Table of Contents

This could serve as a "table of contents" for my "book."  Here is the overview of all those people in the Bible who needed to have their head examined.  This is the raw material that God had to work with in order to create the masterpiece of history -- both the Bible and the grand sweep of the human story.
    I already mentioned the original sibling rivalry; then there was Noah's sons, Abraham and Sarah (and Hagar), and Abraham and Lot (I wrote it wrong last time -- not brothers but uncle and nephew), and Jacob (Isaac's son) "and two women," and Esau; Joseph, the 2nd youngest of the twelve sons of Israel (formerly Jacob).  
    Telling the short list to my friends last night (early December -- sorry I haven't written more sooner!), one mentioned Laban.  Jacob -- the name means "he deceives" -- first tricked Esau, then ran to his uncle, part of the story is what Rich Mullins sang about.

Now Jacob got two women and a whole house full of kids
And he schemed his way back to the promised land
And he finds it's one thing to win 'em
And it's another to keep 'em content
When he knows that he is only just one man

But Laban played Jacob, too.  It's hard for me to feel sorry for either one.
    Then there's King David (as I've already written).  Quite a few of the kings, even the good kings, had issues...
    There must be a separate category for Hosea, whom God told to go marry a prostitute; then, when she went back to "the trade," God called told him to go buy her back.  (Even if you don't read the whole book -- and it's short! -- go read the first four chapters!)
But what do you do with Isaiah, whom God made mute for a time?  There must be another chapter for the strange stories -- Ezekiel in the valley of the dry bones, and the Spirit of God picked up a prophet by the hair, or was it more than once? and the angel told two men to eat books (scrolls), and some of the dreams were just weird: pharoah dreaming of seven famine starved cows coming out of the Nile and eating seven fat cows!!
    Then, back to the wackos, the twelve disciples of Jesus: the sons of thunder, John and Peter and a tax-collector and a zealot (think IRS agent, but worse* and a Tea Party activist, but worse*).  And the story of Paul and John-Mark, which I'm sure has other explanations, but seems off and wrong, and I wonder how many more I can find.


What do you think?  Do you have a nomination for the oddest behavior in the Bible? or the strangest 'character'?
Want me to write a particular story?  Leave a comment

King David

So God picks the runt of the litter, and the prophet Samuel might've thought, "well, God does do things differently, so I'll anoint him and let God take care of him."
Saul is jealous of his victories.  So he keeps him close.  Jonathan and his father don't quite see eye to eye on this young upstart.  Saul fears him, then let's him marry his daughter (with a bride price of one hundred Philistine foreskins!!!), then he tries to kill him.  Did I mention the family fued between father and son?  Jonathan helps David escape.
Then there's the episode with Abigail:

David and his men camped near Nabal (one translation describes him simply by saying he "was harsh and behaved badly.") so David sent his men to greet him on a feast day and said, "look, we've been good neighbors, would you share some of your bounty?"  (Not out of character for that time!)  But Nabal rebuffs his request.  Then his servants go to his wife and say, "do you know that your husband is treating these men poorly, but they're good to have around."
David and company were on their way to attack; David said, "so much for being the nice guy.  I'll kill 'em all!"
But Abigail came and brought a peace offering, and said, "Don't mind him, he's a fool just like his name [his name is literally translated "fool"].  Here, let's not fight today."  And David relented.
Although she didn't tell her husband during the party he was throwing, the next morning, when he was sober, Abigail told Nabal all that had gone on, and he fainted dead away.  Ten days later, he died.
So David also married Abigail.  The last verses of chapter 25 of I Samuel records this, matter-of-factly:

And Abigail hurried and rose and mounted a donkey, and her five young women attended her.  She followed the messengers of David and became his wife.  David also took Ahinoam of Jezreel, and both of them became his wives.  Saul had given Michal his daughter, David's wife, to Palti the son of Laish, who was of Gallim.

 (There's a line in a song by Rich Mullins, I quoted once to a friend, "well it's right there in the Bible, so it must not be a sin, but it sure does seem like an awful dirty trick."  I was not serious then, nor was Rich, and it refers to another story, worth writing, too, but there you go -- it's right there in the Bible.)

Then it takes a soap opera to make David king after Saul dies.

The story goes on an on, but what, you may ask, is the point?  The point is that when God wrote the story, He had to work with what He had.  And all He had -- or has -- to work with is flawed, faulty human beings.  Such is the stuff of this life.  More, God is no more surprised by the short-comings of us humans today than He was back then. When I have to deal with whackos -- all too often, I think -- it's good to know that God does understand; He's had to deal with the same insanity, the same craziness, the same disorders as I do.  "Disorders" -- from the prefix "dis," which means separated from (dis-connected, dis-jointed, dis-eased); separated from order.  That is a great definition.

Shocking Stories

So two kings met to go to war; the one suggested they inquire of the seers -- all but one suggested they would be victorious.  He warned one of the others that he would know who was telling the truth when he (the one who said they would win) was hiding in the bathroom.
The second king said, "you go to battle dressed in royal robes, but I'm going in disguise."
But the enemy had said, "don't kill anyone but the evil king."  (That would be the second one).  The soldiers were going to attack the first one until he cried out, and they knew he wasn't the one they were after.  However, one archer shot an arrow at random and it hit and killed the second king.
He rode his chariot home, but died outside the city wall.
What would you think if I said this story was taken straight from the Bible?  See I Kings 22
I even left out some of the interesting aspects of the story.

Tim Hansel writes, in his book Holy Sweat, "Many of us have one of two basic problems with Scripture reading.  One is that many of us are unfamiliar with the Scriptures. [...]  The second problem is much more subtle and dangerous---we can become too familiar with the Bible's stories and characters so that they no longer astound us."  He lists some of the shocking stories

• In the opening pages of Scripture, amidst the stupendous flourish of creation, we are told that the culmination of all God's artistic ecstacy is that he created man---in his image, no less . . . out of dirt.  A moral agent out of mud.  [emphasis mine]

• He chooses a barren, grumpy old couple named Abraham and Sarah to give birth to a nation that would change human history for all time.  Can't you see Sarah laughing in her 90-year-old apron?

I quote at length because I can't say it better myself

• Then he decides to save this unique nation from captivity through an unemployed Egyptian-Israelite prince who tends sheep and stutters.  He reveals himself to the man through a scrub bush.  And later he puts the Red Sea on dry cycle long enough to allow this ungrateful nation to cross.

• He chooses a teenager who doesn't even have his high school diploma yet to nail a nine-foot enemy right between the eyes with a rock.  The boy grows up to become "a man after God's own heart"---even though the man pulls off one of the biggest blunders in the Old Testament.

That list is incredibly short, and it goes on (later):

The New Testament opens with the most flabbergasting incident of all time---that same Author of creation decided to reveal himself by being born . . . in a barn . . . to a virgin.  Later he set about astounding those around him:

• He took a trusting kid's leftover lunch and fed enough people to fill the Hollywood Bowl and still had enough left over for each of the disciples to have his own take-home basket.  Can you imagine what they were thinking and how these men felt on the way home?
  

• He outrageously shocked, surprised, and exasperated the religious community o the time, the Pharisees.  When the brought him a woman caught in adultery, he wrote something in the dirt and asked the sinless to throw the first stone.  When they dared him to break the Sabbath laws, he did so while quoting Scripture.
  

• The went to parties with people of questionable social standing and morality, and threw "respectable" tradesmen from the temple's steps.  He called Herod "that fox," and was himself looked upon as "a wine bibber and a glutton, a friend of outcasts and sinners."
  

• Rather than sharing the news of who he really was the the proper authorities, he revealed who he really is to a . . . Samaritan . . . woman who had had a handful of husbands and lovers.  Doesn't that at least confuse your prayer life?
  

• He chose the number one persecutor of his followers to become his top evangelist.  And then he gave the keys to the kingdom to the disciple who failed him so badly he denied him three times in one night.  [ed.: with cursing]

Does it sound like my book is already written?  Not by a long shot, but I include that full quote -- most of that is direct quote, but for a few lines -- because I want to awaken people to the outlandish aspects of the Bible.  (I recommend the entire book, by the way, or anything else written by Tim Hansel.)

I'll demonstrate with David next...

My Biography

Know for sure that this is much longer, and more detailed than absolutely necessary, and I'd appreciate a kindly review -- but any and all constructive criticism is welcome.

Last year I was 39 years old.  My son was two years old.  I was as old then as my dad was when he died.  I was fifteen at the time.
But my story does not start there -- nor is that the end.
I was thinking yesterday that I remember almost nothing of my high school graduation.  But when I graduated from Bethel College, in 1992, I recall one friend shouting out my nickname as I walked across the platform.  That contrast is entirely emblematic of the difference between the two educational experiences.  I was very introverted in high school -- more precisely, I was a wall-flower.
I started to come out of my shell in college.  I tried out for the play (oh, I guess I was in the play my senior year of h.s.), I almost joined the declaim team.  I had a lot more friends, and sought out a lot more people.  Don't misunderstand: I was still an introvert.  I vividly recall an instance where I was obliged to attend a party, and I sat quietly on the couch and smiled politely.  That was my senior year of college, and I had a roommate who would've made a great used car salesman; he noticed my "discomfort" and said, "wow, Greg, your really a typical geek, aren't you?"  (Well, words to that effect.  He saw clearly, and said clearly that I was not comfortable in a crowd.)  But it was a transition, and not an immediate change.
A few years later, I would join ToastMasters, and learn to enjoy public speaking.
There was a time, shortly after I was done with college, that I was at a birthday of a friend, and got to talking to her dad, someone who knew my life story.  He asked how I'd grown and changed -- it had been a few years since he'd seen me.  I said, very perceptively, I think, that the person I was at twenty would not recognize the person I was at thirty.  If somehow the younger me could have met the older me, the difference would not be just a matter of gradual maturation, so I could've guessed the eventual result, but a radical change, a growth and transformation unexpected.  It was almost as if, when my dad died, my emotional and social growth halted, paused.  And it seems now as if it took almost a decade before I resumed the process of maturing.  Oh, I grew, and learned -- intellectually and physically, I grew, but there are aspects of my personality that did not continue progressing.  Somewhere along the line, I took deliberate control of the process.  Well, at least I deliberately decided to grow up.
I heard a speaker, addressing parents, primarily, who said that (most) other cultures, besides our own, have a ceremony where a father and/or society at large take a young boy and essentially tells him, by word or deed that, "now you are a man."  An example would be a bar mitzvah.  Something in what he said made sense to me, so there was an occasion where I took myself out to supper (steak), and said to myself, "self, from this day forward, you are a man."  You can laugh at that, or you can recognize some sense in it.  Most people have some transition, whether they acknowledge it as such or not -- it may be the first time you have someone address you at "sir" or "ma'am."  For some, I think, it is the day they're of legal age to drink -- a poor milestone, to my mind, but a marker nonetheless.

I write those two things together as if they're related -- they occurred around the same time, but neither is the cause of the other.  My delayed maturation and my declaration of adulthood.  I wanted to record that there was a significant event where I declared myself a man, unrelated to sex.  Also, it is important that, to understand me, you know that some aspects of my emotional development were delayed by a decade, but eventually I caught up.  But it was not an automatic change.  It was an act of volition, as was so many parts of my life.

When I started writing this, I didn't know it would be so much; but I guess since my story has been full so far, and I want to set it down, there are more paragraphs than I thought.  Also, I know this will later get edited down to size, but when I was learning to write poetry, my mentor taught me, "first, get it all down, and condense it later."  So here it is.

So here I am today, and yesterday my son was born -- three years ago; before that I got married (can it really be seven years?).  I've always been one to be where I am now, and not look back.  My wife laughs at my memory, because to me, anything that happened last week was "a month ago," and something longer ago than that was "years ago."  Some time back, though, we drove near the apartment I was living in while we were dating, and my wife asked if I ever missed it.  I never think about such things.  Oh, I do feel nostalgia at times, but not in a specific way, like "I wish this or that circumstance were the way it was," but only in the most generic sense of, "things seemed better long ago
There are chapters I've left out -- almost a decade and a half when I lived a bachelor's life; the years my sister and I shared an apartment; my introduction and the eventual expulsion of my step-father from my life (also, a story, or even several, for later!).

But I did live those things -- I was born in Ortonville, MN, and lived there until I went to Bethel.  I have lived in Minnesota all my life, from the small town to many of the suburbs of the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan area.  I grew up in a "Christian home."  I learned to love God early, and have always known that He loves me.  I've memorized Scripture, learned the books of the Bible, studied lessons, taught myself the Apostles' Creed (my denomination of origin is Baptist, very non-liturgical, so I wasn't exposed to any formal creeds until much later in life).  I've read the Bible from cover to cover, more than once, and still find that I don't know it all.  I've meditated on the character of God as expressed by Jesus Christ, and still find that I have a faith that is much smaller than I'd like.  My brother and I are both computer programmers, and my sister and I have shared discussions and disagreements for years.

And I have not written much, yet, about the younger brother and sister -- my brother was just here to visit this weekend.
My mom is an incredible woman, who, I now realize, has lived as many lives as I have -- different though they may be -- and more.  This last year she survived the death or her own mother, an incredible woman of faith herself -- and the death of a spouse (I'd say, "last year," but I know it was 1985, and I was less than half as old as I am now...), and raising five kids... 
My mom doesn't just give guilt trips, she's a registered travel agent.  But I owe much of my personality to her, and no small part of my empathy for others, and my faith in God is larger because of her.
No small part of what I could write in my book is due to my family, but I will try not to embarrass them too much, because I am still and will always be part of that family.  Read on for the Introduction...
But this has been a "short" introduction to what has been, in reality, a short life, so far.

My Idea for a Book

    Sarah has a crazy sister.  Who doesn't have a weird sibling? you may ask.  I was talking to her and was commiserating, and agreeing, and thinking, does every family have some member who is strange, or difficult to deal with, or at least a little off?
    The old joke is that one in four people is a little crazy, so if you look at three of your friends and they're normal, then it's you!
    Of course most people can think they're perspective is right, and other people are not normal, and I don't doubt that some may think I'm the one who's crazy.  I'll let you decide that momentarily.
    But here is what I was thinking: if Jesus really was "touched with the feelings of our infirmities," then he must be able to relate, right?  (See Hebrews 4:15.  I know the passage is talking about feeling tempted like we are, yet without sin -- the entire context is 4:14-16)  Truthfully, I was thinking of all the other weird people in the Bible.
    I owe this idea to Tim Hansel, from a book I read, I think, in high school.  There are two problems that Christians have with the Bible: one is that they are unfamiliar with what it says; the other is that they are too familiar with it.  And I started listing off characters: Cain killed Abel -- the original sibling rivalry, remember King David, mourning for Absalom, to the point that Joab had to come to him and tell him, "get your head out of the sand, and look at what effect you're having on your men!"  (See 2 Samuel 19:5-7); Abraham and Lot -- he says to his brother, "we shouldn't fight, you pick one place, I'll go to the other."  So Lot says, "fine, I pick the best plot of land for myself."  Before that, even, there was Sarah sending Hagar to Abraham.  And it's not just the Old Testament, the apostle Paul doesn't want John-Mark along, then later sends for him -- maybe not disordered, but a little odd, isn't it?
And the strangeness isn't absent even in the gospels: Jesus' own disciples are constantly fighting, and being very human -- the "sons of thunder" want to call down fire on the unreceptive towns, John calls himself "the disciple that Jesus loved."  Peter swears never to forsake Jesus and denies Him three times, cursing as he goes...
    But who am I that I should "accuse" the saints?  And am I even close to the truth?
And who in my family is the crazy one?  Sorry, I'm not going to write that here -- though both my wife and I agree, both of us about the other's in-laws, too.
    Don't read the following, I'll write my own chapter next.
    I am a forty year old, oldest son.  I have a brother two years younger than me, and a sister two years younger than that.  Then I have a brother seventeen years younger than me, and a sister nineteen years younger than me.  Do I sound self-centered, describing everyone in terms of me?  I can do one more: my dad died when I was fifteen.  That means that my brother was thirteen and my sister was eleven.  One is a half-brother and one a half-sister, but I've only ever thought of them as my youngest brother and sister, though at times it has felt more like an nephew and niece, but they've always only been siblings, in this together when our mother finally divorced their dad, and he basically disowned them, unfortunately....
   I am a graduate of Bethel College and Seminary -- now Bethel University -- but I have no degree in theology.  I'm a software engineer, but I've studied the Scripture, and try to be careful with the Word of God.  I'm a Christ-follower, but I'll stop short of labeling myself denominationally.
    So that is my basic introduction, boring though it may be, and my thesis is essentially this: crazy is not a new thing, and even the Bible shows characters unvarnished, and today you and I can take some comfort in the fact that God is not shocked by our human situation -- strange though it may be.


Expect this to be re-written over and over again; I welcome and encourage comments -- and criticism is okay, too, even snide remarks are acceptable.  Fire away, just let me know you've read this.

Coming Soon

Watch this spot for future updates. I'm going to write, and hopefully write a lot, and, if I can, sooner rather than later.