How the Bible Actually Works

by Peter Enns

  Travel broadens, as they say. Coming into contact with different people and cultures cannot help but affect our view of ourselves, the world we live in—and God. Both Nahum and Jonah are works of wisdom, of reimaging God to make sense of current experience in the here and now.

  I’d like to think—and in fact I do think—that the portrait of God in Jonah is closer to what God is like: that God does not rejoice in wiping people out, but desires to commune with people of every tribe and nation. But that’s just me. Without a moment’s hesitation, I will say that I favor one story over the other, because it makes more sense to me, as that sense is informed by other experiences that I and those I know have had of God and especially given what I understand of God in my time and place as a Christian.

  But that’s just me. The more important point to raise is that the very presence of both Nahum and Jonah in our Bible forces us all to ponder what God is like in our here and now just as these authors did.

  I may be wrong in how I process what God is like, of course, but I am not wrong because I process what God is like.

  Our diverse Bible demands that we employ wisdom when we read it. It keeps reminding us that we too need to accept our sacred responsibility to sense how God is present in our here and now.

  Rewriting History

  The Bible is relentless in modeling for us wisdom—reading the moment, never detached from the sacred tradition but never simply repeating it, because God is always present and on the move. And so we can never just read the Bible without also pondering it, with creativity and imagination, just like the biblical authors, in order to bring these ancient oracles into our own lives. From the second we pick up the Bible and start reading it, we are drawn into an act that requires wisdom.

  We could go on and on with a lot of great examples from the Bible to support the point, but I’d like to give just one more: the books of 1 and 2 Chronicles. You know, those books that nobody ever reads because they basically repeat those boring stories of Israel’s kings you just slogged through in 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings. But stick with me. You might come to love these books, or at least hate them less.

  The books of 1 Samuel through 2 Kings tell the five-hundred-year story of Israel’s monarchy from the first king, Saul (sometime before 1000 BCE), until the Babylonian exile. In my experience most people who try to read all four books one after the other usually scoop their eyes out with a spoon somewhere in the middle of 1 Kings. To actually finish 2 Kings requires a miracle. Continuing on with 1 and 2 Chronicles is superhuman. And I’m pretty sure Jesus would agree.*

  It doesn’t help that these latter two books come right after 2 Kings. That’s just bad product placement, though that’s only the case in Christian Bibles. In the Jewish Bible, these books are found at the very end. Why? Because that’s where they belong. But why? Because Chronicles is not a repeat of 1 Samuel through 2 Kings. It is a retelling of those books from a much later point in Jewish history. In fact, it is nothing less than an act of reimaging God.

  To make a long story short, 1 Samuel through 2 Kings were probably written before and during the Babylonian exile, and the main question these books address is, “How did we get into this mess? What did we do to deserve exile?” The short answer is, “You committed apostasy by worshiping foreign gods, with your kings leading the way.” In other words, these books interpret events of history and pronounce a guilty verdict on Judah.

  But 1 and 2 Chronicles were written centuries later, probably no earlier than about 400 BCE and more likely closer to 300 or even a bit later—so somewhere in the middle of the Persian period (which began in 538) and perhaps as late as the Greek period (which began with the conquest by the Greeks under Alexander the Great in 332). And these books answer a different question altogether, not “What did we do to deserve this?” but “After all this time, is God still with us?”

  Once again, we revisit our theme: as times changed, the ancient Jews had to reprocess what it meant to be the chosen people—if indeed that label even meant anything anymore.

  Seeing how these late postexilic Jews reprocessed their entire history is for me (and I’m not kidding), the most exciting part of the Old Testament, because 1 and 2 Chronicles are nothing less than one big act of reimagining God, of accepting the sacred responsibility to creatively retell the past in order to bridge that past to a difficult present and thus to hear God’s voice afresh once again.

  And just how creative these books are is evident by how different they are, page after page, from the earlier history in 1 Samuel through 2 Kings. One story—the reign of King Manasseh—gets to the heart of it.

  King Manasseh appears in 2 Kings 21:1–18, where he is absolutely the wickedest loser king in the entire Bible. During his long fifty-five-year reign (the longest of any of the Old Testament kings), Manasseh was all kinds of stupid. If there was a way to incite God’s anger, he found it—including the unthinkable: he systematically erected centers of pagan worship, including in the Temple itself, sacrificed his own son, and shed very much innocent blood, until he had filled Jerusalem from one end to another (2 Kings 21:16).

  Manasseh was so wicked that the author credits him entirely for the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians a few generations later. Even the sweeping reforms and deep devotion to the Law of his grandson Josiah—who is praised by the writer as no other—weren’t enough to cancel out Manasseh’s wickedness: Still the LORD did not turn from the fierceness of his great wrath, by which his anger was kindled against Judah, because of all the provocations with which Manasseh had provoked him (2 Kings 23:26).

  The story of Manasseh in 2 Chronicles 33 also starts out with a hefty list of Manasseh’s sins, but that’s where the similarities end and creative differences begin. According to this author, Manasseh’s sins did not lead to Judah’s exile—but to his exile: the Assyrian army took Manasseh captive to Babylon. This incident is not mentioned in 2 Kings—because it didn’t happen. There was no Assyrian invasion to remove one Judahite king, and if there were, they wouldn’t have taken him to Babylon!

  At this point the author is screaming at us to see his account of Manasseh, like the story of Jonah, as something other than “straight history.”

  We read next that Manasseh, while in Babylonian captivity, humbled himself and repented of his considerable list of sins. So God returned him from Babylon and restored him again to Jerusalem and to his kingdom, where he continued to live out his remaining years as a righteous king, a repentant and restored Manasseh (33:10–17). Not exactly in harmony with 2 Kings.

  So what caused the national exile according to 2 Chronicles if not Manasseh’s sins? The people were at fault. They followed the repentant Manasseh in restricting their worship to Yahweh alone, yet they continued to worship Yahweh by sacrificing at the high places, altars erected here and there, rather than in the Temple alone. This author couldn’t ignore the exile, but he did give it a different cause. The people were to blame, not Manasseh.

  The reign of King Manasseh in 2 Chronicles—with his deportation to Babylon, repentance, and return to his homeland—is not an account of Manasseh’s reign. It is a symbolic retelling of Judah’s exile and return home after the captives had learned their lesson and repented of their sins.

  This retelling of the reign of Manasseh is like a sermon illustration for one of the central themes of 1 and 2 Chronicles, which we’ve also seen in Ezekiel 18 (he of the sour grapes): God treats you as you deserve. As 2 Chronicles 7:14 puts it: If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, pray, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land. That is also how Manasseh is described in 2 Chronicles.

  Life was probably somewhat discouraging for this author and his audience. It’s good to be back in the promised land, but centuries had passed since Judah last had a king on the throne. When will God restore them to their former glory?! When will they once again experience God’s favor and blessing?! Those were the a
ctive questions of their day. Not, “What did we do to get into this mess?” as the author of 1 and 2 Kings was asking, but, “How much longer do we have to wait for a sign that God hasn’t abandoned us?”

  The story of Manasseh, the penitent sinner restored to the place of God’s favor, is a reminder to that audience that God will fully heal them too—if they humble themselves and repent. After all, if even Manasseh back then could repent and be forgiven, surely God will do the same for you here and now if you repent. That is the moral of the story, and to tell that story the author reshaped the past—intentionally, transparently, undeniably—to let the past speak to a very new and different situation.*

  That is to say, the retelling of the reign of Manasseh (and 1 and 2 Chronicles as a whole) is an act of wisdom—of reading the moment and reimagining what God is doing and, more important, what God will do in the (hopefully not too distant) future.

  * * *

  Rethinking the past in view of changing times is about much more than simply rethinking the past. It is that, of course, but it is also about a much grander matter that I hope hasn’t been buried too deeply in the many details we’ve been looking at.

  What was ultimately at stake for the ancient writers wasn’t simply how they perceived the past, but how they perceived God now.

  That’s why they couldn’t simply leave the past in the past, but transposed it to their present. They did so not because these ancient stories in and of themselves held power, but because of what these ancient stories said about God. They were the means by which the people connected with the God of old and brought this God into the present. And what drove them to forge this link with God was the crisis of the moment, whether the fall of the north in 722 BCE, the fall of the south in 586 BCE, or being ruled by a succession of foreigners in the centuries thereafter—Persians, then Greeks, then Romans.

  Seeing the Bible as a book of wisdom, which doesn’t hand us answers but invites us to accept our journey of faith with courage and humility, is a new idea, I suspect, for some reading this book. And that’s why I’ve tried to give some examples and go into some detail, so we can see for ourselves how the Bible actually works—even though, truth be told, we are just scratching the surface.

  I hope too that another vital point—perhaps the point—I am trying to make hasn’t been too obscured by talking on and on about Assyrians, slave laws, and eating sour grapes. Watching how the Bible behaves as a book of wisdom rather than a set-in-stone rulebook is more than just a textual curiosity to be noted and set aside. Rather, it models for us the normalcy of seeking the presence of God for ourselves in our here and now.

  Like that of the biblical writers themselves, our sacred responsibility is to engage faithfully and seriously enough the stories of the past in order to faithfully and seriously reimagine God in our present moment. The Bible doesn’t end that process of reimagination. It promotes it.

  Isn’t this what all this Jesus business is about, anyway, asking anew, “What is God like?” We’re getting there. But first, the universe.

  Chapter 6

  What Is God Like?

  The Universe Freaks Me Out

  At some point I stopped thinking of God as “up there somewhere.” I’m not sure exactly when, but I do know why: I was born in the twentieth century.

  I went to school along with everybody else and (when I was paying attention) learned about galaxies, solar systems, red shifts, and the Crab Nebula. I learned that, technically speaking, there is no “up there” to begin with. That idea only works with a flat earth, not a round one. I also learned that, technically speaking, the universe has no “center”—no point is any more or less central than any other. I’m still quite dense about how that’s even possible, but I’ve entrusted the matter to the kinds of people who never got picked for dodgeball in junior high school.

  I find it a bit unsettling, though, that had I been born in a Viking fishing village or medieval Anglo-Saxon farm, none of this would have come to mind, and I could have gone on with my sorry, laborious life praying to the gods for a good harvest. But, as it turns out, I had no real control about when and where I was born. It just happened, and had I been born at another place in time, it wouldn’t have actually been me anyway (if you follow me).

  And so I have lived my entire life in an age of unparalleled scientific advancements, and the fact of my existence here and now, not then and there, certainly influences how I think about everything, including what or who God is.

  I cannot keep my existence at bay when I think about God. I can’t step outside of my humanity and see things from above. The biblical writers didn’t even do that, so please don’t ask me to try. Maybe we’re not even meant to. But now we’re jumping ahead of ourselves.

  Back to the universe.

  I wanted to be an astronomer when I was young, until I found out you need math. But I still think a lot about what’s out there—though not in a dreamy, contemplative, healthy, awed kind of way, but in a the-longer-I-think-about-it-the-worse-I-feel sort of way.

  King David wrote a really nice psalm about three thousand years ago praising God for how wonderful the heavens are (Ps. 19), which is fine for him, but he had it easy. His “universe” consisted of a flat earth of manageable size, with a dome overhead where the sun, moon, and stars hung out. Above the dome was water (hence the blue sky) and above that somewhere was the heavenly realm where God was seated on his throne. And all of this was, from David’s point of view, probably a couple of thousand years old or so, which I’m sure felt like a long time to him.

  With all due respect to Israel’s primo king, David and I are not on the same page here. I’m more with the seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal, who lived when modern science was coming into its own, and who had public nervous breakdowns in his Pensées such as: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.”

  Hardly the stuff of King David’s praises. Given the vastness of space, which was only beginning to be discovered at his time, Pascal questioned the meaning and purpose of his own comparatively puny little life on one puny little planet at one puny little point in time.* A man after my own heart. If he were alive today, I’d introduce him to light speed, black holes, the multiverse, the red shift, and string theory just to see if I can make a Frenchman spontaneously combust.

  The known universe (apparently there’s even more to it) is about 13.8 billion years old. If we compressed those years into a single calendar year, with the big bang at the stroke of midnight on January 1, our galaxy would have been formed on March 16, our solar system on September 2, and the first multicellular life on December 5.

  It’s almost Christmas, and we’re nowhere close to hairless bipeds. I feel we’re running out of time.

  We’ll get to us soon enough, but first the dinosaurs have to arrive, which they do on Christmas Day. Primitive humans with stone tools don’t arrive until 10:24 p.m. on New Year’s Eve. The Israelites pop up at about 11:59:53 (tick-tock, seven seconds left), Jesus a swift two seconds later, and the last 437 years of our planet’s history occur within the last second of the year. My projected life span would take up a little more than one tenth of a second.

  And now I’m getting depressed. Why do I do this to myself?

  The size of the universe is equally unsettling, and the numbers used to describe it are for all practical purposes meaningless. Traveling at the speed of light (186,282 miles per second), it would take 93 billion years to cross the 546 sextillion miles of the known universe from one end to the other—that’s 546 followed by twenty-one zeros.

  By the way, did you know that counting up to one billion, one count each second, would take 31.69 years—the age that males finally stop playing beer pong? To count up to 93 billion would take 2,947.17 years. If King David had begun counting as a child, he’d be getting done about now.

  Anyway, we don’t need to get into all that. My point is simply, no, King David, the heavens are not telling the glory of God (Ps. 19:1)—at least not with
out a lot of heavy theological lifting and perhaps a double bourbon. The heavens actually freak me out and make me wonder whether there is a God at all—at least the God I read about in the Bible, who is said to quaintly fashion everything, like a potter at a wheel.

  Yes, let’s bring the Bible into this. That’s the point of this book, after all.

  The God of the Bible

  The Bible is, if anything, a book the purpose of which is to tell us what God is like. Some say that “revealing” God to us is the Bible’s true purpose. So when the Bible says something about God, people of faith tend to take it to heart, which we do with some enthusiasm when we read that God is the defender of the poor and oppressed, savior of the widow and orphan, champion of the downtrodden, just king and impartial judge of all, shepherd of sheep, rock of security, flowing stream of refreshment, comforter of the sick, and above all (for Christians) the one who sent us Jesus.

  I am drawn to this God, believe in this God, though with good and bad days, as have many people of faith for a very long time. But, to be honest, I—like Pascal—have a lot of trouble squaring this attentive, supportive, and available God with a God who is responsible for this ridiculously large, impersonal, cold, dark, largely empty, frightening, and not at all comforting or inviting universe we live in.

  Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against the universe. I like the universe, and I’d hate to leave it. But from a faith perspective I’m not sure what it means to say the sorts of things that Christians say about God without a second thought, like God is “up there looking down” and cares for each and every one of us personally—or as Jesus put it, Even the hairs of your head are all counted (Matt. 10:30).