The Victory of “Might Have Done”

I am currently doing something I do at least once a year – reading through Psalms and Proverbs together. Five psalms, one chapter of Proverbs, and a one-day adjustment with Psalm 119 means you can do that in 31 days. If you’ve never tired it, I encourage you to consider doing so. I first learned of this when I was a senior in college and a preacher named Jim Dyer came and spoke to a class I was taking. I’m very glad I was present that day and often share this reading plan with students at Point.

This time I am reading from a new translation of the Old Testament titled The First Testament. It was done by John Goldingay who is an Old Testament professor at Fuller Theological Seminary. As the blurb on the cover says, The First Testament “interrupts our sleepy familiarity with the Old Testament, and sets our expectations off balance by inviting us to hear the strange accent of the Hebrew text.” So far I’ve found that blurb to true!

A week or so ago one of my “five psalms” was Psalm 18. It is a Psalm of David thought to have been written in response to God’s rescue of David from the hands of Saul. The line that leaped off the page to the point that that I put it on my “reminder” list in my iPhone was verse 23: “I’ve been a person of integrity with him; I’ve kept myself from waywardness I might have done.” In particular the phrase “waywardness I might have done” is a really intriguing idea.

I suspect we all often express thanksgiving to Yahweh for His presence in our lives and we ask Him to forgive us for the sin we commit – either by “commission or omission” as I grew up hearing said. Perhaps better expressed in The Book of Common Prayer by the phrase “the things I have done and the things I have left undone.”

But in the context of Psalm 18, David’s faithfulness to God, his integrity with God, and God’s faithfulness to him have apparently combined to help David keep himself “from waywardness he might have done.” Perhaps David was thinking of the story in 1 Samuel 24 where he could easily have killed King Saul in a cave in the Wilderness of Engedi. Or perhaps it was when David could have but didn’t kill Saul as he slept in the wilderness of Ziph. 

I suspect it is impossible to say – but what can be said is that by having a relationship with God marked by integrity, David was able to avoid wayward acts that he could have committed.

As I’ve been thinking about this phrase, two things seem to be important. First, if you read Psalm 18:1-24, you can’t miss the importance of the idea expressed in verse 21, “because I have kept Yahweh’s ways and not been faithless to my God.” If I want to avoid “waywardness I might have done” – keeping Yahweh’s ways before me is important.  Second, I ought to be more expressive of my gratitude to Yahweh for this great gift.

The victory of “might have done” is indeed a blessing.

Freed to be a Slave

Human freedom can be an alluring, and often intoxicating, reality. For all the things I like to do and want to do – I want to be free to do them. But for all the things you like to do and want to do that I don’t approve of, then I want the church, the government, or some other form of authority to say “No, you’re not free to do that.” Of course my ideas of freedom are precisely God’s ideas of freedom – so much of “religion” these days seems to suggest “I’m in charge – God said . . . “

The first line of Paul’s 1 Corinthians 9 starts out with this this bold question: “I’m a free man, aren’t I?” (The Kingdom New Testament: A Contemporary Translation) Paul expected that his readers would answer that question “Yes.”  From that beginning he goes on to discuss a number a ideas about apostles and freedom, but in the middle of the chapter, verse 19, comes to the real issues at hand: 

 “The reason for all this is as follows. I am indeed free from everyone; but I have enslaved myself to everyone, so that I can win all the more.” In other words, it seems as though he had been “freed to be a slave.” That’s a bit of an oxymoron for sure.

From there he talks about all sorts of categories in his culture:  everyone, Jews, those with the law, those without the law, and the weak. He wraps that conversation up by declaring “I have become all things to all people, so that in all ways I might save some.” (9:22) The word “win” floats around in the text five times – once for each category – and then shifts to “save some” as a summary of it all.

Freed to be a slave! Sometimes I try and imagine about all the seeming contradictions that must have fought for space in Paul’s head. A former Pharisee and hater of those who followed Jesus, he is now its chief missionary. Later in Ephesians he will say he spent jail time “on behalf of Gentiles.” He will sit with a group of “God-worshiping women” by a river bank in Philippi and have a conversation about Jesus.  Having been set free from the law of sin and death, he finds himself enslaved to everyone so he can influence them for the gospel.

Actually, at the end of this paragraph he declares this is the very nature of the gospel itself. “I do it all because of the gospel, so that I can be a partner in its benefits.”

Each of the categories Paul mentions has potential for difficult moments for him. It isn’t as though he is thinking “this is a breeze” and I can influence people. Rather he must be thinking something like “this won’t be fun, it won’t be easy, but it will be worthwhile.”

I love being free. But hopefully I love even more the call God has placed on my life. I suspect that is true for you as well. So the question that now remains is something like this: “What area of freedom should I set aside in order to better influence others for the kingdom?”

Elsewhere Paul will remind his readers that when abused, freedom can be an excuse to sin (Gal. 5:13;    1 Cor. 8:9). But he also reminds us that where the Spirit of the Lord there is freedom (2 Cor. 3:17; Gal. 5:1).

Learning to walk in freedom and not abuse it may be one of our greatest challenges these days.

God's Intentional Purpose At Creation

When I read Genesis 2 it seems to be a wonderful narrative rooted in the Jewish idea of shalom. Adam and Eve understand who they are, they have a healthy relationship with each other, they have a life-giving relationship with God, and know their place in God’s wonderful creation.

That is what I describe in my Theological Foundations for the Christian Life class as “God’s intentional purpose at Creation.”  It wasn’t good for the man to be alone, the woman was created and community in fellowship with God was born. My personal favorite way to describe what eternity with God will be like is to dream of “Eden restored.”

In a wonderfully thoughtful new book titled For the Life of the World: Theology That Makes a Difference Miroslav Volf and Matthew Croasmun express concern that theology has lost its way and as a result, the discovery of a “flourishing life” (for me, think Genesis 2) is ever more difficult to find.

One of their more direct concerns is expressed this way: “No longer experiencing ourselves as constituents of a meaningful cosmos and members of a social body, we modern human beings imagine ourselves and act first and foremost as individuals, ideally sovereign owners of ourselves and our actions.” (pages 20, 21) When I first read that statement, it seemed to be such a great explanation for so much of the self-centered, overly individualistic spirit that I see in the newspaper daily. 

Yet unless I have completely misread the Jesus story, it seems He came to help us find a flourishing life – “life abundantly” as He calls it in John 10:10. Could Paul’s imagery in 1 Corinthians 12 of “one body, many members” be a definition of what Jesus had in mind? A flourishing life isn’t so much about “stuff” we own and control as it is “to whom we belong.” There’s hardly room for the kind of individualism that sees ourselves as “sovereign owners of ourselves and our actions” in a body where, “if one member suffers, the whole body suffers.” (1 Corinthians 12:26)

In a few weeks we will celebrate anew the resurrection of our Lord. His resurrection made possible for humankind to begin our journey back to Eden. To that place where shalom defined life. A place where we discover what a flourishing life can look like.

As we approach Easter Sunday, April 21 this year, may we pray daily that our thoughts and words about life and about the gospel’s impact on life will help us in our partnership with God to renew and restore creation to its God-intended purpose at creation. 

That for sure is theology that makes a difference!

 

Eden restored.