Law of Trigonometry

A recurring theme in my studies is how flipping hard it is for me to get anywhere in Leviticus, Deuteronomy or Numbers.  The Law.  Frankly it can seem downright ridiculous.  My inability to understand what the intention of the Law is, has caused me a lot of doubt and frustration.  It’s possible that I’m just not ready for it yet.  My struggles point out my shortcomings, not the that of the Bible.  This all points to my own bad perspectives, my desire to skew things to what I want them to be.  I want the Bible to reflect what I want…not what it actually is.  The Bible is the indicator of who God is, not who I am.  The fact that The Law can seem so ridiculous is an indicator of how far we are Fallen.  The Bible and the Law points to God’s perfection, not our own.  God is unchanging.  God did not change from Genesis 2 to Genesis 3...we did.  As life proceeds the difficulty of the Law and our perpetual failures become more exaggerated.  God is unchanged, but there remains the need to point to who he is, to what we were meant to be.  Perfection was in our hand, ease of life and toil free, but we turned away from God, even just for a moment and Eden was shattered.  We repeat that in our lives even now.  Our failures remain not that we cannot uphold the law (which we can’t) but that we turn away from God.

As someone who has always had a sort of distaste for the Law, I think this is somehow easier to see.  From about 13 years on, I never thought I could obey perfectly, so by 18 I gave up completely.  Just because I ignored it doesn’t mean that the expectations went away.  God remained unchanged.  For someone who leans towards legalism (following the rules verses my desire to rebel), I think understanding can be a little trickier.  The ability to uphold the Law becomes an attempt to point out your own perfection and point out your worthiness to God.  If it is easier for you to “be good”, then it may be harder for you to understand what God really wants from you.

To properly Love the Law is to have reverence for God’s perfection.  Like the two son’s of the Prodigal Son parable, we often get it wrong.  We reject what is right completely or we define our own identity by how righteous we are.  Either way we miss the point.  If only there were someone who could make things more clear, who could point us to what our own hearts were meant for, who could point us to what God’s heart desires.  If only there were someone who could take the Law and deflate the self-righteous, encourage the sinner, demand more and yet make it easier.  Christ did all these things.  It is one of the most brilliant things ever achieved.  We were all made equal.  We are all sinners.  Christ did it not because he abolished the Law, but because he fulfilled it. (Matt5:17)  To those who held their obedience to the letter of the Law as their identity, Jesus said, it’s more than what you do, it is what is in your heart.  To the sinners and Gentiles, he said “I am the Way”, your culture, history and sinful nature are irrelevant.  No one comes to the Father, but through me.  

God remains the same.  The Law remains in tact.  The details and atrocious difficulty of the Law of Moses lays the groundwork for The Christ, the only “human” that could perfect the law, Jesus.  

If there is something difficult in the Bible it may enter your mind that it’s not suppose to be there, that somehow someone made an error, that there is a miscalculation.  This is absurd and arrogant.  I don’t understand Advanced Trigonometry (yet), but for me to suggest that something is out of place in an equation is an indicator of the vastness of my ignorance.  I can be learned in the scripture at my own level.  God will meet me in the word.  He will teach me the basics of addition and subtraction in the Psalms and Proverbs.  Though simple, there is complexity there.  He will give me the fluidity of multiplication and division in the Gospels.  Geometry is in Job and Ecclesiastes and Hebrews and Isaiah as they tie all of the quadrants of the Bible together in axis and arcs.   There is a lot there to be learned and discerned throughout the Bible.  I think some of us have natural inclinations towards certain areas.  I am afraid that there are such difficulties of the Bible that I will never learn certain areas.  I may never fully grasp the Trigonometry of the Law, but that doesn’t change the Truth.  It’s not going to make me stop trying either.  Though it is difficult, God’s perfection remains.  The Joy is that God has written the intuition of what the Law is within us.  Grace is that he sent his son, the teacher, to show us how to retrieve it.  

I close with a telling quote from my high school algebra teacher, “Scott, I’ll pass you if you promise NOT to take any math courses in college.”

Things I said...

It is more important to focus on things that strengthen your character  than things that strengthen your resume. 

Obedience to God's will is God inviting you to take part in your own Miracle.

 Whenever you begin to see others as a means to your ends, you begin to degrade them and fail to see them or yourself as an image bearer of God. 

The chances of being completely original are pretty slim. Focus, instead, on being completely sincere.

Love in Accounting

When your Mom tells you that you played a great game after a particularly not great game we can feel shallowness in that love.  Surely your mom loves you, but in this case the expression of love feels empty.  It's a Mom's job to love you and in doing so sometimes only focuses on trying to make you feel better.  The intentions are good, but the lack of examination of the facts makes the love hard to receive.  But if your Mom tells you how bad you sucked and that you really should not be shooting unless you are under the basket with no one else around, but assures you that she loves you just the same, then that, that is a love that has some weight.  It may not feel great, but you can trust the realness of it.  When someone actually acknowledges the terrible things we already know to be true, and proceeds to love anyway, that gives Love it's heft.  It's not the passive, sentimental, "I've forgotten all your wrongs" Love that changes, it's the very intentional, active, "I know everything about you" Love that makes us new. 

"If anyone really knew me, if anyone knew my heart, they could never love me."
This is a sentiment that many of us have felt or continue to feel.  It is the ultimate self-enforced condition that prevents us from truly loving.  

Let's think about what Unconditional Love really is, what the Grace of God's Love is.  God is Love and once we realize we are Loved and accepted we can begin to take our first steps toward being the version of ourselves that he intended us to be.  But this Love, while Unconditional (meaning there is no circumstance in which God will cease loving us), it is not a Love that is unexamined.  The God of Love is a God that also judges and it's crucially important to realize that you can't have real love without real justice and judgment.  This means that even though I have accepted God's love, I still will have to answer for the life I have been given.  If God were to simply look at his children and all the broken and evil in their hearts and say, "Oh, I love them, their wickedness doesn't matter." then that would not be real love and he would cease to be just.  We know it inherently, a love that doesn't examine is insincere and inauthentic.  This should produce an appropriate fear of our own judgment, and at the same time relief that we can claim Christ.  God's Love is real and complete because he also judges, because he has looked into our hearts, as only he can, and he loves us anyway.  

The capacity to Love one another comes not from how great we are, or how much good we've done, or how much we've fooled others into thinking we are spectacular human beings. No, the capacity to Love comes from God himself: He is just that good.  It is very, very fortunate that we cannot look into each others hearts. That is a burden he has given only to himself.  The Joy of Joys is that he has looked and chosen us anyway.  Don't get me wrong, I don't want to besmirch the pinnacle of God's creation: Human kind.  We are amazing, capable of glorious and terrible things.  We are in fact capable of Love.  But it is only when I can truly accept the depravity of my own heart that I can realize all The Christ has done to make it possible for me to be with him in Eternity.  I am really that bad, he is really that good.  I can't do enough to out sin his Grace.  I just get to enjoy him and that should produce good works within me and around me.  And though his Love will never fade, it is right that I should be held accountable for the ways that I don't let that Love change every action of my life.

We spend most of our lives hiding, fearing discovery.  We also spend most of our lives aching for real connection that remains just out of reach because of this fear.  Yes, we should fear our Lord because he sees all, but also rejoice that his Love has overcome all.  Someone said to me recently, "I just want to be known."  We all feel the weight of that.  Though Christ's examination of our innermost secrets produces real conviction, it also should make us secure in his Love.  It is the most authentic sort of Love.  A Love that gave it's own life, even though we surely did not deserve it.  The Hope is in the Resurrection and the time yet to come.

Scenes: Hodges Family Sitcom - Cry

"You know, as a father of three girls, I just, well you know...look here are the things I think about..." Scott, the Dad, stumbles to put his thoughts into words.  He's thought about this a lot.  He thinks a lot about his impact on his children.
"Yeeesss." Celeste raising her eyebrows as she turns her gaze to her struggling husband.  Her hands stop, knife in hand and holding the potato she is preparing for dinner.  Scott leans back against the counter.  He prepares himself to take another run.
"I want to provide them a secure environment...I want them to be empowered, but..." He raises his finger to emphasize his point "...I also want them to know that will always be there to protect them."
Celeste gives an encouraging question, "Yes, that's good, right?"
"Right, so I have these amazing daughters who I want to be strong for, but I also worry that in being strong for them, they won't have a realistic view of their father...or, or, or even their future husbands!"  Scott is getting agitated for no reason now.  At this point Scott and Celeste's 17 year old daughter has entered the kitchen, listening in without her father knowing.
"I mean, have they ever seen me have emotions other than frustration or anger?  Have they...have they ever seen me cry?"
Celeste stifles her laughter realizing that her sweet husband thinks he's actually too tough.  Before she can respond, Emma breaks in, "What are you talking about?" She says very directly to dad.  Scott swings around to face his daughter, a bit startled.
"Dad, are you serious?  You cry all the time.  You cried at that gum commercial yesterday."
Scott turns his head from his bewildered daughter back to his wife, "So I guess they'll be okay?"

Scenes: Hodges Family Sitcom - The Toothbrush

Scott the Dad stands in front of the mirror in his bathroom.  He is looking intently at his toothbrush.  It is the middle of the afternoon.  The door is open.  His wife Celeste walks by with a basket of laundry.  She notices him but goes on to their bedroom just down the hall.  A moment later she walks by the bathroom again.  She makes a few steps past but slows to a stop and then backs up to stick her head around the corner.  He is still holding his toothbrush in front of him, investigating it. She waits for him to notice her in the door way.    Scott turns slowly to look at her.  As he sees her face, she gently and subtly lifts her chin up in inquisitive acknowledgement.
"Hey...what's goin' on there?" she says.
Scott realizes how silly he looks.  He decides to overcome it by taking a firm and serious stance in explaining what he's doing.
He answers, "Well, my routine was thrown off this morning because I went back to bed after I dropped Emma off at school this morning...ya know I closed last night so I wanted a few more hours of sleep."  He pauses, "I know I had coffee, but I can't remember if I brushed my teeth this morning.  And now it's been too long from when I would have brushed and the toothbrush is dry, so I can't tell if it's been used.  So now I'm just trying to retrace the day to remember if I brushed my teeth."
"Can I ask you something?" she says in a low firm tone, her voice pregnant with judgment.
"Ya." he says, but at this point, he knows he doesn't want her to ask.
"Humor me on this..." she says, increasing the sarcasm in her voice in such a low dose that if others were listening in, they would not have noticed, but he sure did."
"Oh boy..." he relents.
"What would be the downside of brushing your teeth again?"  She walked on not waiting for his response.
Scott sticks his head out bathroom door watching her walk away.  He struggles to find a response.  He never found one.