the good news

Rider on the White Horse by Robert Wright

It’s dark. I can only see my fellow humans as dim, shadowy shapes in a sick reddish light. I hate them, and at the same time I cower among them, using them as a fleshly shield against the pain that never lets up. I’m so used to it now that I have almost grown numb: the moment-by-moment stings of my master’s cruel prod, which I can’t stop running into even though it hurts every time. It’s like a drug, destroying me even as it wraps me tighter in its grip, and I know there is no hope. This is my existence. This was yesterday, this is today, this will be tomorrow. Darkness. Pain. The haunting, but somehow also stupid, moans of the bodies around me as they, too, endlessly run back into the stinging prod.

Every once in a while, I’ll watch blankly as one of these human shapes strikes down another in a cold rage. Death is a near and familiar companion. Sometimes it almost seems like a friend. 

What’s that? Something breaks up the endless chaos of red and shadow. It’s white, even brilliant–it hurts my unaccustomed eyes, piercing straight through me like a knife-beam of light, a thing I have never seen. I blink, but it’s still there, getting closer and bigger and spilling radiant white light over this shadowy valley of death. The bodies around me crush in and scatter like rats, desperate to avoid revelation, desperate to hide from whatever it means to be seen. I instinctively cower back, too, even though I can feel the prod sink into my spine. It’s too bright. It’s too much. I can’t see. I cover my face with my hands and fall facedown on the ground, stumbling over the bodies of the dead, thinking that if only I can be dead, too, I will be spared this probing, blinding light–whatever it is.

Then there’s a voice.

It’s no voice I have ever heard. It doesn’t hiss or snarl, like my masters. It doesn’t moan, like my fellow humans. This voice thunders.

“Get up! You, follow Me!”

I am shaking uncontrollably, but this is a command that overpowers every instinct of self-preservation in my body. I instantly rise to my feet. Still shielding my face from the light, I look up, seeking the Source of this voice.

And in that moment the light shifts from blinding to brilliant. I can see. I can see Him. He is a King, a Conqueror, riding astride a white horse. He wields a sword, but the blade is clean; only his robes are dripping with blood–blood that seems to have come from a wound in His own side, from scars in His own hands.

There are words written into His robe. “KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS.”

He rides forward until I can feel His horse’s breath on my neck. I am still shaking, but I can’t move–can’t so much as bow my head. It’s as if, by seeing Him, I can suddenly see myself clearly.

And I am dead. Dead in my trespasses and sins. I cannot escape this hell that I live in or this master of sin and death that I serve. The pain that I was numb to moments ago is now excruciating, and it’s only sheer terror that keeps me from writhing in agony in His presence.

As if separated from my own body, I am vaguely aware that He has leaned down and taken my hand in His, and somewhere in the recesses of my mind I become conscious of the bloody hole in the middle of His palm.

He speaks again at last, but this time, His voice is as gentle as a rippling brook. “Little girl, I say to you, get up.”

And there falls away from my eyes something like scales. My vision becomes clear for the first time in my existence. I can see the massive army behind the King, a cavalry all clothed in white. And I realize why He is here: to win this dead hellscape for His kingdom. I can either surrender or die.

And I have already been dead once. Whatever this King might do to me, I would rather be on His side than return to the reign of death.

“I surrender.”

Instead of binding my wrists and banishing me from His presence, wretch that I am, I hear Him give orders that I be clothed in white and given a mount. The whole army breaks into cheers of celebration, and I feel tears of what must be joy stream hot down my face as the embrace of what must be love wraps around my soul. I am alive, and I am at peace. I am His.

I fall into the ranks of the rest of the army. We are forward-bound behind our King, spilling the light into more dead and dark places, gathering up everyone who will surrender on our way and welcoming them into what must be a family.

My King has come, and He is taking back all Creation from the power of sin and death. My allegiance is to Him now—Him alone. Hallelujah.

life and rebellion: a tale of two mothers

I’ve been studying the early chapters of Genesis rather extensively as part of my BibleProject class over the last couple of months. It may seem like an odd place to find foreshadowings of the Christmas story, but not if you’re a Bible nerd. After all, everything begins at the beginning.

This verse, in particular, has been making me think:

Now the man had relations with his wife Eve, and she conceived and gave birth to Cain, and she said, “I have gotten a manchild with [the help of] the Lord.”
- Genesis 4:1

One reason I’ve been dwelling on this verse so much is just the obvious translational liberties that have been taken with it—well-intended, but still risky. The bracketed words, “the help of,” do not exist in the Hebrew; they’re added by the translators in an effort to make the sentence make more sense to us. And the word “manchild” is actually just the ordinary Hebrew word for “man.” No reference to a child.

So let’s read it without those alterations:

Now the man had relations with his wife Eve, and she conceived and gave birth to Cain, and she said, “I have gotten a man with the Lord.”

The verb phrase have gotten is related to the same word used of God to denote His status as the source, Creator, and possessor of all things. And the word with, while it could mean with the Lord’s help as the translators have suggested, can also just mean in proximity to the Lord—or similar to what the Lord has done.

So there’s at least one alternative way of understanding Eve’s words: “I have made a man, just like God.” She whose name means “life” may have read a bit too much of her own press and believed that she really could create life, just like Yahweh.

Whether Eve saw Cain as a gift she acquired with the Lord’s help or as a boastworthy achievement that fulfilled her deep-seated longing to be “like God” (Genesis 3:5), we can make one educated guess: She was hopeful that this man would fulfill the words of the serpent’s curse and deliver the death-blow to the sin and deception she had welcomed into Paradise.

The Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, cursed are you more than all cattle, and more than every beast of the field; on your belly you will go, and dust you will eat all the days of your life; and I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the heel.”
- Genesis 3:14-15

Could Cain be that victorious seed? Could Eve’s ill-advised grasp for power and wisdom on her own terms be reversed, and righteousness restored to God’s image-bearers?

No.

Instead, the man Eve created—the son of her fallen flesh—became the father of hatred, jealousy, and murder on the earth. Although his parents were the ones who fell, Cain himself is the first human to draw his first breath in a fallen state. When he raises his hand to kill his brother Abel, he kills all the remaining goodness in his life as well—his identity, his work, his relationships within his family—and is separated forever from the face of the Lord.

Eve goes on to bear more children and receive them with greater humility (Genesis 4:25), but the serpent lives on—and with him, thousands of years of brutality and bloodshed, jealousy and murder, hatred and division.

Until another young woman, whose name paradoxically derives from the word for “rebellion,” meets a being from the spiritual realm.

And the angel [Gabriel] said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and give birth to a son, and you shall name Him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David; and He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and His kingdom will have no end.” But Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” The angel answered and said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; for that reason also the holy Child will be called the Son of God.” … And Mary said, “Behold, the Lord’s bond-servant; may it be done to me according to your word.”
- Luke 1:30-35, 38a

Eve “created” a man through the flesh. Mary submitted herself as a vessel for the Son of Man through divine conception.

Eve thought her son would make her like God. Mary’s Son would be God Incarnate.

Eve hoped her son would rescue her from the consequences of her sin. Mary’s Son would wipe out the sins of all humanity.

Eve’s son became the father of murder and the instrument of the first human death. Mary’s Son became the Resurrection and the Life.

Eve’s son was the first in a long, long line of disappointments who never overcame the wiles of the serpent—but Mary’s Son was the One who, though wounded in the battle, finally crushed him.

And Mary said:

“My soul exalts the Lord,
And my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.
For He has had regard for the humble state of His bond-servant;
For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed.
For the Mighty One has done great things for me;
And holy is His name.
And His mercy is to generation after generation
Toward those who fear Him.
He has done mighty deeds with His arm;
He has scattered those who were proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down rulers from their thrones,
And has exalted those who were humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
And sent the rich away empty-handed.
He has given help to His servant Israel,
In remembrance of His mercy,
Just as He spoke to our fathers,
To Abraham and his descendants forever.”

- Luke 1:46-55

The woman named Life became the mother of death. The woman named Rebellion became the mother of salvation.

Where history would look back on Eve as one accursed, Mary knew from before Jesus was even born that she would be remembered as blessed among women, for she was considered worthy to bear and raise her own Savior—and not through any doing of her own, only surrender to the work of the Lord.

on coping with the Bible

I’ve just started the “Introduction to the Hebrew Bible” course from the BibleProject (it’s completely free, and extremely high quality in both content and production, if you are interested in taking it!), and I decided that as a verbal/written processor, my best bet for retaining what I learn in the course will be to write something about it as often as I can. So here’s a scribbling of thoughts from Session 1, titled, “What on earth is the Hebrew Bible?”

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I’ve been talking to an old friend and longtime spiritual mentor about various theological and Biblical questions lately, and one idea that he raised—and I keep thinking about—is that so much of pastoral ministry can often be spent “undoing” what adults were taught about God, Jesus, and/or the Bible as children. Wouldn’t it be amazing if that were not the case? What would it look like to teach children who God is and how to handle His Word in a way that wouldn’t need to be deconstructed later?

Tim Mackie echoed the sentiment in Session 1 of the class and I liked the way he put it: Christian children’s media is often the clearest revelation of the “coping strategies” we use to deal with our discomfort around the hard parts of the Bible. We rewrite Old Testament narratives as hero-villain stories or moralistic tales, or we turn the Bible into a theological encyclopedia, or we use it to proof-text doctrines we’ve already decided are correct, or we cherrypick the inspirational bits to put on calendars and coffee mugs—all to avoid dealing with the actual text as a whole.

Why? Because the text as a whole is incredibly complex, uncomfortable, difficult, and often not safe for work. Why would God choose to reveal Himself through a Bible like that?

But He does. And when we don’t accept that—and Him—on His terms, we inadvertently produce a lot of Christians who know Bible stories, understand morality, and can bend any passage into a personal application, but who don’t know God or understand His purpose for humanity.

Let me speak for myself: By all the typical metrics, I had the ideal upbringing to produce a Biblically-literate, faithful Christian adult. My parents are both born again, our family attended church very regularly and was extensively involved in church ministry, I went to Sunday school and AWANA every week from toddlerhood on, and I even chose to go to Bible school for a year after high school. I do not remember a time before I started following Jesus. And for all of this, I am so grateful (though still probably not half as grateful as I should be, since we all tend to take our upbringings for granted as “normal,” having known no different).

At the same time, I can look back and admit, with some embarrassment, that there were/are still some enormous gaps in my true knowledge of who God is and what He has done. Being able to pass the test isn’t always the same as understanding the material.

For example, four or five years ago I went through a dark and difficult period of time involving a lot of fear, loss, and grief. In that shadowy valley, I discovered for the first time that I had been leaning on the heresy of “prosperity theology”—and I didn’t even realize it until it gave way! I would have sworn up and down that I didn’t subscribe to any kind of prosperity doctrine, but the truth was, I had internalized years of learning Bible stories as moral tales, ultimately leading me to subconsciously believe that if I was a good enough Christian, God would protect me from pain.

The catastrophic loss of that core belief, even though it was one I had never formally acknowledged, utterly rocked my relationship with God for a time.

The good news is, I do see strides being made toward the creation of better Bible resources for children. Clara has a book that attempts to encompass the story of the Bible in a short, easy-to-grasp form, which is something I don’t remember having at her age—although it skips straight from the exodus to Bethlehem, which leaves out a whole lot of material that it would seem God considers important. Kevin DeYoung’s “The Biggest Story” Bible Storybook is thorough, beautifully illustrated, and fun to read, if a bit episodic in nature. I haven’t yet read his other book, The Biggest Story: How the Snake Crusher Brings Us Back to the Garden, but I’m hoping to give that one a try soon.

And as I contemplate the Herculean task of trying to teach my own child about God and the Bible, I can see why it’s so difficult. Kids are rather black-and-white thinkers, and it’s hard to imagine trying to teach them nuanced concepts that even adults struggle with. Even with all the caveats and disclaimers and shades of gray in the world, we tend to categorize information in pretty simple mental boxes—agree/disagree, safe/unsafe, good/bad, right/wrong.

The longer I study the Bible, the more inadequate those dichotomies seem. A mammoth collection of ancient, divinely-inspired texts that reveals a peephole view of God’s incomprehensible nature and His plan to rescue Creation just doesn’t fit into something as banal as “good/bad.”

And maybe that’s what it takes: Time, and repetitive, fearless exposure to the whole Bible. A ruthless rejection of the coping strategies we use to keep ourselves comfortable with (and protected from) the Word of God.

We all have to face the hard parts eventually. What if, instead of trying to turn the Bible into a safe book, we made our homes and churches into places that are safe to confront potentially threatening questions?