"TWO STEPS BACK" BIBLE

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"We hear his footsteps in the treetops"

There was this Christian missionary who found himself deep in the jungle, meeting with the chief of the village. The missionary asked him,  “Do your people believe in God?”The chief lowered his voice almost to a whisper, and replied, "In the evening we hear the sound of his footsteps in the treetops, but we stay away."  God is by nature unknowable to us humans with our limited intellects. So, the Lord has to reveal himself to us. One of the central beliefs of Jews and Christians is that God does this is through Sacred Scripture, “revelation.” So it’s obviously important to get scripture right; but unfortunately, we often don’t do so! I’d like to offer a couple of basic ideas in this post that might help us to read the bible so as to get the message that the Lord intended.

First, although the bible is a collection of 72 different books with various authors, written over a period of a thousand years, it needs to be read as a unity: From the first verse of Genesis to the final verse of the Book of Revelation, the bible is always heading in one single direction, toward love and unity.

But, and here’s the second point, the bible is written by human beings and is rooted in time and space, bounded by the writer’s specific culture. One scholar said that the bible is “a document in travail.”  We shouldn’t think of it as a book that is finished, and  that we can just read it the way we read a cookbook or a newspaper. This is important: like any human endeavor, biblical revelation doesn’t proceed in a nice, smooth straight line It has a definite  direction, a goal, of course,leading toward the final fulfillment of God’s love, a New Heavens and a New Earth. But it proceeds toward that goal in typical human fashion by taking three steps forward and two steps back.

We can easily recognize the “three steps forward:” E.g. When God has delivers his people through the Red Sea, or brings them into the promised land and they enjoy the first crops in the new country -- this is God being faithful. We see three steps forward toward the goal. When the Word becomes flesh in Bethlehem, or when Jesus gives himself up out of love, to take conquers death itself to save us. Clearly these are events that bring us three steps forward.

But what about the two steps back? The steps that lead in the opposite direction from the goal of love and unity? They’re easy to spot, too. They’re the ones in which God acts like a human! The God of vengeance, who keeps score so he can get back at people. The God of justice, who demands that justice be done. We can relate to this God: he’s like us!

Just yesterday I read about the rioting in South Africa between rival tribes after apartheid was ended.

Imagine a person inside -- It's hell.

Both sides had this thing called “necklacing,” in which people would hold somebody down and slip a tire over his torso, pinning his arms at his side, and then set the tire on fire. When I read that I said to myself, “Oh yeah! That’s what God does to sinners! Hell!" The passages in the bible that talk about this kind of a God are in the “two steps back” column. Some of us good Christians are very reluctant to let go of this very understandable God. We want God to mete out strict justice to everyone: “You break, you pay!”

Some of us get nervous with the "three-steps-forward" God like the Father we meet in the parable of the Prodigal Son. We say to ourselves,  “I know what I would have done if I were that father.” But Jesus came to tell us “Well, you are not that Father, his ways are far above your ways. His love overpowers every other consideration.”  All a sinner needs to do is turn around (repent) and show up at the father's doorstep. No necklacing, no getting out the account ledger to add up your sins.

Three steps forward

And when someone objects, “Hey, necklacing is in the bible, and so is the fact that white people are superior to the sons of Ham, and that we should destroy people who don’t believe in our God!” Jesus gently urges that person to let go of the easily-understandable two-steps-back pages of the bible, and embrace the more difficult mysterious passages, the ones that reveal to us a God who is so loving, so beautiful that He's incomprehensible to us, 

Let's all pray for one another, that the "three-steps-forward" passages in the bible may lead all of us together toward the final goal of infinite, everlasting all-inclusive Love, the Kingdom of God, where we hope to live together with Him as one loving family forever and ever.