An Interesting Occurence

Lately I've been reading through the Gospel of John and the book of Exodus, reading a chapter of John one day, and a chapter of Exodus the next (etc.), or at least trying to. Right now, I am in Exodus 8 and John 7. My original goal with Exodus was an overarching ambition to learn of God's character through a reading of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament, also called The Law by later Jews, being Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy). My goal in reading John was to relearn what it means to follow Jesus and what His life and death and resurrection means to us, and I picked John because I feel as though I've never really focused on it before. It seems like, to me at least, Matthew is the most common of the Gospels, and I have gone through both Luke and Mark before.

Anyhow, with these goals in mind, I began this "ambitious" reading discipline at the beginning of Fall Finals Week (originally it was a chapter of each every day, but that was a little much it seemed like). What I think that I have found, well, been revealed to and had my eyes opened to, is that I have been learning a lot more about myself than about God.

This is a two-way road for me. It both annoys me, and gives me some hope. It annoys me because I already have a tendency, or maybe even lifestyle, to make everything about me, so to find that I'm learning about myself in the Scriptures almost seems like I'm doing something wrong. On the other hand, it gives me hope, because the very thing I seem to be learning about myself is the very same struggle I seem to have been having in the past few weeks, months, [years?].

Lately, it has really been tough to believe, and not only that, but to even know what that means, or to even think about why I ought to. Now, I'm sure that I can find lots of different arguments on why I should or why I shouldn't believe, and I have thought through a lot of these, and argued with myself quite often, and usually have a little debate or logic session going on in my head. What I have been finding is that I don't know that I can do it alone. I don't know that even if I had been giving perfect, flawless, should-be-convincing reasons, that I would believe.

Here's where the Scripture comes in. As I'm reading through John, I'm reading about all of these people who are either told by Jesus or shown by Jesus the power and majesty and truth of Himself and His Father and the Holy Spirit. Take for example the woman at the well in chapter four of John. Jesus asks this woman for a drink, and she makes a cursory cultural denial, basically saying that they shouldn't even be talking. Jesus responds by saying, "If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water." She responds by saying, "Great, where can I get this water, and how are you going to pull it out of the well, you don't have a bucket. Also, does that mean that you're better than Jacob, who built this very well for us?" He answers, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirst again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life." She still thinks He's talking about physical water, so she asks Him for some of this water so she "won't get thirsty and have to to keep coming here to draw water." Then Jesus reveals some of His power. He reveals to her that He is able to prophesy, that He is fully aware that she has five husbands. She says that He must be a prophet, and quickly changes the subject to another kind of controversial cultural topic, where the true worshipers of the God of Isaac ought to worship. Jesus reveals to her that a time is coming when people will worship the Father in spirit and truth, not necessarily on a certain mountain, but rather with sincerity of heart. He also speaks of a salvation that is from the Jews. She says, rather passively, that she knows "that Messiah (called Christ) is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us." Jesus' response? "I who speak to you am he." Throughout this entire dialogue, this woman either doesn't realize the depth of what Jesus is saying, or she continually tries to shift the focus off of controversial issues that will force her to think about and consider what she believes and cause her to actually make a decision one way or another about truly following God, rather than some age-old routine-ridden religion. Although He reveals to her His power, her discourse continues to flee from Him, and this describes the very situation I seem to be in.

Now, what He shows and tells her may not be considered spectacular, for anyone can say that they are the salvation of the earth, and it is possible that someone might be able to find out that this woman has five wives, but He does continue to do miracles. In some instances, there is belief brought about, but in others there is still unbelief. In John 6:25-59, Jesus is confronted by the crowd of people that He feeds miraculously in John 6:1-15. The crowd continues to press Him for information about "the works God requires," about a miraculous sign that they might believe in Jesus as He commands in response to the question, "what is the work of God," about even the fact that Jesus claims to be the "bread that came down from heaven" even though he was the "son of Joseph, whose father and mother [they] know." Jesus greets them by basically saying that they didn't come looking for Him because what He did was miraculous, but because He gave them food, and goes on to urge them not to work for food that spoils (earthly food) but rather to work for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give them, us. Oh, and to not forget, He is approved by the Father. The people have a hard time believing and understanding that Jesus, the Son of Man, is the giver of eternal life. They ask Jesus to provide some miraculous sign so that they may believe, and go on to kind of suggest that it would be bread from heaven, possibly misunderstanding what Jesus says about "bread that cam down from heaven." What they do not realize, or possibly want to ignore, is that Jesus already did a miracle for them. He fed 5,000 men, not including the women and children that would have been there, from 5 loaves of bread and 2 small fish. That would be one one thousandth of a loaf of bread for each person, and even less fish (i.e. not enough!!!) without the miracle of Jesus, let alone the fact that He even provided leftovers! These people are unwilling to believe, to open their eyes to deeper things because they are so preoccupied with what they will eat, with what they can see, with what they can believe easily. Even after Jesus gives them a miracle, even after He explains who He is and what He is and how they may have eternal life, they simply grumble about technicalities that they, and I, probably don't really get, and ask for more miracles, missing the miracle He already did, the symbolism of that miracle (isn't it a coincidence that He gave them bread and then called Himself the bread of life?), and the depth and truth of what He was saying!! They repeat the pattern the woman at the well (presumably) left (presumably because we aren't told whether she ended up believing or not). Later in John 6, it says that many disciples left because of this hard teaching.

Now, how about Exodus? In Exodus 6-8 (thus far), the Lord is using Moses and the Israelites to display His glory, and He is also using Moses and Aaron to free His people from oppression. Moses asks Pharaoh for a few days for the Israelites to be freed from their work so that they may go out into the wilderness to worship and offer sacrifices to the True God. Pharaoh's heart is hardened when Aaron's staff becomes a snake, because Pharaoh's sorcerers do that as well. His heart is hardened when the Lord turns the Nile into blood through Aaron, because Pharaoh's sorcerers do so as well. Finally, it seems as if Pharaoh may let the Israelites go and worship when the Lord sends the plague of frogs. Moses strikes a deal with Pharaoh, that he will pray to the Lord to take the frogs out of the land, even at a specific time, and Pharaoh will allow the Israelites to go worship in the desert. As soon as Moses prays to the Lord and the Lord answers by killing all the frogs, Pharaoh's heart is hardened and he goes back on the deal, not allowing the Israelites to worship in the desert. Pharaoh does this TWO MORE times, with the plague of gnats, and with the plague of flies. He continues to deny the Lord God's people and the Lord God's messenger despite the blatantly obvious display of the power of the God of Jacob, because the consequences of the miracles continue to be taken away by the Lord. He tells Moses thrice that Moses and the Israelites will be able to go worship in the desert so that he can get rid of the plagues the Lord brings, but as soon as those plagues are gone, he hardens his heart and refuses to let them go. What this reveals is two things: a deniability of the power and truth of God and a refusal to believe, in that he sees obvious works of God but plays them off in his head and some mere mystery (or he just can't rationally make the connection that if God can send frogs, He can probably do a lot more, which may be possible as Pharaoh would think about God's in the sense of certain areas, such as the sun god. But, God denies this possibility by bringing various plagues and miracles); and also a use of God for the goodness and power of God, not a love of God because He is God and He has been good to us and loved us first.

Now, how do these all fit in? What I see in these three stories, and in my own experience, is that the human heart is so bent on refusing things that make us uncomfortable, take away our control and possibly our "happiness", and threaten everything that we hold to be true and have based our lives on, that even when we are given miracles and signs and emotions and feelings and intellectual arguments and dreams and miracles of other sorts and all of these other forms of rational and "seemingly irrational" convincings of truth, we will continue to, or at least some of us will, deny that truth merely on the basis of our own comfort, control, and "happiness" by accusing those convincings of a flaw in some way, even if it is the most illogical of ways. Even when we are showed point blank something that we ourselves asked to be shown so that we can believe, we still deny.

So what does this mean? How does this affect us? I think it is important to believers and non-believers alike. I think that it means to believers that first of all, we can't believe on our own, we desperately need the Lord's help to open our eyes, and second of all, maybe we should be a little more fair, a little more tolerant, and little more loving to people who cannot see, and also to people who have different viewpoints, theological or not, that we do, for perhaps they are right and we simply refuse to see. Now, don't take that to mean that everything anyone says is true, because you must, absolutely MUST, think about things, pray about things, meditate on things, check things with the Bible and with those wiser than yourself, but it does mean that perhaps we can try and be a little more fair and tolerant of views that differ from us, perhaps even going as far as to giving them the respect of listening to them and considering them. Now, to non-believers, the message is much the same. As Jesus says, all who ask, knock, and seek will be given unto. (Matthew 7:7-12). To me, it seems that Jesus is saying that this is not just for prayer requests of a new house, or a healed relative, but also for prayer requests of belief. For no matter how much we try and believe through our actions and no matter how much we are shown, it seems that our eyes are closed, and to open them is only the work of God. Perhaps some have more open eyes than others, and perhaps all who come to God have noticed some thing about Him that attracts them to Him, but in the end, it is the work of God that we might believe.

At least, I think so.

Lord I believe, help my unbelief.
Lord I believe, but would you help me see.
(a song of Mike Crawford)


Later

Upon further thinking, and an hour of differential equations, I didn't think this post was quite long enough.

Anyhow, my thought as I walked back from class, and, admittedly, the thought hit me in the middle of class, was that perhaps this entire post is simply a regurgitation of the same "show me a miracle and I'll believe" mindset, just with a different taste. Maybe, in my saying that it is only God that can open our eyes, I am saying the same thing, saying "God do it for me, because I can't do it." Is this the same thing as saying "show me a miracle, then I'll believe?"

After kind of fleshing this out in the above paragraph, maybe this is a false proposition, because in the end it boils down to either God doing it, or yourself doing it. Maybe what I was truly convicted of was a motive. Maybe the same motive that hits the hungry crowd hits me, the motive of an easy belief. They want Jesus to make it even more blatantly obvious than He already has and spell out every single different aspect of their salvation because they want their belief to be easy. Perhaps what I was and am being convicted of is that I've been saying "Lord, build belief in me and open my eyes" not because I truly want to see, but because it is the easiest option, I get the eternal life of belief in Christ, and also don't really have to work.

We can boil it down even further, to the exact same motive, a motive of control. In asking Jesus to spell out the exact facts of salvation and display His power and make it so that they can believe easily, the crowd wants to have control, they want to be able to say, "Yes, I can believe in this in myself because He has made it extremely obvious and has fixed it all for me," whereas when I say, "Lord, build belief in me and open my eyes," in a lazy mindset, I am really only saying, "I don't really want control of this, in fact it's real easy just to not worry about this, and by praying that You'd open my eyes but only so that I can have an easy salvation means that I still really have control, because then I can still go about my own ways." Perhaps.. perhaps.

What are your inputs on this? Is it truly the same thing to say, "Lord, do this for me, for I cannot do it alone," or ought it boil down more to motives?