Walking Upright

            If you are reading this blog, then I can assume that you can read, have access to a computer, and have an internet connection, making you better off than the vast majority of people who have ever lived on the planet. With the exception of a blight that hit my fruit crop this last year, the vast majority of my problems are first world problems. This can sometimes make it difficult to relate to people in the Old Testament. I have never been a slave, I don’t depend on rainfall for most of my food, and the odds of my home being invaded by a foreign power are very slim. But modernity has brought with it its own set of challenges, challenges that are very real when you are in the middle of them, even though they may seem laughable to people who had to share their farmland with lions. So, here follow a few thoughts about dealing with first world problems. 

            “And I will set my tabernacle among you: and my soul shall not abhor you. And I will walk among you, and will be your God, and ye shall be my people. I am the Lord your God, which brought you forth out of the land of Egypt, that ye should not be their bondmen; and I have broken the bands of your yoke, and made you go upright.”

(Leviticus 26:11–13)   

 

            Since we don’t live in tents anymore, God pitching his tent (setting up his tabernacle) among us seems odd. Today we build houses for God, and consecrate them to Him. But the simple fact that God wants to live with us should make us take notice. Why would a cosmically powerful, cosmically good being want to live among His fallen creations? Really, in a cosmic sense, His soul should abhor us as fallen beings, He should refuse to associate with beings that habitually break His commandments, and yet He doesn’t. The only explanation I can come up with for this behavior is that He really loves us. Not in a trite, superfluous sense, but in a He’s-willing-to-get-His-hands-dirty sense. He’s willing to help us slog through the mire of life for no other reason but love. 

            God wants to walk among us, so He can be our God, and we can be His people, and I think He wants this in the most anthropomorphic way possible. He wants us to walk in His paths and talk with Him in the way that we would talk to our most intimate friends. In the modern world, it is difficult to de-distract ourselves long enough to really walk with God, but that is what He still asks of us. He wants us to be His close, personal, friend, not a passing acquaintance. He wants us to put ourselves in a state where He really can “walk among us” so we can feel His presence, even in the most mundane of moments. 

            We were never slaves in Egypt, but I have sometimes felt like a slave to my problems. I have been a slave to my fears, I have been a slave to hopelessness, I have been a slave to the constant list of things to do that weighs upon us in the modern world. These are problems that eventually pass, but they feel so real when you are in the middle of them. In John 11, when Lazarus died, Jesus came to visit his sisters, Mary and Martha. When he spoke with them, He knew their problems were going to be solved in just a few minutes; He was literally on His way to the tomb to bring Lazarus back to life. Yet He didn’t say to them, “Cheer up, your problems will be over soon.” He wept. He acknowledged that their problem was painfully real, and wept with them. And when we, today, find ourselves enslaved to our temporary problems, however small, we can be assured that He will patiently listen to our pleadings, and then help us to maintain perspective. (D & C 121:1-7)

            In ancient Egypt, slavery involved bowing down under the burden of heavy brick yokes. These were curved sticks that went on a person’s neck and shoulders with ropes on both ends so they could carry containers full of mud bricks to the jobsite. Thus, when the children of Israel were slaves in Egypt, they would have spent much of their time hunched over under their burdens, sometimes working all day without ever walking erect. However, when God delivered the Israelites from Egypt, he said, “I have broken the bands of your yoke, and made you go upright.” 

            Sometimes we find ourselves bowed down under our burdens today, weighed down by our problems or our to-do list, spending our days with our eyes on the ground, stumbling towards our goals without the confidence to look up. Just as God broke the yoke of the Israelites, so He can relieve us of our burdens, reminding us of our identity as His children, and giving us the confidence to “go upright.” 

When you find yourself weighed down under whatever form of slavery you are in, remember that you are a child of God and that He can relieve you of your burdens and help you walk upright.  

                       

           

Hearts

"And the Spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, and thou shalt ... be turned into another man."
1 Samuel 10:6

In the past, I often found myself wishing that I could be like somebody else. I want to be as smart as this person, or as cool as that person, or as likeable as that other guy. Inevitably, this line of thought led me to despair. How could I ever be as awesome as the people around me?

After many years of struggling with this, I came to the stark realization: I couldn't. It was literally impossible for me to be the kind of person I wanted to be. I came to realize unequivocally that no matter how hard I tried, I could never do the kinds of things I wanted with my life.

The realization was at the same time deeply disturbing and utterly liberating. I became keenly aware of my own worthlessness but realized, for the first time in my life, that since it was utterly impossible for me to achieve my goals, I could finally stop trying. I could actually rest for the first time in my life.

You would think that this conclusion would have made me feel hopeless, but the exact opposite happened. I had never felt more hopeful in all my life. I realized that I could never achieve my goals, and that I didn't have to. I simply had to let God turn me into another man.

This new man would be able to achieve all the goals I never could. He would be the kind of person I liked spending 24 hours a day with. He would be the kind of man I could look up to. He was the kind of man I would want to be friends with. After years of beating my head against the wall trying to do things by myself, I finally just allowed God to turn me into someone else.

But who was this other man I had been replaced with? How did he get here? The answer is found in 1 Samuel 10.

In 1 Samuel 9 we meet this guy named Saul. He's a pretty cool guy who's just minding his own business, trying to find his dad's donkeys who have gotten lost. However, Saul is apparently getting pretty sick of looking for these donkeys and decides to throw in the towel and go home. His servant, however, has one last idea. He knows there's a seer in one of these towns close by, and figures that if they find the seer, he can tell them where to find the donkeys. So they round up some loose change (apparently it was customary to tip seers back in the day) and go to find him.

As it turns out, the seer they are looking for is Samuel, and God has told him that Saul and his servant are coming to see him. When they finally show up, Samuel is waiting for them (he even has food ready for them) and informs Saul that he is going to be the next captain over the armies of Israel. He then tells him that he will run into some prophets on the way home who will be prophesying, but then "the Spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, and thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man." Apparently, everything happens just the way Samuel said it would, because in verse nine it says, "And it was so, that when he had turned his back to go from Samuel, God gave him another heart: and all those signs came to pass that day." 

As I see it, this verse give us the "who" and the "how" for becoming a new person. The only way to be turned into another person, to be replaced by another person, is through the Holy Ghost. In fact, the person that replaces the "old you" is actually two people: a combination of the best elements of your old self and the Holy Ghost. This is the new person that we can be changed into. It is this that allows us to do and be so much more than we were before, because we aren't doing it by ourselves anymore. When you have become one with the Holy Ghost, one of the three most powerful beings in the universe, even the tough things we have to do don't seem so tough anymore.

The way to achieve this is simple: the Holy Ghost gives us another heart. He can change our desires and make us into new people. It is this process that allows us to become infinitely better, and to be the people we want to be. The process may not be easy, and it is reversible (Saul seems to have rejected this new heart pretty quickly) but I know that this is how regular people can become better people and be who we want to be. 

Perhaps it's time to allow ourselves to be turned into another person. 

Easter

When I was very young, my family moved into a beautiful old house with a huge yard. Both the house and the yard needed extensive work to return them to their former glory, but the yard needed help most of all. It seemed like everything on the property was dead. There was a big dead shrub in the middle of the front yard, all the rosebushes were dead, all the fruit trees in the back yard were dead, and the pomegranate tree bore the most bitter fruit I've ever tasted. (Turns out some pomegranate bushes are meant to be ornamental. Who knew?) 

I decided that the only thing to do with this place was to cut everything down and begin again from the ground up, so I began to do just that. I grabbed my trusty bow-saw and began to wreak havoc on the yard. I cut down the shrub in the front yard, cut down a small tree in the front yard, and started on a small tree in the back yard. Eventually, my dad came around to help me cut it down, and as we began to cut, we noticed that the tree still had a surprising amount of moisture left in it, and that the wood had a faint green tinge to it. Then we realized something: these trees were not dead, they had just been neglected for so long that they were not producing leaves or fruit.

After making this realization, we dove into the project with redoubled vigor. Instead of cutting all the trees down and starting over again, we carefully nursed the trees back to health. We put in an irrigation system, we drove fertilizer spikes into the ground next to the roots, we trimmed the trees back, we cut all the weeds around the trees, and we put down mulch. Then, a few months later, all the trees we thought were dead began to bud again. Even the roses came back. We enjoyed the fruit and flowers from that yard for many years, and they were still producing even when we moved away from that house. 

I have often thought about how sad it would have been if I had simply cut down all the trees and pulled up all the rose bushes without realizing what I was doing. Yet I think that we sometimes do this to ourselves. We look at our lives and don't think that we could possibly salvage the terrible mess our lives have become. Sometimes it seems like it might be best to give up on everything we have hoped for and just start over again. However, just as my father and I realized that the trees in our yard were still alive after all, so I hope that all of us can look at our lives in our darkest moments and realize that we are not as spiritually or socially or emotionally dead as we might have thought. 

After all, it isn't just Christ's conquest over physical death that we celebrate on Easter. If He could be tortured to death and rise again from the grave, He can certainly bring us back, no matter how dead we might feel. 

Happy Easter.      

Abraham's Sacrifice of Ishmael

The Old Testament is full of stories that are hard to understand and, without context, make God look like a pretty tough deity to deal with. One story that brings this home the most to me is the story of Hagar and Ishmael.

Hagar is Abraham's concubine and Ishmael is her son. They live with Abraham and seem to be having a jolly old time in Beer-sheba, when trouble begins to brew. Sarah catches Ishmael doing something she doesn't like, (it's difficult to tell what exactly, as the sentence is very ambiguous, and the Hebrew word there is quite rare) and tells Abraham to kick them both out. In Beer-sheba, kicking people out to fend for themselves basically amounts to a death sentence. It is so dry there that there is little chance of anyone surviving on their own. One would think that Abraham would just tell Sarah to get over herself, and it seems like he might be considering just that course of action, when God appears and tells Abraham to kick them out, and tells him that Ishmael will survive to have children.   

It seems terrible to imagine that God would have a family separated like this, but that's not the only questionable thing God does in the Abraham story. According to Abraham 2:22-24, God tells Abraham to lie to the Egyptians and tell them that Sarai is his sister, not his wife. (My brilliant wife informs me that there is a word in Egyptian that means both wife and sister, so this is not quite a lie, but he wanted the Egyptians to think his wife was single, so it still counts as a lie in my book.)

Of course, the most egregious offence that God seems to commit in the Abraham story is when He asks Abraham to sacrifice Isaac to him. This ruling was reversed at the last minute, but that almost makes God look even more capricious. So what is really going on here?

I think it is possible to see Abraham's story as a story of loss and recovery. Over the course of Abraham's life God asks him to sacrifice everyone close to him, and then God makes sure he gets most of them back.

At the beginning of Abraham's life, he has some family problems (his dad tries to kill him,) so God tells Abraham to get out of Ur and go to Canaan (via Haran.) He knows this will mean leaving his family behind, even those he may have loved, but he does it because God asks him to.

Shortly thereafter, Abraham goes down to Egypt, where God asks him to, temporarily, sacrifice his relationship with this wife. It is clearly meant to be short term, but for a time, God asks him to give up Sarai as his wife. He does so. Abrahams sacrifice of Sarai is very temporary, but it certainly seems that God asks him to give her up for a short time, even if it is mostly a symbolic gesture.

Then, Abraham marries Hagar but, as noted above, God asks Abraham to give Hagar and Ishmael up. Abraham does so. This sacrifice of Ishmael and Hagar makes the sacrifice of Isaac even more moving because when God tells Abraham in the next chapter to go and sacrifice his only son, it simply drives home the message that Abraham has no one left. He just "sacrificed" Ishmael the chapter before, and now he has to sacrifice Isaac. He is about to do so, and is stopped at the last minute.

But now you may be asking yourself, "What about Ishmael? He practically falls off the face of the earth after Genesis 21. How does Abraham get him back?" The answer to this may be provided by a much later text, the Quran. According to some Muslim traditions, Hagar and Ishmael move down south to Mecca. Abraham is eventually told they are living there, so Abraham begins to go down to visit them on a regular basis, and even builds something of a temple, the Kaaba, with Ishamel. This might just be wishful thinking on the part of the Muslims, trying to make sense of a difficult story, but I think it just might be what really happened.

Finally, there is Abraham's restitution with his immediate family back in Ur. This comes to Abraham indirectly through his son, Isaac. In Genesis 24, Isaac marries Rebekah, who is Abraham's brother's granddaughter. Initially this may seem odd, as we know Abraham's family were not the most upstanding people, but it seems that they got better a few generations down the line, such that it was said of Rebekah that no man had "known the like unto her." Her marriage to Isaac can be seen as a re-joining of Abraham's immediately family with his brother's family, the family he had to leave behind so many years before.

With that, Abraham's life has come full circle. He is asked by God to give up his brother, his wives, and his sons, but slowly, over the course of his life, he gets them all back again. God certainly asked Abraham to sacrifice a lot, but once God saw that Abraham was completely dedicated to him, God made sure that Abraham got it all back and more. I can't help but wonder if that is the way it will be for us. Sometimes we have to go through great periods of loss, but I think that God is in the business of restitution. No matter how much we lose, if we lose it in His name, God will make sure our losses get made up, in this life or the next.                   
   

The Unknown

"For ye have not passed this way heretofore." - Joshua 3:4

Sometimes life is surprisingly similar to the conquest of Canaan. (By this I don't mean that I'm surprised about how often I get involved in hand-to-hand combat with my neighbors.) What I mean is that sometimes I find myself in a completely unfamiliar environment, embarking on something new. Sometimes it's getting a new job, or no longer having a job, or moving, or going to a new school. Whatever it is, I often find myself utterly unprepared, sometimes without even a frame of reference.

I imagine that this is exactly how the Israelites felt as they approached the invasion of Canaan. Technically they were "returning" to some kind of ancestral homeland, but these people had never lived there before. In fact, they had probably lived in the desert for most of their lives; it is likely that most of them had never even seen the place they were going to be living soon. In situations like this, it is easy to let fear overtake you and to become frozen by indecision.

This very thing appears to have happened to the Israelites. In Joshua 3, the Israelites leave from Shittim and go to the river, as though they were about to cross, but then they stop there for three days, perhaps frozen by indecision. The Israelites know that the Jordan is their Rubicon: once they cross it, things are never going to be the same again. Their pleasant pastoral lives are about to be replaced by lives of warfare from which there can be no retreat.

However, I think that God must have known how they were feeling at the time and decided to make the transition less scary for them. So, on the fourth day, Joshua sent messengers throughout the camp, telling the Israelites, "When ye see the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, and the priests the Levites bearing it, then ye shall remove from your place, and go after it." In other words, God is volunteering to be the first one into the unknown. From what we know of God from Exodus, this is not really surprising. God went before the children of Israel into the desert as a pillar of smoky fire, so having his "throne" go before the children of Israel into the Holy Land is only fitting. However, some Israelites may have been unaware that he could do this. In much of the Ancient Near East, gods were seen as beings that only had jurisdiction over certain areas, not over the whole earth. The idea that God could fight the children of Israel's battles in Egypt, in the desert, and on the other side of the Jordan must have been amazing to some people.

But this is not all God does to reassure them: "Yet there shall be a space between you and it, about two thousand cubits by measure: come not near unto it, that ye may know the way by which ye must go: for ye have not passed this way heretofore." In other words, God tells the children of Israel to maintain enough distance between themselves and the Ark for them to gain some perspective and to tread with confidence in the path of the Ark-bearers. If they had crowded right behind the Ark, the Israelites would have been unaware of the right path, having to walk it with the Ark, but by allowing some distance between themselves and the Ark, it became easier to see the path of the Ark stretching out before them. This perspective allowed the Israelites to know a section of the right path before they began their journey.

Sometimes in life it is easy to rush into things blindly because we feel we have to, and it is true that in many cases we are called upon to venture into the unknown. However, we need not go without perspective. The Son of God has gone before us. Even if we "have not passed this way" before, we know that He has, and seeing His footsteps stretching out before us can help us find the right path.        

Christmas

I'd like to think that I'm probably related to the Druids somehow. I'm not the biggest fan of pagan ritual, but I very much enjoy ambling though the woods. One December, during one such excursion in the woods of North Carolina, I saw that there was still some greenery in the branches above me. This seemed strange to me, as the leaves had long since fallen from the trees. I looked more carefully up at the canopy of branches above me, and saw that the greenery was not from the tree itself, but from a plant that was growing out of the tree. Mistletoe. 

Mistletoe is a parasite that grows on deciduous trees in North America and Europe and is one of the more iconic symbols of Christmas. However, the history of mistletoe as a symbol seems to stretch much farther back than Christmas does. According to the ancient author Pliny, the Druids used to use mistletoe in all kinds of rituals, thinking that it would make the land more fertile. Eventually, when Christianity was introduced into western Europe, mistletoe was absorbed into the rituals surrounding Christmas with the tradition of kissing under the mistletoe.

Because of its obvious pagan origins, it may be easy to dismiss mistletoe as just another Christmas tradition, but maybe there's another way to look at it. In the Prose Edda, a work from the Middle Ages which details elements of Norse Mythology, the Norse god Baldr is everybody's favorite god. Everybody on earth seems to love Baldr because he is so nice to everyone. But one day, Balder has some bad dreams and is afraid they might be a sign of his impending death. To keep himself safe, he and his friends make all the plants, animals and elements in the world swear an oath that they would never hurt Balder. However, since mistletoe is so small and seemingly harmless, they pass it up and do not make it swear the oath.

Balder and his friends soon realize that the oath they made everything swear could be the makings of a new game. Since everything promised not to hurt Balder, they can throw stuff at him as hard as they want and the projectiles,wanting to keep their oaths, will avoid Balder. (This game seems very Viking to me somehow.) Loki, upset by Baldr's invincibility, decides to finish off Baldr once and for all. He discovers through treachery that mistletoe is the only thing that can hurt Baldr and devises a plan to shoot Baldr with a mistletoe arrow. He makes the arrow and convinces Hodr, Baldr's blind friend, to join in the game and shoot at Baldr.  He does so but, being blind, does not realize that Loki has given him the mistletoe arrow.  Baldr dies instantly.

Because everyone loves Baldr so much, they try to make a deal with Hel, the aptly-named goddess of the underworld, to free Baldr. She says she will only let Balder come back after Ragnarok, when many of the other gods are dead. The return of Baldr will usher in an age of peace and prosperity for the world.

At Christmastime, Christians celebrate the birth of a dying and reviving God who descended into the underworld; a god who, after a time of terrible calamity, will one day return to usher in an age of peace and prosperity for the world. Although our God was not killed by mistletoe, perhaps when we see it hanging up this time of year, we can think of the Baldr story and remember our own God, the God Christmas was meant to celebrate. 

Temples

So, you hear a knock on the door one day after work.  You open it, and see God standing at your doorstep.  What do you do?  Do you let Him in immediately, or would you hurriedly go turn off the TV or try to clean the place up a bit?  He says He needs to stay for three months.  Would you be comfortable with having God in your house for three whole months?  Would you have to make a lot of adjustments or would it feel pretty normal?

Most of us will never have to answer any of these questions.  I live in Utah right now, so I figure God would have plenty of places to stay if he wanted to spend a few days on earth for some reason.  But one guy actually had to answer these questions: Obed-Edom the Gittite.

We don't know much about this guy.  He was probably from a Levite city called Gath-Rimmon, and he lived outside Jerusalem during the reign of King David.  In fact, he probably lived right along the main road leading down to Jerusalem.  It is very likely that he was standing outside his door along that road on the day David brought the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem.  He would have seen the Ark come by, pulled along slowly by two oxen, driven by two brothers, Uzzah and Ahio.  

It is also very likely that he would have been watching as one of the drivers reached out his hand, steadied the Ark, and instantly dropped dead.

What now?  He couldn't just leave this body in the street, and he certainly couldn't let the Ark sit there in the middle of the road.  The king could have had somebody take care of Uzzah while a few other guys took the Ark the rest of the way.  But suddenly, King David was not so sure he wanted the Ark in his house anymore.  He was afraid that Uzzah's death might be the first of many, and he didn't want his family to be on the list.  So what did he do?  He asked Obed-Edom the Gittite if he would be willing to keep the Ark at his place.  In other words, he asked him if he would be willing to turn his house into a temple on the spot.

It looks like it worked out pretty well for him.  In fact, they seem to have put it in Obed-Edom's house right away, just to get it out of the road.  I would like to think that Obed-Edom didn't have to scramble around much to temple-ize his house.  Maybe he just threw open the doors and let the Ark in right away.  Even though he was clearly dealing with a God that had exacting standards, standards he had just seen played out during the Uzzah incident, it was said of him: "The Lord hath blessed the house of Obed-edom, and all that pertaineth unto him, because of the ark of God."

I can only hope that if I were to keep God in my living room for three months that it would be a blessing to me.  I can't help but wonder if it was a little weird at first, to open the door every day and see the throne of God in your front room.  But it probably became second-nature after a while.

Just like it does for us.

Think about it.  A lot of us have the gift of the Holy Ghost, meaning we have God living with us.  Granted, He is God the Holy Ghost and not God the Father, but perhaps we should take more serious the notion that our bodies are the temple of the Holy Ghost.

Aaron, the brother of Moses, used to wear a little metal plate on the front of his hat with the words, "Holiness to the LORD" written on it.  Perhaps that is apt today.  Not that I am going to go around with a hat like that, but maybe the idea still applies.  As temples of the Holy Ghost shouldn't we be "Holiness to the LORD" just like temples are "Holiness to the Lord?"  

In some ways, Obed-Edom's experience is light-years removed from anything that might happen to us, but in some ways, we have his experience every day.  The phrase "holiness to the LORD" could better be translated "consecrated to the LORD," or "set aside for the exclusive use of the LORD."  And shouldn't we all be consecrated to the Lord?  My house is not specifically set apart as a temple right now, and I don't go around with a metal plate on my forehead, but maybe we would do well to remember that we have all been set apart for the exclusive use of God.

Thanks to the gift of the Holy Ghost, I live, work, eat, and sleep in the presence of God, as long as I am worthy of His presence.  He can be in my house anytime, just as certainly as the Ark was in Obed-Edom's house.  Sure, I don't have the Ark in my living room, but the Holy Ghost can still visit anyway.  He just has to sit on the couch.