The Solomon Paradox

I’ve always thought it interesting that Solomon wrote Proverbs, the everyday handbook for discipline, prudence, discretion and discernment. His life story is evidence that his wisdom seemed to reside mostly in the realm of ideals, not in the core of his character. Here’s a guy who absolutely disrespected his father, David’s, life, kingdom and devotion to the one true God. I can’t help but think of Paris Hilton and a hypothetical scenario where, upon the death of her father, she is suddenly charged with running his mammoth hotel chain and humbly runs to God for help. God gives her heaps of business acumen, she writes inspiring books, but spends most of her time slurping rum-laden Jell-O shooters, shopping for handbags and sunglasses with other trust fund babies, and collecting chiseled boy toys from every household in Beverly Hills. Contrary to the wisdom of Proverbs, Solomon not only hung out with bad company, but he lived with bad company. He had sex with bad company. Lots of it. He built the temple his father only dreamt of, but it ended up in the shadow of altars to pagan idols, Chemosh and Molech, erected on the hill east of Jerusalem. And that was only two of the many high places he built and only two of the many idols of his many pagan wives. He didn’t stop there. His idolatry divided a united kingdom of Israel and left her spiritually in ruin. I’m currently teaching a series called “Imperfect People of a Perfect God” and last night Solomon was on the “hot seat.” We were looking into his life to find ours. I pointed out that he steadily processed through the 3 steps toward idolatry. Toleration > Comfort> Participation. Instead of eating an elephant one bite at a time, I suppose the elephant (the rare carnivorous kind) ate him bite by bite.  And of course, it happens so easily to us as we pander ourselves to modern-day pleasures.

The most interesting part of the story is also the most necessary. God is so gracious toward Solomon from beginning to end. Even at first, when he was running to God for help, Solomon offered sacrifices on a pagan altar in direct disobedience to divine decrees found in Deuteronomy 12. God still answered and blessed. Even when Solomon began participating in ritual pagan worship along with his wives and God’s anger burned white-hot, the Lord chose to “tear the kingdom away” from his son and not Solomon himself. What’s more, God ensured Solomon that one tribe (Judah) would remain for
Jerusalem, the lineage through which Jesus would arrive to address the idolatry in us all. And it was an enormous affront to God that he had personally appeared to the wise king twice, yet Solomon still went passionately into the laps of dead gods. I suppose it’s a sad story, though in the end the flickering pilot light of redemption withstood another stiff gust of spiritual infidelity exhaled by a chosen people. And now, for us in Christ, the flame of God’s righteous love is incinerating the bones of sin and scorching the lungs of death as it scrambles to stay out from under Jesus’ feet. 

I’ve come to discover how different God is from us in the way he relates truth and wisdom. His words and commands don’t originate in his thoughts and sensible ideals. They originate in his character. In who he is. That’s a fundamental difference between us and him and a great reason to be in relationship to him. His talk is his life, but he can’t be reduced to the sum of his words, as is often done to make him a tablet-wielding dictator of the cosmos issuing job descriptions instead of love letters. Most of us, as N.T. Wright says, want a General at the foot of our beds in the morning telling us, “Do this and do that” instead of the God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth who is there actually saying, “Once upon a time…” Our eternal lives don’t begin by morally ascending to principles and dictates. They begin by ascending to relationship. It’s probably more like descending, coming down off our ladders stretched between reality and manufactured moral high ground to see and hear something far more worthy of our lives. The vision and voice of David’s God. Maybe what Solomon needed was a lonely pasture, a deadly enemy, a forsaken cave, or a constant stream of wars to discover that he need more than God’s blessing and wisdom. He needed God himself. Maybe we need those, too.

Reality’s Translucence to God

“Again and again, faith has risked being suffocated in the embrace of power. The struggle…to avoid identifying Jesus’ Kingdom with any political structure is one that has to be fought century after century. For the fusion of faith and political power always comes at a price: faith becomes the servant of power and must bend to its criteria.”

No, it’s not an N.T. Wright diatribe on empire. This is a quote from Pope Benedict XVI’s just-published book, “Jesus of Nazareth.” Newsweek (May 21) just did a spread on the pontiff, Joseph Ratzinger, and his broad treatise. And I have to tell you I was very inspired by their conveyance of some of his insights. It’s easy for us Protestants to write off the Catholic sphere of devotional and inspirational life, but check this out: In addressing the historicity of the miracle of the wedding feast of Cana, Benedict XVI proposes that we look deeper at the meaning of the story to discover its authenticity, as our Enlightenment minds and methods are apt to avoid doing. He says that, as a sign of God’s “overflowing generosity,” the “superabundance of Cana” is the first signal that “God’s feast with humanity, his self-giving for men, has begun.” He suggests that the Gospels, read critically and with love (a Pope-proposed duality of attitude), show us “reality’s translucence to God.” I love that thought. God sees clearly through our alleged constructs of reality and in Jesus “explodes all the categories” we use to dissect truth and assign our convenient meanings to life and circumstance. Apparently this Pope has a lot to say, urging us to “trust the Gospels.” And he’s got my attention.

If Peter Parker can forgive…

…well then so can we. Aside from the fact that Warner hired someone from Kraft to consult on just the right amount of cheese to inject in the weenie that is “Spider-Man 3,” they actually take a stab at providing their viewers with a moral. And that moral is forgiveness. Except not really forgiveness, but something they call forgiveness. I know some people will find great reasons to like this movie (special effects, deliberate quirkiness, yada…), but they will all pale in comparison to the “Shut Up!” that any thinking person should be feeling after throwing your $9 into this orifice. 

 Here goes: Peter Parker finds out that the Sandman didn’t mean to kill his grandfather. It was a terrible accident. And then Harry the Hobgoblin’s son finds out that Peter didn’t actually kill his father. It was a terrible misunderstanding. Peter treats Mary-Jane like trash, but then finds out that it was the fault of a terrible alien thing that flew in on a meteor and possessed his Spidey-suit. Then they all get together, make silly cry faces and declare their “forgiveness” for one another. And Peter spells it all out for us by telling us how important forgiveness really is. But wait a minute. Don’t you have to have actually done something to be forgiven for it? You see the problem. Need I write more?

 I recently read N.T. Wright’s “Evil and the Justice of God,” which is another excellent book that doesn’t provide any answers to the question of why pain exists if God loves humanity so much. And that’s why it’s good. Essentially, it provides an understanding of evil in terms of what God has done, is doing, and will do about it. It doesn’t presume to make sense of suffering, but to show how suffering is not the “final word.” Read it. He writes some things that are really potent, not least of which is that forgiveness doesn’t try to minimize the weight of an offense or the degree of pain that is inflicted. It doesn’t say, “Well you didn’t mean to” or “It’s not as bad as maybe I think” or some other disingenuous hogwash. It actually takes every bit into account and has to let it be as offensive or vile or demeaning as it really is. Then forgiveness says, “Although this is how bad I’ve been treated, this is my response. I forgive it all. Not part of it or some of it by degree. All of it.” Point is, forgiveness doesn’t find a way to say the bad stuff is less bad. It says it’s as bad as it really is. And then addresses it tit for tat. For it to really be forgiveness, it has to really be something to forgive.

We’re truly forgiven by God. Not because he overlooks our selfishness and idolatry. He stares it right in the face, feels the betrayal all the way to his holy kidneys, and points to the finished bloody work of Jesus on the cross. It’s bad stuff. Really bad. And so it’s forgiven at that depth and to that power.     

Heart Transplants for Mannequins

The reason humans exist is to show what God is like. Sounds crazy, but it’s just plain true. According to Moses, God made Adam in his image and likeness. That might mean a lot of things, but at the very least it means that when you encountered Adam, you encountered something of God. And of course, Adam (and Eve) ate the forbidden fruit. It must have tasted like dust, because that’s what humanity has been biting ever since. You might say that whatever God intended went terribly wrong. But that wouldn’t be entirely true. God was deeply pained and responded to their betrayal by allowing Adam and Eve the break they desired from the life they knew. They had knowledge unparalleled just by virtue of their relationship to Him. They had access. But they wanted knowledge for themselves, in themselves, from themselves.

Nevertheless, God continued to show what he is like through humans. Like a sick Buddy Rich fill, God melted into 5/8 from 4/4 without missing a beat. It’s called grace. Grace is the opposite of rejection. Grace is who God is. And humanity is where he shows it. Grace from God is like a surgeon who puts human hearts in mannequins, the creepy department store ones from the 60’s that always look like they’re doing “the Robot” in a crooked wig. And they transform into real people when he has sewn them back up. God is a fantastic surgeon and the only way we know that is because we are the mannequins.

The reason God the Son became human after centuries of trying to make it clear to the Israelites, his chosen people, is to show humanity what humanity is like. Real humanity. Real reflection of God. Jesus was God’s new-fangled multimedia presentation and it went over with the Jews not unlike some of what I try to do goes over on a slow Sunday morning. Many of them just didn’t get it. But there could be no clearer picture or more effective teaching tool. Hebrews 1 says, “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being. Jesus is the “last Adam” according to Paul in 1 Cor 15. The Son didn’t wear a dusty wig and he didn’t model polyester suits on broad plastic shoulders. He was real. He was pre-Tree. He bit the dust hard enough to kill it, not him (for very long, that is). And because he was real, a real heart became available to us. Real humanity with real skin is all over us. God is evident through us. I love the fact that God never stops showing who he is through what he has made, even when what he  made became terribly disfigured, painfully fake and poorly dressed.