Briarwood Graduates and Careers Class: Recent Episodes
Chad Escue
Even though the Bible is really a library of 66 individual books written on three continents in three different languages over a period of approximately fifteen hundred years by more than 40 authors who came from all walks of life, the Bible remains one unified book from beginning to end, without contradiction.
Some may object to the idea that there are no contradictions in the Bible, but there has been no other book so scrutinized over such a long period of time in an attempt to find real contradictions, and yet there’s not a single alleged contradiction that does not have a satisfactory explanation. This unity sets the Bible apart from all other books as utterly unique and is evidence of the divine origin of the words that God moved men to record.
The Bible is a true collaboration between God and human beings. It's a library of books by many human authors and a unified work by One Divine Author, 100% Divine and 100% human without diminishing either.
We all approach the Bible with our own ideas about what the Bible is, which shape the way we read it, which shapes our understanding of ourselves, the world, and God. Most of our ideas about Scripture are shaped by good intentions, but do they reflect what the Bible has to say about itself? This season is about learning to read the Bible along the grain of its own design because when we learn to see Jesus in every theme, law, story, and symbol we will be transformed into his image from glory to glory.
The Fear of Yahweh is the beginning of knowledge and wisdom (Proverbs 1:7; 9:10). What is the relationship of emotional experience to knowledge and wisdom? It may appear to us that the two are completely unrelated, but the Bible teaches that a right emotional relationship to God is the foundational principle for knowing anything rightly. In that sense, our emotional connection to God has priority over our knowledge about him.
Is fear a good thing? On the one hand, the most common command in the Bible is "Don't be afraid!" It occurs 365 times, one for every day of the year. But, on the other hand, the fear of Yahweh is the fundamental principle of all knowledge and wisdom (Proverbs 1:7; 9:10) and the defining characteristic of Jesus' delight (Isaiah 11:1-3). How do we reconcile the concept of fear in the Scriptures with everything our modern culture of fear is telling us about fear as a purely negative reality?
Anger is the emotional response to injustice and evil. It's an emotion designed by God to destroy obstacles to justice and provide the energy for bringing restorative justice. But handling anger can be like handling dynamite. You can use it to move mountains, but handled without due care, it will destroy you. Psalm 137 gives us a model for owning, praying, and limiting our anger that is shocking and scandalous, but if we take the time to listen, we'll find anger a manageable and powerful tool for justice and holiness.
If you've spent much time in the church in America, you might have a view of God's anger that is far too simple. The Bible gives a complex portrait of God's anger that often gets dumbed down by reading it in where it isn't. In today's podcast, we take a look at the first three instances of God's anger in the Bible (Exodus 4:14; 15: 4-8; 32:10) and learn some surprising things about why God gets angry and how he expresses his anger.
We typically think about grief, sorrow, or sadness as "negative" emotions. But, God has given us the capacity for grief as a reflection of his own nature and to accomplish his purpose of making us more like Christ. Grief is the emotional equivalent of physical pain and, as when we feel physical pain, we must learn to use emotional pain to find what's out of joint so we can begin to heal. In Psalms 42 and 43, we have a front row seat to someone analyzing his emotional pain through the process of lament. We're looking at the condition of grief and its causes and cure.
If happiness is the emotional experience of fullness, our reaction to knowing all of our deepest needs are met, then what happens when our fullness is diminished? How do we experience the loss of the things we need for life? That experience is called grief. In this episode, we look at God's grief from its first explicit appearance in Genesis 6:1-11 to understand grief's true purpose and pattern.
Last week we learned that our God is the Happy God (1 Tim 1:11; 6:15). Tomorrow, we're going to focus on happiness again, but with the goal of discovering how we can find happiness. Every moral philosophy is centered on a profound question: "What is the good life?" Or, "How do we pursue happiness and human flourishing?" Psalm 1 gives the Bible's definitive answer to that question and warns us about three groups who claim to know the way to happiness but whose way leads to misery.
A. W. Tozer said that what comes into your mind when you think about God is the most important thing about you. What is the default position of God's face? Do you imagine God with resting grump face? Or, could it be that the God revealed in the Bible is actually happy!? Paul calls the Father, "The happy God" (1 Timothy 1:11) and, what's almost more audacious to us, he calls Jesus, the man of sorrows (Isaiah 53:3), "the happy and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords" (1 Timothy 6:15). How would it change your life to know that God is the Happy God?
Does God have emotions? How we answer that question will have tremendous implications for our lives. We become what we worship. Worship a cold and distant emotionless deity and you will become cold, distant, and emotionless. But what if you worship Yahweh? "Yahweh is a compassionate and gracious God; slow to anger and overflowing with loyal-love and faithfulness" (Exodus 34:6). The God of the Bible has revealed himself as a God who is deeply and emotionally invested in his creatures. How can we reconcile the idea that Yahweh's very name is "passion" (Exodus 34:14) with the idea that with him, "there is no variation or shadow doe to change" (James 1:17)?