My earliest memory was when I was 3 years old. I woke up in a crib, which was strange because I normally slept in a bed, and found my wrists bound and my leg elevated. A giant (to a 3-year-old's eyes) bottle of liquid hung suspended above my foot with a tube running to a needle in my ankle. A nurse saw I was awake and smiled and told me to let her know when the bottle ran out. As she walked away I called, "It's out!" She came back and smiled again. "No, it's not, honey. I'll come back in a little bit to check on you." No, it wasn't a dream. At 3 I had contracted spinal meningitis and lapsed into a coma. I woke up tied to a crib because they were giving me fluids to keep me alive. The event was real. I say all that because we humans have "interesting" brains. We can conjure up false memories. We can "steal" memories when someone else who was there tells us about it and we make that our own recollection. We can do all sorts of odd things to come to perceptions that are not true, but we believe that they are.
This is one of the things I consider when I read my Bible. Most people who read the Bible will not exactly read it for all it's worth. Most people will read it to confirm their bias, their comfort zone. But if the Bible is actually what it claims -- "God-breathed" (2 Tim 3:16), written by men moved by the Spirit speaking from God (2 Peter 1:21) -- then it is unavoidable that at some point(s) the Bible will make claims that go against our comfort zones ... or even our own logic. And it does ... almost routinely. It says things like "take up your cross" and "rejoice in suffering." Jesus said, "If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple" (Luke 14:26). Seriously? Joseph told the brothers that sought to kill him and then sold him into slavery, "You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good" (Gen 50:20). Really? We are asked to believe, in this fallen and sad world, that "God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose" (Rom 8:28). These kinds of things are not rare or hard to find in the pages of the Bible. Nor are they "human" in the sense that they would be the kinds of things we would normally come up with. Today some of this stuff is so outlandish that Christians are rejecting it, things like "Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord" (Eph 5:22) or "And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience" (Eph 2:1-2). "Dead? Really?? Be serious." But if the Bible is God's Word and God is holy -- "other" -- and not like us, it only stands to reason that Scripture will contain things that violate our sense of "reasonable" or even "right."
Our memories are helpful, but not infallible. A lot of of what we remember is true and some is not. One way we can verify some of our memories is to see that no one made it up, no one told you, no one fed you this, like that memory of mine when I was 3. It couldn't have been manufactured because 1) it fit the facts of the time, but 2) no one I know was there to tell me about it later, so I can be pretty sure it is an actual memory. One of the ways we can verify that Scripture is God's Word is finding these things in its pages that are just not ... human. They're not things we would come up with. They are, like God, "other." And it takes faith to conclude, "Well, that's what it says, so that's what I'll go with." But not blind faith. Faith in the God who breathed it, in the Spirit who moved men to write it. These kinds of things are fingerprints of the divine. And if all you encounter in your Bible are the things you are comfortable with, perhaps you're not reading it for all it is worth.
No comments:
Post a Comment