A Bouncing Baby and Sour Milk

I have two unrelated short stories this morning.

A Bouncing Baby

With all due respect to everyone else, my one year old niece is the sweetest and cutest little girl ever. My wife and I had the joy to babysit her all day on Saturday. We heard that she had a meltdown and rough night Friday night but we were blessed with sweet Violet all day on Saturday. Violet danced and sang (well her 1 year old version of singing anyway) to both her favorite kids CD as well as to Christmas music. She ran around in her walker thing. And she took rides in her train–which her Grandpa made out of wooden boxes and caster type wheels. And when it was nap time she went to sleep right away. (The only trouble we had was a user error where I forgot to give her a pacifier.)

It was a long but enjoyable day. The few things that I realized is just how much work a 1 year old can be. It is something that I was cognitively aware of but is now something that I have experienced. We have babysat her when she was younger where she needed constant supervision. But it's different now. She is vastly more mobile which means she can go from being in a benign situation to a dangerous situation in the blink of an eye. It reminds me of being an adult. We can do the same thing except we can get into even more dangerous situations even quicker. 

Sour Milk

This morning I was attempting to use up the last of the milk in my cereal. It was getting to the bottom of the container and it has been in the fridge for a bit so I went through my "end of the milk" ritual. First I looked at the date. It said sell by December 2, 2011. It is only the 5th so I figured that we might still be good. So on to the second step. I opened the container and did the eyeball test. I swished it around and it looked ok. Then came the third step. I sniffed the milk...and it smelled ok. So I poured it on my cereal.

I shoveled the first spoonful into my mouth and "Houston we have a problem." It is amazing the things that can go through your head in a split second. I was eating an off brand rice crispy cereal and so I was initially trying to decide if it was just a poor rendition of cereal, the lingering affect of taking a sip of coffee immediately before a spoonful of cereal or if the milk was in fact starting to sour. I was simultaneously debating what to do with the now mouthful spoonful of cereal. 

If it was merely the bad effects of a pre-cereal coffee sip and I spit the cereal back into the bowl then I would have a sullied bowl of perfectly good cereal. If it was bad cereal then I could choke it down and dump the rest of the bowl. However if it was bad milk I didn't want that bad boy making a round trip through the food canal.

I quickly decided that the milk was bad and took immediate action. Sometimes the difficulty of dealing with a difficult situation is what makes the situation so difficult...if you know what I mean.

Difficult passages and the different genres of the Bible

How we should handle difficult passages can be an interesting and difficult process in and of itself. When we were dealing with the Abraham and Isaac passage in our Bible Study (part one of this discussion can be found here) someone asked a very good question.

"Can we understand this passage as a parable?"

Parables are short and simple stories that Jesus told in order to communicate a deeper spiritual or moral truth. Sometimes the story itself is very easy to understand but the meaning behind the story can be very complex. For example the Parable of the Sower found in Matthew 13 taken at a very basic meaning is fairly easy to figure out. And that is if you plant seeds in areas that are not good for growth then the seeds won't grow but if you plant the seeds in good soil then they will grow and produce well.

Jesus later explains to the Disciples that he uses parables to explain deeper spiritual meanings because it is easier for people to start with the simple truths. So when we start to investigate the deeper meaning of the parable we find that Jesus is not actually talking about farming but about how different people react to his teaching.

The thing about parables is that while they may be based in truth (there certainly are people that plant seeds), they are not tied to an actual event (Jesus was not referencing a specific person planting seed at a specific time.) So in terms of dealing with the story of Abraham and Isaac we have no indications that this story is a parable. It is a story that is told about specific and actual events.

So while it might be very tempting–and easy–to explain away the story as a parable, the passage does not allow us to do so. We have to deal with this passage in a different way than we would a parable.

But the question about how understand the story of Abraham and Isaac is an excellent one because it points out a very important fact about the Bible. It is not a singular work. It is a collection of books that were written by different authors that used very different styles of writing. On top of this the Bible uses different types or genres of writing within each book that need to be read with different lenses. There is Historical/Epic, Law, Wisdom, Prophecy, Poetry, Apocalyptic, Gospel, Parable, and Epistle/Letter. And that is not a complete list. Each of these genres are to be understood a little differently.

It is very easy to see this in the above parable example. We do not read the Parable of the Sower and think that Jesus was talking about a specific person or that he was an agricultural guru. Rather when we read it we take its meaning at face value. Jesus was communicating a truth through a story. We also see this in everyday use. If we came across a headline that said "Bears maul Packers" we would understand that headline in very different ways in different sections in the paper. We take the headline at face value. In the Sports section it has a different face value than if it were to appear above a story about a couple of animals running loose in a meat processing plant.

The same goes for the Abraham and Isaac passage. It is a very difficult story for us to understand but we have to take it at face value. It is a story about how God tested Abraham by giving him a command that seemed contrary and out of character for the type of command that God would normally give.

How should we handle difficult passages?

The story of God telling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac has always troubled me. It is one of those passages in the Bible that I could do without. And in a certain sense I would be happier if it was completely absent. Of course the next best thing would to be able to explain it away somehow.

This passage was the passage that we looked at last night in Bible Study. We discussed a couple of possible lessons to learn from this story and one that was somewhat satisfying for me was that at the end of the day God will provide. He might not always do so as we expect but he will provide. But there was a large part of the conversation that centered on why God would ask Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.

And my conclusion is that I don’t know. This passage has all sorts of crazy in it. To me it seems crazy that God would ask Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. It seems crazy that Abraham would go along with it. Just a few chapters earlier we see Abraham standing up to God when God declares that he is going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. We don’t have any record of Abraham wrestling with God over this command which doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen.  But we don’t see it and I want it in there. Finally it seems crazy that Isaac would go along with everything. Abraham is over 100 years old at this point and Isaac was old enough to carry the wood for the sacrifice. I’m guessing that he would be strong enough to fight back against his father, which I think would be a natural and understandable reaction of self preservation.

It is very important to point out that from the context of the passage that God never intended for Abraham to actually sacrifice Isaac. God was only testing to see if Abraham was obedient to God to the point of giving up the promise of God. Abraham was promised to be the father of a great nation through Isaac. It was quite a promise that contained a lasting legacy. To this day Abraham is known as the Father of Israel. God wanted to test Abraham to see if his obedience lay in the things that God could provide for Abraham or if his obedience lay in the fact that God is God.

But still. There are parts of this passage that just do not make sense and there are parts that I do not like.

And that is ok.

The Bible is the revelation of God and I cannot shape God in my own image. I cannot simply black out the parts that I do not like. In a certain sense I have to accept them and live with the tension. I also cannot sweep them under the rug. When someone challenges me on my beliefs based upon this passage it is perfectly fine to say that I don’t understand it and I don’t necessarily like it.

This is a passage that we need to take on faith. It is not a blind faith trusting that God will simply wave his hands and make everything disappear. But rather it is the faith that God was ultimately in control and that one day when we see him face to face that we will understand. There are difficult passages in the Bible that cannot be ignored or explained away. We need to face them head on and make as much sense as we can of them. But we should not ignore them or try to explain them away.

Further Reading:
Why did God tell Abraham to sacrifice Isaac?