There was still Time to Change

I have decided to take a short break from “The Eight Things that I Believe” (or was it nine?).

A few weeks ago, I made an excursion through the Minor Prophets. These make up the last 12 books of the Old Testament, and have a motley collection of themes. Most people ignore them, because they are at the back of the Old Testament, and don’t seem so important.

(They are “Minor”, because they are shorter than the “Majors”. There is no musical differentiation on major and minor keys, intended here.)

Individually they have some good stories and interesting lessons. The most famous one is probably the Book of Jonah, who was “swallowed by a whale”. Actually it wasn’t a whale, but a large fish, but who cares.

I would have liked to say that, in reading the Minor Prophets, I was particularly struck by some or other point. However, on this occasion, this would not be true. It was only some days after I had completed my meanderings through these twelve books that it occurred to me that the prophecy of Nahum (7th of the 12) was unusually uncompromising in its telling, even by the bloodthirsty standards of the Old Testament.

Like the story of Jonah (the 5th minor prophet), it is about the forthcoming destruction of the city of Nineveh (in what is now Northern Iraq). In the book of Jonah, however, the forthcoming destruction did not happen. The Book of Jonah was set some time earlier than the Book of Nahum and the two books are completely contrasting.

The Book of Jonah has a number of themes. One of them concerns Jonah’s announcement to the people of Nineveh of their impending destruction because of their evil. The city’s response is immediate. The inhabitants are appalled by their own acts, and go out of their way to demonstrate this before God. Those of you who have read the Book will know that God himself changes his intentions and spares them (classically called “A Happy Ending”).

But my original purpose in starting this blog was not so much to talk about the book of Jonah (book 5), but to contrast this to the Book of Nahum (book 7).

The Book of Nahum, set some time later, prophecies the complete destruction of Nineveh, (which took place in 612 BC). The prophet recounts the evil carried out by this city during the course of its brief reign as the leading city of the region (which I do not intend to go into here) and announces its imminent destruction.

This prophecy was not a warning. It was a statement of God’s intent, of (future) fact. There was no opportunity now for the City to change its way and to turn to God. It was too late for that. The decision was made.

Embedded in the storyline of Nahum are words of comfort to the people of Israel. Israel had suffered at the hands of this empire, and now this was going to be over. God reminded Israel of his love for them, while at the same time, reminding them of their obligations to serve Him. (This also could the subject of another blog, but not this time, folks).

The message of Nahum was clearly not for the people of Nineveh. They were not listening. They had had their moment and now it was over. The message was for God’s people (as a sign of his love) and for those for whom there was (or is) still an opportunity to change.

There comes a moment for individuals, for organisations, countries, when the clock has stopped and judgement (in whatever form) comes. But until that moment comes, there is still time to change.

If we are asking the question “Is this God’s judgement on us?”, then the book of Nahum shows us that the answer is probably no. If God’s judgement had come, we would have known about it. It would all be over. If God is calling people to return to Him, then there is still time, but that period will, at some point, come to an end.

His Own Pleasure and Purpose

When I did my original “List of Nine Items” for Ian Chambers, this was the first item on the list. I don’t know why I placed it first. It was not necessarily because I thought that it was the most important. It was just the first one that came into my head.

One could argue for ever about whether one belief is more important than another. However, as they are all part of the “Nine Items”, they are equally important. As “The Existence and Nature of God” came first, this one is second, merely as an arithmetical necessity.

Before we go on, I should mention that to get this far, you should have read Part 1 (link).
http://colinhawkersother.blogspot.com/2011/09/existence-and-nature-of-god.html
If you find that blog offensive and disagree with it violently, then you will enjoy this even less, and you should probably do something else.

Prayers are often phrased in the following way. They are requests to God to do something for us, our friends, our country perhaps, or the world as a whole. I do not make this statement to criticise it. My view at this point is largely neutral. However, it is my starting point that we are concerned largely with ourselves, even in our Religion.

All this is very natural. It is often good and right as well.

How does this sit with the fact that it was God who made man (and time, the earth and the Universe etc) and not the other way around (despite what some may say*)?

I could pose the question in a different way: “Did God create me for my benefit?” or “Did God create me for His benefit?" My original hypothesis is that we start by believing the former, i.e. that our creation was for our benefit. This universe is about me.

The theme in the Bible of God’s chosen people (whether the people of Israel in the Old Testament or the Church of the New Testament) places great emphasis on the importance of “us”. It also places even greater emphasis on God’s dealings with us, of what he requires from us.

God’s dealings with us also point us in the same direction. Life is not a trouble free existence and God is not a Father Christmas, bringing us endless presents. But I am only telling you this stuff now that you already know.

Why God should go to what seems to have been a great deal of trouble is not clear. The Westminster Shorter Catechism has a stab at this and says: “Man’s chief end is to know him and glorify him forever”. This is quite a leap.

So what is that purpose? This is a sensible question. The central point is that God made all this, everything that we see, touch, hear, think etc. for his pleasure and purpose. What my thoughts, ideas and speculation on what this purpose might be, will have to be saved for another day.


* For a heavyweight rebuttal of some of the arguments that God does not exist, you could worse than read: http://www.brainwaves.org.uk/reports/lion_bw_report_018.shtml

Existence and Nature of God

It was Ian Chambers to whom I first sent my “List of Nine Things in which I Believe”. He was suitably encouraging, but observed amongst other things, that (i) there were actually only eight items on the list and (ii) there was nothing on the nature or existence of God. He assumed that this was because I took the statement for granted.

He was correct, but I also agreed that it needed to be on the list, as it was “kind of important”. (This in itself is a “kind of “English understatement.)

I am told that the statement “I believe that God exists”, requires me to say what I mean by God. I am not very good at this intellectual or philosophical stuff. As a result, there will be a huge amount of plagiarism in this and a large number of statements which will be challengeable by people more articulate than me and accusations of “Shout loudly; Argument weak”, all of which, most likely, will be correct.

But this is my blog, so who cares. Grumpy and his brother have never been famous for rigour, just uninformed prejudice, together with 98% of the rest of the population.

So I will start with a quote from Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion”, where God is said to be ‘a superhuman intelligence, who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us”. Actually I must confess I have not read the book. Furthermore I have lifted it from a quote from someone else’s article. However, the point is that this starting point does OK for me, as I am a man of very little intellectual rigour.

Next step is to expand on this, and to give God (and I will refer to him as “him”, in the masculine, out of intellectual laziness) a number of characteristics. I cannot prove any of them, but I am sure that they cannot be disproved either by endless arguments in smoke-filled college rooms.

He is the only God. There are no others. To put it another way, there is only one of him.

He is eternal and outside space and time. He has always existed and always will.

He created time, the universe and all that is in it. He sustains, guides and controls it. He created the Universe out of nothing. He creates order out of chaos.

He is a hidden God, who reveals himself as he chooses.

He is good. He is a moral God (included in the first of the Church of England’s “39 Articles”, which come highly recommended).

He cares and loves those who turn to Him and trust in Him.

There are many other characteristics that are ascribed to Him. Please do not be annoyed or angry with me, but I am not always sure that I can remember them or know what these all mean. I leave it to you to add to this list, and improve on this.

I want to be a Screwdriver

Do you ever have one of those random conversations, where you end up on a topic, with no particular recollection of how you got there? This occurred to me over Christmas, when talking to Louise. As in the film “Inception”, “In a dream, you never ask how you got to this point.” Perhaps most of my conversations are like this.

Anyway, this particular conversation alighted on the point of why God ever bothered to create this world and in particular, us. In the usual man-centred view, we think about “us” or “me”. We think in terms of what God does for us or should do for us, and ask why things happen to us. The thought of what God gets from this, leaves us scratching our heads, either at the question itself (“What sort of question is that?”) or leaving us perplexed as to a plausible answer. (An acceptable and realistic response is certainly “I don’t know”.)

Nevertheless, you may have your own answer. The nearest that I could come up with was a mixture of Old Testament, when, for example, God talks about “Making a Nation for my own Name” and the “New Testament”, as it describes the (spiritual) Church (being the totality of all those who trust God, and not to be confused with the organisations that go by the same name).

The theory that we talked about was that God has a role for us in this “Building” and that this role is pre-defined. In the initial drawings and specifications for God’s “Spiritual Building”, there are hundreds and thousands of different parts, all important, but not all visible. The parts that visible are the most noteworthy. “Perhaps I can apply for the post of a Prophet; a minor one would be alright”.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. God writes the specifications and the parts, and allots us roles within this. We cannot all be Great Doors, or Magnificent Windows. We do not get a vote. Of course, we can choose not to follow the route, to object to it, to be puzzled by it, to doubt it.

But if I could apply for a role, I would be a screwdriver. Pretty small and insignificant in the overall scheme of things, but occasionally very useful in some specialised way. It spends most of its time doing nothing, just being a screwdriver, waiting to be used to do what it does best; screwing in screws.

Writing a Novel and the Shepherds

November has been and gone and with it, the deadline for the “Write a Novel in November”.

I thought (correctly) that writing a novel without a couple of intermediate steps was a seriously bad idea. As a first step, a short story seemed to be the logical step, and I had my first crack at this. Being a modest person, some critical feedback was sought and received. The best that could be said was that it scored well “For Effort.” Don’t give up the day job. One member of my family said that the short story was good (with a face that looked as if she was chewing a lemon), but that my Blogs were really good (said with the enthusiasm of a diner at a gourmet meal). Point taken.

I was trying to bring the story of the birth of Jesus, the shepherds and the wise men into the 21st century. By this I mean, if Jesus were to be born today, to whom would the angels appear and who would be the wise men?

The other question that had strolled through my mind was why were these events recorded in the bible? They certainly make for some great nativity plays, and where would School Christmas Plays be without these celebrated characters? (Kevin asks where the essential donkey came from in the original).

Leaving such theological niceties aside, I thought that some teenage boys, finishing their shifts at McDonalds, would meet an angel, in the form of a glowing business man, on their way home. The three wise men would clearly have money to give away, so in this day and age, they must be bankers (I have thought about extending the story to cover how they came to look for the star in the first place, but that would be even more speculative and take too long).

As to the point of the story, I imagined that Mary, having travelled so far in the cold for a reunion of some kind, and ending up in a hospital without any staff or beds (nearer to real life in England than you might imagine), was feeling very cheesed off. What of all the promises that had been made months before about the baby. Joseph too might have been puzzled, not to say disbelieving. And into this come our Likely Lads, in the form of the shepherds or McDonalds staff, who had just been given the same message as she had received all that time ago.

Maybe (and only maybe, because I am really stretching a point here) Joseph was still not completely convinced by the whole affair, and worried about the money, when in walk three wise men / bankers bearing gifts to value of a decent win on the National Lottery.

Just because the Bible does not record these emotions does not mean that I am wrong. I might not be correct either, but the story is there for a reason and it makes you think, doesn’t it.

As to the second rate story of my lads from McDonalds, glowing businessmen, and three bankers, I may just put it on my Novel blog, and be done with it. Or I may not.

Business Ethics

I have set myself the challenge of writing a novel in 2011 and have enlisted the support and ideas of my blog followers. Already a number of related ideas have emerged from the creative riches of this group. Without giving the game away, possible common themes involve, in one way or another, the matter of Ethics, or at least Principles. This caused me to reflect on some of the experiences of my own business career. Ethics has always been a topic in business, and frequently talked about, even if not acted on consistently. Into this fray, stepped the Business Schools.

I think that it was the Economist magazine which questioned why Ethics should be a subject at Business Schools. If it was not, then I render my apologies to them. But someone out there asked the question as to whether there was really any point. The line of argument was broadly that Ethics represented what we were, and that if it needed to be taught, then heaven help us.

I do not intend to discuss the ethical behaviour of at a Company level, but to reflect on some events in my own career, that came to mind.

The first involved a very pleasant person, who went on a crusade against me, over the miscalculation of some fees. The first mistake was mine, but the personal war that took place over email and in meetings and that carried on for the following four weeks was well…..wait for the Novel. Some years later, when we worked together on a project, he apologised and said “But, of course, it was the Company that made me do this”.

In the second, I was asked (and gave) my opinion on what factors would be taken into account when deciding on the Vendor for a particular business process, and what answers would be taken as a positive solution. Being youthful and naïve, I was surprised to see these points, almost as I had dictated them, repeated in a very senior presentation to justify a particular product. The person doing the presentation had the choice of inserting these ideas as facts or looking for another job.

A further instance involved a manager being asked to answer an email, which had been addressed to a senior member of the business. The email requested the putting right of a small injustice. The manager was given instructions to write an answer denying the claim, even though he felt that moral right was on the side of the claimant. He wrote the response that he was instructed to give.

These dilemmas are daily. There are countless other examples. They go to the heart of many of the day to day conflicts that employees and customers feel towards Companies. Employees are required to carry out actions which may go against their own innermost ethical compasses. When people have years of service with a company, mortgages to pay, and children to bring up, these matters are not so easy to resolve or to censure.

I do not propose an answer. However, I think that the Economist was correct. This cannot be taught. The person in the first case still knew that it was wrong and perhaps this is a step in the right direction. When people have no feeling at all about their own actions in the workplace, then this is time to become worried. But the question still remains for each person, whether a line exists and where that line might be.

You are Only Allowed to Believe 10 Things

I saw recently that the debate about women priests has popped up again. I do not recollect the context and anyway, the debate probably never really went way. I was most likely just not paying attention (“Sit up at the back and pay attention, Hawker”).

I cannot get my head around this question. Actually, as readers of my Blogs will realise, there are a great many questions that I cannot get my head around. It is not that I am not interested (although that might be the case). It is more that I cannot develop an opinion about which I have any real conviction.

These questions outnumber the questions and beliefs about which I do have conviction. Poor fellow, that I am. These questions are very important to most people. In the Church, for example, they decide which denomination or which branch of the denomination you will join, whether you are high-church or low church and if you have the wrong view or belief on a topic, you will not feel welcome or at least feel very uncomfortable.

So I have decided to make a mid-year’s resolution to only really believe in ten things. I thought of making this five to start with (and still think that five is a good number), but there are Ten Commandments, and there must have been a good reason for making them ten. Jesus had twelve disciples. Now I know that ten is not twelve, but it is more than five. Also as we have all gone metric, even the greengrocer in Brentwood High Street, I will stick to ten.

Now, it is not that you cannot have an opinion about other matters, but these ten will the only ones which are really allowed to matter from now on. Now try it.

It is hard isn’t it? Finding ten beliefs or opinions is not the problem, but there is so much to leave out.

I have a theory (only a theory, you understand) that most of what we believe is clutter. They form a mental attic or garage, where we store up various views that have been collected over the years and never thrown out and never used in any practical sense.

I have nearly completed my ten, but I am struggling. I believe so few things with conviction, that I am not sure that I am going to need ten.

By the way, my opinion about whether you can have ten or twelve does not count towards my ten. (…and believing in the Ten Commandments counts as one). This is my blog, so I make the rules. Fun, isn’t it.