Finding God in the Human Side of Scripture
By Dennis Berlin

     Whenever we approach the Bible or even presume to talk about the nature of it’s inspiration, we would do well to take upon our lips a prayer which I learned during my undergraduate studies at Union College.  The professor who taught us the prayer is Sylvester Case who says he uses this prayer often.  The prayer is one I have had on my lips time and time again since I was introduced to it, especially is this true in times when I feel compelled to navigate perilous intellectual or spiritual waters.  The prayer is, “Lord, guard my heart and guard my mind.”  If human beings are good at any one thing it is self-deception.  We like to imagine that we are very rational beings (even that is often a deception), but psychology has demonstrated in study after study the true depth of our inclination to lie to ourselves or to be genuinely deceived.  Our greatest danger comes to us when we are not aware--by choice or willful ignorance--of this painful fact, and it would be good to remember that “the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked...” Jer. 17:9
     When we approach the sacred scriptures we have doubly to be wary of self-deception because much is at stake.  Enticing and partially legitimate yearnings to be masters of our own destiny or even natural fears of losing certain cherished and comforting beliefs, can both pull the wool over our eyes and lead us into believable error, even to the point that we lose vital faith if we are unaware of our prejudices.  We should not kid ourselves that there is little at stake in this matter; the Bible is the one source of our hope beyond our current brief flash of existence, it provides us with the only truly meaningful purpose which I have personally found in any opposing world-view or philosophy.  I don’t know about everyone else, but I am not satisfied with the alternatives.  The other day I listened to a prominent radio doctor inform his listeners that our whole purpose in life may in fact be to perpetuate sperm.  But there is a powerful witness which is calling out to us a much different story--we ought to take this witness very seriously.  We ought to, as Moses at the burning bush, take off our shoes (so to speak) from off our feet and consider the holy ground we stand on.
     This does not mean however, that we should check in our brains at the door when we approach scripture, nor is it helpful in the long run for us to raise these very special writings up on a mental pedestal to the point of sanctimony.  Indeed,  given the very high and important nature of the writings, we ought to fully engage every ounce of whatever mind God has allowed us to possess to seek the clearest possible understanding of these words, and in recognizing the many compelling evidences they possess to recommend stronger faith in their content.
     Just here is a form of self-deception which is the special temptation of just the sort of people who value the scriptures the most.  In an environment awash with so-called “higher” criticism and atheistic assumptions, we are very susceptible as God-lovers and protectors of the “inerrancy” of the scriptures, to fall prey to a temptation of over-emphasizing the divinity of the scriptures in a mistaken belief that this extreme will counteract the opposite fallacy.  This subtle self-deception which attempts to sanitize the Bible from all human frailty, while well intentioned, can lead individuals or whole denominations to reach a point where they cannot read God’s scriptures within the very human context in which they were written, and therefore fail of properly understanding and applying God’s Word, or worse.  Believing that our extreme view is protecting faith, we may actually set ourselves up--and other fair-minded seekers--for a later disillusionment or crisis of faith when we or they have unanticipated collisions with the human reality in scripture.
     I tackle this issue, because this is exactly the place I found myself one day as a result of overemphasizing one aspect of God’s Word to the the neglect of another--disillusioned-- and I now see that my mini faith-crisis could be directly traced to an exaggerated view of inspiration which I had both been taught and had personally developed through my own studies.  My trouble came one day as I was reading the book of Jude; that tiny little book found just before Revelation which many Christians hardly read, because it is like driving through a small town; you blink and you’ve missed it.  Besides this there are a few items in Jude which seem to puzzle certain Christians who do chance to take a look at the one chapter long book.  Phrases, for instance, referring to an argument about the body of Moses and a reference to Enoch, “the seventh from Adam,” lead people to correctly deduce that there are stories here being referred to, which cannot be found in the Bible.  I have sometimes given proof-text Bible studies based on Jude to point to an answer regarding a question about evil angels or why Moses was on the mount with Jesus even though he had died and was buried.  Jude was convenient for proof-texts precisely because something is mentioned in Jude not found elsewhere in scripture, and seemed to me to be a kind of spiritual “missing link” for a couple of issues.
     I had studied the book of Jude at various times, but never seriously, since the book just did not seem as important as the others of the 66 from which I had to choose.  Then one day something I heard or read or thought about led me to the little book; at this late date I don’t remember exactly what it was that inspired my research (it may have been my interest in the dead sea scrolls which led me to the reading of an ancient book called 1 Enoch), but nonetheless it peaked my interest and curiosity about those stories referred to in Jude.
     Before I finished my research I had become painfully aware of a fact about Jude that disturbed me greatly, especially in light of the probability that the book was written by one of the actual brothers of Jesus.  The disturbing fact was the apparent use of Pseudepigraphical sources in such a way as to intimate that these stories were actually believed by Jude to be fact.  Pseudepigraphical books are any number of books from around the time of Christ bearing the name of some great person but which was not actually written by that person.  At the time of Christ there were many titles of this common literature among the Jews and also later Christians with such well-known names as Moses, David or Enoch in their titles--much of it was apocryphal in nature.  What especially surprised and confused me was the clear reference in Jude to a prophecy by “Enoch, the seventh from Adam.”  We all know who that is, but the old testament says almost nothing of detail about him.  Having said, “the seventh from Adam” there would be no question in any reader’s mind as to whom Jude was referring.  I always supposed while reading Jude that this prophecy must have been revealed to Jude directly from God, perhaps in a vision, since it would be highly unlikely that a prophet from long before the flood would have had writings survive the flood and end up thousands of years later in the hands of a Galilean Jew without having mention of them anywhere in the old testament.  It intrigued me a number of times that God would see fit to tell so much about Enoch to Jude when the old testament contained no specific details at all. The real shocker came when I was actually reading the book called 1 Enoch (in ancient times just “Enoch”)--one of the known pseudepigraphical books extant at the time of Christ, but only relatively recently rediscovered in Ethiopia and later also in the Qumran caves (among the dead sea scrolls)--for the first time.  I began rolling through the book, when I landed on something in the first page that sounded vaguely familiar to me.  It went like this:

9 And behold! He cometh with ten thousands of His holy ones
To execute judgment upon all,
And to destroy all the ungodly:
And to convict all flesh
Of all the works of their ungodliness which they have ungodly committed,
And of all the hard things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.
 I went back to the book of Jude and sure enough, this was nearly word for word what Jude was quoting:
 
And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints, To execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him. Jude 14,15
    At first the thought occurred to me that maybe the book of 1 Enoch was really an inspired account of the real Enoch--until I read on.  The book went on to describe an elaborate plot worthy of the most exciting Greek epic poem about the gods.  The reference in the old testament to the “sons of God” marrying the “daughters of men” (and therefore leading the world to become very wicked, thus bringing on the flood) is elaborated upon as angels who left their place in heaven so to speak and came down to earth in order to have sexual relations with human women.  These women then produced giant offspring who went around killing people.  These giants turned into the demons which are to forever attack people, after their bodies died and their supernatural spirits were set free from the giant bodies.  The several angels who “kept not their first estate,” all named, are--to make a long story short--confined until the great judgment in a pit out in the desert with rocks covering it at one point and at another point to the “abyss” which is a bottomless nothingness at the edge of the flat earth somewhere in the vicinity, or beyond the area, where there are the great fires to which the sun goes into every evening when it reaches the edge of the flat earth.  They are confined until the day of their great judgment.  Many interesting things were shown to Enoch such as the literal cornerstone of the earth, the sky (here believed to be something solid) meeting the edge of the flat earth and living spirits of dead people stuck in various places of confinement.  The spirits in confinement include Cain, who keeps pleading with God for forgiveness, which he will never get.  It would make a brilliant science fiction movie, indeed!  Among the many curiosities of the book is the fact that the “tree of knowledge,” which got Adam and Eve cast out of “the garden” in the scriptural story, is here a righteous and good tree, and accredited for all the good wisdom people have!  Unbelievable as it is to me this is what anyone can read.
     This really gave me disillusionment as my sense of truthfulness convinced me that there was no way of getting around the implication that Jude was quoting this strange book (which I would never consider inspired) as authority and giving a statement from the book as from the real Enoch, which came out of a book that clearly was not written by the real Enoch.  This was not my only grief with Jude.  After reading the accounts in 1 Enoch of the chained up angels, I suddenly understood exactly what was probably being referred to in Jude 6, which refers to angels who “left their own habitation,” etc.  Here was clear evidence that Jude took seriously something that I consider to be quite a ludicrous explanation of a passage in Genesis, besides the many other problems encountered in this clearly pseudepigraphical book.  This very verse is often used as a proof-text to demonstrate the doctrine of angels rebelling in heaven along with Lucifer and being cast out of heaven and reserved for the final judgment as we understand it.  This is probably not the real meaning at all, since it is most probably referring to a much different story from the same book of “Enoch,” which Jude quotes from, a story which is about a few angels having sexual relations with human women--not about the great controversy or Lucifer’s campaign against God in heaven.
     There is one more well known reference in Jude which is also coming from a pseudepigraphical source.  This is the reference to the conflict between Michael and the Devil which is found in a now missing portion of a book called the “Testament of Moses,” which is clearly not a book written actually by Moses.  The tradition of the resurrection of Moses, however, was a prevailing tradition in Judaism and does fit--not necessarily the pseudepigraphical version--with the fact that Jesus on the mount of transfiguration saw Moses and Elijah both.
     I later learned that there is evidence that Jude is not the only new testament writer who apparently used such sources within his writings--and Paul even quoted from Classical pagan poems.  However, Jude, especially clearly, seems to believe the truth of the source he’s quoting.  After a bit of further research I discovered that in the times of the early church there were indeed various people within Christianity (some believe it to be most Christians)--as a product of their times--who revered the writing of 1 Enoch and some of the other various apocryphal writings which were later rejected, and by being rejected earning a definitive designation as “false.”  A good number of the early church fathers quoted from the book of 1 Enoch.  The apparent fact of Jude’s acceptance of this extra-biblical “disguised” book made me, for a little while at least, question whether Jude was even inspired, because I saw what looked to me to be evidence of human frailty (very incompatible with my view of inspiration at the time) in the fact that he would be holding this common misconception of his time; and further, that God wouldn’t have sanitized this letter from any human error since it was destined to be in our canon and to be considered “infallible.”
     How did I resolve this issue in my mind?  By recognizing what it was and what it was not, that I was actually witnessing in Jude.  What is it that I was actually witnessing?  I was simply witnessing the possibility that God could use people who did not have it all together yet--and without correcting them at that (even though they were writing what He knew would end up in our Bibles!).  While spending much time talking with the Lord about this in my personal prayer walks, I came to realize that this implication didn’t do one single thing to damage the powerful reasons why I had come to (and still do) have absolute confidence in the divine inspiration of Scripture.  Among these are such things are the astounding fulfillment of prophecy, the effects upon my life and others, the amazing answers to the sin problem, the historical reliability, the supernatural consistency of message between widely separated writers, the powerful claims of Jesus coupled with one of my big linchpins, the astounding eyewitness reports of the resurrection, which confirms all Jesus said and all he taught about scripture as well!  I could write a whole article, and even a book, just on the reasons I believe the eyewitness to Jesus’ resurrection to be one of the most logically irrefutable (unless there’s a reason someone wishes to be in denial) witnesses to the reality of Jesus’ claims.  I won’t go on to the many other convincing evidences I see for keeping faith, here, but none of the numerous evidences, philosophically, subjectively, objectively, upon which my personal faith is built, are harmed by the human evidences in the book of Jude.
     What this experience does effect is my understanding of what inspiration means and it therefore does carry certain implications which an honest Christian must deal with.
     First of all this implies that God does not grant all knowledge of all things for all times to His prophets.  God deals with particular issues at hand, sometimes allowing many misconceptions to go unchallenged for the time, as less relevant than the point He is trying to get across to His people.
     Second, the implication is that God does not sanitize the scriptures from human frailties.  This fact is only scary because many of us expect Him to do it, in order to fit our preconception of inspiration.
     Third, the implication is that we need to sometimes seriously reconsider the way in which we use proof texts.  After discovering a secondary source in the book of Jude, I realized it is not responsible use of scripture for me to use Jude 6 (which is really not the point of Jude anyway, but an illustration) to prove that the angels were cast out of heaven with Lucifer and are bound waiting for the judgment, even though I know that in most cases I could get away with it easily.
     Fourth, we are forced to recognize that the Bible may often not even be dealing with the questions we approach it with.  When I come to Jude looking for truth about angels, I’ve come looking for something the book was never intended to supply any more than Jesus’ parable of the rich man and Lazarus was for the purpose of describing life after death.  I’m not saying indirect references can’t be used, but caution should be exercised in extrapolation from an illustrative reference.
     Fifth, there is a definite problem with the sanctimonious downplaying of the use of our brains when approaching the Bible.  One of the tragedies of ultra-conservatism/fundamentalism (which I’ve had heavy experience with) is the overkill on downplaying reason.  While it is a real problem to make reason some kind of god or even God with capital “G” (the fact is that even reason has limits), we terribly deface the image of God when we fail to use our God-given brains and content ourselves with sloppy thinking.  While the dangers of self-reliance are real, we should ever be careful not to demonize those among us who are prone to question pet assumptions.
     Sixth, the implication is that there is a fallacy whenever we try to once-and-for-all nail down God with certain rules; in effect deciding for Him how He can and cannot act.  William Cowper wrote the most fitting words in his hymn, “God Moves In Mysterious Ways.”  My real problem was not truly with the inspired text, but with my pet view of how I thought God must go about inspiring.
     An ultimate implication--and I say this guardedly--is that upon certain matters, even the prophets can be mistaken (I don’t mean a matter which it was God express purpose to get across--the point at issue).  Also, God may sometimes actually work through a misconception!  Adventists only have to pause and consider “The Great Disappointment” of 1844 to instantly agree upon this matter.
     What my experience does not imply is that the purpose or point which the Spirit was attempting to get across was in any way foiled!  Dr. Robert Johnston of Andrews University has used the illustration of a sermon delivered with poor grammar.  We may choose to get distracted when listening to a sermon, by the fact that the preacher used some very poor grammar to get his point across, but the point can be just as powerful--a good point can be gotten across even with poor grammar or even illustrations that didn’t really happen.  God’s Word is God’s Word and we have no right to reject it just because it was given by someone who didn’t understand everything we think we do as in Jude’s case.

     A lot of people seem to recoil at the evidences that the scriptures are God’s working through frail humans.  When we see David ranting on his enemies in the Psalms or calling for their vengeance killings upon his deathbed, or we hear about grace-preaching Paul getting into bitter dispute over a young intern who didn’t live up to his expectations.  Some people are troubled.  I am encouraged!  Because I recognize just how far I still am from that mark at which I aim.  If God can work through those who had definite imperfections in the Bible, I am given courage, that even while I am a far cry from the ideal, God can still use me--He won’t wait until I have it all together before making me His instrument of blessing. It is wonderful good news that God can use us where we are--we don’t have to be all there yet in order for God to already work through us--even using our misconceptions sometimes to His perfect ends!
     We should not be too startled when we run into something that looks like human imperfection.  God’s intended purpose for the scripture is infallible--His ways, though, are not our ways, and perhaps we don’t understand things in the proper light.  What was God’s purpose in scripture?  Was it to reveal facts about misguided cultural assumptions?  Was it for the purpose of contradicting every pet assumption within a given culture (we’re kidding ourselves if we think our own culture is immune).  Was it to give ultimate scientific understanding?  Was it to deal with philosophical questions? Or was it meant to heal a relationship broken by sin back in the garden of Eden?  When we’re uncomfortable we should ask, why did God allow this to be in the Bible? Clearly, in Jude He did not sanitize out the human element nor the human imperfections, and I suspect it is the same elsewhere (that is precisely the good news!).  However, the human imperfections were not what God was dealing with at that instance.  We can say with confidence that every message He ever intended to give has been infallibly sent, in spite of the human imperfections.
     Indeed, if we come to the Bible with an ultimate faith that God is responsible for everything being just the way it is, then we need to ask ourselves, did God perhaps even have something to teach us by allowing the imperfection to be included just as it was in His scripture?  I have a faith that God does things with rich purpose.  For me to bump into something unexpected (based on my imperfect grasp of God’s immensity) should then lead me to adjust my attitude in accordance with my faith.  I must seek from God what this unexpected thing has to say to me about Him who designed for it to be there!  It is my experience that when we find something unexpected from God and then learn from it, we are liable to discover some of the grandest gold nuggets for our relationship with Him.  We can find sources of encouragement from some of the most unlikely things, if we don’t play the denial game (which breeds doubt and disillusionment) or use the unexpected as a sorry excuse to cast away our confidence (“which has great recompense of reward”).  I am delighted that throughout history God has often chosen to use the most unlikely people and circumstances to accomplish His greatest works (to confound our man-made limitations perhaps?)  Joan of Arc, only a boy named David, pagan magicians (the “magi,” or wise men) from the east, a young virgin girl in Nazareth, even young and timid Ellen Harmon!  We should be careful about boxing God inside our imperfect understandings, because as soon as we box God in, we will be confounded by examples of God working through the most unexpected pathways.  We should be careful also of believing God cannot use US until we have our act all together--it is clear from scripture that God even used people who weren’t all there yet theologically or spiritually, or who fully participated in many errors common to their time and culture (how careful should we be not to judge those we consider to be in error even in our own time, in light of this).  Where would the Protestant reformation be if God waited to use people like Martin Luther until he should have had everything right?  Suppose God would use no monks and no people who burn others at the stake (John Calvin) or no Sunday worshippers or no pork eaters or no predestination preachers, etc.  The list could go on and on, but would there ever have been any progress even in Adventism if God’s brooding Spirit had not taken possession of the human element--imperfections and all--and began a work in spite of the fallibles within the humans He had to work with?  I could go on and on with just the Adventist examples!  And imagine us Adventists being hard on modern people who take time to accept and reach our “perfect” ideal.
     I personally take great encouragement from the fact that God can even speak through a donkey--it’s my only hope!  And I cannot get over the fact that many of the people from whom the gospel knowledge was passed on to me, are people with very imperfect understandings, definite sins and many undeniably great shortcomings, and yet I feel I truly owe them a debt of gratitude that is nothing short of my life--my spiritual life.  What great good God can do, even through our most halting efforts at faithfulness!  Simple things like passing on a rudimentary knowledge that there’s something important in a little black book called Holy Bible.  And God can do more if we attempt more--it is self-doubt that prevents us, God hasn’t lost His power.
     Many times I have heard someone say, “I will start to do something for the Lord someday, but right now I’ve got personal issues that have to be dealt with--I can’t lead others when I’m struggling myself!”  The trouble is that the people who say this, predictably never seem to come to the place where the issues get solved!  In the mean time their inactivity for the Lord makes their spiritual muscles weaker and weaker just as lying in bed won’t build bodily muscles and strength.  An imperfect but wise person once said, “The best way to get wet when it’s raining is to get busy working at something, because it forces you to put down the umbrella!”  If all the Christians who haven’t got it all together yet--that includes me--would put down the umbrella of our excuses, I believe we would discover that it is raining showers of blessing.  After all, didn’t Jesus say, “It is more blessed to give than to receive?”  Purpose; beautiful purpose.
 
 

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