Friday, January 17, 2020

The Tenanites

In biblical history, the Israelites have had to deal with a lot of other "'ites"; Canaanites, Jebusites, Hivites and and a host of other people groups that spell check doesn't recognize. As a family, we've been studying our way through the parables in the book of Matthew. While narrating back what he remembered from the parable of the tenants, my nine year old son identified a new group.
"...then the owner of the vineyard turned it over to the Tenanites to produce its fruit."

After we all had a little laugh and continued our study, the nature of the slip became somewhat profound. A targeted portion of the audience for Christ's parable was the religious and political authorities whose forefathers played a role in driving out all the different enemy-ites. Now those authorities had become the object of Jesus's metaphor about people who will be driven out. They had become the enemy-ites. It went over about as well as Jesus's teachings about them usually did. They looked for a way to arrest him.

 https://www.flickr.com/photos/bible_cartoons/32003239218

So here we are today with a tendency to feel rather confident about the rights we associate with being Christian. We're well established to say the least. That's partly because of the privilege we've inherited from righteous forefathers. I know our nation wasn't forwardly founded on Christianity but it was close enough that Christians have naturally grown to expect a high level of privilege and influence.

 A prominent point in the parable of the tenants is that God's "vineyard", the resources he has invested for the purpose of getting a return, are only for those who have returning it to him in mind. I say all this to pose a question for myself as much as anybody. To any degree and at the risk of fighting God himself, has privilege and influence turned my faith into the means of preserving my privilege and influence? Faith may well result in both but I see the need to keep scrutinizing my own motives to make sure they're focused first on what God expects from his investment in me. It's easy to become a "Tenanite".

Thursday, January 9, 2020

Hot Potato

I'm on an Old Testament kick again. It's so interesting to study God through the context of historic examples with a specific nation, Israel, designated as his people. That's something we don't have in quite the same way today. It lets us see God without the modern ambiguity about what he's directly responsible for. It's not all tidy and flattering but it is all a truthful glimpse of who he is.

My most recent musing comes from the the book of 1 Samuel where the Philistines are playing a panicked game of hot potato with the ark they stole from Israel after giving them a sound thumping. It seemed like a great victory to the Philistines until deadly illness almost immediately started inflicting whatever town they tried to keep the ark in. As the pattern became clear and the loss piled up, they returned the ark to Israel and their life presumably returned to normal, worshiping the pagan god Dagon in relative health with no immediate doom at their door.

Not to be taken as a God who plays favorites, when the Israelite's got the ark back, God also killed seventy of the them who looked into it. Apparently, if God does lead you to put some real semblance of him in a box, you had better not look too closely.

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/653162752178993828/

Anyway, this account carries a couple interesting points for me. One is that God shows favor but not favoritism. Even if you're fortunate enough to be the ones who really do have God in your box, you still have to be careful, perhaps even more so. And that leads to the second point. The Philistines were spared simply because they returned the ark, not because they turned to serving the God of Israel. Sometimes the only thing needed to get out of acute trouble is to stop actively fighting God's people and stealing their stuff. He'll deal with them harshly enough on his own.