Such a Crick in the Neck

Human nature is, at best, stubborn and willful.  Of course, many times that predilection serves us well, and even helps us survive in a less-than-optimal environment.  I’ve read that if baby birds didn’t have to struggle to break out of their shell, they’d never survive, because the struggle to emerge actually equips them with strength.  If we never struggled, we’d be useless to those around us. 

As an educator, I’ve seen a frustrating tendency that isn’t doing our society any favors.  When certain parents are always coming in to rescue their kid from necessary consequences, the child misses so many valuable lessons about accountability.  I’m not talking about completely ignoring the need to advocate for your child, because I’m all too aware that if YOU don’t, sometimes no one else will.  But when a child’s choices have brought them to a certain place that requires discipline, and the parents try to spare them from the resulting ramifications, then that child learns NOTHING, except that they appear to be entitled to a free pass, regardless of what they’ve done.  They actually feel empowered.

And oh, can I just tell you a little about the monster of self-pronounced liberty and total lack of restraint that returns in its place?  It.  Ain’t. Pretty.  I’m a witness—been there, done that, got the t-shirt and the action figures.  The child digs in, the back bows up, the chin juts out, the lips curl into a shameless smirk, and the look in their eye says, “Go ahead.  Call me on it.  I dare you.”  With every passing year (and I’ve just passed the Year 28 mark in my teaching career), I see it more. Multiple times every single day, and that is no exaggeration.

I’ve been reading the most incredible book, which I highly recommend to anyone who considers themselves to be a student of the Word of God.  In Handbook on the Psalms and Wisdom Literature (from the Apostolic Handbook Series, published by Word Aflame Press Academic), Jeremy Painter skillfully paints a picture of Israel’s pouty, self-entitled response following Moses’ departure to talk to God on Mount Sinai.  He describes how God abruptly ends His chat with Moses, to tell him, in essence in Exodus 32: “Look, Moe.  The folks that you’re leading, the same 6 million that I delivered from generations of slavery?  The ones I parted the Red Sea for?  Yeah, while you’ve been up here, they’ve been busy down there having Aaron create an idol for them to worship…because apparently, they don’t see ME as being up to the task.”

Excuse me?  I mean, can’t you just hear the crickets chirping?

(By the way, the colorful rendering of what God says to Moses was from my ridiculous imagination.  I’d hate for Jeremy Painter to be blamed.)

For the first time, but not for the last, God calls his people an oh-so-flattering, but oh-so-accurate thing:  stiff necked.  So consumed with their own way, they couldn’t even turn their head to remember what God had just done for them. Here’s how Jeremy Painter connects the whole episode together:

“The formation of this metaphor after the act of worshiping around a metal cow is not a coincidence.  The point of the metaphor is that Israel had literally become what it was worshiping: stiff-necked.  Like a cow that refuses the harness or the plow (i.e., stiffnecked), Israel would not take the yoke.  The newly redeemed people had, like a calf, which has little capacity for memory, forgotten the miracle which had delivered them from bondage only a few weeks earlier.  Israel was unresponsive, as a metal cow would be; unshapeable, as a metal cow would be; ungrateful, as a metal cow would be; unguidable; incapable of taking direction. Israel had become what it worshiped. Moreover, God’s people now bore a strong resemblance to their oppressor.  Pharaoh, whose heart, after a lifetime of idol worship, was ‘hardened’ against God’s voice.”

--Painter, p. 142

“The Bible on Idolatry: A Closer Look”

Handbook on the Psalms and Wisdom Literature

See?  He says it so much better than I ever could.

I guess our dilemma is this:  How do we know when we are falling into the trap of being stiff-necked?  Where is the line between fighting for what we see as right, and becoming a victim of our own stubborn willfulness?  On one hand, God tells us, “Be on guard. Stand firm in the faith. Be courageous. Be strong,” (1 Corinthians 16:13 NLT), and on the other, he tells us to be pliable, like clay (Isaiah 64:8).  So which is it?  Can you be both?

Well, He’s the one who says so—so it must be true, and it’s up to us to dig deeper and find out what He wants from us.  That’s what “rightly dividing the Word” is all about.  And we can clearly see in 1 Corinthians 16:13 that it says “Stand firm in the faith,” not “Stand firm in your own self-serving ignorance,” or “your stubbornness,” or “your pride.”

Here’s one more quote from Jeremy Painter:

“Idolatry is a fundamental rejection of the idea that God is our future, our hope, the answer to the meaning of our existence. It is essential that we ask ourselves today in what way our culture’s gods (sex, money, power) are re-creating us in their own image.  May we learn from history.  In time, the idolatrous nation always sinks with its clueless idols into the oblivion.”

--Painter, p. 143

“The Bible on Idolatry: A Closer Look”

Handbook on the Psalms and Wisdom Literature

Does that mean that pride, and stubbornness, and willful ignorance is idolatry?

Hmmm…there’re those blasted crickets again.

Last night, my very wise Pastor, Rick Olson, taught about the importance of diligently governing your thoughts.  I’m paraphrasing, but he said, “Our mind is a battlefield.  Any thoughts that give you a feeling of strong discouragement or worthlessness are not from God.”  He also talked about the opposite, when you think your thoughts and ideas and opinions are the only right opinions, that this is another tool of the enemy to derail our thinking process.  This is how we allow ourselves to become all manner of destructive things: offended, wounded, self-entitled, hopeless, depressed, pessimistic, egotistical—it all begins with our thoughts.

I feel like Ephesians 4 has been my ‘candy-stick’ lately, but I’ll quote it here again, because I find it to be so profound.

Ephesians 4:17-24 NKJV

This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you should no longer walk as ^[f]the rest of the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their mind, ¹⁸ having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart;

There’s that heart thing again!

 ¹⁹ who, being past feeling, have given themselves over to lewdness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.

²⁰ But you have not so learned Christ, ²¹ if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught by Him, as the truth is in Jesus: ²² that you put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, ²³ and be renewed IN THE SPIRIT OF YOUR MIND, ²⁴ and that you put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness.

In the New Living Translation, verse 23 says: “Instead, let the Spirit renew your thoughts and attitudes.”  In other words, be pliable.  Be bendable.  Be tender.  Be teachable.  Be moldable.  But not just by anybody, and certainly not by the attitudes and after the fashion of this crazy, self-righteous world.  Let the Potter mold you into a vessel of beauty.  Let the struggle develop you into a radiant, powerful work of art.

Isaiah 29:16 NLT

How foolish can you be? He is the Potter, and he is certainly greater than you, the clay! Should the created thing say of the one who made it, “He didn’t make me”? Does a jar ever say, “The potter who made me is stupid”?

Isaiah 64:8 NLT

And yet, O Lord, you are our Father. We are the clay, and you are the potter. We all are formed by your hand.