Still learning and growing…

After a difficult lunch break yesterday with Kirsten due to some misalignment with our conversation or lack there of. Sometimes I just drift off into my own world when it’s obvious that is not where I should be. We drove back to work and I took about 30 minutes and dove into some scripture and then remembered a section from Rob Bell’s book: “Sex God”. What follows is what I sent to Kirsten through email (she loves receiving emails throughout the day, one of the things I have to work on). There was some personal stuff afterwards I am choosing to leave out right now, but here is what woke me up…

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“Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and embraces his wife. They become one flesh.” | Genesis 2:24

Now the one flesh seems to be about their having sex. Which, or course, it is. But there is so much more going on here. Even having sex in this story is about something else.

In Jewish tradition, words are extremely meaningful. In our english language the dictionary has somewhere between one or two thousand words, yet the Hebrew language sits somewhere at over seven thousand words!

So when it is said in Genesis that a man and woman will become “one flesh”, the word for one in Hebrew is the word “echad“.

Echad is oneness made up of several parts or members. So the man and woman are two people, two separate, independent beings, and yet when they come together, they’re one. The word is significant because it occurs in one of the most well-known passages of Scripture in Jewish history. It’s a prayer from the book of Deuteronomy that begins, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.”

This prayer, called the Shema, fro the word “to hear”, is the central declaration of the Jewish faith, a way of reaffirming all that life is about.

The Lord is one.

The Lord is echad.

God is echad.

It’s the same word as “one flesh” in Genesis: “And the man and woman shall be echad flesh.”

Central to the Bible is the affirmation that there is one God. Not many, one. An sex between the man and woman has something to do with God.

Who is God.

What is God like.

Adam and Eve are one as God is one.

Same word.

This marriage between a man and woman - their having sex - is about something bigger - is about something much bigger than the relationship itself. It points beyond them to somebody else - to God.

The point of marriage isn’t marriage.

It’s a picture.

A display.

A window that you look through to something else.

A marriage is a mission.

Our world is echad. It isn’t one. It’s broken, shattered, fractured, with pieces lying all over the floor.

We have friends who are broken from “broken homes“.

A couple “split up“.

A spouse is “shattered” by his lovers infidelity.

Somebody’s marriage fell apart and she’s “picking up the pieces“.

When our trust has been betrayed and those who were supposed to stand by us don’t, this naturally has consequences for how we think about God. It becomes hard to trust that God is good when our significant relationships simply aren’t that good.

A marriage is designed to counter all of this. Not to add the brokenness of the world but to add to the “oneness” of the world. This man and woman who have given themselves to each other are supposed to give the world a glimpse of hope, a display of what God is like, a bit of echad on earth.

*excerpt taken from “Sex God” by Rob Bell

Introduction: Part 1

During the introduction of David’s Edwards book, “LIT”, he describes his first time experiencing God and his life throughout grade school and off to college. His description reminded me of my same experience once I began attending church in 9th grade.

If you are around my age, 25, or older you most likely have been to an event when you were young, or a church service where you were asked… “if you were in a car wreck today and died, would you go the heaven or hell?” I have been to a hand full of those services myself, but the scare tactic never worked on me personally. 1) But for some that was the beginning, a walk down the center aisle, grab a card, fill it out and sign your name. 2) Next up was my teenage years where the key goal to being a strong Christian was the life of purity/abstinence. If we could just keep our hands off of the opposite sex (or same sex), then we would be right with God. Other things were talked about, but the largest moral code to uphold was that of purity. So many of us grab the card and signed our name to be pure, and some even placed the promise ring on their hands. 3) Now I was off to college and took a New Testament class with some good friends. What I found out was there we many other views of God & Jesus outside of my small Southern Baptist background view. Like Edward’s, I encountered a group of people who said…    

“to love God you must be accepting to everything and everybody, regardless of who they are or what they believe. And above all else, do not confront anyone for any reason.”

4) And now I have the decision to be a real “Man of God”. An honorable, faithful, consistent “Man of God”. I am encouraged to find an accountability partner, break out the paper, and write down the morality checklist. And once a week, if we are lucky, our partner will grab that piece of paper we signed and ask me the questions. Not much dialogue to follow, just some yes and no answers and some lies to fill the space between.

Ok, so after those 4 major areas of many peoples lives and some of yours I’m guessing, what do we do different if this is a problem. Tomorrow is Part Two of this little Introduction and how Character changes all this. But I’ll leave you with this…

We are trying to modify people’s behavior instead of changing their heart!

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**for more detail on this post visit the previous post here to read about my plan with this new book I am reading, “LIT” by David Edwards