Creepy men who know it all

After the service where I preached a self-proclaimed and clearly complacent wannabee sage approached me. He had some answers to questions I clearly hadn’t asked. He volunteered his incredible insight regarding the place and future of Israel up to three number of places after the decimal point.
The ease and certainty with which he took Old Testament prophecies (with the aid of an abundant splat of rhetorical lubricant) and transferred these from thousands of years of history to 2018/19 left me with my mouth scraping the ground.
Completely blindsided I could not but produce sheepish noises as a response and felt myself sliding into a mild depression. The overwhelming sense of hopelessness and idiocy regarding my lack of basic knowledge in this (and other Biblical) matter descended on me like a dark blanket.

Apparently, my sermon must have triggered a sense of mission in the man: “I must seek to save Jan den Ouden.”

Back home I told Martha what happens to me when someone lectures me from a position of grandiosity and poses to have answers to every thinkable question. These people are slightly inhuman and more like machines that are designed to chop and destruct. These are the divisive elements that one finds in almost every church across the world.

In general, people don’t have an issue with open, honest and explorative conversations that are based on reciprocation. We call these dialogues and in general these result in deepening of mutual ideas, thoughts and convictions while affirming and respecting the other.
With a machine, you can’t have a conversation. You can just watch and listen to the often monotonous noise it produces while chopping and destructing.

“What an obnoxious man that is,” I summarised the result of that potentially constructive conversation.

My frustration can be traced back to the question what the Bible is to us. When you approach it as a step to step guide to construct a complicated and ingenious LEGO product, and you have determined beforehand what the product is supposed to look like, LEGO will take you quite far as there are plenty elements to construct what you want. LEGO was quite clear about the end product but (in this case) didn’t provide the step to step guide. Hence, we make up our own.

Or one can look at it as a Magic box. I remember I had one as a kid. It housed 150 magic tricks of which I mastered five. That was impressive enough to leave my peers flabbergasted so I couldn’t bother learning the remaining 145. The Bible is a big enough book to pick and choose your favourite tricks and try to impress your friends with those five.

The “mantra” of many believers across the world is “God is love and everything he does, he does out of love.” Many people (believers and non-believers alike) take offence at this kind of unjustified reduction. It’s like water-skiing over double sweetened whipped cream as if there’s not a care in the world, let alone the thought that God might have other characteristics that are a bit harder to explain and implement. Take the idea of a jealous God for instance. Have a go at that one!
(I am writing this blog because I have been asked to preach on this particular attribute and am supposed to prepare for it but felt this sudden urge to write this blog in order to justify my procrastination).

Yes, go ahead and reproach my infantile simplicity when I claim to believe that the Bible is about how God relates to the world and man, and what this teaches us about how we are to relate to God, each other and the world in which we live. At the centre of that story, we find Christ who wants and is able to restore the relationships that are broken. Only in Him and through Him life gets a deeper sense of meaning and purpose. Outside of Him it remains complicated and hopeless.

By the way, if ever anyone catches me slowly morphing into a machine, stop me!