I am (partly) on the Side of the Moaners

In the Book of Exodus, the people of Israel get a bad press (Exodus is the second book of the Bible, concerned mainly with the Israelites being led out the land of Egypt). Click for Link.

The People of Israel were minding their own business as slaves in Egypt, when Exodus gets going. They complained, of course, about their mistreatment and oppression at the hands of the Egyptian Pharaohs and his people, but generally that was like the English complaining about the weather, or the trains. It’s what people do. Then along comes this chap, Moses, saying that they need to leave and go to “A land flowing with milk and honey”.

Moses then proceeds to make himself and the People of Israel so offensive to the Egyptians that they get thrown out of Egypt. Actually, quite a lot happens on the way, so you need to read the story yourself.

As if this were not enough, far from going straight to the promised land, they end up being trapped between the Egyptian army and the Red Sea (of “Moses and the Red Sea” fame – yes, the very same), and threatened with annihilation. “Are there not enough graves in Egypt…..?” seemed a reasonable and eloquent response to this. As it turned out, they were not annihilated, and the Egyptian army was drowned instead. (Exodus 14)

And instead of the Promised Land, the next stop was the desert. There was nothing to eat. Had God brought them to the desert to starve them to death? Plenty of moaning and general protesting to Moses was required before a proper regular supply of food was provided. (Remember “Manna from heaven”?) (Exodus 16)  

After that, there was no drinkable water, and so lot more moaning and general protesting to Moses was repeated, demanding to know whether God had brought them here to die of thirst.  O.K., so water then appeared and that particular crisis was averted.  (Exodus 17)

No sooner had they got the water sorted out, than a local tribe attacked them. Pretty frightening, but with Moses praying to God, locals were defeated.

So it all goes to prove that unless you moan and groan and generally complain to God, nothing much happens. I am not sure if that was the intended lesson from these four encounters, but the people of Israel certainly saw it that way. Still, I expect that moaning to God is better than not talking to Him at all, especially if you have not been in the practice of recognising God’s hand (or even His existence).

Now I admit that it all then got a bit out of hand when Moses went up to the top of Mount Sinai to collect the ten commandments and plenty of other ceremonial and moral laws. He was gone longer than expected, so the People of Israel decided that Moses had been a big illusion and proceeded forthwith to make a “Golden Calf” their God. (Exodus32)  How anyone can think that something they have made is “God” is quite beyond me (and was quite beyond Moses as well). I think that the People of Israel would have said something like “Well, every other tribe has one”.

Perhaps they had gone too far this time with their moaning and groaning.

It all came to a pretty pass some time later, when God showed them the Promised Land and they decided that it was just too difficult. Well, some people never learn. The result of all this was that they tramped around the desert for 40 years, until they had dies out and the next generation was ready to carry on. (Number 14)

Now the point of all this is that I am on the side of the moaners, at least for some of the time. It takes a few demonstrations of God’s ability for the point to get through to His People (or, in the case of the People of Israel, not to get through). Actually the Old Testament shows us that they never really got the point at all, which is quite astonishing really.

Even more astounding is that God never gave up on them, not because he thought “they had it in them” if He just gave them one more chance. Rather it is in His nature not to give up.

Personally, I think that having a good moan from time to time is warranted. After all, we do not ask to get into some of the earthly scrapes that we end up in, especially when we think that we are on course generally. (Was Lack of Faith Rewarded? click forlink)

Can it be completely wrong to put God on the spot? “You promised ………”

What were People Expecting? (and John the Baptist)

Last autumn, I made some notes on John’s gospel. My original intention was to see what claims Jesus made about himself, but in the event I ended up looking at what people were expecting and who they thought Jesus was.

For example, it became increasingly less clear to me what people meant when they said to Jesus “You are the Messiah.” The writer, John, does not expand on what did they meant by this or what they thought that the Messiah was going to do.

If this is an omission, then either it must be deliberate or the answer to this can be derived from elsewhere.  I will not expand on this here, but put forward a hypothesis later.

In my notes, I separated the types of people (or in one case, a single person) that Jesus encounters into five groups. All are recognisable from John’s gospel. You may categorise them differently, or find sub-types, but in whatever way they are categorised, it is sometimes easy and sometimes not so easy to see the corresponding people in the 21^st century.

In this blog, I will further expand on just one of these “types”.

1.  John the Baptist – Here is the “Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world”.

2.  Ordinary people, who begin to understand (a glimpse, a shadow of) the truth

3.  Ordinary people, who want to see an earthly King and expected that the Messiah was an earthly liberator

4   Pharisees generally, who didn’t want to see any change

5.  Some Pharisees who did want to change (Nicodemus / Joseph of Arimathea)

As this blog is only allowed to run to 800 words (a self-imposed restriction), I will limit myself to describing further just one of these types. However, before I do this, I will make the observation that none of the people (with some notable exceptions) who declared Jesus to be the “Messiah” or “The Son of God” were there at the crucifixion.

John the Baptist

I found it interesting that there was only one person, John the Baptist, who understood so profoundly who Jesus was and expressed it so concisely. He had an advantage that, as Jesus’ cousin, they had known each other for 30 years. The Bible does not tell us how his views were formed and at what point in his life, John the Baptist understood who Jesus was and what his own role was to be.

One thought from this perhaps is that it takes many years to know Christ / God. Our initial encounters are important (and are meaningful) and it is hard to accept that those views will be incomplete. But they are incomplete and they take years to grow and mature.

John’s message was totally uncomplicated. Firstly to the Pharisees (the religious leaders) and people generally was “Turn away from your wrong-doing, and be baptised as a sign of this” and regarding Jesus, it was “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world”.

There is something enviable about a faith that is so uncomplicated. I suspect that our religious opinions and faith become cluttered with various views that are not central to the plot. This may be because that it probably takes 30 years (if it ever happens), to discern what is important and what isn’t.

However, I was disappointed by my failure to identify a corresponding person in today’s world. I may have been looking in the wrong place, of course, or having seen him, simply failed to recognise the person. Actually, I am not sure if I would recognise him if he came. How would one recognise him?

I was not sure whether John’s lifestyle was important. On balance, I think that it was. His lifestyle was so simple that his message was unspoiled by accusations of ripping people off or exploiting his followers, and the other types of accusations that can contaminate a spiritual message.

Was John the Baptist a one-off, never to be repeated? In the sense that his mission was to announce the coming of Jesus, and to proclaim who Jesus was, then it was definitely a one-time event. Perhaps that is why I cannot find the 21^st century John the Baptist. Alternatively, one could consider that the role of the Church collectively has that role. To point out to men that God is there and to insist that we turn to him is similar if not identical to John the Baptist’s and is an admirable calling.