Archive | Old Testament

Attributed to Dierick Bouts the Elder, Nethderlands, 1447 – Moses and the Burning Bush, with Moses Removing His Shoes

It’s summertime! * And with it come visions of barbecues, long summer days, walks in the woods and glorious starry nights.

All these powerful aspects of nature have been a focus the past few months while preparing three talks for a Bible conference on Scriptural Metaphors in Nature. What a powerful topic and the two brief pieces for the June newsletter are glimpses into lessons learned. If you too love the Psalmist’s cry:   “Heaven is declaring God’s glory; the sky is proclaiming his handiwork” (Ps. 19:1, Common English Bible), sit back and read on. 

When you think of ‘fire’ in the Bible, you might go to its utility as a means of cooking, creating tools or heating homes. Such uses are reasonable and common. But it is the Bible’s metaphorical use of fire that reveals a two-part pattern of affliction and purification, devastation and deliverance.

Such meanings grow out of the literal nature of fire as a changing form of matter whose chemical reactions make it self-perpetuating. In other words, fire keeps burning as long as it has fuel and oxygen to feed it.

Wow. Those ancient Biblical writers zeroed in with laser insight on fire’s ‘self-perpetuating’ characteristic and saw its too frequent counterpart in human nature’s worst characteristics running unchecked. Isa. 9:18 describes how ‘wickedness burned like a fire.’ Since “wicked” isn’t a word often used today, substitute its 21^st century similarities– anything criminal, barbarous, illegal, despicable, odious and outrageous. Doesn’t such behavior, usually designed to produce ‘shock and awe,’ show itself daily in the worst kind of self-indulgence?

Yet this is precisely what the prophet understood when he declares in the next verse (Isa. 9:19) that ‘the people became like fuel for the fire; no one spared another.’ Besides originating the English expression, ‘adding fuel to the fire,’ Isaiah captures how the darkest aspects of human nature feed division, immorality, discontent.

The Bible never leaves us at this description of the problem but lifts to the answer. Its many references to fire often include the concept of sacrifice. What must be relinquished in order to have the fire of inspiration burn instead?

In Abraham’s case, it seemed to be doubt that needed sacrificing. In its place, Abraham was learning to trust in the very God that had provided his son Isaac; that somehow this God wouldn’t be like the quixotic tribal gods surrounding his people, governing by whim and vendetta. Rather Abraham was finding God could be counted on to consistently bless not punish His offspring. A ram was supplied instead of a son as an appropriate sacrifice on this open fire of spiritual lesson-learning.

Most frequently, the Scriptures indicate that fire represented the presence of God, often through theophany’s (or ‘God-appearing’s’). Two vivid examples involving fire were the burning bush appearing to Moses, and the pillar of fire that led the children of Israel through the wilderness.

A revealing exercise is to look for the Biblical uses of fire and see what it represents: sacrifice, God’s presence, purification or something else. As we discover such specific examples throughout the Old Testament, the New Testament’s Pentecostal moment of ‘tongues of fire’ (Acts 2:3) takes on fresh meaning. And as you explore, we’d love to hear what you’re discovering so please share with Bible Roads’ readers.

Watch for the release on streaming video of the complete three talks on the Bible and nature, coming July 1st under the title: “Spiritual Sustainability: A Biblical Perspective”. And now for that walk in the woods…

• At least in North America, so my apologies to our friends in Australia and New Zealand.

Everyone knows what light means – whether it’s the child convinced it’s all that stands between monsters and his bed, or the person appreciating street lamps after leaving the theater. It just makes life better, easier, happier. In fact, light is defined as the energy source for illumination, the very power that makes sight possible.

If our fourth grade science lessons taught us anything, it was that the sun supplies light that provides energy to green plants, which in turn provides for other living things in that first big word learned: photosynthesis.

Think of the Bible as a lesson in a kind of spiritual photosynthesis, as God supplies the light man needs, who in turn reflects that needed light out to humanity.

With over 200 references to light in the Old and New Testaments, it’s quickly evident this is a major metaphor running its golden thread through the Bible. My question, when asked to give a talk (“Let there be Light”) for a recent conference on Biblical Nature Metaphors, was if there is a pattern throughout the Scriptures in how light is used?

I was a bit in awe to discover three distinct blueprints concerning light.

The first you might call the light of God or ‘Genesis light’. It’s the illumination at creation on that first day, when formlessness and emptiness give way to form and fullness.

This ‘Genesis light’ appears again on the fourth day of creation when lights separate day from night, with the sun and moon making their Biblical debut. How the ancient world revolved around light – with every primeval culture welcoming full moons turning their face to earth once a month. What a logical opportunity to worship, celebrate, dance and meet. The Jews even organized their original calendars around the moon’s cycles.

The Psalmist wrote about Genesis light as the very presence of God, all the time making it clear that this light was not God itself, as so many of their neighbors believed.   The Greeks might have revered Helios, god of the sun, or the Romans their Mithras, but the Hebrews understood God was behind the light, but not the material expression itself. “Let the light of your face shine on us, O Lord,” Ps. 4:6 declared. And “you are clothed with honor and majesty, wrapped in light as with a garment” (Ps 104:1).

One indication of the seriousness and significance of light appears in Exodus when one of the ten plagues is darkness. That it’s lineup–in the ever more grim manifestations of divine displeasure–is number nine, says much. Only the death of the firstborn child is worse than darkness covering the land. And the Exodus account makes clear such darkness, or absence of light, isn’t just experienced visually, but viscerally. ‘Then the Lord said to Moses, “Stretch out your hand toward heaven so that there may be darkness over the land of Egypt, a darkness that can be felt” (Ex. 10:21).

The other two aspects of light (the light of Christ and man’s role as light’s representative) will be discussed in subsequent blogs. You’ll also be able to hear and see the whole program later this summer around July 1, when a streaming video will be released on this and two other talks on Biblical metaphors of nature: “Spiritual Sustainability: A Biblical Perspective”.