A Long Obedience

Imaginatively. The Bible includes us, always. Our lives are implicitly involved in everything said and done in this book. In order to realize this we must enter the story imaginatively. We must let our conversations and experiences and thoughts be brought into the story so that we can observe what happens to us in this new context, through this story line, rubbing shoulders with these characters.

We have picked up the bad habit of reducing what we find in the Bible to ideas or slogans or principles or out-of-context “verses.” Forget the details; skip the mystery; we want a definition we can grasp and be comfortable with. We depersonalize the Bible into abstractions or “truths” that we can reconfigure and then fit into the plots that we make up for our lives. But the Bible shows us God present and active in and among living, breathing human beings, the same kind and sort of men and women that we are. Imagination is the capacity we have of crossing boundaries of space and time, with all our senses intact, and entering into other God-revealed conversations and actions, finding ourselves at home in Bible country.

Prayerfully. We are taught to read in order to gather information. Our schools train us to read books so that we can pass examinations. We’re good at looking for facts. “Knowledge is power,” they tell us. Books contain stuff that we can use to get a degree, fix an engine, hold down a job, solve a mystery. But the Bible is not primarily a source of information; it is one of the primary ways that God uses to speak to us. “God’s Word” we call it, which is to say, God’s voice—God speaking to us, inviting, promising, blessing, confronting, commanding, healing. The Bible is not so much God telling us some thing—some idea, some fact, some rule—as God speaking life into us. Are we listening? Are we answering? Bible reading is prayed reading.

Obediently. Obediently? We aren’t used to this. We have grown up in a culture that urges us to take charge of our own lives. We are introduced to thousands of books which we are trained to use—look up information, acquire skills, master knowledge, divert ourselves . . . whatever. But use? Well-meaning people have told us that the Bible is useful, and so we pick it up. We adapt, edit, sift, summarize. We then use whatever seems useful and apply it in our circumstances however we see fit. We take charge of the Bible, using it as a toolbox to repair our lives or as a guidebook for getting what we want or as an inspirational tract to enliven a dull day.

But we aren’t smart enough to do that; nor can we be trusted to do that. The Author of the book is writing us into his book, we aren’t writing him into ours. We find ourselves in the book as followers of Jesus. Jesus calls us to follow him and we obey—or we do not. This is an immense world of God’s salvation that we are entering; we don’t know enough to “apply” anything. Our task is to obey, believingly, trustingly obey. Simply obey.

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I sometimes amuse myself by imagining Friedrich Nietzsche, who announced the death of God and who is now long dead himself, showing up in my study as I’m writing my books. He looks over my bookshelves and sees part of a sentence he wrote as a title on one of the books. He learns that I wrote the book. He beams (although I do have trouble imagining Nietzsche beaming). How pleased he is to find that I have kept his wonderful sentence “A long obedience in the same direction” in circulation into the third Christian millennium.

Then he takes the book off the shelf and looks through it. His face furrows into an angry frown. The old atheist was convinced that Christians, by promoting the weak and ineffectual Jesus to keep the weakest, spiritually diseased, morally unfit and inferior parts of the population alive and reproducing, were a malign influence on civilization and would be the ruin of us all. He thought he’d delivered a death blow, and now he finds us still at it.

I love imagining him standing there angry and appalled, beard smoking, astonished that these weak, inadequate, ineffectual and unfit Christians are alive still, and still reproducing.