He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. (Micha 6:8)
When I mention the Bible
in some places, the predictable response is a question about how I can stand such
teachings as stoning rebellious sons, or forcing women suspected of infidelity
to drink something nasty that will physically harm her when there is no evidence
– just a jealous, probably delusional husband. The first problem with this question
is that the person asking it as “cherry picked” portions of scripture of which
he/she is sure “nobody in their right might could approve.” He/she isn’t
seeking to understand. He/she might not have any difficulty with putting gun owners
who refuse to give up their guns in prison for life (or the death penalty) or requiring
enforced re-education (AKA brainwashing or reprogramming.) So, it’s not that
they’re opposed to violence. They’re just opposed to violence that they don’t approve
of.[1]
What brings that rant to
mind is today’s verse, because those people never cite verses like today’s.
They don’t mention seeking forgiveness for wrong-doing, loving your enemy,
praying for those who persecute you, or living lives characterized by love,
joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, or self-control.
And we all do this, at least a little. We resent being told “no.” But the negatives
aren’t the real messages of the Bible. They’re there because they are necessary.
They are harder to rationalize ourselves about. After all, “I tried really hard
to do good and failed” basically requires leniency. “Thou shalt not murder”
requires, at the very least, that we try to justify ourselves as to what
constitutes murder.
But the positive commands,
like “You shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and
strength” and that what is required is that you “act justly, love mercy, and walk
humbly with our God” takes more than simply not murdering. It isn’t just one
thing, but a whole lifestyle. It becomes very clear that living positively not
only takes more but is impossible on our own. I suspect that’s the real reason people
point out the laws like the ones in the first paragraph, because if they can
reject the parts of the law that don’t make sense to them, they can reject the more
offensive parts that prove them to be failures.
But the problem is that
the laws don’t go away. They don’t let us slide. The challenge for each of us,
then, is to pay enough attention to what is going on around us that we recognize
opportunities to act justly, to love mercy (and therefore show it), and to walk
humbly with our God. What if we thought as much about that as we do about all
the errands and tasks on our To Do list?
[1] As an additional side note on the
water of jealousy passage, there is no record in Scripture of it ever being
administered. And this may be the reason why – if the jealous husband put his
wife through this trial, and he was shown to be wrong, the whole community
would see the woman as virtuous, and the jealous husband as a fool. And – since
the law gave husbands the right to stone adulterous wives, this trial took away
his justification for doing so. It saved women’s lives!
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