God Has a Name
Hello readers. It’s been two weeks since you’ve heard from me, happy to report Thanksgiving went well. I went to Idaho and made my uncle run a 5k turkey trot with me, he had fun - there’s a lesson in there about trying new things. There was a baby at the house on Thanksgiving, that was also really fun. And think whatever you want about politics, but the rest of my family was in a good mood based on how things went down in early November. Overall, good trip.
Today I made it through about a hundred pages of John Mark Comer’s new book God Has a Name. I think Comer’s getting into the frequently seen write-a-book-every-year phase of Pastoral Ministry and I, for one, am excited for the content, though not necessarily as excited for my “books I bought but haven’t read yet” stack to keep growing (although there is something comforting about having books on deck(?). Can I get an amen?). It’s been a good book, it reads like he’s talking to the reader which honestly is my favorite style of writing, don’t tell anyone. Some of it is a miss on me: he just recently used the word “bajillion”, and in a section that I’d say was unnecessary (verging on inappropriate) made a link between the possibility of a specific malevolent spiritual being and some specific tragedies in a certain part of the country (p. 85, for anyone who’s read it already, or will)...that I could have done without. Other than that, loving it.
He’s writing primarily about Exodus 34 when God essentially explains to Moses who he is. “And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.” I think we forget what a monumental act of grace it is for God to tell us anything about himself. It’s the hubris of the westerner to live in a universe as complex as this a still say “god is dead” (as if for all of human history, God has been mere delusion), to discount the historical validity of Scripture and render it all fiction, or entirely ignore spiritual realities in other parts of the world without considering the enemy’s main course of action in the West is the lullaby method (see Screwtape Letters, Lewis, 1942).
There’s a point that Comer makes in the first few chapters about this passage that got me going. When people ask us to tell them about God, we often reply with the “omni’s”: he’s omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient. All true, and earth shattering on their own, but I wonder how helpful they are to the modern thinker. I started working vocationally in student ministry when I was 20 (I’m 28 now, yikes) and one of the…bajillion…lessons I’ve learned over the years is the importance of contextualization, and how to do that without being condescending. I don’t have time to flesh that out, maybe another blog post, but I’ll give an example - if I stand up to give a talk to students and my main analogy is about how when you get into your late 20’s your lower back starts hurting, I should just sit back down before I start. What good will that do them? Or, I’m not going to give a Wednesday night talk on intinction during communion unless my boss makes me. Not that none of them know what age is, or pain, or dipping bread in wine (grape juice!) but they’re young and their bodies are made of rubber and they can eat pizza and mountain dew then immediately go run 5 miles at race pace. I also hate it when people talk down to students, that’s definitely an article coming down the pipe. Anyway…
My point is this: why abandon God’s own concise description of himself for something that can come across inaccessible or academic to your average friend. With all due respect, they don’t care to try and wrestle with how God can be here and there, they want to know if He cares about them. They’re not interested in finding out that God is all powerful, they want to know how he can be that and still let Hurricane Helen happen. They want to know whether or not the guilty go unpunished. They want to know if they’re still loveable. Let them know!
Have a great weekend.
In love,
Josh
