Bible

Becoming Ecclesiastical

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I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind. What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be counted. I said in my heart, “I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me, and my heart has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.” And I applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a striving after wind. For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.
—Ecclesiastes 1:14-18 ESV

Wisdom in old ageBack in the summer of 1988, at the young age of twenty-five, I was working at a Christian camp in Wisconsin. While walking back to my residence, one of the young women on summer staff noticed me singing a hymn to myself, walked up to me and said, “What makes you so happy? You’re the happiest person I know.”

Yesterday, I was sitting down with my young son reading some passages out of an old Good News Bible—the one with the stylized line drawings in it. After we were done, I was flipping through and found a passage out of Ecclesiastes that made me laugh, especially since I have blogged here many times about the Church and work issues:

Only someone too stupid to find his way home would wear himself out with work.
—Ecclesiastes 10:15 GNB

That got me thinking about the rest of Ecclesiastes. At the time of my being told I was the happiest person that young woman knew, Ecclesiastes was my favorite book in the Old Testament. Considering the somber and almost regretful tone of the book, it doesn’t quite seem to work with my state of mind at the that time. Truthfully, I’m not sure the whole of the book rang true for me. Sure, I loved passages like

Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! Again, if two lie together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him—a threefold cord is not quickly broken.
(Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 ESV)

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.
—Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 ESV

He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.
—Ecclesiastes 3:11 ESV

but I never truly pondered the rest of Ecclesiastes because, frankly, I was too young to see.

Now I am forty-two, a husband, and a father. On reading through Ecclesiastes again in the Good News I was struck by how the rest of the book now spoke to me in a way that it didn’t seventeen years ago. There’s a bittersweet longing for youth, yet with the understanding that to be youthful is to be largely ignorant of the world, much like I was at twenty-five.

If I ran into that same young woman who pronounced me to be the happiest person she knew, I don’t believe that she would say the same thing of me today. However, I don’t consider this a step backward in my faith. Instead, I acknowledge it’s a part of “becoming Ecclesiastical,” seeing life with older eyes and noticing now the vanities you never considered before. To be twenty-five is to be invulnerable, but to be older means you’ll sooner than you imagine be attending funerals for friends you once thought would always be there. It is to know that the world we leave our children will not be as idyllic as the world we inherited. It is to see how striving after riches and glory is nothing more than wind. It is to understand that perhaps a nice meal with people you love is more important than power and fame.

There is a sadness in becoming Ecclesiastical. It is the sadness of accumulated wisdom, a wisdom despised by the young who must painfully learn the lessons of Ecclesiastes only through their own aging. The world says otherwise, but those who become Ecclesiastical understand that

… under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all.
—Ecclesiastes 9:11 ESV

It’s the wisdom of God that He’s made us to learn hard truths in time. There’s no shame in acknowledging that life is difficult and eventually leads to the grave. Yet too often we praise the fools who pretend that this simply isn’t the case.

The tough wisdom of Ecclesiastes shouldn’t be written off by those who always want to think happy thoughts. This book exists in the Bible for a reason. Life isn’t always happy and there would be no rejoicing if sorrow didn’t exist. To the older and wiser, becoming Ecclesiastical renders both the sorrow and the joy our friends, even if the rest of the world around us cannot understand.

A Shameless Plug for e-Sword

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I think the best electronic Bible system available for Windows-based computers is e-Sword. Given that it is entirely free (though donations are gladly accepted), I want to thank Rick Myers for providing such an outstanding tool out of the goodness of his heart.

This may be a little late to the game, but as someone who has loaded up on the plug-ins available for e-Sword, I don’t always go back to the site to check for additions. Though it’s been almost a year, I see that the English Standard Version is available for download from the site. Excellent.

If you are a PC user (I’m a Mac guy, but I have a PC, too), this is essential software. Check it out today.

Occam’s Bible Razor

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This weekend I promised some folks on another site that I would take a look at the idea of the Priesthood in the same manner that I looked at Apostleship. I was tackling my idea that the formal office of priest has passed away and is now only owned by one person, Christ. No mortal human “priest” exists to carry on the role Christ now does for all of us. (Backstory: this is mostly my attempt to counter the growing trend in evangelical circles to make the father in a family some new form of “family priest,” an idea that has no history that I can find in the Christian Classics Ethereal Library or any of the writings of Jonathan Edwards.)

Well, in the course of getting ready for an apologetic examination nonpareil, I ran into a huge problem with the Greek word “presbuteros” (from which we get the word “Presbyterian”, the key meaning being “elder”) which some who support a distinct role of “priest” want to use in the same way that we use “hiereus” (high priest). The “presbuteros equates to a modern NT priestly role” seems so tortured to me that trying to disqualify presbuteros in order to make my point is maddening. Frankly, I’m not prepared to write a dissertation on this, what I saw as a simple subject before it got obfuscated.

Cross on BibleAnd that brings me to my whole point.

Jack Deere once wrote that if you take someone who has no experience with the Bible or Christian doctrine at all and you sit that person down to read the Bible through for the first time, that person is not going to come away from the Bible a cessationist. Now I realize that’s a whole ‘nother topical hornet’s nest, but the idea is what I want to hold onto here. Likewise, Leonard Ravenhill, one of my favorite authors and preachers, once said that one day someone is going to sit down with the Bible and truly believe it and then we’re all going to be ashamed.

Does Occam’s Razor apply to the Bible?

William of Occam stated quite simply:

Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.

Or in 21st century English:

The simplest answer for explaining something is most likely to be true and is to be preferred.

Perhaps we need to recover this same perspective when it comes to reading the Bible.

Now this is not to say that we can strip the depth of meaning out of the Scriptures. No one man can take in all the breadth of knowledge and beauty the Bible contains. But what if the simple, first-through reading of a passage of Scripture is closest to its true meaning? Some of our most debated doctrines today seem quite tortured when theologians start beefing about Greek verb declensions. Why not just read a passage and let the very first thoughts you get about it serve as the basis for belief? Does the Holy Spirit demand that we parse verb forms in order to get to “the real meaning” of the Bible?

The older I get the more this bothers me. I think Deere may be right. It’s only after most new Christians are exposed to us “mature” believers that they start to temper their initial excitement at reading the word of God. “Oh, so it doesn’t really mean that?” is not the kind of attitude we should be encouraging in spiritual beginners. I know I get tired of hearing some people try to dissect John 14:6 by using tortured logic to say that Jesus isn’t really saying He’s the only way to be saved. I’m sorry to say this to the text-floggers out there, but I think that is exactly what He is saying. Doesn’t a first reading of that passage say that? Don’t you have to contruct an elaborate deconstruction of that passage in order to get it to say something entirely different from what it seems to say on a first reading?

I’ve noticed that several apologetics blogs are starting to emerge. That’s great. We need good apologists. But I also think that perhaps we are losing the basic truth of “the first read.” I know that I wish I could strip away twenty-eight years of “Bible learnin'” to be able to read a text with a first-timer’s eyes. Maybe then I could be the man of Ravenhill’s aphorism and go on to be far more than the critics would contend I could be.

So all I ask is, why are we making it all so difficult? Anyone else here desiring an Occam’s Bible Razor? (I hear Family Christian Bookstores is looking to sell a titanium one for $14.98, but don’t quote me on that!)