the beginning and the end

My studies over the last few weeks and months have had me turning over the idea of “the beginning and the end” in a variety of ways. This is a familiar phrase from a few different Biblical passages, perhaps most famously the Book of Revelation, when Jesus claims this title for Himself:

“Behold, I am coming soon, and My reward is with Me, to give to each one according to what he has done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.”

Revelation 22:12-13

Interestingly, the last couple chapters of Revelation act as a mirrored bookend with Genesis 1-2—the beginning and the end of the story. They match, and they tell us so much about what comes in between. Genesis begins a conversation about who God is and how He intended Creation to work; Revelation then offers the final say on who God is and how He intends the New Creation to work. The middle is … messy, full of questions and contradictions and moments of uncertainty, where we watch humanity fail to carry out God’s intentions again and again.

It has me thinking about how we view the Bible generally: As the beginning of the conversation, or the end?

Most of the time, I’ve noticed, we use it as the end. To doubters, we hand verses. To questioners, we respond with verses. To people who would ask us to see something in shades of gray rather than black-and-white, we give verses.

We effortlessly throw verses at anyone who disagrees with us, makes us uncomfortable, or asks us to think about a different possibility—and not because we want to open the floor for discussion or better understanding, but to silence debate, stay in our comfort zones, and have the last word. The Bible becomes a clumsy battering club in our denominational disputes and culture wars, leaving little space for it to act as the precise, soul-piercing blade of the Spirit it claims to be.

And the more time I spend with the Bible, the less convinced I am that we are “accurately handling the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15) when we use it in this way.

One of the things I love and hate about being a lifelong believer who grew up in church is that I “know” all the answers—the church answers, that is. This is helpful when it comes to constructing and corroborating doctrine, or avoiding blatant heresies, but it’s much less so when all those clean and pat church answers cloud my ability to recognize the complex and uncomfortable questions God is actually asking.

In other words—I’m well-trained in using the Bible as an end. But what about learning to let it be the beginning?

What happens when we let the Bible speak on its own terms, unfettered by our pre-determined bounds of doctrine? What happens when we let God tell us who He is, uncontained by our neat boxes of divine attributes? What would we learn about who He is, what He is doing, and how He wants us to reflect Him if we stopped trying to tell Him—and everyone else—who He is allowed to be and what He is allowed to ask of us?

Of course, I know there is a vitally important place for right doctrine. It matters that we relate to Yahweh rightly, and we know a lot about how to do that (and how not to do it) from the Scriptures. But an honest reading of the Bible won’t let us hold our “right answers” very tightly. It will challenge them and question them and throw them into turmoil at nearly every turn. It will demand of us to think and feel and undo and rebuild. It will constantly force our conversation-ending verse-wielding back into a place of humility and uncertainty, where there is room for an incomprehensible God and His creative work.

The Bible is an end: It has the authority to define God and tell us His story. It has the true answers we are looking for. But if that’s all it is—if the conversation has no beginning—then we will miss the messy riches of the middle, the parts where we have to wrestle with God and leave marked by the encounter to receive the blessing. We miss the questions it would ask of us. We miss the lifelong journey of discovery and delight it promises, because we were too mired down in making sure we “knew it all.”

I’m noticing that the more I learn, the less I know. As God increases in my perception, I decrease. Every new discovery or epiphany simply expands the universe of what I don’t understand. With every answer comes a thousand more questions.

This, I think, is as it should be.

five experiences that have helped me understand the Bible better

Though I haven’t been in a formal Bible classroom for seven years, I will always call myself a Bible student. As a disciple of Christ, I am learning that His teaching can happen through anything and anyone, at any time, and anywhere; while I feel immensely blessed to have had the short year of intensive Bible scholarship that I did, the greater challenge at times has been to remain in that seated position at His feet no matter where I am in life. To, like Mary in Luke 10, find space to listen to His Word even as regular life goes on buzzing around me.

Reflecting on this recently, I’ve been amazed by how so many of my life experiences have lent a richness to my study of the Bible and knowledge of God that I couldn’t have gained in a classroom. God’s work is constant, and often goes unnoticed in the moment, but I’m amazed by how He has worked through some of my most mundane or seemingly-unrelated experiences to build me into the disciple He wants me to be. I wanted to share some of the experiences that I think have impacted me the most, in hopes of encouraging you to reflect on your own.

1 / GROWING UP ON A FARM

I didn’t know, while I was living the first eighteen years of my life on a farm in eastern Washington, that God was teaching me some valuable things I’d take with me in learning how to study the Bible and understand His character—but now I can hardly imagine how different my perspective on God’s Word would be without this background. The Bible was written largely about an ancient, agricultural, hill-country people. Their lives were a struggle of survival, dependent on weather and crops and harvests and animals; in particular, they had to depend on one another, because it took each member of the family doing his or her part to keep them all alive. By comparison, my farm life was downright cushy, but I did get to taste what it is to be mutually dependent on each other, on creatures, and on the earth; I can understand fairly easily the countless agricultural metaphors the Bible uses to describe God, His work, and His wrath. Although there is still a huge chasm in understanding to overcome between my own culture and that of the ancient Biblical author, I think it would be that much wider if I had grown up on a postage stamp yard in the American suburbs instead.

2 / MY YEARS RAISING SHEEP

For about a decade when we were still living at home, my sister and I raised a small flock of Suffolk-Hampshire sheep together as 4-H projects. Nothing has informed my understanding of human nature and God’s relationship with His people quite as colorfully as my experience with sheep, which are, of course, one of the most-used illustrations in the Bible—from the ancient sacrificial system to Psalm 23 to Christ Himself, the “Lamb who was Slain.” When I read the passages in Scripture that compare God’s people with sheep, I know exactly which traits inspire them: chiefly, helplessness and fear. Humans and sheep have in common a total lack of meaningful ability to control their circumstances and protect themselves, which leads to a constant baseline instinct of fear, and frequently inspires them to make very unwise choices.

This has helped me to understand that God doesn’t look on me with contempt for my sinfulness and distrust, but with compassion for it. He knows that, deep down, my lack of faith has its roots in fear, and as the Good Shepherd, He wants to rescue me from the dire consequences of the sinful choices I’ve made out of fear and call me gently into the safety of His fold. If I know anything about dealing with sheep, it’s that responding with aggression and anger to their already-precarious state of mind will inevitably cause them to scatter in panic and flee. It breaks their trust and makes me, the one who was supposed to shepherd and protect them, into a predator and a threat. Thankfully, God’s shepherding of my own fearful heart is patient and perfect.

3 / ENGLISH LITERATURE CLASS

When I was a junior in high school, I enrolled in a college-level literature class that was taught by Mrs. Kruse, locally famous for her quality teaching and standard of excellence. I read short stories and books from a range of literary greats, such as D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Leo Tolstoy, William Shakespeare, Jack London, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Herman Hesse—and then was expected to write analytical persuasive essays on various aspects of each work in under an hour. Far more than learning the content of a handful of famous stories, this class taught me how to think critically and quickly, how to ask the right questions, and how to search carefully for and articulate the answers. I learned how to read the invisible concepts behind the visible words on the page, how to connect ideas from one person’s story to a larger universal truth, and how to see a work as both a whole and its parts at the same time. I find I am constantly called on to use these same skills when I study the Bible, which is a literary masterpiece all its own, a highly complex work that is anchored in a far different context from my own and yet speaks to truth that remains absolute regardless of what changes in the world around it.

4 / SEEING THE HOLY LAND

Before I went to Israel the first time, others who had already been there told me how standing in the very places it all happened would bring to life my experience of the Bible. I believed them, but I couldn’t fully grasp how right they were. Seven years and two tours of Israel later, it’s hard to clearly recall what it was like to read the Bible before I could see and smell and taste and touch it in my memory. I have seen the Valley of Elah where David slew Goliath. I remember the caves above Ein Gedi where he hid from Saul. I’ve stood on the ground where Paul departed Israel for Rome, never to return, and I’ve touched the bedrock of Calvary. When I read about Jesus calming the storm, I can smell the wind over the Sea of Galilee, and when He preaches the Beatitudes I can envision the crowd on the hillside. Traveling in Israel made the Bible more than words and stories and characters—it is familiar and colorful and alive.

5 / MARRIAGE

I knew, in theory, all about the “mystery” of marriage as a reflection of Christ and the Church long before I ever got married. Actually being married, however, has pretty much exploded everything I “knew” in theory—in hard but necessary ways. Nothing else has shown me so clearly how insidiously sin has distorted all of God’s good gifts. Woven into my entire understanding of Ephesians 5 was a fallen worldview straight from the curse of Genesis 3, tainting God’s beautiful picture of selfless love and submission working together to bring Him glory with ugly hidden undercurrents of oppression, self-protection, and distrust. But as my husband and I both do the work to unlearn these patterns, I am rediscovering the beauty in God’s original design for humanity in Genesis 1 and 2. He created incredible goodness, and He is in the midst of an incredible redemption plan for all that goodness—which He has invited you and me to be part of, married or not! The story of the Bible isn’t just something to read and study, it’s also something we have active roles in as God’s children, looking ahead to when all that has been defiled by sin is made new and glorious.

Marriage has also given me a special appreciation for the relentlessness of God’s love for His people, even and especially when they have repeatedly failed or betrayed Him. I’ve lived the reality of being failed by and then forgiving the very person who vowed his commitment to me; I have also been the one to fail him and be forgiven. Through it all, the marriage covenant stands firm, a stalwart reminder that so, too, does God’s covenant love for us—regardless of how poorly we treat Him sometimes.

BONUS / HAVING A BABY (TBD)

So, I have not actually had a baby yet, but I have spent the last 5+ months carrying one, so I am currently very aware of all the birth and parent-child language God uses in the Bible! Stay tuned—I have a feeling this one is going to rock my world. (Baby girl is expected September 2020!)

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Your turn—what are some of the unexpected or everyday things you’ve experienced that God might be using (or want to use) to help you know Him more? Your list will likely look a lot different from mine, but at the same time, it’s probably exactly the list He knows you need. God is teaching us constantly if we have the heart to learn, whether we ever step into a Bible classroom or not.

big, improbable ideas

This week I read a statistic that troubled me. On the YouVersion app, which populates different Bible reading plans and similar resources, a reading plan covering the theme of “justice” in the Bible has a 70% user completion rate.

The problem? It’s only a three-day plan.

That is, only 70% of people who sign up for a reading plan that will take three days can actually follow through on those three days.

It’s not surprising. We all know that our attention spans are shrinking, our lives are getting busier, and longform content is becoming less and less popular. We’d rather get the one-minute summary video with an eye-catching slideshow than take in the full depth and breadth of a topic. But it is still troubling.

One of the biggest projects I’ve created through this blog so far is a plan to read through the Bible in 180 days. If 30% of people won’t follow through for three days, how many will still be in it at the end of 180? One percent? Less?

Part of me fears that my vision is too big. It’s too much to expect of people, to read through the whole Bible. It takes too long. They don’t want to do it. They’re too busy. They’re too distracted. It’s one of those lovely, big ideas that I should probably pass off as improbable, if not impossible.

And I know that IT IS a hard task. I myself took this year off from Bible180, because it’s a big investment of time, energy, and brainspace to read through the whole Bible in such a concentrated amount of time. But whether you try to read the Bible in seven days, 180 days, or 365 days - it’s still going to be a really big book that requires really big commitment. We can’t distill it down to a one-minute video and still capture the beauty and complexity of who God is and what He has done.

And I know this, too: There are people that have completed Bible180 from beginning to end. Some of them within the 180-day timeframe, some of them taking a bit longer, but they’ve done it. I know who they are. They’ve shared with me how it has impacted them. Even the ones who made it to Deuteronomy, or to Jeremiah, or to the end of the Old Testament - they experienced transformation, too.

There is a pressure to make things easier. Faster. More bite-size, accessible, watered down. There are plenty of voices telling me I have too many big, improbable ideas - that nobody wants to do that much work.

But I contend that some of us are hungry to put in the work.

Some of us are hungry for the dense, nutritious meat of the Word. Some of us - probably more of us than anyone realizes - have been on a diluted diet for far too long, and we long to know God in His richness. His depth.

Maybe it isn’t about whether I can keep 500 people on task to read through the Bible that matters. Maybe it’s about whether the five or ten or twenty of them that were truly starving get fed.

The Bible school that I attended in Florida attracts one, maybe two dozen students every year. Not the hundreds or thousands that other institutions can boast. But the ones that uproot their lives to spend their days marinating in the fullness of the Bible, the ones that put dollars and hours behind their desire to learn from its every page whether they ever reap a tangible return on the investment or not - these are just one example of the truly hungry. And when the truly hungry seek after what can truly satisfy, they will be filled - even as their appetites are whetted for more.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

Matthew 5:6

We’re all in different places in our walks with Jesus. Some of us need the milk-based diet - we are babies and we need someone else to hold the spoon. Some of us have been stuck on milk for a bit too long, but haven’t yet identified our real need for something different. Some of us have long outgrown the liquid diet and our souls are crying out for more substantial nutrition - and the skills to feed ourselves - to fuel our growth.

There’s a good place for cutting things up into bite-size pieces. But to the fear that I have too many big, improbable ideas that “no one” will ever want to partake in, I say that’s not true. Because I am someone, and I am starving, and I know that I am not the only one.

Are you one of the hungry ones? I’d love to hear about your experience with the Bible and what you feel is missing from your current spiritual “diet.” Leave me a comment below!

(The photos in this post were taken on a recent hike to McCall Point, Columbia River Gorge.)