Confronting Job
For the next three months in Sunday Bible study, we are facing off with Job, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon. And I thought Ezekiel would be a challenge. The Lifeway study helps are a starting place; at least they limit me as to what I'm supposed to try to cover. But my goodness! These books confront the most existential problems of life--massive human suffering on a personal level, depression and despair, and eroticism.
Job is the first one. I get to "Job feared God" and that's about as far as I get. My first lesson should be a Biblical definition of what it means to fear God. None of this "reverential awe" stuff. Job feared God. The ancient world had good reason to. Apparently we do not, despite the tsunami and the recent earthquake in Indonesia over the weekend and then let's not even talk about Katrina. Not that God is nature, but that God controls nature, and we can only prepare and run, we can't change it or "improve it." Medical technology has improved but the human body is still the human body it was 3,000 years ago. (Considering the overwhelming amount of obesity nowadays, and not just in the U.S., maybe the human body is less healthy or at least adaptable than it was 3,000 years ago.)
Of course, you bring up fearing God in a Southern Baptist or any other kind of evangelical church nowadays and we all get antsy. We're not supposed to fear God, because Jesus is nice. Fearing God will make us legalistic clones. Fearing God leads us to all kinds of psychological pathologies. We'll be like the Muslims, for goodness' sake! But I think we'll find the word fear a lot more times in the Bible than we want to admit. Sure, love is in there more than fear, and maybe not so much fear in the New Testament as the Old, but it's there. We are post-Enlightenment, so much of nature can be explained outside of providence; we're postmodern, so certainly we can't take one cultural definition of God more seriously than another, now can we?
So my lesson is going to be about the two key words in Job. Fear and curse. You either fear God or curse Him when life hits the fan. Curse is for tomorrow's blog.
I like this blogging thing. I have learned to compose through my fingertips and not through cursive. The cursive seems like a wasted step now, which I hate to admit. As conservative as I am socially, and as much as I curse cell phone usage, I use as much technology as possible. I don't even mind voice mail (press 1 for ...) at businesses. Better that than being put on hold.
As for my "journey toward the doctorate," my biggest "fears" if you can still call them that still revolve around driving to Atlanta. I wish the campus were not in downtown! And I wish the classes didn't get out so late! But I've walked all over London by myself late at night, so I can do this; I plan to travel very light, no purse, just some cash and one card in my underwear and my driver's license.
I am reading Mayhew's "The New Public". It's ok. He's verbose and unnecessarily complicated. The ideas he is presenting are not that complex, but he couches them in words that are supposed to make them seem so. I think this will be a common discovery in doctoral work. I have to get used to reading this kind of academic discourse more quickly, since I won't have massive amounts of leisure to read these books. I plan to not go in the summers for now so I can read up and recuperate.
Job is the first one. I get to "Job feared God" and that's about as far as I get. My first lesson should be a Biblical definition of what it means to fear God. None of this "reverential awe" stuff. Job feared God. The ancient world had good reason to. Apparently we do not, despite the tsunami and the recent earthquake in Indonesia over the weekend and then let's not even talk about Katrina. Not that God is nature, but that God controls nature, and we can only prepare and run, we can't change it or "improve it." Medical technology has improved but the human body is still the human body it was 3,000 years ago. (Considering the overwhelming amount of obesity nowadays, and not just in the U.S., maybe the human body is less healthy or at least adaptable than it was 3,000 years ago.)
Of course, you bring up fearing God in a Southern Baptist or any other kind of evangelical church nowadays and we all get antsy. We're not supposed to fear God, because Jesus is nice. Fearing God will make us legalistic clones. Fearing God leads us to all kinds of psychological pathologies. We'll be like the Muslims, for goodness' sake! But I think we'll find the word fear a lot more times in the Bible than we want to admit. Sure, love is in there more than fear, and maybe not so much fear in the New Testament as the Old, but it's there. We are post-Enlightenment, so much of nature can be explained outside of providence; we're postmodern, so certainly we can't take one cultural definition of God more seriously than another, now can we?
So my lesson is going to be about the two key words in Job. Fear and curse. You either fear God or curse Him when life hits the fan. Curse is for tomorrow's blog.
I like this blogging thing. I have learned to compose through my fingertips and not through cursive. The cursive seems like a wasted step now, which I hate to admit. As conservative as I am socially, and as much as I curse cell phone usage, I use as much technology as possible. I don't even mind voice mail (press 1 for ...) at businesses. Better that than being put on hold.
As for my "journey toward the doctorate," my biggest "fears" if you can still call them that still revolve around driving to Atlanta. I wish the campus were not in downtown! And I wish the classes didn't get out so late! But I've walked all over London by myself late at night, so I can do this; I plan to travel very light, no purse, just some cash and one card in my underwear and my driver's license.
I am reading Mayhew's "The New Public". It's ok. He's verbose and unnecessarily complicated. The ideas he is presenting are not that complex, but he couches them in words that are supposed to make them seem so. I think this will be a common discovery in doctoral work. I have to get used to reading this kind of academic discourse more quickly, since I won't have massive amounts of leisure to read these books. I plan to not go in the summers for now so I can read up and recuperate.
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