Our Church Family

Dear church,

We have a pantry in our home that has some squeaky bi-fold doors in front of it. And throughout the day – especially during the pandemic – I can periodically hear those doors opening. Kids are seeking food. 

I suppose I can fix those doors so they won’t squeak. But why would I do that? It is good to know when the kids are raiding the pantry and, if the mood strikes me, to shoo them away. “Wait for dinner,” I might say.

We are drawn to food. We can’t help it. And teenagers and pre-teens are even more this way. They are a hungry bunch, and there’s not much you can do to satisfy them.

When Mary and I worked in youth ministry, we occasionally would have special gatherings for the youth group, and we’d order pizza. Pizza is the universal youth group food – fast and easy, and there is very little clean-up involved. Upon delivery, it always amazed us how fast the food disappeared. In a blur, it was gone, and nothing was left but empty pizza boxes strewn about the room.

Adults seem to be able to moderate their eating habits a bit better. And some adults are almost religious in the way they abstain from certain types of food. Prosperity affords people the luxury of being picky.

But everybody must eat. And so we are drawn to food. At some point during day, we will feel hungry, and we will want to eat. It is a need we must satisfy. If we don’t, our bodies will suffer. 

“So when the famine spread over all the land, Joseph opened all the storehouses and sold to the Egyptians, for the famine was severe in the land of Egypt. Moreover, all the earth came to Egypt to Joseph to buy grain, because the famine was severe over all the earth” (Genesis 41:56-57).

Joseph almost seemed to fulfill the prophecy that God gave to Abraham – “and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). Surely, you can see how this might be so. Here was a great-grandson of Abraham throwing open the storehouses of Egypt so the world might come to buy grain and to survive the global famine. 

And it wasn’t just that the people were coming to Egypt for grain. They were coming specifically “to Joseph.”Certainly, the families of the earth were blessed by the family of Abraham. 

Followers of Jesus should be paying attention here. From the very beginning, God had a plan for his people. They were the carriers of the promise. It was a promise for Israel, yes, but it also was a promise for the whole world. 

And so when we read the people of Egypt were famished and crying out to Pharaoh “for bread” – and Pharaoh then sent them to Joseph, saying, “Go to Joseph. What he says to you, do” – we ought to be on high alert as Christians. 

We also want “bread.” Let’s go to the One who has it. Whatever he says to us, we ought to do it!

We know Joseph’s bread monopoly was not the ultimate fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham to be a blessing to the families of the earth. In reality, Jesus was that fulfillment. But Joseph gives us an early pointer to what Jesus would come to do.

Jesus told a crowd of people, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst” (John 6:35). And we recognize Jesus as the one who gives not just food for our bellies but food for our souls. 

There is a monumental difference between the two, but the two are connected. And this makes the story of Joseph important. Through Joseph and the offspring of Abraham, God was blessing the world with life. God continued to sustain his creation. Humans can’t continue to exist without food in their stomachs, and God provided for that. We need food, too.

But physical food is not all we need for fullness of life. We need something more, and this is what the world fails sometimes to see.

Just before Jesus declared himself to be the bread of life, he said this: “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. For on him God the Father has set his seal” (John 6:27).

And this is how we know God wasn’t bringing his promises to their final fulfillment in Joseph. All Joseph had to offer at that moment was grain for bread – for “food that perishes.” The food that endures to eternal life was still to come in the form of Jesus Christ. We are to put our trust in him. 

Of course, it wasn’t just “all the earth” who came to Joseph for grain. It also was the family of God. The most important part of this story is the fact that God was preserving the nation of Israel through the actions of Joseph (Genesis 42:1-2).

The nation of Israel was going to survive. It would carry on. Along the way, it would receive more bread, of course (John 6:31-32). Our stomachs are always crying out to us when they are hungry.

But the end game is eternal life. Everything pointed to that.

The question we must ask ourselves is whether we are seeking this bread from heaven. Perhaps we only are seeking food that perishes. And by this, we might think of anything that is physical and temporary – things that satisfy our five senses. This is what the world seeks, and rightly so. 

But there is more to life than mere “bread.” If all we do is raid the pantry, looking to satisfy our stomachs, we will miss out on eternal life. 

In a lot of ways, we are like those teenagers yanking open those squeaky pantry doors. It may not be food we are after. Prosperity can free us to be picky, after all. And so we may be chasing after money or sex or things related to our pride, like revenge or reputation. That may be all we ever chase after in life. 

In what ways are you pursuing bread from heaven?

Chris

Dear church,

When we encounter things we don’t understand, we can become troubled. Think of all the times you have been anxious about something – about your job, about your marriage, about your health, about your kids, about your parents. So much in this life stirs our spirits in a negative way, and we are troubled as we wonder what is the meaning of these things that are happening and that we don’t understand. 

The dreams of the butler and the baker put them in a position where it was obvious to Joseph that something was amiss. He’d been with them every day since they had been thrown in prison. He had learned some of their habits and their personalities, and he couldn’t help but notice they weren’t themselves that morning. “Why are your faces downcast today?”

They’d had some dreams they didn’t understand. And they had asked around. No one else seemed to be able to provide any meaning for these dreams. Pharaoh would have the same problem a little later in the story. “So in the morning, his spirit was troubled” (Genesis 41:8).

I once knew a man who was troubled by the things of life, the things he had seen and the things that had happened to him. His wife struggled with brain cancer. It was enough to cause her to undergo a range of therapies, chemo and otherwise, but it was not enough to kill her. This couple had two wonderful children, a boy and a girl. The husband and wife were in love. All was very good – except for this inexplicable cancer. 

The man cast God aside because God was giving no answers about the cancer. What was the meaning of it all? What was the point of being so close to so much happiness and yet being weighed down by this evil thing that could wreck it all at any moment? God did not seem to be providing answers. So the man gave up on God. Surely God is not good, he concluded. 

Joseph seemed to know otherwise. And he leaned into God when he encountered things that seemed to escape human understanding. “Do not interpretations belong to God?” Joseph carried with him a brash confidence that simply knew God had the answers to the questions that trouble our spirits. 

We might give this confidence another name – faith.

Joseph started with the expectation that God knew. God is the one who can interpret the times. He knows the meaning of it all. Interpretations “belong” to God. He is the rightful owner of them because he is the rightful owner of all of reality.

Needless to say, we ought to seek him out when we encounter things in life that we simply do not understand and that cause our hearts to be troubled and our faces to be downcast. The interpretation – the answer – will come from him. It belongs to him.

In those hard cases where answers do not seem to come, where God perhaps remains silent in the face of our honest questions, we ought not to lose faith. This is heart-wrenching to say, and much grace is required. But if the interpretation belongs to God, we need to keep looking to him. He will give us the answer in due time. Perhaps he is refining us, or even testing us, by way of his silence.

If we turn aside from God in the face of that silence, we never really believed he had the answer to begin with. We never really believed all interpretations belong to God. The person of faith never loses hope in God and never requires God to act according to our own timelines (Daniel 3:16-18).

Chris

Dear church, 

In three stories in a row, clothing is waved in our faces. 

The coat of many colors of Joseph, stained with blood by his brothers – false evidence of his death. The cord and staff and signet of Judah, left behind with Tamar – positive evidence of his sexual escapade. And then the garment of Joseph, held up by Potiphar’s wife – false evidence of his guilt.

What are we to do with this? 

All three of these garments were detached from the people to whom they belonged. Someone else had them – after obtaining them in a rather unseemly way. That’s one thing they have in common. The brothers betrayed Joseph. Tamar had sex with her father-in-law while disguised. Potiphar’s wife tried to seduce Joseph. 

And then Joseph’s brothers, Tamar, and Potiphar’s wife – suddenly in possession of a garment – began to wave those garments in the air, saying in essence, “Look what I/we have! This tells the story!”

And when these garments appear, they do tell a story, either true or false. It is evidence. 

Interestingly, only one of the people left holding the garment was telling the truth. Perhaps we ought to re-think our ideas about Tamar. She was telling the truth, and Judah’s belongings told the tale about his character – and Tamar’s.

Meanwhile, Joseph’s brothers were lying, and Jacob’s bloodied coat told the tale about them and their treachery. The same was the case with Potiphar’s wife. She, too, was treacherous.

In both cases, Joseph’s garments were stripped from him. He was an unwilling participant. Something was taken from him. 

Not so with Judah. He gave part of his garments away – payment for sin.

This is a picture of human interaction. Sometimes things are taken from us by others. We get hurt. Other times, we give valuable things away – things we ought to keep. 

In all of it, we find pain. So much hurt is bound up human interaction.

But again, God can use all of this for his glory. The schemes of humanity do not prevail. The tug and pull of people fighting against each other, plotting against one another, is not too much for God.

When we’re stripped of something that belongs to us, God can bring us restoration. When we give something away that we should have kept, God even can use that for his glory and our good. 

The question we must continually ask ourselves is whether we believe this. 

Chris

Dear church,

We have a rug in the basement of our house, and I was sitting down there looking at that rug the other day. I noticed how dirty it was. Some of you might call it filthy. There was a mix of dog hair, dust bunnies, bits of paper, flakes of firewood from the stove nearby, crumbs of food, little strings from some unknown source, lint, and miscellaneous dirt. And that’s just what I could see. 

I knew that rug tends to get dirty. After all, we live there, too. The rug needs regular vacuuming. 

A couple of months ago, I was in the basement in the middle of the night, reloading the wood stove, and I was sitting on that rug, waiting for the flames to kick up so I could go back to bed. And then I saw a mouse, sitting on the rug, staring at me. 

It was a live mouse, fortunately – a dead mouse would be one step too far in this story of the dirty rug. And that mouse didn’t seem to mind me being down there with it. The mouse started scurrying around on the rug, stopping here or there to pick up bits of something – potato chip crumbs, maybe – as a snack. The things the mouse was attracted to were so small I could not tell what it was eating. They were just microscopic bits of debris.

Now, I offer that story knowing there are some people whose skin will crawl at a description like that. A rug in that condition in their homes would cause their hearts to palpitate, and not in a good way. There are some who like to keep a clean house – no filth allowed. They even will pull the refrigerator out from the wall every few months to clean underneath it. They can cite chapter and verse from the CDC about how much bacteria is in your shower or on your toothbrush at any given moment. 

The sight of filth, any filth, makes them spring into action. That filth will be made clean, or else. 

This is probably particularly true in this era of face masks and hand sanitizer. There are some who get queasy if you stand too close or at the thought of not washing their hands before they eat. Handshakes? Forget about it. Too dirty, too unclean, too unsanitary.

With all of that said, I think I may begin work on a “theology of filth,” because it seems to me we have shunned the very idea of filth from our culture and our lives. And can be a good, positive place for dirt in our lives. When boys play baseball, I noticed that they relish the most not in the hits and the strikeouts and the pop flies, but in sliding into home plate, where they leave behind a cloud of dust and run back to the dugout streaked with dirt and marked by huge smiles. 

Dirt has a place in our lives whether you like it or not, and Chapter 38 gives us a dirty little story. This wasn’t the good kind of dirt, either – the kind of boys and baseball. This is the kind of dirt that needs vacuuming, and quickly! Judah slept with his daughter in law, who dressed up as a prostitute in order to seduce him, even though Judah didn’t seem to need much seducing. 

We don’t care much for this story. It is very unpleasant, and we wonder why it appears here, breaking up the story of Joseph just as that story was getting going. But there are some reasons for this story’s appearance here. 

Judah appears to have drifted off from the family, marrying a Canaanite woman. This is not what the Israelites were supposed to do. 

But Judah appeared blessed at first. Three sons to carry on the family name is a good thing. Judah found a wife for his oldest son. Her name was Tamar.

However, the first son was wicked, and God took his life. We don’t know in what ways the oldest son was wicked, so it probably doesn’t matter to the course of the story. All that matters was the man was wicked. This likely tells us something about Judah and his immediate family. 

So the oldest brother was dead, leaving Tamar a widow. The custom at the time was for the younger brothers to provide children for their deceased older brothers. But Onan didn’t want to do this. We get a rather graphic picture of how he avoided carrying out his familial duty. God didn’t like what Onan was doing, depriving his older brother and his widow of a child. And Onan was no more. 

Judah didn’t seem to see the wickedness of his two older sons. He seemed to think Tamar was cursed. And so he didn’t send his third son – the last of his remaining sons – to Tamar. 

When Judah’s wife died, a problem immediately arose. If Judah’s third son didn’t produce a son himself, the family line would die out. 

Judah surely knew this. And so did Tamar. She dressed up as a prostitute and slept with her father-in-law. She got pregnant. Fortunately for her, she kept her father-in-law’s staff, signet, and cord, knowing this would help her to prove the child’s paternity. 

What a filthy story. This is worse than my rug. But there it is before us, demanding to be dealt with. We must respond to this story as God’s Word to us.

So why does this story appear here, just after we learn of Joseph’s brothers – Judah included – throwing their brother into a pit and selling him into slavery. 

Joseph was abandoned, and so was Tamar. The family that was supposed to love and protect turned into a haven of betrayal. 

Tamar had nowhere to go, except back to her father’s home, where she could not re-marry and where she would have been treated as a kind of failure. Two men had married her, and two men ended up dead. And it was not her fault. 

And so she was abandoned and left in a state of uncertainty, not knowing what would happen, whether her life and family ever would come to fruition. She was not unlike Joseph, stuck in that pit and the put in chains. What would become of him?

We can learn a lesson here about selfishness. Humans, because of our selfishness, are self-destructive. We tear things apart and withhold good things – think about Joseph’s brothers tearing their kinship apart, and think about Judah withholding his final son from Tamar. We do this in order to please ourselves or achieve the result we have determined to be good. 

And in the process, we just continue to lose. Three sons became just one son for Judah – and then his own wife died. The twelve brothers in Jacob’s house suddenly became just eleven. We imperil our own future because of our selfishness, because of our divisions, and because of our fears. 

And so we are self-destructive. This dirty little story tells us all about it.

But another lesson we can learn is that salvation can come from the strangest of places and in the most unlikely of ways. 

You might notice how disguises were used both in the story of Judah and Tamar and in the story of Joseph and his brothers. The savior came in a disguise, and those who were saved didn’t recognize their saviors at first. 

When Joseph’s brothers arrived in Egypt, they met Joseph but didn’t know it was him. The story took a few more twists and turns before they recognized him and before they were delivered from the famine that threatened the existence of their family. 

In the dirty story of Judah and Tamar, Judah didn’t recognize his daughter-in-law. And she, it turned out, was the savior of his family. Judah said, “She is more righteous than I, since I did not give her to my son …” (Genesis 38:26).

Why was Tamar righteous? She gets a bad rap. If you are a young woman and seduce your father-in-law, you are always going to get a bad rap. But Tamar was bound by marriage to Judah’s family. There was no undoing that. As much as we like divorce and our individualistic pursuits in our culture, there was nothing noble about that in Tamar’s culture. 

And if Tamar had not remained committed to Judah’s family, there was a real possibility his family line would have died out. And Tamar, as hard as it is for us to wrap our minds around it, served as a righteous savior for Judah’s family. Judah saw her actions as a sign of faithful commitment to her kin – to him.

Yes, salvation can come from very unlikely places. It sometimes comes disguised. 

“For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrowsand acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not” (Isaiah 53:2-3).

Perhaps, it is no wonder Tamar is mentioned explicitly in the genealogy of Jesus (Matthew 1:3). Here is a person from Jesus’ family whom we’d rather not talk about – despised, and we esteemed her not.

Frankly, Judah is the same. What an unsavory man – leaving his family to marry a pagan woman, raising two sons who turned out to be pretty bad characters, withholding care from a widow and his own daughter-in-law, and sleeping with a prostitute. And this was all after betraying his own brother, Joseph. 

Judah is mentioned in Jesus’ genealogy, too. Jesus is the lion of the tribe of Judah.

Yet another lesson we might learn from this story, and perhaps the most important lesson we can learn, is that God is not limited by humanity’s sinfulness. Judah and his brothers – and Tamar – were the family of God. These were his chosen people, and they were flawed people indeed. 

Surely their many flaws would throw God’s plan off-track. Surely this dirty rug surely could not be used by God to bring out his purposes for his creation. But God remained in complete control. 

And God remains in control today. Sometimes, we call this the doctrine of providence. This is the idea that nothing is outside the control and plan of God. And God works all things out for good. And this applies to your own life. 

And I’m sure you have a dirty rug or two, rolled up in the spiritual closet of your life. And you probably think it would give us all heart palpitations if we were to pull those rugs out and have a look. But God is at work in your life, too. 

In writing to the church in Philippi, the apostle Paul told the church there that he remembered them fondly. He said he prayed about them with joy because they had helped him share the gospel from the very first time he met them.

And then Paul said this, “And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6).

I think maybe all of us should keep something around the house that is just dirty. Don’t clean it. Maybe it’s a rug, or a cupboard, or the floorboard of your car. Let it stay dirty and unkept as a reminder – a reminder of spiritual things. Genesis 38, a filthy Bible story, is a reminder.

You’ve got your dirty “rugs.” I’ve got my dirty “rugs.” My theology of filth would say that all that dirt only serves to help us to see the glory of God. God is at work in us and around us. And he has a good work that is moving forward even now in you and in me. And he will bring that good work to completion on the day of Jesus Christ.

Chris

Dear church,

How do you pray for your friends? Sometimes, it can feel very repetitive, and even a little shallow: “Lord, please help old Joe with his problem … I know I’ve asked you about this every day for a year, but I really mean it.” And on and on we pray, day after day, adhering to Jesus’ encouragement to continue praying and not give up (Luke 18). There’s nothing wrong with this, but you can enrich your prayers if you use your Bible as you pray.

Here is an idea for you. Pray the Psalms for your friends. Actually, pray the Psalms on behalf of your friends and with hope for your friends. Here’s an example.

I have a friend who is going through a difficult time right now. I believe he is in a “pit.” You know what that is like, surely – when things are difficult, when you have failed, when you wonder whether there is any hope.

And so I pray Psalm 40 for him: “I waited patiently for the Lord; he inclined to me and heard my cry. He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure. …”

This is a prayer I pray for my friend knowing he is still awaiting this outcome – to be drawn up out of the pit of destruction. My prayer is God would make this psalm a reality in the life of my friend. I pray this with a hope that I can hear my friend say these things for himself someday soon – “I have not concealed your steadfast love and your faithfulness from the great congregation” (Psalm 40:10).

You can do this for your friends and loved ones, too. Consider their circumstances in life and then pull out the prayer book of God’s people and see where the Lord leads you. Let these prayers, the prayers of God’s people, guide your prayers for those whom you love. 

There’s nothing magical about this, but it does help us learn the biblical language of prayer, and it does often yield new insights about the theology of life, death, and suffering. And it breaks the monotony of our voices in prayer. Let the long history of God’s people speak for you from time to time.

What does this have to do with Joseph and his brothers in Genesis 37? 

Well, the story of Joseph prefigures the life of Christ. That is, it points us directly to Jesus. The father sending his son to find his brothers is a beautiful picture of Jesus coming into the world. Of course, the world only had betrayal for the favored son. But the son eventually emerged from the pit (and the prison) to save the whole family. 

We ought to think of Jesus as we read this story.

So we can think of the pit as not just a hole in the ground but a place of death and captivity. The Bible affirms this picture of the “pit” as just such a place. The Psalms are a good place to go to see this. And so is Revelation.

Joseph faced the pit. Jesus faced the pit. We, too, face the pit. In big and small ways, we face what amounts to the destruction of our lives. We face this every day when we are confronted with our old temptations. We face this every day when we forget to rely on God. We face this every day when we build idols for ourselves and follow them. We face this every day when we begin to lose hope.

And so we pray to the one who emerged out of the pit – to Jesus Christ himself – that he would lift our lives up out of the pit. When we accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, we enter into a new life up out of the pit. But the pit remains. 

Satan doesn’t give up on us just because we have become Christians. We are still capable of sin and even despair. 

This is why we must continue to encourage one another (Hebrews 10:24-25). And this is why we must continue praying for one another. We trust that God hears our prayers.

Chris

Dear church,

Mary and I bought our first house in 2001 in Lawrence, Kansas. The guy next door to us had been in his own home for a long time – and it showed. If nothing else, it showed because of his lawn.

His was a picture-perfect lawn. Thick green grass, perfectly manicured. His backyard was accented by fruit trees. His fence stood up straight.

The comparison between his lawn and mine was rather stark. My yard had one half-dead elm tree in the front yard. The grass grew in clumps, and there was plenty of exposed dirt across the expanse of my yard. Whenever I mowed, I kicked up so much dust that you couldn’t see from one end to the other. The lawn mower literally bounced across the yard as I pushed it across the “turf.” 

And I won’t even tell you about my fence, which leaned in one direction or the other, depending on which way the wind blew. And the wind always blows in Kansas.

They say the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. In my own case, this was literally true. The grass was greener over there.

And despite my best efforts to keep up – or even catch up – with my neighbor, it was not going to happen. Fortunately, we sold the house about three years later, so I was freed from my quest.

Have you ever found yourself in that position, where you can see quite clearly that someone else is much better off than you in some area of your life? And there’s just no way you are going to catch up? Sometimes, it just seems like a few special people catch all the breaks and whatever they touch turns to gold. Meanwhile, we are slaving away with marginal results. 

Of course, we don’t think about how hard those other folks worked for the “breaks” they got, or the skill they developed over a long period of time in their jobs, in their parenting, in their landscaping techniques, etc. The fact of the matter is that in certain moments, we simply feel frustrated with our lot in life. Things don’t go our way, and we grumble.

Genesis 36 is about the descendants of Esau. As you read it, you might notice this genealogy comes with relatively little detail. Generation follows generation with almost no comment. But you also might notice the recorder of this genealogy tells us that this was a family that grew into a nation – the Edomites – and that was populated by chiefs and sons and kings and warriors. These were people who won wars and who reigned over their homeland. Most importantly for our Bible reading, these were people who had a homeland. They possessed land.

This is how it went for the family of Esau. Things seemed to go pretty well for them.

The rest of the Old Testament tracks the history of the family of Esau’s twin brother, Jacob. And things didn’t seem to go quite as well for them – at least for much of the time. 

Within one generation, Jacob’s family would face a famine and end up in exile in Egypt. That exile would turn into 400 years of slavery. That would be followed by a miraculous rescue and then 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. When Jacob’s family finally did get its land, it would hold on to it with a very precarious grip. It was the “land of their possession,” but just barely. And the family would lose the land, regain the land, and lose the land again. 

Take a look over the fence at Esau’s descendants. The grass really is greener there.

But when we live by the flesh only – as Esau surely did and which we are tempted to do – we will fail to see the hand of God at work in this troubled history of the nation of Israel. God was refining a people for his glory. His people – the descendants of Jacob – were the carriers of the promise that led to the coming of the Messiah. Out of these people of slavery and wandering and squandering came Jesus Christ. 

God was at work even in the yard with the patchy grass. You couldn’t always see it clearly sometimes, but he was at work.

We go through difficult times, too. Our church goes through difficult times as well. But even in those, we trust in the promises. As Israel was awaiting its Messiah, so are we awaiting his return. As Israel spent many years sojourning in foreign lands, so we are sojourning in a place that is not our ultimate home (Hebrews 11:13-16). We are still looking for a better country. 

And we know God is refining us, too, even as we go through our difficult times. And so we trust in His plan and process. God always is at work among his people, even as we look at the bare spots. 

Chris

Dear church,

I went to the eye doctor the other day. I have been having trouble with slightly blurry vision when I read. It’s gotten to the point where I am pushing things away from my face in order to see them clearly. And my arms are barely long enough now. 

The eye doctor came into the room and said, “Welcome to being older than 40.” So that was reassuring. After she completed the eye exam, she looked at me and said, “Everything is normal. Your vision is actually better than most people your age. But I have to tell you, it will keep getting worse. There will come a point when you won’t be able to read anything without glasses. We can’t do anything about that. So just get used to it.”

I used to be proud of my eyesight. A lot of my friends and other people I know have been forced into glasses and contact lenses, and I was just trucking along with 20/20 vision, not even thinking about it. 

And now, the decline in my vision has been diagnosed. The doctor gave me some medical term for it that I have since forgotten, but she said it’s totally normal. Everyone will suffer from poor vision in their lives, if they live long enough.

When I was in high school, my dad suggested I should try to be an optometrist when I grew up. I asked him why I should pursue that profession. He said, “Because everyone eventually needs glasses. You’ll have great job security.”

He was right, of course. That’s a bit of advice I sometimes wish I had followed. At the eye doctor’s office, all sorts of people came in – young and old. An elderly lady was there with her walker. Her friend told her she would go wait in the car until she was done. “What!?!” the elderly lady said. The friend then shouted – “I’m going to go wait in the car!” 

Hearing loss probably will come to me, too.

Having never worn glasses, I was overwhelmed at the choices a person has in frames. I stood there for a long time looking at dozens – probably hundreds – of frame styles. How does a person even know what to pick? Thick frames, thin frames, no frames, Harry Potter glasses, heavy smart-guy glasses. And then there’s anti-glare lenses. And you have to decide whether to have “transition” glasses that turn into sunglasses when you are outside. 

I’m sure I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know!

So I just gathered up a selection of frames and took them to Mary, who is an experienced wearer of glasses, and I asked her just to tell me what to buy. “Which ones do you like?” she asked as I cycled through half a dozen frames. I told her I had no idea because I hadn’t even looked in the mirror with any of them on. After we settled on her two finalists, I finally found a mirror. 

I saw a man in decline. 

It’s the inevitable decline. We are frail people, you know. Our bodies work pretty well for about 30 years and then things begin not to work quite as well. And we must come to terms with this. A lot of people care very much about their health, of course, and this is easier said than done. These bodies of ours are pretty important to us.

And if we don’t believe in the resurrection, they are REALLY important to us.

One of the most interesting things about my trip to the eye doctor was watching people try on glasses while wearing their facemasks. COVID-19 plays a role in everything we do now. I noticed that the moment I put on a pair of glasses while wearing a facemask, I fogged over the lenses. Mary had warned me about this problem.

The people working in the eyeglass shop monitored the number of people who were coming into the building so they could stay in compliance with the pandemic regulations. They roped off the entrance when they hit max capacity.

So here we were, a dozen or so of us humans who were trying on eye glasses, dealing with a pretty important decline in one of our bodily functions – our vision – while at the same time being as careful as possible to keep from getting the coronavirus and making things all the worse. 

Our bodies are fragile and declining. We know that. Let’s not exacerbate things. 

And back in Genesis 35, Jacob tells his family, “Put away the foreign gods that are among you …” It seems Rachel’s theft of her father’s household gods had spread like gangrene within the family (Genesis 31:19).

And so they put them away. And Jacob threw them all under a tree. 

What are our “household gods”? Can our physical health become a god to us? Can it become an idol? I think we know that it can. The reality of COVID-19 has forced this issue to the front-burner for Christians. We have to decide just what we think about our health – and our ability to protect it. 

I think this has been a good thing. 

We want to care for our health. We want to be responsible for it, and so we put on our masks, stay six feet apart, and use hand sanitizer until we bleed. But at the same time, we must recognize that we can’t really control our health. I can’t do anything about my eyes. And I can’t guarantee I won’t get COVID, even if I take the vaccine and wear my mask. 

Our bodies simply will do what they will do. 

The danger is in trying to be in total control of our health. To think of our health as some sort of highest good, some item to protect at all costs, leads us to an unhealthy place – in a spiritual sense. It can cause us to be anxious, and it can cause us to develop an unhealthy view of the things God has created. We begin to worship, in a sense, created things (ourselves) rather than the Creator. 

We need to “put it away,” as Jacob told his own family. Our good health, if we have it, is a gift from God himself. And I believe our declining health, which many of us are experiencing today, can be a gift as well – if we keep it in perspective.

Chris

Dear church,

This chapter made me think about guilt – and cancel culture. We know a little about each of these. 

Guilt occurs when we do something wrong, and we know it. Our consciences mess with our minds. We feel terrible because we have sinned. There’s a blot in our lives, a memory of impurity. We feel even more terrible when we sin again. And this guilt is heightened when we go for a long time without committing some of our own personal signature sins – those sins that we have struggled with for years – and then suddenly fall back into them. 

We are burdened by guilt. 

And then we go to church, or we read our bibles, and we learn again about Jesus’ death on the cross – for our sins and because of our sins. And our guilt grows. We did that. We put Jesus on the cross. 

So that’s guilt. Now I also thought about cancel culture.

Cancel culture is when someone does something that is offensive to our cultural norms, whether everyone agrees with our cultural norms or not. The person doesn’t have to intend to do something bad. He or she just finds that what he or she did was offensive to others in some way. The prevailing culture then “cancels” that person. The person is fired from a job or removed from social media. No one is immune from cancel culture, even the president of the United States. 

The problem with cancel culture is the way it banishes forgiveness. Forgiveness, in cancel culture, is weakness. In this sense, forgiveness can be offensive. It offends the offended even more when the offender is forgiven by anyone. And so the forgiver, if you aren’t careful, can be canceled, too!

So Genesis 34, which is about rape and murder, reminded me of guilt and cancel culture. The reason is this: When impurity enters our lives, our natural instinct is to eliminate it and atone for it at all costs.

Look at Dinah’s brothers. They lived in a communal culture. Some sociologists call it a “strong-group” culture. Brothers and sisters looked out for one another. They defended one another. If you hurt one member of a family, you were hurting the whole family. Notice how the patriarch Jacob took a backseat in the action in this chapter. This was the whole family acting as one.

It was natural for the brothers to seek revenge for their sister, especially considering what Shechem was trying to do. The threat was the family of Israel blending in with the pagan nations of the Canaan, of it losing its distinctiveness. Shechem was trying to co-opt the future of Israel.

Faced with this impurity, with this blot on the sanctity and honor of the family (not to mention on Dinah), two of the brothers took it out on a whole tribe. Violence against the flesh ensued. 

I thought about guilt and cancel culture because this is what we tend to do when we discover with clarity our sin. We punish ourselves. We want to rid ourselves of the blot. We strive with all our flesh to make it right. We conjure up ways to keep from sinning again. We tell ourselves sometimes that we are no good, and that we’ll never be any good to anyone. We might even wonder whether we are worthy of anyone’s love, and if we are worthy of God’s love. 

We become guilty, and we want to fix our guilt in anyway we can. Unfortunately, we can’t. We don’t forgive ourselves. We might want to cancel ourselves, to settle in our minds that we are just no good at all.

Despite all our efforts at atonement, there’s only one way to become pure again, and that is through the grace of God. Notice how no one consulted God in this chapter. Simeon and Levi didn’t ask for God’s direction. In fact, it wasn’t until the start of the next chapter that God spoke up. 

And he told Jacob to build an altar. 

This is interesting. The family was told to go worship. Please realize this: Righteousness comes only by the way of God. And God’s way was to send himself to give us righteousness. This is why Christ came. He died your death so you wouldn’t have to. And he did it for joy (Hebrews 12:2).

And we learn to accept this as we walk with Christ. He said, “It is finished.” It already is done. There’s nothing more to do – for him or for you. 

We just trust Christ. We sin. We know this. As Christians, we trust Jesus enough to rest in him. 

Our impurities have been covered over already. We walk in new life, and we learn new habits and learn to push away sin with the help of the Holy Spirit. 

The consequence for the sin has been canceled so we don’t have to be.

Chris

Dear church,

The apostle Paul said he and the other apostles had been entrusted by God with the “ministry of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:18). Reconciliation means a broken relationship now is restored. God and humanity have a broken relationship because of sin. Humans consistently live contrary to God’s ways. We sin against him.  

Jesus Christ is the answer to this problem of brokenness. Paul wrote, “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:19).

The implication here is that those who are reconciled to God by putting their faith in Christ now have a part in this ministry of reconciliation. Paul demonstrated how this was done: “We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Corinthians 5:20). Christians ought to be doing the work of reconciliation, urging people to put their faith in Christ and to experience a restored relationship with God. 

In Genesis 33, Jacob seems to serve as a forerunner in this ministry of reconciliation. I am not sure Jacob actually needed to reconcile with Esau. God already had demonstrated his provision for his chosen people – even in the face of military threat (Genesis 14:14-15). We might expect Jacob would have had no problem – with the supernatural help of God – in defeating this force of 400 men led by his brother, Esau. 

But Jacob sent gifts instead. He adopted the posture of a servant, bowing down before Esau seven times. And where we expect to find conflict, we find a tender reunion. This is reconciliation. There is something very Christ-like here.

We can think of this as presenting to us a picture of God’s people encountering a world that ought to be hostile to it. The world is a place of conflict. And people, like Esau, frequently find their desires frustrated. God’s plan may at first seem to take away our “rights.”  

But the people of God are to serve as a blessing to that hostile world. For the first time, Jacob seemed to be carrying out that core mission of God’s people – “and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). 

The coming of Jacob turned out to be good news for Esau – in the form of 200 female goats, 20 male goats, 200 ewes, 20 rams, 30 milking camels and their calves, 40 cows, 10 bulls, 20 female donkeys, and 10 male donkeys (Genesis 32:13-15). 

This is a picture of reconciliation, the people of God bringing a blessing to the world. 

But Esau didn’t seem to too interested in all that livestock. He just seemed happy to see his brother, the chosen one (Genesis 33:4). After 20 years, Esau’s murderous anger finally seemed to have “turned away” from Jacob (Genesis 27:45).

What is the ministry of reconciliation today, in the age of the church as the people of God? I suppose it involves giving stuff away. We’ve done that quite a bit as a church. We’ve given away money to people in the community, and we’ve done some pretty elaborate things to help out the businesses in town. And before the COVID-19 pandemic, we allowed people to use our church building rent-free. Is this the ministry of reconciliation? We have tried to be a blessing to the people in our community.

As individuals, we also try to be a blessing to people. There’s a whole worldview that’s been built up, both inside and outside the church, around the concept of social justice. A lot of the principles within that worldview are biblical. Be a good neighbor. Help the poor. Look out for the needy and oppressed. Is this the ministry of reconciliation?

I don’t know. “We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Corinthians 5:20). Paul also said, “From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer” (2 Corinthians 5:16).

The begging of people to be reconciled to God goes beyond the “flesh,” which we know is very this-worldly, very temporary. Esau was a man of the flesh in his younger days, so craving for a bowl of soup that he gave away his birthright.

It seems to me we ought to go beyond the “flesh” in our ministry of reconciliation. We need to offer people the good news about eternal life. We need to present them with the way of salvation. We need to do more than simply giving people stuff – flocks and herds and milking camels and money and rent-free church buildings. 

Esau, rather inexplicably, didn’t seem to care much about those things. His eyes were only for his brother, Jacob, the chosen one of God (Romans 9:13). Jacob represented the promises of God. Those things were bound up in Jacob and his family, and Esau came and embraced him.

We carry those promises with us, too. The same promises that were bound up in Jacob are in us as well. 

And then we so often give stuff away – fleshly stuff – because we feel like we ought to do such things to be a blessing. These are things of the flesh, however. Our ministry of reconciliation runs the risk of stopping at the level of the flesh. 

But we have something eternal to offer, something more. “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. … Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 5:21; 6:2).

I guess my question is this: Should we dispense with all things acts of charity if we are not also coming to people with the explicit “message of reconciliation,” as Paul described it. The unbelieving world is happy to take our physical stuff. I’ve never been rebuffed when trying to give stuff away! But without the gospel, it’s just stuff. 

People need to know who we are as children of God, as bearers of the promise. They may not embrace us because of that. Esau’s descendants certainly didn’t continue to embrace the children of God. Just keep reading the story, and you will see.

But the best thing we can give is the good news of Jesus Christ. Our highest desire ought not to be to offer food or money (although both are good). It ought to know we have faithfully served as true ministers of reconciliation.

That was a bit of a ramble today. Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are always welcome!

Chris 

Dear church,

Here is your main point for today: Humans are schemers, and God is sovereign. That is to say, humans are very good at plotting and planning and doing their own thing. Humans continue to be very good, as they were at the Tower of Babel, of seeing something they want and then pursuing it with tenacity. And it doesn’t matter whether the thing they are seeking is good or bad, righteous or evil. And it doesn’t matter whether the thing was well-conceived or not. Humans will scheme to get what they want. 

God, meanwhile, is sovereign. That is, he is in total control. His plans will go forward whether humans participate in them or not. But, of course, the book of Genesis makes clear God wants humans to participate in his plans for humanity. God’s plans are for our benefit and flourishing, not God’s. 

We see a series of human schemes in this section of Scripture, from Genesis 25-32. And this isn’t the only scheming we’ve seen in Genesis, but we have to stop and start somewhere. 

Jacob, of course, schemed to obtain Esau’s birthright. A famished older brother was just wanting some stew. He was exhausted. Jacob, of course, was a man of deception and struggle. Jacob, by his very nature, was a schemer. “Sell me your birthright now,” he said (Genesis 25:31). Jacob might have been surprised Esau was willing to go along. His birthright for a bowl of soup? But here, Jacob’s scheming starts. 

At some point, it entered Jacob’s mind that the birthright – the ability to collect the inheritance – was a very valuable thing to have. And Jacob decided he would obtain it on his own, even though his mother already had received the prophecy that “the older shall serve the younger” (Genesis 25:23).

This is what schemers do. They see something they want, or understand something should be theirs, and they go grab it. And we want to rationalize this text to make Jacob seem righteous, and we can almost do it. Esau was a fleshly fool, after all. But something doesn’t quite seem right about this, or at least it shouldn’t. 

Sinners scheme. Worldly people scheme. God’s people do not – and Jacob was one of God’s people! “They lay crafty plans against your people; they consult together against your treasured ones” (Psalm 83:3).

A little, off-the-cuff scheme that goes well can embolden the schemer. Bigger schemes can be concocted. This is what we see when Jacob goes to his father, who was old and couldn’t see well. Jacob lied to his father boldly. Isaac asked, “Are you really my son Esau?” Jacob responded, “I am” (Genesis 27:24). 

And so our suspicions about Jacob prove to be true. He was a liar and a cheat. His swindling his older brother out of his birthright was a prelude. God’s people aren’t to do this sort of thing. These are the ways of the world. “They search out injustice, saying, ‘We have accomplished a diligent search.’ For the inward mind and heart of a man are deep” (Psalm 64:6).

Jacob’s schemes result in him running away. Schemers must run. And the scheming of Jacob seems to be only rivaled by the scheming of Laban. But we probably feel better about Laban’s scheming because Laban hadn’t been given the promises of God that Jacob has received. And, when Jacob awoke the next morning and found Leah by his side, we feel a little bit of satisfaction. Jacob reaped what he sowed. “What is this you have done to me?” Jacob demanded (Genesis 29:25). The deceiver was deceived. Perhaps he learned his lesson. 

But the fact of the matter is, human scheming prevailed on the earth. Laban saw what he wanted – a husband for his firstborn daughter. And Laban schemed to get what he wanted. “All day long they injure my cause; all their thoughts are against me for evil. They stir up strife, they lurk; they watch my steps, as they have waited for my life. For their crime will they escape? In wrath cast down the peoples, O God!” (Psalm 56:5-7).

Jacob wanted to marry Rachel. She’s the one whom he had fallen madly in love with. But after the double marriage, Rachel proved to be barren. A pregnancy wasn’t coming to her even as it was coming to her older sister, Leah. That’s why she wanted Reuben’s mandrakes. Mandrakes were considered an aid to fertility. 

The schemes of humanity continued. If God won’t do it, I will. This might be our unspoken mantra sometimes. If God won’t help me, I at least ought to help myself. And I might do it not in God’s ways but in the ways of the world. Rachel knew having children was a sign of worldly success. And she, too – much like Esau – was hungry and desired satisfaction. “Please give me some of your sons mandrakes” (Genesis 30:14).

Leah, meanwhile, wasn’t immune to scheming. She knew an opportunity when she saw it. A few mandrakes for Rachel could give her more opportunities to spend time with Jacob. Perhaps she could find her way to more sons. “You must come in to me,” she told Jacob, “for I have hired you with my son’s mandrakes” (Genesis 30:16).

You might notice that no one here was seeking God. No one was crying out to him. No one was pursuing him. “They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt; there is none who does good, not even one” (Psalm 14:3; also Romans 3:10-12).

The scheming continues unabated. Jacob’s odd breeding program shows us he still was looking for ways to get ahead using his own devices. My own personal opinion is Jacob was using what amounted to some sort of local superstition or imitation magic when he put those peeled sticks around the water troughs. There seemed nothing particularly holy about what Jacob was doing. And God proved to Jacob in a vision it was God who turned that flock striped, spotted, and mottled (Genesis 31:12). Remember, God is sovereign.

So what are we to make of all of this scheming? God picked a pretty lousy group of people through whom to work! But he only had lousy people to work with! Let’s not judge Jacob, Esau, Isaac, Rebekah, Laban, Leah, and Rachel – all of whom had obvious flaws – without also looking in the mirror. 

We are active schemers, too. We see things we want, and we go after them. We don’t sense God is working, or he is not working fast enough. And so we do the work for him. At other times, God isn’t in our thoughts at all. God’s plan for us and for his church and for the world is the furthest thing from our minds. We just go do what we do to get what we want. 

Think about the scheming that occurs today. Think about investment traders, driving the price of stock up and down for a profit, scheming their way to success. Think about the way we want material things and can’t have them, and so we accumulate debt to get them. Think about the scheming conversations we sometimes have with people, passive-aggressively trying to get what we want without the person realizing we only are trying to get what we want. 

God uses flawed people because there are no others. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). But God also can use flawed people, whether they know it or not. And God can use the things of our lives to bring about his good in the world.

The apostle Paul wrote, “But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us” (2 Corinthians 4:7). God does his work in the lives of schemers so that when they stop to reflect, they can see that the ultimate good brought out of their lives was nothing they did on their own. It was all God. 

Jacob and Rachel and the rest were merely cheap jars of clay. And so are we. Sinful schemers – every one of us. But God is sovereign. And now we carry very precious promises inside of us.

This is what makes Jacob’s wrestling match with God so valuable for us to consider. I’ve thought about this story a lot during the past few days. Jacob was a man who wrestled with God and God’s purposes throughout his life. It would take a miracle for God to work his promises out in the world through this schemer. And yet …

I find it valuable to remember Jacob wrestled with God at night – all night, it seemed – struggling against this angel, struggling to submit. And by the end, Jacob had come around. “I will not let you go until you bless me” (Genesis 32:26). Jacob finally realized that humans need the blessing of God to thrive. The blessing of God is what matters. 

In reading about Jacob’s wrestling match with God, I don’t know whether we should think about Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane or not. But this is what I think about. A struggle took place on that night. The man of God struggled with the purposes of God. “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death. … Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will” (Mark 14:34-36).

God is sovereign. Only God himself could enter into human life and push aside the scheming ways of man. Only Jesus Christ could wrestle with God, not for a blessing, but to be a blessing to the world – to do the thing that the family of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was always aimed to do. 

Humans are schemers, and God is sovereign. 

Knowing this, how should we live? Quit scheming. Repent of it – all of it. And rest in God. Like Jacob, cling to him. Ask God for a blessing rather than making it all happen yourself. 

We have come to understand that good things follow hard work, and even better things follow smart, hard work. And so we work hard and smart.

But do we pray first? Do we pursue God before we start our smart, hard work?

And do we submit to God? Do we give our lives over to his will?

The Christian life, it seems to me, is a pure life. Our motives our pure, and our desires are simple. We want more of God and whatever it is he wants in our lives. And we wait for him to show us what to do, how to live, how to respond, and we allow him to have his way with us in everything we do. 

The answer might be to pray more. It also might be to slow down, to evaluate every action, to see where our human scheming is stepping in front of God’s way for us. Now it is your turn to reflect.

Chris