Revealing the Unknown by the Known: NT

By now you can probably see how the ideas Micah and I were grappling with at the time sort of overlap and complement each other. In fact, when he and I actually sat down to talk over some of what we'd been pondering, it was like finding out you've each been working with half of a puzzle. Everything one of us said sent the other on a tangent of "Oh, here's how this connects all these things I've been thinking about!" It was a fun conversation . . . and probably, now that I think about it, one of our long car trip conversations. Always the best.

So now that Micah's introduced his idea of divine change management, let me take you back to my half of the puzzle, and talk about how God continued in the NT to reveal the unknown (himself and his ways) through the known (what we know or accept to be true about the world, God, and how God works). My favorite example of this is the Sermon on the Mount.

The Sermon on the Mount is the name people have given a long teaching section in the Gospel of Matthew. It's found in chapter 5 with the Beatitudes (the "blessed are . . ." sayings), and moves from these straight into a discussion of the Mosaic Law that sort of frames the rest of the sermon. If you haven't read these chapters, do. They're a fantastic snippet that catches the heart of Jesus' teaching on ethics, lifestyle, and godliness.

The Sermon can be a bit confusing at first read, though. It feels like a list of impossible rules and ridiculously high expectations. In fact, it feels so much like a list of laws that Jesus' introduction feels false: "I have not come to abolish [the Law and the prophets] but to fulfill them." How can he call it fulfilling the Law when he spends just about the entire sermon telling his audience to follow his laws and not the old Laws?

Well, it might help to look at how Jesus' contemporaries thought about the Mosaic Law. The whole point of law, regardless of your religion or legal system, is to create a code that carries penalties for breaking it--penalties harsh enough to "encourage" people not to break it. The focus of law, then, is to prevent bad behaviour. The Pharisees took this one step further. They were so concerned about inadvertently breaking the Law that they created a whole host of extra rules and traditions that built, as they said, a "hedge" around the Law. In other words, the Pharisees had created an incredibly complex, elaborate, and ever-growing system of rules that focused on keeping you from even coming close to breaking any of the Laws of Moses.

At first glance, Jesus' approach doesn't seem that different, except that his standards are even higher and more impossible than the original Mosaic Law. His statement, then, that he's come to fulfill and not abolish the Law demands that we take a closer look at what he's doing. And here is where I have to credit a lot of my thinking to a class taught by Tom Thatcher, and to a book I read a year or so later, Kingdom Ethics.

It helps to look at how Jesus frames the Sermon on the Mount. He starts with a nifty little poem describing ways of being, of living and thinking, that move one toward godliness. He doesn't waste any time setting up boundaries between good and bad behaviour, suggesting that prohibiting bad behaviour is not what he's trying to accomplish here.

Instead, Jesus is looking to see what a person produces--actions and words--to tell him who that person is. Again, this is not like the Mosaic Law, prohibiting bad behaviour. It's about becoming the kind of person to whom the behaviour Jesus describes comes naturally. The point is that Law can never on its own produce people who just do the right thing. It can only produce people who don't do wrong things. Jesus' point is summarized in Matthew 5.48: "So then, be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect." This isn't about some ridiculously impossible standard. What a lot of translations fail to communicate is that the Greek word for "perfect" is the same word used for "complete, finished." Jesus isn't demanding perfection before he'll accept anyone. He's calling his followers to continually seek integrity between their beliefs, thoughts, words, and actions: to be complete, whole, and true in the focus of their lives. He's calling his followers to a revolutionary way of thinking about words and actions as proof of your allegiance and identity.

It's about practicing your way into right behaviour and godliness. Every thought, word, and action is an opportunity to demonstrate who you are and to reflect God more and more truly.

If you read NT Wright, it's what he would call reclaiming your original calling as God's image-bearer: to be and live out in this world the image of God's perfect, complete, holy being.

So what does this have to do with known vs unknown? Well, Jesus took the accepted understanding of Law--prohibiting negative behaviour--and used it to explain the unknown--a new way, a way that reflects God more clearly and opens our eyes to a new understanding of how God works. Jesus took the known--the Law of Moses--and stepped it up a notch, injecting an unexpected element that would cue his audience to look a little more closely at what he's really saying. The sheer impossibility of complete perfection, as we see it, combined with Jesus' claim to fulfill but not erase the Law, cues us to study his words a little harder to see the unknown he's trying to communicate. And the result is that we see a new way of being, a way of becoming who we were created to be, reclaiming our heritage one step at a time toward godliness.

And we as Christians have an extra boost in our quest: we have God's own Spirit living in us to provide the guidance, strength, and even power to pursue this amazing agenda of kingdom living.

Let's Get it Started: The Gospel as Change Management

For the sake of discussion, let's make a few more assumptions. With this post, we're basically done with the "fundamental assumptions" part and ready to dive into the meat.

There are a lot of books out there on organizational change. You can get doctoral degrees in the subject, actually. It's a relatively recent topic of study, but it's growing quickly and is immensely interesting to lots of smart people. That's not an assumption, that's just a lead-in.

God is omniscient. By that, we mean that God knows all propositional truth. There's some debate over "experiential knowledge," but that's not immediately relevant. For the sake of this discussion, let's go with omniscience meaning "God knows every fact that exists." He knows every fact about science, about technology, about history, and about human behavior. Including behavior such as how we react to change.

My dad has a lot of leadership maxims. One of his favorite is "One step ahead is a leader. Two steps ahead is the enemy." The idea is that if you want to lead people, you have to stay close to where they're at. Too far ahead and you stop being somebody they follow and start being somebody they shoot at. It's true in wilderness hiking trips and it's true in transitioning multi-million-dollar companies.

So here's something to ponder.

What if God is using principles of organizational change management in order to transition humanity from a rebellious state into one that is more receptive to him?

I'm not saying that God waited until some 20th-century business consultants figured this out and then He used their ideas. Quite the reverse... that the stuff we call "organizational change management" is just an a rediscovery of the what God's been doing with us for the past few thousand years.

Many people are bothered by the fact that, at least superficially, God looks different in the Old Testament than in the new... and yet God himself declares that He doesn't change. So what if it's not God that changes? What if humanity has been changing a little bit at a time over the millenia, and God always reveals himself in a way that's one step ahead of where we're at?

What if God is carefully walking with his creation in order to always stay just one step ahead? Close enough to reach out to, but never stationary? Always within reach, but never within our grasp?

What if this process is still going on?

This is a significant part of what Judi and I call "The Tweak." Among other (related) things, we'll be exploring this idea in the Old and New Testaments.

Fundamental Assumptions, pt. 2

The second of these basic assumptions is that God reveals the unknown by the known. I know, saying it that way's not too helpful, because it doesn't mean anything yet. So another way to say it is: God starts with what you know or accept to be true, and moves you from there a step at a time closer to himself.

God works within the context--cultural, temporal, spiritual--of his people, and draws what is true about that context, about his people's beliefs about their context, and uses those to move them a step at a time closer to him.

For example, in Abraham's day, there was a certain formula you followed when you made a formal agreement with someone. Basically, you symbolically called down nasty things on yourself if you broke the agreement. This was frequently in the context of someone swearing to a certain action, etc. to someone more powerful. The less powerful one, of course, is the one agreeing to the actions with dire consequences for failure.

When Abraham swore a covenant with God in Genesis 15, this would have been his expectation, too. Abraham gathered up the animals and set the stage for this amazing covenant he was entering into with God, and God with him. As gory as it is, the animals actually symbolize the consequences of breaking the covenant: death. And so Abraham had it all set, ready to swear to the death to follow God, and then falls into this weird sleep. God gives him a phenomenal set of promises, and then an invisible spectre apparently takes Abraham's path between the dismembered animals. In fact, God very symbolically and poignantly put himself in Abraham's place, swearing the covenant against his own person, and in the process making his promises inviolable.

So here God took the known (Ancient Near Eastern covenant practices) and inverted them, revealing his unknown attributes of humility, disdain for power plays, and utter trueness of nature and character. Abraham must have spent weeks playing that evening back in his head, trying to make sense of it!

Another good example is Jonah. When Jonah runs away from God in a ship, today's readers think, "Wow, what an idiot. Everyone knows you can't run away from God." But the truth is that at the time, many Israelites still considered God to be a sort of tribal deity. That sounds terrible, but read through Judges some time. God may be the Superman of tribal deities, but he's still Israel's god in the same way that the Hittites had gods and the Assyrians had their gods. Israelites were odd in that they only followed one God. I mean, really, folks! Didn't your mother ever tell you not to put all your eggs in one basket? A lot of the battles between Israel and other nations were cast in the Old Testament (see the prophets, especially the Minor ones) as battles between God and the other nation's most powerful deity. Sure, my god can kick the pants off of your god. It took a little while for Israel as a whole to come to the "God is the only true God" conviction. And now I'm getting ahead of myself.

Because Jonah jumped into a boat to take him across the Mediterranean to get away from God. After all, if your God is Israel's God, and you go live among another people, God can't get you, right? So that's a big part of the message of Jonah: God isn't just a tribal deity. His power extends over the Meditteranean and all the way to the most powerful city of the most powerful people of the time: Nineveh of the Assyrians. The double whammy in this is that the strength of a deity was directly connected to the martial prowess and victories of his people. So by that logic, the Assyrians had the strongest gods. After all, they controlled a huge empire and eventually led Israel off into slavery (not Judah, which was a separate little kingdom at the time).

God's complete sovereignty over the sea (which symbolized some of the greatest natural powers and was symbolized by some of the most powerful deities of the peoples around Israel), and the Assyrian king's repentance and submission to God's commands both hammered in the point that God is God over all places and all peoples, no matter how powerful, fierce, and frightening they are. God demonstrated the unknown--that he is the Only True God--by inverting and exploiting the known--the common belief in tribal deities. Whether you're an Israelite or an utter pagan, the story of Jonah was a loud and clear message of God's complete sovereignty over everything and everyone. Pretty profound stuff.

And this post's already too long, but I wanted to get in a couple of good illustrations I've been thinking about. You'll see this pattern repeated over and over again in the Old Testament, and then it amps up a notch to cycle through the New Testament, too.

And I guess I'll have to save the NT for another post.