Rainforest

[The Midweek Encounter is a ministry of Encounter Church in Kentwood, MI. These posts are reflections on Sunday's message, which can be heard here each week: http://myencounterchurch.org/#/messages-media]

Ten minutes before I had to leave for the airport freshman year of college, the zipper ripped out of my suitcase. It was not a high quality bag, and I was trying to fit in everything I owned (I significantly violated the weight limit for checked baggage). I overestimated the strength and size of the bag, and in a last ditch effort my roommate sat on top to keep it shut while I zipped it. As soon as she got up, the zipper’s stitching burst open. (Duct tape quickly solved this problem, yet befuddled the TSA agents who decided to randomly search my bag – I hope they enjoyed the dirty laundry!)

Although I grew up in church, my concept of God was very small. I knew mainly four things about God - He was love, He sent His Son for me, He lived in heaven and He wrote the Bible. (Maybe I knew a few other things – I should give my Sunday school teachers more credit…but still, it was a skeleton understanding.) It all fit very nicely and neatly into my faith suitcase.

My world expanded as I grew older; I studied science in college and made new and interesting friends with novel opinions about everything. Instead of trying to figure out how God and my faith meshed with those new things, I ignored the dissonances for as long as I could. I tried to cram everything into my nice, neat faith suitcase. The older I got, the more frayed the edges became, and the harder it was to keep my view of God so small; the suitcase was going to burst open.

My own narrow knowledge and understanding restricted what I was willing to consider or accept about God and His character. We try to contain our understanding of God in neat little parameters of our own invention, but those are limits that God does not actually provide.

Eventually, I started reading my Bible (for real). And talking with other people who studied their Bibles. And reading books by people who had studied it longer. Talk about needing someone to sit on your suitcase to close it!

I wanted all of my life experiences and all of my Bible studying to fit nicely and neatly into my concept of God. Manageable and small, I wanted an answer to every question. No exploding zippers, no duct tape.

Photo Credit: Flickr user Vllseskogen, Creative Commons

Maybe knowing God isn’t like packing a suitcase at all. The longer I seek Him and desire to know Him, the more I get the sense that knowing God is more like exploring the rain forest. At first you notice a few key things: trees, rain, heat. But if you’re willing to search and seek, question and dig for answers, you will discover more and more: a gorgeous flower, a powerful waterfall, a fearsome panther, the way things work together. Curiosity will require more searching: How do all the dead leaves and bugs disappear? A microscope might provide a new perspective, and climbing through the trees would yield unexpected discoveries you may not have considered from the ground. The more you know, the more beautiful it is, and the more deeply you enjoy it. Even if you stayed and lived in the rain forest for a lifetime, you still would never search out all of its secrets, never know every niche and nuance. There’s no way you could pack a rain forest into a suitcase – anything that might fit would never represent the totality of it; an essay or even a book could not contain it. It’s just too much!

So it is with God. He is just too much!

Pastor Dirk’s encouragement this week is that when our world collides with our nice neat picture of God, we shouldn’t fight it and grow discouraged by the collision. Rather, that we should seek the scriptures to let God speak into the confusion, and let our minds be blown.

He is bigger and wilder, so much more than we can imagine. He is more generous, He loves more fiercely, His justice is greater and He is more powerful than our minds can comprehend. Discovering Him will take the careful study of a lifetime. When He speaks, He expands our expectations and deepens our love.

On this side of eternity, we won’t ever have all of the answers about God and how He moves and works in this world. Our knowing will always be partial, a poor reflection. For all of us who know and believe Him though, the day will come when we will know Him in full; we will know Him face to face!

The loose edges of my understanding of God are becoming more comfortable. I’m learning that He is so much more than I can imagine; to box Him in is to create a God in my image.

Like the Bereans in Acts 17, let’s search the Scriptures daily to know Him more and hear Him speak, all the more when our world collides with our understanding. I want God to speak into my small and squashed ideas about Him, and burst them wide open.

[Robin Bupp is married to Caleb, and they are from many places east of the Mississippi (but are calling Michigan home for the foreseeable future). A former high school science teacher, Robin is slowly turning the two Bupp kiddos into tiny nerds while they teach her lots of things, including humility and patience.]

When God Stops Speaking

[The Midweek Encounter is a ministry of Encounter Church in Kentwood, MI. These posts are reflections on Sunday's message, which can be heard here each week: http://myencounterchurch.org/#/messages-media]

Sitting down to read the Bible can be a daunting task. In one sense, it’s so simple—open it up, pick a section, and read the words on the page. Except because it’s the Bible, we know that’s not supposed to be all there is to it. The book of Hebrews calls the word of God “alive and active,” but when I read it, sometimes it feels like it’s become lifeless and lethargic. It can feel like the way I’m reading the Bible is broken, and unless I devote every waking hour of my entire life to studying Hebrew and Greek and reading every commentary I can find, I won’t be able to really understand what God is really saying through the Bible.

It’s like God knew people would continue to despair over trying to understand the Bible, because In Deuteronomy 30, Moses delivers a word to the people of Israel, telling them, “Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach… No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it” (verses 11 and 14). The Israelites had recently left the land of Egypt where they were enslaved, and were on a journey to the land God had promised them—“a land flowing with milk and honey.”

Reading the Bible isn’t a journey in a physical sense, but it is a journey in other ways—a journey of discovery, a journey of transformation, a journey of learning about God and how he wants us to live. The task, like a trek to a new country, may seem daunting at times as we encounter passages of the Bible that seem to contradict each other, or that don’t make sense to us in today’s times, or that are worded in a way that seems fit only to confuse us. But as God worked to bring the Israelites out from their lives of bondage, he remains near to us today, actively working to bring us to him and to help us know him more. 

When we read the Bible, we’re not doing so in a vacuum, completely alone and abandoned—we read the Bible and God is with us as we do. It’s our job to read it and to use resources available to us to understand it, but the ultimate understanding and ability to apply it to our lives comes only from God. The more we spend time with the Bible, the more opportunities we’re opening up where God may speak to us. It may come in the form of a comforting passage found during personal devotions, or being convicted by a message from a pastor, or a conversation at a Bible study that brings newfound clarity. 

Of course, the opposite is true as well—if we continued to read the Bible for any length of time, there will inevitably be seasons where it truly feels like our way of reading it is broken, and that God seems to be sitting back and decidedly not helping us understand it any further. After Moses’ assurance that the Israelites were capable of carrying out the commandments he had laid out for them, the Israelites spent the next few hundred years proving him wrong. They broke, if not every single one of the commandments, most of them. Because they tried to be obedient out of their own strength instead of relying on God’s power to enable them to obey him, they were unable to fulfill what God told them to do.

Without God, we don’t have the ability to continue reading the Bible consistently and having it always speak to us in vibrant and applicable ways. Instead, we must remain faithful to the task without despairing when we stumble over difficult sections, trusting God to illuminate it for us in ways we cannot—and in ways we may not see for some time. But, because God is who he says he is and does what he says he will, we can know, even in those seasons where things aren’t making sense, that God is at work speaking into our lives and shaping us to look more like him.

[Brianna DeWitt believes in Jesus, surrounding yourself with good people, and that desserts are best when they involve chocolate and peanut butter. She writes about faith, growing up, and whatever else pops into her head on her own blog, and tweets (largely about food) at @bwitt722.]

Wrath and Chocolate

[The Midweek Encounter is a ministry of Encounter Church in Kentwood, MI. These posts are reflections on Sunday's message, which can be heard here each week: http://myencounterchurch.org/#/messages-media]


While baking the other day, I licked some stray cocoa powder off my finger (I’m comfortable with my less-than-hygienic baking practices!). I was expecting the usual, all-together chocolate experience – the sweetness makes the bitterness just right - rich and complex. I was abruptly reminded that cocoa is unsweetened! Thanks to some quiet time in the Old Testament prophets, the cocoa incident made me think of God’s wrath. 

If someone asked me to describe God, I’d probably talk about His love and grace, His mercy, and His faithfulness. It’s not likely that I would burst out with, “God is so awesome! He avenges His foes, and will not leave guilty people unpunished!” Those things are very true, and in some circumstances they would be very comforting. But generally, God’s wrath makes us a bit uncomfortable, right? I want to describe God in the ways I would like people to describe me. My anger is not a good thing, and I’d rather not have it in the description. Sin always seems to be tangled up in my anger! My anger is selfish and prideful; it rises from out of the hidden impatience and jealousy that lurk in the still dark parts of my heart. God’s anger has none of those issues, because He is wholly good. “No one is good – except God alone.” (Mark 10:18) He is not like us (Psalm 50:21), He is perfect, completely without sin.

God’s wrath is nothing like mine.

Just prior to the cocoa incident, I had read the first chapter of Nahum. The first six verses are striking, a fog-horn-loud reminder of why we need God’s grace and mercy! Here’s a quick sampling: “…the LORD takes vengeance and is filled with wrath,” (v 2) “…the LORD will not leave the guilty unpunished,” (v 3) and “Who can endure His fierce anger? His wrath is poured out like fire; the rocks are shattered before him.” (v 6)

In my particular printing of the Bible, these verses nearly claim the entire first column of the book. One lone verse is set apart below: “The LORD is good, a refuge in times of trouble.” (Nahum 1:7) The first time I read through the verses, I skimmed over this verse – compared with the less-familiar terrain of God’s wrath, the declaration of His goodness seemed commonplace; but it’s not! Nahum is sharing about God’s jealous anger and His righteous vengeance. Then he is inspired to write, “the LORD is good.” All of the anger, vengeance and punishment discussed in these verses can be trusted in God’s hands, because He is good.

As I stood with my unpleasant tasting cocoa in my mouth, I thought of how without sugar, chocolate is hard to swallow. If I did not trust God’s goodness, His wrath would be hard to swallow. It’s the totality of God’s character that makes Him holy and righteous!

When Jesus is our Savior, we can rest knowing that God has a merciful plan for the wrath that we deserve (…and we do deserve wrath – check out Romans 3:9-20). Romans 3:24-25 (NIV) says, “[We] are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood…;” an alternative translation of verse 25 says, “God presented him [Jesus] as the one who would turn away God’s wrath.” In God’s goodness and love and justice, He sent Jesus to take the wrath we are due. God is so good!

Pastor Dirk mentioned this week that God’s wrath comes up more times in the Bible than His love, yet God’s wrath is never absent of His love. God’s wrath is never like unsweetened cocoa – bitter, divorced from His love, only wreaking havoc. His wrath is a part of His love. “God is light; in Him there is no darkness at all.” (1 John 1:5) I can trust God’s wrath – even when I don’t understand it, or don’t have any idea what He’s working out – because He is good, He is light, and He is love!


[Robin Bupp is married to Caleb, and they are from many places east of the Mississippi (but are calling Michigan home for the foreseeable future). A former high school science teacher, Robin is slowly turning the two Bupp kiddos into tiny nerds while they teach her lots of things, including humility and patience.]