, so will I treat the people living in Jerusalem. I will set my face against them. Although they have come out of the fire, the fire will yet consume them. And when I set my face against them, you will know that I am the LORD. I will make the land desolate because they have been unfaithful, declares the Sovereign LORD.”

John 15:1-8 (TNIV)

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.

I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.

Both passages speak to the usefulness of believers (Israel and believers in Christ) and their connection to the Lord. Ezekiel condemns Jerusalem for its unfaithfulness, for turning the special wood of the (grape)vine (symbol of Israel) into an ordinary branch of wood, no different than the nations around them, used for the ordinary and mundane. Christ condemns those who are unfaithful to the vine, who go their own way, and lauds those who remain in the vine (Him), bearing fruit and bringing glory to the Gardener.

“The sense of sacrifice appeals readily to a young Christian. Humanly speaking, the one thing that attracts to Jesus Christ is our sense of the heroic, [but] the sense of heroic sacrifice is not good enough.”

There has been a lot written lately in blogdom about what types of relationship should exist between men and women in marriage and in the Church, primarily focusing on the passages from 1 Corinthians 11 (v3) and Ephesians 5 (vv. 21-33). Paul writes in Ephesians 5:25 that husbands are to “love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy…”

Men, how easy is it to make giving up yourself to your wife the object of your marriage!? You try to honor her by sacrificing all of your time, your resources, your energy, your interests, etc. to fulfill her desires, but in the end, it’s incomplete. You find that you’ve completely missed the mark and turned your heroic sacrifice into an idol, the false object of your marriage. Your marital relationship is distorted because you forgot to put God at the front of your sacrifice.

Christ sacrificed for us, but he did so under the direction of the will and wisdom of God. Instead of blindly giving up everything to fulfill the needs of my wife, I need to seek God’s wisdom first. I am responsible to God first, not my wife. How easy it is to distort a valid Biblical teaching and lose sight of our focal point - Screwtape would be so proud!

“Therefore, we must the more eagerly anchor our lives to the things that we have been taught lest the ship of life drift past the harbour and be wrecked.”

What happens when you wake up one day and realize how far your “ship of life” has drifted out of the harbor and into perilous waters? Do you panic and row hard for land through demonstrative works, exhausting yourself in a few short minutes so that you’re carried even further out to sea? Do you throw up your hands in defeat and condemn yourself to the mercies of the tides, casting your lot that God’s grace alone will bring you back to the safety of shore? Or do you soberly take your bearings, pray that you would be filled with God’s renewing strength, and bend your will to restoring your relationship with his Spirit?

Winslow Homer tackled a subject akin to this in his great seascape, “The Fog Warning” (1885), in which a fisherman rows steadily back to his ship in the face of rising seas and impending fog and darkness:

“Men who are accustomed to danger occupy a mental attitude towards it that has no room for melodramatic pose. Simple, sober, the unconscious hero of the picture turns to get the bearings of his schooner as he bends to his oars with all the steadiness of a man who has a long way to row and who must neither waste his strength in spurts nor lose his head. Small amidst the waves of the Atlantic looks his dory, far away seems the vessel, hard and cruel is the complexion of the sea. . . .” (William Howe Downes, “American Paintings in the Boston Art Museum“)

No matter how far away God seems, we must trust that he will give us the strength to return to the safety of his harbor. Nothing is impossible with God; his journey may take our entire life’s span and wring out every drop of our constitution along the way, but to arrive at the Kingdom’s shore will be the sweetest reward.

The passages from the My Utmost for His Highest devotional from yesterday and today (2 Corinthians 10:5) caught my eye related to this topic and I wanted to briefly explore them related to Romans 12:2.

“We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” (2 Corinthians 10:5, TNIV)

“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.” (Romans 12:2, TNIV)

Essentially, when we are saved and have “entered into the experience of sanctification” (My Utmost…), our minds begin to be transformed so that our thoughts and actions are not guided by reaction and impulse and human pretension, however well intentioned, but by the discipline of obeying God. When we are transformed, our minds are renewed so that we can choose to obey God. This then is the free will of a Christian: it is not the freedom to make any choice that we care to, but the freedom to make the only choice of forcing every thought to be a captive prisoner of Christ and subject to His sovereign will.

“That is why I remind you to stir into flame the gift from God which is yours through the laying on of my hands. For the spirit that God gave us is no cowardly spirit, but one to inspire power, love and self-discipline.” (2 Timothy 1:6-7, REB)

The language of the REB continues to grab me. I was struck by the phrase “stir into flame” and immediately drawn back to my youth in Alaska. Our house was heated with hot water pipes that got energy from the wood-burning stove in the kitchen. Different types of tender provided different kinds of heat: split spruce logs would create a fast, hot fire that provided immediate heat, but quickly burnt down to ashes and needed to be constantly refilled; birch wood is denser and lasted longer, good for maintaining (relatively) even temperatures for cooking and baking; black coal collected from the ocean beaches (from underwater coal seams) lasted the longest and provided warmth long into the cool nights.

The first person up and awake in the morning was charged with starting the fire and warming the house for everyone. It was not unusual to see the tender box full of cold, gray ashes that needed to be sifted to create room for new tender. Yet the process of sifting and stirring the ashes more often than not revealed warm or even hot coals that were still burning and could be used to rebuild a fire. A scrap of newspaper or birch bark or spruce kindling was placed carefully on the coals and as the fire gained strength, additional fuel was added until a roaring fire began to chase away the night chill.

That memory provides me with a powerful reminder that once we’ve accepted Christ’s salvation and invited the Holy Spirit into our hearts and lives, He is always there, no matter how far we fall aside and let our fires languish. God’s coal is eternal and never loses its ability to create the heat and light that chases shadows from even our darkest corners. All we have to do is let Him take away our cold ashes, revealing the live coals of His love for us, and new kindling can be added to fan His Spirit into flames in our lives again.

1 The Lord is my shepherd;
He is sufficient for all my needs.
2 He lets me lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside quiet waters.
3 He renews my life;
He leads me along the right paths
for His name’s sake.

Psalm 23:1-3 (HCSB)

Now I know that the Hebrew in v.1b is a form of “to lack”; the HCSB’s actual translation is “there is nothing I lack” (see Jay’s post for other variants). It’s just that “lack” is just such an unpoetical word - very harsh and gutteral, quite a contrast to the language surrounding it: shepherd, lie down, green pastures, quiet waters, renew… the NLTse uses “I have all that I need” - much better, but changing the focus of the verse from “I” to “He” would also keep a sense of repetition flowing through these first phrases. There’s a subtle tie to v.3b, “for His name’s sake” (where “He is sufficient” is part of a probable translation of the “El Shaddai” name of God). It’s also a positive statement and uses nine syllables like the two phrases that follow it (at least in the HCSB’s translation); the NLT is actually better, matching the six syllables of the opening phrase.

Just a random translation idea…