Welcome to the professional website and personal weblog of Jeremy Del Rio. Whether you're a client, friend, or curious onlooker, please don't stay a spectator. Engage the conversation. Your contributions matter here.
« A fly on the wall | Home | Reaching post-Christians »
Who are the Bible’s real heroes?
By Jeremy | March 13, 2007
J, theological question for you to think about. Phrased in it’s broadest form… who is the hero/are the heroes of the Bible? Are the O.T. saints to be revered for their ability, accomplishments, leadership skills, ethics, etc.? Or are they just jacked up sinners to whom God extended free grace? The truth is that the primary (only?) thing to be admired/pursued/mimicked is their FAITH. Interestingly, the Bible insits that even that faith was a gift from God, and so again our attention flows back to God, not men, not ever. His glory will not be shared with another. It’s his. All of it.Phrased differently, is the Bible a story about man's pursuit of God, God's pursuit of man, or a combination of both? Is it about God's abounding, eternal grace, man's faith (and by extention, courage to obey) in that grace, or a combination of both? No matter how the question is phrased, I believe the answers to be both/and. The Bible is both a story about a merciful and just and loving God who extends free grace to jacked up sinners, and it's also about sinners deciding whether to receive the grace God offers. Time and again throughout Scripture, God presents sinners with options: Be bold. Have courage. Meditate on the law. Do what it says. Confess your sins. Walk humbly. Be kind. Love God. Love your neighbors. Live by faith. Don't worry. Seek first the kingdom of God and its righteousness. Do justice. Renew your mind. Run the race. I have trouble understanding those commands as computer code that programs the behavior of God's chosen few. Instead, they sound to me like choices God offers mankind, even in our fallen, sinful state. Hebrews 11 describes Old Testament heroes with the refrain, "By faith, [so and so] did ..." Every one, from Abel to Rahab to David made choices to act in the face of circumstances that told them acting was senseless, even suicidal. Yet their actions -- the "evidence of things not seen" -- is what Scripture commends them for. The mark of their faith was their obedience. Jesus put it this way: "If you love me, obey my commands." From my vantage point behind the dark glass through which we attempt to perceive God's eternal character, when Jesus instructed us to love him and others as ourselves – “do this†(Luke 10) – He wasn’t urging passive acceptance of an inevitability. He imbues his invitation to love with everything that makes the act of loving someone meaningful. James further describes our faith response to God's love in this way: "faith without deeds is dead" (James 2:26). Returning to the question, Hebrews 12:1-3 beautifully describes the Bible's real heroes as both Jesus who modeled the kind of selfless love he expects from us; and men and women who follow his example.
"Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of [Old Testament] witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart."What do you think?
Topics: faith, grace, theology | 4 Comments »
March 14th, 2007 at 3:34 pm
Yes, such a beautiful passage from Hebrews, a clear call to look to JESUS alone. The O.T. saints are merely witnesses compelling us not to write books and articles about them but to look to Jesus and His splendor. And so both/and is cool as long as it means: God PRIMARY. Saints SECONDARY. God HERO. Saints WITNESSES to GOD and His heroic grace freely extended to them and us.
The lion in a pit book is the problem. Seeing Benaiah as Hero gets the writer and us thinking “Hey, I can be a Hero, too, like Benaiah. Yeah. I can defeat my lions. My name can end up lights, too. I can do it if I try. The Gospel is about me conquering my lions.” That whole paragraph is oil to the Gospel’s water. It is man-centered trash. It sells because we all want to be the star, but God won’t have it.
Plus, it is death to my soul for me to try and be the Hero. Now the whole focus zooms into me and my works and my guts and my sinlessness and my accomplishments. If I succeed it sucks because I will pat myself on the back and God will come and rip my self-righteous legs from under me. If I fail it sucks because I will be so burdened down with the fact that I couldn’t overcome my lion (whatevere the hell that means). Either way, me as hero is death. But when God is Hero and I am welcomed into His grace and His accomplshments and freely and through no effort of my own, that I can dig. That is Gospel.
March 14th, 2007 at 4:50 pm
Matt, you’ve piqued my interest in this Benaiah book. Wow. Hadn’t heard anything about it before.
Generally, I would agree with you that it’s dangerous to base entire theologies around one or two or three verses of scripture — especially when those verses are usually taken out of context. I’d go further and say that it’s foolish to do so, especially since Paul reminds us that, when it comes to understanding God’s “manifold” wisdom, we see through the glass darkly this side of eternity. Until we see Him face to face, we are privileged to glimpse the mysteries of our faith. And we would be wise not to build hard and fast rules and overbroad proclamations about God’s character based on glimpses.
But I would similarly caution against discounting the impact of one or two verses, especially when they represent testimonies of broken lives God redeems for His glory. “We overcome the enemy,” John writes in Revelation, “by the blood of the lamb and the word of our testimony.” I personally know people who have been inspired to great faith by the testimony of Benaiah and others listed among David’s mighty men. The beautiful thing is when we dig deeper, beyond the few verses in 2 Samuel 23 and 1 Chronicles 11, and learn the history of the mighty men, we learn how they were previously among those who came to David during his exile at the Cave of Adullum (1 Samuel 22). There they were in distress, indebted and discontented, and he became their leader. They chose to follow him, as he followed God, and their lives were transformed.
The testimony isn’t about getting our name in lights, but it is about “offering ourselves as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God, which is our reasonable act of worship” (Romans 12:1). The act of offering ourselves, and further offering ourselves sacrifically, is something God requires of us. Romans 12 continues by urging us not to think our ourselves more highly than we ought (which I think is your primary concern as well) but rather with sober judgment, according to the measure of faith God has given us. Tellingly, the requirments to offer our lives in worhsip, to do so sacrificially, and to maintain a right perspective on whowe are apart from His grace, are not forced out of us. They are presented as choices that He empowers us by faith to reject or embrace.
Which, I think, is likewise the story of the Hebrews passage. The author reminds of us in chapter 11 why the “great cloud of witnesses” were commended as witnesses — by faith they did something, namely they obeyed God despite their circumstances. Then in chapter 12 he points us back to Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, while at the same time charging us to follow His example. Voluntarily. “So that you will not give up.”
March 14th, 2007 at 6:17 pm
It is a hop-skip-jump to heresy to base a theology on 2 verses. ORU taught me that loud and clear man. That’s why, as you say, in this case, taking the entire context of David’s mighty men into consideration is the thing to do. And the Gospel can be told through those stories… like you said: “when they represent testimonies of broken lives God redeems for His glory.” But how many Old Testament messages do we hear with that emphasis?
I say preach the Gospel from the Old Testament or don’t preach the Old Testament at all. The glorious thing is that we CAN preach the Gospel from Benaiah and David and the Old Testament. It’s all about God and grace and redemption for screwups. But sadly we don’t. We preach ‘you can do it if you choose to and if you are courageous and if you work hard at it. Hey, kids, be like Joseph! Be like Be like David! You can do it if you really love God!’ And so you become PRIMARY and God SECONDARY. That’s Oprah, not the Gospel.
The context of the whole Bible is that people suck and people sin, and yet were created in God’s image and that image isn’t erased, and, in grace, God redeems and restores. That ubiquitous context demands that we not make superheroes out of anyone but Christ. There is nothing good in me that has not been given to me by God. Nothing.
And then when we do come across a stud saint who has preceded us that we really connect with, we are not looking for the 7 steps they took to victory (Top Ten Worst Sermon I Ever Heard: David’s 5 Smooth Stones and How You Can Overcome Your Giant) but we are looking for God’s grace and their faith response to encourage us to share their faith and dependence on God.
Clearly I am a bitter kid from wasted hours of my life listening to man-centered sermons that brought me to spiritual arrogance and then to total spiritual self-loathing. I do repent of any arrogance that may be in this post. What I long for is to have people free from thinking that being a Christian is about their striving to be good enough and to just rest in the grace of God and His work done for them. There is peace and freedom in that that doesn’t come from thinking how it’s up to me to charge the lion in the pit. Christ has already conquered. He is the hero.
March 14th, 2007 at 7:31 pm
I feel you, bro. We’ve both wasted lots of precious time and energy striving to be something that, apart from grace, we’ll never be.
About 8 or 9 years ago that message was brought home to me. Perfectionist Jeremy could preach grace to everyone else, but was too busy trying to live up to some self-imposed standard of self-righteousness to receive grace for himself. So I found myself on a treadmill of sorts, failing over and over and over in the same area of my life and beating myself over it every time. … More to come …