Knowing the Will of God for Your Life

Knowing the Will of God for Your Life

The Will of God Ep. 3. This week we discuss knowing the will of God for our lives. God’s will is not a secret. God has revealed it and wants us to know it and do it. We discuss the difference between abstract, universal moral principles and the concrete commandment of God and we looked at the life of Bonhoeffer as an example. Here are a few quotes that cut to the quick of the class: Bonhoeffer on knowing the will of God: [Meditating on Ps. 119:19 “Do not hide your commandments from me.”] There is no doubt: God has given his commandments for us to know and we have no excuse, as if we did not know the will of God. God does not allow us to live in irresolvable conflicts; he does not turn our lives into ethical tragedies; rather, he lets us know his will, demands its fulfillment, and punishes disobedience. Things here are much easier than we like. Our distress is not that we do not know God’s commandments but that we don’t do them—and that as a result of such disobedience, we are gradually unable to recognize them. It is said here not that God hides his commandments but: God is beseeched for the grace not to hide his commandments. It is within God’s freedom and wisdom to deny us the grace of his commandment; then, however, there is for us not resignation but far more the urgent and persistent prayer: “Do not hide your commandments from me.” Bonhoeffer on the specificity, clarity, and concreteness of God’s commandment: God’s commandment is God’s speech to human beings. Both in its content and in its form, it is concrete speech to concrete human beings. God’s commandment leaves human beings no room for application and interpretation, but only for obedience or disobedience. God’s commandment cannot be found and known apart from time and place; indeed, it can only be heard by one who is bound to a specific place and time. God’s commandment is either utterly specific, clear, and concrete or it is not God’s commandment. Just as specifically as God spoke to Abraham and Jacob and Moses, and just as specifically as God spoke in Jesus Christ to the disciples, and to the congregations through the apostles, so God speaks just as specifically to us, or God does not speak at all. Karl Barth on the definiteness of the divine command: In [Genesis and Exodus] there is no such thing as a general rule which can be debated and needs to be filled out in its application. …And, again [in the Gospel of Matthew], it is the case that those who want religious ethical principles will find nothing here, but will have to turn to the other words of Jesus which seem to be more pregnant in this respect. Yet if they do they turn away from the living and acting person of Jesus Himself which is the content of the Gospel. They overlook the fact that we can best learn what the commanding of Jesus means at this point where we are so unequivocally confronted by his sovereignty, where he himself and his will take the place of every universal precept, and where we see him make this very definite use of his sovereignty. This is what happens when Jesus commands. …In the command of God we are face to face with the person of God, with the action and revelation of this person, with God himself. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com [https://cameroncombs.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Becoming a Mother of God

The Will of God Ep. 2. A catena on the birth of God in each person: Meister Eckhart: Here, in time, we are celebrating the eternal birth which God the Father bore and bears unceasingly in eternity, because this same birth is now born in time, in human nature. St. Augustine says, “What does it avail me that this birth is always happening, if it does not happen in me? That it should happen in me is what matters.” We shall therefore speak of this birth, of how it may take place in us. Matthew Fox, riffing on Eckhart: What good is it to me if Mary gave birth to the Son of God 1400 years ago and I do not give birth to the Son of God in my own person and time and culture? . . . We are all meant to be mothers of God. Volker Leppin on the theology of the German mystic Johannes Tauler: Isaiah 9: “For a child has been born for us, a song given to us.” Tauler explains this verse with a three-fold hermeneutic. The biblical text initially speaks of the intra-Trinitarian birth of the Son through the Father, secondly of the historical birth of Jesus in time [to Mary]…and thirdly of the birth of God in the soul of a faithful person. Maximus the Confessor: The mother of the Word is the true and unsullied faith. Just as the Word, who, as God, is by nature the creator of His mother who gave birth to Him according to the flesh, and made her His mother out of love for mankind, and accepted to be born from her as man, so too the Word first creates faith within us, and then becomes the son of that faith, from which He is embodied through the practice of the virtues. Jordan Daniel Wood, commenting on Maximus: This is our adoption, how we become God’s children. As it was in the historical Incarnation, the Holy Spirit, who dwells perichoretically (wholly) in the Son, is ‘the one creating’ the Son’s birth in and as us. Maximus again: Christ is always born mysteriously and willingly, becoming incarnate in those who are saved. He causes the soul which begets him to be a virgin-mother. Dietrich Bonhoeffer: We can and should speak not about what the good is, can be, or should be for each and every time, but about how Christ may take form among us today and here. Bonhoeffer again: The will of God is nothing other than the realization of the Christ-reality among us and in our world. The will of God is therefore not an idea that demands to be realized; it is itself already reality in the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ. The will of God is…a reality that wills to become real ever anew in what exists and against what exists. The will of God has already been fulfilled by God, in reconciling the world to himself in Christ. To disregard the reality of this fulfillment and to set a fulfillment of one’s own in its place would be the most dangerous relapse into abstract thinking. Since the appearance of Christ, ethics can be concerned with only one thing: to partake in the reality of the fulfilled will of God. Chris Green: When the world as you know it starts to crumble…you need to understand that it’s just a birth pang, it’s just a contraction. God is being born…God wants to be born right here, right now—in your life and in mine, in your family and in mine, in this city, in our schools, in our children’s lives, in the lives of our neighbors—God is ready to be born…You need to remember that when everything is going wrong it’s just that Christ is crowning, and have hope. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com [https://cameroncombs.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

God Is (Not) in Control

The Will of God Ep. 1 Here is an excerpt from Chris Green’s Surprised by God [https://a.co/d/021IkHdj] that not only cuts to the heart of what we discussed in class, but is the genesis for all my thoughts on the matter: “In many ways, our move toward a mature grasp of the truth begins in the recognition that God is not in control of what happens in the world, and that all that we experience in this world is at best an incomplete realization of God’s will for us. Perhaps we want to think God is in control because of our own fantasies for control or our own anxieties of being controlled. Regardless, we have to come to terms with the fact that God is not in control–even as we confess in faith that God is sovereign… “[S]overeignty is utterly other than what we have known as control. Control makes something act in ways false to itself. It violates, overpowers, coerces, masters. Control takes away freedom, forcing someone or something to do what is against its own nature or will. And God, as creator, simply does not–and indeed, cannot–do that kind of violence. God gives being to creatures, affording them their freedom, their integrity. To say that God is sovereign is to say that God does not need control to get his will done. He does not have to destroy our freedom to express his own; he does not have to subjugate us to make himself known as Lord. God’s sovereignty is such that his freedom is not at odds with our freedom, and his Lordship does not subjugate but frees and empowers and fulfills. Creatures overpower; God reigns. And that reign is absolutely identical with God’s love… “Luther said that if all we had to go on was our experience of the world, we would have to conclude either that God does not exist or that God is evil. But by faith we see more than our experience of the world: we see God, and hear his promises to set all wrongs right. Until the end, therefore, when God’s will is finally fully done, we have to maintain a distinction between what happens and what God is doing, trusting that nothing happens apart from God’s will but that not everyuthing that happens is itself God’s will. Or to say the same thing another way, everything that happens takes place within the will of God but not everything that happens is the will of God. What is more, nothing that happens is God’s will in fullness. Whatever happens, then, and whatever GOd does, we are left waiting for the fullness of God’s action, and so we pray, even after GOd has acted, “Let your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt 6:10)… [Tragic events need not be said to be “the will of God,” as if God planned for this tragedy to happen just like so.] “It is best, I think, to say that [tragic events take] place not as the will of God, but within the unfolding of that will of God. Difficult as it is to imagine, [those moments] remain open to the will of God—God even now is still active then and there, in a time closed to us as past. Hence, we must patiently endure until God’s will is finally, fully done. And when that will is done, then we will see that God indeed is good… “In history, God has not yet acted fully–except in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. IN him, we have seen already what we do not yet see anywhere else for anyone else. As the writer of Hebrews says: ‘Now in subjecting all things to [human beings, as promised in Psalm 8], God left nothing outside their control. AS it is, we do not yet see everything in subjection to them, but we do see Jesus’ (Heb. 2:8-9a). That is, we do not see human beings in their rightful, promised place. WE do not see the world set right. But our hope is that what has already happened to Jesus, what is already true for him as the Last Adam and the head of new creation, will be true of us too in the end. We believe that God already has done everything God can do for Jesus, but not yet for us—and so we live by faith and not by sight… “Whatever happens to us, whatever comes or goes in our experience, good or bad, fortunate or unfortunate, we can know God is not through being God yet, not through doing what he eternally purposes to do, and when God’s will is finally fully done, all things will be made right…When God is all in all, everyone will know what we see already not by sight but by faith. In the meantime, we remain faithful, hoping against hope in a God for whom all things are possible and in whom all things not only have their beginning but also their rightful and joyous end.” (Surprised by God, pp. 39-44) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com [https://cameroncombs.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Jesus and the God of the Old Testament

The Joseph Story Ep. 7. In lieu of a write-up of the class I’ll leave you with a couple of quotations. The first, from St. Maximus the Confessor, which framed our discussion. The second, from Chris Green’s Sanctifying Interpretation, which was the primary source for the entire class. St. Maximus the Confessor: “In consequence, it is necessary for him who seeks God piously not to latch on to a phrase, lest, instead of God, he unknowingly receive things about God; that is, because he is dangerously devoted to the words of Scripture instead of to the Word, the Word flees the mind which thought it had taken hold of the bodiless Word by his garments, indeed, much like the Egyptian woman who did not take hold of Joseph, but of his clothes instead…” Chris Green: “What are we to do with these [hard] passages? … One [approach] which is essentially Patristic, and which I think also fits with the best of Pentecostal interpretations. It insists that there is a spiritual sense to every text, and that we must press past the literal sense, ‘the letter,’ to grasp or be grasped by ‘the spirit.’ Read this way, the violence in the OT actually means something besides what it seems to mean at the literal level. Origen, for example, argues that the calls for Israel to wipe out the people of the land as described in Joshua are a parabolic way of calling for the churches to put to death their sinful appetites. In his own words, ‘a kingdom of sin was in every one of us before we believed. But afterwards, Jesus came and struck down all the kings who possessed kingdoms of sin in us, and he ordered us to destroy all those kings and to leave none of them.’ And he concludes: ‘Unless [Israel’s] physical wars bore the figure of spiritual wars, I do not think the books of Jewish history would ever have been handed down by the apostles to the disciples of Christ, who came to teach peace, so that they could be read in the churches’ (Origen, Homilies on Joshua 15). “These passages] do, of course, put us as readers in a difficult place…The good news is that God means to put us in that difficult place. “God uses the Scripture to overthrow our false conceptions of God. Paul was deeply committed to the Scriptures before he encountered Jesus on the road outside Damascus. But after that encounter, he was differently and more faithfully biblical, because he saw God differently—in the face of the resurrected crucified Jesus of Nazareth. “For most of us…the most difficult are the ‘texts of terror’ that characterize God as vindictive, bloodthristly, malevolent. The God we think we find in the OT is difficult to stomach, never mind adore. What are we to do in the face of these difficulties? We cannot ignore them, or dismiss them by using Jesus’ ethic as a trump card, playing the NT off against the OT. And we cannot explain these difficulties away by saying the OT texts merely witness to an earlier phase of God’s self-revelation and the moral development of God’s people. According to Jesus’ own teaching, how we read the OT is itself God’s judgment of us. The OT is nothing other than Jesus’ testimony, the Spirit’s prophecy (Rev. 19:10); therefore, to refuse Moses’ witness is to turn away from Christ. But to receive that testimony faithfully is to be indwelt by the Word that glorifies us with God’s own glory (Jn 5:36-47)… That is well and good, you might say, but how should it determine our reading of horrifying texts? We must begin, I believe, with a clarification, distinguishing the God who inspires and interprets the OT texts from the one described in the texts themselves. The inspiring, interpreting God is of course the Triune God revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Nazarene. But the narrated God, the God who is a character in the biblical stories God has inspired, is sometimes an entirely or almost entirely false image of the true God. In the Scriptures, God humbly takes on the guise of a character, one character among others—sometimes even a bad, or at least conflicted, one. As Rowan Williams argues, one way of understanding Scripture is as ‘a parable or a whole series of parables’ in which God says of himself: ‘This is how people heard me, saw me, responded to me; this is the gift I gave them; this is the response they made,’ requiring us to respond in kind (Williams, Being Christian, p. 28). I would say it just a bit differently than Williams does. In the ‘parables’ of the OT, God is not reporting to us how people understood and misunderstood his ways then and there. Instead, God is is here and now putting us to the test by describing himself at least somewhat misleadingly. ‘Everything written long ago was written to teach us’ (Rom. 15:4)… “If what I have just been describing seems too strange to believe, take a moment to consider the way Jesus taught and how people responded to his teaching, The Evangelists show us that he spoke mostly in parables, riddles, and symbolic acts, and read the Scriptures subversively and troubled traditional practices. In response, some of his contemporaries think they have understood him when they in fact have not. Others, like the rich young ruler (Mt. 19.16-22), understand him just well enough to be enraged or saddened by what he has said. A few are intrigued enough to follow him in spite of their lack of understanding. Most are left in complete bafflement. To make matters stranger, Jesus tells us that he intended such responses: ‘I speak in parables, so that ‘looking they may not perceive, and listening they may not understand’ (Lk. 8:10). Why would he do that? Rickie Moore offers what I take to be the pathbreaking insight: ‘Jesus told parables for one reason: in order to ‘throw’ people. Jesus threw people for one reason: in order that they might be broken. And Jesus became the wildest parable of all when He became broken. Everybody was thrown by that.’ Here, then, is the critical point. The same Jesus whom we find teaching in the Gospels is the Word who speaks in Scripture. And his pedagogy remains the same. He continues to tell parables, and for the same reason. He means to throw us, too.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com [https://cameroncombs.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

All Israel Will Be Saved

The Joseph Story Ep. 6. Jewish scholar Yair Zakovitch says that the book of Genesis is the Table of Contents for the Bible. Everything is contained Genesis in embryonic form, it is the genetic code of the Bible. The more I study Genesis the more I’m convinced he’s right. I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say that most every point Paul makes in his letters can be made on the basis of texts from Genesis. Perhaps Paul’s most important point is taken from a line in the Joseph story. In Romans 9–11 Paul is making an intricate argument about God’s faithfulness to his people Israel, despite their unfaithfulness, and he’s trying to show that God’s including the gentiles in the new covenant is consistent with God’s original promises to Israel. Far from nullifying God’s promises to Israel, it is actually by bringing the gentiles into the covenant that God is keeping his promises to Israel. And at the climax of this argument in Romans 11 Paul gives a famous–or maybe infamous–line: Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the fullness of the nations has come in, and in this way all Israel will be saved. (Rom 11:25-26) Many commentators on the book of Romans throughout the centuries have been baffled by what Paul might mean by this. What does it mean that all Israel will be saved? Who does “Israel” refer to? What makes this more difficult to answer is that it is a fact of history that there are a multitude of names to refer to the people from this region: Jew, Israelite, Hebrew, Israeli, etc. Do those all mean the same thing? New Testament scholar Jason Staples has made the definitive case that the answer to this is no. Although for the better part of the last two centuries we have treated the main biblical terms “Jew” and “Israelite” as interchangeable, they are not used that way in Scripture (or ancient historical texts like Josephus). To what does the name Israel refer? First, it refers to the patriarch Jacob after God changed his name to Israel. Second, it is applied to the children of Israel/Jacob. Therefore, it comes to refer to the twelve-tribe totality of “Israel.” But something complicating happens in the history of this people. They split in two. The North secedes from the southern kingdom. The North (which was comprised of ten tribes) retained the name Israel, while the South (comprised of Judah, Benjamin, and Levi) took the name of its most prominent tribe Judah. After the split between the two kingdoms, those from the North were called Israelites while those from the South began to be referred to as Jews after the tribe of Judah (Yehudim in Hebrew and Ioudaioi in Greek). This, of course, means that after the split the terms “Jew” and “Israelite” are not interchangeable names for the same group of people, but rather, as Staples has shown, the term Jew is a subset of Israel. In other words, all Jews are Israelites, but not all Israelites are Jews. The term Israel can refer to the twelve-tribe totality but it can also more specifically refer to the northern kingdom (depending on the book of the Bible you are reading and the context of the passage). Think of it this way: “Kansan” is a subset of “American.” All Kansans are Americans but not all Americans are Kansans. And yet, as Staples has pointed out, “Countless scholars [today] regularly alternate between these terms for stylistic reasons.” Simply put, we’ve gotten very confused over a pretty simple, but important fact. If we fast forward in the story to 722 BC we find another complicating factor. The northern kingdom of Israel was conquered and carried into exile by the Assyrians. The ten northern tribes were never seen again. All that remained were the southern tribes—or, those that were called Jews from Judah—which included people from the tribes Judah, Benjamin, and Levi. To complicate it once again, this means that while all Benjaminites are Jews, not all Jews are Benjaminites. So, we can see that the question of who “all Israel” refers to In Romans 11 is not as straightforward as we might imagine. By “all Israel” Paul almost certainly does not simply mean “all Jews” because there are some Israelites who are not Jews. For example, the Samaritans of Paul’s day did not claim to be Jews but descendants of the northern tribes of Joseph (Ephraim and Manasseh). The Samaritans’ claim was disputed, but the disputation was never over whether they were Jews but whether they were Israelites. In other words, Samaritans are Israelites but not Jews. The key to answering the question of who Paul means by “all Israel” comes in the other odd phrase he uses in the same sentence. And this line is taken directly from the Joseph story. Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the fullness of the nations has come in, and in this way all Israel will be saved. (Rom 11:25-26 The only other place that this odd phrase appears in Scripture is in Genesis at the end of the Joseph story. Jacob/Israel is an old man and about to die, so Joseph brings his two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim, to Jacob so that he can bless them. In a surprising twist, Jacob gives the firstborn rights to the younger son Ephraim. Jacob says that Ephraim’s seed will become “the fullness of the nations.” Ephraim, of course, becomes the prominent tribe from the northern kingdom. The kings from the North come from the tribe of Ephraim. This means that when the northern tribes are carried away by the Assyrians it is “Ephraim” who is, as Leviticus 26:33 puts it, “scattered among the nations.” The consistent promise of the prophets is that God will act to restore all Israel—meaning the twelve-tribe totality. Which means he will have to regather the northern Israelites (usually referred to as “the house of Israel” or “the house of Ephraim/Joseph”) who have been scattered among the nations. Here’s just one example from Zechariah: “I will strengthen the house of Judah, and I will save the house of Joseph, and will bring them back because I have compassion on them. They will be as though I had not rejected them for I am the Lord their God and I will answer them. Ephraim will be like a mighty man…” (Zech 10:6–7) What’s more stunning for many Christians today is that all the new covenant promises found in Jeremiah and Ezekiel where God promises to put his Spirit in his people and give them a new tender heart of flesh are made exclusively to Israel. The dry bones in the valley in Ezekiel’s vision are the dry bones of the house of northern Israel—those tribes that have been long gone for centuries. So, why do gentile Christians read these passages and assume they are promises made to them? Now we are starting to feel why Paul received so much pushback. Paul thinks that God has acted in one elegant, brilliant move to fulfill both Israel’s original calling to be a light to the nations and his promise that he would restore all Israel. Paul, along with the other apostles, recognized that God’s Spirit was being poured out not only on Jews but on gentiles as well. Gentiles were receiving new, tender hearts of flesh with the Torah written on them. God was keeping his promise to Israel but in a completely surprising way. Jews of Paul’s day knew the promise of the prophets was that God would regather his scattered people from among the nations. But they didn’t know how this would happen since the northern tribes had all dissolved. They had inter-married wherever they were taken into exile, so after more than eight centuries there was no trace of them left. They had, for all intents and purposes, become gentiles. Then it must’ve hit Paul. God promised to resurrect the lost tribes of Israel, but he was doing it by bringing in the gentiles/nations because that’s where the northern tribes had been scattered. This is why the resurrected Jesus commissions his disciples in Acts 1:8 to take the good news to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. God is restoring Israel—resurrecting the lost northern tribes—by bringing in the nations into which they assimilated. So “all Israel” looks something like the chart below—where “exiled Israelites” or “Ephraim’s seed”—have become “the fullness of the nations.” Remember Paul says, “Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the fullness of the nations has come in, and in this way all Israel will be saved.” This is how God is saving “all Israel”—by bringing in the nations. In class we connected this back to the Joseph story. Here you can read through a substack post from Jason Staples himself, responding to a question I put to him a couple months back on Jesus, Judah, and the Joseph story. (I especially like the line where he says, “Combs is, of course, exactly right.”) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com [https://cameroncombs.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]