Exploring My Strange Bible

This part camps out in the second book of the bible, Exodus. We explore the story of Moses, Pharaoh, and the liberation of the Israelites that all culminates in the night of Passover. This was one of the most important foundation stories for the Israelite people in ancient times, and its crucially important for understanding Jesus. He timed his arrival into Jerusalem for the Passover feast and at the Last Supper he used the Passover symbols to explain the meaning of his coming death.

From there we move on to learning about the covenants between God and Israel and the giving of the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai. This is, again, a core idea that Jesus picked up and developed in his own teaching .

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After many years of pastoral ministry I found that some of the main misunderstandings people have about Jesus come from misunderstanding the larger biblical story that he brought to fulfillment. When we try to understand who Jesus was without reference to the Old Testament, it's kind of like watching the Star Wars movies, but skipping the first episode. You can follow what's going on, but you won't really understand the deeper elements of the story. This set of lectures was my effort to condense the first five foundational books of Jesus’s bible, because they introduce the Plot conflict and storyline that Jesus believed he was bringing to fulfillment.

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Many people believe that science and religious faith are bitter enemies with conflicting views of the universe. One the one hand there is the scientific account of the origins of life and then there is the story of universal origins told by the bible. But is this tension real, or is it based on a deep misunderstanding of what the Bible is and how it communicates? This is a lecture I gave at a Science and Faith conference at Blackhawk Church in Madison, WI in the year 2011. I ask what it means to read the first two pages of the Bible as ancient Hebrew texts written thousands of years ago. When we begin with that simple fact, Genesis chapters 1-2 say many surprising things we never would have imagined, and they also leave unaddressed most of our modern questions. Consider this a crash course in reading the Bible as an ancient cross-cultural experience.

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In the final episode we see Jonah's response when God forgives his enemies. He's hot with anger and chews God out for being to gracious.

This part of the story challenges us to reconsider Jesus' teaching to love and forgive our enemies, those people in our lives who are the most difficult.

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Jonah goes very much against his own desires to the ancient city of Nineveh. He utters a very strange five word sermon and the people of Nineveh have a very interesting response. Also, we discuss the meaning of the biblical word “repentance” and what it does and doesn’t mean.

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In this episode we ponder the very strange and beautifully intricate poem that Jonah utters in the belly of the fish. This is a powerful and heavily ironic moment in the story.

This poem represents a moment when one of God’s people is in crisis. Jonah discovers that his crisis is actually God’s work to bring him to the end of himself. Jonah’s experience in this story forces us to think about similar moments of crisis in our own lives.

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Jonah is ironically portrayed as God’s own prophet, but he is the only person who really refuses to listen to God. This episode explores how Jonah is “asleep at the wheel” and deaf to God and everything that God uses to communicate to him.

This story invites us in to think about our own lack of perception and awareness of the ways that God might be trying to get through to us.

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In this episode I’m laying the groundwork for exploring the story of Jonah with new eyes: Who is Jonah? Why did he flee and get on a boat to Tarshish? And why is his story in the Bible?

We also ponder the question of why Jonah ran from God. He thought he was saving his own life, but in reality, he was running from real life. Followers of Jesus face the same choice today, whether or not we will let go of our own vision of the “good life” and instead take up Jesus’ vision for our lives.

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