Apocalyptic news

Because US elections always happen around this time of year, the lectionary always has me reading the book of Daniel in the mornings.  I strongly recommend reading Daniel before reading the news; and then maybe reading it again after the news if you need to.  Daniel is a book of apocalyptic, which does not mean that it is all dramatic and disastrous - that wouldn't make it very much different from the BBC news website (or whatever other news source you're currently using).  Daniel is apocalyptic because it peels back the surface level of the apparent churn of human events to show the deeper spiritual significance of what is going on.  It doesn't deny the reality of the human level - as if history is just an illusion, or a mere mask for something else - but it gives a revealed insight into what is going on from the divine perspective, which is often very much at odds with the human perspective.

Perhaps the key revelation in Daniel is this: whilst there is constant flux in human affairs, and no human state has the stability and permanence to which it pretends, there is a divine plan which lies beneath everything and which will be brought to light as the meaning of it all.  So in chapter 2 this morning we were being reminded that kingdoms - even Nebuchadnezzar's apparently unmovable kingdom - will come to an end, the Most High is overseeing the succession of human states with the intention of bringing to eternal dominance the Kingdom of his own Son.  There is a lot going on at the human level, but when God desires he brings the whole thing - not just an individual kingdom but the whole succession, the whole constant movement of human rise and fall - crashing down, to be replaced by an unshakeable Rock.

I've been mulling some applications.  Firstly, it's so important to remember with Daniel that it is God who "changes the times and seasons; he removes kings and establishes kings."  I think we can be prone to imagining a sort of 'providence of the gaps', where the Lord is in charge of things we can't quite explain or quantify, but where there is a process, an ordered system which we can understand, for getting something done, God is an unnecessary hypothesis.  In an ordered democratic system, surely voters and not the Most High choose the leaders.  But the biblical vision of providence is much more thoroughgoing than this.  Nothing falls outside of God's control, even things which are eminently within our control.

Second, knowledge of providence does not blunt the horrors of history.  Consider that the whole book of Daniel happens within the context of exile, a result of brutal invasion and destruction.  The kings featured are not good characters.  They are brutal imperialists.  Even in chapter 2, Daniel and his friends live under the threat of a capricious death sentence.  Everything is bad.  And yet...  I think we need to be willing to face how bad things are (although a reading of Daniel does helpfully remind us that things could be and have been much worse), and still say 'and yet...' without flinching.  God is in control.  That he allows these things, these terrible things, may be incomprehensible to us, but he has shown us that he is good, and he is after all the God of the cross and resurrection, in that order.

Third, I think it is helpful to admit a very high degree of uncertainty when we're thinking about reading human history.  There is no manifest and obvious storyline to human history, and although it is probably inevitable that we will try to frame events within a plot that makes sense to us, we have to admit that we don't really know what is going on.  Even for Christians, who 'know' the big storyline, we need to be cautious about assigning particular events in 'secular' history a role in that story.  After all, when God establishes his everlasting kingdom that doesn't come from within the churn of human history, but from without, and takes down the whole human statue.

Why is this happening?

A friend asked at the weekend whether people had been looking to me for a spiritual explanation for this pandemic.  Simple answer is no.  I'm aware that in past generations, and still perhaps today in some fringe sectors of the church, attempting to read providence to quite a detailed level has been commonplace.  It has been normal, for example, to draw a straight line between sin in society and 'punishments' through natural disaster or illness.

As I said to my friend, I don't see much of that.  People in the church are primarily asking not, why did this happen, but, how should we respond.  I see positives and negatives in that shift.  The particular positive is that it takes seriously the interaction between Jesus and a blind man in John 9.  The disciples want to know whether the man was born blind because of his own sin (presumably foreseen, rather than actually committed in utero) or because of the sin of his parents.  In other words, they want a causal chain to explain, in terms of divine providence, why this has happened.  Jesus doesn't offer them that sort of explanation.  They want to peer back into the man's family past to find the cause; Jesus directs them to the present.  Here and now, this man can be healed, in a demonstration of God's grace and kindness shown through Jesus.  So Jesus seems to cause the whole conversation to pivot from 'why has this happened' to 'how should we respond', and in so far as we're attempting to follow him this can only be good.

One negative that I'm aware of is that our spiritual forebears had a very lively sense of God being actually involved in directing the course of history.  For us, that has become largely a theological truth that has little bearing on our lives.  I think contemporary conservative evangelicalism has deistic tendencies; of course God has intervened in history, particularly in the incarnation, but now everything is (in practice, not in theory) just wound up and left to play out.  Under pressure from a philosophical concept of free will which is alien to Christian theology, and belatedly inheriting the themes of 18th century rationalism, we have tended to minimise the idea of God's direction of all things.

A particularly unfortunate consequence of that tendency at the moment is that we are reluctant to say things about providence which Scripture gives us clear warrant to say, and therefore we are hampered in hearing the message which I am convinced God wants to give us through these events.  Consider these verses from Psalm 90, for example:

You return man to dust
and say, “Return, O children of man!”
For a thousand years in your sight
are but as yesterday when it is past,
or as a watch in the night.
You sweep them away as with a flood; they are like a dream,
like grass that is renewed in the morning:
in the morning it flourishes and is renewed;
in the evening it fades and withers.
For we are brought to an end by your anger;
by your wrath we are dismayed.
You have set our iniquities before you,
our secret sins in the light of your presence.
For all our days pass away under your wrath;
we bring our years to an end like a sigh.
The years of our life are seventy,
or even by reason of strength eighty;
yet their span is but toil and trouble;
they are soon gone, and we fly away.
Who considers the power of your anger,
and your wrath according to the fear of you?

Well, who does consider it?  Who considers that we live in a creation that is not merely broken but cursed?  Who considers that God's wrath against sin is manifested daily?

I don't think we ought to try to trace this pandemic back in God's providence to particular sins, as if we could read God's mind.  But I do think we ought to think of this pandemic in line with God's revelation, as if we could read God's word.  Pain, as C.S. Lewis famously pointed out, is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world.  If we are being jolted awake right now, the right response is not to try to read an inscrutable providence to find out precisely why, but to pay attention to God's word, to examine ourselves and our society in the light of that word, and to repent of any and all sin that we find.

Ultimately, the reality of God's wrath should and must drive us to Jesus.

Samson is a bad man

One thing has particularly struck me reading through the story of Samson recently in Judges 13-16: Samson is awful.  He is a horrible, horrible human being in almost every way.  He treats women like chattels.  He disrespects his parents.  He is unfaithful to God's covenant with Israel (as demonstrated by his marriage choices).  He is extraordinarily gifted by God, but shows no gratitude whatsoever.  He makes no effort to maintain the ritual purity expected of a normal Israelite, let alone a set-apart Nazirite.  He is short-tempered and proud.  He brutally murders people because he is angry and he needs thirty garments because of a stupid bet.  He is vengeful.  He lacks faith, and repeats the grumbling of his forebears when he finds himself in the wilderness without water.  He frequents prostitutes.  He is careless and self-confident to the point of extreme arrogance.

Samson is a bad man.

But - such a promising beginning!  A veritable annunciation in Judges 13, and "the young man grew and Yahweh blessed him.  And the Spirit of Yahweh began to stir him..."  Chosen from the womb by God to be the leader of his people.  Did God choose poorly?

The story actually gets more disturbing in some ways.  This morning the lectionary took us through the tawdry story of Samson's wedding.  His parents tried to persuade him to marry an Israelite, but Samson was having none of it: he would marry a Philistine, apparently just because he thought she was hot - he doesn't have a conversation with her until later.  Samson is marrying into the people who are currently oppressing Israel; not a great look for a deliverer, and on the pattern of the book of Judges that is what we are expecting him to be.  The marriage, of course, goes wrong, and Samson goes off in a rage and murders people and loses his wife (which will have further repercussions, by which I mean more murders, tomorrow).

But none of that is the disturbing bit.  There are two verses in this chapter which are genuinely alarming.  Verse 4:"His father and mother did not know that it was from Yahweh, for he was seeking an opportunity against the Philistines."  And verse 19: "And the Spirit of Yahweh rushed upon him, and he went down to Ashkelon and struck down thirty men..."

Samson is awful, but it is God who is looking for an opportunity to strike the Philistines - Samson's desire for an unwise and probably illegitimate marriage is "from Yahweh"!  What do we do with that?  Is God as awful as Samson?  If Samson is a bad man, is God a bad God?

Here is where we have to take a careful and nuanced view of God's sovereignty.  There is no doubt that the author of Judges wants us to know that Samson is a bad dude.  It is part of the downward spiral in post-conquest Israelite society that the deliverers who are raised up get progressively less heroic and godly (compare the way the Gideon and Jepthah stories are told, for example, and note the parallels around the treatment of Ephraim, seeking of rulership, etc. etc.)  So the perspective of the text is that Samson is not a role-model.  But the perspective of the text is also that Yahweh God is holy and righteous.  It is certainly not the intention of the author to endorse Samson, but neither is it his intention to implicate God in Samson's awfulness.

So how do we read it?  Samson acted sinfully, but God acted righteously through sinful Samson.  Samson murdered Philistines in petty rage, but God righteously judged the Philistines through petty Samson.  Note that God does not, according to the text, just opportunistically use Samson's crimes for good ends.  In fact, that Samson is chosen from the womb and gets such a big annunciation story serves to underline that God has actively ordained that this wicked man will play a role in his righteous schemes - and yet without himself being tainted in any way by Samson's evil.  Our view of God needs to be enlarged - he is above and beyond, operating on a different plane from us.  But our view of God also needs to be disciplined by revelation - this God is not afraid to mix it up on our plane.

In the end it is impossible for us to disentangle the evil that people intend and the good that God purposes.  We can only pray and work against the former and trust for the latter.  God will sort it all out in the end.