Introduction: Scripture and our Life with God

The chapters which follow offer examples of the way Old Testament stories may illumine our lives with God. In this introduction I aim to set that study in the broader context of the way scripture relates to those lives before God. There seem to me to be two complementary aspects to that. Essentially, there are times when scripture determines the agenda and we respond, and other times when we set the agenda and scripture responds…

…[First,] Scripture is distinctively a story in which we locate our own story.

In our age we are a very existential people. Only the present counts, only what I have experienced counts. The really important thing is telling my story. Yet in reality we are what we are because of the story in the midst of which we are. We are who we are because we belong to our particular century, because we live in our particular decade, because we live where we live. When people studying church history in two hundred years' time write essays on the church in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries they will think we were very odd. Living where and when we do has many advantages, but it also involves limitations, ways in which our perspective is skewed. Scripture sets us in the context of a different story, a story which extends from a Beginning to an End, a story which has Jesus at its crucial point. It sets us in the context of a story in which things happen which we have not experienced (yet). It does not thereby take away from our importance; it enables us to see our story more clearly by seeing it in context. Reading part of scripture's story can therefore do amazing things to us.

Such reading needs to take us right inside the story, so that we relive it. We need to allow ourselves to be sucked into it. When my mother-in-law watched soap operas on television, she did not merely watch them. She took part. Marshall McLuhan once taught us that television was cool communication - it does not involve us and our imagination, as radio does. Ann's mother had not read McLuhan. When someone was about to do something unwise, as they often do in soaps, she would tell them not to (unfortunately they took no notice, rather like us reading the Bible). Our college staff once had an outing to see The Taming of the Shrew. The performance was in the round, to encourage the audience to feel part of it, and when there was a rhetorical question addressed to the audience, one of my colleagues (who did not feel as bound by the rules as the rest of the audience) answered the question out loud; the cast never relaxed again. That is the way to read the Bible, taking its stories as told for us. [For more on the Bible as Story, link here.]

In the studies of the Old Testament in this book we will be focusing on stories, but in the broader context there are other ways in which scripture shapes us. Scripture is, second, a set of commands, values and principles to live by; sometimes its stories illustrate and inculcate these (or their opposites). Someone in my family who does not go to church once commented on the difference between Christians and Jewish people. For Jewish people their faith was something that shaped their everyday lives, for Christians it was more a matter of what they did on Sundays. That is the impression the outsider gets. If you ask Asians about the nature of their religion, they will tell you about what they do, if you ask Westerners about their religion they will tell you about what they believe. See what we have done to our Asian religion!

Parts of the Old Testament lay great emphasis on observances governing 'cleanness' and 'stain', observances which distinguished the people of God from other people and which were then terminated within New Testament faith. Christians have often wanted to reestablish such observances, to make themselves look and behave differently so as to provide protective boundaries around their community. My own generation was thus brought up with an alternative sub­culture: Christians did not go to the pub or the cinema and did not shop on Sunday. The contemporary younger generation tends to have an opposite attitude. Christians are now entirely at home in the pub. We have moved from having a silly kind of distinctive Christian lifestyle to not having one at all. Scripture's nature is, among other things, to give us a set of priorities that is different from the world's, at points where it needs to be... Scripture is a set of commands and values and principles to live by, so we look to it to transform our priorities in life.

Third, scripture is a nightmare and a dream of the future. The calling of the prophets is to share God's nightmares and to dream God's dreams, and then to pass them on to the people of God. These nightmares and visions are not bound inevitably to take place. They are disasters that hang over the people or blessings that God wants to give them, but whether they come true depends on the response people give to God. Scripture thus holds before us possible scenarios and invites our response.

Fourth, scripture is people's testimony to how experience with God has worked for them, testimony to shape our experience. It is often assumed that the way we experience things comes from inside us: it is part of us, a given, expressing who we really are. That is a fallacy. We experience things the way we do because of the way we have been shaped, the way we have been taught. The process thus involves a mixing of what is inside us and what has come to us. Liturgy, for instance, is designed to shape us, or rather it does inevitably shape us, whatever its own nature is. It is for that reason important that the liturgy itself is of the kind that we would want to shape people. That is why it is important that liturgy is commonly stiff with scripture; it is in this way that scripture trains us in the way we experience life. If scripture reflects the truth about God, it appropriately shapes us so that we truly experience God.

In the same way scripture is designed to be a key shaping factor with regard to the way we pray. The Psalms thus offer us a clear model of how life with God is, of what prayer is like and how it works. The Epistles in the New Testament do the same. As far as I can see, how we actually pray reflects very little of the way scripture prays. We pray in the way of our tradition. Scripture is designed to provide a pattern for our prayer. [See our discussion of Bible-shaped prayer from last year.]

…scripture is a resource into which we escape to give it opportunity to conform our story to God's, our way of life to God's, our visions and nightmares to God's, our experience to the one God offers. Scripture sets the agenda.

Scripture in Response to Our Agenda

It is also possible and important to come at the question of scripture and our lives with God from the other end, from when we set the agenda.

A few years ago I went through an experience of a particular personal loss. The ultimate in loss is literal bereavement, but we all go through other sorts of losses in life, losses which are little bereavements. Changing jobs can be like that, especially if it involves moving house and changing churches; it can take quite a while to get used to life after those little deaths. We all experience losses like these when our children leave home, or when a key relationship in our life comes to an end, or when our church gets amalgamated with another one, or when we are made redundant. I myself went through something a little like one of those, something which indeed felt a fearsome bereavement. For months on end I lived much of the time with a deep hole inside me, a pain that really seemed physical, a heart that ached inconsolably. I would get up in the early hours and cry out to God from my armchair, sitting in the early morning sun which shines through our patio windows in the winter and which that year belied the way I felt (it was a lovely sunny winter). I would cry out 'Will it be all right?' And I knew God always said 'Yes', and I knew that it would be all right in due course. I had read books on real bereavement and watched people go through it, and that did help me to believe that the tunnel would come to an end, but of course you do also have to live with the darkness in the meantime.

There were one or two things that helped to sustain me. One was students and colleagues who I knew I could ask to pray with me and whose prayers were always a blessing. But another, and the most astonishing, was the Bible. It was the most astonishing, not because of the mere fact that it proved capable of being an encouragement, a resource, a well, a rock, through that experience of hopelessness, emptiness, desert and drowning. I would have taken for granted that the Bible could be a help from time to time. What was astonishing was the extraordinary consistency with which it did that.

One of the keys was this: If you are an ordinand [akin to a seminary student preparing for formal ordination into church ministry] and you are finding it impossible to cope with life, one of the natural things to do is to give up coming to chapel. If you are the principal, however, and you have a reasonably average superego telling you what to do, you cannot do that. You have to go to chapel anyway. So each morning I would join with other people there, join them with that deep gaping hole inside me, that hurt in my heart that I knew would heal one day but which was not healed then. I would join them, with all that inside me, and listen to the scriptures being read and join in the reading of the Psalms, and every single day there was something in those scriptures that directly addressed me, consoled me, challenged me or made a promise to me.

I wonder now whether I am exaggerating, painting an experience of scripture other than it was, but that is how I remember it. Perhaps it was not really every day and I have misremembered it in that way. Perhaps it was only four days out of five - though as Meatloaf once said, even two out of three ain't bad. What I do know is that if the cloud outside was overwhelming me and the hole inside was consuming me at 7.55 a.m., one way or another through the scriptures and/or someone's ministry and/or just sitting with God, by 8.55 a.m. the hurt had not been healed, because it had to take its time, but balm had been applied to it, and I could face another day. And in that process in which God did not fail me, the scriptures played a key role. They were the indispensable and the most consistently soothing anointing.

Fortunately I can demonstrate to myself that I am not making it all up because I kept a kind of diary in an old school notebook. I cannot remember why I started doing that, though I do know that it became important because when I was being overwhelmed by the gaping hole at 4.00 a.m. and I was hesitant to wake some hapless student or colleague to ask them to pray with me (though I know they would not have minded) it became my resource book, or perhaps more my comfort blanket. I would carry it round with me in case I needed a fix from time to time. I would be fearful of being separated from it, because it was the evidence that God still existed and cared about me, because God was speaking to me through the scriptures. When at those moments I could not remember anything about what I believed and what might be the grounds for hope, it contained all these golden pages with things that God had said to me, that the scriptures had said to me.

Recently I again wondered what sort of things these were, and I worked through my red notebook to see if I could categorize them. Now the schema I have just used for articulating the kind of thing scripture is (story, imperative, vision, testimony) is deeply engrained in me and it is probably inevitable that it partly also shapes the way I categorize my experience of scripture. But not entirely, so perhaps I am not fudging the evidence too much. Further, I found that I could trace an interesting order in the prominence of the different functions of scripture as I went through that healing process.

Early on, not surprisingly the most common thing I found scripture did for me was provide me with means of articulating my feelings to God. But what I found as I read back in my book was that it hardly ever just did that. What it did was set a conversation going, something like the conversation in Psalm 42, where the psalmist asks 'Why are you so downcast, Trust in God!' The psalm makes clear that talking to yourself in prayer is important.

One day, for instance, we apparently read Psalm 107 in chapel. I noticed and noted that this psalm is all about people being in distress, darkness, and affliction, but that it keeps moving onto 'But God took them out of their trouble'. The next day we of course read Psalm 108, which starts 'My heart is fixed, O God, my heart is fixed', and I noted 'It didn't feel very fixed last night' when I had felt depressed and oppressed, but then that 'it's God's mercy and God's glory that are decisive - I mustn't think it depends on me' and on my capacity to stay fixed. The next week we had reached Psalm 119 and I noted verse 57: 'Yahweh, you are my portion'. 'My portion': my means of support and life, something and someone specially for me. The same day, I am amused and embarrassed to report, I received a special blessing from a lesson from the book of Baruch in the Apocrypha, a lesson which acknowledged to God that 'it is the living who mourn their fall from greatness, who walk the earth bent and enfeebled, with eyes dimmed and with failing appetite - it is they, Lord, who will sing your praise and applaud your justice'. There was a promise there to lay hold of. The next week it was 2 Timothy, where Paul is made to say that his life is already being poured out on the altar, that he has run the great race and finished the course, that there now awaits him the garland of righteousness; and I wrote ‘I do not want a garland of righteousness. I want to be loved, to be talked to, to be appreciated, to be understood. But I am willing to be poured out. I will run. I will finish the course'.

As I hinted, what strikes me now as I read the way people's testimony to their experience in scripture was interacting with my experience is that scripture was indeed giving me means of articulating my experience, but all the time it was not confined to doing that. It was moving me on, not just mirroring where I stood. Here were people who had been where I was and therefore had authority to say things to draw me on, which is what one might expect, on reflection.

When I did this analysis of my notebook, I expected the way scripture gives its testimony and shares its prayers to be prominent. I was surprised at the second function I found running through what I'd written, which was scripture directly being confrontational, demanding.

'The person who wants to come after me must deny self and take up their cross and follow me', we read one day early on. My loss was not my cross in the strict sense, but there is something a little like taking up the cross in what you do with painful experiences - rather than giving in to self-pity. 'Reckon others better than yourselves; look to each other's interests', we read in Philippians 2. There are times when you have to give way to someone else. I have rights but I do not have the right to claim them, we read in 1 Corinthians. My rights lie in the gospel, not in anything else I am entitled to claim. There was an element of confrontation in the way scriptural testimony sought to draw me on, but there is a more explicit element of confrontation here. In our situations of need God does not simply say 'There, there', does not merely exercise accurate empathy. God challenges us about moral issues, about the stance we take to these situations. In a strange way that is part of the good news. 'God's judgments are in all the earth; he confirmed it to Jacob as a statute', I noted in Psalm 105. In relation to our destiny, what we call God's 'law' is good news, it is promise. Israel never saw the law as a burden. It was a delight, it was a wonderful gift of God's.

Less surprising was the third role I found scripture fulfilling. It was telling me stories with an implicit promise. That was not surprising as I have already noted that the most prominent feature in scripture is story. Much of this material in my diary comes from October and November, the weeks leading up to Advent and Christmas. Then, at the beginning of the church year, we read the Abraham and Sarah narrative, which we will consider in chapter five, and that is the kind of story which is in scripture to offer implicit promise to us. Genesis 15 is where God affirms the promise that there will be a future, and I wrote: 'There will be unpredictable grace for me in fulfilment of God's promise and I have to trust. If it was predictable [if I could see how it could work out], it wouldn't be un­predictable [it wouldn't have the characteristic nature of promise of being something that surprises you when it comes true]. I can't see how the future can work out happily - [but] that's why there has to be trust [the kind of trust Abraham had to show, which led God to approve of him]'. I still find this paradox difficult but important. I cannot see how the future can work out in a way that honours what had come before, but if I could, it would cease to have to be a matter of trust.

A fortnight later we reached Genesis 22, Abraham's offering of Isaac, and I wrote about 'holding the most precious thing[s] on an open hand before God. God doesn't take them away without restoring them in some way'. But I still do not know what that means. Later those stories became linked in my mind with Jesus's silly remark about the girl who was not dead, just asleep; what looks like the end may not be the end.

Of course there is an ambiguity about our relationship to stories about the past. When we got into Advent Itself the lectionary moved on to Isaiah 40-66 and I noted the verse which Von Rad puts at the front of the second volume of his Old Testament Theology: 'Stop brooding over days gone by: I am going to do something new'. In the new year when we read John 2 one Sunday after Epiphany, I noticed that marvellous comment about Jesus keeping the best wine till the end. Scriptural stories contain implicit promises for the future.

There were two other ways in which I found scripture ministered to me. The fourth was scripture as a way of looking at what goes on, as something which gave me new perspectives. At the end of the old church year we read Ecclesiastes, and I made a note of the passage about there being a time for this and a time for that, about accepting changes of the time, about accepting what is possible. Alongside Ecclesiastes the same morning we read Paul declaring that as far as he was concerned life was Christ, and that if he was to go on living in the body there was fruitful work for him to do. So, I noted, there was no reason to balk at actual loss or the prospect of loss, because there would still be fruitful work to do. Passages like that were another way of God being confrontational, but they were doing so by inviting me to look at the whole situation in different ways, giving me new perspectives.

And fifthly scripture often reminded me of facts about God. I wrote out much of Psalm 46 one morning, about God being a refuge and strength, and accessible help, and about there being a river whose streams make glad. I also wrote down Matthew 10:29, I suspect when Professor David Ford memorably preached on it after his wife had had a stillborn child. It tells how no sparrow falls to the ground 'without your Father': not so much that your Father wills it, causes it, or plans it, but that your Father knows it, and determines to get a grip on it, to do something creative with it and with its consequences, and somehow to bring new life out of death.

In due course I stopped writing verses down in my notebook. The process of inner healing that God built into our minds and bodies was taking place and the pain of loss came to be mostly memory. Indeed, when a fracture heals the join is actually stronger than the bone around it, so that if you break that limb again it will be at a different place. I know that in several senses the place of that healing is one that is less vulnerable than it was before, when I did not even know it was vulnerable. I would still say that the pain of loss is 'mostly memory', because when you touch a scar you mostly still feel something there. Jacob always limped after someone insisted on wrestling with him. Indeed, one would not want the loss completely to have gone from memory, because that would be to forget the thing one lost and to stop valuing it. But the pain is nearly all gone, and of course the irony is that the pain therefore no longer drives you to God. It stopped driving me to scripture, desperate to hear God speak to me through it. The stimulus that drove me in my helplessness to scripture was no longer there.

But having realized all that in connection with doing this analysis of my little red book, once or twice I have again come to scripture with expectancy and openness, despite the fact that I am not feeling especially bereaved, and I have found it had the same power to speak. So I invite my readers to two forms of openness to scripture. On a regular basis let it set the agenda as you listen to its story, its priorities, its nightmare and vision, and its testimony; let it shape you. And also, as you need to, come to it as who you are, with your agenda, and let it respond to you with its testimony, its confrontation, its stories with implicit promises, its new perspectives on your agenda items, its reminders of the facts about God.

In particular, let these stories from Genesis to 1 Samuel do that.