An Adequate Title

I want to glorify myself. So. Bad. I'm trying to fit God into my picture, and what's worse is that I realize I am doing this. I really do. I'm taking a Hebrew Bible class this semester, and my professor's basic intent behind his teaching is to get us to look at the Hebrew Bible in a purely historical manner. This means we can't assume that the stories being told are true but are rather representations of the actual cultures from which they came or for which they are about. Basically, he boils it all down to the Hebrew Bible being a tool for faith -- a faith that was constructed by the Jews and is projected onto what we Christians now know of as the Old Testament. Yeah, I don't quite get it either. And I'm slowly coming to realize it really doesn't work. There was a time when I wanted to believe these things about the Bible. I thought it'd be fine to step back and say I simply can't know whether this Bible is factual or not, but that I can still have faith in God the way that these characters had faith. Is it necessary for me to say here that I was rather atrociously wrong? Turning the Bible into a bunch of moral fairy tales will not conjure the longing for God, and more specifically for Christ, that these self-affirming Scriptures demand that I have. My dad has loaned me a book called All Truth is God's Truth by Arthur F. Holmes. It's a bit too pedantic for my ignorant mind, but I've pulled a lot out of it as far as understanding how God's reasoning really can't be matched. "The relation between faith and reason should be understood accordingly as the relation of the whole person, with his most basic and inclusive commitment, to his intellectual activities. It is a whole-to-part relation, rather than part-to-part. Reason properly operates under the motivation of faith, with the purposefulness of faith, with the integrity of humility and teachableness of faith, and its path is illuminated by knowing what it is the person so heartily believes. 'By faith we understand that the world was created...' (Heb. 11:3) does not mean that faith is itself either a source of knowledge or a substitute for knowing, but that the whole person's faith in God includes an understanding that God is the creator and that this affords the starting point for further thought. Faith gives perspective to reason, but it has no royal road to learning that can bypass difficult questions and hard thinking. The Christian believer knows God to be the ultimate source of all truth. In principle, all truth is God's truth. But the working out of this principle in regard to all the arts and sciences as well as theology is a job that reason itself must do." There is no way for me to succeed in even trying to understand this amazing world without a greater desire for trying to understand God, who I am told I can never fully understand. But doesn't that make Him all the more worthwhile? "But when the archangel Michael, contending with the devil, was disputing about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment, but said, 'The Lord rebuke you.' (Jude v. 9)" Even the archangel Michael knew he couldn't speak out of his own reasoning and judgments. What he knows is what God reveals to him, and that is where he draws his reasoning... without plagiarism, at that. This pride in my own abilities and reasoning is continually tripping me up. The more I feel like I am not only recognizing it but also coming out of it, the more I see how so many facets of my existence are clinging to... me. I know that I have not been seeking a relationship with God. I really don't know when I ever have, and while that scares me, it also gives me hope. I can at least know that there is more -- that there is a God who truly loves me, not me going to church, not me putting on a happy face for my friends and family, not me attending BCM activities. All I know is the John 3:16 business. The business that says God loves me. Not only that, but God gave me the ability to love in a way specific to me. He wants me to love Him and love others in the ways by which he has given me the ability and even the desire to do so.